Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith, by K. Scott Oliphint. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013. 277 pp. $19.99.
Because Cornelius Van Til is both a towering figure in modern apologetics and also notoriously challenging to understand, several authors have attempted to write popularizations of his thought. Supplementing useful works from Greg Bahnsen, John Frame, and Richard Pratt, Scott Oliphint offers what he calls a translation (rather than introduction) of Van Til: his aim is to “translate much of what is meant in Van Til’s own writings from their often philosophical and technical contexts to a more basic biblical and theological context” (26). Oliphint’s volume is a valuable contribution to this goal.
Happily, Oliphint avoids a problem characteristic of many works on Van Til’s apologetic: that of spending more time defending Van Til’s apologetic than defending Christianity. Oliphint closes several chapters with sample conversations with various forms of unbelief (atheism, Islam, etc.). This is a great virtue; as Oliphint says, “An apologetic that can do little more than continually talk about itself is not worth the effort exerted or ink spilled over it” (25).
Holding the entire volume together is Oliphint’s list of “The Ten Tenets” of covenantal apologetics. These tenets are entirely theological in nature; they function as the most basic commitments needed to develop a robustly Christian apologetic. The common theme of the Ten Tenets is covenant, from the Triune God’s voluntary condescension (in tenet one) to the claim that all facts are what they are because of God’s covenantal plan (in tenet ten).
This emphasis on the covenantal grounding of apologetics gives rise to one of Oliphint’s more ambitious proposals: that Van Til’s apologetic be referred to as covenantal apologetics rather than presuppositionalism. Oliphint hopes to move away from this popular nomenclature, as he believes that it is misleading in some important ways. Primarily, his concern is that it suggests a kind of relativism that is utterly foreign to Van Til’s apologetic project.
His suggested replacement, covenantal apologetics, will strike some readers of this journal as so overtly Reformed as to be off-putting. The label suggests the possibility that Van Til’s apologetic approach might be incompatible with a dispensational reading of Scripture in the same sense that it is (in fact) incompatible with any theology that is not fully Calvinistic on divine sovereignty. While a full discussion as to whether one can advocate both covenantal apologetics and dispensational theology is beyond the scope of this review, in my judgment, Oliphint’s proposal has much to commend it.
His concern about the relativistic implications (or, at least, misunderstandings) of presuppositionalism is warranted. Further, the notion of covenant is centrally important to Van Til’s project. The covenant idea expresses the exhaustively personal nature of divine revelation: that every fact in the world, being what it is because God says so, therefore reveals God. Only because of this covenantal relationship that all image-bearers have with God can the apologist call the unbeliever to epistemic repentance: submitting to the Lordship of Christ is a necessary precondition of rightly accepting any part of God’s revelation. Whatever one concludes about the proposal to rename this school of thought, Oliphint has rightly drawn attention to the importance of the concept of covenant in Van Tilian apologetics.
A second major proposal of Oliphint’s, but one that might be less substantiated on Van Tilian grounds, is that the goal of the Christian apologist should be persuasion rather than proof. Readers of Van Til are doubtless familiar with his bold pronouncement: “The best, the only, the absolutely certain proof of the truth of Christianity is that unless its truth be presupposed there is no proof of anything.” How then can Oliphint argue “the notion of proof is, at best, tenuous” (122)?
Oliphint’s argument is that Christian apologetics are never to be thought of as existing in a vacuum, as though a given argument, in some pristine Platonic form, itself settles all questions. Rather, apologetics is always done within a (here it is again) covenantal context: speaking to image-bearers, within God’s created world, armed with God’s verbal Word as the final authority on all matters.
Whether Oliphint’s advocacy of persuasion over proof fully accords with all that Van Til argued is, again, more than can be settled here. Nonetheless, his argument is worthy of consideration, and is likely part of the explanation for why Van Til himself never laid out, in strict analytic form, the transcendental argument that he famously advocated.
A final strength of Oliphint’s work is the examples of internal critiques of unbelieving worldviews. This method of argument, essential to any Van Tilian apologetic, Oliphint labels the “Quicksand Quotient.” Oliphint observes that his sample dialogs, illustrating the method of pitting an unbelieving worldview against itself, are necessarily incomplete. “This dialog,” he says, “…could go in many different directions and continue for a very long time” (217). While the apologist cannot anticipate every possible rebuttal, having the method of defending the faith demonstrated is immensely valuable.
Without question, Oliphint’s translation of Van Til’s apologetic would serve well as a text in an apologetics course, and his generous use of sample dialog makes it accessible to a wider audience than his otherwise technical arguments might permit.
