Cornelius Van Til and Rousas John Rushdoony, Part 3: Moving Spirits

This is the final essay in a series documenting the relationship between R. J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), the founder of the Chalcedon Foundation, and Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987), a professor of Christian apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the first essay in this series,¹ I provided a brief intellectual biography of Van Til and outlined how Rushdoony first encountered him. The second essay² recounted how Van Til’s ideas influenced Rushdoony’s early ministry and played a key role in his development as a thinker and activist. It also pointed to some of the ways Rushdoony influenced Van Til and helped shape the public reception of presuppositional apologetics.

This essay picks up where the second in the series left off to detail the two men’s relationship from the 1960s through the 1980s. The first portion of the essay deals with Van Til’s attempt to reconcile his career as a professional theologian with Rushdoony’s work to popularize the presuppositional apologetic method. The different goals of both men led to no small amount of tension as Rushdoony the activist and Christian social reformer found himself at odds with Van Til the professional philosopher and theologian. But as the remainder of the essay demonstrates, the strains between the two men were dwarfed by their mutual affection for each other’s research and their shared commitment to a rigorously Christian vision of epistemological purity. The essay moves beyond the tensions between the two to outline how Rushdoony’s work with the Chalcedon Foundation was deeply influenced by Van Tillian principles. As the essay wraps up, I document how Rushdoony’s activism at the Chalcedon Foundation reflected an attempt to embody and further Van Til’s presuppositional apologetics.

“Don’t Put Me on a Pedestal”

In many ways, Rushdoony’s collaboration with Van Til peaked during the late 1950s and the 1960s. Their collaboration started when Van Til reviewed drafts of Rushdoony’s By What Standard?³ in the 1950s and continued throughout the 1960s as the two traded ideas and manuscripts. During this period, Rushdoony edited many of Van Til’s manuscripts and often brought order to disorderly work. By 1959 Van Til so trusted Rushdoony as his editor that he told Rushdoony to “[m]ake any changes you deem necessary” to one of his manuscripts.⁴ Later, working on an unnamed project, Van Til allowed Rushdoony to edit several distinct essays into a single volume. Van Til was amazed at the results: “Thank you for sending the four batches of manuscript material. I am again impressed with your ingenuity in that you could find some semblance of unity in all this material. It is truly amazing.”⁵ In short, the surviving correspondence between Rushdoony and Van Til suggests that Rushdoony played an important role in shaping Van Til’s scholarly output, a fact often overlooked—or unknown—to Van Til’s students and biographers.⁶

But this trust between Rushdoony and Van Til did have its limits. In fact, the only major strain between the two men was that Rushdoony supported Van Til too much. This became evident soon after Rushdoony began publicly speaking and writing on Van Til’s behalf. In 1955 Rushdoony gave a speech defending Van Til’s apologetics. When Van Til heard of the lecture through a friend of a friend, he was grateful to Rushdoony for his impassioned defense of presuppositionalism. Van Til especially liked that a non-academic could offer such a clear and persuasive account of his epistemological ethics. “You as an ‘outsider,’” Van Til wrote to Rushdoony, “can do a lot for the cause.”⁷ Since Rushdoony was neither an academic nor a recognized theologian with a university appointment, Van Til felt that Rushdoony carried a certain weight among other churchmen who had made ministry—not abstract reflection—their life. But Van Til did worry that Rushdoony’s effusive praise might also alienate less sympathetic audiences. Accordingly, even as he deeply appreciated Rushdoony’s defense of his ideas, Van Til also cautioned Rushdoony: “please don’t put me on a pedestal.”⁸

Herein lay one of the few obvious tensions between Rushdoony and Van Til that at times strained their relationship. Rushdoony was a warrior and activist for his faith. In Van Til’s thought Rushdoony saw the means for reordering the very structure of American civilization. In contrast, Van Til was an academic. By nature and training, academics tend toward caution, equivocation, and conceptual conservatism. Even as he waged battle with theological modernists and liberals in his books and essays, disciplinary constraints bound Van Til to eschew the sorts of grand pronouncements and laudatory praise with which Rushdoony often lavished him.

