JUDICIAL WARFARE
Christian Reconstruction and Its Blueprints For Dominion
by Greg Loren Durand

Chapter Nine:
Reconstructionism's Dependence on Van Tilianism

       The leading Reconstructionists have been unabashed in their commitment to the presuppositional apologetic system of Cornelius Van Til and it is safe to say that the structure of Reconstructionism could not have been built upon any other foundation. Hence, it is necessary to give a outline of the Van Tilian worldview and a brief rebuttal of its tenets.
       Romans 1:18-32 teaches that fallen man not only knows that the true God exists (verses 20-21), but he also knows that this God has an absolute moral standard which binds all mankind and to which is attached the penalty of death for disobedience (verse 32). In other words, men are aware that there is a covenant of works because the "work of the law" has been "written in their heart" (Romans 2:15). This assertion is proven by the fact that every religion known to man is a manifestation, in one form or another, of a works-based system of righteousness. Even the most primitive savage has a concept of deity whose wrath he fears and whose favor he seeks to earn through good deeds, rituals, or even sacrifice.
       The subject of which Paul wrote is the conscience, a word derived from the Latin "com" (with) and "scire" (to know or to discern). A man with a conscience is a man "with knowledge." The conscience is "the faculty by which [man] perceives the moral effect of actions in Time in reference to their results upon himself in Eternity. It is that sense which over and above the idea of Right and Wrong, has with it the idea of duty, the sense that it is right, and proper, and suitable to act this way, and not that; and the sense that if we do this way, then are we to be declared just; if we do that way, then are we to be declared unrighteous. That it is the sense of Duty and of Responsibility."⁽¹⁾ The function of the conscience is threefold: "The first is Prohibitory. 'This act thou shouldest not do.' The second, Recording. 'This act I have done.' The third is Prophetic. 'Therefore for this act I am responsible'.... The Prohibitory has reference to the Present; the Recording to the Past; the Prophetic to the Future."⁽²⁾ It is therefore the agent of the covenant of works, always setting forth the moral standard, always reminding man that he has failed to meet this standard, and always declaring that he stands before his Creator in a position of condemnation as a result of that failure. Shakespeare put it thusly: "My conscience hath a thousand several tongues; and every tongue brings in a several tale; and every tale condemns me for a villain." Conscience may at times slumber, but it is awakened by the Word of God and again thunders its judgments. "I once was alive apart from the law, but then the commandment came and it slew me."
       Through his conscience, the unregenerate man can only know God as His Judge. Inheriting original sin from Adam, and worsening his condition by his own actual sins, the sinner is always running away from God and yet at every turn, God thunders out His judgments through the faculty of his own conscience. Indeed, there is a civil war raging within the unbeliever in which his depraved will urges him to indulge his sinful passions in opposition to the authority of conscience; in fact, the obstinate sinner will spend his whole life trying to silence the voice of his conscience - to suppress the righteousness of God (Romans 1:18) - and in this effort he will only be successful if abandoned by God to his own lusts (Romans 1:28). The traditional Reformed doctrine of common grace enters at this point to teach that all men are not as evil as they could or would be because God inhibits such efforts to render the conscience inactive. Man longs for autonomy, but his own conscience - the ever-present voice of God's moral law⁽³⁾ - stands as a barrier to that goal and he is thus prevented from giving full vent to his depravity.⁽⁴⁾ The utter impossibility of escaping God's presence should lead him to repentance, but, if left to himself, he will instead respond by hating his perceived tormenter. The unregenerate sinner is therefore rendered unable to hear the call of a merciful God as it is declared in the Gospel and unable to trust in Christ for salvation.
