Non Sola Ratione: Three Presbyterians and the Postmodern Mind [1]

K. Scott Oliphint¹

           My task is to attempt to show the abiding relevance and underlying unity of three influential and penetrating thinkers in the contemporary Reformed theological tradition.  This may seem, at least initially, like a difficult task. One of the things that the Reformed tradition is particularly adept at (and this should be seen as one of its strengths) is delineating differences in emphases and nuances that can help clarify the truth and application of Scripture.  Because of the caliber of these three men, clarifications and nuances in ideas and applications are abundant, and there should be no question that there are disagreements between them.  There is enough written on their differences, however, that anyone interested could see those differences delineated for them.²  The differences are important.  They are so important that understanding them will profoundly impact one’s approach to apologetics, as well as one’s approach to, and delineation of, theology generally.  In that sense, understanding the differences will help one to know how best to ‘glorify God and enjoy Him forever’ with respect to these disciplines.

           As important as those differences are, however, there are significant areas of concern and critique that serve to bring these three together.  These areas of agreement could easily be seen as grounded in the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition which each of them shared.³  Their commitment to the theology that became prominent again after the Reformation, together with their commitment to the church as the vehicle through which God would bring people to Himself and thereby influence the culture, generated some penetrating and fascinating themes in each of these men, themes that run through their own respective works and careers.  Given these themes, it might be helpful to emphasize the contribution that these three can make to the current cultural and intellectual climate.  We will attempt to argue, therefore, that (at least part of) the emphases of these three can provide for the church today a helpful and needful path through the morass of confusion that most secular thinkers, as well as many biblical scholars and theologians of the day seem to savor. 

           In this chapter, I would like to highlight one central and crucial aspect of the contributions that conspired together to make Gordon Clark (1902-1985), Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984) and Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) men of significant influence in the church of Jesus Christ, both during their lifetimes and during ours.  This particular aspect, I will suggest, is the very one that alone is able adequately, and radically, to challenge the principles and perils of unbelieving thought, no matter what its forms.  In that way, the contributions of these theologians are as relevant (if not more so) for the church now as they ever were.

           The best way, it seems to me, to begin to emphasize the underlying and unified critique of these three presbyterians is to see that critique against the backdrop of current discussions.  In that light, perhaps the most penetrating and relevant critique given by these three can be seen in the application of their analyses to what has come to be called postmodernism.⁴  That may sound strange, given the fact that postmodernism was less influential during the heyday of their respective careers.  As I will try to show, however, postmodernism is just modernism in costume, so that any critique of the latter will entail a critique of the former.  The trenchant critiques given, therefore, by each man penetrate as deeply into postmodern as into modern thought and life.  Fundamentally, and radically, each man saw all unbelieving thought, which would include postmodernism, as a crisis of ultimate authority.  Postmodernism is likely the most explicit expression of that crisis to date and is therefore most susceptible to the radical critique that each of these men brought.  Before the critique, however, we should look at postmodernism itself.

           Postmodern thought is notoriously difficult to categorize.  That, of course, is part of its charm.  A position not clearly categorized is even less clearly refuted.  Its very allure, therefore, is the ability it seems to have to hide behind its own obfuscation, virtually impervious to criticism, since any one point can quickly and with apparent ease turn into its opposite.  One who holds to postmodern thought pretends to hold to no ultimate commitments.  Thus, any critique is thought to be of minimal interest to a postmodern mind.  A critique of one postmodern hypothesis will provoke a postmodern’s about face so that another, opposing, hypothesis can be immediately defended.  Since the appearance of no real commitments is given, a true postmodern can easily defend one position, or its opposite, depending on context.  And ‘round and ‘round it goes. To the extent, then, that people love the dark and tenebrous rather than the light and luminous, postmodernism is one of the more lovable options currently available.  But just what is this dark and lovable thing called postmodernism?

