What do you think?
Rate this book
The Trinitarian Theology of Cornelius Van Til
Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987) offered a confessionally Reformed doctrine of the Creator-creature relation that stands out as distinct in contrast to both traditional Roman Catholic and contemporary Barthian alternatives. His Trinitarian theology of the Creator-creature relation supplied a pioneering enrichment of Reformed theology in the traditions of Old Princeton and Old Amsterdam.
In this volume, Lane G. Tipton interprets Van Til in his own historical and polemical context and demonstrates how the immutably dynamic life of the self-contained Trinity bears upon God’s relation to Adam in the work of creation, the act of special providence in covenant, and the person and eternal Son in the event of incarnation.
Tipton argues that Van Til’s Trinitarian theology deepens confessionally Reformed Trinitarianism and federalism in contrast to medieval Thomistic and modern Barthian theological alternatives. In a period marked by theological decline, he strives to clarify and extend confessional Reformed Trinitarian and federal theology in the service of the church’s union and communion with the immutable person of the crucified and ascended Christ of Scripture.
In this volume, Lane G. Tipton interprets Van Til in his own historical and polemical context and demonstrates how the immutably dynamic life of the self-contained Trinity bears upon God’s relation to Adam in the work of creation, the act of special providence in covenant, and the person and eternal Son in the event of incarnation.
Tipton argues that Van Til’s Trinitarian theology deepens confessionally Reformed Trinitarianism and federalism in contrast to medieval Thomistic and modern Barthian theological alternatives. In a period marked by theological decline, he strives to clarify and extend confessional Reformed Trinitarian and federal theology in the service of the church’s union and communion with the immutable person of the crucified and ascended Christ of Scripture.
- GenresTheology
177 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 29, 2022
17 people are currently reading
60 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 3, 2022
Outstanding. Seriously.
September 27, 2022
Greg Bahnsen explained Van Til’s apologetic method. John Frame touched on broader theological issues. Lane Tipton gives us something quite new: a whole book on Van Til’s Trinitarian theology. He clears up misunderstandings and explains some of Van Til’s rather unique phrases. Tipton’s thesis is that every error concerning God comes from either having God participate in man or man in God (Tipton 16).
Self-Contained Trinity
When Van Til uses words like “self-contained God,” he means that “God does not exist in correlation to the universe, with each side of the relation characterized by mutual change” (17). This is excellently put. In other words, he means that God is a se. One minor theme in the book is that creation does not participate in the substance of the Godhead. I agree. I would like to point out, however, that there is an ambiguity here that neither Tipton nor some Thomists seem to be aware of. What does “participation” actually mean? No one really defines it. Even when I finished reading through all of Plato, I had only a vague idea of what the word meant. This means there are two errors to avoid. One is to define participation in such a thick way that one becomes part of the substance of the Godhead. The other is to weaken it where 2 Peter 1:4 is all but meaningless.
Whatever participation means, Van Til posits, not a participation of the divine essence, but a finite replication of it to covenant man (19). This leads to another key point of Tipton’s: Rome’s view of the analogia entis entails theistic mutualism. Theistic mutualism says that God and creation are in a correlative relationship. We will return to that claim later.
Tipton’s chapter on the Triune Creator is a fine presentation of some of God’s attributes. He even suggests how these attributes, some of them anyway, safeguard our understanding of God and the universe. Immutability, for example, precludes any form of pantheism (25). On this point Tipton rightly rebuts John Frame. Frame, by contrast, “advocates for a species of theistic mutualism when he posits two modes of existence in God” (32 n.21; cf John Frame, Doctrine of God, 572).
The heart of this book, maybe surprisingly, is not Van Til on the Trinity, but Van Til on the image of God. Van Til simply expounds the standard Protestant view that man was created in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. Adam was already disposed for communion with God. Rome, by contrast, says something is needed to raise man above his created nature. This means that man’s position is already defective before the fall. Scripture, by contrast, says that any conflict in the being of man is a result of sin (44).
The Trinity
This is where problems arise, all of them self-inflicted for Van Til. I note up front that I do not believe Van Til was a heretic on the Trinity. I know what he was trying to say (see below). Rather, he simply chose the absolute worst way to express his views on the Trinity. Tipton says Van Til is misunderstood on this point. He alludes to Keith Mathison, R. C. Sproul, and John Gerstner. There are two problems with that. One, those men did not really attack Van Til on the Trinity. They attacked him on apologetics and his reading of Reformed sources. Two, it is not clear that they actually misunderstood what he was saying. When someone says the Trinity is both One Person and Three Persons, it is not the critic’s fault that he misunderstands what you are saying.
