Presup, Van Til, & Trinitarian Theology w/ Lane G. Tipton

The Reformed and Presuppositional Background of the Conversation

Alright, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala, and today I am back with another guest. If you looked at the YouTube thumbnail, you guessed it, I have Dr. Lane Tipton on to speak with me about Cornelius Van Til's Trinitarian Theology.

He just wrote a wonderful new book, of which I'm still in the process of reading. He was so kind to me, sent to send me a PDF of it, and I have my phone read it to me, so I'm still in the process of plowing through some stuff, but so far it is an excellent read and folks can definitely pick that book up right now on Kindle and hardcover.

It is $9 .99 on Kindle and $34 for hardcover if you're that kind of guy that likes to smell the the wonderful smell of a brand new book. I know I have a weird obsession with new books. I don't know if any of my listeners share that, but both of those options are open to you if you so desire to go over to Amazon and pick that book up right now.

It's available, but I would like to just share a little bit about my guest, Dr. Lane G. Tipton. He is associated with Reformed Forum. He teaches theology there, and there are a lot of content on the YouTube channel, especially with respect to what we're really interested in on this channel, presuppositionalism, Vantillian apologetic methodology, reformed theology, and so I highly recommend you guys check out Reformed Forum.

Dr. Tipton is also a minister in the OPC, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and his academic interests include hermeneutics, soteriology, Christology, covenant theology, Trinitarian theology, modern theology, and the integration of biblical and systematic theology.

So he has his hands, if we can say his mind, in many different topics, and I'm pretty sure everyone who is listening today will enjoy Dr. Lane Tipton. So without further ado, I'd like to invite him on the screen.

With me. Dr. Tipton, how are you doing? I'm doing great, brother. It's a delight.

To be here. Long time coming. Well, wonderful. Yeah, so just for background, I had invited Lane. It's all right if I call you Lane, right? Absolutely, brother. Okay, okay, so we just met like five minutes ago, so we're best buddies, right?

We've emailed, though. We've emailed. That's right, that's right. So I had invited Lane.

Onto the show a while back, and he was super busy, and so we kind of pushed it off for a long time, but I'm super happy that he's been able to make the time to come on with me tonight. So I'm very much looking forward to this conversation.

Is there anything you'd like to add about yourself that you think folks might find interesting before we kind of dive into the main topic of our discussion? Well,.

Not necessarily interesting, but Reformed Forum, where I'm serving in terms of teaching, has a Reformed Academy, is publishing a wide array of literature right now, and is really starting to, I think, present a wide range of theological material that can assist pastors and elders and interested students, and of course, I just delight to serve at Trinity OPC in Easton.

It's wonderful, and it's an overflow of just a love for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which I've had for many, many years. So thanks for having me on.

Appreciate it. No, it is an honor and a pleasure. What I really appreciate, when I was reading a little bit of your description, is that you have a strong background in academic theology. I mean, you're in academia, you write at the scholarly level, you publish, yet you are a minister, a servant of the church, and I think that is a very powerful and very Christ-centered and church-centered thing to do, that you have one foot in academia, the other foot in the church, and use, you know, what you've learned, what you've studied, to kind of benefit the body of Christ, and I think that's where all the action is at, that's where God has called us to do, so I very much appreciate that about you.

Now, I think you're gonna get a kick out of this, so when people hold to presuppositionalism, they'll call themselves a presuppositionalist or a Vantillian, but I have not heard this before here, this is from Jeff Downs, he.

Says, I'm a Tiptonian. I love Jeff, he's a dear brother. Let's just say we're Reformed, we're in the tradition of Gerardus Vos, we're confessional, we love Vantill, and insofar as Tipton is helpful in some small way, we'll listen.

To him. We need to make that go viral, though, a Tiptonian That sounds awesome.

Well, thank you, that made me laugh when I read it. Jeff's kind, but that's way overstated and out of focus. Order and proportion, order and proportion. So now, I want to talk.

About your book, but I have a question that a bunch of people always ask me, and I'm going to use my self-centered greediness to ask this question first, before we get into the topic of your book. Now, we all know that as Reformed Christians, the bedrock, the soil out of our Reformed theology is where our apologetic flows from, right?

