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Patrick Arnold's third place essay

The following is Patrick Arnold's third place essay.

In Defense of Revelation

Patrick Arnold

It is a preposterous idea that truth exists. Laughable, even. And, what’s more, to be found claiming that truth can be written, preserved, relearned, and defended — truth originating and communicated by a divine Being, no less! — is an all the more absurd idea to the minds of many today. Yet this is exactly what the Christian is called to defend, regardless of the convictions of the age. The questions we will ask throughout this essay, questions which Christians of every generation must ask, are these: How can God’s revelation be defended today, in the 2000s, and what challenges does it face from the philosophies of the world, and from theologies inside the churches?

This essay will not be aggrandizing the current state of secular America and the Western world, or the plights of its remaining Christian churches; nor will it be calling its readers back to that golden-age—the Reformation, say—when truth, knowledge, and Scripture itself were respected, loved, and sought after. The work of the believer in every age, especially those who seek to teach and defend the faith once and for all delivered, is less like some heroic tale of glorious and noble wars fought long ago, and more like the arduous and slow process of an ice-breaker pushing and breaking through paths an ever-freezing ocean of ice, in good seasons and in bad, with no visible end in sight. Such could be said of the work of Gordon Clark in which he analyzed, questioned, and challenged the thinkers and ideas facing Christianity during the 20^th century. The legacy that Clark has left, in books like God’s Hammer, is not best served by a museum or a dusty library; neither by idolized memorial and mere quotation, but by the classroom and the study. It is a legacy with a dual-function: it calls us back to Scripture, the surest guide the Christian has, the wholly and uniquely Word of God. And it calls us ahead, to continue to defend and teach the faith, and build upon the shoulders of giants God has raised up throughout the ages. It is with these two goals that this paper is directed as well.

Clark’s collection of essays in defense of Scripture sets out the apologetic agenda for generations to come and powerfully contributes to what Paul refers to when he states that “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised up against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”[1] Unfortunately, I cannot hope to build upon each of the pillars of his 11 articles, not the least because I lack Clark’s succinctness and the broadness of his understanding. The topics of this essay, then, are threefold: first, we will connect Clark’s arguments and exhortations to parallel theological issues facing the Protestant and biblical doctrine of Scripture today. Second, we will sketch some of the more philosophical changes in the decades since Clark’s work, and attempt to discern what new challenges (or old challenges with new faces) have been raised for Christianity and specifically its biblical doctrine of revelation. And third, we will elaborate on the program for defending the doctrine of revelation, which Clark outlines throughout the essays and what I will refer to as “catechesis into worldviews.”

No apology will be made for focusing on topics that an unfortunate number in Christian churches would unreflectively dismiss as utterly irrelevant to life as a believer and knowledge of Scripture. Admittedly, the surveys and arguments sketched here are not for everyone in the pews, in the same way that extensive study of the biblical languages, archaeology, textual development and (constructive) criticism, and more abstract theological debates are all the more not for everyone in the pews, though nonetheless necessary. Yet I ask the reader for patience, and if my essay is done well, the concerns and arguments raised in this essay will not be delusions of “philosophy and empty deceit” we are warned against, but will contribute as far as possible to the very opposite: the two goals of pointing back to Scripture, and ahead to a continuing defense and teaching of Scripture’s content, always seeking further the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that are in Christ.[2]

