My Philosophy after Christ project continues with notes on the late Reformed philosopher Gordon Haddon Clark (1902-1985). Douglas Douma, the author of The Presbyterian Philosopher: The Authorized Biography of Gordon H. Clark, recently posted an essay about how one ought to go about defending the Christian faith (AKA, apologetics methodology). I commend Douma’s stimulating post to readers. It forms the background of this one, a (nonexhaustive) commentary upon most of it.
We sometimes learn by drawing contrasts, and when it comes to defending the Christian faith, one of the most instructive is that between the apologetics method of Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) and Clark’s.
For Van Til and his expositor Greg L. Bahnsen (1948-1995), the first question is: what worldview are unbelievers presupposing when they raise their objections?
For Clark and the first proponent of his philosophy and theology, John W. Robbins (1948-2008), it is: how do you know? For Clark, that means: what axiom does your objection to Christianity presuppose and what follows from it?
For Clark and Clarkians, the only rationally defensible axiom is: the Bible is the Word of God and therefore every proposition affirmed or taught in it may be taken as true and upon it one may build a philosophy of life.
For a time in the late ‘80s, I was a Clarkian (see my exchange with Bahnsen here and here. I was also a correspondent of Robbins’s. I have copies of our letters; Robbins’s estate should as well.) I had been a recent graduate student in philosophy, and Gordon Clark (who chaired Butler University’s philosophy department for 28 years) epitomized for me the ideal of Christian intellectual. That he also admired aspects of the thought of one of my philosophical heroes, Brand Blanshard, was also a plus for me.
A couple posts ago I wrote:
For decades I asked, “What is the evidence or argument for this worldview?” (for example, Marxism, Existentialism, or Christianity). It was the wrong question. I had been assuming that “worldview” always means an explicitly held ideology, philosophy, or theology, a system of ideas one is obliged to justify (or counter) with evidence and argument. One does not, however, argue for one’s worldview, at least not one’s basic worldview. Rather, one’s basic worldview—a network of nonnegotiable beliefs about one’s relationship to others, to the cosmos, and to God—is the foundation upon on which one argues or asks questions. One’s basic worldview is implicated in the effort to argue or justify. It gets expressed in socially and historically conditioned ideologies, philosophies, and theologies. They are many, but the worldview-forming capacity, like the language-forming capacity, is anthropologically one.
This wasn’t clear to me, however, when I was “debating” Robbins about the merits of Clark’s apologetic methodology. (Critics are free to think my present clarity is without warrant.) I assumed (naively) that it’s always appropriate to ask, “How do you know?” I now say “How do you know?” presupposes answers to more basic questions, such as, “What kind of world is it such that the quest for knowledge of the truth makes sense to an English-speaker above a certain age with the leisure and interest to ask it?”
The question “How do you know?” can translate (or be translated into) equivalent thoughts in hundreds of other natural languages. To the expected Clarkian comeback: “How do you know that?,” I answer: when I read the Bible, I get the impression that God created us to communicate linguistically, which means interacting and grappling with the world with our bodies with their central nervous systems and organs of sensation.
In my view (for which neither Van Til nor Bahnsen are to blame), the Bible is not a set of gunk-free thoughts or axioms, innocent of the historical contingencies of linguistic development. Rather, the Bible is a body of divine thoughts communicated through symbols, themselves rendered and conveyed physically and therefore temporally. The figures we meet in Scripture no more fret over epistemology than eating or sleeping.
Knowing is something we were created to do spontaneously, like walking, eating, sleeping, and praying. We can reflect critically on our knowing, asking what exactly we’re doing when we’re doing that. To play the skeptic about the intellectually processed deliverances of our senses, however, invites the risk of evading responsibility for what we know. (“I don’t really know that I cheated on my spouse, and therefore that I am guilty of adultery. That’s just my fallible opinion.”) Adam was disobedient, but when he didn’t doubt that God spoke to him in the garden, he didn’t evade an intellectual exigency or fail to meet a cognitive obligation.
Clark’s philosophical reflections were under the control of a rationalist paradigm of knowledge. Only someone else as steeped as he was in the Western philosophical tradition had a prayer of dislodging that commitment in a debate. No debating partner of his, to my knowledge, had the skill necessary to realize that hope.
