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Long Description |
WESTMINSTER'S NEGATIVE CONFESSION
In the final days of October, 1990, the long-predicted book by the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary finally appeared: Theonomy: A Reformed Critique. In response come Westminster's Confession. It is both a negative and a positive statement. Theonomists believe that "you can't beat something with nothing." It is not enough to demonstrate that someone is wrong; you must also show what is correct.
Cornelius Van Til made this principle the bedrock application of his apologetic method. It was not enough to demonstrate that his opponents' systems of thought were internally inconsistent; he also showed why Christianity is the only logical alternative. But he left an incomplete legacy. He refused to offer an explicitly biblical alternative to the natural law theory that he had refuted. His system created a judicial vacuum.
Into that vacuum have come two rival factions: the political pluralists and the theonomists. The battle is now engaged.
Westminster Seminary's problem for a generation - indeed, Calvinistic American Presbyterianism's problem for two centuries - has been to justify a commitment to modern religious and political pluralism in terms of the Westminster Confession's judicial standards. The faculty has been double-minded on this point: Proclaiming their commitment to Van Til's apologetic method, they have simultaneously denied the idea that the Bible is the bearer of biblical blueprints or judicial frameworks for society. In short, they have abandoned any ideal of a Christian society, i.e., Christendom itself.
This is Westminster's social and cultural confession - a Theologically negative confession, proclaiming in the name of the original Westminster Assembly what society ought not to be, but never daring to suggest what it should be. In contrast, Westminster's Confession offers a positive confession. It offers a biblical alternative. It restores the vision of Christendom. |
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Inside Flap |
AN ABANDONED LEGACY
From 1923 until his death on New Year's Day in 1937, J. Gresham Machen was the widely acknowledged intellectual leader of conservative evangelical Protestantism in the United States. He was also the strategist for the conservative forces within the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (northern) until his expulsion in 1936.
In the spring semester of 1929, a split took place in Princeton Theological Seminary, the nation's most academically rigorous conservative seminary, when Machen and three other faculty members resigned in protest to theological compromise. In September just one month before the stock market crash, Machen's new seminary opened in Philadelphia, Westminster Seminary.
During the summer, Machen had tried to persuade Cornelius Van Til to join the faculty. Van Til said no, but then relented and came to Philadelphia that fall. By appointing Van Til as professor of apologetics, Machen made the single most important academic decision of Christian higher education in the twentieth century.
What Van Til brought to the classroom was a complete rejection of humanism in philosophy. He dismissed almost two thousand years of compromise by Christian philosophers in their vain attempts to make Christianity conform with pagan intellectual categories. He was not afraid of becoming an intellectual revolutionary.
For over four decades, Van Til labored to persuade generations of Westminster students that the Bible is both the starting point and the final court of appeal in all matters intellectual and moral. He argued for the self-attesting nature of Scripture. The Bible is the only absolute voice of authority in history, he taught.
With his retirement in 1972, Westminster came to its moment of truth. Would it replace Van Til with someone equally committed to this view of biblical authority? Or would it abandon his legacy by hiring a non-Vantilian? The absolutist nature of his apologetic system left no room for compromise - an all-or-nothing decision.
Westminster faced a choice: Van Til or mainstream evangelicalism. It took the second path.
By 1972, the seminary was in no mood to carry on Van Til's all-or-nothing tradition. It had broadened its student base after 1965. it had also broadened its financial base. Perhaps most important, it had repositioned itself as a mainstream evangelical seminary with an uncompromising apologetic. But evangelicalism today is compromised.
All decisions are personal. The seminary had not positioned itself; its leadership had positioned it. Its guiding light Edmund Prosper Clowney, D.D. Step by step, beginning in 1962, Clowney had moved the seminary into the evangelical mainstream. Van Til was clearly outside that mainstream.
In 1990, that decision was confirmed in a symposium written by the faculty of Westminster Seminary, Theonomy: A Reformed Critique. In the guise of a critical analysis of the ideas of the Christian Reconstruction movement, the faculty has made it clear that at Westminster the Van Til legacy is now just one among many on campus, which means that his legacy has been scrapped. There was never any possibility of an plurality of apologetic approaches in Van Til's system. It is an anit-pluralist system.
Westminster's Confession is both a history and a critical analysis of Westminster's decision to scrap the legacy of Van Til.
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Catalog Description |
In October, 1990, the long-promised book by the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary finally appeared: Theonomy: A Reformed Critique. This book is North's two-pronged response. First, he takes up the major essays and themes of the Westminster faculty's critique/interaction with theonomy and provides clarifications and rejoinders. Second, he argues that Westminster has abandoned the apologetic theory of Cornelius Van Til, which maintains that between the believer and the unbeliever all ground is common ground, but no ground is neutral ground. No neutral ground means that every square inch of life is claimed by Christ, including law, civil government and social ethics. No neutral ground means that the Bible must be the ultimate authority in every sphere of life. The Westminster faculty has abandoned Van Til, substituting various versions of "neutral" natural law theory. The faculty has not openly faced up to the question: "If not Van Til's philosophy, what?" |
