Lane Tipton on Gordon Clark and Cornelius Van Til

Recently, I wrote on the importance of history (link). An example of this stems from a dialogue on Lane Tipton's book, The Trinitarian Theology of Cornelius Van Til. I have since purchased the book, and below, I'll link to a video lecture by Tipton that covers much of the same content. Of initial interest to me was pg. 79 of Tipton's book:

...when we realize that Van Til speaks of God as "one person" in a manner synonymous with Bavinck's speaking of God as "absolute personality," we can discern that Van Til intends to add nothing beyond what Bavinck has already expressed. It is highly likely that Van Til uses such language to polemically sharpen his critique of Gordon Clark's conception of the divine unity as "mute substance." Clark's rationalistic notion of "mute substance" supplies part of the polemical context for Van Til's insistence that there is no impersonal dimension to God's unity as an absolute personality... (Tipton, The Trinitarian Theology of Cornelius Van Til, pg. 79)

Further, on pg. 85, Tipton writes:

...we fail to do justice to Van Til’s concerns if we do not factor in his theological disagreements with the theological rationalism of his day, particularly the rationalism of the neo-evangelical Gordon H. Clark. Van Til’s comments on the incomprehensibility of God, especially in An Introduction to Systematic Theology, arise immediately from the context of the Clark–Van Til controversy. As a result, Van Til’s understanding of the Trinity and divine incomprehensibility is designed partly to correct the rationalistic distortions he detected in the formulations of Clark. What will prove instructive for our discussion of Van Til’s doctrine of the Trinity is the appearance, years after the controversy itself, of a motif in Clark’s theology that denies personality to God’s unity. While definitively dissenting from the personalists, Clark devised formulations that amount to the opposite error of the Boston Personalists in that he can affirm tripersonality only by describing the essence of God as mute or unconscious. The personalists deny personality with respect to God’s diversity, while Clark denies personality with reference to God’s unity. 

It is out of this matrix of Trinitarian reflection that Van Til deemed it appropriate to utilize the language that God is “one person” or “absolute personality,” while not allowing that affirmation to subvert the complementary truth that God exists as three persons or a tripersonal being. In Van Til’s mind, the formulations of both the Boston Personalists and Gordon Clark proved inadequate to convey the absolutely personal and incomprehensible character of God’s Trinitarian existence.

This has led other people to follow Tipton's conclusions. For example, Christopher Smith reviews of Tipton's book by stating (link):

This absolute personality means, contra Gordon Clark (1902–85), that self-consciousness can be found in the Triune God even while there is a self-differentiated existence as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, thus guarding against the tritheistic notion of three centers of self-consciousness. Van Til was reacting to Clark’s notion that in God there are three “distinct bundles of thoughts,” i.e. self-consciousness. Van Til’s opponents were broader than merely Gordon Clark, however. Indeed, his primary opponent was a school of thought Tipton identifies as “theistic personalism,” and Van Til’s thought was, in large part, a reaction to these views.

So, how accurate is Tipton's assessment of Clark's influence on Van Til? Despite other areas in which I enjoy Tipton's work, my answer will be: not at all. 

For starters, Van Til's language of "absolute personality" is found in works as early as his An Introduction to Systematic Theology. In the 1971 preface to this book, Van Til writes:

The first ‘‘edition’’ of this syllabus appeared some thirty-five years ago. Its title then was: An Introduction to Systematic Theology. Since then much has happened in theology. Yet the old syllabus is now made available again in a practically unaltered form. The author has dealt with the main developments of recent theology in other writings.

That means Van Til's syllabus was originally made available in 1936. Access to this original would aid in answering which topics were impacted by later theological developments and which topics were "practically unaltered" (although having such access will turn out to be unnecessary to answer whether Tipton's analysis is accurate). 

