Did Bahnsen Contradict Himself?

It’s been clearly established that Van Til believed the following:

For human knowledge, we must always have natural and special revelation. The two must always go together. He often spoke of the two as “limiting” each other and that they are “coterminous.” Dr. Lane Tipton, in his excellent recent series on Van Til’s theology, says they are “symbiotic” and “organically related.” (See his “Point of Contact: Lecture 2”).

Greg Bahnsen, with typical flare, says the following:

“Facts and interpretation of facts, cannot be separated. I advise you to write that in your notes…”

See his Van Til seminar series, lecture 2, 18-min. in here.

Write it in your notes, people! It *will* be on the quiz!

(See also, Van Til in Intro to Systematic Theology, pg 19 of the pdf: “God is the one and only ultimate fact. In Him…fact and interpretation of fact are coterminous.”)

In context, Bahnsen is getting at the same thing, namely that special revelation must be the guiding lens through which we interpret fact (natural revelation). Again: …special without natural is empty; natural without special is blind…

All’s well and good, so far, and yet, meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Bahnsen, in “Van Til’s Apologetic”, starting on page 267 (of the pdf. version) launches into a discussion of so-called “non-inferential” beliefs. For example, we see our friend Sam in the store. We know it’s Sam without performing any mental calculations.

This, says Bahnsen, is the type of belief unbelievers(!) have in God. That is, at the exact moment a man sees the world around him, he forms a non-inferential belief in the triune God of Christianity. As a quick aside for my readers, Bahnsen ties this view to Van Til with an interesting citation:

Van Til maintained, following the teaching of Paul in Romans 1-2, that all men have a knowledge of God that is justified by direct apprehension of His handiwork in the world and within themselves. Even without a discursive argument or a chain of inferences from elementary observations about experience, all men see and recognize the signature of their Creator in the world that He created and controls, as well as in themselves as His created image.

Van Til wrote, “Man is internally certain of God’s existence only because his sense of deity is correlative to the revelation of God about him. And all the revelation of God is clear.”

That last line from Van Til is cited as Defense of the Faith, pg. 196.

Also consider Dr. Oliphint along these same lines, in his discussions of Covenantal Epistemology which I’ve discussed here, and with the same gripe I’m laying out now, for Dr. Bahnsen.

So, here we have these big Van Tillian guys saying, on the one hand, there are no brute, uninterpreted, facts…yet, on the other, suggesting that there are a plethora of non-inferential, uninterpreted(?), brute facts. Most notably are all the facts unbelievers know about God, but also perhaps we might include all so-called instances of “knowledge by association” (such as in Bahnsen’s example of seeing our friend Sam in the store).

If we allow this sort of brute factuality, we may as well be foundationalists. Or, worse, we may as well call David Pallmann up and eat crow before him. He’s been yelling at us a few years now about there being states of affairs in the world with which man’s mind is directly acquainted.

So, how to resolve this?

Is the great master Bahnsen truly in a contradiction?

I think, maybe?

When we walk into a grocery store and immediately (non-inferentially) recognize our friend Sam, what role did special revelation play? It must play *some* role, else this counts as a genuine instance of natural revelation (Sam in the store) without special, leading to knowledge. Did Bahnsen have an unstated, retroactive justification scheme in mind? Not that I’ve ever heard of or read.

How might we reconcile this issue, given the resources of Van Til’s philosophy?

Well, it seems for both Van Til and Bahnsen, beliefs must be intelligible and thus “conceivable” to count as knowledge – even these “basic” level God beliefs and/or empirical beliefs. So while they were not reached at the end of a series of discursive logical calculations, they are, however, logically fit together in one’s worldview – that is, conceptualized and “interpreted.” We get a hint of this from Bahnsen a little further on when he admits this “non-inferential knowledge” is, nevertheless, “mediated” through the natural world.

To be technical, here, we might extend this to say that man’s mind and his belief-forming faculties, to the extent they’re normative and operating according to their design plan, are part of the mediating “natural world”. As such, they are filtering this “in-coming” data through a conceptual framework, sifting and sorting and making it intelligible such that it can be expressed by a belief.

We – VT and B’s ardent fans – must clarify a Reformed and uniquely Van Tillian approach to philosophical folk psychology here.

…I’ve been working on this by ostensible appeal to Lynne Rudder Bakker’s material, but that’s grist for the mill of many future posts.