           Fundamentally, it seems, it is the consistent outworking (or, at least, historical progression) of Kantian thought⁵.  It is the natural implication, perhaps even the culmination, of a certain reading of Kant’s monumental and influential work, Critique of Pure Reason.  In that sense, postmodernism is what we might expect of post-Kantian thought.  It is,  to put it another way, Kantian creative anti-realism writ large.⁶ 

           Creative anti-realism, in its most radical, ontological (i.e., with respect to being), form, is the view that whatever exists, exists by virtue of the powers and categories of our own minds.  In its most radical, epistemological (i.e., with respect to knowledge), form, creative anti-realism holds that truth is a product, solely and completely, of my mental processes and activity.  In either case, the source of being and truth is seen to be the human mind, reason itself.⁷  We create (creative) the world through our own mental categories, and our creations cannot ‘connect’ (anti-realism) with the ‘outside’ world itself.

           In thinking of truth and existence in this way, postmodernism has sought to emphasize the contribution of the individual (or a small group of individuals) to the process of philosophical (or theological, or linguistic, or social, or...) debate.  The postmodern would want to demolish any notion of ‘the way things are’ and substitute for it the more up-to-date idea of ‘the way things are to me’, or ‘to us.’  To speak of a way things are is to speak in modernist language; it is to assume that the world ‘out there’ is in some way accessible to us, able to be understood and interpreted by us all. 

           But this cannot be the case for a postmodern.  The world is beyond our grasp.  The sheer disagreement over what the world is like is evidence aplenty that it cannot be rightly understood.  This was the trap that ensnared modernism.  Modernists assumed that our reason was able to grasp and understand the world with some kind of universal objectivity.  For postmoderns, however, our reason provides little help for us when it is the outside world that we want to know.  In this way, postmodernism has been seen (wrongly, it seems to me) as rejecting the autonomy of reason.

           Along with the rejection of reason’s autonomy, a further, perhaps central, tenet of postmodernism is a rejection of (what some have called) classical foundationalism.  Classical foundationalism is a theory of the structure of knowledge.  On a foundationalist model, it was thought that beliefs could be categorized in one of two ways, and that such categorizations would allow us to understand the world, and all of its parts, as fundamentally and universally reasonable.  Not only so, but this kind of reasonable world is governed and maintained by the laws and dictates of reason itself.  Thus, classical foundationalism was a way of seeing, and thus of knowing, the world.  In a foundationalist structure, our connection with the world was expressed either by the way in which the world ‘presented’ itself to us, which would create in us basic beliefs about the things presented, or by the way in which we formed beliefs by gathering, analyzing and synthesizing other facts, based on those basic beliefs.

           But this, so we’re told by postmoderns, gave to reason the ability to understand and know the world from the outside in.  In other words, in a foundationalist scheme of the world, we simply responded to what the world had to offer, surrendering to its imposition, forming beliefs and justifying them on the basis, and in the context of, the way things are ‘out there.’  This scenario gave to reason a kind of universal, and universalizing, quality (at least in theory).  All that was needed for us to know the world, and to see in it universal laws, criteria and regulations, was the proper and persistent use of our reasoning faculty.

           In a post-Kantian world, however, reason is thought to be much more limited in its use.  For post-Kantians, the world is neither understood nor coherent until and unless we bring our own mental categories to bear on it, which, of course, we must do.  This means that, while there may be a world ‘out there,’ it is both unknown and unknowable.  The fact that it is ‘out there’ makes its existence necessary. as a pre-condition of what we know, but also, by definition (since it is ‘out there’), inaccessible to the mind.  Reason cannot take us from its own inner categories to the outside world of (initial) chaos. 

           Thus, whatever we claim to know, we know only because of the creatively constructive activity of our minds.  This is not to say that the creative activity of the mind is all that there is.  There is, and must be, according to Kant, more.  But the ‘more’ that is there is a noumenal ‘more’ and thus, while necessary (at least for ‘practical reason’), is nevertheless separated from the activity of the mind; it is, in every important way, beyond us. 

