Predication and the Necessity of the Christian Worldview

Cornelius Van Til, a pioneering Reformed apologist, famously argued that every act of predication – every meaningful statement that attributes a property to a subject – presupposes the God of Scripture . In Van Til’s presuppositional apologetic, the very possibility of saying anything true or meaningful about reality hinges on the ontological and epistemological framework of Christian theism. This article will explore Van Til’s teaching on human predication in depth, examining why predication requires the Christian worldview, how non-Christian theories of predication fail to account for intelligibility, and how Van Til’s insights compare with classical theories from Aristotle to Frege and Russell. We will also engage contemporary philosophy of language and analytic theology as they relate to Van Til’s doctrine of analogy and revelational epistemology, and offer biblical exegesis that reinforces Van Til’s claim that only by presupposing God can language and logic be meaningful. Throughout, the superiority of Van Til’s presuppositional approach to predication will be demonstrated in both philosophical rigor and biblical consistency.

Predication, Universals, and the Christian Worldview

At its most basic, predication is the act of asserting something about a subject – for example, saying “the peach is sweet” predicates sweetness of a peach . Such simple sentences belie deep philosophical questions: How can an individual thing (this particular peach) possess a universal quality (sweetness) that also applies to other peaches? What justifies our use of general categories (like “peachness” or “sweet”) across many particular instances ? These questions touch on the classic “problem of universals” – the relation of the one (universal concepts) and the many (particular things). Van Til contended that the Christian worldview alone provides the necessary ontological and epistemological foundation to solve this problem and make predication intelligible . In Christian theism, God is the ultimate source of unity and diversity, and human knowledge reflects His ordering of reality. Thus, every meaningful predicative statement implicitly rests on the truth of God’s creation and revelation.

Ontologically, Christian theism offers a unique solution to the one-and-many dilemma through the doctrine of God. Van Til taught that the ontological Trinity – one God in three persons – is the true “concrete universal” that reconciles unity and diversity . In God’s being, unity (oneness of essence) and plurality (three Persons) are equally ultimate and harmonious, providing the metaphysical paradigm for how universals and particulars coherently relate . “It is only in the Christian doctrine of the triune God… that we really have a concrete universal,” Van Til wrote; “In God’s being there are no particulars not related to the universal and nothing universal that is not fully expressed in the particulars.” In other words, because ultimate reality (God) is not a featureless unity nor a chaotic plurality, creation made by this God can have real universals and particulars in meaningful relation. Christian ontology denies the existence of “brute facts” – uninterpreted particulars with no order – by affirming that all facts are created and interpreted by God. As Van Til’s disciple Greg Bahnsen explained, “for the Christian, universals exist in a concrete fashion within the mind of the Creator Himself. God ‘thinks universally’ and such thinking is found in man ‘analogically.’ The Christian’s presuppositions about God provide a rationale or basis for the intelligibility of conceptual reasoning (with generalizations, categories, laws, etc.).” . In God’s plan, the categories by which we classify and predicate are not arbitrary human inventions but reflections of the rational order He built into creation.

Epistemologically, the Christian worldview asserts that human beings, made in the image of God, are endowed with the capacity to know the world analytically because our minds are fashioned to “think God’s thoughts after Him” . Van Til emphasized that human knowledge is revelational at its core: we can predicate truthfully only because God has first defined and revealed the natures of things. Adam’s naming of the animals (Gen. 2:19–20) is an illustrative paradigm – man classifies reality under God’s authority, not as an autonomous act of constructing meaning from scratch. Because God is the author of every fact and the interpreter of every fact, when we formulate a true predication (e.g. “the peach is sweet”), we are aligning with God’s prior interpretation of that peach’s properties. This is why Van Til insisted that all human knowledge is “analogical” to God’s knowledge: we know in creaturely fashion the same system of truth that God knows exhaustively. Our concepts and universals are finite replications (on a human level) of the infinite concepts in God’s mind . For example, we possess the concept of “sweetness” or “peachness” as a general idea, but this universal category exists originally and preeminently in God’s intellect, as part of the blueprint by which He governs creation. Thus, when we predicate “sweet” of a peach, we rely (usually unwittingly) on a transcendental context in which God has established both the universal quality and the particular instance and the coherent relationship between them. In Van Til’s words, “the whole problem of knowledge has constantly been that of bringing the one and the many together… the question of the relation of unity to diversity receives a definite answer from the doctrine of the… God [of Scripture].” Predication requires that reality has an orderly, intelligible structure and that our minds can genuinely grasp it – conditions which, according to Van Til, only obtain if Christian theism is true. Without the Christian’s God, we could not make any intelligible predication at all .

Van Til’s Critique of Non-Christian Theories of Predication

Van Til was sharply critical of non-Christian (secular or non-theistic) theories of predication, arguing that they inevitably fail to account for the meaningful intelligibility of experience. In his analysis, every non-Christian worldview is caught in an inescapable dilemma: it lapses into “rationalism and irrationalism” at the same time . By “rationalism,” Van Til meant an attempted emphasis on unity, law, or abstract universality apart from God; by “irrationalism,” he meant an emphasis on sheer particularity, chance, or chaotic diversity apart from God . Unbelieving thought, he observed, oscillates between these two poles in a way that “destroys all basis for intelligible predication.”

