Here is one of the many Leithatisms I missed when first minted:

Based on a student’s questioning, I’m wondering whether “presuppositionalism” is the best term to describe what Vantillians are after. We don’t, after all, come up with some kind of set of axioms or theological idea “prior” to receiving revelation. We can talk about making the Triune God our “starting point” as much as we want, but faith in the Triune God is not in fact the “starting point” of our thinking (in either a chronological or logical sense). I like Frame’s revisionist view that “presuppositions” are really “basic commitments,” but that still seems to individualistic to me. I’d rather think of how we can ecclesiologize Van Til: Instead of saying that “all our thinking is grounded in the presupposition of the Triune God of Scripture,” we might say “as Christians we think and act from within the Church, which is the body of Christ and the community of worshipers of the Triune God.” This moves Van Til in the direction of postliberals and postmoderns, but that’s not a bad move in this case I think.

I’m wondering if it would be helpful to say that Van Til needs some help from Wittgenstein (spoiling Egypt and all that). Having read a ton and a half of “book-length material” (an appropriate phrase since many of these books gave notice on the title page that they were not books) by Van Til, I thought I had special insight into W’s On Certainty. But now I’m pretty sure I fundamentally misunderstood W. I equated “language game” with something close to “ultimate presupposition.” But I don’t think W. is often thinking of a self-conscious proposition held in one’s mind. I think his point was that humans have ingrained postures in every (including the most literal) sense of the word. What makes you instinctively bow your head is as much a part of W’s language games as what ideas you never question.

Whenever we think about knowledge, we need to remember what it means to know how to play chess. Does one know by having the rules memorized? Or is something else meant?

Presuppositions must be embodied to be presuppositions.