So what is Van Til saying? He begins well. Tipton notes that the “divine essence has no existence outside of each Trinitarian person” (63). Moreover, the unity in the Trinity is a numeric, not a generic unity. The persons of the Trinity are not members of a genus called “Godhead.” And in one area where I think Van Til did make a valuable advance in Trinitarian theology, he says that each person “exhausts” the divine essence. Whatever it means to be God, a divine person is it. Each person is “interior” to the other persons.
One Person and Three Persons
Following Bavinck, there is “absolute personality” in the Trinity (74; cf Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, 304). This absolute personality entails self-consciousness and self-determination. This absolute personality “opens itself up organically in a threefold existence.” God’s being is a “personal unity” (Tipton 76). It works like this:
Absolute personality → threefold, self-differentiated existence (77)
Now we can proceed to Van Til’s infamous claim. When he says “one person” and “three persons,” what he means is “absolute personal being/personality” and “three persons.” The word person shifts in meaning. At this point he is simply guilty of the fallacy of equivocation, not heresy. Tipton tries to rescue the phrasing, saying “the terms ‘person’ and ‘personality’ [are used interchangeably] to refer to God in his unity” (83). This does not sit right with me. If we front load divine unity with personality, then we muddle the distinction between nature and person. To this Van Til would reply that we cannot, ala Gordon Clark, make the divine essence a “mute” essence. I agree. The older fathers noted that the concept person can already do that. A person is a mode of subsistence. As a mode it modifies the divine essence. It is a mode of existence (tropos hyparxeos). The divine essence is never free-floating in the abstract.
The book ends with a good discussion of perichoresis and autotheos. We will spend some time on the latter term. Autotheos means the Son’s essence exists of himself and not with reference to the Father (112). The Father communicates the person, not the essence to the Son. In fact, “one subsistent person is not sustained in his essence by another Trinitarian person, since all persons subsist equally as the entire underived essence of God” (117).
Van Til ties all of this together with the idea of “mutual representation.” Tipton explains that “each person represents the whole of the divine essence (in the relations of subsistence) and the other Trinitarian persons (in the relations of coinherence” in the Godhead” (132). In fact, mutual exhaustion correlates with mutual representation (133).
Conclusion
Is Thomas Aquinas a theistic mutualist? He might be. Tipton, like Van Til, does not engage in actual analysis with primary sources. I counted two places, I think. One was on p.141, and there it dealt with the argument from First Cause). The bibliography lists no works by Aquinas. To be sure, he references learned works by Thomists on this topic, but we still do not know what Thomas actually said. There are problems with Thomas’s account in places, and I agree with Tipton on the donum. I admit that some Thomists do indeed speak of a sharing (or at least, seeing) the essence of God. If Thomas said something like that, we would need to see where and to see what he means by it. We see neither. Thomas probably held to the chain of being ontology, but did he mean that there is just one being and God has more of it than we do? That seems more of a criticism of Scotus. My own reading of Thomas, no doubt largely shaped by men like Norman Geisler and Mortimer Adler, suggests something like the following: God and man have being analogically, not univocally. We can say our concepts of being are univocal, but our judgments of it are analogical.
Following Norman Geisler, I would say that unless we have something like an analogy of being, we will not be able to escape Parmenides’s challenge. Parmenides said if we think being is univocal, then all being is one. If we say it is equivocal, then we would differ from other objects and God by not-being, or nothing. In which case, being is still one. The solution, then, is that we have our being analogically of God.
That’s not crucial to this review, though. What is crucial is that we are still not sure of what Thomas said. I can even grant Tipton’s claim for the sake of argument, but we would at least need to see it.
Notwithstanding the above criticism, the book is excellent. Tipton has done what Van Tillians normally do not do: he explains some of Van Til’s unique phrases. I do wish he would tell us what “concrete universal” meant for Van Til. I do not think anyone should criticize Van Til on the Trinity without at least reading that section in this book. It may not necessarily convince you, but you will at least have seen what Van Til does and does not mean.
