Dr. Cornelius Van Til of Westminster Theological Seminary reached the noble age of eighty on May 3. And on July 24 his devoted wife of fifty years, Bella Klooster Van Til, joined him at eighty! The editor asked me to write a short article to commemorate this landmark in the lives of my influential uncle and aunt. I gladly comply with this request, although the reader should realize that objectivity is never possible, least of all among relatives. I take this occasion to publicly thank God for His gifts to Dr. and Mrs. C. Van Til and to praise Him for granting the Van Tils these many years for unusual service in the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Cornelius Van Til was born at Grootegast in the province of Groningen, the Netherlands, on May 3, 1895. This was the year in which the first volume of Herman Bavinck‘s great dogmatics was published, and Abraham Kuyper’s influence was already pronounced throughout Holland. The Free University which had been established in 1880 was slowly progressing. After Kees, as he was called, spent his first ten years on a Dutch farm in wooden shoes, the family emigrated in 1905 and settled in the farm country of the Highland–Munster area of northern Indiana, some twenty-five miles south of Chicago. The Van Tils became members of the Christian Reformed Church and helped to establish a local Christian School. Although Kees enjoyed farming—he still gardens for a hobby—he felt called to prepare for the ministry of the gospel. High school and college costs were difficult for an immigrant family with eight sons, but at the age of 27 Kees graduated from Calvin College in 1922 in a program which included both “prep school” and college. The year 1922 was a difficult one at Calvin Seminary because of the “Jansen case.” A number of Christian Reformed students, including Kees Van Til, decided to study at Princeton which was still noted as a stronghold of Reformed orthodoxy.

In 1924 Van Til received the Th.B. degree from Princeton Theological Seminary as well as the M.A. degree from Princeton University. The following year he received a Th.M. degree in Systematic Theology. He established a warm relation with Professor Wm. Brenton Greene, Jr. who taught apologetics and he came to know Dr. J. Gresham Machen who was teaching New Testament subjects. In the fall of 1925 Kees married his longtime girl friend from Munster, Rena Klooster, and they returned to Princeton to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy. He received this degree in 1927 after defense of a dissertation on God and the Absolute.

Now thirty-two years of age and armed with a prestigeous Ph.D. from Princeton, Dr. Van Til was called and ordained as the pastor of the small Christian Reformed Church of Spring Lake, Michigan. He served here for only a year when he was appointed Instructor in Apologetics (1928–1929) to teach in the place of his former professor, Dr. Greene.

Troubles were now openly brewing at Princeton as modernism was making inroads. Dr. J. Gresham Machen had been elected by Princeton‘s Board to be Professor of Apologetics as successor of Dr. Greene. But the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., under President J. Ross Stevenson‘s urging, did not confirm Dr. Machen. In that context Dr. Van Til was offered a one-year appointment as an instructor. Reluctantly he asked for a one-year leave of absence from Spring Lake, and went to Princeton –a move which was to change the course of his life and tie him in with Machen’s history. In the spring of 1929 Princeton was reorganized and modernism was now in the saddle. Although Dr. Van Til was offered a full professorship after his one-year term as instructor, he declined the appointment and returned to his congregation at Spring Lake.

He was not to remain long, however. Under the Icadership of Dr. Machen, Westminster Theological Seminary was being organized to carry on the historic position of old–Princeton. Dr. Van Til, as well as another Christian Reformed minister, R. B. Kuiper. and Ned B. Stonehouse, were invited, with others, to join the original faculty. C. Van Til began as Professor of Apologetics at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia in September 1929. Although his love for the Christian Reformed Church never waned, his life work was teaching at Westminster where he officially retired at the end of the school year in 1972. Up to the present he has continued to serve as a part–time lecturer. His life has been intimately bound to the difficult and challenging and inspiring history of Westminster Theological Seminary. There he has stood out and become well known throughout the world as “defender of the faith.”

Dr. Van Til’s life work has been the development of a consistently Reformed apologetics. Thoroughly grounded in the Reformed theology of the Dutch theologians, Kuyper and Bavicnk, Van Til gradually came to see that the apologetics of the Hodges, Warfield, and Greene involved a synthesis with Scottish realism and other forms of non-Christian thought. A reformation of apologetics was needed to break away from any form of a nature-grace dichotomy. Every thought, also in apologetics, must be conformed to Christ. This has been Van Til’s major contribution in developing a consistently Reformed apologetics for the defense of the Christian faith. Hc has shown that the defense of the Christian faith undertaken in apologetics cannot proceed from a neutral or rational position but only from within the presuppositions of the Christian faith itself. In this project Van Til was helped by and allied with Professors Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd of the Netherlands. But Van Til’s attention was specifically focused on apologetics and the defense of the faith. In this role he was unique; he was indeed the “prince of twentieth century Christian apologetics,” as Meredith Kline of Gordon–Conwell Divinity School described him. His influence upon his students and upon the Reformed world especially, has been profound.

