This is another post on how Van Til misled me.  It has to do with God and glory.
Van Til asserted that a belief in the God of the Bible involved accepting the “full-bucket paradox”–that you could add to that which was already full.  What was being added, he said, was glory to God, even though God was already all-glorious.

I suppose I should interject a word about paradox in theology.  The difference between a real contradiction and an apparent contradiction is that one is, in principle, reconcilable, but the person doesn’t know how yet.  The whole idea behind an apparent contradiction is that we can know truths without knowing the truth of how the two truths can both be true.

So, I have no problem acknowledging that there are things that appear contradictory and aren’t really so.  And it is perfectly conceivable, in my opinion, that God can tell us things that we don’t understand how to relate to one another.  We don’t have the right to reject one of both of these affirmations because we can’t reconcile them.

All this is to say that my present disbelief in the “full-bucket paradox” is not due to some refusal to accept the possibility that a paradox is the best we can do.

For a long time I did accept this paradox, taking it as an unquestioned axiom that God did all things for his own glory in that sense.  I was taught better when I attended a Sunday School class that consisted in videos of John Gerstner’s “Handout Theology.”  I was more or less prejudiced against Gerstner, because of my loyalty to Van Til and Gerstner’s commitment to “classical” apologetics.  Also, Gerstner said some things about God and creation in the name of logic which sounded, and still sound to my ears, seriously heretical.

So when he addressed the “full-bucket paradox,” I wasn’t in the state of mind to hear him.  But he did address it.  He said that God did not do anything to glorify himself but to reveal his glory.

My automatic response was, “Well that doesn’t explain anything!  If God wants to reveal his glory, we have to ask why He does so.  Obviously, he does it to glorify himself.  So the paradox remains.”

It wasn’t until years later, during one of my unsuccessful attempts to get all the way through a Nozick book,  that I realized I had made an unnecessary assumption.  In order to offer an explanation for God’s basic behavior, all one has to do is offer a self-subsuming rule–a rule that explains itself; a rule that explains the decision to adopt the rule.  Doing all things for one’s own glory works that way.  Once can explain the decision to adopt the rule on the basis of the rule.  But Gerstner’s alternative works just as well.  There is no reason to assume some more basic motivation underlies it.

Of course, later, I was taught a more Trinitarian approach in which the persons of the Trinity eternally give themselves to one another, glorifying one another.