I. Continuing Theological Debates over the Doctrine of Scripture

            Let’s began by all-too briefly looking at three areas of continued development and debate surrounding the doctrine of Scripture Clark’s essays were originally published more than fifty years ago. As there is nothing new under the sun, so too, we will see, are these three challenges facing the doctrine of revelation little different in substance than what Clark battled in his essays—making many of his arguments and conclusions still applicable. The doctrine of Scripture Clark defends is a classically orthodox position, not limited to that of the Reformers but certainly ably articulated by them in creeds like the Westminster Confession. As the Confession famously states, “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture,” and therefore (among other corollaries) “The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.”[3] For these statements to be true—for the Bible to be the Word of God, the only sufficient, fully trustworthy and authoritative source of knowledge of God, his will and world—what must be true of this written revelation? As Clark argues throughout his collected essays addressing precisely this question, this written word must be inspired (authored ultimately by God even when written by humans with distinct styles and backgrounds), inerrant, sufficiently clear, and at least in part propositional (that is, containing statements of fact with determinate truth-values). But as we begin to unpack these features of special revelation, just as Clark discerned a plethora of objections to this doctrine in his day, so too do we find even many professing evangelicals undermining and subtly opposing revelation today.

First, there is the very question of Scripture’s view of itself. Does Scripture claim to be inspired and inerrant, making universal, absolute truths-claims? And if it does, what does it mean by these words, such as “inspired” and “truthful”? Clark starts with the biblical claims concerning itself, and returns to it repeatedly, citing both well-known texts like 2 Timothy 3:16 that declares all Scripture to be breathed out by God himself, and sampling some of the many lesser-known declarations in Scripture testifying to its own truthfulness and origin in God.[4] One would think if any debate were as good as over, it would be the Bible’s undeniable self-testimony to be the wholly true word of God. Yet as much as ever, this well-attested exegetical conclusion is attacked, often through eisegetical ploys or redefinitions necessitated by a broader worldview hostile to revelation.

For example, the late Stanley Grenz, once a defender of evangelicalism, emerged later in his life as one of the greatest apologists for a postmodern revision of Christianity. “We live in a linguistic world of our own making,” he argued. “As Berger and Luckmann note, human reality is ‘socially constructed reality.’”[5] In other words, Grenz thought, the world we inhabit, even with Scripture in hand, is one created by our own particular cultures, societies, and languages. Truth and theology, then, can only be local expressions of individual groups—there can be no absolute truth understandable by the human mind that breaks into this world with a “Thus saith the Lord.”[6] There can be no doubt that the anti-intellectual, anti-propositional, anti-logical nature of theological liberalism and Neo-orthodoxy is alive and well within many self-professed Christian churches that embrace Postmodernism, and Clark’s arguments particularly against Neo-orthodoxy and Existentialism remain as pertinent as ever, for at the heart of the postmodern turn in contemporary Christianity is the assumption that language is not just fallible and unable to carry understandable truths of the divine, but that language is unavoidably fraught with the culture, ideology, and beliefs of any given speaker.[7] The very idea of a propositional, written truth from God is, a fortiori, absurd for a postmodern theologian like Grenz. By these presuppositions, then, the inspiration and truthful, divine origin Scripture repeatedly claims for itself must be reinterpreted or categorically dismissed. But as, for example, Louis Gaussen’s Theopneustia compilation shows so obvious, the Protestant doctrine of Scripture summarized, for example, in the first chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith, is the Bible’s view of itself, and is antithetical to any postmodern revision.

Second, another attack on the truthfulness and reliability of Scripture has recently come from within historically Protestant groups. The idea that Scripture, while being fully true in all it claims, nonetheless presents a worldview of myths contrary to empirical science certainly did not die with Bultmann and his attempted demythologization of Scripture or Paul Tillich and his view that all religious language is inescapably symbolic. Peter Enns, formerly a professor of Old Testament at Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia, before his removal, argued in his 2005 book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament the often recited view that passages like the creation account in Genesis are myth, products of a premodern and unscientific worldview.[8] That is nothing new, but he also argues that this is fully consistent with the beliefs that the Bible is inerrant, inspired, and divinely authored while humanly written, as traditionally held by evangelicals. Words like “myth” are redefined by Enns to be in altogether different categories than questions of truthfulness. Here we see again the twisting of words Clark belabors to expose—more subtle, for example, than Kenneth Hamilton’s attempt to argue that all biblical language, even all language, is mythical in some way, but no less destructive. An inerrant, divinely authored body of statements cannot be combined with the view that the text also contains myths and misperceptions of flawed human authors, as some Reformed theologians have argued in response to Enns.[9] As Clark could have very well said in reply to Enns, “The chief difficulty with myths in not that they are literally false, but rather that their alleged non-literal ‘truth’ is meaningless.” Indeed, the meaning of words like myth, inerrant, and truth, are stretched beyond recognition by Enns and many others in the church today who wish to compromise the historic Protestant doctrine of Scripture. With the innumerable attacks against the truthfulness of Scripture and credibility of the Christian worldview coming from naturalistic science, viewing the Bible as a combination of ancient myths and platitudes is little more than a blatant concession to naturalism, going against (for example) the literal hermeneutic that characterizes how later writers like Peter and Paul often interpret the Old Testament.