• Rationalistic Predication (Unity without the True God): Some philosophies try to ground predication in universal principles or innate structures that supposedly need no reference to God. Classical rationalism, for instance, might assume that logic, mathematics, or universal ideals are self-sufficient realities. An example is Plato’s theory of Forms, where universals like “sweetness” or “peachness” exist in a transcendent realm of Ideas. While this grants a kind of unity to predication (each peach is sweet by partaking in the Form of Sweetness), it creates an unbridgeable gulf between universals and the concrete world. Plato’s rationalism thus begets an irrationalism – the empirical world becomes a shadowy, less real realm of “mere opinion” disconnected from true Being . As Frame summarizes Van Til’s critique, “The enduring problem of Plato’s philosophy is the difficulty of achieving any intelligible relationship between the two worlds.” Predication falters because the Forms (universals) are so abstracted that particulars lose their significance. Other rationalist tendencies appear in thinkers like Parmenides (who posited a static One, rendering change illusory) or Spinoza (who made everything a facet of one Substance, dissolving individual distinctions). In modern times, Immanuel Kant’s epistemology sought a universal framework in the a priori categories of the human mind, which impose unity (causality, substance, etc.) on the flux of experience. But Kant’s system, as Van Til noted, split reality into the orderly phenomenal realm (structured by our mind) versus the noumenal realm of “things-in-themselves” which is ultimately unknowable chaos . Kant thus exemplifies the rationalist/irrationalist dialectic: he rationalizes experience by universal categories, yet admits an underlying reality of which we can know nothing – effectively an appeal to unknowable “chance” at the foundation of knowledge. Van Til’s verdict is that any system that denies the Christian God ends up either absolutizing abstract rational principles to the point of losing the diversity of creation, or absolutizing randomness and particularity to the point of losing all unity. In both cases, meaningful predication collapses. Without a personal Creator who unifies the world, a secular philosopher’s universals are ultimately baseless and their connection to particulars is mysterious or arbitrary.

• Irrationalistic Predication (Diversity without the True God): On the other hand, empiricist and materialist worldviews err in the opposite direction, stressing particular facts and sensory experience while denying any intrinsic universals. A strict materialist or nominalist holds that only concrete, physical things exist – no immaterial categories or Forms. But if “peachness” is nothing more than a convenient name we give to similar fruits, and there is no real universal, then what does the predicate “is sweet” truly mean for different peaches? On such a view, each object is utterly particular; our general terms are arbitrary labels that do not correspond to any enduring reality. This radical nominalism or particularism renders science and language unintelligible: we could never generalize from one instance to another, nor could we be sure that any attribute we name (sweet, red, ripe, etc.) has the same meaning next time. Van Til often said that “there are no brute facts” – meaning that facts do not exist in isolation, but within God’s ordered system . The atheist or materialist who insists on “brute” particular facts without God must either smuggle in some principle of order (thus borrowing from the Christian worldview) or else accept that his world is ultimately chaotic and unknowable. Indeed, if one denies all universals or laws, predication becomes impossible – one could not even say that two actions or objects are of the same kind, since no common kind would truly exist. Van Til notes that unbelief “believes that the apparent order in the universe is ultimately based on disorder, upon chance” . This amounts to intellectual suicide, for if at the bottom of reality there is only chance, our words and concepts have no stable reference. Yet no one can live or reason consistently within pure irrationalism. Even the materialist must use universal concepts (like “matter” or “energy” or “peach”) and logical laws, though his worldview gives him no right to do so. Hence, the non-Christian oscillates: when pressed on the chaos of pure chance, he swings back to assume some rational structure in the universe (e.g. laws of nature, logical absolutes), but without God this structure has no foundation, so it collapses into chance again. Van Til described the unbeliever’s thought as a “dialectic of rationalism and irrationalism” that cannot provide a consistent basis for intelligible predication . The tragic irony is that unbelievers rely on the very God they reject: every time they assert a meaningful predication or use logic, they are borrowing capital from the Christian worldview.

In Van Til’s transcendental critique, then, non-Christian philosophies fail to answer how predication is possible. If the universe is fundamentally impersonal (whether a cold rational absolute or a swirl of atoms), there is no reason that mind, meaning, and reference should arise. Van Til would ask: How can universal logical laws exist in a materialistic universe? How can permanent categories or values exist in a relativistic, evolutionary flux? How can the human mind – itself a collection of particles – hold abstract concepts that are valid everywhere and always? The non-Christian has no sufficient answer. The unity and coherence that predication requires are unjustified miracles in his system. By contrast, Christian theism comfortably answers: laws of logic, moral absolutes, and universal concepts are reflections of God’s eternal character and thought, and the uniformity of nature flows from God’s providential governance . Thus Van Til concluded that without the presupposition of the Christian God, no fact can be truly known or coherently spoken of. He challenged skeptics on this point, often phrased as the “impossibility of the contrary”: if the God of the Bible did not exist, we could not prove or explain anything at all . In formal debate, Bahnsen summarized this VanTillian argument: “The atheist world view cannot allow for laws of logic, the uniformity of nature, the ability for the mind to understand the world, and moral absolutes. In that sense the atheist world view cannot account for our debate tonight.” . In short, intelligible predication is a gift of the Christian cosmos – those who deny the Giver end up in epistemological darkness, however much they insist they “see.”