No Biblical theory of knowledge consigns everything we believe outside of Scripture—especially true beliefs—to the bin labeled “mere opinion” (δόξα, doxa). Human knowledge does not have to meet the standard of episteme (ἐπιστήμη), as Clark held. Should not a Biblical theory of knowledge account for Adam’s knowing (יָדַ֖ע, yada) Eve (Genesis 4:1) and Mary’s not knowing (οὐ γινώσκω, ou ginosko) any man before her marriage to Joseph (Luke 1:34) (and Gordon Clark’s knowing Mrs. Clark)?
In human knowing, the physical cooperates with the intellectual. These two aspect don’t somehow “come together,” because they’re never apart. They are intrinsically and inextricably linked. We can notionally distinguish them, but why would a Christian want to decouple them? Human insight or intellectual grasp is always into what is given in sensation or the imagination, both of which are brain functions.
This holds for logic and mathematics as it does for sensory perception. We symbolically express our syllogisms and equations after conjuring them in our imaginations. That is, in our brains. We interpret the alphabetic symbols arranged in our Bibles. But our interpretations don’t necessarily lead to certainty. The Holy Spirit may convince us incorrigibly of truths, but the quest for certainty is not Biblical. It is a thoroughly modern enterprise.1
Douma writes that Clark’s “apologetic methodology flowed from his theory of knowledge.” But is that the right order? Does Scripture indicate it? One’s apologetic methodology ought to follow Biblical anthropology. In the Bible, I do not find an affirmation of the primacy or priority of epistemology. Insistence on the latter betrays a “worldly philosophy.”
“The Van Til school, in contrast, seems to have jumped over the subject of epistemology and gone straight into apologetics,” Douma writes. “There is little developed epistemology in Van Til or his followers.” But they didn’t “jump over” epistemology. Rather, they grounded the task of discovering and formulating such a theory in Scripture’s worldview. One can inductively derive an epistemology from Scripture, but Clark’s standard was strict deduction from axioms. For him, induction, a formal fallacy, is useless.
Yet in at least a couple of places, Christ Himself seems to have assumed that an inductive inference could ground discernment. Take, for example, Matthew 16:2-3 (KJV):
The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven. He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?
Or Luke 12:54-56 (KJV):
And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is. And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?
Christ was not endorsing empiricism when He acknowledged his audience’s pragmatic confidence when interpreting the sky’s color or a cloud’s movements or in drawing other perceptual inferences. Rather, He grounded His rhetoric in the way people actually relate cognitively to the world. He faulted them for their hypocrisy or lack of spiritual discernment. But not for succumbing to “the fallacy of induction.”
“For Clark,” Douma writes, “the Bible itself is the Word of God and therefore all of its propositions are true.” No Van Tillian denies this. But propositions are embodied, enfleshed, incarnated in creation’s physical aspect, analogously to the Logos of God. A divine person incarnated Himself in a descendant of David and male offspring of Mary. The Word was made flesh (John 1:14). Who other than a Platonist or other species of rationalist would be offended by this?
Clark surmised that God uses the Bible to occasion propositions in the minds of its readers. But what’s the theory of this alleged occurrence? It’s a conjecture. “God reveals knowledge not through the senses (which cannot produce propositions), but directly to man’s man mind ordinarily upon the reading or hearing of Scripture.” In other words, any connection between the black marks on the Bible’s white pages and the divinely intended propositional communication is purely coincidental, and God sovereignly controls the coinciding vectors. But the connection is not humanly intelligible.
In order to prevent an infinite regress [Douma writes] some truth must be assumed. The empiricist assumes sensory perception, the Christian (according to Clark) must assume the truth of God’s revelation in the Holy Bible. To ask one to prove the truth of the Scriptures is to miss the point. To prove the Bible in such a fashion would be to assume something else as more trustworthy, and that is an affront to God.
Or, we can presuppose the worldview one discovers in Scripture (what I’m currently calling our “birthright” worldview2) and have an insight into it: it is the only one that makes sense of our sense-making (social, scientific, historical, esthetic, etc.). This does not involve “proving the truth of the Scriptures,” but understanding, in the light of Scripture, who we are.