In short, Van Til’s professional concerns often butted up against Rushdoony’s spiritual commitment to the “truth” he found in Van Til’s ideas. To Rushdoony, Van Til was an intellectual mentor and religious guide; he was not just one theologian among many vying to establish the legitimacy of their respective theological visions within the normative discursive standards of academic theology. Van Til understood what was at stake in the professional game and dutifully played his part. Rushdoony felt the rightness of Van Til’s ideas in his very soul; academic discourse did not interest him.

The result was a pronounced awkwardness in their relationship as Rushdoony lavished triumphal praise upon Van Til’s epistemology, while Van Til studiously sought to rein in what he perceived as Rushdoony’s adjectival excess. In fact, Van Til attempted to check what he saw as Rushdoony’s unwarranted praise in the earliest drafts of By What Standard. In his comments on what eventually became chapter four of the text, Van Til told Rushdoony, “The article on the [‘]Psychology of Religion[’] seems to me to be very good, but again I wonder whether you could leave my name out at many places. At any rate, when you refer to me perhaps you could tone down your generous adjectives.”⁹ Similarly, in a later letter, Van Til asked Rushdoony to “omit most of the laudatory adjectives.” He continued, “I mean this seriously, you give me more than enough credit by writing the book at all, and it may offend some unnecessarily. Some may think of it as primarily for propaganda.”¹⁰

For his part Rushdoony dismissed Van Til’s concerns. When Rushdoony asked several of his friends to read the manuscript and assess his comments about Van Til, he reported that they “delighted in all of it, including parts you were troubled about … and wanted no changes. They felt that the present revisions of my statements regarding you should stand, [and] that I am more accurate in my evaluation of your stature than you are.”¹¹

Weasel Statements

This issue became particularly troublesome for both men when the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary began to organize the publication of a festschrift to honor Van Til.12 Traditionally, a festschrift is a collection of original essays written to celebrate a living academic’s contribution to a given field of knowledge. While generally positive assessments of the scholar’s career and achievements, the essays in festschriften often feature critical essays weighing the merits of the scholar’s work and measuring it against others in the field. The faculty of Westminster organized the festschrift to coincide with Van Til’s seventy-fifth birthday and his fortieth year at the seminary in 1970. Under the leadership of Edward Robert Geehan, a general editor at Charles “Hays” Craig’s Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, the volume collected original essays by Westminster faculty and international theologians such as the Dutch thinker Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977) and the South African theologian Hendrik G. Stoker (1899–1993). Geehan also invited Rushdoony to contribute.

Rushdoony offered an essay on Van Til’s contribution to the “one and the many problem” in philosophy.¹³ When Van Til read an early draft of the essay he was shocked: it was too positive!  Van Til thanked Rushdoony for the contribution but asked him to tone down the praise because he feared that his critics might think him like one of the great villains of the New Testament: “My opponents will only say that I accept adulation from admirers in some such way as Herod did. I am, therefore, requesting that you change a couple points at least.”¹⁴ Upon reviewing Van Til’s request, Geehan seconded the notion, noting, “Having become so used to defending his [Van Til’s] position against constant attack, he is somewhat uneasy in the presence of praise.”¹⁵ Geehan asked Rushdoony to revise portions of the essay so that it might conform more to the scholarly standards of the festschrift.

In a terse response to Geehan’s request, Rushdoony registered his disgust with scholastic niceties. “I have no fear of being criticized as ‘unscholarly.’”¹⁶ “Today scholarship is identified with the weasel statement, which speaks equivocally on all things, unlike that unscholarly gentleman, John Calvin,” Rushdoony fired back to Geehan. “I do know from experience that Dr. Van Til is unduly fearful of praise, and, because of this, I have complied.”¹⁷ Only Rushdoony’s respect for Van Til compelled his compliance with Geehan’s request.

