Presuppositions - Van Til and Philosophical Hermeneutics

Vern Poythress (left) is a Professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary. I came across his review of Anthony Thiselton's Two Horizons. This is one of Thiselton's major works and one of his more widely read and accessible books where he analyzes the hermeneutics of Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and Heidegger in relationship to New Testament interpretation. It is an excellent work.

Here is an excerpt from Poythresses review (The bold type is mine):

Now, it seems to me, we need a further book that will integrate Cornelius Van Til’s work with the developments delineated by Thiselton. Why do I mention Van Til? Well, Van Til’s idea of presuppositions is in fact closely related to Heidegger’s “pre-understanding” and Wittgenstein’s “scaffolding of our thoughts,” “form of life,” “grammatical utterances.” Van Til focuses on only one area of pre-understanding: religious commitment. By contrast Heidegger, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein are interested in the entire spectrum of presuppositions, basic commitments, assumed verities, priorities of interest, attitudes, and tone of life. Both Van Til and the others stress how basic commitments, many times unconscious, pervasively influence interpretation. In one sense, then, Van Til represents only a special case of the problem. Superficially he seems to be aware of only one aspect of the interpretive horizon. But this one aspect is also the “one thing needful.” The crucial missing element in the hermeneutical spectrum that Thiselton covers is a stable, transcendent, personal, accessible source of authority. Without this, Heidegger, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and the lot are one step away from pure relativism. One can always point out that their own analysis of the entire hermeneutical circle is rooted in their historical and cultural horizon. They are, of course, well aware of this. But how can they know that they are right about anything? They must presuppose (arbitrarily?) the possibility of finding truth by autonomous reflection within their own horizon. And how can they claim to be descriptive and not evaluative? What they put forth as descriptive rather than evaluative contains an implicit negative evaluation of (say) positivism, Platonism, animism, Islamic fate, Christian science, out-of-body experiences, and the disappearance of stable world and ego in the writings of Philip Dick and Jorge Borges. They presuppose a cultural horizon that has excluded or made marginal such “forms of life.” On what grounds do they give these evaluations? By what authority? Within their own “forms of life,” there is no genuine transcendent reference point, hence no answer to these questions.

The above quotation is of interest to me because some of my first philosophical reflections several years back were on Cornelius Van Til's Presuppositional Christian Philosophy. From there my interests eventually gravitated to hermeneutical philosophy, and from there I quickly found myself reading the above book by Thiselton (Two Horizons) that Poythress has reviewed.

As Poythress indicates Van Til's idea of "presuppositions" does show similarities to Heidegger/Gadamer/Wittgenstein. In this sense, I always thought that Van Til was close to being something of a Christian forerunner to postmodern thought. But then Van Til makes a very rationalistic (small "r") move, what some refer to as Onto-Theology. For Van Til what we need to make sense of all of our experiences is a transcendent ground. That transcendent is God, and even more specifically the revelation of Scripture. We must ground the cause-and-effect in the character of God or else we have no assurance of its ongoing reliability. We take things like cause-and-effect or "truth" for granted - we are presupposing their reliability. For Van Til, only the Christian worldview has the presuppositions that can bring rationality or make any sense of any aspect of human experience. We presuppose a transcendent Creator that binds it all together, even if we do not acknowledge the transcendent Creator.