           Kant saw his philosophy as an epistemological Copernican revolution in which knowledge was no longer a response to an external world.  Instead the world that we know revolved around the categories and capacities of our minds.  Whereas the external world occupied a central place in discussions of knowledge prior to Kant, after Kant, the mind, though thought to be far more limited than before, became, nevertheless, the center of the epistemological universe.  The Kantian revolution had begun.

           This Kantian revolution has been able after him, like a child at Halloween, to dawn divers costumes as it moves from historical house to historical house and to trick away the tastiest treats of various disciplines, rendering them empty in the end.  In its more current, postmodern, costume, it has given rise to all kinds of stimulating and shocking statements (which is another part of postmodernism’s current appeal) -  statements like, ‘there is nothing outside the text,’ (Derrida) or, ‘truth is whatever our peers will let us get away with saying’ (Rorty).  Part of the problem with these statements, as we noted above, is that they are inherently (intentionally?) unclear and opaque.  They seem either to be saying nothing of any real interest, or something so shocking that it is difficult to take them seriously.⁸

           Perhaps we can take Rorty’s statement as a case in point.  Does Rorty really mean to say that truth is determined by our peer group?  On one read, probably not.  On one read, what Rorty is really saying with respect to epistemology is close to what Thomas Kuhn said with respect to science.⁹  He is simply attempting to say that our theories of knowledge (or of anything else) are in fact justified, or not, within our respective groups.  So, no matter how loudly I want to proclaim my theory, if my group doesn’t, in the end, find the argument convincing, then it remains my own theory and not something acceptable. 

           If that is all that Rorty is saying, then his contribution to postmodernism is, for all intents and purposes, jejune and vapid.  One would be hard-pressed to find any theory or argument - one, that is, that has been, at some point in time, accepted - that has not been argued in the context of its peers.  As a matter of fact, if one found an accepted argument that had not been argued in the context of its peers, it simply would not be, by definition, an accepted argument.  If that is all Rorty, and by extension postmodernism, wishes to say, then the real conundrum might be found in an attempt to justify the ink spilt over such a view.

           There is likely more to it than that, however.  It is more plausible to suppose that what postmoderns wish to say is something more radical than the obvious.  It is likely that what they, or at least Rorty and those like him, wish to say is something a bit more Kantian, more Copernican, something more cosmically neoteric than the above.  Perhaps Rorty wants us to think that the belief or position justified (or not) by our peers is, as far as we can tell, all that there is of the matter at hand.  There is not, or at least we cannot access, anything other than the justified (or not) belief-cum-peers.  The truth of the matter, in this case, would reside, not in anything external to us - a real world, for example - but in the group itself.

           Now this is a radical claim and if it is true it might pose real problems for Christianity.¹⁰  If the truth of the matter depends on us and if that is all there is to the truth of the matter, then my belief that Christianity is objectively true can itself only be true if my peers agree, or let me get away with saying it.  But then my belief of the objective truth of Christianity is only true because of my peers.  Thus, the objective truth of the matter is never really known, knowable or accessible.  No wonder then that it is common in these postmodern days to hear that postmodernism has called ‘such and such’ Christian belief into question.

           We should see postmodernism’s critique, however, in its proper context.  Just what is it, we could ask, that makes us think that there really is a critique, given the postmodern position?  Alvin Plantinga’s response to such a question bears repeating here:

But you don’t automatically produce a defeater for Christian belief just by standing on your roof and proclaiming (even loudly and slowly), “God is dead!”  (Not even if you add: “And everybody I know says so too.”) Nor can you call Christian belief (or anything else) into question just by declaring, “I hereby call that into question!”  You can’t destroy a way of thinking just by announcing, “I hereby destroy that way of thinking!”  This will not do the job, not even if it is embodied in writing of coruscating wit and style, and not even if you adopt a superior air and elegant gestures while intoning it.  Something further is required.¹¹

           At least part of the ‘further’ that is required is some kind of argument that truth is what the postmoderns want to say it is, or that no correspondence with the outside world is needed for the justification of a given belief.  But postmoderns are reluctant to give such an argument, or at least to say that they are.  To give such an argument is to fall again into the terrible trap of Enlightenment thought wherein reason is the arbiter of truth.  To give such an argument, they will tell us, is to violate the very principle that they are seeking to establish.  So, the obfuscation continues.  How, then, does one address the postmodern situation?

