2 * 2 = 4. Dem stimmen Christen wie Nicht-Christen zu. Cornelius van Til meint: Ja, aber sie bringen diese Rechnung nicht mit dem Gesetz Gottes in Verbindung. Dies bringt sie weiter weg von Gott, anstatt sie näher zu ihm zu bringen:
Now the fact that two times two are four does not mean the same thing to you as a believer and to someone else as an unbeliever. When you think of two times two as four, you connect this fact with numerical law, you must connect munerical law with all law. The question you face, then, is whether law exists in ist own right or is an expression of the will and nature of God. Thus the fact that two times two are four enables you to implicate yourself more deeply into the nature and will of God. On the other hand, when an unbeliever says that two times two are four, he will also be led to connect this fact with the whole idea of law; but he will regard this law as independent of God. Thus the fact that two times two are four enables him, so he thinks, to get farther away from God. And it is this basic difference between what ‘two times two are four’ means to the unbeliever that the doctrine of common grace has helped us to see. It has enabled us to focus our attention upon the antithesis without fearing that we ar doing injustice to any of the facts that surround us. (7-8)
Wie sieht van Til die Rolle der Allgemeinen Gnade?
Common grace helps to point out that things which look alike are not ultimately alike. Common grace points specifically to the fact that similarities between the people of God and the people of this world are but proximate similarities and that these proximate similarities play before the background of ultimate differences. (7)
Van Til kommt deshalb zum Schluss:
(A)rithmetic must be taught in a Christian School. It cannot be taught anywhere else. (18)
If … the finite personality is not placed face to face with God, and the ‘facts’ about which the finite personality is to learn or the Environment to which it is to be adjusted is not placed face to face with God, there cannot possibly be any fruitful contact between the subject and the object of knowledge. (23)
Cornelius van Til. Antithesis in Christian Education. In: Louis Berkhof. Cornelius van Til. Foundations of Christian Education. P & R: Phillipsburg 1990 (reprinted).