Classical Theories of Predication in Contrast

To further illustrate Van Til’s insight, it is helpful to compare his approach with several classical theories of predication and the problem of universals, from Aristotle through modern analytic philosophers. These thinkers recognized the challenge of predication and proposed various solutions – yet, as we shall see, their theories either echo in part the truths that Christian theism fully grounds or they expose the tensions Van Til highlighted when God is omitted.

An 18th-century depiction of the Porphyrian Tree, a classical diagram illustrating Aristotle’s hierarchy of categories (substance, genus, species, individual). Aristotle’s scheme organized particulars under universals in a logical taxonomy. Van Til agreed with the need for such order in predication but argued that only the Christian worldview, with its Creator who ordains the hierarchy of being, can ultimately justify why any Porphyrian tree of classification should correspond to reality.

Aristotle – the father of classical logic – dealt extensively with predication in his Categories and Metaphysics. Aristotle rejected Plato’s separate realm of Forms, insisting that universals (form) exist within particular substances. In Aristotle’s view, to predicate “S is P” (e.g. “Socrates is wise”) is to affirm that the subject S (an individual substance) instantiates the predicate P (a universal quality) in some category (quantity, quality, relation, etc.). He introduced the idea of a hierarchy of genera and species – as visualized in Porphyry’s Tree – where each level provided a unifying concept for the particulars under it . This was a more concrete approach than Plato’s: universals have no free-floating existence; they are realized in things. However, from Van Til’s perspective, Aristotle’s system, while more “down-to-earth,” still lacked a sufficient ontological foundation. Aristotle posited an eternal cosmos and an Unmoved Mover, but this Mover was an impersonal thinking thought that did not create the world or the categories. Therefore, the structure of reality that Aristotle’s predication scheme relies on is ultimately a given, a brute fact of the universe. We might ask: why should there be a hierarchy of being at all? Why do substances and attributes cooperate so harmoniously to allow knowledge? Aristotle had no answer beyond “that’s how it is.” Medieval Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas saw this gap and inserted God into the picture: Augustine famously held that universals are the ideas in the mind of God, and Aquinas taught that the forms exist in the intellect of God and in things (God’s creative plan impresses forms into creatures). In doing so, they made Aristotle’s world depend on the Christian God’s ontology. Van Til stood squarely in this line when he argued that Aristotle’s logic and categories only make sense if the biblical God is real. The law of non-contradiction, which Aristotle enshrined as the supreme principle of thought, is not merely a human convention – it reflects the consistent, non-self-contradictory nature of God. Likewise, the existence of fixed categories and telos in nature (so crucial for Aristotelian predication) presupposes that a rational Creator endowed things with natures and purposes. Aristotle, not having special revelation, could glimpse the what of predication (that it requires structure and telos) but not the why. Van Til would say Aristotle’s system borrows capital from the Christian view: it borrows the idea of an ordered reality with knowable forms, but without crediting the personal Creator who alone can furnish that order. The result is that pure Aristotelianism cannot ultimately defend the reality of universals or the reliability of induction – a point later highlighted by skeptics like David Hume (who attacked the notion of causation and universals in an empiricist framework). Indeed, if form and matter just happen to coexist, one could always doubt whether our classifications truly capture necessity or are just customary. In summary, classical realism (Aristotle’s included) has an intuition of the need for unity-in-diversity (hence the Porphyrian tree), but apart from Scripture’s God it leaves an explanatory void at the very top of the tree – Ens (being) itself is accounted for by no higher principle, whereas in Christianity Ens is derivative of I AM (the self-existent Creator).

Modern philosophy saw renewed struggles with predication, especially during and after the Enlightenment. Early modern empiricists like John Locke and David Hume leaned toward nominalism, seeing universals as mere names and emphasizing only observed particulars. The chaos of this approach led Immanuel Kant to attempt a rescue: he agreed with Hume that we have no access to metaphysical Forms “out there,” but he proposed that the human mind supplies the necessary universals. Kant’s categories of understanding (such as unity, causality, substance) are a priori concepts that we impose on the sensory manifold to make experience intelligible. In effect, Kant internalized predication’s framework – the structure needed for predication comes from the subject (the knowing mind) rather than an independent realm of Forms or a Creator. While this allowed Kant to affirm the universal and necessary character of scientific predications (we must experience in terms of causation, for example, so “the stone broke the window” has objective meaning under the causality category), it did so at the tremendous price of relativizing knowledge to the human standpoint and severing it from things-in-themselves. Kant admitted that the real nature of things (noumena) might be entirely different – we can never know. Van Til appreciated Kant’s transcendental strategy (asking what makes experience possible) but fiercely criticized Kant’s autonomous starting point. By making the finite human mind the legislator of nature’s order, Kant had essentially asserted human autonomy and left God out. The result was, from Van Til’s view, a profoundly incoherent scenario: the human mind makes nature conform to its concepts (unity triumphs in the phenomena), yet the mind itself is a tiny part of a potentially chaotic unknowable reality (diversity/irrationalism lurks in the noumena) . Kant again exemplifies why non-Christian predication fails – he produced a sophisticated framework for why predication and science work, only to confess that it doesn’t actually tell us what is ultimately true, since ultimate reality is inaccessible. The Christian, however, does not face a hidden noumenal realm; God has revealed the true nature of reality sufficient for our needs. We can have objective knowledge because both our minds and the world are creations of the same God, and He designed our mind to correspond to the world (an assurance Kant could not derive from his system). In a sense, Van Til would say Kant “subjectified” the role of God’s intellect (transferring the source of order to human reason) but thereby fell into a new problem – a finite “god” (man) cannot guarantee the truth of his predications about an infinite unknown.