           Perhaps the best way to address the problem is the way that Clark, Schaeffer and Van Til taught us to address every other form of unbelief.  Perhaps it is best to try to get at the underlying presuppositions of such a position, to see if the position itself is standing on solid ground, or if (as is the case with all unbelieving thought) it is sinking in its own quicksand. 

           As we look more closely at postmodernism, we should see that the problem surrounding it, and the problem that has thus filtered down to the thinking of our western culture, is, as we said above, the problem of authority.  If there is a consensus in postmodern thought (and that is still a live question), it would likely center around postmodernism’s rejection of traditional notions of anything, but preeminently traditional notions of authority. 

           One who considers himself to be centrally postmodern in his thinking will no doubt deride any and every appeal to an authoritative system or source of thinking and living.¹²  Postmoderns reject all attempts at systematizing, whether in philosophy, theology or any other discipline  (except, of course, their systematized principles that are designed to reject systematizing).  To systematize is to artificially impose something on a text or a context that is, in fact, not there.  Postmoderns would like to convince us that any appeal to a unifying, systematizing ‘whole’ has been shown to be an abysmal failure in the past, that our best approach as we face the future is to have the courage to reject this approach now.¹³

           But just what is postmodernism’s ground for its claims?  Why should we seriously entertain notions that call into question so much of what we need to take for granted for life and thought?¹⁴  To what can the postmodernist point that should give us pause to consider this position? 

           One thing to which every postmodern will point is, as was said, the failure of the modern.  Because modernism sought to bring all truth and life under the big umbrella of autonomous reason, and because it has failed in its task, we should be willing, if not eager, to consider an alternate, opposing viewpoint.  This analysis has some real appeal.  It is certainly true that modernism, with its insistence on the near godlike capabilities of reason to deliver us from evil, has done little to help us intellectually and, practically speaking, seems to have left almost unspeakable evil in its wake.  The quest for universalizing and systematizing rationality has ended, they tell us, in oppression and destruction.  Surely, that fact alone would cause us to cry out for something else.

           The (initial) appeal of this kind of analysis is likely the best, and perhaps the only, explanation for any influence that postmodernism has had in our time.  As we weary of things well-worn we’re only too willing to discard them, like an old pair of shoes, and to put our money on what is currently, in culture and in intellectual life, fashionable.  To do so may (and historically speaking will) itself end in failure, but it will at least keep us, for the moment, well, fashionable.  We’ll remain on the ‘cutting edge’ and we’ll maintain an air of relevance that modernism cannot give.  In remaining fashionable (and this is particularly true in academic circles) we can keep up with the (postmodern) Joneses, speaking to and with them, putting our names in all the right circles.  Our intellectual and academic careers will follow the avant-garde.

           It should be noted, however, that, in spite of this appeal, such an analysis is not new in the history of the west, or of western thought (and if it’s not new, one wonders why it would appeal to a postmodern).  Thales’ water gave way to Anaximander’s apeiron, which gave way to Anaximenes’ (hot?) air.  Heraclitus’ becoming gave way to Parmenides’ being.  Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas gave way to Hume’s clear and distinct skepticism.  Kant’s abstract universal gave way to Hegel’s concrete universal.  And on the story goes.

           The history of western thought would hardly be intelligible without the pattern of the failure of one philosophy, then that philosophy being discarded and replaced by another, which then itself fails only to be replaced by yet another.  So, the appeal of postmodernism is, in one important sense, just more of the same.  But it is not just the pattern and response that is the same.  Unfortunately, for postmodernism and those who love it, its foundation and ground are the same as modernism’s.  For postmodernism is, in the final analysis, the same as modernism.