For example, Clark's work in the 1940s is referenced in the 1971 edition; specifically, Clark's "The Primacy of the Intellect," "The Answer," and "A Christian Philosophy of Education"). Obviously, these works would not have been discussed in the original 1936 syllabus. If the language that God is "one person" or absolute personality" appeared in the original, such would seem to antedate any mention of Clark. 

Also, are there even any contexts in the 1971 edition in which Clark merits so much as a mention while Van Til uses the language that God is "one person" or "absolute personality"? No - one can read Van Til's book himself to verify that this is the case.

Further, Clark's rhetorical question of whether a person is "to be considered unconscious, mute substance?" comes from The Trinity (1985), 3 months prior to his death. The most thorough bibliography on Van Til (of which I am aware) states that his last published article came at the age of 87. How is it possible that Tipton thinks Van Til critiqued a 1985 statement by Clark if Van Til's last published work was in 1982? I could very well end this post with the simple observation that it is impossible for Van Til to have been reacting to a thought by Clark in 1985.

[To be more precise, while Clark's The Trinity was originally published in 1985, Clark had finished the manuscript as early as 1977 as part of a larger project: a systematic theology (link). Because The Trinity was not published until 1985, however, I will continue to refer to that as the earliest date Van Til might have read Clark use the phrase "mute substance" unless evidence is shown to the contrary.]

There are more points to be made, so I'll come back to Clark's actual remarks found in The Trinity later. Let's turn to Tipton's book. If we set aside Tipton's tangent on paradox, human freedom, and divine sovereignty (pgs. 96-98), the only reference Tipton makes to any of Clark's works is The Trinity. Thus, it doesn't appear that Tipton has in mind any other statements by Clark that were made during the 1920s-1970s that might have impacted Van Til's language in question. g

I have already intimated that Clark's works in the 1940s do not appear to relevantly bear on Van Til's language that God is "one person" or "absolute personality," at least so can as I can discern from the 1971 edition of Van Til's Introduction to Systematic Theology itself. On the contrary, take the following statement by Clark written before 1936:

1935. Revised edition of Readings in Ethics. Gordon H. Clark and T.V. Smith, eds. New York: F.S. Crofts and Company. 

But one must learn that when a philosopher says God, he may not mean God. Both Jew and Christian regard God as an Almighty Personal Being who chose to create the world. Two Christians, Descartes and Leibniz, may have disagreed on the question whether God made this world good by choosing it, or whether God chose this world because it was good. But all agree He chose and created. But for Spinoza, on the contrary, there was neither choice nor creation, for his God is not a personal being.

Additionally, consider other statements Clark made in the 1940s:

1949. Authority in Religion. The Witness Jul: 5-6.

The Christian as well as the modernist believes that God has revealed himself in nature. But if this is the only revelation, if this is the most definite revelation there is, men soon begin to see in the marvels of nature, nature and only nature. A real, living, personal God recedes into the dim, unnecessary background.

Pre 1950. Language is Beautiful - and Deceitful. The Home Evangel

The other day a Jewish community house, to raise funds for their unfortunate brothers, invited a philosopher to give a lecture. The philosopher was a Christian, in the original, orthodox, Biblical sense of the word. He chose to speak on the reality of a personal God, and tried to show that only by trusting a personal God could man face the world and solve its problems. A gentleman in the audience said that he did not believe all the stuff this philosopher propounded. “I don’t believe in any personal God,” he insisted, “I am a Unitarian.” 

And so it seems that “Unitarian” has come to mean “atheist.” And “Christian” has come to mean one who denies the Bible and rejects the blood atonement of Christ. All this leads a thoughtful person to believe the more in the inherent depravity of man, out of which comes the modem depravity of words. Respectable authors must long for a regeneration of language; but this can only occur by a regeneration of the human heart that is at enmity with God.

