For Van Til the reformed Calvinist system was the correct interpretation of the revealed Word of God in the Bible. And the Bible, as it presents a Christian worldview, is not only rational but it is the only rational worldview to base one’s life on and that can adequately explain the world we live in. He also criticized the Arminian and Roman systems as insufficiently Biblical since they acknowledge and incorporate unregenerate man’s ability to reason rationally about God.

First Things has published a piece online highlighting the work of Alvin Plantinga and his recent award of the Templeton Prize. This award is given annually to any living person judged to have made an exceptional contribution to life’s spiritual dimension. The award is not limited to academics or even explicit Christians. But that is no matter.

Alvin Plantinga is a Christian philosopher of the Dutch Reformed tradition. The subject matter of his works has included a defense of the rational belief in God through the ontological argument and answering the problem of evil. His work on the latter subject is widely hailed. But what struck me about the article was a quote from one of Plantinga’s students describing the poor state of Christian philosophy in the 1950s – when Plantinga began his work – to the quality and quantity in which it exists today. A result the student attributes to Plantinga. Now, he may well be right. Plantinga might justly be considered to explicit Christian philosophy what Justice Antonin Scalia is to originalism and textualism in the legal realm. However, I took a little umbrage to the idea that the Christian philosophy of the 1950s was in a poor state.

Simply put, before Plantinga there was Van Til. The problem, I suspect, is that Cornelius Van Til might primarily be considered a theologian or Christian apologist and not a Christian philosopher. But the problem with that, as anyone who has read Van Til knows, is that he dealt in explicit philosophical terms. His use of philosophical language, i.e., the Transcendental argument, the ontological Trinity and its epistemological and metaphysical implications for Christianity, the problem of the one and many, his frequent casting of other theological systems as Kantian or Hegelian, and the fact that his academic duelists included philosophers of one degree or another all serve to show that predominantly Van Til was a Christian philosopher. His published books frequently discuss the nuances of Kantian, Hegelian and Aristotelian thought as applied to historic Christianity and to Calvinism. It also cannot be denied that Van Til was deeply influenced by the School of Amsterdam which included preeminent Christian philosophers such as Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven.

Rev. Van Til died in 1987, 14 years after the establishment of the Templeton Prize. While Prof. Plantinga rightly deserves such an award it is unfortunate that Van Til never received it and that his thought and legacy remains largely confined to the unapologetically reformed denominations of America. Why he never got such an award I cannot say. But what seems interesting to me as I perused and read summaries of Plantinga’s work is that it seems his subject matter is more frequently theistic rather than Christian. That is not true in all cases as he does have a published work explicitly defending the Christian system. But that work only came after he first published a book defending the belief in God in general. I read that and immediately knew what Van Til might say: “The belief in a god and the belief in the Trinitarian God revealed in the Bible are two completely different things and defending the former only to get to the latter after is sinful.”

This gets to why Van Til has not got his due credit in the larger Christian world much less academic philosophy in general. For Van Til the reformed Calvinist system was the correct interpretation of the revealed Word of God in the Bible. And the Bible, as it presents a Christian worldview, is not only rational but it is the only rational worldview to base one’s life on and that can adequately explain the world we live in. He also criticized the Arminian and Roman systems as insufficiently Biblical since they acknowledge and incorporate unregenerate man’s ability to reason rationally about God.

But for Van Til total depravity was just that and it could not possibly be expected that a non-Christian could come to rational beliefs about the God of the Bible by first convincing him of theism only then to be persuaded to the Christian system. Of course, he recognized that this happened in fact all the time. But he rejected that such persons could rationally explain in principle such a method and still be true to the Bible. If after reading that you are scratching your head that is perfectly understandable. But this is not the time or the place to get in depth about Van Til’s apologetic. I encourage the reader to pick up one of his many books edited by K. Scott Oliphint or by Greg Bahnsen and to learn about his thought in his own words and the helpful footnotes of his students.

For now I think it is enough to say that while Christian philosophy did not have as wide a range publishing-wise in the 1950s as it does today it was nonetheless in a healthy state and that is because of Cornelius Van Til. Plantinga may have helped it gain a wider acceptance among the secular philosophers but if that is the case then the question that should be asked is how so? Was he being explicitly Christian in his presentation like Van Til or did he sand down the rough edges and dilute the message in order to make it more palatable to Gentile philosophers who love wise words but are stumbled by the Cross?

Timothy J. Glass is a member of Tates Creek Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Lexington, KY, and is a J.D. Candidate 2017 at the University of Kentucky College of Law.