Human autonomy “distorts the doctrine of Scripture itself by finding the ultimate exegetical tool in the subjective experience of human freedom” rather than acknowledging the authority of Scripture and the Holy Spirit to confront the souls of men.26 The real issue is whether sinful man will recognize and submit to God’s pre-interpretation as original or not.
Third, he often speaks of the nature of Scripture in the very terms he uses to describe the nature of God. Rather than seeking a general concept of revelation from which to reason back to God, “When we seek to determine the nature of the Christian-theistic concept of revelation we turn again to our concept of God.”27 With a view to special revelation, for instance, he relates the self-attesting nature of Scripture to “the self-sufficient and self-explanatory character of the Triune God.”28 When setting forth a distinctively Christian epistemology concerning the necessity of Scripture for illuminating both the object and subject of knowledge, he states that:
. . . the concepts of an absolute God, an absolute Bible, and absolute regeneration go together. The concept of absolute Scripture as a necessity for the illumination of the object of knowledge and of the subject of knowledge go together.29
Tied to the absolute nature of both God and the Bible is the absolute authority with which God speaks to us in and through Scripture. Van Til is quick to point out that dealing with an absolute authority necessarily involves circular or spiral reasoning on man’s part.30 Interestingly, this creates a situation which parallels discussion in contemporary hermeneutics concerning the hermeneutical spiral and the nature of reading and interpretation as a dialogue. In terms of the subject-object relationship (another key issue in hermeneutics), Van Til observes that since nothing has “existence and meaning independently of God, it is impossible to think of the object and subject standing in fruitful relation to one another that they actually do unless God is back of them both.”31 In another place, he addresses the issue of allowing men to interpret “facts” without God as the Achilles’ heel in apologetics, and argues to the contrary:
The real issue is whether God exists as self-contained,32 whether therefore the world runs according to his plan, and whether God has confronted those who would frustrate the realization of that plan with a self-contained interpretation of that plan. The fact that Christians . . . can never do more than restate the given self-contained interpretation of that plan approximately does not correlativize that plan itself or the interpretation of that plan . . . the self-contained circle of the ontological trinity is not broken up by the fact that there is an economical relation of this triune God with respect to man. No more is the self-contained character of Scripture broken up by the fact that there is an economy of transmission and acceptance of the word of God it contains.33
I will address particular emphases exhibited in this lengthy quote in later chapters, but at this point it is sufficient to highlight how Van Til speaks of God, Scripture, and God’s interpretation almost seamlessly, with a view to their unique shared quality of complete self-sufficiency, even as they come into contact with man and man’s interpretation. At the same time, he maintained a nuanced understanding of the unity and interplay between general and special revelation, both being revelation of the same God:
it is, according to Scripture itself, the same God who reveals himself in nature and in grace . . . revelation in nature and revelation in Scripture are mutually meaningless without one another and mutually fruitful when taken together.34
For Van Til, both general and special revelation exhibit corresponding qualities of: necessity, authority, sufficiency, and perspicuity.35 As far as special revelation is concerned, these attributes are so important that if any were missing, we would have none of them. “The whole matter centers on an absolutely true interpretation that came into a world full of false interpretation.”36 A genuinely Christian philosophy of history must not only recognize a distinction between the two (general and special), but also must not separate them. Indeed, history is not properly self-interpreting but, rather, needs special revelation (even more so, since the fall) in order to complement and interpret it. Again, he explicitly ties these corresponding attributes of general and special revelation to the nature of God who reveals both.37 God is self-interpreting and so is Scripture.38 If Scripture was dependent upon any other principle for its own interpretation, then it would not be ultimately authoritative. Likewise, if God were dependent on anyone or anything other than himself for his own self-explanation, he would cease to be the ultimate authority.
Fourth, Van Til often speaks of the necessity of Scripture after the fall,39 with a view to redemptive history. Consider the following statement:
no valid interpretation of any fact can be carried on except upon the basis of the authoritative thought communication to man of God’s final purposes in Scripture, as this Scripture sets forth in final form the redemptive work of Christ. Every fact must be interpreted Christologically.40
In particular, he presupposes the storyline of Scripture as the context for understanding its message as a whole, implying that this message functions as an interpretive lens through which fallen man must view interpretation in general. Interpretation must be exercised in light of the telos of the redemptive-historical message of Scripture.41 He urges that “Scripture must be interpreted in analogy with Scripture itself . . . all interpretation must be subordinated to Scripture as a whole.”42 In response to an essay by Richard Gaffin on the hermeneutical value of Vos’ The Pauline Eschatology, he says that after receiving revelation from God, man must submit all his reasoning “at every point to the teleology of Scripture.”43 Moreover, opposing the claim of Howard Roelofs and Jesse De Boer that the facts and redemptive-historical interpretation recorded in Scripture are inherently ambiguous pointers to the Christ, Van Til affirms that “Scripture gives an infallible interpretation of the events it records.”44 In the same context, he makes reference to the “interpretation found in the canon of the Old and New Testaments,” which men (like Roelofs) wrongly seek to stand above and judge by the criterion of their own reason.45 This speaks of a distinct canonical awareness in Van Til’s interpretive approach.
Fifth, he emphasized the exhaustively personal and covenantal environment in which man exists and interprets.46 Likewise, God’s revelation, both general and special, is exhaustively personal and covenantal.47 As we shall see later, this idea is rooted in his doctrine of the Trinity, in which the three persons are covenantally related.