Now, I really did try to do some legwork on Tipton's behalf. I had to scour my notes to find anything by Clark that Tipton could have remotely included in the alleged "matrix" of reflection out of which Van Til opted to use the language of "one person" or "absolute personality." The closest I could find was a letter from Clark to J. Oliver Buswell on April 3, 1937, to which Van Til probably did not have access and which I doubt is the sort of thing Tipton had in mind anyways (since Clark is just attempting to summarize Shedd):

Question: Is the being of the second Person of the Trinity derived from the Father according to Vos?

Answer: I doubt it. On p. 216 of The Self Disclosure, Vos says that the glory of the Son comes from the Father, and on pg. 221 Vos says that Jn. 5:26 and 6:57 teach that the Son's life is derived from the Father. He further seems to accept the doctrine of eternal generation.

The question therefore becomes, what historically is the doctrine of eternal generation, and what does the word 'being' mean?

Hodge, Vol I. on the eternal generation quotes Turretin as opposing the eternal generation of the essence of Christ and as therefore opposing the Nicene fathers. Having read Hodge hurriedly I may be mistaken on the 'therefore' in the last sentence, for I do not think the Nicene father taught what Turretin attacks.

Shaff, Creed of Christendom, Vol I, p. 37, says that the Athanasian creed excludes every kind of subordination of essence. It states clearly that absolute unity of the divine being or essence.

Shedd, History of Christian Doctrine, Vol. I p.316, speaks of the essence as that which is one, the personality three. Thus persons may be generated but not the essence. Shedd also, p. 317, remarks that the eternal generation is necessary but creation depends entirely upon arbitrary will. Apparently this denial ofthe generation of essence is compatible with the expression: the Father communicates the one eternal essence to the Son. By 'communicate' I guess is meant Platonic participation (though there is something queer here) and raises the question whether Gregory of Nyssa was correct in saying that the relation of persons to the Godhead was the same as that of individuals to their Idea.

The generation therefore is of a Person by a Person. As Calvin I xiii 19 says: “we justly represent him as originating from the Father.”

Shedd, op. cit. p. 323: “Hence the Nicene theologians harmonized the doctrine of eternal generation with that of unity of essence by teaching the necessity of this generation.”

CONCLUSION. Since the Nicene fathers maintained eternal generation in their repudiation of Arianism, it seems to me first that there is no ground for saying that Vos implies the generation of essence, being, reality (ousia); and second that the doctrine instead of being dangerous is an excellent method of defending trinitarianism against Arianism.

May I also add that Vos may not have the “unified perspective” of Machen and Warfield because he approaches his problems exegetically rather than systematically.

It is also difficult for me to imagine that Van Til himself would have nitpicked Shedd. That in mind, here is the full context of Clark's rhetorical question cited by Tipton. From pgs. 129-130 in The Trinity (2010 edition):

Several romantically inclined students, and a few professors as well, have complained that “this makes your wife merely a set of propositions.” Well, so it does. This suits me, for I am a set of propositions too. And those who complain are as they think. Is a person to be considered unconscious, mute substance? Why is he not conscious thoughts? Of course, one may just say “thoughts,” for thoughts cannot be unconscious.

Naturally, human beings are mutable: Their thoughts or minds change. The three Persons of the Godhead are immutable because their thoughts never change. They never forget what they now know, they never learn something new, in fact they have never learned anything. Their thought is eternal. Since also the three Persons do not have precisely the same set of thoughts, they are not one Person, but three. If substance were the principle of individuation – for we have seen that space-time cannot be – then there could not be three Persons. Identity of substance would mean identity of person. If then substance, for this and other reasons, is not the principle of individuation, the theologians referred to should explain what their principle is.

One may disagree with Clark's metaphysical reductionism of persons to sets of propositions (as I do and have argued against). A few points, though:

1. The immediate context of the quote is in reference to human persons and substances, not divine. 

2. The point of the bold is obviously meant by Clark to be a denial that persons are unconscious, mute substances... but one would think Tipton and Van Til would agree with this? If so, then what is the issue? Is Tipton inferring something more, e.g. that Clark thinks all substances are unconscious and mute? If so, his inference is by no means obvious to me, and I think he would need to give more evidence of this.