(Disclaimer: I was given a complimentary copy by the publisher. I was under no obligation for a favorable review. My thoughts are entirely my own.)
Self-Contained Trinity
When Van Til uses words like “self-contained God,” he means that “God does not exist in correlation to the universe, with each side of the relation characterized by mutual change” (17). This is excellently put. In other words, he means that God is a se. One minor theme in the book is that creation does not participate in the substance of the Godhead. I agree. I would like to point out, however, that there is an ambiguity here that neither Tipton nor some Thomists seem to be aware of. What does “participation” actually mean? No one really defines it. Even when I finished reading through all of Plato, I had only a vague idea of what the word meant. This means there are two errors to avoid. One is to define participation in such a thick way that one becomes part of the substance of the Godhead. The other is to weaken it where 2 Peter 1:4 is all but meaningless.
Whatever participation means, Van Til posits, not a participation of the divine essence, but a finite replication of it to covenant man (19). This leads to another key point of Tipton’s: Rome’s view of the analogia entis entails theistic mutualism. Theistic mutualism says that God and creation are in a correlative relationship. We will return to that claim later.
Tipton’s chapter on the Triune Creator is a fine presentation of some of God’s attributes. He even suggests how these attributes, some of them anyway, safeguard our understanding of God and the universe. Immutability, for example, precludes any form of pantheism (25). On this point Tipton rightly rebuts John Frame. Frame, by contrast, “advocates for a species of theistic mutualism when he posits two modes of existence in God” (32 n.21; cf John Frame, Doctrine of God, 572).
The heart of this book, maybe surprisingly, is not Van Til on the Trinity, but Van Til on the image of God. Van Til simply expounds the standard Protestant view that man was created in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. Adam was already disposed for communion with God. Rome, by contrast, says something is needed to raise man above his created nature. This means that man’s position is already defective before the fall. Scripture, by contrast, says that any conflict in the being of man is a result of sin (44).
The Trinity
This is where problems arise, all of them self-inflicted for Van Til. I note up front that I do not believe Van Til was a heretic on the Trinity. I know what he was trying to say (see below). Rather, he simply chose the absolute worst way to express his views on the Trinity. Tipton says Van Til is misunderstood on this point. He alludes to Keith Mathison, R. C. Sproul, and John Gerstner. There are two problems with that. One, those men did not really attack Van Til on the Trinity. They attacked him on apologetics and his reading of Reformed sources. Two, it is not clear that they actually misunderstood what he was saying. When someone says the Trinity is both One Person and Three Persons, it is not the critic’s fault that he misunderstands what you are saying.
So what is Van Til saying? He begins well. Tipton notes that the “divine essence has no existence outside of each Trinitarian person” (63). Moreover, the unity in the Trinity is a numeric, not a generic unity. The persons of the Trinity are not members of a genus called “Godhead.” And in one area where I think Van Til did make a valuable advance in Trinitarian theology, he says that each person “exhausts” the divine essence. Whatever it means to be God, a divine person is it. Each person is “interior” to the other persons.
One Person and Three Persons
Following Bavinck, there is “absolute personality” in the Trinity (74; cf Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, 304). This absolute personality entails self-consciousness and self-determination. This absolute personality “opens itself up organically in a threefold existence.” God’s being is a “personal unity” (Tipton 76). It works like this:
Absolute personality → threefold, self-differentiated existence (77)
Now we can proceed to Van Til’s infamous claim. When he says “one person” and “three persons,” what he means is “absolute personal being/personality” and “three persons.” The word person shifts in meaning. At this point he is simply guilty of the fallacy of equivocation, not heresy. Tipton tries to rescue the phrasing, saying “the terms ‘person’ and ‘personality’ [are used interchangeably] to refer to God in his unity” (83). This does not sit right with me. If we front load divine unity with personality, then we muddle the distinction between nature and person. To this Van Til would reply that we cannot, ala Gordon Clark, make the divine essence a “mute” essence. I agree. The older fathers noted that the concept person can already do that. A person is a mode of subsistence. As a mode it modifies the divine essence. It is a mode of existence (tropos hyparxeos). The divine essence is never free-floating in the abstract.
The book ends with a good discussion of perichoresis and autotheos. We will spend some time on the latter term. Autotheos means the Son’s essence exists of himself and not with reference to the Father (112). The Father communicates the person, not the essence to the Son. In fact, “one subsistent person is not sustained in his essence by another Trinitarian person, since all persons subsist equally as the entire underived essence of God” (117).