But Dr. Van Til was a controversial figure. In old age his strikingly handsome, goateed father lived near the state line between Indiana and Illinois. This state line running between Munster and Lansing is a very straight line. And C. Van Til was one to draw straight lines in Reformed apologetics. The line between truth and error, between Christianity and oonChristianity. between Reformed and non–Reformed is a straight line, he contended. There is no room for compromise. With a penetrating intellect Van Til became a sharp critic of modernism (as was Machen) as well as of Roman Catholicism, Arminianism, and Neo-orthodoxy which he labeled The New Modernism in his first major publication in 1946. In his fervor for the truth without compromise, Van Til found it painfully necessary to criticize also Reformed colleagues whom he judged to be following dangerous routes. These included his friends C. C. Berkouwer and H. Dooyeweerd as well as H. Kuitert and J. Daane. It was, however, always with a heavy heart that he pursued these critiques within the Reformed family.

It was my privilege to spend more than two years in graduate work at Westminster. My wife and 1 lived in a small apartment in the home of Uncle Kees and Aunt Rena. These were delightful and extremely profitable years as I engaged in daily dialogue with Uncle Kees and regularly enjoyed afternoon coffee and cake with them while my good wife worked. A fiend for exercise, Uncle Kees was always ready for a hearty walk through the rural country-side of his Chestnut Hill home in suburban Philadelphia. These walks were an important part of my education. He was always talking about the theologians, past and present, and about the past and present struggles of the churches. And in those conversations I learned how difficult it was for him to say what he was convinced had to be said in criticism of fellow Reformed theologians. These matters cost him many sleepless nights and much psychological anguish.

Van Til‘s life-style is simple and his energies surprising. He is an authentic man, an authentic Christian, godly and devoted. He was a Christian pastor to his neighbors and to his students. He called on sick neighbors regularly and witnessed to them in simple ways as he presented the Gospel. He cared for the common man and prized his visits to Indiana with family and farmer friends. Yet his influence was worldwide and many of his students throughout the world carryon with “an epistemological self-consciousness” awakened by this former Indiana farmer.

Van Til has been a prolific writer and one is hard pressed to keep up with his publications since his retirement. During the 1930‘s he began putting out various syllabi for his courses. These were constantly revised and improved and he has spent retirement years ill revising and publishing some of these as well as producing new books. His first published work was in 1946. He has published some twenty books and a dozen or more pamphlets and bookJets. Numerous articles and book reviews have also been published. And he has lectured widely and made his case for Calvinism in many of the major universities in the country.

On the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 1965, Dr. Van Til was honored with a special issue of Presbyterian Guardian containing articles by friends and colleagues. I especially enjoyed the article by Prof. Paul Woolley, Van Til’s longtime colleague at Westminster and the only other living member of Westminster’s original faculty. On the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday an impressive “Festschrift” was published with the title Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions on the Theology one! Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til. In addition to stimulating articles from scholars around the world—Stoker, Dooyeweerd, Packer, Berkouwer, Zuidema, Ridderbos —and responses by Van Til, this volume also contains a seven–page bibliography of Van Til’s writings up to 1971.

The eightieth birthday was celebrated at West· minster with a musical concert in Van Til’s honor. The newest building on the Westminster campus, the classroom and chapel building, has been named Van Til Hall by the Board of Trustees. Thus, two men whose lives began to be entwined in the providence of God at Princeton in the 1920’s now have their names enshrined in the two adjoining buildings of Westminster—Machen Hall and Van Til Hall. The Presbyterian Guardian of last May carried a laudatory survey article by Rev. Paul Szto, a Christian Reformed pastor, who was greatly influenced by Van Til’s apologetics.

The last few years have been difficult years for the Van Tils because of Mrs. Van Til‘s injuries and illness. But God has given her remarkable recovery and that has been a tremendous blessing to these two eighty-year olds who have been such a solid support to each other during their fifty years of married life. May God grant them blessed twilight years! And may their impact upon Reformed apologetics continue to grow. Soli Deo Gloria!