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. Continue reading “Gordon H. Clark’s scripturalism: Shawn Lazar’s revision”