About this sermon
A Morning Instruction class of personal reminiscences about Cornelius Van Til from a pastor who served his congregation in Glenside, Pennsylvania, beginning in 1981, when Van Til was elderly. Van Til is remembered as a Christian gentleman, classically trained and devoted to his students and his church, and as a pastor himself to those around him. The talk recalls stories from his teaching and later years and reflects on how his apologetics has been received, sometimes as a test of orthodoxy and sometimes rejected without real engagement.
Sermon transcript
Thank you, Brett. I was asked by Ed Hardesty while we were in Japan, and he said, we’re going through Meather’s biography of Van Till, and would you come give some reminiscences about Dr. Van Till when we get back? And I said, well, OK. There’s a proviso that I had and sort of, what would I say? Sort of a warning label. It’s not gonna be as profound as you might hope.
I was asked, when they were writing the book, I got a phone call and they were asking me for reminiscences about Van Til. And you have to understand that when you’re a pastor, there are a lot of things that go between people and their pastor that are private and are things that someone might say that they don’t necessarily wish to have passed along or might not have said as an opinion or a thought when they were younger. And I knew Dr. Van Til in his latter years. I became pastor at Glenside in 1981, 80-81. And he was already an elderly gentleman.
He had good days and he had bad days. Some days he had very good days, and some days weren’t so good. He was an elderly gentleman. And I underline that word gentleman because Dr. Vantel was always a gentleman. He was a Christian gentleman from another time. We don’t have gentlemen very much like that anymore. He was a man that was classically trained. He reminded me one time that he had to write one of his theses, and I don’t remember whether it was a master’s or a doctorate or what, but he had to write it in Latin. So that was a long time ago, you know. He was a man who suffered a lot for the sake of the gospel. Always was good natured, good will, always had a twinkle in his eye and was ready for some fun and some laughter.
He conducted his classes in a semi-humorous fashion, although it was very serious business. He was known for throwing chalk at his students. And sometimes it’s hard to sit through a class that involves philosophers and all kinds of things. And sometimes he would just come into class and lay across the desk and start somewhere in the middle of a lecture somewhere.
And if somebody wasn’t listening, why, he’d just beat him with a piece of chalk. He stopped doing that in his latter years because one time he threw a piece of chalk, and it happened to be one that was just recently broken, and it had a sharp edge. And it cut the student at whom he threw it. And he was so abashed by that that he never threw chalk again.
And one could understand the embarrassment. But when he came to his final illness and I visited him, one of the things I feel rather comfortable sharing, sort of here at the beginning, is What he requested to be read, I asked him what he would like to have read to him from the scriptures. We both knew at that point that he was in his final illness and that he would not recover.
And so I began to visit him on a more frequent basis. And I asked him the first time, I said, now, what would you like for me to read to you from the scriptures? And he didn’t hesitate a second. He said, Revelation 21 and 22. And he frequently liked to be reminded of those things. And just as a reminder to us, I thought I’d quickly read just portions of that. And then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.
He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And he who is seated on the throne said, behold, I am making all things new. Also he said, write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true. And he said to me, it is done.
I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his god. and he will be my son. And then from chapter 22, then the angel showed me the river of the water of life bright as crystal flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city also on either side of the river, the tree of life with its 12 kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month.
The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and the lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads, and night will be no more. They will need no light or lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. And it is that vision of the nations pouring into the tree of life and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
Underlined for me once again the concern for the evangelization of souls and the bringing in of the elect of God into his church that animated Dr. Vantill. I mean, he’s often thought of as a philosopher and he certainly was that and a theologian and he certainly was that. And of course an apologist that is in the technical sense, an apologist. And, uh, he was of course, premierly that.
But, um, The men were animated by a deep desire to see people come to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and come into his church as those who have been radically transformed by the gospel and by the spirit of God to a new life in Jesus Christ. And I think those things don’t often get reemphasized and come across the way they should. And as they were, especially in the beginning of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And I had the privilege of knowing many of the men who were young men when the Orthodox Presbyterian Church was founded and were old men, some of them very old men by the time I knew them.
Of course, Dr. Van Til was one of them. I said he suffered for the gospel and, you know, a person of his education and ability In another time, and of course there aren’t other times, God places us when, where, and how he pleases, and he’s good, what he does is good, his will is right, and we serve when, where, and how he pleases, and we should be content and rejoice in that, and these men were content. They stood up against a a tsunami of cultural change and opposition, the likes of which we’re just beginning to see again, just the enormity of what was happening.
And he would remind me of people that he had in his classes from time to time. One of the times that I got to spend the most intimate time with him was not when I would do pastoral visits. He had a certain view of pastoral visits, and they were sort of formal. And I became accustomed to that. You know, his upbringing was in the Dutch church, and I always suspected that he thought in Dutch and spoke in English. He certainly wrote that way. That’s part of what makes it impervious to some people. The other thing was, I said to him once, well, Dr. Vantel, we were, well, I got ahead of myself, but that’s all right. If I keep moving, maybe you’ll listen. Try and hit a moving target.
We were going out to lunch one day. He liked to go out to lunch. He liked to take people out to lunch. He wasn’t a wealthy man, but he was alone by this time and he enjoyed the company. One of our deacons used to go pick him up for lunch. We would go for lunch.
One of the most intimate times that I would have with him was not when we’d go to lunch or when I did pastoral visits, but when, on occasion, I would pick him up for Wednesday evening prayer service. Usually, Grace Mullen picked him up. And she was the assistant librarian at the seminary, and you probably all know her well. And she was great friends with Charlie. she would pick him up and bring him to Wednesday evening prayer meeting, without fail, unless he was not well or in the hospital.
And sometimes he was very clear and very good, and sometimes one wasn’t quite sure where he was since he wasn’t in the room, even though he was sitting there, as happens with elderly people. My dad’s 92. He’s in a nursing center. And we’re not always sure what he knows or understands. And that’s sometimes the way Dr. Van Til was. Although he could walk, he had good balance, he had a good physique. But when he was in good health and Grace couldn’t pick him up and I picked him up, we would have very nice conversations.
But I was talking about when we were headed to lunch and I asked him one time, I said, because we had a student with us, I had the deacon myself, and we had a student. He was going to take this student to lunch. He had some questions. I had been saying to the student some things to help him read Van Til, because Van Til could be rather opaque for some people to try to read. And I said, Dr. Van Til, I’ve encouraged this young man, if he really wants to understand what you’re trying to do, that he reads Calvin’s Institutes. Did I tell him the right thing?
Turned around from the front seat. I was sitting in the back seat where I belong. And he was sitting in the front seat and he turned around and he said, of course. And just turned around and looked out the front window again. Sort of like, young man. So I was treated by Dr. Vantel as both a student and a young learner. And sometimes one would almost think a young fool. But also at other times, quite respectfully, as his pastor.
And if I came to visit him, I would be ushered into the room. Maybe somebody was there also visiting, or the family that lived with him, caring for him. And they’d say, well, come on in. And he’d be sitting in the living room. And I’d come sit down. And the first thing he’d say to me is, good. In other words, the pastor was here. Good. He was getting a visit.
And I was expected to read the scriptures and pray. And then we would talk about things that were of concern to him. And we would talk a little bit about things in the church or other such things. And that was a more formal time. And it was very clear that at that time he was taking the role of one who was a congregant and I was the pastor.
And that was not so much, it wasn’t at all because of any particular gifts I had or who I was or what I was doing or even his appreciation for my ministry, but it was the high view of the word of God that he had and of the pastoral office. and of the fact that we all need the word of God brought to bear. And he was quite willing to be ministered to in that way. You don’t find that kind of humility today among people. People find it hard to have a pastor today for some reason. And he was not of that ilk. He had been raised with a much different view of things than that.
And we were walking one day somewhere, I forget where, and actually I was walking with Bruce Hunt and we met Ani Saka and he asked Dr. Van Til, or we were talking, and he said, oh, this is my pastor. So that’s sort of how that came about, that people said, well, Steve was his pastor, because it wasn’t so much that I said anything about it or that that was well-known. It was just that Dr. Van Til would say that if someone said, well, who’s your pastor?
He said, well, you know, where do you go to church? He never hesitated to say, I go to church in Calvary Glenside. We didn’t always have professors like that. There were professors who said, where do you go to church? And he said, well, I was preaching over at such and such a place this past week or whatever. But I have some very humorous recollections of Dr. Van Til.
He was certainly a gentleman and a scholar, but he also liked fun. He always had a twinkle in his eye, as I said. Every Sunday I tried to greet him. He could get out of the pew pretty quickly, just so he wasn’t in the way and didn’t stumble and so on. He was a good-sized gentleman, was tall at one time.
His son would bring him to church on Sunday while he was alive. His son died while while I was pastor there, well before Dr. Van Til died. That’s another story. But Earl would come and pick him up and bring him to church. And usually that was the time when Earl would, he collected a Lincoln Continental for an investment. He had it, it was a car he liked and it was a nice car and it had plenty of room. His dad could get in the back seat and drive. So it was parked out where Dr. Van Til could get in the car. And Dr. Van Til got out that particular Sunday before I could get to him. And so I thought, oh, I miss Dr. Van Til.
I want to get out and say hello to him. So I went out to say hello to him. And I came around the side of the car where he was sitting behind the driver’s side in the back seat. And they had electronic windows. And he rolled down the window. And he looked over at me, and he said, get away from the car. I’m trying to look important. And he rolled the window back up. End of interview. So, I mean, we had a lot of fun that way. And I didn’t mind being the butt of his jokes at all. He was a gentleman who had already lost his wife. And in the early years while I was there, his son rather unexpectedly passed away.
Earl was driving home from work. And when he got home, he said to his wife, Thelma, he said, oh, man, he says, I have the worst headache I’ve ever had in my life. And he went in and laid down on the couch, and she was fixing dinner, and she heard a thud. And she went in, and Earl was on the floor. And he had had an aneurysm burst in his head, and he was, for all intents and purposes, gone. But, of course, he was still breathing, so they rushed him to the hospital. And after surgery, the surgeon came out and took me aside and said, you’re the pastor. I said, yes. He said, well.
You know, there’s the whole brain is just gone. I mean, it was just an explosion in his head and the pressure built up there. There’s nothing we can do. And for all intents and purposes, he’s not there. But his body’s still breathing and his heart’s still beating.
Now what do we do? So I explained it to Thelma and she was not ready. for him not to be on life support, so they put Earl on life support. And that evening, there were a number of the men from the seminary who went over and sat with Dr. Van Til. And then when it was clear what had happened and what was going to unfold over the next few days, while his body got the message that Earl wasn’t home anymore, then I went over and I gave Dr. Van Til the final word about what was happening.
He didn’t say anything at the time. He was silent. It was quite a blow. And then somewhere in the next week or so, Earl’s body was shutting down and it was very clear there was nothing happening but what the machines were doing. And when the machines were turned off, why then, he immediately, his body immediately shut down. It was, his heart immediately stopped. He wasn’t breathing on his own anyway. And then I had to go tell Dr. Van Til about that event. And he took it very well.
That was something that was indicative of Dr. Van Tell, that he believed in God’s purposes, that God was sovereign, and that these things were from the Lord, and you received them as from the Lord’s hand. He was a Calvinist, and his desire in apologetics was to develop a an apologetic that answered to our thoroughgoing Calvinism so that there was a presentation and a defense of the gospel that actually arose out of the gospel and the character of the gospel itself. He wrote Hattie DeWard. Reverend DeWard was an early minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. My brother was out in Grand Rapids at what was then called Harvest, I think. And Hattie DeWard’s husband and Dr. Van Til had been close friends, and they had conducted Gerhardtus Voss’s funeral, actually, together.
I once had a picture of that with the open casket, but someone removed it from my files for some reason to use, and it was never returned. So I don’t have it any longer, but I know it exists somewhere. And that was before I went to Eritrea. So those things get lost over the years. But they were good friends together. Dr. Vantill and Hattie DeWard kept up correspondence over the years and so once in a while she would show my brother letters from Dr. Vantill when my brother visited her out in Grand Rapids.
On one occasion, he said, Steve, you’ve got to hear this. And it was not long after I had begun to preach at Glenside, Dr. Van Til wrote to Hatties and he said, finally, a pastor who believes and preaches the sovereignty of God. I don’t know what that meant, but I was very glad to hear that he was happy with my ministry. He was very much the Calvinist, and he wanted and he was looking for someone who actually not only doctrinally believed that, but that it’s pressed through the way we think and apply that in our Christian life. And it was a hallmark of how he dealt, for instance, with the death of Earl. That was something that God had ordered and he was willing to receive and accept. You don’t want to take that comment too seriously by him because finally a pastor. He hadn’t remembered the last couple or something.
There had been fill-in pastors. One would question why they were there, but there had been some very fine men who filled that pulpit. Dr. Van Til served at the seminary at a time when it was small in numbers and he would tell me about guys. Recently I saw one of those evangelists that studied at the seminary.
What was his name? He had sunshine. It was down in Maryland. What’s that? No, no, the, oh, it was back in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s. He had a radio program and he had, oh, why am I not remembering that name? Anyway, I just saw that somebody wrote a biography on him. It was funny, because Dr. Van Til had laughed about, maybe it’s good I don’t remember his name. Morning, where’s that place in Maryland? What was the name of that Jane down there? He had a camp down there. Sandy Cove, yeah, down at Sandy Cove. I forget the name of the place.
But he was a famous reformed, sort of semi-reformed evangelist. And Dr. Van Til said, I was never any used to that guy at all. He just came into the class. He knew exactly what he believed. And I never had any effect on him whatsoever. But he did affect other people that We might be surprised to hear, when I conducted Dr. Van Til’s graveside service, afterward, a pretty impressive elderly gentleman came up to me and he had a bodyguard on each side of him. It looked like a bodyguard on each side. It wasn’t. It was just probably syncophants that were there. But it was Carl McIntyre. And he came up. pressed right up close to me, you know.
He was a very impressive man, always was very forceful, took my hand, it hurt. And he said, and he was very appreciative of the message, which was nice. But what he really wanted to say was, you know, the two men that affected my life more than anyone else were Jay Gresham Machen and Cornelius Van Til, and now they’re both with the Lord. That was what MacIntyre said. Now, one, with all the trouble that Carl MacIntyre caused, those two men in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, one might not have expected that response, but that’s what he said at the time. And first thing he said to me was, do you know who I am? And I said, yes, sir, I do. Dr. Van Til wasn’t that way. He didn’t want to impress others with his presence or his person.
But he was very concerned that the gospel as it really was in the scripture would be communicated and thought out and brought into various fields of endeavor. One time I came to visit him and he was reading at his desk. I went upstairs and he was reading at his desk. And I wondered what he was reading. And he said it was either Bavink or Birkhoff. I can’t remember correctly, but it was a systematic theology. And it just, for some reason, as a young man, it just caught me off guard for a moment. And I said a stupid thing, as we often do, say stupid things.
I said, well, why are you doing that? I mean, he could write his own, you know? Why are you doing that? He says, well, you have to keep up. You have to keep these things fresh in your mind. I understand what he means now, but of course, I didn’t understand then. But that’s the way it was.
And what you have to understand in those days, and I think this is good and right, and we ought to learn from this, He was concerned that Reformed theology as a whole, as a system, be pressed through our thinking. That how we think of God, how we think of the world, God’s providence, God’s care of things, the whole nature of redemption, Calvinist doctrines, but the whole, the whole of it as a system pressed through in our thinking, in our presentation of Christ in the church and so on. So for him, systematic theology was an organizing feature of our thought. It was something that was positive.
It’s often spoken of today in a negative way, but it was a positive for Dr. Van Til and something that was part of the shorthand of your thinking, how you pulled things together. And in that sense, he had a high appreciation of systematic theology, and he expressed that to me on a number of occasions.
He hardly ever missed morning worship, and he seemed always to seek to be attentive in morning worship. There were others who regularly slept during morning worship, but Dr. Van Til was not one of them. And as I said, he would come to the weekly prayer meeting. And it’s often when I would fill in for someone else and pick him up and drive him to the prayer meeting, we would get to talk if he was having a good day. And it was, those were very enlightening conversations.
Like my old pastor, Bob Atwell, He viewed the early Orthodox Presbyterian Church as a bunch of just very young men. You know, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church was started by a bunch of very young men and very few men. And that’s something to be remembered. You know, we might look back and say, well, you know, these guys, they didn’t have it all together. They were struggling to deal with the onslaught of modernism and progressivism and the whole change of a society. And many of them were just barely Calvinists. A large group of them were thinking about going into the CMA.
So these were not people who, you know, and when they got into Dr. Van Til’s class, for many of them, that was the first time they ever heard of the Reformed faith being presented sort of as an entire picture, something coming on to mold your thinking about everything. And it was just an overwhelming experience. John Mail told me that it wasn’t until his father returned the next year after he had had Dr. Van Til. that he’d even become a Calvinist. And then that was because of what Dr. Van Til had taught.
And the way, it wasn’t just, you know, a particular argument, just one thing, but the whole of the Reformed faith as it pressed And said, now this is what the Bible teaches, but this is really the way God is. This is the way the world is. And from the ground up, this is how I have to be thinking. And so he threw over his thinking. And many of the students were like that, apparently.
But Dr. Van Til said during the war he had three students, and I can’t imitate the faces he made, but he made three faces. One was looking up agape at the ceiling. One was, you know, like completely, his eyes rolling back in his head, and the other was, you know, intent on thinking his own thoughts. As only Dr. Van Til could make these faces.
He said, I often wondered, what was I doing there? At one point, very early on in his career, he went to Machen with his resignation. That’s probably in the book somewhere. He said, you know, we really don’t agree on apologetics, so if you would like me to resign, I can offer my resignation. And Dr. Vangel said, if we can’t afford to lose the janitor, much less our professor of apologetics.
And Dr. Vangel was fond of repeating that over and over again with a chuckle, because You know, he thought of himself as just there by the skin of his teeth. He got an honorary doctorate from Project Strom in South Africa. And he told me, he said, I was more appreciative of that than the one I earned. So it’s interesting, the things that mean something to us in life. He was very much aware of his rural upbringing and sort of the idea that he was a farm boy.
And you can see that in some of his examples. They haven’t preserved a lot of his lectures. I wish they had been. And they haven’t preserved a lot of his examples. But you still can get some of that rustic sort of thing here and there in his sermons and lectures. And you can get them. I guess there’s a collection of them that you can get online and so on. But it’s really in his examples that I found so much help in understanding Dr. Van Til and his thinking.
Like the man of water who lived in the world of water, climbing up a ladder of water to try and get out of the world of water. But how could you ever, you say? That sort of, if you want to know why the liberal media is liberal, but it doesn’t understand that it’s liberal, it’s because it’s the man of water, looking in the world of water, saying, of course we’re all made out of water. Our presuppositions determine where we come out.
And he always was very sensitive to the argument that he argued in circular reasoning But the fact is that where people begin is going to structure the way they look at things. And therefore, they’re going to take what they look at and structure it the way they look at it. And then they’re going to come out with their conclusions that fit the pattern of their thinking with which they began. That’s what you see. happens on the evening news, it’s what’s happening as people look at the world from their political point of view, it’s what happens when the scientists look at creation and they see a creation that’s very, very old, and all of these things. They’re looking with presuppositions that structure their whole approach, and then their whole approach structures their conclusions. And Dr. Van Til was very much aware of that, and that was very much a part of how he felt we should approach our understanding of both the world and philosophy and thinking, but also how it ought to be critiqued, and then how we ought to carefully restructure what we do on the ground of our presuppositions so the direction we go is not the direction that’s signaled by the presuppositions of others.
He used road signs. to talk about that. If you follow somebody else’s road signs, you’re not gonna get to where you wanna go. Your destination is, you gotta follow a whole different set of road signs. If you follow their road signs for long enough, and then you say, no, but I’ve gotta go the other way now, they say, well, why are you leaving us? And that’s why he talked about the old apologetics as being inconsistent in that way.
It is interesting that a number of people have tried to write about Dr. Van Til, what he taught, what he believed. I think the only one that he felt that got it right while he was alive was Craig Bonson. That’s what he told me. I asked him about John Frame’s little book, Van Til, the Theologian, and he said, I didn’t recognize myself in that book. So that might help you. in your reading, and he was quite adamant about that. Of course, he had a proviso, and he’d say, well, I said, who would you have liked to succeed you at the seminary? He said, well, Craig Bonson would have been good, he said, except for that little matter of theonomy. And that’s the way he would talk, you know, just that little matter of theonomy.
He liked to pinch. And when he would see me at prayer meeting, and even if I hadn’t driven him, he’d come up and he’d grab me by the back of the arm and pinch me. And it would get your attention. I mean, he was taller than I was. And he would get ahold of the back of my arm and he would pinch.
And I’d say, yes, I’m here. I’m listening. You know? Practically bring a tear to your eye. One time he did that, and he pinched so hard, and he pulled me around the corner, took me in a little cubicle I had as an office at the time. And he said, you know this PCA thing? He said, Steve, you’ve got to do something about that. And he said, do you? And I tried my hardest. He said, you know, and you have to understand the way he talked, but he said, we own the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
By that he meant the Reformed faith. And it was very, very much a matter of deep reverent concern for him that the special principle, as he called it in apologetics, the converting, regenerating power of the Holy Spirit not be messed with, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit that had been recovered in the Reformation, not be distorted. And the idea now of the gifts and these things being allowed, you know, charismatic speaking in tongues and the idea that this was a matter of indifference. that somehow you could have a service where people could get up and say, thus saith the Lord from the pew, you know, and the Lord gave me a message, or they’re speaking in tongues. This was a matter of grave concern, that Reformed people wouldn’t see that this is not something that comports with or is compatible with our doctrine of the Holy Spirit. one at such great a price, you see, in the past. And then this would be watered down, diluted in some way. It was a grave concern to him. And also the matter of the Sabbath. But the thing that really exercised him at that point was masonry.
You know, masonry was still very big in the South at that time. talking around 1980, 1981, 82 in there. And he said, Steve, you know, in the church I grew up, it was in the Dutch Reformed Church, the Christian Reformed Church, you couldn’t be a member and be a Mason.
And he said, we can’t allow this. He says, that’s universalism. and it’ll destroy the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. So he was very exercised about that and I think I had a bruise for a while on the back of that arm after that conversation. He was really exercised about it and he was not against ecumenicity at all, don’t get me wrong, but it was just a deep concern. Those things, masonry, we can’t allow that.
Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the Reformed Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, we have to protect that at all costs, even at the cost of not joining with another group with which we might have affinity and desire to join. And so he was very concerned about that. He was also concerned later on what it looked like because, you know, we kept going through these cycles of trying to commit suicide as a denomination. And I guess we went two or three times through that kind of thing while I was in Glenside. And finally he said to me one time while he was still alive, towards the end of his life, just don’t let them use my apologetics as a criteria for what’s orthodox. Don’t let that divide the church. I never forgot that because he was intent on that. That was something that meant a great deal to him. And I was very pleased on the one hand and unpleased on the other. You know, you get mixed emotions. I could hear his voice ringing in my ear when we adopted a curriculum and put it in the back of our book of church order that included Pantaleon apologetics as almost a hallmark of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
That is expressly against his wishes. And very few people, I think, are aware of that, or if they are aware of it, have followed it. It’s not that I would depreciate his apologetics. But I think in his mind, the conversation wasn’t over. And I think what’s happened in a sense is sort of tragic in the whole area of apologetics because for many, orthodoxy is determined by whether you’re a Vantillian or not, whether or not they understand that. I’m not sure they understand it. What being thinking through things in a Vantillian way is and what presuppositional apologetics really are. But nevertheless, it’s a hallmark for them of orthodoxy And then other people just rejected outright, but the conversation hasn’t gone on.
There hasn’t been a continuing discussion of epistemology that is how do we know what we know? And those kinds of things. Do Christians know differently than those who are unregenerate and how they look at the world? That was a big question when it came to how does God know what he knows and how do we know or what God knows, and what is truth, and so on. These questions are all related. And Dr. Van Til, I think, would have preferred that the conversation go on, and that these kinds of things would develop, and there would be a lot more asking the question, how, as Reformed Christians, from where we come in terms of our system of theology, that we find taught in the scriptures. What does that require of us in our thinking about the way people know and how we present the gospel and the way we look at the world?
It’s not that there aren’t right and wrong answers. I’m not saying in any way, shape, or form he was a relativist. He hated relativism. But that we don’t say, any one of us, that we are the answer. And I think he felt that very keenly, that his approach should not be considered the and the only approach, and then all others excluded. And I think we’ve kind of, oh, we’ve run out of time. We might have a few minutes for questions. I should maybe stop with that.
Yeah. yeah back when the PCA started you know they weren’t they didn’t refuse to accept people who believed in speaking in tongues and other spiritual manifestations that was not to be made an issue of And they were bringing in people. You see, there were a lot of folks leaving the Southern Presbyterian Church at that time with those who had already left the PCA. And there were people coming out of the PCA, the UP, or the PCUSA in the north. And so their desire was to be a national church. So they didn’t want to be so exclusive. Many of their elders were masons.
And so these were issues in the formation of the PCA. PCA formed, I forget what year it was, right around the time we got married, I don’t know, was it 1970, 71, somewhere in there. And within just years, the character of the church began to change. And you can sort of see that in the history, because you have someone, for instance, in the life of Morton Smith. He was involved with RTS. And then you have Greenville Seminary starting. That became necessary in his way of thinking. Greenville originally was called Thornwell Seminary.
Their idea was, and Morton Smith was the first, I don’t know if he was the first moderator or the first, he became the clerk, sort of the original clerk of the PCA. But he was one of the founding fathers and the idea was very much different than what eventually happened and it was just, That kind of concern that Dr. Mintill was expressing, he felt that it would be a big mistake to go in at that time.
And those issues should be discussed. They should be dealt with. And it should be made clear what our doctrine of the Holy Spirit was. That’s what that was about. If I wasn’t clear, Another funny comment he made, he came down one time, I think it was while I was still in seminary. You have to excuse me because memories fade and the timeline gets changed over the years, as some of you can realize. But I remember him coming down the back steps of the seminary, flapping a picture of himself on the front of Christianity Today. So you can still look that up when that was.
And I was crossing, there was a little dogwood tree there at the time, and I was crossing across towards the parking lot. And he came and he says, look, Steve. He said, I died. Because he was on the cover of Christianity Today. Another time, his insurance company sent him a notice that his insurance policy was filled up or whatever.
I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what. He said, look, I’m dead. I said, what’s that? He says, well, I’m not covered anymore. They sent it back to me. He says, I’ve lived too long. I don’t know what it was, whether the cutoff was 90 91, but he got a great thrill out of having lived so long that all these funny things were happening. Who was it? Was it Bart or someone else? He met only once. And he said, you’ve been a naughty boy.
Well, yeah, to Dr. Van Til. Well, that was sort of the attitude he had towards me. So you have to understand I’m not an expert in that way. Let’s see if I left anything out. Well, he was a warm-hearted person. And I think I’d want to end with that, that he was certainly a person whose heart and soul was for the gospel and for the worship of the Lord Jesus Christ. And at his deepest core, he thought of himself as just simply a believer, a sinner saved by grace. And he really didn’t share an understanding of Presbyterian piety with us. I mean, Presbyterian government, but he shared Presbyterian piety in the sense that He believed that that was the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit and that you could really count on the Lord. You could really count on the Lord. And he did. And he believed in a warm-hearted, reformed Christianity.
And it was very hard to see him go, like so many of the others that we had to let go. When I was at Glenside, I had One year I had a funeral every month, and one month I had a funeral every week. So that was, how many, 16 funerals in that year. And I lost a lot of those folks who had been very instrumental in forming what we’ve enjoyed in the years since.
The last time I saw Dr. Van Til, I can end with this, he was in bed, he was unconscious, he was up in his bedroom, and I think he was lecturing. He was in a coma, but I could just faintly hear him going through things, but it was in Dutch. It wasn’t in English, and I couldn’t understand. But to me, it sounded very much like his lectures. And I don’t know where he was in his mind, but right to the end, he was presenting the gospel.
I’ve taken up more than enough time. Sorry about that. Thank you. It was a privilege. Let’s close in prayer. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for this time that we have had to reflect upon history, the history of our denomination and the biography of one person. And we thank you for the testimony of his life and the way that it still speaks to us, and his humility and his godliness. We do love and appreciate those who went before us, We do ask that you would cast down anything in us that would seek to make these who we hold very highly, that we would not make them lords over us, but that we would see them as they truly are, fellow servants, those who were saved by grace, even as we are and have been. Still though, we thank you for the way that you have used these people in such great ways to help us to know more of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we pray, amen.
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