As Geehan assembled the text, Rushdoony grew increasingly unhappy with the festschrift. After reading a draft of one contribution that criticized Van Til’s apologetics, Rushdoony wrote to Van Til that he was “dumbfounded” by the “stupid” festschrift article.¹⁸ Privately, Van Til conceded that he agreed with Rushdoony’s assessment of the essay. He felt that the piece’s author was a “bumptious individual,” but he worried to Rushdoony that he couldn’t refuse a piece—even a mediocre one—because of the fact that “he is critical of my views.”¹⁹

Rushdoony particularly resented the direction taken by the festschrift because he had begun a similar project four years earlier. But rather than a traditional festschrift, Rushdoony had envisioned a “study which would point to the future in terms of the directions laid down by your philosophy, i.e., its implications for historiography, for economics, for theological and textual studies, for philosophy, and so on.”²⁰ In short, where the current festschrift project was backward-looking and concerned with offering critical assessments of Van Til’s impact in the past, Rushdoony had hoped to produce a “seminal study” that used Van Til’s ideas “to indicate the directions Christian thought should take in terms of your philosophy.”²¹ Faculty from Westminster asked Rushdoony to delay his project so they could assemble their festschrift. Rushdoony assented, but came to regret the decision.²²

Beyond the Academy

Although the scholarly reception of Van Til remained a perpetual annoyance for Rushdoony, he continued to push Van Til’s ideas outside of the academy. Here he met with much more success. Initially, he found some of his most receptive audiences among college students, conservative women’s clubs, and businessmen. He began reaching these audiences during his brief stint at the libertarian-oriented William Volker Fund based in Burlingame, California. During the middle of the century, the Volker Fund was one of the few political and socially conservative philanthropic institutions with significant resources.²³ The fund hired Rushdoony as a consultant because of his anti-statist, religiously-grounded beliefs.

After the publication of By What Standard in the late 1950s, Rushdoony used grants from the Volker Fund to support his work on an ambitious set of writing projects and speaking trips throughout the United States. It was during his time as a Volker affiliate that Rushdoony either began or finished manuscripts that eventually became The Messianic Character of American Education,²⁴This Independent Republic,²⁵ and The One and the Many.²⁶ Each of these books grew out of lectures Rushdoony gave to conservative groups across the country, and although they varied widely in content—from educational theory, to Christian historiography, to political theory—each text rested on the solid foundation of Van Tillian presuppositional epistemology. Thus, for example, in the “Preface” to The Nature of the American System Rushdoony wrote, “Behind the writing of history is a philosophy of history, and behind that philosophy of history are certain pre-theoretical and essentially religious presuppositions.”²⁷ He then spent the book developing a philosophy of United States history based Christian presuppositions. Similarly, at the outset of The One and the Many, Rushdoony uses Van Til’s conception of the Trinity as the foundation for a new political philosophy that rejects centralized statism for decentralized forms of governance.²⁸

Although Rushdoony spent less than a year officially associated with the fund,²⁹ that was all the time he needed to make connections with various important mid-century conservative organizations including the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI). Rushdoony’s connections brought presuppositionalism to a much wider audience than Van Til could have reached as a teacher and writer of narrowly focused philosophical and theological monographs. In fact, when recounting the success of this string of publications—especially his Messianic Character of American Education—Rushdoony noted, “The irony of the situation is that the sales of my book to church circles are negligible, while remarkably good to secular sources, libraries, colleges, universities, and other sources, and the secular reviews [are] uniformly enthusiastic!”³⁰ This fact was not lost on Van Til. He understood that Rushdoony was pushing his ideas well beyond the confines of the academy and seminary. “I am always amazed,” he told Rushdoony, “by the energy with which you are proceeding to present the Reformed Faith to those who are among the educated and the cultured of the land.”³¹ But, remarkably, Rushdoony wasn’t just presenting the Reformed faith; he was presenting Van Til’s interpretation of the Reformed faith, a fact that had massive repercussions for the lives and reputations of both men.

Presuppositionalism and the Chalcedon Foundation

In 1965 Rushdoony moved to the suburbs of Los Angeles to establish Chalcedon, Inc., a non-profit organization through which he could lecture and raise funds to start a Christian college built on Van Tillian insights. Eventually Chalcedon, Inc. evolved into the Chalcedon Foundation, which Rushdoony used to build on the connections he made while lecturing and researching at the Volker Fund. In a series of lectures and home church meetings during the 1960s and ‘70s he impressed upon his audiences the importance of Van Tillian epistemology and its necessity within any orthodox system of Christian thought and action.