       The Calvinistic doctrine of "total depravity" is often misunderstood to mean that fallen man is so thoroughly wicked that he cannot do or know any temporal good. Of course, the Bible itself nowhere teaches that the functions of human nature are inoperative or that they are evil in and of themselves; man's problem is that his will has been corrupted by sin and his mind is "enmity against God," but that, under normal circumstances, the conscience remains quite active and it is to this human faculty that the Gospel message is addressed.
       Van Til went far beyond the Scriptures and mainstream Reformed theology in his concept of "antithesis," adopting a hyper-depravity, or total corruption, which virtually eliminated the image of God in man after the Fall. Unregenerate man, according to Van Til, is so thoroughly depraved that he does not have any knowledge whatsoever of right and wrong: "The natural man cannot will to do God’s will. He cannot even know what the good is."⁽⁵⁾ Hence, there can be no such thing as an inherent moral law natural to man in his fallen state and therefore no common ethical ground between believers and unbelievers. To the Van Tilian, there is "no other standard" for ethics outside of special divine revelation, for even though fallen man has access to general revelation through the creation, he will always and without exception interpret it "in terms of his assumption of human autonomy" (i.e., that there is no God). Therefore, "The unbeliever is the man with yellow glasses on his face. He sees himself and his world through these glasses. He cannot remove them. His interpretation of himself and of every fact in the universe relating to himself is, unavoidably, a false interpretation."⁽⁶⁾
       To Van Til, human autonomy is not the elusive goal of a man actively running from God, but the presupposition from which he already thinks and acts. In other words, fallen man is an epistomological atheist. If this were the case, it would fail to explain why he hates Him in whose existence he does not believe. It fails to account for the religions of the world, which, as stated above, all involve the attempted propitiation of divine wrath through works of righteousness. Van Til insisted that fallen man borrows from the theistic worldview in contradiction to his own autonomous principle, but the truth is that all men are by their very nature theistic. Therefore, since both the believer and unbeliever presuppose a theistic worldview, communication of the Gospel message is possible.
       Not only is the unbeliever unable to have any knowledge of his Creator, but he also cannot even understand the natural world correctly. According to Van Til, "The natural man is as blind as a mole with respect to natural things as well as with respect to spiritual things,"⁽⁷⁾ and "the natural man does not, on his principles, have any knowledge of the truth."⁽⁸⁾ To a Van Tilian, therefore, there can be no such thing as natural revelation, natural religion, and natural law. The natural man has to be constantly "stealing" from the revealed Christian worldview in order to make sense of the world around him: "Men need to presuppose the truth of Christian theism [Trinitarianism] in order to account for their own accomplishments,"⁽⁹⁾ and "the Christian theist must claim that he alone has true knowledge about cows and chickens as well as about God."⁽¹⁰⁾
       Van Tilianism constitutes a subtle denial that the conscience is the voice of God within all men and effectively reduces fallen man to the level of a brute with whom it is impossible for the Christian to communicate:

       It will be quite impossible then to find a common area of knowledge between believers and unbelievers unless there is agreement between them as to the nature of man himself. But there is no such agreement.⁽¹¹⁾

       But without the light of Christianity [regeneration] it is as little possible for man to have the correct view about himself and the world as it is to have the true view about God. On account of the fact of sin man is blind with respect to the truth wherever the truth appears. And truth is one. Man cannot truly know himself unless he truly knows God.⁽¹²⁾

       "Every one of fallen man's functions [the emotions, the conscience, the reason, etc.] operates wrongly," according to Van Til.⁽¹³⁾ He insisted that "the ‘reason’ of sinful man will invariably act wrongly,"⁽¹⁴⁾ and so the Christian may only declare "thus saith the Lord" and never attempt to reason with him on the subject of sin and judgment. Although an unbeliever may appear to assent to biblical truths, Van Til believed that this was only "formal" (apparent) and not actual assent, because "there can be no intelligible reasoning unless those who reason together understand what they mean by their words."⁽¹⁵⁾ The unbeliever may speak of such matters as the soul of man or of a supreme Being, but what he means by these terms is completely different from what the believer means. Van Til criticized traditional Reformed apologists because "they attribute to the natural man not only the ability to make formally correct statements about ‘nature’ or themselves, but also to mean by these statements what the Christian means by them."⁽¹⁶⁾ The "antithesis" between believer and unbeliever is so severe that they cannot even agree on the meaning of the words "is" and "is not."⁽¹⁷⁾
       This view undermines the very preaching of the Gospel, which, biblically speaking, is a direct appeal to the conscience and the reason of the sinner using the moral law. God Himself reasoned with unbelievers on the irrationality of their rebellion thusly: "Come let us reason together. Why will you die?" The Apostle Paul, certainly a master of evangelism, was constantly found to be declaring the reasonableness of Christianity to his unbelieving Gentile audiences. While Peter, the Apostle to the Jews, relied exclusively on special revelation in making his evangelistic appeals, Paul rarely, if ever, appealed directly to Scripture, but rather drew his arguments from natural revelation and even from heathen philosophers. In Acts 17, we find Paul utlizing logical argumentation when introducing his pagan listeners to the righteous demands of God’s moral law in an attempt to awaken their consciences - something which would have been unthinkable for him to do if Van Tilianism were indeed true.
       Besides the conscience, there is another voice through which the eternal God speaks to the fallen world - the civil magistrate, who occupies the same external office which the conscience occupies internally. Everything that is said of the conscience in Romans 2:14-15 is also said of the magistrate in Romans 13:1-6 and there is no reason to assume that the law which each enforces is not the same natural law. Thus, in removing the natural law from the individual, Van Tilianism, if consistent, necessarily removes it from society as a whole. Everything which Van Til denied to the private citizen must also be denied to the civil magistrate. On this point, however, Van Til was not consistent with his own system and he even complained that some of his students, such as Rushdoony and North, were applying his teachings to the political realm in a way he did not approve.⁽¹⁸⁾ This point is crucial to an understanding of the theonomic position relating to law and government. In subsequent chapters, the reader will see how the application of Van Tilianism to the civil realm has led the Reconstructionists to insist upon revealed biblical law as the only legitimate source of the governmental authority. According to Brian Schwertley, "With the doctrine of total depravity [as interpreted through the lens of Van Tilianism] you cannot say that man can autonomously determine his own law system, and have a good law system."⁽¹⁹⁾ Some of the movement's leaders, such as R.J. Rushdoony, have gone even further and openly denounced the historic Reformed understanding of the role of the magistrate as the enforcer of natural law as "heretical nonsense."⁽²⁰⁾

Endnotes

1. William Adams, The Elements of Christian Science: A Treatise Upon Moral Philosophy and Practice (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: H. Hooker, 1850), page 78.

2. Ibid., page 81.

3. In his book, William Smith gave a cogent argument that the conscience is the "ear" through which the Holy Spirit speaks to every living man (ibid., page ).

4. I would argue that this common grace was largely absent from the ante-deluvian world, and as a result, the world was plunged into such a state of chaos that its complete destruction was necessary. With the exception of Noah and his family, mankind at that time was a living illustration of Paul's doctrine of reprobation in Romans 1:18-32.

5. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1967), page 54.

6. Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1969), pages 258-259.

7. Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1974), page 82).

8. Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1972), page 184).

9. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, page 120.

10. Van Til, Metaphysics of Apologetics (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1931), page 194.

11. Van Til, ibid., page 67.

12. Van Til, ibid., page 73.

13. Van Til, Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1976), page 43.

14. Van Til, ibid., page 83.

15. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, page 77.

16. Van Til, Systematic Theology, page 113.

17. Van til, ibid., page 37.

18. Gary North complained at length of this lack of consistency in Van Til's thought in his book, Political Polytheism.

19. Brian Schwertley, "A Reformed View of the Judicial Law," Part Four, posted at www.sermonaudio.com on September 2007.

20. Rushdoony, Institutes, page 9.