I was listening to a lecture by John Robbins on logic and he mentions a quote from Van Til that I actually found alarming.
Cornelius Van Til said:
We speak of God as a Person, yet we also speak of three Persons in the Godhead. As we say that each of the attributes of God is to be identified with the being of God, while yet we are justified in making a distinction between them, so we say that each Person of the Trinity is exhaustive of divinity itself, while yet there is a genuine distinction between the Persons. Unity and plurality are equally ultimate in the Godhead. The Persons in the Godhead are mutually exhaustive of one another.
This reeks of modalism. It seems to follow that if each Person is exhaustive of the other, then each must be the same as the other in composition and function, but different only in identity. That is to say, that the Father is the Son is the Holy Spirit, and can and does fulfill the functions of the others, but is different as identified separately from the Son and the Holy Spirit. This makes each Person of the Trinity merely an emanation or a mode of the Godhead and not a distinct and separate Person.
The above conclusion would lead to patripassionism, which teaches that God the Father became incarnate and suffered on the cross. If the Father is mutually exhaustive of the divinity of the Trinity, then his Personhood also exhausts that of the Son, meaning that he must have at least been present in and of the Son during the crucifixion, and not separate and distinct as reported in the Scripture ("Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?"). Moreover, it would have been nonsensical for Jesus to say this if he too was exhaustive of the divinity of the Trinity, for he would have had all the knowledge, purpose, and power of the Father in him. This formulation reverts the three-Person revelation of the Triune God into the monadic problem that you mention above.
In fact, as I have already expounded upon in Van Til's other writings, he denies that God's truth is ever accessible by man. You mention that the monadic problem leads to a God that exists apart from the world. This seems to be a consequence of Van Til's theology. Not only is there no real distinction (only in identity or name) between the works of the Persons of the Godhead, but he also denies that man can truly know God as he knows himself. One might then also wonder how he is able to so clumsily distort the doctrine of the Trinity.
He finishes,
Cornelius Van Til said:
God is a one-conscious being; and yet, he is also a tri-conscious being.
This is a very clear contradiction, as is the above.
Non-Christians often make the objection that the Trinity is contradictory. But this is wholly invalid in the orthodox formulation that God is one being and three Persons. Since we speak of him being one in
being, but three in
Persons, there is no contradiction, as we are speaking in different senses. But Van Til discards this orthodox Christian view, probably because he no longer assigns difficulty to biblical contradictionshe accepts them as valid. The result is that he converts the doctrine of the Trinity into an illogical doctrine. More importantly, this departure brings with it overtures of centuries old heresies, which the church had endeavored to refute since the end of the apostolic era.
Van Til is emphatic that God is one Person, numerically one, a single individual Person, but also three Persons that are mutually exhaustive of each other, thus showing God to be truly One. This is nothing but Unitarian doctrine disguised as orthodox understanding of the tri-Person distinction.
Soli Deo Gloria
Jon
