Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Cornelius "One Liner" Van Til

"When the enemy attacks the foundations, we must be able to protect these foundations" (24).

"The church's doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God is based upon and is the logical consequence of God's absolute self-existence" (33).

"It is really only the Christian who can speak of implication, because no one but him really takes the idea of an absolute system seriously" (35).

"The proper way to begin with facts is therefore to claim that unless they are what Christians say they are, they are unintelligible" (41).

"All men are either in covenant with Satan or in covenant with God" (68).

"Once man has sinned, his intellect is disturbed no less than are his emotions or his will" (75).

"The average philosopher and scientist today holds to a nontheistic conception of reason and therefore also to a nontheistic conception of evidence" (87).

"Surely the Christian, who believes in the doctrine of creation, cannot share the Greek depreciation of the things of the sense world" (93).

"Either man is created by God, or he is not" (97).

"The assurance of the truth of revelation is the work of the internal testimony of the Spirit" (103).

"Without the testimony of the Spirit, even Adam and Eve in Paradise would have lived in uncertainty and doubt" (104).

"Revelation is always testimony . . . . [i]t is always authoritative testimony and as such requires obedience" (114).

"The revelation of God was deposited in the whole of creation . . . . [m]an was to be God's reinterpreter, that is, God's prophet on earth" (129).

"Nature cannot be studied fruitfully except in combination with man. Man is the reinterpreter of God's universe" (134) [I know. I know. This is a two-liner.]

"The Christian can obtain his philosophy of fact from no other source than Scripture" (152).

"Man is and remains God's self-conscious creature" [cf. Romans 1:19] (160).

"The created personality is the highest manifestation of the personality of God" (160).

"No sinner can interpret reality aright" (164).

"Revelation in nature is but a limiting concept, a concept incomplete without its correlative [correlative concept is what is needed for a limiting concept to be understood] as found in supernatural communication" (171).

"The foolishness of the denial of the Creator lies precisely in the fact that this Creator confronts man in every fact so that no fact has any meaning for man except it be seen as God's creation" (174).

"Salvation means that man, the sinner, must be brought back to the knowledge of himself as the creature of God and therefore, to the knowledge of God as the Creator" (195).

"It is a common mistake of modern theology to mix the categories of the ethical and the metaphysical" (209).

"The distinction between Creator and creature has not been changed in the least by the incarnation of Christ" (212)."

"When sin came, it would have destroyed true prophecy. Then God gave the mother promise" [Genesis 3:15] (213).

"The central miracle of Christianity, as it is in the person and work of Christ, is necessary not because man is man, but because man is a sinner" (219).

"Man needs true interpretation, but he also needs to be made a new creature" (219).

"[A] healed soul in a healed body needs a healed nature in which to live" (220).

"Now God, in special revelation, actually brings the true interpretation into the possession of the souls of those whom he has chosen" (222).

"Revelation had to be historically mediated" (224).

"Jesus was the greatest religious expert that ever lived. Accordingly, we ought to attach great weight to his words" (231).

"It was necessary that the ethical alienation should be removed in order that the original metaphysical relation be able to function normally again" (232).

"Scripture needs no additional revelation" (240).

"[O]nly God himself can testify to the revelation that he has given of himself. Special revelation must, in the nature of the case, be self-testified" (243).

All quotes from An Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God (P&R, 2007).

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