Frege and Russell, key figures in analytic philosophy, approached predication through the lens of symbolic logic. Gottlob Frege in the late 19th century developed a formal system in which predication is the application of a concept (conceived as a function mapping objects to truth-values) to an object. For example, “_is sweet” would be a concept that yields True when an object with sweetness is input. This logical calculus allowed precise analysis of predication and avoided some ambiguities of natural language. However, Frege’s approach assumed a realm of abstract entities: concepts, numbers, propositions – a kind of Platonic “third realm” that is non-empirical. In fact, Frege treated the laws of logic as eternally true, immaterial realities that we grasp by reason. This is strikingly consonant with a theistic view (seeing logic as reflecting an eternal rationality), yet Frege did not ground these laws in God. When asked how abstract objects exist or how we access them, secular philosophy struggles: are concepts brain-independent things? If so, where and what is their mode of being? Frege’s program ran into the infamous Russell’s Paradox (when Bertrand Russell discovered a contradiction in naive set theory underlying Frege’s system), indicating something was amiss in treating universals as straightforward objects. Russell himself moved towards a type-theory and a form of logical atomism. Bertrand Russell tried to reduce predication and all of mathematics to logic in Principia Mathematica. He held an empiricist ontology of discrete sense-data and particulars, but an almost Platonic view of logic and universals (at least in his early work). Russell acknowledged that we need universals: “Qualities” like redness or sweetness, he argued, are real features that multiple things can share, and relations like “before” or “larger than” are objective. Yet as a realist without God, Russell could only posit that universals exist “out there” in some abstract sense, alongside the physical world. This dualism was never resolved in his philosophy – the link between the world of universals (truth, logic, mathematics) and the world of physical facts remained mysterious. By mid-20th century, philosophers like W.V.O. Quine even questioned the distinction between analytic (logical) truths and synthetic (factual) truths, undermining the confidence that our logical predicates are timelessly certain. Van Til would say that Frege and Russell demonstrated the need for stable, universal meanings and logical laws to make language and science possible – but only the Christian worldview can provide a personally guaranteed correlation between those logical entities and the world. In Christian terms, the laws of logic and arithmetic are reflections of God’s consistent character and thought, and the physical world behaves in accordance with them because God ordained it so. Secular logicians like Frege were, in effect, describing the logic of the Logos (John 1:1) without knowing its source. It is telling that some contemporary Christian analytic philosophers have explicitly argued that the laws of logic are best understood as the thoughts of God – a thesis that Van Til would heartily endorse. For example, one analysis states that the ontological Trinity is “the ‘concrete universal’ upon which all rational thinking depends” , and that without the Christian God, logical absolutes have no home. The upshot is that classical and analytic theories of predication highlight the necessary elements (universals, laws, logical relations), but they leave a fatal explanatory gap unless these elements are rooted in the Christian doctrines of God and creation. Van Til’s presuppositionalism boldly claims to fill that gap: the coherence that Aristotle, Kant, Frege, and Russell strained to secure on autonomous grounds is freely given if we “presuppose the God who speaks in Scripture” .

In sum, Van Til’s teaching is not opposed to the formal insights of classical logic or modern analysis; rather, he transcends them by situating those insights in a biblical philosophy. He agreed that predication involves a unity (concept) applied to a diversity (instances) and that logic is indispensable – but he asserted that only Christianity can explain why this works. Thus, while Aristotle and Frege can help describe how we predicate, Van Til answers why predication is possible at all. The biblical consistency of Van Til’s view emerges when we realize that Scripture implicitly taught these principles long before philosophers named them: the Bible presents a God who is absolute unity and diversity (One God, Three Persons), who created a world of distinct things according to their kinds (Gen. 1) yet all under one sovereign plan, and who made man in His image with the capacity for language and rational classification of reality (Gen. 2:19-20). Van Til’s contribution was to make explicit that predication presupposes creation – a thesis that stands in stark contrast to the classical attempts to have predication without a Creator.

Analogy, Language, and Revelational Epistemology in Van Til’s Thought

A hallmark of Van Til’s epistemology is his doctrine of analogy: the idea that human knowledge is a finite, derivative copy of divine knowledge. Van Til insisted that “all human knowledge is analogical of God’s knowledge; there is no univocal point at which human understanding and divine understanding coincide on the same level” . This doctrine was rooted in the Creator-creature distinction – God’s thoughts are qualitatively higher than ours (Isa. 55:9), yet we truly know when our thoughts reflect His as a creaturely approximation. Van Til’s view here built upon a long tradition of speaking about analogy in theology (notably in Aquinas), but he gave it a distinctly presuppositional twist. Whereas Aquinas spoke of analogical predication mainly in the context of how we speak about God’s attributes (e.g. calling God “good” analogically, not in exactly the same sense as a human is “good”), Van Til broadened analogy to all human predication: every fact we know, we know in subordination to God’s prior knowledge of that fact. As one commentator puts it, “Van Til’s doctrine of analogy concerns the relationship between different sorts of minds – that of God and man – and not merely between concepts and creatures” . We do not create or fully comprehend the universals we use; we think God’s established truths after Him.