In October 1965, Rushdoony sat down and wrote a brief report to his community of supporters, which he mimeographed and handed out. In that short report—the predecessor of Faith For All of Life—Rushdoony wrote, “What you are doing, in your support of me, is to sponsor a counter-measure to the prevailing trend, to promote by your support, interest, and study, a Christian Renaissance, to declare by these measures your belief that the answer to humanism and statism is Christian faith and liberty.”³² Rushdoony’s statement underscored the profound ways he hoped Chalcedon could serve as an institutional manifestation of the basic insights of Van Tillian presuppositionalism: proper education, founded on rigorous Christian presuppositions, could lead to a Christian Renaissance—a rebirth, a reconstruction—of American culture.

Through the resources of Chalcedon, Rushdoony not only continued his relentless lecturing and writing schedule, but he also began cultivating a generation of thinkers, teachers, and preachers to become presuppositional warriors in the battle against secularism and statism. Perhaps most famously, Rushdoony supported the early careers of a number of young men who would become synonymous with Van Tillian apologetics and Rushdoony’s own project of Christian Reconstruction. For example, Rushdoony used Chalcedon to support the graduate education and early writing careers of Gary North (b. 1942) and Greg Bahnsen (1948–1995).³³ In fact, he used Chalcedon’s resources to provide funding for both young men to study directly under Van Til at Westminster Theological Seminary.

In many ways, however, Chalcedon’s support for individuals such as North and Bahnsen was much less significant than its more amorphous and harder to determine influence on a network of issues in the areas of higher education, homeschooling, and political activism. This work began in the late 1970s when Rushdoony shifted his focus away from encouraging young men to attend seminary and instead spent a considerable amount of time pushing Christians to bring Van Tillian epistemology to bear on law schools and other institutions of higher education.

Of the many bright and determined young lawyers that Rushdoony encouraged to litigate in the interest of Christian liberty, John W. Whitehead was certainly the most significant. Whitehead published many popular legal texts, including The Separation Illusion: A Lawyer Examines the First Amendment,³⁴ and went on to found the Rutherford Institute in 1982 with Rushdoony’s support. As with Chalcedon, the Rutherford Institute similarly embodied Van Til’s ideas: Rushdoony and Whitehead used Rutherford to—among many other things—provide courtroom support to homeschooling parents who wanted to teach their children according to strictly Christian epistemological principles.

This wider influence on colleges, professional schools, and homeschooling manifested itself in complex ways that remain nearly impossible for historians to track or sociologists to map. Rushdoony sometimes received letters from college students at secular institutions asking for information about Van Til. In many cases these inquiries suggest that Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation had become synonymous with Van Til’s philosophy. In one interesting note, two college students wrote to Rushdoony:

A fellow Christian and I have recently become very enthusiastic concerning the theological and social/political works of Cornelius Van Til, Herman Dooyeweerd, Francis Schaeffer, and yourself … Both of us belong to Reformed churches, but only recently we have begun to realize the social and political implications of our Christian beliefs. We have become convinced that it is crucial that we understand and teach others the proper Christian social and political structure that is taught in the Word of God …³⁵

When Rushdoony relayed such notes to the aging and now-retired Van Til, he was surprised by Van Til’s pessimistic response. In one note authored in the late 1970s, Van Til doubted that such good news about his ever-increasing influence could really be true. Rushdoony would have none of it:

I was happy to hear from you, but your letter saddened me a bit, because you seem to find my reports about the growth of your influence ‘too generous to be true’ … Now we do not get such [positive] letters every day, but we do get enough of them to indicate that things are happening, and that the sons of Cornelius Van Til are beginning to appear all over the world. Therefore: REJOICE!³⁶

As the previous paragraph indicates, the late 1970s saw Van Til recede from the frontlines of the battle to press presuppositionalism in all areas of life. With his retirement in 1972 Van Til continued to teach at Westminster until the late 1970s, but his most significant publications were already behind him. Always modest and self-effacing, Van Til refused to take credit for any of his achievements as a philosopher, theologian, or epistemological revolutionary. In his humble mind all of his successes belonged to others: to the LORD, to his students, to Rushdoony. In a brief handwritten note, Van Til told Rushdoony, “I am more indebted to you than I now realize. You are the moving spirit back of all. The Lord bless you and keep you and yours henceforth and forevermore.”³⁷ Certainly Rushdoony would have disputed the assertion and did so in later letters, but in a melancholy postscript Van Til revealed that his eternal legacy was weighing heavily on his mind: “Soon we shall meet at Jesus’ feet!”³⁸

