(Written for Professor John Frame, September 1995)

The purpose of this essay is to give the modern-day Reformed apologist some perspective on this thorny dispute about the appropriate legacy of Van Til for apologetic method. The following pages will seek to defend at length the flexibility in method that Frame has enthusiastically brought to the Van Tillian school of apologetics, showing how Frame applies the principles of common grace and depravity to apologetic method more consistently than Van Til himself. But that flexibility will be defended in a way that remains sympathetic to the core concerns of those who would wish to maintain transcendental argumentation as the exclusive way to honor Christ in the defense of the faith. It will be seen that, despite well-intentioned criticism to the contrary, Frame’s "presuppositionalism of the heart" is the best way to preserve Van Til’s distinctive theological legacy while avoiding Van Til’s mistaken inferences from that theology to the area of methodology.

The present thesis proceeds in two steps. First, Van Til’s best arguments for a transcendental approach will be neatly presented, correlated with Frame’s best criticisms against the necessity of that approach. Second, in the aftermath of this hopefully illuminating exchange, an attempt will be made to more precisely articulate the proper relationship between transcendental and traditional arguments in the repertoire of the Reformed apologist.

The most clear, concise, comprehensive, and perhaps "classic" definition of transcendental argumentation—or reasoning by presupposition—is from Van Til’s Defense of the Faith, quoted here at length as a springboard for further discussion:

According to Van Til, the traditional arguments for Christian theism set forth defective representations of biblical teaching, defective in at least three essential aspects. They do not accord with the norm of God’s truth in their starting point, method, or conclusion:

First, the starting point of the traditional apologist is an autonomously-conceived epistemology, employing general "laws" and empirical "facts" interpreted apart from the Scriptures and acceptable to both believer and unbeliever.

But for Van Til:

Second, the traditionalist’s method eschews God-honoring circular argument in favor of autonomous linear arguments: inductive argument by way of analogy, deductive argument from a priori principles of "reason," or an unstable combination of the two.

Third, his conclusion is probable, not certain, and inevitably depicts a finite God: a "first cause," a designer of the world, a moral lawgiver, etc. This god is perhaps the god of the philosophers, but certainly not the infinite yet personal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob:

Only transcendental arguments—arguments which presuppose the truth of Christian theism from the outset, reduce opposing positions to absurdity by indirectly proving "the impossibility of the contrary," and conclude with nothing less than the biblical God—honor the norm of God’s truth in every way.

Frame effectively counters Van Til’s charges by showing how, in principle, no normative considerations are actually violated by the traditional method. Van Til’s criticisms overstate the case, and do not pay sufficient attention to what is actually going on in such arguments.

The starting point of the traditional method is not necessarily an unbiblical or "neutral" epistemology. To be sure, various theories of truth—empiricist, rationalist, subjectivist, common-sense, etc.—have been adopted by apologists in church history. But (1) the soundness of a particular apologetic argument does not depend upon the epistemology of the one doing the arguing, and (2) many traditional apologists did not even self-consciously adopt an epistemology as a prerequisite to their work. So even when Van Til has been successful in identifying concessions to unbiblical thought in the epistemologies of past Christian thinkers, he has tied the subjective commitments of those apologists too tightly to the objective truth-content of their arguments. For example, in evaluating Van Til’s treatment in CTK of Augustine’s epistemology, Frame points out that Van Til’s criticisms are irrelevant to the issue of methodology:

Similar confusion is found in Van Til’s account of the Roman Catholic starting point. In building up his apologetics by the direct method, the Roman Catholic can (according to Van Til)

But even if he can, the apologist doesn’t have to "agree with the natural man in his conception of both the starting point and the method of human knowledge." He can be subjectively committed to the self-attesting authority of Christ in Scripture while at the same time objectively in his argument be appealing to the knowledge of God which the natural man does have. Simply put, there is no necessary connection between the statement of an argument and the epistemology of the person who states that argument. God requires that our apologetic arguments be true, no more and no less.

The traditional method is not defective simply because it is direct rather than indirect. The norm of God’s truth licenses the traditional, direct approach in a number of ways.

First, the logical model exhibited in a transcendental method of argument need not be indirect. The transcendental case for God’s existence, setting forth God as the necessary presupposition for all intelligible predication, can be made either directly or indirectly as to its form. As Frame puts it,

Second, the practical strategy of the transcendental method—whereby the believer places himself upon the position of his opponent and assumes the correctness of his opponent’s method merely for argument’s sake—ultimately gains its persuasive power for exactly the same reason that traditional arguments have been persuasive. Both types of argument appeal, in the final analysis, explicitly or implicitly, to Christian truth which the unbeliever has already accepted at some level of his consciousness.

