Authors and Books

We read a variety of books at Van Til College. Our core foundation are books about the Christian worldview and its application. We spent a year recently on John Frame's "History of Western Philosophy and Theology" which he wrote for his Apologetics class at Westminster Theological Seminary. We have read books about business law, international politics, the history of the church and the history of the West. We spent one year on business with a special focus on small family owned businesses.
 

Some authors we have read include:
 

Cornelius Van Til

R. J. Rushdoony

John Frame

Greg Bahnsen

Gary North

Kevin Swanson

Iain Murray

C.S. Lewis

David Chilton

Francis Schaeffer

John Stonestreet

Ian Bremmer

Rodney Stark

Tapestry of Grace - homeschool curriculum
 

You might have noticed in the above pictures several books by R.J. Rushdoony. Why do we read books by Rushdoony?

 

As described above in "Overview", Van Til rigorously carved out a Biblically faithful view of man's knowledge. In particular, he battled against the idea that there are spiritually "neutral" ideas. In other words, if all of man's knowledge is based on a foundational assumption about the existence (or non-existence) of the God of the Bible, then how can any of man's ideas be neutral? Instead, all our ideas will ultimately be based on and testify to one view or the other.

In the 1950's a man named R.J. Rushdoony picked up Van Til's Biblically faithful view of man's knowledge and began to apply it to all of life. Van Til believed that it applied to all of life but in his lifetime he didn't really get to it. So, it remained for R. J. Rushdoony to pick up Van Til's work at apply it to other areas of life beyond philosophy. In particular, Rushdoony applied Van Til's "no neutrality" to the idea of law. Every law is either based on the truth about the God of the Bible or it is not. In this way Rushdoony argued that should have God's law for our society rather than man's law.