So our apologetic flows from a consistent application of Biblical Reformed theology. But I keep getting this question, Lane, is it possible to be a presuppositionalist in any consistent way without being reformed in our theology?

For example, I don't know if you're aware, but there are a lot of Eastern Orthodox Christians claiming to be presuppositionalist, and even some Roman Catholics. Is that inconsistent? If so, why? A lot of people ask this question, and I figured you'd probably be the guy to ask, since you are well-informed with Reformed theology and Vantillian thought.

Presuppositionalism, Reformed Theology, and the Trinity

Oh, sure. Well, let me.

Try it this way. You probably already know this about me, but I give kind of textured, layered answers. Yes. If you begin with a kind of broad evangelical, Biblicist, Reformed view that's out there, represented by the Oliphant frame and others, you could be a covenantal presuppositionalist, believe that God is mutable, ignorant, developmental, changes, grows, but somehow we're just presuppositionally committed to God.

And, you know, that kind of me and my Bible, mutualist, Biblicist approach, that can appeal to almost anyone. So Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, evangelicals, they can say, well, I'm presuppositionalist.

I presuppose God exists. But that's just surface level and unhelpful. So the follow-up answer to that is that if you look at Vantill's theology, and I'm not trying to center my book, but if you do read the book, if anyone happens who's listening to this to read the book, Vantill begins his apologetic with a self-conscious integration of the Continental Dutch and English Puritan, or to put it a little more narrowly, old Amsterdam, old Princeton reception of Calvin's Trinitarian theology, which Calvin was trying to refine from Augustine and others.

And he presents his apologetic as the fruition and outworking of a uniquely and distinctively Calvinistically reformed doctrine of Trinity. So it's, yes, is it biblical? Yes. But it's biblical as received in terms of the creedal, lowercase C, Catholic tradition, and as the reformed tradition, and in Vantill's instance, the integration of the Continental Dutch and English Puritan tradition, so that you cannot be presuppositional.

And by the way, I prefer that vastly to the more recent mutualist-biblicist nomenclature of covenantal. We can talk about that if you desire to. But the presuppositionalism of Vantill is robustly and staunchly from the outset committed to an autothean Calvinistic doctrine of the ontological Trinity and the way that interfaces with a reformed doctrine of federalism, image of God and covenant.

So the long answer is that, the longer answer than the first one, is that if you look at the actual deep structures of Vantill's thought, the Eastern Orthodox denial of the ontological Trinity as understood in the West, it's denial of the filioque, it's denial of the immutability of God in his revelation with its essence energies distinction.

That precludes them. The Roman Catholic nature-grace dualism of Thomas Aquinas, its insistence on the donum super additum and participation in the essence of God, that precludes the Roman Catholic view from Vantill.

So the short answer is that presuppositionalism, as articulated by Vantill, is an organic and inexorable extension of the, and this is the way I put it in the book, I'm not trying to turn to the book, we don't even have to talk about the book.

We're going to get to the book, but I'm glad that you're...

But for Vantill, apart from my book, for Vantill, Vantill's theology at its root is an ecumenical, synthetic, and constructive expression of the continental Dutch and English. Puritan expression of classical reformed Trinitarianism and classical federalism, reformed federalism.

That integration is what underwrites the presuppositional approach to apologetics, so that it's just not possible for mutualists, biblicists, covenantal types, Eastern Orthodox types, Roman Catholics, Bardians, dipolar theists, open theists, Socinians, they cannot embrace the presuppositional approach to apologetics because they have not embraced the reformed Trinitarianism and covenantal theology that.

Underwrites it. Yeah, now one more kind of question related to that, and then we can to the book, because I do want to talk about Cornelius Vantill's Trinitarian theology, because I think it's so much wide-ranging application to so many different other areas, but what about libertarian freedom?

Someone who holds to a libertarianly free will position, is that in any way inconsistent with, say, a reformed understanding of God and how we relate presuppositional methodology in a way that's consistent with how we understand God and his.

Decrees and things like that? I'm so excited you asked this. I love stuff like this, brother, by the way, so I love this give and take stuff. Let me put it this way. The classical expression of libertarian free agency I think has been captured by the Socinians in the 16th century and the open theists in the 20th and 21st century.