Third (although we could list many more areas of debate), the doctrine of Scripture that we defend here, that has been defended in every generation by faithful believers as Clark did in his own, has seen both great development, and perhaps even greater disparagement, in the study of its transmission throughout history. The historical development and translation of the books of the Old and New Testaments—how the copies multiplied and changed over the centuries, how they were first organized into the canon Protestants accept today, how we may verify the reliability of the existing manuscripts and translations, what bearing textual studies have on our doctrine of Scripture and knowledge of God, and so on—is no doubt a challenging area of research that has, thankfully, witnessed much progress over the past few centuries and repeatedly confirms the accuracy of the Biblical text.

These are issues Clark must pass over and assume in each essay, and we must as well. But it is an area that needs continuing research and defense, not the least because of men who popularize many fictions and misrepresentations about the history and transmission of the Biblical texts. Bart Ehrman’s work, such as his book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, and the widely read novels of Dan Brown like The Da Vinci Code, have become standard citations of skeptics, both laymen and, amazingly, often academics alike.[10] What is most regrettable about such popular works is their lack of relevant, clear arguments against the accuracy of our knowledge of Scripture. Instead, they perpetuate gross misrepresentations, historical myths and generalizations about the history of the Bible since its writing, vastly exaggerating problems currently existing in textual criticism while underestimating or passing over the corresponding research done by Christians (and non-Christians) that support the truthfulness of Scripture. Claiming that the Bible we have today contains thousands upon thousands of differences in its existing manuscripts, and presenting these “findings” as if no one until, say, Bart Ehrman and other non-Christian scholars in the early 21^st century knew about them, is just one piece of propaganda among many in such recent popularized works. Scholarly, responsible and documented work in textual studies should be welcomed by Christians, especially when the reasonableness of the faith is not built upon taking the most recent work in textual studies and Bible difficulties as conclusive.[11]

II. Sustaining a Defense of Scripture in Today’s Philosophical Climate

            We have noted the continuing theological debates to get a glimpse of the challenges facing the doctrine of Scripture today, many of which are the same as Clark faced, and we have certainly not here settled them (although some very capable responses were referenced in the footnotes, to which I implore the reader to pursue). To proceed now from theological to philosophical issues might seem like a regression to some, a non sequitur to others. Some Christians take “philosophy” to be synonymous with “speculation,” or an elitist way of making things complicated with an air of superiority that common sense would say are quite simple. Who can deny that Christians doing philosophy have sometimes proceeded in such manners, and often failing to start with the truths in Scripture as ultimately authoritative? But this begs the question: What is the Christian’s relationship to philosophy? Of course, there are many non-Christian philosophies, much of which is hostile to Biblical Christianity. So let me make this a much simpler question: What is the Christian’s relationship to true philosophy? The answer at first is rather obvious. The Christian’s metaphysics is in part his doctrine of God and creation. The Christian’s epistemology is in part his doctrine of revelation. The Christian’s ethics is in part the moral nature and commandments of God. The Christian’s anthropology is in part his doctrine of man, sin, and redemption. And so on. All of this is to say that the Christian has a philosophy just in virtue of having a theology: the Christian has answers, theo­-centered answers, to many questions raised in philosophy. This overlap helps explains why a scholar like Gordon Clark could move so fluidly between theology and philosophy, and why he felt the need to take both seriously in his work.

