I should say something more about John Murray. It was common in those days for students to say that they had come to Westminster for Van Til but that they stayed for Murray. Murray was not well known outside Reformed circles, but as a theologian he was peerless. Murray, Clowney, and Van Til are the authors I refer to most often today. Murray’s Collected Writings are a wonderful treasury of exegesis and theological reflection. The present-day criticism of Murray in Reformed circles is in my judgment unworthy of him.

I’ve been asked to list some people and writings that have influenced the distinctive ideas of my theology, apologetics, and ethics. But such a list will not mean anything to most readers unless I explain to some extent why and how these people and writings have influenced me.

First some general autobiography, overlapping what I say in RLT, included in this volume.

I was born in the Pittsburgh area in 1939. I received Christ as my personal Savior and Lord at around age thirteen, through the ministry of Beverly Heights, an evangelical congregation of the United Presbyterian Church of North America. This was about the time Billy Graham first visited Pittsburgh, where I lived. I went to one of his meetings, with the church youth group. Although I did not “go forward,” some of my friends did, and I saw profound changes in their lives. I sensed my own sin and need for Christ and came to trust him.

The music ministry of the church also changed me profoundly. I took organ lessons there and sang in the choir. The youth ministry taught me the gospel; the music ministry drove it into my heart. From that time on, I have been deeply interested in worship.

My theological interests, too, began very soon after my conversion. Our youth leader, Bob Kelley, was not afraid to get us kids into some pretty heavy duty theology; he later became a professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Another professor there was Dr. John H. Gerstner, the same one who had such a deep influence on R. C. Sproul. Gerstner was a frequent speaker at our youth camps and rallies. He was a Socratic master teacher: I don’t think I’ve completely forgotten anything I heard him say, or any of the thought processes he conjured up within me.

In high school years I also listened closely to a number of radio preachers, particularly Donald Grey Barnhouse of the Bible Study Hour and Peter Eldersveld of the Back to God Hour. Barnhouse was an evangelical pastor in the liberal Presbyterian denomination (PCUSA), rather dispensational in his theology. Eldersveld was a Dutch Calvinist from the Christian Reformed Church. Both had gifts for vivid language and persuasive argument. I hung on their every word.

Princeton University, 1957–61

At Princeton University, the main influences on me were my teachers on the one hand and the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship (PEF) on the other. The PEF was just about the only evangelical group on campus at the time. Through its ministry (and that of Westerly Road Church) I grew spiritually as at no other time in my life. My knowledge of the Bible went to a deeper level at PEF under the teaching of Dr. Donald Fullerton.1 Both PEF and Beverly Heights encouraged me to memorize Scripture. I learned some seven hundred verses through the Navigators’ Topical Memory System, and those are the verses that continue today to serve as landmarks for my theology.

PEF was dispensational in its viewpoint, as Barnhouse was, but Gerstner thought dispensationalism was an awful heresy. I never accepted the dispensational system, but neither could I accept Gerstner’s harshly negative verdict about it. My friends at PEF were godly people who loved Jesus and the Word. We prayed together every day and visited dorm rooms to bring the gospel to fellow students. Princeton was a spiritual battleground, and the PEF folks were my fellow soldiers. Struggling together for Jesus against opposition tends to magnify the unity of believers and to decrease the importance of disagreement. Surely Jesus intended for his people to wage this battle together, not separated into different denominations and theological factions. My experience with PEF (and earlier with Graham) prevented me from ever being anti-evangelical, as are many of my Reformed friends. At Princeton, I became an ecumenist.

I majored in philosophy and also took courses in religion, literature, and history. The religion courses, together with the denominational campus ministries, gave me my first introduction to theological liberalism. Although I had toyed with similar ideas during my high school years, I sharply rebelled against liberalism in college. Princeton liberalism was casual religion: no authoritative Bible, no passion for souls, no desire for holiness, no vitality. Indeed, the Christ of Scripture simply wasn’t there. Later, I read J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism,2 which argued that liberalism was an entirely different religion from Christianity, and I found it entirely persuasive. Although liberalism has changed its face in the years since, I still see it as the opposite of the biblical gospel.

PEF taught me the importance of holding firmly to the supreme authority (including infallibility and inerrancy) of Scripture as God’s Word, over against liberal religion. I have never abandoned that foundation, and it has played a major role in my teaching. In PEF, further, one could never argue a theological position without appealing directly to Scripture. Although this approach is sometimes derided as “proof-texting,” I believe that rightly used, it constitutes the only sound theological method, and this has been a major emphasis in my work through my life. In this regard, see especially my article IDSCB.

My philosophy teachers, for the most part, did not profess to be Christians at all, liberal or otherwise. Walter Kaufmann, who had recently published his Critique of Religion and Philosophy,3 was an expert on Friedrich Nietzsche and himself a very Nietzschean thinker, who did his best to destroy his students’ Christian beliefs. His anti-Christian arguments didn’t bother me much, by the grace of God. But I greatly enjoyed Kaufmann’s brilliant intellect, clarity, and wit. His writings influenced my own writing style. (Over the years, I have had to temper the polemic edge of that style.) And like me, he had no sympathy with liberal theology. He attacked both conservative and liberal Christianity with equal zest, even presenting a persuasive critique of the liberal “documentary hypothesis,” which divided the Pentateuch into works of many different authors.

Other philosophy teachers gave me a good introduction to the history of philosophy, particularly Gregory Vlastos in Greek and medieval philosophy and George Pitcher in the modern period. I also studied with Ledger Wood, who revised and updated Frank Thilly’s widely used A History of Philosophy. 4 But in general, the Princeton philosophers took a negative approach to their discipline’s history. For them, the history of philosophy was largely a history of error. When we studied Plato, the important thing was to see all the mistakes Plato had made, not to value his vision. Same with other philosophers. This negativism can be understood partly from the fact that Princeton’s philosophy department was one of the last to abandon logical positivism. Carl Hempel, the positivist of the Berlin school, taught logic and philosophy of science and, like other positivists, despised metaphysics, which had been such a central concern of the philosophic tradition.

Yet I did take a course in metaphysics at Princeton. It was the last one ever taught in that era: shortly afterward, the department voted to never again list a course with the word metaphysics in it. But the course I took from G. Dennis O’Brien had a large impact on my thinking. O’Brien was a young Roman Catholic (although Kaufmann said he could not vouch for O’Brien’s orthodoxy). He had studied at the University of Chicago and valued the “classical realism” of Richard McKeon and John Wild.

In the metaphysics course, we studied Aristotle, Spinoza, and John Dewey, three philosophers of very different eras, with very different-looking metaphysical systems. O’Brien rejected the find-the-mistakes approach of his colleagues. When he taught Aristotle, one would have assumed that he was Aristotelian. But when he taught Spinoza, he seemed Spinozist, and when he taught Dewey, Deweyan. His general point was that if you started where Aristotle started, understanding his inheritance from his predecessors, understanding the questions he tried to answer, using the conceptual equipment available to him, thinking with the same intellectual gifts Aristotle enjoyed, you would probably come to the same conclusions he did. For O’Brien, the same could be said of Spinoza and of Dewey.

Aristotle described the world as a collection of things, Spinoza of facts, Dewey of processes; but these, to O’Brien, were not so much factual differences as differences in the philosopher’s “way with the facts.” Metaphysics in general, he thought, was not a discovery of new facts, but rather it explored “ways with the facts.”5 Although O’Brien didn’t use this terminology, what I took from his analysis was that Aristotle, Spinoza, and Dewey looked at the world from three “perspectives,” as if viewing from three different angles.

I didn’t entirely agree with this approach, and still do not. I think there are such things as “metaphysical facts,” and I believe that many disagreements in metaphysics are precisely factual disagreements. But O’Brien’s course was stimulating to me as few other courses have been. I was convinced that alongside other differences among philosophers (including factual differences), there were also “perspectival” differences. That is to say, not all the differences between thinkers are differences between truth and falsity, right and wrong; factual disagreements; or differences between clear thinking and “mistakes.” Some are also differences in perspective, looking at the same truth from different angles. That was the beginning of my inclination to understand reality “perspectivally.”

So when I graduated from Princeton, I was biblically oriented (almost biblicistic, but I think in a good way), antiliberal, ecumenical, and incipiently perspectivalist.

Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia), 1961–64

At Westminster, I studied largely with the “old faculty” that had taught there from the 1930s: Cornelius Van Til, John Murray, Ned Stonehouse, Paul Woolley, and Edward J. Young, plus some gifted younger men, such as Edmund Clowney and Meredith G. Kline.

I had begun to read Van Til in college, seeking help in dealing with the philosophical problems I encountered at Princeton. I had earlier read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity,6 The Problem of Pain,7 and Miracles.8 Van Til was very critical of Lewis, but Lewis actually prepared me for Van Til. The Miracles book was especially helpful to me. There, Lewis showed that naturalism and Christianity were two distinct and incompatible worldviews, and that arguments against miracles typically assume that naturalism is true. Lewis seemed to me to be entirely right, and that readied me to believe Van Til’s assertion that the Christian faith is a worldview unto itself, with its own distinctive metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Lewis also prepared me to accept Van Til’s view that opposition to Christianity is not based fundamentally on factual discovery, but rather on presuppositions that rule out Christianity from the outset of the discussion.

Van Til became the greatest influence on my apologetics and theology. In my view, although I have been subjected to some derision for saying this, Van Til was the most important Christian thinker since John Calvin. His message is precisely what people of our time need most to hear: that the lordship of Jesus Christ must govern our thoughts (2 Cor. 10:5) as well as every other area of life. Every problem of theology, apologetics, biblical studies, science, and philosophy takes on a very different appearance when we reject non-Christian presuppositions and seek to think consistently according to Christian ones. Certainly, nobody who has not spent time with Van Til can understand well what I am about.9

I was interested in Van Til not only for his presuppositional epistemology and apologetic, but also for ideas of his that are less well known. In my Van Til the Theologian10 booklet and in my larger book CVT, I discuss Van Til as a theologian, particularly his understanding of theological method. I took an interest, for example, in his threefold understanding of revelation in his Introduction to Systematic Theology:11 revelation from God, nature, and man. He subdivided these, in turn, into various permutations: revelation from God about God, from God about nature, from God about man, from nature about God, etc. He also developed his ethics in accord with another threefold distinction found in the Westminster Confession of Faith: every ethical decision may be evaluated according to its goal, motive, and standard.12 He denied that these topics must be taken up in any particular order, for he believed that each implied the others.

O’Brien had led me to think in terms of “perspectives.” My Christian adaptation of O’Brien, under Van Til’s tutelage, was that perspectivalism was necessary, since unlike God we are finite beings. We cannot see everything at once, as God does. So we must investigate things, first from this angle, then from that. But Van Til took me a step further: from a general perspectivalism to what would be called triperspectivalism, to a set of threefold distinctions that are especially important for our reflection. Nature, man, and God; goal, motive, and standard.

Edmund Clowney reinforced this triadic perspective. In his course on the doctrine of the church, he produced an impressive pyramid diagram. The pyramid’s base was divided into two intersecting triads, one listing the church’s ministries, the other the church’s leadership. The ministries were worship, edification, and witness. The offices of the church provided leadership in teaching, rule, and mercy. The diagram also distinguished “general” officers from “special,” by bifurcating the triangle into an upper and a lower section. All Christians hold the “general” office as teachers, rulers, and givers of mercy. But there are also specially ordained people who have particular responsibilities in these areas: teaching elders, ruling elders, and deacons. Above the pyramid, with a space between him and the rest of the pyramid, was Jesus Christ, the head of the church, who embodies the ultimate in all the offices, the supreme Prophet, Priest, and King.13

My triperspectivalism began to bring together Van Til’s triads, Clowney’s triads, and some others into a general overview. When I later began teaching at Westminster, I taught the doctrine of God, organizing the material under the general headings of God’s transcendence and immanence, following a common pattern in theology. But I became uneasy with this approach, coming to sense that transcendence was an ambiguous idea. Does it mean that God is so far from us as to be “wholly other” (Otto, Barth)? If so, how can he also be immanent? It occurred to me that biblically it would make more sense to define transcendence in terms of God’s kingship or lordship: God is not infinitely removed from us in Scripture; rather, he rules us. My studies in divine lordship yielded an emphasis on God’s control, authority, and covenant presence, which I came to call his lordship attributes. When Scripture talks about God’s being “high” and “lifted up,” it is not referring to some kind of wholly-otherness, but to God’s kingly control and authority over his own domain. So why not define transcendence in those terms? And then immanence can refer to his covenant presence, his determination to be “with” his people, Immanuel.

Then (since I also taught ethics) I came to see that this threefold scheme correlated with Van Til’s “goal, motive, standard.” God’s control was his lordship over nature and history, so that they conspired always to achieve the goal of God’s glory. His authority was the standard for the behavior of his creatures. And his redemptive presence, in the hearts of his people, creates in them the motives necessary for good works.

This threefold understanding also applied to the doctrine of revelation and Scripture, which I also taught in my early years. As Van Til said, there is revelation from God, nature, and man about God, nature, and man. Nature is, of course, under God’s control. But God also comes in person (and in his written Word) to speak to us with authority. Further, he reveals himself in human beings, his image, which is to say that God’s revelation is present in us as well as outside us.

I came to believe that the ultimate root of these triads was the triune character of God. He is the Father, who develops an authoritative plan; the Son, who carries out that plan by his powerful control of all things; and the Spirit, who as the presence of God applies that plan to nature, history, and human beings.

This narrative has gone beyond my Westminster student years, but I need to return there to mention some other influences. One important influence was certainly Meredith G. Kline, who made exciting discoveries about the nature of biblical covenants. In my later teaching and writing, I made much use of Kline’s idea that covenants were essentially treaties between the great King Yahweh and the “vassal” people that he has called to be his. As Kline showed, these treaties took written form, and their literary structure was somewhat constant: the name of the great King, the historical description of his past blessings to the vassal, the stipulations or laws of the covenant, and the sanctions: the blessings for obedience and the curses for disobedience. In the triad of history, law, sanctions, I found another application of my triperspectivalism. The history describes God’s powerful control over nature and history; the law pronounces his authoritative requirements; the sanctions show that he is not an absentee Lord, but is present to show mercy to and discipline his people.

Kline identifies Scripture as God’s treaty document in his The Structure of Biblical Authority,14 a book that I have used again and again in my own teaching and writing. I think it is the first real theological breakthrough since B. B. Warfield on the nature of the Bible. The treaty is authored by the great King, is holy (placed in the sanctuary), and has supreme authority for the vassal. In this study, Kline shows that God intends to rule his people by a book.

But I also received much help from other Westminster professors in maintaining a strong doctrine of Scripture. Edward J. Young’s Thy Word Is Truth15 was a great help in showing me the biblical rationale for the doctrine of inerrancy. Indeed, every course I took at Westminster in some way reinforced the truth of the authority of Scripture. Edmund Clowney showed us that the primacy of God’s Word could be found on nearly every page of Scripture. Van Til, in The Protestant Doctrine of Scripture16 and in An Introduction to Systematic Theology, presented biblical authority as inevitable, in terms of a Christian philosophy. And John Murray’s wonderful article “The Attestation of Scripture”17 and his Calvin on Scripture and Divine Sovereignty18 summarized the issues masterfully.

I should say something more about John Murray. It was common in those days for students to say that they had come to Westminster for Van Til but that they stayed for Murray. Murray was not well known outside Reformed circles, but as a theologian he was peerless. Murray, Clowney, and Van Til are the authors I refer to most often today. Murray’s Collected Writings19 are a wonderful treasury of exegesis and theological reflection. The present-day criticism of Murray in Reformed circles is in my judgment unworthy of him.

What I learned best from Murray was his theological method. At Princeton, my PEF friends urged me not to study at Westminster. In their view, Reformed theology was more a celebration of its own tradition than a serious reading of Scripture. When I came to Westminster, I was armed by this criticism. If Westminster had defended its teaching mainly by referring to its confessions and past thinkers, I would not have been persuaded. But Murray focused on Scripture itself. His classes were almost entirely spent in exegeting the main biblical sources on each topic. In this, he was not afraid to differ from Reformed tradition, even the confessions, when he believed the biblical text pointed in a different direction. He described his method in his essay “Systematic Theology,”20 which I have read again and again, and on which every young theologian should deeply meditate. Here he condemns traditionalism and advocates a concentration on biblical exegesis.

My own theology is very unlike Murray’s in style, diction, and emphasis. But in its method and most of its conclusions, my work is more like his than any other theological writer’s.

I was more ambivalent to the large emphasis at Westminster on redemptive history or biblical theology. A number of the professors had been deeply influenced by Geerhardus Vos, professor of biblical theology at Princeton Seminary. Edmund Clowney, although he had not studied with Vos, was also enthusiastic about Vos’s ideas and taught students to focus their sermons on the redemptive-historical significance of each text. This meant that biblical texts were intended to proclaim redemption in Christ (the Old Testament looking forward to him, the New Testament reflecting on his incarnation, atonement, resurrection, and ascension). Sermons, on this view, should also focus on redemption and not on, say, the moral successes or failures of biblical characters. Sermons that used biblical characters to illustrate spiritual or moral issues were called “exemplarist” or “moralistic.”

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