Their argument is that God, now please hear this, their argument is that God cannot in the nature of the case foreknow the acts of moral agents who possess libertarian freedom. It's unknowable. Why? Because the libertarian conception of freedom is that moral free actions, free agency, is not determined by natural causality or the decree of God.

I have an old professor, he's one of my favorites from Westminster in California. The reformed affirm foreknowledge and foreordination. The Armenians affirm foreordination, deny, pardon me, affirm foreknowledge, deny foreordination, and the Socinians and open theists deny foreordination and foreknowledge.

And so the Calvinists affirm that God foreknows exhaustively and definitely the free actions of moral agents in part because God is omniscient and in part because they don't possess libertarian free agency.

Namely, the idea that free actions are not determined by natural causality or divine foreordination. Secondly, and this has been fascinating to me, I won't give you names at this point because it's not necessary, but there have been some even within the ostensible, I'll call it nominal, Vantillian tradition who have published as far back as 2003 up to 2018, this doctrine, that when God is calling out to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 -9, where are you?

He does not know where they are. Now, this is key, not because they have libertarian free agency, but because God, when he relates to creation, either A, assumes to himself a distinct and separate second mode of existence that's contingent, temporal, and ignorant, or he generates somehow or takes to himself somehow covenantal properties by which he is ignorant, like the creature.

So there have been even those who claim to be Calvinists who say that God so limits himself in his relation to creation, that while creatures don't possess libertarian freedom, God has limited himself in such a way that he's taken to himself the mode of creaturely noesis.

Namely, some put it this way, God has a covenantal mind that's ignorant, that's developmental, that doesn't know where Adam and Eve is. Genesis 3 -9, when he says, Adam, where are you? He doesn't know.

Or in Genesis 22, 13 -18, Abraham, now I know that you believe me. These so-called reformed theologians are saying, well, I didn't know before, but Abraham, now I do. I really know that you believe in me.

But the irony is this, it's this so-called approach, this second mode of existence or covenantal approach, it's not Socinian in the strict sense of the term because it doesn't affirm libertarian free agency, but it belongs in the Socinian tradition because due to either voluntary transformation or voluntary self-limitation, God actually doesn't know the future.

Now over against both of those views, the traditional Socinian view, the open theist view, libertarian view, God doesn't know the future. And this newer, I don't know what to call it. Some people even call themselves Vantillians.

I'm just going to call it an evangelical reformed biblicist view. That's the best way I know how to do it. People who claim to be reformed but have a view that's functionally Socinian. Over against those, I wrote an essay, I don't know if you're even aware of it, but I wrote an essay in the Confessional Presbyterian.

It was published about a year ago. I could send you a copy of it if you want me to. Sure, yeah. You can post it wherever you want, if you want. But Herman Boving, who's so useful here, he and Vantill, but I'm going to talk about Boving.

Boving says that the view, this is so beautiful in his Reformed Dogmatics, says that the view of Genesis 3 .9, that God doesn't know where Adam and Eve are, that he's ignorant, is quote-unquote absurd.

That God might speak in an accommodated way. God might be denominated by categories borrowed from the creature and in space and time. And creaturely qualities might render the way God relates to creation.

But even though those creaturely qualities render God's relation to the creation, God remains, and this is key, this is Augustine, this is Calvin, this is Westminster Confession, this is Boving, this is Vantill, this is Foss, this is not the Sassanians and not these covenantal types or these evangelical mutualists, but that God remains omniscient and immutable and impassable and simple in his sovereignly-willed relation.

He's the same apart from that relation as in it. And so when you ask me that question, they're really kind of a 1A, 1B, the Sassanians and the modified covenantal evangelical mutualist biblicist types on the one side.

And then there's the old school Augustinian Calvinist Reformed on the other side. And the people who belong on that other side, that Reformed side, are the likes of Augustine, Calvin, Boving, Foss, Vantill.

And there is, it's so funny you've asked me this, I'm thrilled you did. I'm so happy you're answering it in such a long way, because.

You have no idea how often, I just got a question today. I'm like, I'm a Molinist. Can I be a presuppositionalist? I'm thinking, well, Molinist holds a libertarian freedom. I wonder if there's a relation there.

So I'm happy you're unpacking this. This is super helpful.

I'll just put it this way. The tender answer to that is no. Let's talk. Let's keep talking. You can be a Molinist and you can go with Craig and the Sassanians and the Opentheists and the Covenantal Mutualist Biblicist types, but there is a qualitatively different Augustinian Calvinist Reformed alternative.

And it's really key. So I'm so glad you asked me this. And I don't deal with that as directly in the book, but in that volume or shorter essay that I told you about, I think it's called, how about this?

I don't remember my own essay title, but it's something like Bavinck and Van Til on anthropomorphism. They just offer a robust affirmation of, here's the deal. I'll put it this one last way, brother, and then we'll move on.

The Reformed affirm an unqualified doctrine of omnipotence, omniscience, simplicity, immutability, and impassibility in God's relation to creation, as well as apart from God's relation to creation. So it's unqualified.

God, whether he's apart from creation or in relation to creation is unqualifiedly living, immutable, impassable, omniscient, and simple. All other forms of, whether it's Bardianism, whether it's Schleiermacher, whether it is Opentheism, Dipolar Theism, Covenantal Apologetics, or Process Theism, all those other views are going to have a dialectical conception where God is immutable apart from creation, mutable in relation.

Simple apart from creation, composite in relation to creation. Eternal apart from creation, temporal in relation to creation. Omniscient apart from creation, ignorant in relation to creation. Omnipotent apart from creation, but impotent, relatively speaking, in relation to creation.

And probably, I'm not sure this is the, because it's been burned and pulped and hidden, but the best dialectical expression that I've just explained is found in this volume. It's hard to find anymore.

God With Us. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. God With Us. It's also, you know, in a lot of other books, but that's a real good kind of crisp summary of that dialectical, sick at known, qualified doctrine of immutability, impassibility, and simplicity.

And it's, it's, it's, it's, and there are others. I mean, Frame does it, Charles, Clark, Clark Pennock does it, Cobb and Hartshorne. There are a host of others, but that's the more well-known, you know, question mark view.

Sure, sure. Now, I just want.

To let you know, Lane, I wish I can put you in my pocket. And when I want to talk theology, take you out and start talking. Listen, I love that when you explain something, the love of the topic shines out in how you explain it.

And so you're very engaging to listen to. And I love how you just unpack that. And I'm going to tell folks right now, I keep getting asked that question. I'm going to make that little segment, a separate video, and I'm.

Going to answer it. And it's a joy to do this with you. I really enjoy it. Like I said, it was too long in coming, but I'm glad we're doing it. Well, awesome. Well, hopefully we can.

Be friends in the long run. I would love to just connect with you and pick your brain. I know you're.

Busy, but I think we're instantly friends, brother. We'll just keep developing. Awesome. All right,.

Cool. All right. Well, let's talk about your book. Cornelius Mantel. That's why we're here. Well, my question wasn't related directly to your book. So I want to focus on the book so that people know we're now talking about the book specifically.

So Jeff, again, he's like, Eli has.

Become a Tiptonian. The name is going to stick, Lane. We can't let it, brother. I need to get a mug with you on it. And then I'm just kidding. I'm just going to put it this way. The men that I am talking about who have expounded the biblical text, they must become greater.

I must become smaller. That's just that's how it should be. All right. Well, before I kind of ask you.

Specifically about your book, like more directly, why is Vantill someone that people should read today? I mean, he's definitely a major player in reform circles. But why would you say people in general should read Vantill?

What value does Vantill have for the Christian world today? And then we'll kind of pivot into the specific topic that you've chosen to write about and kind.

Of unpack with respect to his thought. It dovetails well. And I can tell you've been doing this for a while, brother, because that's just a tremendous question. Authentically, I really mean it. Let me put it this way.

I'm going to play to some of the sympathies of the people that I think listen to your podcast. OK. Remember that time you first became a Calvinist when you remembered that that or realized for the first time God is a is a sovereign, immutable, all determining, all decreeing, loving, covenantal God.

And you thought to yourself, this Calvinism, this reformed theology that I found is so precious to my soul. Well, that's what, in large part, motivated the pursuit of this study and the expression of Vantill's theology.

And let me put it this way. This is like an inclusio, Eli, of my book. It's the introduction and it's the epilogue. I probably should have called it prologue epilogue, but I didn't get cute enough. It was, you know.

But anyway, here's the point. Vantill offers and I hope this is practical to people. Some people will say when you first hear me, I think a lot of people say that's not practical. But if you listen and keep thinking, it becomes about as practical as anything in the world.

But let me put it this way for your listeners. I interact toward the end of the book. And I know you didn't ask me about the book and I didn't ask you about Vantill, but they segue so well. There's a book that was edited by Bruce McCormick and Thomas White.

I consider McCormick the preeminent Barth scholar and White is one of, but not the, preeminent Thomas scholars. I think Emory's probably preeminent. Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, an unofficial Catholic-Protestant dialogue.

At the beginning of that volume, which I cite in the epilogue, they say that Thomas and Barth, traditional Thomistic theology and Barthian theology, modern Barthian theology are analogous to Dante and Shakespeare.

They dominate the landscape, just as Dante and Shakespeare dominate the landscape of literature. So Thomas and Barth dominate the landscape of viable, contemporary, conservative, orthodox, Trinitarian theologies of the God-world relation and all that it entails.

What I argue in the epilogue, and I try rigorously to demonstrate in the book, is that there's a third figure. He's neither Dante nor Shakespeare. I haven't decided how to transpose that analogy, but in the theological analogy, the third person is Cornelius Van Til.

And here's what I mean by that. Thomas holds to a view of the creator-creature relation that requires the ontological reproportioning of the creature to participate in the essence of God. White grants it.

Emory grants it. Thomas says it. It's quite clear. It's basic, if you know, standard, traditional Roman Catholic theology. Barth, on the other side, says that God, and I'm going to use a little different language than Barth uses, but God reproportions himself to the modality of the creature.

God limits himself. He becomes his opposite. He becomes finite, temporal, mutable in the Christ event. And so you have these two monumental presentations of the creator-creature relation, but both of them, in Van Til's terminology, are correlativist.

The creature participates in the being of God for Aquinas. God participates in the becoming of the creature for Barth. It's astonishing how similar they are, and McCormick and White note the ecumenical potential for traditional Thomistic and traditional Barthian theology.

Standing in sharp contrast to them is Van Til, who says God does not reproportion himself to the categories of the creature in the decree or in creation. We're not talking about incarnation. And the creature is not reproportioned to God.

God relates—here's my way of putting it—God as God without modification relates to the creature as creature without modification in creation and covenant, as distinct, inseparable, simultaneous facets of his condescension.

And what that means—and I'm trying to make this relevant, brother, I promise. I'm trying to make it as practical as I can to your listeners. No, you're doing great. That means this, that if you are following Calvin, the Confession, Vos, Bavink, Van Til, old Princeton, Van Til's integration of all of them, you have a distinctively unique, confessionally reformed conception of the creator-creature relation that cannot be reduced to and is antithetical to medieval Roman Catholic theology on the one side and modern Barthian theology on the other side.

It's a tersemquid. It's a third thing. It's a unique, distinctive, deep-structure voice that I call the deeper Protestant conception. So there's the deeper Protestant conception that stands in antithetical relation to the deeper Catholic and the deeper modernist conceptions of Aquinas and his ilk, Barth and his ilk.

So for your readers, if you're interested in Van Til, he gives voice to that old-fashioned Calvinist reformed theology you fell in love with when you understood the five points covenant theology and the system of doctrine contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith.

And when you read all those reformers, they were saying, we don't agree with the Romanists. And when you read all those 20th century conservative theologians who said, we don't agree with Barth, Van Til gives you the most profound integrated alternative to both of those differing theological traditions.

Excellent. Excellent.

I hope it's useful. Excellent. Thank you so much. So Van Til is still very relevant to us. And I think if people just know him through his apologetic, I think they should be encouraged to read some of his other things because that reformed theology kind of oozes out of everything that he writes and everything that he says.

And so I would commend that to others who are interested. Now, Van Til's Trinitarian theology, what drew you to focus on this element of Van Til's thought? I mean, there's so much that he has contributed to in the realm of theology and apologetic methodology.

What caused you to focus on his doctrine of the Trinity?

Van Til, Bonson, and the Dissertation That Became the Book

I think there are two things. Number one is you've shown me your cup on Bonson. And let me just say before all your listeners, I studied under Greg Bonson from around 1990. Yes. Until 1995, when he died, I believe it was December 11th, 1995, when he passed into glory.

