Cornelius Van Til, Karl Barth, and The Federal Vision

I recently mentioned that Jim Cassidy on Lane Keister’s Greenbaggins blog nailed it when he wrote concerning the PCA’s Standing Judicial Commission’s failure to defend the Gospel in the Peter Leithart case:

. . . the SJC has been duped by Leithart’s distinctly dialectical methodology by which he can say the same thing in two contrary ways. Asking him to be more clear and precise, along with providing clarity and nuance, is to ask a leopard to lose his spots.

While this comment is both insightful and zeroes in on the underlying problem explaining why men in the PCA have been hamstrung and unable to condemn the erroneous opinions and Christ denying false gospel of the Federal Vision, Cassidy and others like him are unable to identify the elephant in the room.  While Cassidy attributes Leithart’s snakelike ability to speak out of both sides of his mouth to the influence of Karl Barth, he is blind, as are others, to the influence Cornelius Van Til.  Van Til is well known for his belief that the Scriptures are riddled with logical paradoxes along with his theory of analogy where all the so-called “apparent contradictions” of Scripture are mystically harmonized in the hidden mind of God.  

Further, this belief that these biblical paradoxes cannot, and even must not, be resolved at the bar of human reason is the heart of Van Til’s Creator/creature distinction and is the core of his theology and the theology of every Federal Visionist along with the vast majority of their opponents.  On this score the connection between Barth and Van Til is unmistakable, even if men educated in most Reformed seminaries are too enamored by personalities to notice, much less care.  Concerning Barth John Robbins wrote:

His theology itself is dialectical. It prides itself on the assertion of contradictories. It sees contradiction as essential to theology. Barth is always saying “Yes” and “No” to the same things. His theology involves theses and antitheses, with no resolution of the two. God is “wholly other” than man. In Christ God is “wholly hidden” and “wholly revealed.” There is an “infinite qualitative difference” between time and eternity, God and man, but yet we cannot speak of God in the abstract. In this respect, Barth remained indebted to Kierkegaard all his life. And in this respect, Barth’s dialectical theology must remain opaque to any reader. No person can believe contradictions, knowing them to be contradictions. But contradictions and dialectical theology are useful, not only for confusing one’s readers, but for allowing one to accomplish a purpose without clearly stating what the purpose is.

Barth’s dialectical theology permitted him to use old words and phrases – Biblical words and phrases – while giving them new, and quite un-Biblical, meanings. What the liberals had done partially with phrases such as the “divinity of Christ” and what the Roman Catholics had done with terms such as “justification,” “church,” “saint,” and “grace,” Barth was able to do with the entire theological discourse of the Reformation. His equivocation was not occasional and partial, as in liberalism, but throughout and complete. Barth made Protestant theological equivocation systematic and systemic. – Karl Barth

How far is this from Van Til who said; “Our knowledge is analogical and therefore must be paradoxical,”  and “all teaching of Scripture is apparently contradictory.”  When faced with seeming contradictions in Scripture Vantillians have been instructed to simply believe — in the face of all reason — that there are no contradictions for God.  As John Frame explains concerning the so-called insolvable paradox of the problem of evil:

[W]e are in a strange state of affairs: we have two propositions (“God is good” and “God foreordains evil”) which we can show to be logically interdependent in one sense; yet we cannot show them to be logically compatible except by an appeal to faith….

This balance of interdependence and paradox is in the interest of thinking in submission to Scripture. Scripture must be followed both in its assertions of interdependence and in its refusal to reconcile all doctrines to our satisfaction. Thus, a paradox remains for us,  though by faith we are confident that there is no paradox for God. Faith is basic to the salvation of our knowledge as well as the salvation of our souls.

Consequently, when someone like Peter Leithart or Jeff Meyers come along and say both “Yes” and “No” to the vitals of the faith, even the Gospel, those trained in Van Til’s theology of paradox chalk up the contradictory statements of these unrepentant heretics to just another apparent contradiction.  As Dr. W. Gary Crampton explains:

Once one asserts (with Barth and Brunner) that truth may come in the form of irreconcilable contradictions, then, “he has given up all possibility of ever detecting a real falsehood. Every time he rejects a proposition as false because it ‘contradicts’ the teaching of Scripture or because it is in some other way illogical, the proposition’s sponsor only needs to contend that it only appears to contradict Scripture or to be illogical, and that his proposition is one of the terms…of one more of those paradoxes which we have acknowledged have a legitimate  place in our ‘little systems’” (ibid.). This being the case, Christianity’s uniqueness as the only true revealed religion will die the death of a thousand qualifications.

What is our conclusion? Simply this: The Bible does not contain logical paradox. Clark is correct; any so-called logical paradoxes found in Holy Scripture are little more than charley-horses between the ears that can be removed by rational massage; they are the result of faulty exegesis, not God’s Word. Any stumbling in this area will lead to (at least) a fall into neo-orthodox nonsense.  – Does the Bible Contain Paradox?

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