           Gary Gutting, who is himself somewhat sympathetic with Rorty’s postmodern project, detects, in spite of that sympathy, the underlying problem with it.  He notes:

Rorty’s pragmatism is certainly critical of classical formulations of the Enlightenment project.  But, as I will show, properly clarified and modified, it renews rather than rejects the fundamental Enlightenment idea of human autonomy through reason.¹⁵

           In the end, postmodernism is yet another attempt (doomed to failure like the rest of unbelieving thought) to make the mind and practice of human beings the final arbiter and judge of truth and life.  The problem - as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be (until the end of history, at least) - is that the Kantian Copernican revolution was no radical revolution at all; it was only window dressing. 

           The attempt to reject reason’s hegemony and to substitute for it another, more enlightened mode of inquiry and truth, is fundamentally just another attempt, maybe with different terminology or methodology, to assert reason’s hegemony after all.  That, we should notice, is the problem.  And the problem is not simply a problem of authority in the abstract, it is a deeper problem.  It is the problem of attempting to base our thought and lives on our own minds, an attempt that leads to futility.  Furthermore, it is not simply that we have encountered this problem after Kant; this problem can be detected, without much effort, in virtually all of western thought and culture.  The crux or essence of a crisis or problem of authority, put simply, is the attempt to apply the principle of homo mensura - “man as the measure” of all things.

           Now one Latin phrase certainly deserves another in response.  The only proper response to homo mensura is the emphasis and methodology that Clark, Schaeffer and Van Til sought to appropriate throughout their respective ministries - non sola ratione - not reason alone.  This may seem to be an obvious and not so significant insight for a Christian.  What is obvious, however, is the way in which this tenet has been virtually ignored in the history of the church.

           It seems to me that the Presbyterian triad - Clark, Schaeffer and Van Til - stand together on this most crucial point.  Unless and until we have a Word from God, the Word of God, we simply cannot make sense of the world around us or the ‘world’ within us, not to mention the more important truth of how we can please God.  We have no means by which to explain why we trust that the world in which we live, move and exist is, in fact, something that is known by us. 

           It is not, of course, that (at least in the typical case) we don’t believe the world to be a certain way.  People do, in fact, trust that the house that they leave each day will, under normal circumstances, be there when they return, and will be in roughly the same shape as when they left.  The living room will not have changed to the bathroom, or to a warehouse, or to a unicorn while they were away.  That fact, and countless others that we need for living each day, is something on which we do and must rely.  The problem, however, is that, apart from God’s revelation to us, we have no reason why we ought to or can trust such facts.  Schaeffer was insistent on this point:

When people refuse God’s answer, they are living against the revelation of the universe and against the revelation of themselves.  They are denying the revelation of God in who they themselves are.  I am not saying that non-Christians do not live in the light of real existence.  I am saying that they do not have any answer for living in it.  I am not saying that they do not have moral motions, but they have no basis for them.  I am not saying that the person with a non-Christian system (even a radical system like Buddhism or Hinduism or the modern Western thinking of chance) does not know that the object exists - the problem is that they have no system to explain the subject-object correlation.  As a matter of fact, this is their damnation, this is their tension, that they have to live in the light of their existence, the light of reality - the total reality in all these areas - and they do live there, and yet they have no sufficient explanation for any of these areas.  So, the wiser they are, the more honest they are, the more they feel that tension and that is their present damnation.¹⁶

           Perhaps postmodernism is, in Schaeffer’s sense, ‘wiser’ and ‘more honest’ with respect to the world.  Perhaps its denial of any objectivity should be applauded for its honest look at the state of things.  But, if so, it should also be exposed for what it, in fact, is.  It is the natural conclusion to a long history of relying on the limited and errant faculty of reason alone as the ground on which we stand in order to make sense of the world.  Reason, on this view, is given the right to ultimate authority.

