Christ Rules

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Van Til teaching seminary students .

Van Til teaching seminary students .

Christ rules...everything. Welcome to ChristRules.com, the home of Van Til University, founded on the work and teachings of Cornelius Van Til, the great Dutch philosopher. You can read the book about Van Til by R.J. Rushdoony here.

Here is what Rushdoony had to say about Van Til:

Van Til is important because he developed the meaning of the presuppositions of the faith. What he did was to show very, very tellingly that all thinking has undergirding it various presuppositions or axioms. Those axioms will determine the kind of thinking that will follow, just as the axioms of geometry will determine what kind of geometry you are going to have; if you change the axioms you get a different geometry. Well, Van Til demonstrated that the axioms of theology, of our Christian thinking must be the triune God and His enscripturated word. When you begin with that, then you can think Christianly. If you begin with autonomous man and his reason, you will end up with nothing. The whole history of modern philosophy demonstrates that.

Descartes began with “Cogito Ergo Sum.” I think, therefore I am, and ultimately it lead to Sartre, who said that the only thing real in the world is myself. If you exist you are the devil. Nothing else is real or important. Now, the only way you can account for the world and the people in it is to begin with a presupposition of the triune God and His word, then you don’t have a problem of knowledge, and an epistemology or theory of knowledge has really been dropped by philosophy because they can’t solve the problem, they cannot say: ‘This is how we know.” They have no valid theory of knowledge. So historic philosophy is dead, because it has reached a dead end. Historic philosophy is gone and now you just have logical analysis analyzing the meaning of words in a philosophical context, as a kind of game, a meaningless game.

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Well, Van Til makes clear that on the Presupposition of the Triune God and His word, only then can we have valid knowledge, valid science, valid anything. He is the key thinker of this century, he will be better known I believe a hundred and two hundred years from now than he is today, but during his lifetime the contempt with which he was treated was incredible, because what he did exposed the shallowness of so much Christian thinking; a great number of prominent Christians went out of their way to be radically abusive of him, but he took it with unfailing grace.

From: Reflections on God’s Faithfulness In My Life Q&A

Van Til University is the parent institution of Pocket College which features the work of Van Til's disciple, R. J. Rushdoony, who worked out the implications of Van Til's thought to a great extent. More such work is needed and we hope to sponsor as much as we can. - Arnold Jagt - www.facebook.com/arnoldjagt

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