The influence of idealism on the apologetics of Cornelius Van Til

Abstract

"Cornelius Van Til completed his doctoral work at Princeton University in 1927 with a dissertation entitled "God and the Absolute," in which he argued that the God of Christian theism could not be identified with the Absolute of philosophical idealism.1 A couple of years earlier he had completed his Th.M. at Princeton Theological Seminary, with a thesis entitled "Reformed Epistemologa" 2 In spite of the close proximity and historical relationship of these two institutions, they were clearly distinct, with the seminary then being a much more conservative institution. The philosophy department of Princeton University at that time was under the direction of the British idealist Archibald Allen Bowman"