This view of knowledge has intriguing connections with developments in the philosophy of language and analytic theology. In the 20th century, philosophers of language like Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasized the role of forms of life and communal language-games in giving words meaning. In a way, Van Til anticipated the notion that meaning is context-dependent: for Van Til, the ultimate “form of life” or context required for meaning is the context of God’s revealed world-order. Language is not a free-floating system; it functions because reality and minds are pre-conditioned by God for communication. Just as Wittgenstein said a private language is impossible because language is inherently rule-governed and social, Van Til argued that a “private” autonomous interpretation of the world is impossible – we must operate within the rules and structures God has ordained. In other words, intelligible language presupposes a certain framework. Van Til’s transcendental claim is that the only framework that yields universal intelligibility is the Christian one. Unbelievers, of course, do use language and logic, but Van Til would say they are unconscious participants in the God-ordained language-game of reality, since even the unbeliever is living in God’s world and made in God’s image (though he suppresses that truth, Romans 1:18-20). Thus, when atheists or non-Christians manage to communicate and discover truth, it is because they are on “borrowed territory.” They speak meaningful sentences only by virtue of divine capital – a thesis increasingly explored by presuppositionalists using the tools of analytic philosophy. For instance, some analytic theologians have reformulated Van Til’s argument as a form of transcendental argument for God’s existence (TAG), claiming that the preconditions of meaningful discourse (logical laws, reliability of sense, objective morality, etc.) necessitate the Christian God. Bahnsen, in Van Til’s tradition, explicitly made this case: “Van Til proposed that the Christian worldview ‘alone’ provides an outlook wherein human experience in all of its aspects has meaning. The alternative views reduce to absurdity because they render reason, science, ethics, etc., nonsensical or incoherent.” . This is essentially a philosophical proof that language and predication cannot even get off the ground without the biblical God.

Analytic theology has also shown interest in Van Til’s revelational epistemology – the priority of God’s revelation in all knowledge. This approach resonates with Reformed epistemologists like Alvin Plantinga, who argued that belief in God is “properly basic” and that naturalism is self-defeating to rationality. Van Til’s version is more all-encompassing: not just belief in God, but every belief about anything presupposes God’s revelation. In practice, this means that Van Til denied the possibility of neutral human reasoning. He claimed that no fact can be known truly unless seen in relation to God, and correspondingly, any theory of predication that refuses to presuppose God will ultimately collapse into “utter darkness” (to use his phrase). Modern discussions in theology about the noetic effects of sin (how sin affects reasoning) and the necessity of regeneration for a full grasp of truth echo Van Til’s insistence that the unregenerate mind is at odds with the very foundation of logic and meaning. Yet Van Til also acknowledged common grace – God’s merciful restraint and gifting – which allows unbelievers to function and discover truth in spite of their rebellious presuppositions. Common grace explains how communication between believers and unbelievers is possible at all (since in principle they operate on contradictory ultimate commitments). It is God’s patience that the unbeliever’s mind can latch onto truth while denying the Source of truth.

The doctrine of analogy also intersects contemporary analytic discussions on religious language. Some have critiqued Van Til’s analogical knowledge as if it makes human language about God equivocal or unintelligible – a debate famously played out in the Clark–Van Til controversy. Philosopher Gordon Clark accused Van Til of undermining confidence that we know the same truth as God knows, if indeed none of our concepts are univocal with His. Van Til responded that our knowledge is genuine, just not comprehensive or self-authorizing – an analogy is not a falsehood, it is a scaled-down likeness. John Frame clarifies Van Til’s point: “Man’s knowledge is true because, not in spite of, the fact that it is analogical.” . Far from being a bug, analogical reasoning is a feature of creaturehood – it secures that God remains God (the ultimate knower) and we remain dependent yet accurate knowers by grace. In analytic theology, discussions of models and analogies for God (e.g. how human fatherhood language relates to God as Father) take seriously that we often use analogical predicates. Van Til pushes us to recognize that this analogical relationship extends to all predication due to the Creator-creature gap. Modern analytical theologians concerned with the consistency of Christian doctrines (like the Trinity or Incarnation, which can appear logically paradoxical) have found in Van Til an approach that both affirms the law of non-contradiction and accepts mystery by distinguishing God’s knowledge from ours. For example, when dealing with paradoxes, Van Til would appeal to “two-level” truth: not that something is false for us and true for God (that would be contradiction), but that we might not be able to reconcile truths (like divine sovereignty and human responsibility) at our analytical level, though they are perfectly reconciled in God’s system. This kind of approach has been fruitfully compared to models in analytic philosophy such as finite analogy vs infinite reality, showing that Van Til was grappling with what later thinkers came to call epistemic humility and model-theoretic understanding of theology.

In summary, Van Til’s doctrine of analogy and revelational epistemology places him in conversation with many currents of modern thought: he anticipates the notion of worldview-shaped meaning (found in postmodern and linguistic philosophy), he parallels the Reformed epistemologists in seeing the necessity of presupposing God, and he contributes to theology’s longstanding effort to express how our language relates to God’s transcendent reality. His fundamental contribution is stressing revelation as the ultimate given in human knowledge. We do not start from a neutral point and reason up to God; rather, we start from God (acknowledged or not) and reason on the basis of His revelation. This has profound implications for predication: it means that when a Christian and non-Christian both say “this peach is sweet,” they may have superficially uttered the same predication, but on the worldview level they mean radically different things. The Christian’s predication is coherent within a framework where “sweetness” is a real quality created by God, and the human mind can genuinely recognize it as part of an ordered reality. The non-Christian’s predication, if taken to be consistent with his professed worldview (say, materialism), has no reason why the statement should hold true beyond subjective habit – thus he speaks better than his theory can justify. Van Til invites us to press this point in apologetic encounters: to gently show the unbeliever that even in making a simple predication, he is “not far from the Kingdom of God,” since he must tacitly assume meaning and order that only come from the King.