And I have as an apologist, I categorically disagree with the theonomy, categorically reject the post-millennialism. But in terms of his reading of Van Til, I think among the second generation Van Tilians, head and shoulders above the rest.

Frame, Oliphant, Edgar and others. He really was. He just stood out. But when I studied with Bonson, I would take courses with him, Eli, correspondence courses. And if I would finish with a segment, I'd get one hour with him for Q &A, just the two of us, where I'd call him up landline.

This is back in the day. I mean, people are going to think TV was still in black and white when I'm telling this story. I mean, this is way back in the day. We don't even have computers yet. I was taking notes by hand.

I'd call him up and I'd talk to him. And I told him, I said, Dr. Bonson, after I'd had him for like a year or two, I said, hey, Dr. Bonson. And he was the nicest guy in the world to me. Just nothing but kind.

And he also had an encyclopedic understanding of things. And I couldn't tell if he was lecturing or reading notes, because he was just that like, it's like kind of data, the Star Trek thing. But I would ask him, I said, Dr. Bonson, I noticed that you talk so often about worldview and about the way that the Christian worldview accounts for logic and causality and ethics.

It accounts for abstract universal entities as well as changing and variable patterns in experience. But what I've noticed, Dr. Bonson, is that you don't trace in any sustained way in any of your writings that I've found the relationship between the self-contained ontological trinity, his revelation in covenant, and its implications for worldview apologetics.

And he said to me, I don't remember the year. It was somewhere around 1993 before I went to Westminster, California, when I was in Austin, Texas. He said, Lane, you should write a book on that someday.

He said, go for it. He said, I haven't. I haven't gotten around to it. It requires a special expertise in Trinitarian theology. I've been more focused on method. And I think the worldview is correct. Van Til talks about that, but I've not connected the dots.

Brother, here's what I did. Little young Lane, in 1993, 25 years old, I wrote that down. Read up on this, exclamation mark. That's point one. Then point two, I go to Westminster, California. I'm going to abbreviate this story.

I study under my two favorite professors, Strimple and Klein, 1A and 1B. And I don't even know who to put first. They are militant Van Tilians. And they talk about them all the time. And they tell me that I should go on to do a PhD.

And I don't want to do philosophy. I want to do theology. They said, go study under Gaffin. So I come to Westminster, Philly in 1998, still at that time, old Westminster, committed to the old doctrines and everything.

Gaffin was still there. And Gaffin told me, he said, Lane, what do you want to write on? I said, well, for my dissertation, I said, I'd like to write on ontological and economic facets of Christology and try to trace out the relationship between Trinitarian processions, the missions of the Trinity and the resurrection of Christ, because you haven't done that.

And he went, you know, Dick, he said, that's fair. I haven't. But then he said, but there's one thing you've yet to do. He said, you have yet to write on Van Til's doctrine of the Trinity. He said, Dr. Strimple told me that you'd written a paper for him out there.

You must write a dissertation on Van Til's doctrine of the Trinity, clarify his doctrine of the Trinity, situate it in terms of the tradition, develop its implications for covenant and apologetics. You must do it.

It's 75 years overdue. And he would not let me switch. He told me, you know, seriously, brother, I mean, Dick is not a forceful man. Dr. Gaffin's still alive. He's not a forceful man at all. He was forceful with me.

That pushed me to say, OK, let me get all of my Van Til material. Back then, it was the CD-ROM, Eric Sigward's CD-ROM. This is way back. And I read absolutely, made sure I read absolutely everything Van Til had written and then wrote the dissertation, which now, Eli, has what you have in the book that's before you and others is a perfecting and absolute comprehensive rewriting of that volume.

So that's how my interest connects to the book that's right before you.

See, I love those background stories. I love them because it's those little things that contribute to what people look, that people see the book and they're like, man, this is a great book. I want to like, you know, study this and pick it apart.

But it's it's those little beginnings that give birth to these big projects. And it takes a lot of research to do those things. And so I really love that background sort of stuff. That's really fascinating.

Van Til’s Doctrine of the Trinity and Absolute Personality

Now, when I often hear discussions on Van Til's Trinitarian theology, there are a lot of people who misunderstand Van Til and claim that he holds to an illogical understanding of the Trinity in terms of which God is both one person and three persons.

