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?

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Cornelius Van Til argued that Reformed theology demanded a Reformed apologetic, one based on its doctrine of God and doctrines of grace. John Muether, in his excellent biography of Van Til, quotes him at length on this issue:

A generally evangelical apologetic to a large extent defeats its own purposes. True enough much good may be accomplished, both by an Arminian theology and by a generally evangelical method of apologetic. In this fact all who love the Lord will rejoice. But how much more good may be accomplished by the grace of God through a more consistently Biblical theology and a more consistenly Biblical apologetic. A generally evangelical apologetic does not drive the natural man down into a corner with no hope of escape. It does not track him down till he is at bay. It does not destroy his last shelter. His fire is not altogether extinguished...A plea for a vigorous apologetic ought therefore to be a plea for a genuinely Reformed apologetic. We may not be clear, indeed as to the full implications of a truly Reformed apologetic. But this fact does not justify us in refusing to point out those who, with us, love the Christian faith that a generally evanglical apologetic...is inadequate for any time and especially inadequate for our time.

Van Til's presuppositionalism reflected his debt to the theology of Herman Bavinck, who had written in the first volume of his Reformed Dogmatics years earlier:

Apologetics cannot precede faith and does not attempt a priori to argue the truth of revelation. It assumes the truth and belief in the truth. It does not, as the introductory part or as the foundational science, precede theology and dogmatics. It is itself a theological science through and through, which presupposes the faith and dogmatics and now maintains and defends the dogma against the opposition to which it is exposed.

...If Christian revelation, which presupposes the darkness and error of unspiritual humanity, submitted in advance to the judgments of reason, it would by that token contradict itself. It would thereby place itself before a tribunal whose jurisdiction it had first denied. And having once recognized the authority of reason on the level of first principles, it could no longer oppose that authority in the articles of faith.

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Van Til knows that the first thing he would do when entering a classroom is to draw the diagram you see at the left on the chalkboard. The two circle diagram was representative of the Creator-creature distinction, one which Van Til unapologetically (no pun intended) maintained was absolutely crucial to Christian thought. The two lines connecting the circles represented the covenantal relationship between God and man. Man, the creature, was always dependent on God, the Creator, and His revelation. The one circle on the left represented non-Christian thought, where any idea of "God" was rooted in the creature.

It was for this reason that apologetics could never have its foundation in any thought that rejected the Creator-creature distinction. No vague notions of reason would suffice, neither would the idea that Christians and non-Christians could find some sort of neutral ground from which to engage in apologetics. And so he devoted himself to working out an apologetic that honoured the relationship between God and man and rooted itself fully in the revelation of God. For Van Til, there simply was no other way.

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There are echoes of such thinkers as Van Til and Dooyeweerd in this:

The implicit narrative of covenant always presupposed that something had gone drastically wrong within creation. But it isn't just that if God is proposing a solution there must have been something wrong. The particular solution God proposes—that of beginning a family and promising them a land—shows that what is wrong concerns, in a central way, the fracturing of human relationships and the fracturing of the relationship between humans and the non-human creation. And the particular faith for which God calls indicates, as Romans 4 draws out, that at the core of the problem is the failure of humans to trust God, to give him praise and honour as the all-powerful creator. All of this is strikingly reemphasised in the gift of Torah, which holds out an extraordinary blueprint of what a genuinely human life is like, a blueprint which called forth the delighted acclaim we noted in Psalm 19, and of course plenty of other places.

The failure of human beings to be the truly image-bearing creatures God intended results, therefore, in corruption and death. When we begin with creation, and with God as creator, we can see clearly that the frequently repeated warnings about sin and death, referred to as axiomatic by Paul, are not arbitrary, as though God were simply a tyrant inventing odd laws and losing his temper with those who flouted them, but structural: humans were made to function in particular ways, with worship of the creator as the central feature, and those who turn away from that worship—that is, the whole human race, with a single exception—are thereby opting to seek life where it is not to be found, which is another way of saying that they are courting their own decay and death. This is to say, with the entire Jewish tradition, that the basic sin is idolatry, the worship of that which is not in fact the living creator God.
— N. T. Wright, Paul: In Fresh Perspective, 34-35.

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