“Cornelius Van Til: A Review Article” by William D. Dennison

John R. Muether’s, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman is a triumph as an ecclesiastical biography! Muether’s well-written and easy to read volume is not for the casual reader of biographies; rather, his achievement comes with a challenge as each page demands reflection and candid engagement. Our OP historian masterfully coordinates the narrative to entice the reader into being an engaging spectator of Van Til’s life journey. If you have a passion for the Reformed faith, then you will share in the concerns, anxieties, disappointments, frustrations, delights, joys, and triumphs of this churchman, apologist, seminary professor, husband, father, grandfather, confident uncle, and respectful sibling. You will be gripped by a penetrating look into difficult decisions: farmer or academician, Christian Reformed or Orthodox Presbyterian, Calvin Theological Seminary or Westminster Theological Seminary (a few occasions), the nature of his respect and critique for fellow Reformed comrades (e.g., Hodge, Warfield, Kuyper, Bavinck, Jellema, Daane, the DeBoers, Masselink, Clark, Carnell, Dooyeweerd, Schaeffer, Gerstner, and Clowney), evangelicals (e.g., Buswell, Henry, Graham, and Lewis), and the modernists (e.g., Barth, Marty, etc.). While using primary and secondary sources effectively, Muether’s exhaustive labors into letters of correspondence and personal interviews pull the reader into the inner dynamics of his subject. …