3. In fact, this inference would be false. In the same book on The Trinity, Clark says (pg. 67):

In VII, ii, 3 Augustine makes substance and essence synonyms, and in VII, iv, 7 he twice, and maybe a third time, includes nature. This may help some readers to escape from Aristotelian matter and Locke’s two substances, but the term essence today is also vague. If, however, these terms were replaced by the word definition, several difficulties could be avoided. The definition of the Triune God is not the definition of the Son.

Obviously, Clark thinks the Son is a person who is neither mute nor unconscious. If the Son is a definition (= substance), then even in 1985, Clark thought that there is at least one "substance" that is neither mute nor unconscious. Of course, there are numerous problems with this construction, but the point is that Tipton seems to be reading into Clark's rhetorical question things that are not entailed. 

For those who don't have access to Tipton's book, Tipton's lecture on Gordon Clark: Theological Rationalism and Trinitarianism support what I have argued: that Tipton inaccurately interprets a rhetorical question by Clark from 1985 and anachronistically refers to it as part of the polemical context out of which Van Til's distinctive Trinitarian theology was formed. For example, between minutes 21-25, Tipton says:

To clarify a bit the relationship of the hypotheses to the essence of God - the relationship of the persons to the essence - what distinguishes the persons from the godhead or the essence is self-consciousness. Mute substance is not what characterizes the persons - that is collections of thought collections of thoughts. Personhood is not what characterizes the substance - it's unconscious and mute.

And so look at what you start to find in the polemical context that Van Til faced: whether it's the personalists at the early turn of the 20th century moving into the 20s and 30s or whether it's the developing neo-evangelical trinitarianism of Gordon Clark in the 30s, 40s, and into the 50s, what do you find?

You find an affirmation of unipersonality that calls into question the integrity and personality of the individual hypotheses in personalism, or you find an affirmation of personhood as bundles of thoughts - a novelty in the history of the reformed tradition, but that's how personhood is defined - but in a way that makes the essence of God unconscious, mute substance. 

And so there's an affirmation of one Consciousness (a denial of three Consciousness) in the personalists there's an affirmation of three Consciousness and a denial of one Consciousness in the neo-evangelical rationalists...

Did Bavinck confirm absolute personality as an entailment of numerical unity and divine simplicity? Yes. Did Hodge affirm that there is one will, one mind, one consciousness in a way that peacefully and sweetly complies in mystery with tri-personality? Yes. Did Van Til follow both? Yes.

But according to Clark, personality requires only those things not common to the three and he draws the implication from that that the essence of God is unconscious, mute substance that is antithetically related to personality. See, a necessary condition for Clark for the possibility of personality is the presence of propositions not common to the three. So what Clark lacks is a theological principle that can account for the absolute personality of God. 

I see no evidence that Clark said anything in "the 30s, 40s, and into the 50s" which could be labeled "neo-evangelical trinitarianism," and I have already quoted several statements by Clark during this time period which cut against it. A 1985 quote which may not even be correctly interpreted is insufficient evidence for the idea that Van Til owed his distinctive Trinitarian language or views to anything Clark wrote. 

Conclusion: my theory is that Tipton is unaware of Clark's gradual, metaphysical synthesis I have posited elsewhere (link). This is understandable in the absence of an historical chronology such as that which I have been putting together. Tipton might assume Clark's earlier Trinitarian views were more or less consistent with what Clark expressed in 1985. But this is an assumption which cannot be maintained. History matters (with this, Tipton would surely agree).

[Parenthetically, if I were pressed to pinpoint when Clark's understanding of "persons" changed, I would suggest Reason, Religion, and Revelation (1961, "Trust in a person is a knowledge of a person; it is a matter of assenting to certain propositions") illustrates an outworking of Clark's rejection of the correspondence theory of truth. 

