Question 9. How many persons are there in the Godhead?
Answer. There be three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one true, eternal God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory; although distinguished by their personal properties. (Westminster Larger Catechism)
Cornelius Van Til argued that the Reformed faith was the expression of consistent Christianity. This Christianity, “. . .stands for ultimate personalism” (Van Til, Defense of the Faith 85).
The foundations of reality are not built upon impersonal forces, like the kind posited by determinism. The Christian worldview is grounded in a personal God: a personal God that creates and sustains the world, a personal God that governs righteously.
As God is personal, we who are created in his image were created to be like him, to image him in every way that a creature could possibly imitate the Creator. It is only because God is a person that man’s personality has any significance at all. There is a distinction between the personality of God and the personality of man; God as sovereign is absolute personality, and man as his creature is a covenant personality. This is to say that the ultimate context of creaturely existence is relational.
“. . . the idea of analogical or covenant personality is that which alone preserves genuine significance for the thoughts and deeds of man” (Van Til 168).
John Frame’s book Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought highlights this as a significant position: “Van Til summarizes his doctrine of God in terms of ‘self-contained fullness.’ Another Van Tillian summary of this doctrine is that God is ‘absolute personality.’ Both words in the phrase are important. Some non-Christian systems (as the polytheistic religions and modern philosophical ‘personalisms’) posit personal gods of one kind or another, but those gods are not absolute in the sense of being self-contained. Other non-Christian systems accept absolute realities of various kinds, but those absolutes are not personal. Only in Biblical teaching are absoluteness and personality combined in the Supreme Being” (Frame 58).
Frame goes on to quote from Van Til’s Survey of Christian Epistemology: “Man’s surroundings are shot through with personality because all things are related to the infinitely personal God. But when we have said that the surroundings of man are really completely personalized, we have also established the fact of the representational principle. . . Because he is a creature, man must, in his thinking, his feeling and his willing, be representative of God” (Frame 59).
Greg Bahnsen helpfully distills Van Til’s position in his wonderful book entitled Van Til’s Apologetic. Bahnsen writes, “The Christian thinks about himself and about everything in the world as being intimately related to God—created, controlled, and preinterpreted by Him. Our aim is to know Him better, to see His glory and wisdom worked out in the world, to respond in obedience and praise, etc. This is not at all the primary perspective of the unbeliever. He holds that we must begin with the ‘hard, cold, dry lifeless’ facts that are found in an impersonal environment of randomness; and ‘personal’ considerations (self-consciousness, man as a free personality, creativity, dignity, purpose, moral standards, etc.) must be secondary qualities or realities that somehow evolved by chance from the more fundamental building blocks of matter or energy” (Bahnsen 278).
Here it must be seen that any attempt to preserve the responsibility and dignity of man by removing him from the conditions of covenant reality—a reality which is governed by a sovereign, personal God—fails on account that it destroys the foundation for any meaning whatsoever. Bahnsen highlights this epistemic destruction: “But for the non-Christian, the impersonal, space-temporal universe either exists by itself or is intelligible in itself, without reference to God. Things and events are simply what they are, with no need for (or possibility of) more basic explanation. The facts are ‘brute’—that is, particulars unrelated to any plan or interpretation. The universe consists of purely random matter, moving completely by chance. The connecting links between brute facts—whether concepts or laws—exist apart from God as abstract, impersonal, and apparently self-existent universals. Facts and events cannot be known, much less interpreted, in advance, thus making any hypothesis as credible as any other hypothesis prior to investigation and/or prior historical eventuation” (Bahnsen 279).
The Westminster Confession uses the language of personality to describe God; Van Til faithfully applies this principle to the work of philosophy.