“A ‘limiting concept’ for Van Til is one that needs another if it is to be properly understood. It implies a complementarity. For example, one part of the Bible will not be properly understood without the other parts.”
For Kant, a limiting concept means a barrier beyond which human reason cannot go. God, as a concept, limits human thought, whether or not he exists.”
William Edgar
This idea of CVT of a limiting concept is distinct from the idea of a limiting concept for someone like Kant who posited a noumenal realm, the contents of which were indefinable and unknown to man. Kant placed God in that noumenal realm but still spoke of God but only as a limiting concept to keep man’s abstractions from completely slipping off the table.
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“Though for Kant a limiting concept presupposed his agnosticism with respect to our knowledge of the noumenal, for Van Til a limiting concept is that which is, at one and the same time, determined and defined by another, limiting, concept. Thus, the doctrine of election is a limiting concept with respect to our choices. It should be remembered that limiting concepts are not necessarily on a par with each other. God’s election precedes our choices. Given creation, however, one (freedom) is defined and determined by the other (election).”
Scott Oliphint
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(1)The Neo-Orthodoxy foundational principle is (2) dialecticalism. The dialectical principle consists of the idea of the (3) exhaustive humanist correlativism of God and man, as (4) limiting concepts, as expressed in the idea of (5) the sovereign meaning making Kierkegaardian subjective individual.
1.) Neo-orthodoxy = Barthianism
This idea is still frequently found in the Church today and is taught in one form or another in most of the mainline Seminaries. (Note – Postmodernism in its varied expressions is just an extension of this neo-orthodox existentialism.)
2.) Dialecticalism — Reasoning by way of taking opposite principles (thesis vs. anti-thesis) and arriving at a “truth” that is a synthesis of each opposite extreme.
3.) Exhaustive human correlativism of God and Man = The Neo-orthodox take the idea of God and Man (as defined anthropocentrically by autonomous man) as interconnected opposites and then preforms the operation described in #2.
4.) Limiting concepts = For the neo-orthodox neither God or Man is concretely defined. The only purpose they have is to provide conceptual limits for the purpose of reasoning. God existed in the noumenal (unknown) realm and so anything said about God is just an abstraction intended to provide boundaries for reasoning. Man exists in the phenomenal (known) realm but as man cannot be known without a known God man also becomes an abstraction intended to provide boundaries for reasoning vis-a-vis a God which only exists as an man-made autonomously created limited concept. (Note — The word “God” is merely a placeholder for the projection of autonomous man. Such a god has no independent existence.) Man and God are thus each and both limiting concepts of the other.
5.) the idea of the sovereign meaning making Kierkegaardian subjective individual = The Philosophy of Kierkegaard which held that the subjective individual was sovereign and as such was the one who was responsible for making meaning. For Kierkegarrd the Objective (God) had disappeared and all that was left was the sovereign meaning making subjective individual.
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“Since all unbelief is resigned to the dialectical methodology, it is the foundational principle not only of Neo-Orthodoxy, but of every ideology that is not Biblical, Historic, Reformed Christianity. Neo-Orthodoxy is simply a pretense of Christianity that doesn’t really want to be Christianity.”
Scott Craig Mooney
