Banshen and Van Til: The Need For Common Ground
The following comes from Greg L. Bahnsen’s Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings & Analysis, specifically the section titled “Apologetics as a Conflict Between Final Authorities.” This section gives a relatively brief summary of some of the core ideas about knowledge, reason, and interpretation held by Cornelius Van Til and developed by Bahnsen.
Bahnsen begins by challenging the common idea that reasoning is morally neutral. We often think of ethics as having to do with conduct—how we treat people, the choices we make, and the motives behind our actions—while reasoning seems to belong to a different category. Logic, philosophy, science, and the evaluation of evidence can appear to be detached intellectual activities that have no particular moral character.
Van Til rejects this distinction. Bahnsen explains that “the way in which we use our minds—the way in which we reason, how we evaluate claims to the truth, the standards we adopt for knowing, etc.—is itself an ethical matter.” Thinking is something human beings do, and therefore our thinking is also subject to our obligation to God. The command to love God includes loving him with our minds, and Paul calls Christians to bring every thought into obedience to Christ.
The disagreement between the Christian and the non-Christian, therefore, is not simply a disagreement about particular facts. They do not merely disagree about whether God exists, whether Jesus rose from the dead, or whether the Bible is true. According to Bahnsen, they approach the entire question of knowledge from different starting points. “The believer and the unbeliever recognize two different final standards for living—including that aspect of living known as thinking, reasoning, and arguing.”
The issue is ultimately one of authority. What determines whether something should be regarded as true? What standard do we use to interpret our experiences and evaluate evidence?
For Van Til, sin affects this process of reasoning just as it affects every other dimension of human life. The problem with the unbeliever is therefore not simply that he lacks enough information. Bahnsen warns against the assumption that “the only thing that the sinner needs is true information.” Instead, Van Til argues that human beings need both true information and the ability to interpret it properly. As he puts it, “Sin is not only misinformation, it is also a power of perversion in the soul.”
This means that sin affects the way evidence itself is interpreted. Van Til argues that the unbeliever does not approach the evidence for God from a position of neutrality. Rather, he attempts “to cast doubt upon this evidence, to make it appear as though the evidence were not clear.” Even intellectual work in science or philosophy is therefore religiously conditioned. The scientist in the laboratory and the philosopher in the study approach reality either “as a covenant-keeper or as a covenant-breaker.”
Bahnsen develops this through Van Til’s idea of a reference point or final authority. Every person must ultimately have some standard by which other claims are evaluated. Bahnsen illustrates this with a disagreement about a statue at Piccadilly Circus. A tour book describes the statue one way, while someone who has actually seen it remembers it differently. If another person trusts the tour book rather than the eyewitness, the disagreement is not simply over what the statue looks like. It is also a disagreement about which source should be trusted.
Van Til believes something similar happens at a much deeper level whenever Christians and non-Christians reason about reality. They are operating from different ultimate reference points. He expresses the alternatives sharply:
“Either one thinks in terms of the authority of Scripture, making reason and all its activities subject to this authority, or else one acts and thinks on one’s own ultimate authority.”
The distinction is important because Van Til is not rejecting reason. Christians and non-Christians both reason. They both examine evidence, draw conclusions, and use logic. The question is what authority governs that reasoning.
Van Til therefore argues that “human experience and human logic must be interpreted in terms of God and Christ rather than that God and Christ must be interpreted in terms of human experience and logic.” Human reason cannot stand above God as an independent judge determining whether God has adequately demonstrated his existence. If God is truly the ultimate authority, then there cannot be some still higher authority by which God is evaluated.
This is also why Van Til rejects the possibility of religious neutrality. If someone claims to stand neutrally between Christianity and unbelief and then decide which is true, that person has already assumed some standard by which the claims of Christianity will be judged. The supposedly neutral standard has therefore become more ultimate than God.
For Bahnsen and Van Til, conversion consequently involves much more than accepting several new propositions. It produces a fundamental change in the person’s point of reference. Van Til describes conversion as a “Copernican revolution.” Before conversion, man refers reality ultimately to himself. After conversion, “he refers all things to God his Creator, and to Christ his redeemer as the final point of reference.”
Van Til describes the change dramatically:
“Formerly he stood on his head while now he stands on his feet.”
Conversion is therefore an intellectual as well as a spiritual transformation. The believer now seeks to understand everything in relation to God. Even ordinary life falls under this new orientation: “Whether ye eat, or drink, or do anything else, do all to the glory of God.”
This understanding also shapes Van Til’s account of the relationship between faith and reason. Faith and reason are not competing means of knowledge. Reason remains necessary. Bahnsen describes reason as a tool, but a tool that is always being used according to some deeper standard or direction.
The Christian therefore continues to use “our minds, our intellect, our reason, our consciousness” in understanding revelation. Faith does not replace reason. Instead, according to Van Til, “faith is the impelling power which urges reason to interpret aright.”
What Van Til rejects is the idea of an abstract and religiously neutral Reason that Christians and non-Christians alike can treat as the highest authority. Bahnsen writes that Van Til insisted that “we cannot speak of human reason in general, or of the human consciousness in general.” The reason of the non-Christian is employed from within a commitment to human autonomy, while Christian reason is employed by someone who understands himself as a creature of God.
This distinction extends even to the Christian’s interpretation of the natural world. Van Til acknowledges that the Christian continues to struggle with sin and therefore remains capable of interpreting reality incorrectly. He writes that the Christian “would interpret nature wrongly, due to the sin that is within him, unless he be enlightened by Scripture and guided by the Holy Spirit.”
Scripture thus becomes more than one source of information among several. It becomes the framework within which everything else is properly understood.
For this reason, Van Til does not want Christians to speak of Scripture and reason as two independent authorities. He writes that if a Christian says, “Scripture and reason convince me that this or that is true,” what he should mean is that his reason, “as it looks at everything in the light of Scripture, has convinced him.”
Reason is still doing the interpreting, but it is supposed to operate under the authority of Scripture.
Bahnsen finally brings the argument to its strongest conclusion. Apologetics is fundamentally a “conflict over ultimate authorities.” The disagreement between Christian and non-Christian concerns not merely individual conclusions but the presuppositions or final standards by which conclusions are reached.
Van Til therefore writes:
“For science and philosophy, as well as for theology, we frankly take our basic presuppositions from Scripture.”
And he goes even further:
“There are no central truths on which all [believer and unbeliever] agree.”
That statement captures the radical nature of the position. For Bahnsen and Van Til, Christian and non-Christian thought do not ultimately operate within a shared intellectual framework and then disagree about God within that framework. Their disagreement reaches all the way down to the framework itself. They differ concerning the final authority by which evidence is evaluated, experience is interpreted, and truth is known.
The argument is therefore not simply that everyone has assumptions. It is that our deepest assumptions are religious in character and govern the way everything else is understood. For Van Til, the Christian properly interprets reality only when reason is placed under Scripture and all things are understood in relation to God and Christ. The unbeliever, by contrast, attempts to interpret reality from some other ultimate authority, ultimately placing human judgment where divine revelation belongs.
That is the epistemological foundation upon which Van Til and Bahnsen build their approach to apologetics.
A Threefold Critique
There are three problems I see with this account of knowledge.
1. They raise the problem of interpretation without adequately solving it
Bahnsen and Van Til rightly emphasize that human beings do not simply encounter facts without interpretation. We interpret what we experience in light of assumptions, prior beliefs, and larger commitments.
But once this problem is raised, pointing the Christian back to Scripture does not solve it.
The Bible itself has to be interpreted. Christians who believe that the Bible is the Word of God and who sincerely seek to submit themselves to its authority have disagreed with one another for centuries over what it teaches. They have disagreed about baptism, communion, predestination, church government, eschatology, and many other important matters.
So if everyone interprets reality in light of assumptions, the Christian does not escape the problem simply by appealing to Scripture. He must still interpret Scripture.
Bahnsen says that the Christian should reason “in the light of Scripture,” but the question remains: How do we determine whether our interpretation of Scripture is correct?
Simply saying that Scripture is the final authority does not answer that question. Two Christians can both affirm Scripture as their final authority and nevertheless interpret it differently.
Van Til and Bahnsen therefore identify a genuine problem—the unavoidable role of interpretation—but they do not show how the Christian actually moves from Scripture to the correct interpretation of Scripture and of the world.
2. They draw too sharp a distinction between Christian and non-Christian understanding
The second problem is the way Van Til and Bahnsen speak about believers and unbelievers.
The Christian is described as having undergone a complete change in perspective. Before conversion he stood “on his head”; afterward he stands “on his feet.” The believer now possesses the proper reference point for understanding reality, while the unbeliever continues to interpret reality from rebellion against God.
But Scripture itself gives us a less simple picture of believers.
Paul’s use of Israel in the wilderness in 1 Corinthians 10 is important here. These were people who had experienced God’s deliverance and were part of the people of God, yet Paul describes them turning from God into idolatry, sexual immorality, testing God, and grumbling. He then uses their failures as a warning to Christians.
Hebrews 3 and 4 returns to the same wilderness generation and gives a similar warning. People who had received God’s revelation and experienced his works nevertheless failed to understand and respond rightly to him.
The important point is that being one of God’s people does not mean that a person now consistently sees things correctly.
Sin remains in believers. Christians can still misunderstand God, misunderstand Scripture, misunderstand themselves, and misunderstand the world around them.
That creates a problem for the sharp division Van Til and Bahnsen draw between Christian and non-Christian thought. They speak as though the Christian, because he has the correct ultimate reference point, now has the proper perspective, while the unbeliever interprets reality from a fundamentally false one.
But believers themselves can fail to understand. They can turn from what God has revealed. They can reason from false assumptions.
So Van Til and Bahnsen are not warranted in speaking as though Christians simply possess the proper perspective while non-Christians are simply lost in a false one. The continuing presence of sin in believers makes the situation more complicated than that.
3. What is needed is a clearer account of common ground
This leads to the third problem.
At times Van Til and Bahnsen come close to speaking of common ground, but their emphasis remains upon the difference between the Christian and non-Christian point of view.
Yet before we are Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, secular humanists, or anything else, we are human beings.
And whatever we come to believe, we remain human beings.
That shared humanity matters enormously for the question of knowledge.
What is it about human beings that makes knowledge and argument possible in the first place? Many thinkers throughout history have identified rationality as something fundamental to human nature. Human beings reason. We recognize relationships between ideas, follow arguments, draw conclusions, identify contradictions, and seek to understand the world.
This rational nature is something Christians and non-Christians share.
And from a Christian perspective, reason does not need to be understood as something independent of God. John begins his Gospel with the Logos, the Word:
“In the beginning was the Word.”
He then says:
“In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4).
The emphasis, then, should not be upon reason as though it were something standing over against God. Reason in us is grounded in the Word of God. The light by which human beings understand is itself from him.
So the common ground between Christian and non-Christian is not some supposedly neutral place outside of God.
The common ground is our humanity itself.
We are all human beings before we are Christian, Buddhist, secular humanist, or anything else. We share a rational nature, and that rationality is grounded in the divine Logos. We may interpret differently, begin with different assumptions, and reach very different conclusions, but we nevertheless remain the same kind of beings.
That common humanity gives us a genuine basis for reasoning with one another.
For a fuller development of this idea of common ground, see Mr. G’s essay “Common Ground” at The Logos Papers: Common Ground — The Logos Papers