Van Til ties all of this together with the idea of “mutual representation.” Tipton explains that “each person represents the whole of the divine essence (in the relations of subsistence) and the other Trinitarian persons (in the relations of coinherence” in the Godhead” (132). In fact, mutual exhaustion correlates with mutual representation (133).
Conclusion
Is Thomas Aquinas a theistic mutualist? He might be. Tipton, like Van Til, does not engage in actual analysis with primary sources. I counted two places, I think. One was on p.141, and there it dealt with the argument from First Cause). The bibliography lists no works by Aquinas. To be sure, he references learned works by Thomists on this topic, but we still do not know what Thomas actually said. There are problems with Thomas’s account in places, and I agree with Tipton on the donum. I admit that some Thomists do indeed speak of a sharing (or at least, seeing) the essence of God. If Thomas said something like that, we would need to see where and to see what he means by it. We see neither. Thomas probably held to the chain of being ontology, but did he mean that there is just one being and God has more of it than we do? That seems more of a criticism of Scotus. My own reading of Thomas, no doubt largely shaped by men like Norman Geisler and Mortimer Adler, suggests something like the following: God and man have being analogically, not univocally. We can say our concepts of being are univocal, but our judgments of it are analogical.
Following Norman Geisler, I would say that unless we have something like an analogy of being, we will not be able to escape Parmenides’s challenge. Parmenides said if we think being is univocal, then all being is one. If we say it is equivocal, then we would differ from other objects and God by not-being, or nothing. In which case, being is still one. The solution, then, is that we have our being analogically of God.
That’s not crucial to this review, though. What is crucial is that we are still not sure of what Thomas said. I can even grant Tipton’s claim for the sake of argument, but we would at least need to see it.
Notwithstanding the above criticism, the book is excellent. Tipton has done what Van Tillians normally do not do: he explains some of Van Til’s unique phrases. I do wish he would tell us what “concrete universal” meant for Van Til. I do not think anyone should criticize Van Til on the Trinity without at least reading that section in this book. It may not necessarily convince you, but you will at least have seen what Van Til does and does not mean.
(Disclaimer: I was given a complimentary copy by the publisher. I was under no obligation for a favorable review. My thoughts are entirely my own.)
April 21, 2023
Tipton provides a scholarly work on shedding light to the common misunderstandings of Van Til’s Trinitarian Theology. High recommend to anyone who wants to understand Van Til’s thought and how he is right in line with Reformed Trinitarian Theology. Dense and well researched. This is what Reformed Theology needs to recover today.
November 5, 2023
CVT ranks among my top 3 favorite theologians, and is the most important Christian thinker of the 20th century. Since publishing his contemplations on the Trinity, his works have been both venerated and vilified. In this work, Tipton exonerates CVT from heretical charges, and demonstrates how his Trinitarian framework is the most robustly Christian model available. Tipton demonstrates CVT's philosophical cohesion, historical context (John Calvin, Old Amsterdam, and Old Princeton), and biblical fidelity. A must-read for Christians and pastors who want a highly developed and refined Trinitarian theology. This is a short but difficult read, but well worth the effort.
January 24, 2024
This was an outstanding book, but it’s not for the faint of heart.
Tipton carefully traces the theological and philosophical influences on Van Til’s doctrine of the Trinity, attempting to show that Van Til was in line with historic, reformed orthodoxy. Tipton also contextualizes Van Til’s formulation by detailing the contemporary disputes he was engaged in over the doctrine of God with men like Gordon Clark.
The one section of the book that I think should have been expanded upon in much more depth (hence the star deduction) was Calvin’s doctrine of the Son as autotheos. Specifically, I wish Tipton would have more rigorously defended his claim that Calvin wasn’t radically departing from Nicene and post-Nicene orthodoxy when it comes to eternal generation and the communication of the essence. Rereading the early creeds, it sure sounds like they are affirming a communication of essence. Even if Tipton had been able to substantiate that Calvin, Van Til, Warfield, and Vos weren’t radically breaking from the past, Tipton didn’t make it overly clear what exactly they believe is being communicated from Father to Son. But, alas, I guess I should just to dig into Calvin myself.