           Christians cannot, in this sense, give ground to the postmodern agenda.  One of our more fundamental beliefs as Christians is that we, happily and boldly (because of God’s grace), live as a people under authority.  Not only so, but as Christians we confess that the authority under which we live is a universal authority.  It is God’s authority and as such it applies to everything that is.

           God’s authority is not something that has been kept secret.  It has been revealed to us by God.  Whereas, in past times and in different ways, God revealed Himself and His will through various means, in these last days He has spoken through His Son (Heb 1:1f.).  That revelation, which is preeminently the Scriptures but includes also the revelation through creation, because it is God’s revelation, carries with it all the authority of God Himself.  Thus, Christians are, as God’s willing servants (by grace), preeminently ‘people of the book.’  That book is the Bible; it is God’s authoritative Word to His people.¹⁷

           The truth of Scripture, then, is at least a part, and a significant part, of the answer to the problems posed by postmodernism.  That should not surprise us, since that truth is the answer to the problems posed in any generation.  It is the Reformed and Presbyterian view of Scripture, of God’s revelation, as that view is explained, for example, in the Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter I, that forms the basis for a sound, biblical apologetic. 

           When people challenge us to ‘give a reason for the hope that is within us’ (I Peter 3:15), we should immediately realize that the ‘reason’ given comes, not ultimately from ourselves, but from God’s own revelation.  It is revelation itself that provides a response to the challenges brought against Christianity.  Clark, Schaeffer and Van Til all understood this, and so were able to provide answers to the challenges of postmodernism, and to whatever else will soon take its place. 

           Because postmodernism is, at its roots, modernism in costume, it falls prey to the very rationalism that it seeks to negate.  Note Schaeffer on rationalism:

...a rationalist is a person who thinks man and his reason can come to final answers without information from any other source.  No one stresses more than I that people have no final answers in regard to truth, morals, or epistemology without God’s revelation in the Bible.  This is true in philosophy, science and theology.  Rationalism can take a secular or theological form.  In both, the rationalist thinks that on the basis of man’s reason, plus what he can see about him, final answers are possible.  My books stress that man cannot generate final answers from himself.¹⁸

           Whether an individual or a group of individuals, we simply are not able to create the truth.  The issue, then, is the authority of God’s revelation and its application to the struggles and questions that come to human beings who live in God’s world, all the while attempting to refuse His revelation.  That refusal, however, is culpable.  In any form, modern or postmodern, unbelief is rightly understood as a denial of God’s revelation.  It is not as though people who refuse God’s answer are honestly seeking Him, or wondering about with no ax to grind.¹⁹

           In this way Schaeffer, Clark and Van Til, were self-consciously applying their own Presbyterian and Reformed heritage to the cultural, philosophical and theological issues of the day, or of any day for that matter.  They were, all three, also unified in their rejection of the liberalism, modernism and neo-orthodoxy that had stolen the Reformed gospel from so many of the churches.  In that rejection, they together sought to demonstrate, in thought and in life, that no other answer could be found than that given by Reformed theology, as expressed in its creeds (particularly, for them, the Westminster Standards). 

           To use one illustration of this, Schaeffer’s emphasis, in so many of his books, on the erroneous dichotomy of the so-called ‘upper story’ and ‘lower story’ came from his own discussion with Karl Barth, and his conviction, after that discussion, that Barth had nothing more to offer the modern world than a kind of spiritualized, existential secularism.²⁰  All that Barthianism could offer was a ‘pre-postmodern’ postmodernism.  The world according to Barth, if it was even God’s creation, simply did not matter.  What did matter for Barth was the revelation-event.  But that event, no matter how loudly Barth would protest to the contrary, could only be grounded in a person’s own reason.

           So also for Clark.  In his analysis of Kenneth Hamilton’s, Words and the WORD, Clark’s description of Hamilton’s notion of language could be pulled from virtually any postmodern text.