In a moving but disjointed letter written in 1978 shortly after the death of his beloved wife, Rena, Van Til again thanked Rushdoony for his work. Van Til began by recounting how he “used to haul cow-manure,” plowing “22 miles” of “clay soil” in order to help his father pay for his first year of college at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He told Rushdoony of how, “For 8 years Rena and I kept company—no money for a wedding. For 52 years she and I were happily married.”³⁹ “I dare scarcely to think of her or look at her picture for fear it will stymie my work. I pray daily and with tears that I may continue alone to do something for the kingdom in our Savior.”⁴⁰ He concluded by telling Rushdoony that, although he had been “utterly unknown” to the Westminster theologian when Rushdoony first began defending the New Modernism in the 1940s, “I am and shall always remain deeply grateful to you for your … work and for your encouragement—in the face of ridicule—to me in my labors for our common Lord and Savior.”⁴¹

Conclusion

Cornelius Van Til died on April 17, 1987. Rushdoony did not hear the news immediately. On April 20 and 21, Rushdoony lectured at Dordt College, a small Reformed liberal arts college in Sioux Falls, Iowa. After the session, Dordt’s president Dr. John B. Hulst, pulled Rushdoony aside and told him about Van Til’s passing. Hulst also told Rushdoony “that on one occasion Van Til told him that I [Rushdoony] alone understood him [Van Til] clearly and interpreted him accurately.”⁴²

Through the remainder of his career Rushdoony continued his mission to clearly and accurately interpret Van Til. Never one to shy away from lavishing praise of his mentor, collaborator, and friend, in the May 1995 issue of the Chalcedon Report, Rushdoony wrote, “Cornelius Van Til was a giant of the Faith, one of the greatest men in the history of Christianity.  Many in the United States are doing their best to forget him, but his influence keeps expanding.”⁴³

Rushdoony worried that Van Til’s influence in the United States could wane if something wasn’t done. He ended his short note with an impassioned call to get more of Van Til’s major books back into print. Since Rushdoony’s warning about the possible diminishment of Van Til’s legacy, a host of important new publications have appeared: an electronic edition of Van Til’s complete works appeared in 1997;⁴⁴ Greg Bahnsen’s Van Til’s Apologetic appeared posthumously in 1998;⁴⁵ Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company has reissued several of Van Til’s major works;⁴⁶ and in 2008 John R. Muether published his excellent biography, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman.

From his assertion that Rushdoony was the “moving spirit” behind the public rise of presuppositionalism, to his obviously heart-felt statements of gratitude for Rushdoony’s efforts to popularize his writings, it is clear that Van Til believed that Rushdoony was singularly important to his career as a philosopher and apologist. Similarly, it is hard to imagine that the Chalcedon Foundation or Rushdoony’s consistent effort to reform higher education and homeschooling would exist without the moving spirit of Van Tillian epistemology. Although it would certainly be a misrepresentation to say that the two men’s projects were identical, it would not be an exaggeration to say they helped shape each other’s careers and that each man helped determine the context in which the other would be interpreted. In short, it is impossible to imagine Van Til without Rushdoony’s work, and vice versa.