Tipton carefully traces the theological and philosophical influences on Van Til’s doctrine of the Trinity, attempting to show that Van Til was in line with historic, reformed orthodoxy. Tipton also contextualizes Van Til’s formulation by detailing the contemporary disputes he was engaged in over the doctrine of God with men like Gordon Clark.
The one section of the book that I think should have been expanded upon in much more depth (hence the star deduction) was Calvin’s doctrine of the Son as autotheos. Specifically, I wish Tipton would have more rigorously defended his claim that Calvin wasn’t radically departing from Nicene and post-Nicene orthodoxy when it comes to eternal generation and the communication of the essence. Rereading the early creeds, it sure sounds like they are affirming a communication of essence. Even if Tipton had been able to substantiate that Calvin, Van Til, Warfield, and Vos weren’t radically breaking from the past, Tipton didn’t make it overly clear what exactly they believe is being communicated from Father to Son. But, alas, I guess I should just to dig into Calvin myself.
January 11, 2023
Lo mejor que he leído este mes. Realmente me ha encantado y lo recomiendo a mil.
December 31, 2022
Tipton seems to have two interrelated purposes in this book – first, to critique Scott Oliphint’s “covenantal attributes” doctrine by showing that it is a fundamental betrayal of Van Til’s doctrine of God (chapter 2), and second, to defend Van Til’s doctrine of the Trinity (the rest of the book). I was convinced by the first argument but not by the second. In my opinion, Van Til’s doctrine of the Trinity ought to be quietly and respectfully set aside as a departure from Nicene orthodoxy caused by his well-intentioned but ultimately misguided attempt to use the doctrine of the Trinity to solve the philosophical problem of the One and the Many. Even more disappointingly, Tipton agrees with Van Til’s opposition to the traditional formulation of the doctrine of eternal generation as involving the communication of the divine essence. Van Til was just following Warfield here, so I suppose Van Til can be somewhat excused, but with the current revival of traditional Nicene Trinitarianism, we now know that Warfield made a serious blunder at this point. I also believe that a strong case can be made that Warfield fundamentally misunderstood Calvin’s autotheos doctrine, a misunderstanding which Tipton unfortunately repeats in this book.
February 19, 2024
Since some prominent Van Tilian theologians (Oliphint and Frame) have been accused of theological mutualism and compromising orthodox positions of theology proper and the doctrine of the Trinity, Lane Tipton sets out to clarify Van Til's doctrine of God and the Trinity, delineating where he has built upon the theology of Old Princeton (Hodges, Vos), Old Amsterdam (Bavinck) and Calvin.
The book builds up in six chapters, and though being relatively short (163 pages), it is a dense read. In the first two chapters, Lane contends that it is Rome (Aquinas) and Barth that have committed theological mutualism in their articulation of the anologia entis and anologia temporis instead, either having man participating in God's being (Rome's donum superadditum) or in God's time (Barth). He then contrasts these positions with Van Til's, who, following Vos, Bavinck and others before him, delineates that a biblical view of God's relationship with His creatures can be guarded by the Creator-creature distinction (God's immutability and absoluteness), and understood through the concepts of the imago Dei and the covenant of works. Man, therefore, whether in creation, salvation, or eschatological consummation, does not participate in God's essence (being or time), but relates to God as God's image bearer and being in covenant relationship with Him. Chapter 3 postulates Van Til's doctrine of the Trinity by examining how he builds from Hodge and Bavinck, while chapter 4 describes the polemical context that he was writing in. Together these two chapters explain Van Til's preference to describe God as "Absolute Triune personality" and even what many theologians find problematic as "God is one person and three persons."
Chapters five and six are where the book really climaxes as Tipton postulates how Van Til refined classical Reformed Trinitarianism and how it fits into Van Til's overall conceptualisation of covenant theology, the imago Dei, and even his form of apologetics. Before that, Tipton presents how Calvin's concept of "Autotheos" was a paradigmatic breakthrough with earlier tradition, where Calvin posits that Christ is "God in Himself." This means that, contrary to how earlier theologians may speak of the Father as the fountain of divine essence and communicates the divine essence to the Son, Calvin actually disagrees and states (along with Vos, Warfield, and Bavinck who refined Calvin further) that the Father does not communicate the essence but communicates processional relations (i.e. eternal generation). This means that the Son (and each person of the Trinity) exhausts the divine essence by and in Himself (simplicity and aseity). Along with Calvin's Autotheos, Van Til combines this with the Perichoresis and intra-trinitarian relationship of coinherence (also developed by Turretin and Hodge). In the Perichoresis relationship, each person of the Trinity, while being Autotheos and exhausting the divine essence in and by Himself (Christ is God in Himself), also "mutually intertwine, interpenetrate, inter-permeate" in an intimate communion and eternal union. Hence Van Til can say that the Triune God is an Autothean Perichoresis, each person is exhausting the divine essence, while in complete communion with one another and therefore representing each other, not communicating the divine essence but communicating processional relations.
