“Cornelius Van Til” by John M. Frame
Cornelius Van Til was born on May 3, 1895, in Grootegast, the Netherlands, the sixth son of Ite Van Til, a dairy farmer, and his wife Klazina. At the age of ten Cornelius moved with his family to Highland, Indiana. He picked up English quickly and spoke thereafter with very little trace of an accent.
The first of his family to receive a formal higher education, Van Til in 1914 entered Calvin Preparatory School in Grand Rapids, where he remained to study at Calvin College and at Calvin Theological Seminary. These institutions were all schools of Van Til’s denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, which was made up mostly of Dutch immigrants like himself. But after his first year of seminary, Van Til transferred to Princeton Theological Seminary. In those days, Princeton was an orthodox Calvinistic school, as was Calvin, and there was much mutual respect between the two; but Princeton’s roots were in American Presbyterianism rather than in the Dutch Reformed tradition represented by Calvin. While in seminary, Van Til was also admitted to Princeton University as a graduate student in philosophy, working on a doctorate as he completed his seminary course. In 1925 he completed a Th.M. at the seminary and married his childhood sweetheart, Rena Klooster; in 1927 he completed a Ph.D. at the university. …