“Why Machen Hired Van Til” by D. G. Hart and John R. Muether

When J. Gresham Machen left Princeton in 1929 to start Westminster he insisted that Cornelius Van Til be the professor of apologetics at the new seminary. To students who would later study with Van Til Machen’s resolve was obvious; the Dutch Calvinist’s presuppositional apologetics was the backbone of a truly Reformed education. But to Machen’s former students and colleagues and Princeton his choice of Van Til was odd. Van Til’s apologetical method broke with Old Princeton’s evidentialism and appeared to undermine Machen’s claim that Westminster was perpetuating Princeton.

 

Orthodox Presbyterians have tried to fit together the pieces of the Machen-Van Til apologetics puzzle if only because of the importance of both men in shaping the identity of their denomination. For instance, the late Greg L. Bahnsen argued that Van Til’s presuppositionalism was fundamentally compatible with Machen’s reliance upon rational proofs and that the apparent tensions between Machen and Van Til stemmed from a misreading of both. In contrast, Charles G. Dennison has tried to show that Machen in his later years was learning from the new faculty at Westminster and so would have come around to Van Til’s position in due course.[2] Whatever the merits of these explanations, Machen’s choice of Van Til could not have been better given the context of the ecclesiastical and theological struggles of the 1920s and 1930s. That decision also continues to be instructive for Orthodox Presbyterians today who desire to preserve the unique and faithful witness of the church.