This is clear with respect to transcendental arguments once it is made plain that the criticism of the unbeliever’s worldview is not purely internal (CVT 259). When Van Til calls the believer to place himself upon the position of his opponent, and to assume the correctness of his opponent’s method merely for argument’s sake (DF2 100), he is not calling the believer to adopt all of the unbeliever’s position, including his rationalizations and self-deceptions! If that were the case, the Christian would drown with the non-Christian in his sea of unbelief (SCE 205-6). The comparison of worldviews requested of the unbeliever necessarily involves a Christian standard of comparison, for (1) no "worldview-neutral" standards of comparison are possible, and (2) a non-Christian standard will end in futility. So what really happens in the practical strategy which Van Til advocates "is that the Christian is telling the unbeliever how the unbeliever’s principles look to him as a Christian" (DKG 360). In that regard, a transcendental argument will only be persuasive if the unbeliever already accepts the standard of comparison the apologist is employing.

In similar fashion, a traditional argument will only be persuasive if the unbeliever already accepts the Christian concepts implicit in the premises and logical connections of such an argument. The traditional arguments "work because (whether the apologist recognizes this or not) they presuppose a Christian worldview" (AGG 71-2), a Christian concept of cause, order, perfection, ethics, etc. Non-Christian understandings of these concepts lead to futility, which is the chief reason why the traditional arguments "do not work" for so many non-Christians. For example, the cogency of the ontological argument is in the Christian paradigm of perfection that is built into it. A Buddhist would oppose the ontological argument because nothingness, not pure being, would be a perfection for the Buddhist (cf. AGG 116-7). In the same way, the cogency of modern-day transcendental arguments is bound up with a particular (ultimately Christian) concept of "intelligibility," whether or not that concept is openly admitted by the unbeliever as Christian. Previous concepts of rationality or intelligibility (e.g. Plato’s) influential in history would not give a Christian conclusion. Thus each method of argumentation, transcendental and traditional, trades upon Christian truth already accepted by the unbeliever. In this regard, transcendental argumentation is not inherently more faithful to the norm of God’s truth than is traditional argumentation.

Thirdly, the above two considerations come down to saying that a direct method does not necessarily reveal a commitment to autonomy. The apologist cannot be said to conceive of facts independently of God simply because he starts his argument by appealing to those facts directly, not mentioning God explicitly at the outset. Scripture points to the evidence for God, and this evidence can and must be presented to the natural man, whether directly or indirectly. A direct argument such as Aquinas’ argument from motion can, as previously mentioned, have a transcendental conclusion. Conversely, an indirect argument may be guilty of autonomy if it employs a non-Christian conception of "intelligibility" or "rationality" (cf. CVT 257). When Clement of Rome compares the pagan belief in the ever-rising phoenix to the Christian belief in the resurrection, is he not reducing the unbeliever’s position to absurdity, for inconsistently accepting the one belief and not the other? "Surely Clement, implicitly, is doing that very thing. Is it necessary to do this explicitly rather than implicitly? Perhaps that is what Van Til wants to say, but I don’t know how he would argue for it" (CVT 194).

In the end, Van Til does seem to acknowledge a variety of legitimate modes of argumentation.

In summary, the apologist may express his commitment to the lordship of Christ over knowledge, in various ways. And he cannot be said to compromise God’s norms in his method if the premises, connections, and conclusions of his arguments are true.

Lastly, Van Til’s objection that a traditional argument proves only a probable, finite god, is not persuasive.

With respect to the charge of finitude, it is not possible for the conclusion of an argument to exhaust the whole truth about God. If Aquinas’ argument from motion proves the existence of a first cause, then that conclusion is true as far as it goes; it certainly proves no less than that. As Frame puts it,

Van Til’s objection concerning finitude seems to grow out of his concern that an apologetic argument not artificially separate the "thatness" of God (his existence) from the "whatness" of God (his definitive character). But, says Frame,

Ironically enough, a transcendental argument can also be subject to the same misdirected charge of finitude that Van Til directs toward the traditional arguments, and that on at least two counts. First, the transcendental conclusion that God is the source of all intelligibility is indeed true, but is not the whole truth about God. God’s holiness, justice, love, sovereignty, etc., still need to be established by subsidiary or supplemental arguments (cf. AGG 73, CVT 254-5). Second, in the spirit of Hume’s objection to the teleological argument, it is not clear why the epistemological requirements of a finite universe require a personal source of intelligibility which is itself infinite. Could not the job be done just as well by a finite god? The cause seems to be greater than the effect. This is to say, not that the transcendental argument excludes an infinite God, but that it needs to argue for that conclusion separately.

