Few theologians debated how we know what we know as much as Cornelius Van Til. The son of Dutch farmers, he crossed the ocean as a young boy and spent his life asking whether human reason can, in fact, stand on its own without God. That question marked every class he taught.
Born in 1895 in Grootegast, the Netherlands, Van Til was ten years old when his family emigrated to Indiana in the United States. He was the first of his siblings to attend higher education, graduating from Calvin College in 1922 and then moving on to Princeton Theological Seminary.
At Princeton, he completed his master’s degree in theology in 1925, the same year he married Rena Klooster, his childhood companion; his doctorate in philosophy would follow in 1927. The marriage lasted 53 years, until her death in 1978.
When theological liberalism advanced over Princeton Theological Seminary, Van Til joined J. Gresham Machen and other professors in founding Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929, in Philadelphia. There he would teach apologetics and systematic theology for more than four decades.
Van Til argued that there is no neutral ground between believers and unbelievers: every person already starts from presuppositions about God, the world, and knowledge. He gave this method the name presuppositional apologetics, today associated with his name in any manual of Reformed theology.
His defense of the faith was not always conciliatory. His harsh criticisms of Karl Barth’s theology and his long dispute with colleague Gordon Clark over the incomprehensibility of God divided the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. For theologian John Frame, a disciple of Van Til, neither side was at its best in that dispute.
Van Til retired from regular teaching in 1972, but continued teaching occasionally until 1979. He died in 1987, in Philadelphia, just days before his 92nd birthday. He left behind dozens of books and hundreds of articles, now gathered in editions that continue to train pastors and Reformed apologists.
His conviction that all gospel preaching already presupposes the truth of God continues to guide those who today proclaim the faith to peoples and cultures with very different worldviews. Van Til reminded us that the gospel does not ask human reason for permission: it confronts it and transforms it.