This theological grammar of Autotheos and Perichoresis forms for Van Til the "representation principle" where he delineates God's relationship with His creature in the imago Dei and covenant of works. Because each person of the Triune God is Autotheos, God can relate to His creation without change to Himself nor communicating the divine essnce. That God is immutable in His Creator-creature relationship is also analogical of His Authean Periocherosis relationship in the Godhead, each person each exhausting the divine essence while communicating relationship, therefore not communicating and nor exhibiting mutability of the divine essence, even while being in relation to each other Divine Persons and creation. At the same time, the Periocherosis within the Triune God is also analogical of God's relationship with His creation, both in the imago Dei (general revelation) and in the covenant of works (special revelation). Because man is the image-bearer of God, he is made to be in relationship and communion with God (just as God is also in Periocheriosis relationship among the Triune Persons), and all this in the context of God's aseity, immutability and sufficiency, analogical of God's Autotheos personality.
This is a really dense but outstanding and extremely enlightening read. There are areas in which I would hope that Tipton had fleshed out a bit more. For example, chapter 4 plainly explain some of the philosophical terms (personalism) that Van Til was adapting/combatting in his polemical context, but I am not quite sure how it was helpful to the overall book nor did I think that the polemical context was clearly explained. Besides that, it seems like that actual "Van Til's Trinitarian theology" only comes to its own in chapter 5 and 6, where the earlier chapters actually quoted a lot more from Bavinck, Vos, Calvin, Hodge and the rest instead, so the earlier chapters feel more to be an elucidation of classical Reformed Trinitarianism that Van Til inherited, whereas the portion where His doctrine of Trinity and theology proper fits into his overall covenant theology and apologetics is only slightly explained. All that said, a really remarkable summary of Van Til's unique contribution to classical Reformed Trinitarianism, focusing on what he inherited from the earlier theologians in the Reformed tradition, which is a must-read for all who are interested in Van Til's theological apologetic and the current classical theism/Trinitarianism debate.
The book builds up in six chapters, and though being relatively short (163 pages), it is a dense read. In the first two chapters, Lane contends that it is Rome (Aquinas) and Barth that have committed theological mutualism in their articulation of the anologia entis and anologia temporis instead, either having man participating in God's being (Rome's donum superadditum) or in God's time (Barth). He then contrasts these positions with Van Til's, who, following Vos, Bavinck and others before him, delineates that a biblical view of God's relationship with His creatures can be guarded by the Creator-creature distinction (God's immutability and absoluteness), and understood through the concepts of the imago Dei and the covenant of works. Man, therefore, whether in creation, salvation, or eschatological consummation, does not participate in God's essence (being or time), but relates to God as God's image bearer and being in covenant relationship with Him. Chapter 3 postulates Van Til's doctrine of the Trinity by examining how he builds from Hodge and Bavinck, while chapter 4 describes the polemical context that he was writing in. Together these two chapters explain Van Til's preference to describe God as "Absolute Triune personality" and even what many theologians find problematic as "God is one person and three persons."
Chapters five and six are where the book really climaxes as Tipton postulates how Van Til refined classical Reformed Trinitarianism and how it fits into Van Til's overall conceptualisation of covenant theology, the imago Dei, and even his form of apologetics. Before that, Tipton presents how Calvin's concept of "Autotheos" was a paradigmatic breakthrough with earlier tradition, where Calvin posits that Christ is "God in Himself." This means that, contrary to how earlier theologians may speak of the Father as the fountain of divine essence and communicates the divine essence to the Son, Calvin actually disagrees and states (along with Vos, Warfield, and Bavinck who refined Calvin further) that the Father does not communicate the essence but communicates processional relations (i.e. eternal generation). This means that the Son (and each person of the Trinity) exhausts the divine essence by and in Himself (simplicity and aseity). Along with Calvin's Autotheos, Van Til combines this with the Perichoresis and intra-trinitarian relationship of coinherence (also developed by Turretin and Hodge). In the Perichoresis relationship, each person of the Trinity, while being Autotheos and exhausting the divine essence in and by Himself (Christ is God in Himself), also "mutually intertwine, interpenetrate, inter-permeate" in an intimate communion and eternal union. Hence Van Til can say that the Triune God is an Autothean Perichoresis, each person is exhausting the divine essence, while in complete communion with one another and therefore representing each other, not communicating the divine essence but communicating processional relations.
