The editor and translator, Daniel Ragusa, has performed a great service in his editing and translating of these twenty-four journalistic reports prepared by Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987) for inclusion in the Dutch religious newspaper, Die Reformatie, in the 1935–1940 period. This reporting on developments in America might have continued longer, were it not for the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. German occupation meant that the publication of Die Reformatie was suspended. The import of Van Til’s reportage is far greater than it first meets the eye.

In a very skillful introduction, Ragusa places Van Til in the context required in order for the reader to understand why an American philosopher-theologian would be writing (in Dutch) for this particular Dutch newspaper. Van Til’s family roots lay in the 1837 religious division (the “Afscheiding”) of the National Reformed Church of the Netherlands, which helped to create the constituency that read Die Reformatie. This was a constituency that had stood for absolute fidelity to the Reformed confessional documents as well as the factuality of events recorded in biblical history. The newspaper’s editor, Klaas Schilder (1890–1952), was also attracted to Van Til because, within their respective countries, each was in the vanguard of opposition to the growing influence of Swiss theologian Karl Barth. Van Til had an additional motivation beyond this collaboration with Schilder; he wanted to confirm Dutch readers in their existing tendency to see the controversial events playing out among American Presbyterians in the 1930s as a replay of their nineteenth-century Dutch religious history. One of Van Til’s 1935 letters, published in Die Reformatie, posed the question, “Afscheiding in 1936?”

These overlapping, but distinguishable purposes, were useful in building a trans-Atlantic community of feeling. The seminary (Westminster) with which Van Til had been associated since its founding in 1929 and the small denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which followed the creation of Westminster, both needed friends and supporters. Van Til was keen to secure this support in the Netherlands as well as in his native Midwest; in both respects, he succeeded.

Of course, the way to know Van Til cannot be provided through twenty-four letter-articles supplied to a Dutch newspaper. Several serious biographies exist for this purpose. Yet there are in these pieces of journalistic correspondence valuable allusions to occurrences in Van Til’s years at Princeton and at Philadelphia; these shed interesting light on Van Til’s definite perspective. A few examples will illustrate what is to be gleaned.

In 1929, J. Gresham Machen invited at least six Princeton faculty members to accompany him to launch Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia. Van Til, already an instructor at Princeton, was among the three who accepted the invitation (the others being Robert Dick Wilson and Oswald T. Allis). Considering that the number declining included Machen’s mentor in New Testament studies, William Park Armstrong, the revered biblical theologian Geerhardus Vos, and the venerated theologian C. W. Hodge Jr., one grimaces to find Van Til (like others who went with Machen) regularly disparaging post-1929 Princeton as if these trusted former associates were not still there, faithfully laboring on. Van Til, as much as any of the early Westminster faculty, was hawkish in his monitoring of the ebb and flow of events in Princeton. It is not saying too much to say that he was a polemicist on such matters. In 1937, he could write, “The history after 1929 has also proven that the Reformed sound is no longer actually heard from Princeton” (p. 119). A close examination of Princeton, even at the date of Van Til’s writing, shows a situation much more complex than he acknowledged.

Van Til had strong differences of opinion with Free University of Amsterdam theologian Valentine Hepp (1879–1950). Hepp had given the Princeton Stone Lectures in 1930 and made a point of visiting the young Philadelphia seminary while in the region. Westminster sought but did not gain from Hepp the unqualified endorsement he might have supplied in his own editorial role at Die Reformatie (the role later filled by Schilder). Hepp, however, recognized that a faithful witness to the Reformed faith was still being continued at Princeton; his viewpoint set him at odds with the polemic being generated in Philadelphia. Moreover, Hepp was in those years on an Atlantic-hopping campaign to build up an international Reformed alliance. This involved Reformed groups in Hungary, Switzerland, France, Germany, South Africa, the USA, and the United Kingdom, as well as in his homeland. But from Van Til’s perspective, Hepp was a temporizer (p. 34). Van Til and the other early Westminster faculty members seem to have been vaguely aware of these larger, transatlantic efforts, but were so preoccupied by the survival of their young seminary and young denomination that they scarcely had time or interest to be involved. There was no appreciation for Hepp’s coalition-building.

Van Til’s correspondence also made reference to disagreements within the Machen-led movement, disagreements which resulted in the resignation of numerous seminary trustees and the departure of Professor Allis. The bone of contention had been the insistence that all trustees and all faculty members pledge support for the independent mission board Machen had begun and the shadow-denomination “Constitutional Covenant Union” which Machen had created in anticipation of denominational division. Samuel G. Craig, a trustee and editor of Christianity Today magazine, resigned over the matter. Van Til portrays Craig as halting and lacking in nerve (p. 54). Van Til could not have known in 1935 that he would eventually turn to Craig’s Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company as his main publisher and collaborate with Craig in the production of a compact edition of Warfield’s writings.

Finally, we are able to see through Van Til’s eyes what he considered the underlying issues that led to a division of the nascent alternative Presbyterian movement within a year of Machen’s death (in 1937). Van Til described the underlying causes of this 1937 division by alluding to the mixed multitude that followed Moses out of Egypt, “Dispensationalists, half-dispensationalists, and quarter-dispensationalists also left with them. In the struggle against modernism, they stood with him (Machen)” (p.109). But they proved false. Dutch readers of Die Reformatie may have found this interpretation to be to their taste; yet it also disclosed that Van Til, ever the strict confessionalist, was opting for ideological purity in a situation which called for forbearance and coalition-building. Old Princeton had been a “bigger tent” than Westminster.

Thank you, Daniel Ragusa, for what is clearly a labor of love! This collection helps us to see the polemical early Van Til interpreting important inter-war American trends for foreign readers. It sheds light on aspects of Van Til’s stance that will need to be taken into account in future efforts to interpret this period.