With respect to the charge of probability, Frame draws a distinction between the certainty of the evidence (absolute, based on the clarity of God’s revelation; cf. Ro 1:18-21, Ps 19:1), and the certainty of the arguments which reformulate that evidence in logical form (probable, based on our own fallibility as fallen human beings) (AGG 81-2, CVT 220-223). The clarity of revelation is preserved while remaining realistic as to the cogency of specific arguments.

Van Til devotes a lot of space to documenting the alleged shortcomings of traditional arguments and their conclusions. But he seems to be quite aware of the limitations of the transcendental method (perhaps in spite of himself) when he says that

That is, the transcendental claim to exhaustiveness and certainty is a subjective commitment on the part of the apologist, a goal in his work which he must never forget, rather than a formal feature of individual arguments. Van Til continues:

Thus the facts "exhibit" the truth of the system, though their ability to do so is limited by their being only "parts" of that system.

In closing this section on normative considerations, it must be remembered that the real normative issue with respect to apologetic method is, what is explicitly false in the traditional arguments? On that simpler (and more biblical) criterion the traditional arguments fare much better than Van Til has allowed. In summarizing his section on the church fathers Frame says,

As we shall see, this omission may be relevant to the existential context of the apologetic encounter, but not the normative context of faithfulness to God’s truth.

According to Van Til, the traditional arguments for Christian theism merely present the evidence for God’s existence, and fail to recognize the grave situation that mankind is in. Man is fallen, totally depraved, and so will inevitably distort the evidence presented to him by a traditional argument, reinterpreting the significance of that evidence according to his autonomous commitment. Unless the unbeliever’s autonomous standards of interpretation are directly challenged at every point and exposed as epistemologically futile (through the use of a transcendental argument which rests all predication upon the existence of God), the unbeliever will continue to take all the facts thrown at him by the traditional apologist "and toss them behind him in the bottomless pit of pure possibility" (DF2 204). Van Til expounds further:

The reason why the depravity of the natural man will resist a traditional argument is that the autonomy conceded in that method gives the natural man a way out, an excuse for unbelief, a reason for resisting the truth. Thus the normative and situational considerations are perspectives upon an interconnected whole. Because the traditional method is not according to God’s truth (Van Til’s normative argument), the depravity of the natural man is not challenged but affirmed (Van Til’s situational argument).

Van Til has performed a valuable service to the apologist by reminding him of the total depravity of man. But Van Til’s insistence upon the necessity of the transcendental method grows out of his "extreme antithetical formulations" of the antithesis between the thinking of the believer and unbeliever (CVT 153-7). Simply put, Van Til stresses the principle of total depravity in man’s situation at the expense of the principle of common grace, which is also operative in man's interpretative activity.

Consider the passage from Van Til previously quoted: "it is only the atomic energy of a truly Reformed methodology that will explode the last Festung to which the Roman Catholic and the Arminian always permit him to retreat and to dwell in safety" (DF2 105). Or, in a similar vein, "[Romanists and evangelicals] do not seek to explode the last stronghold to which the natural man always flees and where he always makes his final stand" (DF2 94, my italics). The clear implication is that every natural man will resist all traditional arguments, fleeing to that "last lurking place" of his own autonomy in every apologetic encounter. This is plainly contrary to fact, and to the entire history of apologetic encounter between believer and non-believer. It is contrary to fact because the natural man, while totally depraved, is by God’s common grace not utterly depraved. In his depravity he inexcusably and immorally suppresses the knowledge of God, but that suppression is limited by God’s common grace.

Affirming then this "mixture" in the natural man, Frame goes on to expound three perspectivally-related strategies for relating common grace to total depravity. In each case, the natural man’s suppression of the truth is seen to be less than total, paving the way for the effectiveness of traditional argumentation.

From a normative perspective, the antithesis between the knowledge of the regenerate and unregenerate can be characterized as total in principle, while in practice it is actually less than this. "Insofar as men are aware of their basic alliances, they are wholly for or wholly against God at every point of interest to man" (IST 29, my italics). Frame sees this "insofar" as crucial to the normative formulation (CVT 158), for "here Van Til recognizes quite explicitly that the unbeliever may well grant many truths of Christianity. All that antithesis requires in this strategy is that when the unbeliever speaks such truth we should regard him as inconsistent with his own principle" (CVT 158-9).