And so I've often had people message me and say, hey, you know, what do you think Van Til meant by this? It doesn't sound like that's a logically coherent concept to hold. Could you unpack for us Van Til's understanding of the one person and the three persons, since that seems to be a violation of the second law.

Of logic? Yeah, yeah. I'll put it in in contrast. Gordon Clark holds to a doctrine of the Trinity that's heterodox. And he's the one who claimed that Van Til was being illogical in the book. This is in, like, I think, chapter five.

I don't recall. Chapter four. Chapter four. I remember my own book. In chapter four, I situate Van Til's doctrine in light of Boston personalism, Gordon Clark. Gordon Clark held that the principle of individuation in the Trinity is that each person is comprised of a discrete bundle of thoughts, an incommunicable bundle of thoughts.

Thought bundle one is the Father. Thought bundle two is the Son. Thought bundle three is the Holy Spirit. And that means there are discrete, get this, discrete and inaccessible bundles of thought within the Trinity.

And then he goes on to say those personal thought bundles have to be distinguished from what he called mute essence. So in order to salvage the personal thought bundles that are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Okay. He related them to what he called a mute essence, an essence that isn't conscious. The essence has no thought bundles.

Can I ask something? Can I, because I'm trying to make, I'm trying to follow what you're saying and connect the dots. With mute, a mute essence, is he then suggesting that there is an abstract, impersonal element of God, as opposed to God being an absolute person with no impersonality undergirding that?

Is he suggesting?

Precisely. Eli, your instincts are 100 right. He posits mute and unconscious substance in order to make way logically for living thought bundles, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Right. Wow. Okay. Well, yeah, I know that, that's, but, but Gordon Clark, here's the, I want to say this charitably.

Gordon Clark was a philosopher, not a theologian. Yes. And so he was punching way above his weight class. It's like a lightweight punching up toward a heavyweight. And it's just not his thing. He did his best.

That's not orthodox. It is tritheism. Tritheism says there are separate self-conscious centers, incommunicable thought bundles in each person, and that the unity is either love or purpose. And so Clark, Clark turns in that direction, but Van Til, and I have this in the book, so I'll just economize the presentation in the book.

Sure. All Van Til is doing when he says God is absolute personality, this is kind of a well-kept secret. Okay. But I've exposed it. Yeah. Yeah. Here's the musterion is being open. No, I shouldn't do that.

That's too much. But there is a kind of a hidden secret here. All Van Til is doing is quoting and expounding Bavink. The absolute personality language comes directly from Bavink's Reformed Dogmatics. And to put it in a twofold form, when you're talking about is the essence of God absolute personality, Bavink says two things.

Number one, God is self-sufficient, self-conscious, and self-willing. In other words, all of God's acts are how many? Here are the options. One, three, or potentially infinite. They're one. There's one God.

He acts in the unity of his being. And so that one God acts within the unity of his being. He's purposeful, his decree is a decree that comes from one God. The creative works of God come from one God.

The redemption that we know comes from one God. So there's a fundamental baseline unity of God, whereby he decrees, creates, redeems, governs, and consummates as one living and true God. Bavink says that is personal.

It's not impersonal. Electricity doesn't do that. Gravity doesn't do that. God does that. So there's a fundamental personal dimension to his unity. Second point, Bavink says that that unity expresses itself in what Bavink calls a threefold differentiation that we call the eternal processions, where God's love for himself, God's knowledge of himself, is expressed in terms of eternal self-differentiation, where the Father generates the Son and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

And there is this threefold subsistent differentiation within the one undivided personal being and unity of God. So there's one personal purposeful God, but there's a threefold subsistence within that one purposeful God.

So in that sense, it's not a contradiction once you explain and qualify the statement that God is one person and three persons. And so that language, although it can be confusing, we want to emphasize that there is no impersonality, no impersonal context that undergirds the three persons as we describe Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Brother, that's a perfect segue. Let me add my third point, because that's Bavink. So there's one self-purposing, self-determining God. That one God exists in three distinct subsistencies, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Father is God. The Son is God. The Holy Spirit is God. With that remainder, each subsists entirely as that undivided essence. Then Van Til, when he talks about absolute person, he uses it synonymously with absolute personality and says within the absolute personality of God, there are three personal subsistences.