            Readers of Clark’s work on philosophy, especially books like Religion, Reason and Revelation and A Christian View of Men and Things, will have a solid grasp of the main philosophers writing in his day and the corresponding ideas shaping the minds of his generation.[12] However, even in God’s Hammer there is a clear picture of the philosophical ideas underlying many of the current movements in theology—from the anti-intellectualism of existentialism impacting Neo-orthodoxy, to the logical positivism of A.J. Ayer ruling out a priori the possibility of divine revelation. [13] The method of Clark’s apologetic in chapter 5, “Special Divine Revelation as Rational,” is to survey the history of philosophy, from Aquinas to the Neo-orthodox, and show how each fails to safeguard the absoluteness of the laws of logic and the reasonableness and reliability of reason from skepticism and incoherence. “Both the naturalistic evolutionist and the evangelical Christian have their guiding principles,” Clark writes. But the former leaves us with no reason to believe that the human mind evolved to know absolute, universal laws of logic, or with reliable cognitive faculties—if there could even be such things in a materialistic universe. On the other hand, “The possibility of rational communication between God and man is easily explained on theistic presuppositions” given that a rational, omniscient God created both the human mind and languages, where both are able, even in their fallibility, to carry literal, objective truth.[14] Clark can only conclude that, “revelation is not only rational, but is the only hope of maintaining rationality.”[15]

            Just as Clark did not ignore his contemporaries who opposed Biblical doctrine, so too must we address those who oppose Biblical doctrine today, not merely historical figures like Kant, Hume, or Nietzsche, important as they are. The philosophical climate has changed over the past few decades, as it always does. Significantly, by the 1970s, logical positivism and its view that the only meaningful statements were those that were either analytic or verifiable by some empirical means had faded into a much deserved disrepute, even among the philosophers most committed to the results of the sciences and opposed to supernaturalism. Though logical positivism may be as good as dead, the view that the results of the hard sciences are the philosopher’s ultimate, unquestionable authority reigns supreme, and the view that a naturalistic interpretation of the data of these sciences is the only possible, coherent interpretation cyclically perpetuates the dominance of the worldview. At least since the work of W. V. Quine and his essay “Epistemology Naturalized,” virtually every area and problem of philosophy has been subjected to attempts at “naturalization,” to be reduced to or explained in terms of the natural sciences.[16] The now famous work of Paul and Patricia Churchland in developing the materialistic philosophy of “eliminitivism,” which eliminates all concepts of so-called folk psychology, like beliefs and desires, in favor of sophisticated reports of neural activity, is but one extreme example of a now common methodology in academic philosophy.[17]

            For all the challenges Christian theology and philosophy faces from contemporary, analytic philosophy and its unquestionable commitment to naturalism and a naturalistic interpretation of the sciences, it is perhaps not influencing the minds of many in America as much as another, popular and largely pop-culture movement. Analytic philosophy in America threatens to plummet itself into obscurity because of its obsessive concern with minute details and daunting technical vocabulary, as well as its almost complete absence from public life and debate. The movement often dubbed “new atheism,” however, boasts of numerous books on best-seller lists, popular and charismatic public intellectuals from a variety of disciplines, and a growing following among Americans (16% of which now identify themselves as atheists, agnostics, or of no religion/secular, one recent report indicates—but this is merely to reaffirm what’s now common knowledge).[18] Books like The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything are not bestsellers for their careful research, fair presentations, and logical arguments with detailed expositions.[19] In them it is asserted that Christians, like all religious believers, rely on an irrational faith—a subjective and non-rational faith described in much the same way as Kierkegaard’s “objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness of truth” that Clark argues is at the heart of many aberrant theological systems like Neo-orthodoxy, but does not represent the rational, cognitive faith of Biblical Christianity. But the new atheists pretend that this subjective irrationalism which can only appeal to faith against the evidence is all Christianity has ever offered or can ever offer; and what’s worse, Christianity has perpetuated evils far beyond what a rational society simply following the dictates of natural, atheistic science could ever commit. Uniformly, these atheists conclude that we should not merely reject the claims of Christianity, but fervently oppose it and seek its elimination from society. It does not take Christian philosophers to point out the inadequacies of the new atheism, however. For instance, Michael Ruse, a well-established atheist and professor of philosophy at Florida State University, pointedly states,

