Gordon H. Clark’s scripturalism: Shawn Lazar’s revision

Shawn Lazar, Grace Evangelical Society

Shortly after posting Gordon H. Clark’s problematic rationalism a couple of weeks ago, I discovered the best sympathetically critical study of Clark I’ve ever read in the last thirty-five years. From first page to last, it’s well-written. It’s Shawn Lazar‘s Scripturalism and the Senses: Reviving Gordon Clark’s Apologetic, available in paperback or Kindle on Amazon. You can also freely download it as a pdf. (Many of his other writings are also available on that site. You may be asked why you want to access it.)

While reading Lazar, it occurred to me that defending the Christian worldview as the only one that can support rational defense itself—my approach to apologetics (see this and this)—one must first grasp and interrelate that worldview’s elements and their interconnections by reading Scripture, trusting that whatever affirms, teaches, and implies, God affirms, teaches, and implies.

That thought kept me reading Scripturalism and the Senses, even though the author would disagree with my inference. For that, in a word, is what Lazar’s revision of the “master axiom” of Clark’s Scripturalism amounts to:

The Bible is the only source of truth.

Lazar shows that this formulation overstated the matter and led many of Clark’s admirers to say “No thanks.” For even from the Bible we learn that we know things before and apart from reading Scripture. Even to do that, we have to know that’s what we’re doing when we interpret the Bible’s (or any other writing’s) alphabetic symbols as meaningful expressions.

Lazar reformulates Scripturalism’s master axiom this way:

The Bible is the word of God without error, true in all it teaches, affirms, and implies.

Among the propositions that the Bible teaches, affirms, or implies is that we may rely on our sense organs, fallible though they are, in the acquisition of knowledge. There are other sources of truth, but since truth cannot contradict truth, no truth can contradict the Bible. When in doubt, refer to the master axiom.

Further, we don’t need an epistemology to justify belief in the reliability of our sensory apparatus. We believe in its cognitive reliability because Scripture reveals that about us. The Bible’s trustworthiness about the human condition, including its cognitive powers, is axiomatic.

As an absolute starting point, an axiom is not a proper object of direct justification. By its fruit shall you vindicate (or vitiate) your master axiom. The fruit of the Scripturalist master axiom is—and this is my take on Lazar, not his words—that the the Biblical worldview alone makes sense of (a) apologetics (answering de jure or de facto objections to the Christian faith) and (b) metapologetics (vindicating one’s absolute starting point for one’s worldview).

Especially enjoyable for me was Lazar’s discussion of writers who have taught me much over the years, including Alvin Plantinga (proper functioning of our cognitive faculties, proper basicality of beliefs, and critique of naturalism) and David Ray Griffin (hardcore commonsense beliefs).

He thinks Greg L. Bahnsen, another strong influence on me, wrong for subordinating logic to the Biblical worldview. Unless the world has been created and is sustained by God, however, I fail to see how logic has purchase. A failure of insight on my part, perhaps.

The alleged “priority” of logic is (in my opinion) a pragmatically reinforced delusion. Only because the world has been created by the One Whose understanding is infinite (Psalm 147:5) may we rightly affirm that A = A and that A ≠~A.

A controversy for another day. There’s much in Lazar’s monograph I haven’t touched upon in this post, which does not qualify as a book review. I unreservedly recommend Scripturalism and the Senses to anyone interested in a fresh look at metapologetics in general and Gordon Clark in particular. I hope to make time to investigate Shawn Lazar’s other studies.

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