This theological grammar of Autotheos and Perichoresis forms for Van Til the "representation principle" where he delineates God's relationship with His creature in the imago Dei and covenant of works. Because each person of the Triune God is Autotheos, God can relate to His creation without change to Himself nor communicating the divine essnce. That God is immutable in His Creator-creature relationship is also analogical of His Authean Periocherosis relationship in the Godhead, each person each exhausting the divine essence while communicating relationship, therefore not communicating and nor exhibiting mutability of the divine essence, even while being in relation to each other Divine Persons and creation. At the same time, the Periocherosis within the Triune God is also analogical of God's relationship with His creation, both in the imago Dei (general revelation) and in the covenant of works (special revelation). Because man is the image-bearer of God, he is made to be in relationship and communion with God (just as God is also in Periocheriosis relationship among the Triune Persons), and all this in the context of God's aseity, immutability and sufficiency, analogical of God's Autotheos personality.
This is a really dense but outstanding and extremely enlightening read. There are areas in which I would hope that Tipton had fleshed out a bit more. For example, chapter 4 plainly explain some of the philosophical terms (personalism) that Van Til was adapting/combatting in his polemical context, but I am not quite sure how it was helpful to the overall book nor did I think that the polemical context was clearly explained. Besides that, it seems like that actual "Van Til's Trinitarian theology" only comes to its own in chapter 5 and 6, where the earlier chapters actually quoted a lot more from Bavinck, Vos, Calvin, Hodge and the rest instead, so the earlier chapters feel more to be an elucidation of classical Reformed Trinitarianism that Van Til inherited, whereas the portion where His doctrine of Trinity and theology proper fits into his overall covenant theology and apologetics is only slightly explained. All that said, a really remarkable summary of Van Til's unique contribution to classical Reformed Trinitarianism, focusing on what he inherited from the earlier theologians in the Reformed tradition, which is a must-read for all who are interested in Van Til's theological apologetic and the current classical theism/Trinitarianism debate.
December 26, 2024
For some people the Trinity is one of the hardest topic to ever try to grasp one’s mind on; and here is this book that covers the Trinitarian theology of a theologian and apologist that many also have a hard time understanding, Cornelius Van Til. Yet the author Lane Tipton has done a great service with writing this book explaining the Trinitarian theology of Cornelius Van Til. Although this was not a big book, coming in at 177 pages it was something that I had to read slowly at no more the rate of ten pages per hour. Lane Tipton makes his case that Van Til was consistent and following the teachings of the Trinity from respected theologians such as the Old Princeton theologians, Calvin, Vos and Bavinck. Tipton also does a good job explaining what does Van Til mean and Van Til’s insight into the nuances of the Trinity and how the Trinitarian Persons relate to each other.
There are six chapters in the book. The first chapter is rather short, on the Self-Contained Trinity which is followed by a chapter on the immutable Triune Creator. These two chapters lay the foundation of a right Theology Proper for the chapters to follow. Chapter three is titled “Van Til’s Doctrine of the Trinity” and is an exposition of Van Til’s doctrinal statement of the Trinity from what is to me the hardest chapter of all of Van Til’s writing, chapter 17 in the Introduction to Systematic Theology that not surprisingly, is on the Trinity. Chapter four is rather brief compared to some of the other heavy chapters and it covers Van Til’s polemical context where there’s two forces that Van Til was responding to, the error of Personalism and Gordon Clark’s concept of God’s substance being impersonal and Trinitarian Persons are “bundles of thoughts.” Chapter five is on the doctrine of Autotheos and Perichoresis and chapter six is on the Perichoresis and the Representational principle. This final chapter talks about the Representational Principle having implications for other areas such as man as the image of God, the Covenants, the Transcendental reasoning by Presupposition and arguments against Plato, Barthianism and the really contradictory.
