Quotes About Van Til

When Van Til says that 'the principle of unity and diversity must be equally original,' this is a biblical must, made necessary because God is one God and yet triune. The equal ultimacy of the one and many is directly derived from the doctrine of the Trinity.

Cornelius Van Til, under whom Schaeffer studied at Westminster for two years, used Kuyper's notion of the antithesis (i.e., that an absolute antithesis exists in all of life between the believer and unbeliever) to develop his presuppositional apologetics.

John Frame has noted that for Van Til, presuppositionalism did not denote apriorism, but the "pre- in presupposition refers to the 'pre-eminence' of the presupposition with respect to our other beliefs."45

As William Edgar has pointed out, Schaeffer's favorite method in apologetics (pushing an unbeliever to the extreme of his or her own presuppositions to show how dark the world is without Christ) was "very similar, if not identical" to Van Til's idea of placing yourself on your opponent's ground for the sake of argument.