Cornelius Van Til, the American Reformed apologist and long-time professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, held that there was no neutral ground on which the believer and the unbeliever could engage each other. There was a sharp epistemological antithesis between the two because, Van Til maintained, true knowledge could only be rooted in a proper understanding of God and of the nature of man. His critics raised the question of how one was then to present the gospel to the unbeliever, because without any common ground, it appeared that there could be no way of doing so.

Unwilling to compromise in his conviction that the thought of Christians and non-Christians was entirely irreconcilable, Van Til believed that the point of contact between the two could only ever be a head-on collision. However, he believed in the need to share the gospel, and found that the best way to do so was by means of the metaphysical point of contact within the natural man. Van Til writes in his book, The Defense of the Faith,

With Calvin I find the point of contact for the presentation of the gospel to non-Christians in the fact that they are made in the image of God and as such have the ineradicable sense of deity within them. Their own consciousness is inherently and exclusively revelational of God to themselves. No one can help knowing God for in knowing himself he knows God. His self-consciousness is totally devoid of content, unless as Calvin puts it in the Institutes, man knows himself as a creature before God. There are no atheistic men because no man can deny the revelational activity of the true God within him...Every human being is by virtue of his being made in the image of God accessible to God. And as such he is accessible to one who without compromise presses upon him the claims of God.

Thoughts?