“Van Til noted that both Calvin and Machen, at the very end of their lives, were concerned with covenant faithfulness in the generations that followed them. It is no stretch to imagine that Van Til was filled with the same sense, and as he neared the end of his life, he admonished the next generation in the church to continue in covenant fidelity” (John R. Muether, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman, 207).
“For Van Til, creation did not merely establish the self-existence of God. The Creator-creature distinction, rightly understood, did not devolve into the Barthian skepticism of a “wholly other God” of pure transcendence. Just as integral to Van Til’s doctrine of creation was the Creator-creature relationship. As Van Til learned especially from his Princeton Seminary professor Geerhardus Vos, creation was synonymous with covenant. To be fashioned in the image of God was to be in covenant with God. All of God’s words and works entail his covenant relationship with humanity, and thus human beings were divided into two camps: covenant keepers who worshiped and served the Creator as his image bearers, and covenant breakers who worshiped and served the creature, in whose image they fashioned God. This way of articulating a philosophy of history, “baldly stated” by Van Til’s own admission, was foundational for a Reformed apologetic” (John R. Muether, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman, 128).
“That knowledge, though not identical at any point with divine knowledge, is analogous to divine knowledge and an expression of genuine truth from a creaturely point of view” (104).
“Recently, Scott Clark . . . of Westminster Seminary California echoed Klooster’s point by locating Van Til’s views within the context of Reformed scholasticism. Post-Reformation Reformed orthodoxy posited two kinds of knowledge, God’s knowledge and the knowledge that God revealed to humanity. This “archetypal/ectypal” distinction “became the basis for Protestant theological method,” and scholastic theologians introduced the necessity of speaking analogically about the knowledge of God, and of understanding theology as it is revealed to us as an analogue of what is proper to God. Scott Clark has argued that Van Til’s doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God was an effort to maintain this distinction, although Van Til employed a different vocabulary” (John R. Muether, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman, 110).
“Van Til believed that faith is deeper than mere assent, because the Word of God makes an impact on the believer’s heart. . . . The Bible shapes what one knows, but also what one loves and how one behaves” (John R. Muether, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman, 102).
“Treason destroys itself and others too” (Song of Roland, Line 3959).
“In 1927 Princeton University granted Van Til the PhD in philosophy for a dissertation on “God and the Absolute.” Upon graduation, Van Til received a call from the Spring Lake, Michigan, Christian Reformed Church. . . . His pastoral relationship drew to a close in less than a year when Princeton Seminary called him as an instructor in apologetics in 1928. Van Til did not see the invitation as a choice between two vocations. Both the pastorate and a professorship were at heart the same calling. Every minister, he once wrote, had a “V.D.M degree” (that is, a “Verbum Dei Minister,” or “minister of the Word of God”): “When therefore I became a teacher of apologetics it was natural for me to think not only on my Th.M. and my Ph.D. but above all of my V.D.M. The former degrees were but means whereby I might be true to the latter degree.” Preaching and teaching, for Van Til, were not two distinct vocations, and often the preacher emerged in his classroom lectures” (John R. Muether, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman, 58-59).
“Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery” (Flannery O’Connor).
“Together, the two young scholars [John Murray and Cornelius Van Til] expressed common indebtedness to the biblical theological approach of Geerhardus Vos, and each oriented his own approach to systematic theology around the history of redemption” (John R. Muether, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman, 72).
“He that has suffered learns many things in life” (Song of Roland, Line 2524)
“Van Til was remarkably productive in his Princeton days. Equipped with a year of advanced standing, he secured four degrees in five years, including his ThB from the seminary in 1924 and an MA from the university in that same year, followed by a ThM in systematic theology in 1925 and his PhD in 1927 (awarded after he defended his dissertation on “God and the Absolute”)” (John R. Muether, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman, 52).