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s2smodern

Greetings Friends.  I am currently reading Van Til (Common Grace and the Gospel), while I am working on a book introducing Augustine.  I have also been reading Etienne Gilson on a variety of things.  With Van Til in mind, it is interesting what Bonaventure could say (I have in front of me Gilson's The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure.  Here is Gilson on Bonaventure:

"Consider Adam's intellect: it was endowed with a perfectly right knowledge. Truth, by St. Anselm's definition, is  rectitude perceptible only by the soul: which signifies that the thought of God is the measure of all things, that things are true in so far as they are conformed to the thought God has of them, and that our thought in turn is true in so far as it is conformed to the nature of things and to the divine model that they reproduce." (p. 432).

Now, I suspect Van Til could pretty much affirm/say this.  Things are the way they are because God has created all things, and he currently is governing all things.  In Van Til's terms, there are no "brute facts."  Rather, all things are--all the way down--"interpreted" facts.  That is, God's understanding or "interpretation" of all things is what a thing (and every thing) is.  

Thus--as Van Til works this out, we come to truly understand something, when we understand it in light of, and in agreement with, and in terms of God's understanding or "interpretation" of what a thing is.