Biblical Foundations for Predication and Intelligibility

Underneath Van Til’s philosophical argumentation lies a robust biblical theology of knowledge. Van Til was adamant that his approach was simply the outworking of biblical principles: “The Bible as God’s inspired, authoritative Word is the presupposition of the validity of human reasoning.” Therefore, any discussion of predication’s foundation would be incomplete without demonstrating the Scriptural basis for the claim that meaningful use of language and logic requires presupposing God. Indeed, the Bible repeatedly affirms themes consonant with Van Til’s teaching:

• “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10). These verses encapsulate the epistemological starting point that Van Til defends. Reverence for God – acknowledging Him as Creator and Lord – is the fundamental precondition for true knowledge. In context, Proverbs contrasts the wise, who build on the foundation of fearing God, with fools who despise wisdom. The fool, in biblical terms, is not intellectually deficient per se, but morally and spiritually at odds with the source of truth – hence he cannot truly know as he ought. Van Til’s claim that predication assumes the Christian worldview echoes this: unless one begins with a humble submission to the Lord (fear of God), one’s attempts at knowledge are ultimately baseless. The biblical “fool” may utter many true statements by God’s common grace, but his refusal to begin with God leads to an incoherent philosophical stance (cf. Psalm 14:1, “the fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’”). Van Til often cited such texts to show that neutrality in knowledge is a myth – either Christ is honored as Lord even in our reasoning, or else our reasoning is built on sand (Matt. 7:24–27). Application to predication: To say “X is Y” with genuine insight, one must at least implicitly be operating within the framework where the source of all truth and coherence (the Lord) is honored. This aligns with Van Til’s assertion that non-Christian predication, when consistent, would end in meaninglessness – because it lacks the “fear of the Lord” foundation of knowledge.

• Christ the Logos: “In the beginning was the Word (Logos)… All things were made through Him” (John 1:1–3). The Gospel of John identifies Jesus Christ as the eternal Logos, a term meaning Word, Reason, Logic. By calling the Son of God the Logos, Scripture is not merely borrowing a philosophical term; it is declaring that all rationality and communication in creation are rooted in Him. Through the Logos all things were made, so the entire universe inherently has a logical, meaningful structure given by Christ. This undergirds Van Til’s teaching that predication requires the Christian ontological framework: the world was made by the Word of God (compare Genesis 1, “And God said… and it was so”), indicating that everything that exists is a word from God, as it were – intelligible and interpretable. Furthermore, John 1:4 says “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” This light can be understood as intellectual and moral illumination. Apart from the Logos, human minds are in darkness (John 1:5). Van Til often appealed to such Johannine language, asserting that unbelievers, by rejecting Christ, are like those who “loved darkness rather than light” (John 3:19), and thus they lack the foundation of light needed to see truth. Colossians 2:3 reinforces this by stating of Christ: “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” All the treasures – including the ability to relate subject and predicate meaningfully – belong to Christ. The apostle Paul’s point is that one cannot have true wisdom while rejecting Christ, for to do so is to sever oneself from the treasure-store of knowledge. This directly supports Van Til’s claim that meaningful use of logic and language requires presupposing Christ. A Van Tillian might paraphrase Colossians 2:3 to an interlocutor: “If all treasures of knowledge are in Christ, tell me, what have you left to build on outside of Him?” This makes any purportedly autonomous predication look impoverished.

• “In Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). This text speaks of Christ’s sustaining power over creation. Not only were all things created through Him, but He continues to uphold them in unity and order. The phrase “hold together” (synistēmi in Greek) implies coherence, consistence, integration. Van Til’s view of predication finds a strong ally here: the coherence of any fact with any other, and the persistence of properties in objects, is due to Christ’s continual sovereign maintenance. When we predicate an attribute of a subject (e.g. the peach is sweet), that predication remains true only because the world is not random at each moment – the peach doesn’t suddenly become salty or turn into a stone. Why? According to Colossians, because Christ holds creation together in a reliable way. The uniformity of nature, which science and everyday predication rely on, is explicitly grounded in Christ’s providence. The writer of Hebrews makes a similar claim: “He upholds the universe by the word of His power” (Heb. 1:3). Thus biblical theology of providence provides the metaphysical underpinning for why predicates continue to apply to subjects in a stable fashion. Van Til frequently argued that induction (generalizing from instances) and the expectation that the future will be like the past have no valid basis in a non-Christian system (Hume’s problem), but they are perfectly sensible if “the same Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8) and faithfully governs His creation. Christians sometimes take for granted how our doctrine of God undergirds even a simple statement like “fire is hot” – it will be hot tomorrow too, not because of a law of nature floating out there, but because God is faithful. Therefore, every meaningful predication about natural properties implicitly testifies to Christ’s sustaining power, whether the speaker knows it or not. Van Til would say: the unbeliever who assumes the constancy of any attribute “is borrowing from my worldview, where that constancy has an intelligible reason.”