From a situational perspective, the unbeliever as a matter of fact lives in God’s world, and so his apostate system will never be intellectually satisfying to him. In the very nature of the case, his interpretations will be full of "inconsistencies, factual inaccuracies, existential dissatisfactions, etc." (CVT 161). Thus because of his situation as a resident of God’s world, he cannot suppress the truth completely. Indeed, his denials of the truth presuppose the truth.

And from an existential perspective the unbeliever is able to intellectually acknowledge the truth of the argument presented to him (by God’s common grace), even though he does not seek that knowledge according to the right goal, standard, and motive (because of his total depravity). He affirms the truth of Scripture (common grace), but like Satan and the Pharisees he affirms that truth hypocritically (total depravity). His knowledge is genuine, but considered from the ethical aspect it is still defective. The unbeliever suppresses the truth to the degree that he is epistemologically self-conscious (CVT 165).

This is a profound analysis and goes far to explain both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of traditional arguments, arguments which, although not explicitly challenging the natural man’s system of autonomous interpretation, trade on the borrowed capital the depraved man is unwittingly using by God’s common grace. Such grace seems to operate in a dual manner. First, that grace operates internally in the heart of the unbeliever by limiting the consistent carrying out of his professed antitheistic commitment. Second, that grace operates externally upon the environment of the unbeliever by allowing Christian thinking and action to influence history and the general culture, and thus the inherited belief structures of the unbeliever himself.

Indeed, as with his normative considerations about "finitude," Van Til’s situational criticisms of the traditional method come back to bite his own method on the tail. In succinct fashion Frame additionally points out that, "to the extent that sin leads the unbeliever to repress evidence, it may equally lead him to repress the force of a transcendental argument" (CVT 160)! So what is the real advantage of such argumentation? This leads to the third and final set of considerations, pro and con.

These final considerations are perhaps the most difficult to classify. Van Til acknowledged important differences between some unbelievers and others. As Frame puts it:

Thus there is an existential climate to the apologetic encounter, having to do with the individual unbeliever’s own pursuits, concerns, abilities, and place in history. This is not to say that the truth of apologetic argument is actually culturally relative. It just means that so-called "intelligibility arguments" use the borrowed Christian capital of Western civilization in the hearts of men to make their conclusion persuasive. Most Westerns are concerned about preserving objectivity, or logic, or empirical science. So the transcendental argument "speaks to" many of them, showing how God preserves these intellectual values. But in the East, or in a more "advanced" post-modern and deconstructionist age, it is doubtful that the concerns of a transcendental argument would really carry much weight, for the intellectual values it preserves are no longer fashionable in those cultural and historical contexts. The options presented would not be live, forced, and momentous (to use William James’ terminology). We should still seek to reach such "irrationalists," but perhaps in a different way.

Similarly, if the unbeliever is a (Western) philosopher by trade, he will most likely be familiar with the strongest intellectual criticisms of Christianity, and perhaps have self-consciously adopted a sophisticated anti-theistic system of thought. And if he is living in the modern (post-Kantian) stage of history, his philosophical precommitments are likely to be much more explicit and consistently followed through than that of those who preceded him. Transcendental argumentation answers this explicit intellectual challenge of alternate worldviews head on, while traditional argumentation does not. If it is the case that it is "the self-sufficiency of the ‘natural man’ that must first be brought under some pressure, before there is any likelihood of his even considering the truth in any serious fashion at all" (SCE 207), then surely an explicit, self-consciously thought-out commitment to self-sufficiency must be brought under a greater amount of pressure by the apologist.

It is interesting in this regard to identify the various opponents in the Van Til corpus who regularly come in for a beating under the transcendental method. It is usually the Western philosopher-types! It is the "pragmatist philosopher" who invariably regards the resurrection of Christ as a fluke of nature, a hopeful candidate for "Ripley’s Believe It or Not"—until he is confronted by a presuppositional argument. It is the idealist philosopher who rests secure in his concrete universal—until informed by the Reformed apologist that he must know everything in order to know anything. It is the empiricist Hume and the rationalist Descartes who each reason peacefully in accordance with their chosen epistemology—until they are equally disabused of the naive notion that their "facts" and their "laws" may be brought into fruitful relation with each other. These are the paradigm recipients of the transcendental argument in the Van Tillian literature, and for good reason. Their commitment to well thought-out systems of thought make them ripe for the epistemological picking.

By way of contrast, Van Til identifies those whose intellectual "temperament"—whether lethargic, irrationalist, etc.—may actually exclude the appropriateness of transcendental argumentation:

That is, the particular existential climate of the apologetic encounter may not be conducive to highly intellectual discussions about presuppositions and epistemology. The necessity of transcendental argumentation is conditioned by existential considerations.

