Van Til and the Limits of Reason

by Rousas John Rushdoony

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that was a self-conscious move away from the Reformation’s emphasis on faith and revelation. It was the mind of man that became the new standard. “My own mind is my own church,” wrote Thomas Paine in his Age of Reason (Part First, 1794), which was an attack on all religion that claimed to be authoritative and Christianity in particular. It is not without case that Paine’s title is sometimes used as a synonym for the Enlightenment. Its rationalism saw faith as a blind confidence, a belief in nothing, while Hebrews 11:3 tells us it is “through faith we understand…” The Christian must see faith in God’s revelation as opening up understanding, as thinking God’s thoughts after Him, and rationalism as a restriction of thought to the narrow confines of human understanding. Reason is a gift of God, but we must not make more of it than it is. To see our reason as supreme is to see ourselves as supreme, and thereby repeat the sin of seeking to “be as gods” (Gen. 3:5).

The first three essays of this volume were published in a small booklet in 1960 as a tribute to the thought of Dr. Cornelius Van Til, titled Van Til. The last four essays were written some time later and are published here for the first time.

Genres: Philosophy

66 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Rousas John Rushdoony was a Calvinist philosopher, historian, and theologian and is widely credited as the father of both Christian Reconstructionism and the modern homeschool movement. His prolific writings have exerted considerable influence on the Christian right.

Reviews

[Josiah Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Van Til and Rushdoony had, if nothing else, one thing in common. It was that they wanted to approach theology in such a way that the application of God's law was present in all areas of life. Where Rushdoony focused on the ethics of Christian theology as a foundation for God's law, Van Til worked to apply those beliefs to the realm of apologetics, forming the ideology of Presuppositionalism. Rushdoony recognized this and worked closely with Van Til's work and gave more pastoral summaries of the heady topics for the lay person. In this work, Rushdoony retells some of Van Til's thought and addresses some of the limitations of this view as well.

[David Bebber · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great place to start or to continue in one's study of Van Til. Rushdoony works through the thoughts of Van Til and makes his arguments highly accessible to the average reader. I encourage any individual studying apologetics to grab this work read it and revisit it often.

[Seth Goodale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great take on Presuppositionalism.

[Tim Wilder]

I bought it for research. Of some use to see how Rushdoony was thinking at the time, otherwise not much point.

[Peter Kiss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great crashcourse into Van Til's thinking in a way that is more approachable than reading Van Til himself. This would serve as a great intro for someone interested and not wanting to commit to a large and tedious reading. Rushdoony doesn't have any meanness or arrogance in his voice in this book, but writes engagingly and cogently. Overall, a great read with invaluable content that glorifies God.

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

***1/2

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that has been recently published towards the end of 2013 by Chalcedon Foundation. This work is a compilation of writings by R.J. Rushdoony by his son Mark Rushdoony on the insight of the Christian apologist Cornelius Van Til. When I first heard about this work I wanted to get it because Rushdoony was one of Van Til’s early expositor, having written several works expounding his ideas and also applying his apologetics towards other areas as well. Rushdoony’s The One and the Many is one such example in which Van Til’s argument that the Trinity is the solution to the philosophical problem of the one and the many gets some more pages of application especially in the area of critiquing political philosophy. In Van Til and the Limit of Reasons, the first part of the book (chapters 1-3) was originally a booklet on Van Til that Rushdoony wrote for the Modern Thinkers Series in 1960. I have seen this booklet once at a used Christian bookstore years ago and haven’t been able to find it since, so I am happy to see it being republished as three chapters in this present work. I’m also happy that this will also reach a newer audience in our modern world of kindle and the internet. According to the beginning of the book, chapters four through seven are published for the first time. Chapter three is the longest chapter of the book and what seems to me the meat of the book. Rushdoony has a good and memorable analogy from the children story of the Emperor having no clothes to illustrate the task of Christian apologetics: we are exposing the uniblical worldview and philosophy around us as intellectually bankrupt and empty. In this chapter Rushdoony quotes heavily from Van Til’s syllabus Metaphysic of Apologetics and Van Til’s essay titled “Nature and Scripture” in a compilation work by Westminster Theological Seminary titled The Infallible Word. Van Til’s Metaphysic of Apologetics is better known by it’s later publication title A Survey of Christian Epistemology. On page 45 Rushdoony has an excellent discussion distinguishing the difference between ultimate and immediate starting point. This is helpful for readers who might be struggling with the objection that some people have that as human beings we practically begin our starting point with ourselves and what we experience. Van Til’s point was to distinguish between our immediate starting point and the foundation for those starting point, what he calls the ultimate starting point. One of the things I like about reading Rushdoony is following the trail of endnotes of the fascinating documentation of what people think and say. The first half of the book quotes work heavily from the first half of the twentieth century but the second half of the book even quote a work as recent as the 1990s (remember, Rushdoony died in 2001). For the end notes, there is a mistake in which chapter six is titled “Rationalism and Sentimentalism” and chapter seven is titled “The Irrationalism of Rationalism.” It should be the other way around. Examining the end notes and the date of the publication of the works cited made me realized at how old some of these chapters have been written—not necessarily a bad thing but it made me appreciate just how early Rushdoony came around to Van Til’s apologetics and further examine his heavy reading load in light of a Van Tillian framework. The fact that it was written very early also made it valuable to me in terms of historical insight; there are several instances I was surprised to see references to Herman Dooyeweerd. For instance chapter two suggests the optimism of Reformed philosophy during the early days of Dooyeweerd, Van Til and other translators of Dutch Reformed philosophy. I realized Rushdoony’s son in law later published The Twilight of Western Civilization and I can’t help but to imagine Rushdoony had something to do with it but in the end Van Til and Dooyeweerd ended up disagreeing.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this as the first work for someone new to Presuppositional apologetics to read; it require some familiarity with Van Til’s theme and a knowledge of philosophers such as Kant, Hume, etc. But I would recommend this if you want to see how Van Til’s idea eventually shape Rushdoony, and in turn Rushdoony’s application of Van Til here and elsewhere.