By the time of The Philosophy of Gordon H. Clark (1968), it is explicit ("persons are propositions"). Interestingly, Clark's definition of persons is given in reply to Ronald Nash, who in that book suggested "certain affinities" between Clark's metaphysic and "the Boston Personalism of Edgar Sheffield Brightman and Process Philosophy." I wonder if Tipton took Nash's thesis and ran with it.]

Moreover, Tipton simply misreads Clark. His whole argument seems to be tenuously premised on one rhetorical question (!) that in context does not lend even the least bit of credence to Tipton's inferences.

I am no scholar of Van Til, but if I had to make a suggestion, it would be that Van Til drew inspiration from his interaction with Hegelians. See the following remarks from his 1927 dissertation, God and the Absolute:

...in as much as the Absolute is often spoken of as revealing Himself or itself,—being regarded either as personal or as impersonal,—and in as much as this revelation is spoken of as inexplicable 18 , the Absolute is very clearly looked upon as Beyond... 

For McTaggart God is the logical universal immanent in all particulars or else he becomes one of the particulars Himself. Now on this basis it is not possible to maintain that the Absolute has any meaning except that which finds realization in the particulars. It is again quite true that Idealism does not wish to go that far with its emphasis on immanence. It continues to speak of the Absolute as “selfconscious” and “personal.” But is Idealism entitled to such an Absolute? It seems not; a logical universal has meaning only because of and for the particulars in which it is manifested.

Right or wrong, Van Til's thesis (so it seems to me) is that in contradistinction to Idealism, Christianity is entitled to "such an Absolute." 

Perhaps Tipton's other argument in his book are worthwhile, but I hope the above sets the record straight regarding Clark. As an addendum, I don't find Tipton's following line of argument convincing:

The theology of Gordon Clark finds affinity with the personalists in that it is motivated by a strong form of theological rationalism. However, the result of Clark’s rationalism for his doctrine of the Trinity amounts to a virtual denial of a personal essence or ousia in the Godhead – a point that has received little to no attention. Clark’s commitment to theological rationalism, together with his attempt to formulate a principle of individuation within the Godhead, yield a conception of the Godhead that granted self-consciousness only to the hypostases. If the rationalism of the personalists ascribed personality only to the unity of the Godhead, Clark’s rationalism relegated personality only to the diversity within the Godhead. This appeared most clearly in Clark’s argument that self-consciousness applies not to God as a self-identical subject, but only to the distinct hypostases understood as unique combinations of thoughts.

I do not find anywhere in the book that Tipton engages with Clark's points in his later works (flawed as they are) such as one can read in Clark's last letter to John Robbins (February, 1985):

Dear Dr. Robbins, The sheet from the Elders Handbook, which you sent me and Van Til also, held that God is both one Person and three Persons. This seems to be to be a form of Modalism, or Patripassionism as the early Church called it. The three names are names of three activities. When God creates, he is called Father, when he redeems he is called Son. In spite of the fact that Dr. Kuyper and Van Til speak of Three Persons, there is not much personality left, or perhaps I should say individuality. Look again at the seven lines you checked. I don’t know what these people do with “Only Begotten” or the “Procession” of the Spirit, or one of them speaking to another. In the study I am writing on the Incarnation, I preserve the distinction among the three Persons by arguing that although each is omniscient, they do not know, i.e. they cannot assent, the same set of propositions. The Second Person can know and say, “I became incarnate.” The Father cannot say this. The Father can say, “I begot the Son.” The Son begot nothing. What these modalists say on these points, I do not know. But it seems to me that the One Person would have to assert all these propositions, and to my mind that is plain nonsense.

For those interested in pursuing the doctrinal aspect of this debate further, I highly recommend Doug Douma's book The Grand Old Doc, in which he engages Tipton on this point (particularly, pgs. 115-117 and an apropos citation of John Murray).