Van Til’s Insights on the Trinity

Abstract

Cornelius Van Til may have been the most important evangelical Trinitarian thinker in the 20th century, but his work has not at all received the attention it deserves. No doubt one reason for this neglect was the fact that Van Til’s rather difficult approach to apologetics occupied the center of the stage. Amidst controversy about the transcendental argument, epistemology, and questions like whether or not Christians and non-Christians share common ground, the Trinitarian center of Van Til’s apologetics seems to have gone unnoticed. It may be added, too, that his formula for the Trinity — one Person, three Persons — was dismissed out of hand by some because it struck them as a plain contradiction. Finally, Van Til’s trinitarianism perhaps did not attract the attention it should have because it suffered from a lack of full development in Van Til. Though the doctrine of the Trinity is at the core of all that Van Til wrote, one might still say that rather than offering a full-bodied Trinitarian theology, he offered the foundations upon which such a theology might be built. Van Til blazed trails, leaving it up to those after him to build the highways and cities.