What’s Bobby Reading? Cornelius Van Til, Andrew Louth, J. Louis Martyn, and Thomas Torrance (the man)

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  • Barth’s Christology by Cornelius Van Til (actually, this one is read, it’s only a quick 29 pages)

Here’s the last paragraph of the essay (booklet):

[T]hus the Christ who symbolizes this idea of man’s virtual omniscience and a God who knows not himself is the projection of would be autonomous human experience: It is the belief in this sort of Christ that leads men to think that they have done justice to God and Christ while in fact they are still under their condemnation and wrath. The Christ of Barth’s theology is a false Christ, a meaningless mirage, and devoid of ability to give sinners any help. But it is the only Christ that men can find if they will not submit their thinking to the obedience of Christ as he speaks in the Scriptures. (p. 29)

  • Christianity And Barthianism by Cornelius Van Til

Here’s Van Til in the preface:

[T]he present writer is of the opinion that, for all its verbal similarity to historic Protestantism, Barth’s theology is, in effect, a denial of it. There is,  he believes, in Barth’s view no “transition from wrath to grace” in history. This was the writer’s opinion in 1946 when he published The New Modernism. A careful consideration of Barth’s more recent writings has only established him more firmly in this conviction. (p. vii)

There you have it. I plan on posting some of the stuff from Van Til on Barth. There are plenty of things that are perfect bloggy material provided by his essay (booklet) Barth’s Christology. Van Til continues to be the great defeater of Barthianism for some within the post Reformed orthodox camp today (mostly by those who attend and teach at Westminster Theological Seminary). Even what I know of Barth, which has some depth at this point (relatively speaking), Van Til’s points fall flat (in his little booklet tract against Barth’s Christology). My “e-friend” Darren Sumner recently took Van Til to task here; I wish more folk would pay attention to critiques of Van Til, but instead those who follow Van Til seem to continue to follow the notion that Barth is a demon and not a saint—which ultimately is scary!

21 thoughts on “What’s Bobby Reading? Cornelius Van Til, Andrew Louth, J. Louis Martyn, and Thomas Torrance (the man)”

  1. I’m no fan of Van Til, even if that is a freakin cool name. I find it surprising that, as innovative as Barth was (and is) considered in theology, he was anticipated by a lot of the patristics – most notably St. Ephrem the Syrian. Barth was brilliant, but in a lot of ways wasn’t saying anything new.

  2. Hunch without getting into Van Til and backup resources to get what he’s after, and working from my emphasis on CD III: he’s right that there isn’t a “‘transition from wrath to grace’ in history” in Barth’s thought — which seems to me to be primarily a Westminster problem, and depends on how narrowly one draws the lines of “historic Protestantism.”

    If you go looking for the wrath of God in Barth, in terms of substitutionary, propitiatory, or expiatory atonement in the death of Christ, you will run smack into Christ as God. The Puritanical wrath of God that Christ appeases relies on there being a different God back of the man Jesus. If you go looking for it in terms of God’s No to sin, at all points you will run smack into God’s original and ultimate Yes to the creature. Which, once again, is Christ. Deliverance from condemnation and wrath is not the ultimate problem for Barth — and I would venture to say, for many parts of historic Protestantism and the catholic and orthodox traditions — that it seems to be for Van Til. Because Christ is the deus revelatus as well as the deus revelandus, the solution to that problem simply falls out of the math!

  3. @WF,

    Boy, I think I’m going to have to disagree with you in re. to Barth; he was/is quite radical (just think of his concept of election and revelation for example). There is no doubt that Barth does not speak out of a theological vacuum, which is comforting—meaning that as you highlight there are points of contact in the Tradition for Barth, but nevertheless, I think Barth outpaces many theologians of the past into the present … his wake attests to this, I think.

    @Matt,

    Yes, revelation is reconciliation! I have always left Van Til to the side, because I have so often heard him repeated by his followers; and it has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. But I figured I ought to actually give him a read so that I can at least say that I have; esp. with my WTS friends. Thanks for your comment, Matt.

  4. Further hunch: a Dutch Calvinist growing up in America has a very different historical Protestantism than does a Swiss Reformed person growing up in an environment strongly influenced by the results of the Prussian Union.

  5. I need to pick up Van Til myself. And not simply for the “know your enemy” bit! 😉 I’m woefully inadequately trained on the heavily-Westminster-and-Dor(d)t-influenced side of Calvinism, beyond reading Muller’s PRRD.

  6. Bonus on Maximus the Confessor. One of my religion and science profs is an Orthodox biochemist, and he’s a favorite of hers. A bit farther down my reading list at the moment, though. But Martyn comes in much higher! Hard to do apocalyptic without him.

  7. I certainly didn’t mean to say he *wasn’t* radical – only that he was anticipated. In my readings of the patristics, I’m pretty struck by how Barthian (or perhaps how patristic-ian Barth is) they sound – they aren’t as technical and don’t touch on a lot of areas that he did, but I do see a lot of anticipations of his various ideas in the fathers. Though I do think he’s heads and tails above *most* modern day theologians.

  8. @Matt,

    Yes, we all have our informing conditioning contexts;indeed!

    “… And not simply for the “know your enemy” bit!” You are much more noble than I 😉 ! I have read sections of Muller’s PRRD (and a bunch of his other books and essays), have you read the whole of the PRRD?

    Darren S. mentioned that I ought to pick him up relative to some of the stuff I have been writing on Chandler’s and Piper’s two wills in God theology; and so I am. I am looking at Martyn for my research on vicariousness; I am of course looking at how Martyn works with pistis Christou. I favor his rendering; his ‘authorial genetive rendering’ as does TFT et al. And yes, apocalyptic is the broader aspect of this as well (i.e. the conception of God that shapes that kind of thinking etc.).

    @WF,

    What do you think of Athanasius and his impact upon Barth’s approach, methodologically? I guess anticipated is a pregnant term … so thanks for clarifying.

  10. @whitefrozen, once upon a time I wrote a paper and realized after the fact that Bultmann and Dibelius agreed with me. Which is always precisely the wrong way to say it! Barth wasn’t anticipated — he was literate and conscious of the tradition in which he stood. Especially in writing the Church Dogmatics! He picks and chooses and develops his own ideas in connection with the Patristic, among other periods.

  11. @Bobby, I’ve read all of the original two-volume typescript, but I’ve only supplemented out of the full four-volume glossy version. Ironically enough, it was part of my work for our Lutheran polity course!

  13. Not having done any in-depth study on the similarities in the methods of Barth/Athanasius, I can’t make any super-deep observations, unfortunately. But I’ll break out ‘On the Incarnation’ with this in mind and get back to you. I will say, however, that both seem to be operating on roughly the same method, from what I can recall (I reserve the right to qualify this 😛 ). Both have such high, nuanced views of Scripture, God, revelation and Christ that most everything else pales – and neither seems to be locked in the box of ‘Scripture is a fax from heaven’ which I find terribly interesting.

  14. I was working on comparative confessions, and especially the differences in approach between what are preserved in the Book of Concord and the standard Reformed confessions. For period comparison I did the Helvetics and the Heidelberg Catechism. PRRD was a useful source for that.

  15. @Matt,

    Nice. I worked on some of the Reformed Confessions (a comparison of the Scots Confession/Heidelberg Catechism with the Belgic/WCF) for my chapter in our forthcoming book; this is a good practice—I would be interested, some time, to find out what you find out in your comparison (do you have a paper associated with that or notes?).

    @WF,

    Yes, get back. Barth and TFT are known for being Athanasian V. Augustinian; which is why I asked a bit. And another, Yes, Barth was definitely not interested in any kind of dictation theories or inspiration or any such thing (and this of course would be anachronistic for Athanasius … so we’re on safe ground there). Since Barth worked as a Modern theologian (see McCormack’s ‘Orthodox and Modern’), he worked through Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Hermann, and many other Modern thinkers (Heideggar); so I can see how there is definitely a relationship between Athanasius and Barth—and so would he—but then there is definitely heavy points of departure given their historical location and situadedness.

  16. I was actually just thinking about how different their ideas are on the Atonement – Barth has a much less triumphalist view, at least on the surface, than Athanasius. I’ve heard some fairly powerful criticisms levelled at Athanasius theory, but on the whole I count myself firmly Christus Victor. Barth (and Bonhoeffer, now that I think about it) seem to have much more concrete views of the Atonement (not that Athanasius was flighty or anything like that) – I’ll have to do a bit of digging on that.

  17. Bobby – your reading list looks like a lot of fun! Glad you are looking into Maximus. I came to him second-hand, via John of Damascus. Let me also commend to you Ian McFarland’s excellent (and important) essay “‘Willing Is Not Choosing’: Some Anthropological Implications of Dyothelite Christology” in IJST 9 no. 1 (2007).

    Barth has some basic similarities with Athanasius, of course, but on the interesting intra-orthodox discussions (such as the nature of atonement) I do think it’s right that they have important dissimilarities. Part of this, as I will argue in my thesis, is attributable simply to the fact that Athanasius was a pre-Chalcedonian theologian. In an important sense the Chalcedonian tradition left Athanasius behind, and though he rightly remains a champion of historic orthodoxy I think it’s a mistake to baptize and appropriate his thought uncritically, as if it was Chalcedonian.

  18. @Bobby, it is a good practice, and I encourage it as much as I can — especially to Lutherans! It seems to me that the Reformed are always a bit closer to the idea of comparative confessional work, as they don’t have a fourth creed in the Augustana. And what I wound up doing was very amateur, as you might expect of a first-year M.Div. who had been an autodidact for the prior five years. But perhaps it laid the groundwork for my love of Barth — developing an understanding of the differences between pedagogical confessions and definitional ones as they stand in similar polemical contexts. Understanding how deeply dogmatics belongs to the former, and apologetics to the latter. Lutherans don’t have much in the way of pedagogy in the confessions — Luther’s catechisms are profoundly overlooked as expositions of the faith. Our resurgences of “confessionalism” as a result tend to lean doctrinaire.

  19. Interestingly, I have heard John Frame (one of Van Til’s top disciples) say that he believes that Van Til was wrong about Barth (in a lecture from Reformed Theological Seminary on I-tunes U). Frmae has some pull in neo-reformed circles, but sadly, it seems that this insight has not caught on.

  21. @WF,

    I look forward to seeing what you come up with in your digging!

    @Darren,

    Thank you for pointing me to both Maximus and now that essay; I’ll definitely check that out, thanks!

    Have you read Jon Robertson’s Christ as Mediator: A Study of the Theologies of Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra, and Athanasius of Alexandria? I just read about half, and will revisit his book down the road. Anyway, he presses the same point about Athanasius as pre-Chalcedonian as you’re highlighting with your comment—Robertson now teaches at Multnomah Seminary.

    @Matt,

    Thanks for sharing further. Have you read Barth’s Theology of the Reformed Confessions? What you’re getting at sounds very similar to his general theme in that book (which was a great book). The Reformed practice of confession making is something that I highly appreciate, and I think you’re right about the depth offered therein.

    @Brian,

    Yeah, when I used to visit R. Scott Clark’s blog, I picked up on the fact that Frame was on the outs with the post-Reformed orthodox; so you’re point makes even that much more sense given the orthodox veneration of Van Til.

    Thanks for the comments, guys!

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