Cornelius Van Til Collection (#024)

Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) was born in Grootegast, Holland, as the sixth son of a dairy farmer, Ite Van Til, and his wife Klazina. At the age of ten, his family moved to the American Midwest, where Van Til spent the rest of his childhood working hard in the business of farming and husbandry while he growing in spirit under the auspices of the Christian Reformed Church. He learned English quickly, and in 1914 he entered into the Calvin Preparatory School in Grand Rapids, Michigan in anticipation of attending Calvin College, where he served for a time as the editor of the Calvin College Chimes. After graduating from Calvin College in 1921, in pursuit of ministerial calling, Van Til enrolled for one year at Calvin Theological Seminary, studying under the likes of Louis Berkhof. After one year, Van Til transferred to Princeton Theological Seminary where he met and studied under Geerhardus Vos. While at Princeton, Van Til met both J. Gresham Machen and John Murray. Securing a plethora of degrees in a short period of time, he obtained both a ThB from the seminary and a MA from the university in 1924, and he completed a ThM in systematic theology in 1925 and a PhD in 1927.

However, an accurate measure of the significance of Van Til’s life and work cannot be assessed through a matrix of education and associations. Van Til was certainly a scholar, at home in the philosophical language of idealism, but he was also a devoted churchman—after all, he attended seminary in pursuit of ministerial vocation. Following the controversy in the Presbyterian Church of America and the reorganization of Princeton Theological Seminary in the 1920’s, when Machen left Princeton to found Westminster Theological Seminary, he called upon Van Til, now a pastor at a Christian Reformed church in Spring Lake, Michigan, to join the faculty—however, it took great effort on the part of Machen and others to convince Van Til to join the Westminster faculty. Nevertheless, he eventually acquiesced and joined, remaining full-time on the faculty of Westminster from 1929 to 1972 (and part-time until 1979). Additionally, he transferred from the Christian Reformed Church to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church at its inception in 1936.

Militant for the advance of Reformed orthodoxy, Van Til was always at the center of heated debates centered on the issues of epistemology and apologetics. As an apologist, he was most concerned with the consistent application of revelational truth to all knowledge and persons in creation. Moreover, he was highly critical of modernistic trends (including Barthianism) within and around Reformed theology and broader evangelicalism; much to his many subjects’ chagrin, Van Til was often ferocious in his judgment, a by-product of his devotion to Scripture. His most significant publications include The New Modernism (1946), Common Grace (1947) The Defense of the Faith (1955), Christianity and Barthianism (1962), A Christian Theory of Knowledge (1969), and A Survey of Christian Epistemology (1969), among various other class syllabi and articles. Through his writings, his lectures at Westminster, and through his copious correspondence with many of the theologians and philosophers with whom he interacted, Van Til ended his career and ministry as one of the most important religious thinkers of the twentieth century.