For example, Hamilton, expounding Cassirer, says, “Intelligence...is not man’s decisive characteristic.  What really distinguishes him from other animals is his ability to construct symbols ...  He does not first understand the world, and then learn how to put his knowledge into words.  Rather his invention of verbal symbols provides the possibility of his having knowledge...

Clark responds:

This is patently backwards.  It takes intelligence to construct symbols, and in particular before constructing the symbol the man must have something in mind to symbolize.  A primitive man would never invent the sound or vocal symbol cat, unless he had first seen a little tail and heard its other end say meow.  Does anyone believe that he said to himself, “Cat is such a nice sound, I shall use it to symbolize whatever I see tomorrow at noon”?²¹

Clark then goes on to argue that unless one presupposes the truth of God’s revelation in Scripture, one is destined for this kind of (postmodern) absurdity.  In fact, as Clark argues throughout his career, presupposing the truth of God’s revelation in Scripture is the only position that escapes absurdity.  To assume the sufficiency of reason alone in such matters, is intellectual suicide.²²

           Van Til as well dedicated his career to making this same point.  For him, there were really only two principial options when it came to the issue of authority.  Either one presupposes the Christian position as it is given to us infallibly in God’s revelation, or one presupposes oneself as ultimate, which results in a crisis of the deepest magnitude.  If one presupposes oneself, then one rejects the revelation of God and tries in vain to make sense of the world ‘out there.’  With respect to a theory of knowledge (epistemology), Van Til put it this way:

When therefore we examine the various epistemological views with regard to their “objectivity,” we are interested most of all in knowing whether or not these views have sought the knowledge of an object by placing it into its right relation with the self-conscious God.  The other questions are interesting enough in themselves but are comparatively speaking not of great importance.  Even if one were not anxious about the truth of the matter, it ought still to be plain to him that there can be no more fundamental question in epistemology than the question whether or not facts can be known without reference to God. ...Suppose then the existence of God.  Then it would be a fact that every fact would be known truly only with reference to him.  If then one did not place a fact into relation with God, he would be in error about the fact under investigation.  Or suppose that one would just begin his investigations as a scientist, without even asking whether or not it is necessary to make reference to such a God in his investigations, such a one would be in constant and in fundamental ignorance all the while.  And this ignorance would be culpable ignorance, since it is God who gives him life and all good things.  It ought to be obvious then that one should settle for himself this most fundamental of all epistemological questions, whether or not God exists.  Christ says that as the Son of God, he will come to judge and condemn all those who have not come to the Father by him.²³

           The point that Van Til is making here is, again, the same that Clark and Schaeffer attempted to make - unless one presupposes the revelation of God as itself the infallible ground on which we stand, for knowing and living, then one stands not only in error with respect to the world and its facts, but one stands condemned before the God whose revelation is clearly seen and understood in that world (Rom 1:20).

           So, the so-called “Reformation solas” - Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia, Solo Christo, Soli Deo Gloria - rightly leave one ‘sola’ out of the equation that was predominant in all of western philosophy, as well as much of church history.  It was a ‘sola’ that had plagued the church for centuries, a ‘sola’ that was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the fall and its consequences, a ‘sola’ that was grounded, not only in the history of western thought, but in much of Christian apologetics as well.  It was sola ratione; a cry that thankfully fell on deaf ears during the Reformation.

           Unfortunately, ears have not remained deaf to this cry.  In spite of its theological fallacy and its philosophical failure, sola ratione has remained as strong in the present postmodern climate as it has ever been.  Not only in philosophy, but in theology as well, some still want to set forth the postmodern agenda as in some way more enlightened than the modernist’s “Enlightenment” agenda.  That, of course, is erroneous thinking.  It is the kind of erroneous thinking to which our triad devoted themselves to responding.  The answer to that kind of fallacy of thinking and failure of nerve - non sola ratione - can be found in the works of these three Presbyterian apologists, the reading of which reaps rich rewards - tolle, lege, tolle, lege.²⁴
Endnotes