• “By Him all things were created… visible and invisible” (Colossians 1:16). Notably, Scripture includes the creation of the invisible – which we can understand to cover the entire realm of universals, concepts, propositions, and even angelic beings. This was cited in our earlier discussion that universals (like “peachness” or mathematical truths) are part of God’s creation . They are not co-eternal independent entities; nor are they illusions. Rather, they are ideas in the mind of God given reality in creation and in our minds. The invisible furniture of reality owes its existence to Christ just as much as the stars do. Human language and thought operate with these invisible things constantly (we cannot see “justice” or “sweetness” under a microscope, yet we know them). Van Til’s point is essentially Colossians 1:16 applied: when a secular thinker says universals or logical laws “just exist” or are human conventions, the Christian replies that they exist because God made them or made them accessible to us. One blog, explaining Van Til’s argument, put it succinctly: “For the Christian, universals exist in a concrete fashion within the mind of the Creator Himself… The Christian’s presuppositions about God provide a rationale for the intelligibility of conceptual reasoning.” . This is a restatement of Colossians 1:16–17 with philosophical emphasis. Van Til would also appeal to Acts 17:28, where Paul, speaking to Athenian philosophers, says “In Him (God) we live and move and have our being.” Our entire existence and ability to function (certainly including rational function) is in God. Paul even quotes a Greek poet who intuited that “we are His offspring,” implying that humans have a likeness to God that enables rational relation. While Paul used this to build a bridge for evangelism, the presuppositional significance is clear: if in God we have our being, to try to think against God is to undermine one’s own being. One might say: in His light, we see light (Psalm 36:9); apart from His light, we grope in darkness.

• Noetic effects of sin and the need for a renewed mind: Scripture also speaks to why non-Christian theories of predication go awry – not primarily due to lack of intelligence, but due to a moral/spiritual problem. “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt…” (Ps. 14:1). “They became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Rom. 1:21). “The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God… he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). Van Til often referenced Romans 1 to show that unbelief is an ethical rebellion that results in cognitive folly – a suppression of truth. Non-Christians still know God deep down (“what can be known of God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them,” Rom. 1:19), yet they do not acknowledge Him, and thus their thinking becomes inconsistent. This biblical diagnosis matches Van Til’s observation of the rationalist/irrationalist dilemma in unbelieving philosophy . The unbeliever knows the world is orderly (so he is rationalistic at times), but he also insists on independence from God, which leaves only randomness at root (irrationalism). The “darkened heart” vacillates in futile thinking. Ephesians 4:17-18 likewise describes the Gentiles as “futile in their minds, darkened in understanding, alienated from the life of God.” In contrast, a believer is “renewed in knowledge after the image of the Creator” (Col. 3:10). These themes validate Van Til’s insistence that regeneration (a change of heart by God’s grace) is ultimately needed for a person to fully embrace the coherence that the Christian worldview offers. However, even in their rebellion, unbelievers unwittingly testify to the truth – a phenomenon Romans 2:15 notes in the moral realm (the law “written on their hearts”). We could say analogously that logical law is written on their minds as image-bearers of God. They cannot escape using it, yet they cannot account for it without returning to God. This is why Van Til could boldly say the non-Christian “knows God” in a sense and must “borrow from Christianity” to speak at all . The Bible’s teaching that all humans know God at some level (Rom. 1:21) and that Christ is the Light enlightening every man (John 1:9) gives the presuppositional apologist confidence that pressing these issues can “connect” with the unbeliever’s suppressed knowledge. We are not imposing an alien concept on them; we are exposing the foundation they already (inconsistently) depend on.

• “The testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple” (Psalm 19:7). Scripture frequently extols God’s revelation (both in nature and in Scripture) as the source of wisdom. Psalm 19 begins with nature’s silent testimony (the heavens declare God’s glory), and moves to the perfection of God’s law/revelation enlightening the eyes. Jesus prayed, “I thank you, Father… that You have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children” (Matt. 11:25). Here we see that revelation, not autonomous human cleverness, is the origin of true knowledge. Van Til built his apologetic method on this truth: Christians appeal to what God has said – in Scripture and in the created order – as the given by which all reasoning must proceed. This goes against the natural pride of man, who wants to claim credit for his knowledge. But 1 Corinthians 1–2 pointedly says that God made the world’s wisdom foolish and that “the Lord knows the reasonings of the wise, that they are futile” unless founded on Christ (cf. 1 Cor. 3:19-20). For Van Til, to demand autonomous proof of God as a prerequisite to believe revelation is to put the cart before the horse – it is God’s revelation that provides the very standards and grounds for proof. Therefore, he advocated a “revelational epistemology”: starting from God’s Word as self-authenticating and seeing all facts in its light. When it comes to predication, this means we trust what God has revealed about the natures of things and about our own cognitive design. We know that there are orderly classes of creatures because Genesis portrays a God who makes kinds and enjoins Adam to name them. We know that creation is not an absurd chaos because Genesis 1 shows God imposing form and distinction (“light vs darkness,” “each according to its kind”). We know that language can correspond to reality because God Himself uses language to create reality and to communicate with man (Gen. 1:28, 2:16–19). And we know that our statements can be truthful because Scripture calls us to speak truth after God’s example (Eph. 4:25, Col. 3:9-10) – a mandate that would be cruelly nonsensical if truth were inaccessible. The Analytic Theology movement, which emphasizes clarity and logical coherence in doctrinal formulation, ultimately must rest on these revealed assurances: that logic and language are trustworthy tools given by God for the purpose of knowing Him and His world, within the limits of creaturely thinking. Van Til’s strong stance against non-Christian predication serves to protect these biblical assurances from subversion. It is not out of intellectual arrogance that he says only Christians can have a foundation for meaning, but out of fidelity to what God Himself has said about the primacy of His own mind and word in all knowledge.