I found this book stimulating and it made me appreciate Van Til even more after finishing this work. I was also encouraged to see Van Til was conscious of being faithful to classical Trinitarian theology and faithful to what I think is the highest point of Trinitarian Theology with the advances made by older Reformed theologians whom I mentioned earlier. I did not expect it but was immensely delighted with chapter two presenting a good discussion and critique of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Donum Superadditum which would make God correlative with man; this Roman Catholic doctrine is Theistic Mutualism. Another things I appreciate about this book is the author’s contribution to academic scholarship by exploring Van Til’s representational principle which has not receive as much focus. Overall reading this book was immensely beneficial for sharpening my own mind to think more clearly theologically and also it equipped me better to explain some of the intricate details of historic Orthrodox doctrines on the Trinity. I recommend this book although I must caution this should not be one’s first book as an introduction to Van Til or the Trinity.
There are six chapters in the book. The first chapter is rather short, on the Self-Contained Trinity which is followed by a chapter on the immutable Triune Creator. These two chapters lay the foundation of a right Theology Proper for the chapters to follow. Chapter three is titled “Van Til’s Doctrine of the Trinity” and is an exposition of Van Til’s doctrinal statement of the Trinity from what is to me the hardest chapter of all of Van Til’s writing, chapter 17 in the Introduction to Systematic Theology that not surprisingly, is on the Trinity. Chapter four is rather brief compared to some of the other heavy chapters and it covers Van Til’s polemical context where there’s two forces that Van Til was responding to, the error of Personalism and Gordon Clark’s concept of God’s substance being impersonal and Trinitarian Persons are “bundles of thoughts.” Chapter five is on the doctrine of Autotheos and Perichoresis and chapter six is on the Perichoresis and the Representational principle. This final chapter talks about the Representational Principle having implications for other areas such as man as the image of God, the Covenants, the Transcendental reasoning by Presupposition and arguments against Plato, Barthianism and the really contradictory.
I found this book stimulating and it made me appreciate Van Til even more after finishing this work. I was also encouraged to see Van Til was conscious of being faithful to classical Trinitarian theology and faithful to what I think is the highest point of Trinitarian Theology with the advances made by older Reformed theologians whom I mentioned earlier. I did not expect it but was immensely delighted with chapter two presenting a good discussion and critique of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Donum Superadditum which would make God correlative with man; this Roman Catholic doctrine is Theistic Mutualism. Another things I appreciate about this book is the author’s contribution to academic scholarship by exploring Van Til’s representational principle which has not receive as much focus. Overall reading this book was immensely beneficial for sharpening my own mind to think more clearly theologically and also it equipped me better to explain some of the intricate details of historic Orthrodox doctrines on the Trinity. I recommend this book although I must caution this should not be one’s first book as an introduction to Van Til or the Trinity.
August 19, 2022
A masterful treatment of the theology of CVT. Tipton goes where no Van Til scholar has gone before, in providing a dense and yet cogent overview of Van Til’s trinitarian theology, including the context that made this theology possible. What Tipton does is place Van Til firmly within a Confessionally Reformed and Ecumenical tradition, in response to the theological mutualism of Aquinas, Barth, and some modern evangelicals (ex. Frame). This book is meant to be reckoned with, and I suspect it will provide fuel for good theological debate in the years to come.
December 21, 2023
Amazing read, although I struggled remembering a few of the covenantal and more-difficult Trinitarian terms necessary to understand Tipton’s wonderful exposition of Van Til.
September 29, 2024
A helpful book on trinitarian theology generally, Tipton highlights Van Til's particular approach to trinitarianism, arguing convincingly that he stands firmly in the Reformed stream of theology.
November 20, 2024
Not perfect agreement, but the last chapter was very good connecting dots.
February 12, 2025
That Deeper Protestant Conception just got Deeper.
December 11, 2024
Amazingly brilliant and insightful. Ties the insightful work of Van Til on the Trinity to his apologetic method and the image of God. This book truly is a masterpiece on Trinitarian theology.
The book is quite repetitive, but it still warrants careful thought and attention as it unpacks some of the richest truths of the Christian faith.
The book is quite repetitive, but it still warrants careful thought and attention as it unpacks some of the richest truths of the Christian faith.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews