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Scale from 1 to 10
How true was Francis Schaeffer to Cornelius Van Til’s Presuppositionalism?
8 | John Frame Author of Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of his Thought
5 | Scott Oliphint
Author of Christian Apologetics Past and Present (2 vols.)
As the first thinking theologian I read, it was he who drew me to read Van Til. His highlighting of the notion of pressupositions in The God Who Is There was revolutionary for me as a new Christian. With respect to Van Til, however, Schaeffer did not explicitly or consistently carry his own theology into the area of apologetics and culture. So, for example, he was weak on the covenantal antithesis (i.e., either “in Adam” or “in Christ”) that accrues to every person, and I can’t remember his ever building explicitly on Paul’s notion of a universal knowledge of God (sense of deity), from Romans 1:18f. These biblical truths are central to Van Til, and seemed relatively non-existent in Schaeffer’s own works.
Schaeffer considered himself to be a presuppositionalist. He used some arguments more typical of other schools of thought, but what made him an effective evangelist to intellectuals, I think, was his Van Tillianism. He always brought the argument back to basics: the Christiantheistic worldview, vs. “matter, motion, time, and chance.” And his argument was transcendental: Matter, motion, time, and chance is the only alternative to Christianity, and on that basis there can be no beauty, no love, no reasoning. Schaeffer did not cross every “t” and dot every “i” in Van Til’s way, and he was not as profound in his analysis of intellectual history. But on the whole he was more effective in addressing the cultured despisers of Christianity in his day.
5 | Bryan Follis
Author of Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer
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t one level, Schaeffer scores 9 for his total acceptance of the utter importance of recognising the value of presuppositions and as such is very Van Tillian. However, he differs profoundly from Van Til in his view that while there is no common ground with the unbeliever, the Christian can find a point of common contact, and thus he scores a 2. Schaeffer argued that this point of contact arose because the nonChristian was not consistent to his own values and so strayed into the Christian’s territory thus enabling in practice effective communication.