1. Michael J. McVicar, “Cornelius Van Til and Rousas John Rushdoony, Part 1: Every Thought Captive,” Faith for All of Life (May/June 2011), 14–19.
2. Michael J. McVicar, “Cornelius Van Til and Rousas John Rushdoony, Part 2: Defenders of the Faith,” Faith for All of Life (July/August 2011), 7–13, 16.
3. Rousas John Rushdoony, By What Standard? An Analysis of the Philosophy of Cornelius Van Til (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1959; repr. Vallecito, Ca: Ross House Books, 1995).
4. Cornelius Van Til to R. J. Rushdoony, 12 August 1959. Emphasis in the original. All references to unpublished letters refer to material held in the Rousas John Rushdoony Library, Chalcedon Foundation, Vallecito, California.
5. Cornelius Van Til to R. J. Rushdoony, 19 February 1962.
6. For example, major studies of Van Til such as John M. Frame, Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1995) and John R. Muether, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman, American Reformed biographies (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008) make no mention of Rushdoony’s role in editing Van Til’s manuscripts or Rushdoony’s effort to clarify Van Til’s often-opaque prose.
7. Cornelius Van Til to R. J. Rushdoony, 25 December, 1955.
8. Ibid.
9. Cornelius Van Til to R. J. Rushdoony, 23 October 1957.
10. Cornelius Van Til to R. J. Rushdoony, 27 December 1957.
11. R. J. Rushdoony to Cornelius Van Til, 8 April 1958.
12. Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions on the Theology and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til, ed. E. R. Geehan (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1971).
13. Rousas John Rushdoony, “The One and Many Problem—The Contribution of Van Til,” in Jerusalem and Athens, 339–348.
14. Cornelius Van Til to R. J. Rushdoony, 10 February 1969.
15. Edward Robert Geehan to R. J. Rushdoony, 18 February 1969.
16. R. J. Rushdoony to Edward Robert Geehan, 21 March 1969.
17. Ibid.
18. R. J. Rushdoony to Cornelius Van Til, 26 March 1970.
19. Cornelius Van Til to R. J. Rushdoony, 31 March 1970.
20. R. J. Rushdoony to Cornelius Van Til, 17 January 1970.
21. Ibid.
22. Eventually Rushdoony realized his goal of producing a text that assessed how Van Til’s ideas could be applied to disciplines as diverse as history, economics, education, political science, sociology, and mathematics. See Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the Van Til Perspective, Gary North, ed. (Vallecito, Ca: Ross House Books, 1976).
23. Gary North, “It All Began With Fred Schwarz,” LewRockwell.com, December 16, 2002, http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north145.html.
24. Rousas John Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies In the History of the Philosophy of Education (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1963).
25. Rousas John Rushdoony, This Independent Republic: Studies in the Nature and Meaning of American History (Nutley, N.J: Craig Press, 1964).
26. Rousas John Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1971).
27. Rushdoony, This Independent Republic, v.
28. Rushdoony, The One and the Many, 8–10.
29. Rushdoony’s time as a consultant was brief and tumultuous. He was fired, at least in part, because his conservative Presbyterianism chafed many of the more secularly inclined individuals associated with the fund. Even though many of the fund’s rank-and-file staffers disliked Rushdoony’s religious ideas, the fund’s manager, Harold W. Luhnow, remained loyal to Rushdoony even after the fund’s staff demanded Rushdoony’s termination. In turn, Rushdoony remained loyal to Luhnow and even dedicated The One and the Many to him. For a thorough history of Rushdoony’s work at the Volker Fund, see Michael J. McVicar, “Aggressive Philanthropy: Progressivism, Conservatism, and the William Volker Charities Fund,” Missouri Historical Review 105 (July 2011), 191–212.
30. R. J. Rushdoony to Mr. Brough, 26 January 1962.
31. Cornelius Van Til to R. J. Rushdoony, 1 February 1962.
32. Rousas John Rushdoony, “Chalcedon Report, No. 1,” reprinted in The Roots of Reconstruction (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1991), 545. Emphasis in the original.
33. Many readers are no doubt familiar with North’s and Bahnsen’s careers and their tempestuous relationship with Rushdoony and the larger Christian Reconstruction movement. This essay is not the place to recount those oft-told tales. Suffice it to say, during the 1960s and 1970s both men were dedicated to Van Til’s ideas and steadfast supporters of Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation.
34. John W. Whitehead, The Separation Illusion: A Lawyer Examines the First Amendment (Milford, MI: Mott Media, 1977).
35. D. John Guild and Richard W. Bledsoe to R. J. Rushdoony, 5 March 1973.
36. R. J. Rushdoony to Cornelius Van Til, 31 March 1978.
37. Cornelius Van Til to R. J. Rushdoony, n.d. (letter postmarked 28 July 1976).
38. Ibid.
39. Cornelius Van Til to R. J. Rushdoony, 4 April 1978.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42.R. J. Rushdoony journal entry for 23 April 1987.
43. R. J. Rushdoony, “Dr. Cornelius Van Til,” Chalcedon Report (May 1995): 2.
44. Cornelius Van Til, The Works of Cornelius Van Til, 1895–1987, Bristley, Eric D., ed. (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Library System, 1997).
45. Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1998).
46. These include Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics, ed. William Edgar, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2003); Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, ed. William Edgar, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2007); Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, ed. K. Scott Oliphint, 4th ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008).