Through this brief survey of biblical themes, we see that Van Til’s teaching on predication was not an arbitrary philosophical postulate but an attempt to be radically faithful to Scripture’s view of God, man, and knowledge. The Bible presents God as the ultimate interpreter of reality (Isa. 40:14, “whom did He consult, and who made Him understand?”), and man as dependent on God’s interpretation. Jesus Christ, as the incarnate Logos, is the linchpin of all truth – “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Thus, predication “assumes the Christian worldview” in the deepest sense: whenever we utter a true subject–predicate proposition, we are implicitly relying on the Triune God’s creative ordinance, Christ’s cosmic sustaining, and the light of God’s revelation in our minds. To consciously recognize this and glorify God for it is the stance of the regenerate mind; to refuse to recognize it is the stance of the unbelieving mind – yet even in refusal, the unbeliever cannot escape the reality of God’s upholding hand in all his reasoning. As Cornelius Van Til loved to say, the unbeliever can splash and thrash in the ocean of life, denying the ocean’s existence, but he must still swim in God’s waters. In the end, only the Christian worldview allows him to swim rather than sink.

Conclusion

We have seen that Cornelius Van Til’s presuppositional approach presents a rigorous, transcendental account of predication: human predication is possible only because the Christian God is real and has created an orderly, intelligible universe and rational, image-bearing humans to inhabit it. The nature of predication – the joining of universals and particulars in meaningful statements – points inexorably to the ontological Trinity as the solution to the one-and-many problem and to revelation as the source of genuine knowledge. Van Til’s critique of non-Christian theories demonstrated that when one attempts predication on any other foundation, one ultimately loses the necessary preconditions for intelligibility: either universals evaporate into inconsistency or particulars dissolve into chaos. By comparing Van Til’s insights with classical thinkers from Aristotle to Russell, we found that while those philosophers identified important facets of predication, none of their theories can account for the whole picture without tacitly borrowing from the Christian worldview. Van Til’s doctrine of analogy and emphasis on revelational epistemology reinforce that we must think God’s thoughts after Him – our knowledge is a finite echo of the infinite Logos, but an accurate echo nonetheless when guided by Scripture. Developments in philosophy of language and analytic theology have increasingly corroborated the idea that meaning is worldview-dependent and that rationality itself has transcendental conditions that naturalism cannot satisfy. In all this, Van Til stands as a bold herald of the biblical truth that “in [God’s] light do we see light” (Ps. 36:9) – only by presupposing the Triune God can our words, concepts, and logical inferences have true significance.

The superiority of Van Til’s presuppositional approach lies in its holistic integration of theological truth and philosophical necessity. It does not leave Christian belief as a mere add-on to an otherwise secular understanding of reason; rather, it unveils that reason itself, to be reason, must bow to Christ. This is a profoundly God-honoring perspective: “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). Van Til applied this apostolic mandate to the arena of predication and intelligibility. He demonstrated that the Christian can have full confidence in the meaningfulness of science, logic, and ordinary language, precisely because these are grounded in God’s character and revelation. Meanwhile, the non-Christian, if consistent with his presuppositions, would undermine that meaningfulness – but by God’s grace, he is not fully consistent and continues to benefit from the Christian framework he inwardly knows. In closing, we might say that Van Til taught us to hear the voice of God even in the act of predication: whenever we successfully say “S is P,” we should recognize our Father’s upholding hand and the imprint of the divine Logos that makes that statement true. All truth indeed declares the glory of its Maker. The wise man, therefore, will build all his knowledge upon the rock of Christ – for no other foundation can anyone lay, for predication or anything else, than that which is laid by God Himself (1 Cor. 3:11).

Sources:

• Bahnsen, Greg L. Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings & Analysis. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1998. (See especially ch. 3 on the conditions for intelligible experience, and Bahnsen’s commentary on predication .)

• Frame, John M. Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1995. (Frame discusses Van Til’s views on the one-and-many problem and analogy , offering both sympathy and critique.)

• Van Til, Cornelius. The Defense of the Faith. 4th ed. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2008. (Originally 1955. Contains Van Til’s own treatment of the “concrete universal” in Christian theology and the argument that only on biblical presuppositions can one avoid absurdity in predication.)

• “The Great Debate: Does God Exist?” – Transcription of Greg Bahnsen vs. Gordon Stein debate, 1985. (Bahnsen’s opening statement articulates the transcendental argument for God, asserting the impossibility of logic, science, and predication without God .)

• Holy Scripture, English Standard Version. (Biblical passages are cited throughout to substantiate Van Til’s claims: e.g. Prov. 1:7; Col. 1:16-17 ; John 1:1-3; Col. 2:3; Acts 17:28; Ps. 36:9; etc.)