In her efforts to discredit conservative evangelicals, Worthen overreaches. Van Til is not the “forerunner of modern cultural relativism.” Van Til believed in God-defined objective reality, and held that everyone can see true things and come to right conclusions. It is only, however, when we presuppose that God is the foundation of truth that we can truly understand the God-made world. It is at that point that fragmented, provisional knowledge coheres. Van Til, we see, is the very opposite of a relativist.

Who knew theologian Cornelius Van Til is the reason for the demise of American society? Turns out he is according to a recent piece in the New York Times by historian Molly Worthen. The essay is bashfully titled “The Evangelical Roots of Our Post-Truth Society” and takes a surprising swipe at the Westminster don in a section on the “Christian worldview”:

The term is a mouthful, but the idea is simple: We all have presuppositions that frame our understanding of the world. Cornelius Van Til, a theologian who promoted this idea, rejected the premise that all humans have access to objective reality. “We really do not grant that you see any fact in any dimension of life truly,” he wrote in a pamphlet aimed at non-Christians.

If this sounds like a forerunner of modern cultural relativism, in a way it is — with the caveat that one worldview, the one based on faith in an inerrant Bible, does have a claim on universal truth, and everyone else is a myopic relativist.

In Worthen’s telling, the “Christian worldview” is shorthand for a festering bog of horrible ideas: “inerrancy, creationism and the presumption that Jesus would have voted Republican.” As seen in her Oxford book Apostles of Reason, Worthen’s stance is that Van Til, Francis Schaeffer, Carl Henry and their evangelical peers were credentialed, yes, but were not genuine intellectuals. They promoted an anti-intellectual agenda aimed at spreading a few pernicious beliefs and electing candidates who fit their vision of America.

Molly Worthen is a gifted writer and an estimable thinker. She pens some of the most fluid prose around, and she has a real gift for translating high-level discussion into readable, even enjoyable, commentary. This is no small feat in the realm of academic history. But Worthen, for reasons that are not immediately clear to me, seems to doubt very strongly the possibility that evangelical leaders like Schaeffer, Van Til, and Henry were genuinely brilliant (as they surely were). Further, her narrative of neo-evangelicalism runs squarely in the direction of political influence, and thus she characterizes a fundamentally theological movement as a public-square one, a category mistake. (I have made these points in my book Awakening the Evangelical Mind, which interacted with Worthen.)

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