I was a graduate of the University of Georgia and became a Christian late in my sophomore year, though I grew up in a Christian home. I had one foot planted in the truth, but throughout high school and early college, I had another planted in the world and was leaning heavily on that foot. I had questions, but I realized that at the heart of all of those questions was the fact that I just wanted to live my life. To use Van Til’s language, I wanted to live autonomously, and to pursue my own desires, my own plans for my own life. Yet, what I knew about God eventually caught up with me. There was a clear choice: Would I continue to follow my own desires in this world, or would I submit my desires to God and follow Christ? So there was a confrontation in my own life with the gospel that, through my own coming to faith, set me on a path to understand my own struggles with unbelief. That gospel confrontation also suggested how I might engage other students. I was a philosophy student at the University of Georgia, and so was within a context and degree program that forced me to reflect further on these things. That led me to read a good number of apologetic type works, starting with Francis Schaeffer.
After seminary, about midway through my time serving as a campus minister at the University of Georgia, one of our students invited me to a debate, as well as representatives from the Jewish and Roman Catholic student ministries. Various standard objections to the Christian faith were raised in our conversation, specifically by the professor of religion. I began to press things that I knew we’d agree on because we are all alike created in God’s image and live in God’s world. Therefore, we all have common experiences in this world that unbelieving systems can’t account for.
It came out that the religion professor himself had an evangelical background he had left behind. His interest in religion was now primarily historical and cultural. One of the questions I pressed was how he could account for love, which he had affirmed as a religious value that he also promoted. It was clear in his responses that he didn’t have answers to those questions, and he knew it. He remained interested in religion but had no ability to account for that interest or the various values that he affirmed. That conversation didn’t end with him acknowledging this and professing faith. But it was evident that he was bothered, that it provoked him in certain ways.
That really is behind Van Til’s approach: you begin with confidence that people are created in God’s image, and they live in God’s world, and they experience tension as they seek to suppress that truth that they know in the core of their being. We want to press into those areas and expose their inability to account for those values and truths that they want to affirm. And then we aim to demonstrate how only God’s word resonates with their experience in the world and makes it intelligible. And we trust that the Lord will use that—if not in that moment to bring them to a point of faith and repentance, then at least to provoke their covenant consciousness.
Those are fundamental convictions that I operate with as I engage unbelievers, whatever the context, knowing who they are, created in God’s image, even as they’re seeking to suppress that truth. We want to press into what they know, what is undeniable, and demonstrate how only the true God, the triune God who’s revealed himself in Scripture and climactically in the person and work of Christ, can account for their experience, knowledge, and values in this world.