As Clark denied the validity of Thomistic and Van Tillian “proofs” for God’s existence, he has been labeled as a “fideist.” This is a term he was in some ways willing to embrace. (See Three Types of Religious Philosophy, p. 7) But when he provided arguments (rather than attempted proofs) for the Christian faith, some of the same critics labelled him a “rationalist.” Neither of these labels fit the man’s thought. While a choice must be made, it is not without arguments. And while logic is necessary in showing the consistency of a worldview, it is the Holy Spirit that causes belief rather than any demonstrable “proof.”
But what “moves the needle”? Van Til suggested that discerning “the impossibility of the contrary,” that is, the inability of any non-Christian worldview to make sense of sense-making. (I wish Van Til had written “the impossibility of the contradictory,” as contraries can both be true. Bahnsen, the Ph.D. in philosophy, should have corrected this formulation.) The issue is the ground of intelligible predication, an issue Clark never took up. His theological and philosophical discourse presupposed that intelligible predication occurs, but he never gave an account of for the very thing every participant in an apologetic exchange depends upon.
His [Clark’s] critique was not a sweeping transcendental argument, but a one-by-one demonstration of the inconsistencies of non-Christian views.” These are not mutually exclusive enterprises.
The problem is that the serial approach is that it’s not exhaustive. The transcendental argument (TA) attempts to show the exclusive power of the Christian worldview to ground intelligible predication (including that of the TA itself), and that requires showing that the God-Man-World relationship laid out in Scripture alone does the job. Douma chose this passage of Clark’s to explain the apologist’s job:
The process of the reductio [ad absurdum] must be explained to him [the nonbeliever]. There are two parts to the process. First the apologete must show that the axioms of secularism result in self-contradiction. . . . Then, second, the apologete must exhibit the internal consistency of the Christian system. When these two points have been made clear, the Christian will urge the unbeliever to repudiate the axioms of secularism and accept God’s revelation. That is, the unbeliever will be asked to change his mind completely, to repent. This type of apologetic argument . . . [does not] deny that in fact repentance comes only as a gift from God” (Karl Barth’s Theological Method, p. 110.)
With respect: perhaps this describes what an advanced seminary student might be able to do; there’s no reason to think that’s what the Apostle Peter expected Christians to do when he issued our apologetic marching orders (1 Peter 3:15), that is, be always ready to give a defense (ἀπολογία, apologia) of the hope we have in Christ. In his many debates, seminars, and lectures, Bahnsen showed that any Christian of normal intelligence, not only those trained in academic philosophy, could press unbelievers with questions their worldviews can’t answer.3 They’re not required, nor should they be, to “explain the reductio,” or show how secular axioms generate self-contradiction, or demonstrate that the Christian system is internally consistent. Even if justified, such a task would be reserved for above-average apologetes for an above-average unbeliever.
One problem for rationalists (but not only them) is that self-contradiction is problematic only in a completely intelligible universe—which only the believer in the God of the Bible has a warrant for affirming. Without a completely intelligible (because Yahweh-created) universe, the charge of self-contradiction has no force. Without it, logical consistency floats in a void. Clark brought to apologetics the prior conviction in the complete intelligibility of the cosmos, that it harbors no surds, and that logical consistency should be the test of any philosophy on offer. This approach is not saved by translating John 1:1 as “In the beginning was logic.”4 As created in the image of God, we’re programmed, as it were, to approach creation with that presupposition, but only the Bible-believing Christian has a plausible account of it.
Cognizant that I might have missed something that eviscerates what I’ve written, I’ll leave things there for now. I appreciate Douglas Douma’s scholarly efforts on behalf of Clark’s thought, in particular the essay that occasioned this one.
And thanks to David Lull for bringing it to my attention last week.
Notes
1 See, for example, Barbara Fuchs and Mercedes García-Arenal, The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe: From Inquisition to Inquiry, 1550-1700. University of Toronto Press, 2020.
2 I explore the idea of a “birthright worldview” in several posts:
3 See, for example, his 1984 university debate with Gordon Stein and 1991 radio debate with George Smith. I commented upon and provided a transcription of the latter exchange here.
4 Gordon H. Clark, Logic: “In the beginning was Logic, and Logic was with God, and Logic was God. . . . In logic was life and the life was the light of men.” In many publications Clark demonstrated his command of Koine as well as Attic Greek, but this rendering of the opening verses of John 1 tailors translation and exegesis to what a prior philosophical commitment requires. See a discussion of this here. A defense of Clark against Bahnsen’s alleged misconstrual, here.