Van Til Group #5 — The Doctrine of Salvation, the Church, and the Last Things

Carlton Wynne, Lane Tipton, and Camden Bucey open Cornelius Van Til’s book, The Defense of the Faith to pages 33–39 wherein Van Til discusses the doctrine of salvation. Van Til is insistent to maintain the incommunicable attributes of God in all aspects of theology, even here in soteriology. Throughout this section, Van Til refuses to admit any form of mutualism or correlativism in the God-man relation. He writes, "If we refuse to mix the eternal and the temporal at the point of creation and at the point of the incarnation we must also refuse to mix them at the point of salvation." If God is omnipotent, for example, and he desires to save, it is not possible for man to frustrate that plan. This carries through in the doctrine of church as well as the doctrine of last things, wherein the absolute sovereignty of God is maintained at every point throughout history.