The existential perspective, as defined above, is perhaps the only perspective considered which Frame would wholeheartedly endorse as "necessitating" transcendental argumentation! He repeatedly recognizes the need to make apologetics "person-variable," so that its arguments "deal with each inquirer according to his own special needs, concerns, interests, problems" (CVT 167; cf. AGG 64, 72, 89-90, DKG 118-9, 152). Thus, in Frame’s view, some of the church fathers should have been more sensitive to this perspective:

It is not as though the church fathers necessarily asserted something in their arguments that was not true. Rather, the way they presented their arguments was not entirely appropriate for the kind of people who heard them. Likewise, even though Van Til was unwise to link a transcendental goal in argumentation to a particular method of argument, he

We have seen that there are three types of consideration to which Van Til appeals in order to justify the necessity of transcendental argument: normative, situational, and existential. We have also seen, upon analysis, that only existential considerations can serve as a justification for the use of transcendental over traditional arguments in some apologetic situations. But is there a way to more precisely articulate the proper relationship between transcendental and traditional arguments in the repertoire of the Reformed apologist? This was the question asked at the outset of this paper.

There appears to be some unclarity on this issue even in Frame. At one point he considers what is really involved in achieving the conclusion of Van Til’s transcendental argument:

Thus transcendental and traditional arguments are dependent upon each other for their collective cogency. Every argument presupposes the rest.

But if this is truly the situation, then how can Frame later say that

If transcendental argument "presupposes all the other things," then how can that same transcendental argument provide a "foundation for theistic argument," in order to "build up positively the details of the Christian case"? Which is the foundation for which? Is it that transcendental argument may initially prove only a negative conclusion (the futility of autonomous reasoning and how it leads to total skepticism) while needing more traditional arguments to prove its positive conclusion (the necessity of a "full-blown" Christian theism for intelligibility)? But how could the initial critique of autonomy proceed without a picture of its necessary alternative being simultaneously developed?

The solution to this dilemma is to realize that the traditional (!) distinction between transcendental and traditional arguments has almost completely broken down under Frame’s analysis. But that distinction, having been enforced for so long, has a tendency to return at inopportune moments. Transcendental arguments are no longer to be identified by the method they employ; direct arguments will do the job just as effectively as indirect ones. Nor are they to be identified by their explicit starting point (as distinct from the personal commitment of the apologist). Nor are they to be identified by their conclusions being either exhaustive of biblical doctrine or certain in epistemic ranking. All these criteria have been exposed as red herrings in the search for a truly Reformed method of apologetics. Indeed, it may not be possible to identify a particular argument as "transcendental" in the relevant sense. Rather, as Frame himself brings out, the goal of the entire apologetic discipline (not the conclusion of a single argument) should be to establish the "transcendental conclusion": the necessity of presupposing the uniquely biblical God for universal intelligibility (CVT 255).

This is where Frame’s "presuppositionalism of the heart" is so important (CVT 257; AGG 85-88). Christian apologists must first and foremost remain committed in their hearts to the lordship of Jesus Christ over all of life: morally, spiritually, and intellectually. They must retain a specifically Christian conception of knowledge, reality, and ethics in their arguments, despite contemporary cultural and intellectual pressures to make concessions to the wisdom of the world on these matters. They must not give in to the distortions of these concepts as made by philosophers and other thinkers in history. There is no aspect of God’s revelation which has not been subjected to the distortion and suppression of the depraved intellect. Thus the Christian must remain careful and vigilant to set forth nothing less than the truth in their arguments. Apologetics is the whole gospel to the whole man, and even as the man in his fall ended up distorting the entire breadth of God’s revelation, so Christian apologetics must seek to restore man to right thinking with respect to all of God’s revelation.

The apologist must always be asking himself, "What is my goal in defending the faith to unbelievers? Is it to set forth anything less than the biblical God? God forbid! And if the necessity of God for all rationality is my ultimate goal in providing ‘reasons for faith’ (1Pe 3:15), then how do my specific arguments measure up? Do they contribute to the achievement of that goal (situational perspective)? Are they faithful to biblical truth (normative perspective)? Are they sensitive to the unbeliever’s particular circumstances and questions (existential perspective)?" These are the clear and compelling questions that must be asked, and they are more than enough to keep any apologist busy devising particular apologetic strategies in faithfulness to his God. But these are also simple questions, uncomplicated, few in number, and thus immensely liberating in their scope. May God grant the day when "transcendental argumentation," as defined above, truly becomes the "traditional argument" in the church of Jesus Christ!