Let me say that I believe the new atheists do the side of science a grave disservice…. I think first that these people do a disservice to scholarship. Their treatment of the religious viewpoint is pathetic to the point of non-being. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing…. I am indignant at the poor quality of the argumentation in Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and all of the others in that group.[20]

It is difficult to know how to respond to the increasingly widespread propaganda of this movement. Book length responses have shown the “arguments” of the new atheism to be little more than forceful rhetoric—in fact, far better arguments against some of the traditional proofs for God’s existence can be found in Clark’s own writings![21] Yet to what avail? The movement shows no sign of slowing down. Has the fool’s folly been adequately answered? How should the naturalism dominating science and academic philosophy, the new atheism rapidly growing in influence across Western societies, as well as the ever-persistent attacks on special revelation from inside the churches, many of which from the continuing heirs of theological liberalism and Neo-orthodoxy, be answered by Biblical Christians? Let’s conclude this essay by again building on the program laid out in Clark’s essays.

III. Catechesis into Worldviews

            Readers beginning Clark’s collection of articles in defense of Scripture may likely purview the title of the first chapter—“How May I Know the Bible Is Inspired?”—in hopes of an elaborate, detailed and direct argument for why the Bible, likely sitting nearby the reader, is the inspired, inerrant and unique written Word of God. Perhaps the reader gets to the last half, after Clark (as must be done) sorts through undefined terms and opposing theories, titled “The Proof of Inspiration” and “The Testimony of the Holy Spirit,” and ends up sorely disappointed. Hasn’t Clark just asserted that we can know the Bible is inspired because it is harmonious—it just all fits together so nicely—and, after all, the Holy Spirit gives certain testimony of its truthfulness and divine origin to the believer? What kind of argument is that? the reader might ask, with a touch of cynicism perhaps. I suggest that the reader look a little more carefully at Clark’s arguments, and consider them a bit longer before dismissing them as naïve question-begging. First of all, it may be wise to distinguish these two sections—the proof, and the testimony—in terms of reasons versus causes. The logical consistency of the many and diverse books that make up the Bible is meant to be purely a reason, an evidence, for the doctrine of inspiration. It does not ultimately explain the psychological facts of why people accept the basic premises of the argument—the cause, in other words, of belief, which is and can be none other than the inward working of the Holy Spirit. The testimony of the Holy Spirit is meant to solve the “problem of how to accept a premise,” to answer the question, “What makes a man accept an initial proposition?”[22] And the inspiration of the Bible is a proposition, it should be emphasized, that man is fundamentally, ontologically and morally opposed to, as a result of the Fall and the sinfulness of mankind, as Clark goes on to explain in the next section.

            But this leaves us with the problem of how to understand the reason Clark gives for believing inspiration. Surely it is an argument, but how can the internal self-consistency of Scripture be a strong argument, one unique to Christianity (and not, say Mormonism)? Notice that Clark provides the program for defending inspiration, but not the full argument itself. As he states, “because it is so intricate and difficult, one naturally wonders about an easier method.” [23] Let’s call this argument in its fullest form catechesis into worldviews. The first premise of the argument is none other than teaching the whole of Scripture. In piecemeal, we find this in the great catechisms and confessions of the early church and Reformation, as well as in expositional commentaries on the Bible fleshing out these themes in individual books, as well as the intricate, logical and detailed works of systematic theology like Calvin’s Institutes and Biblical theology like Vos’s Biblical Theology to tie it all together. The more that Scripture can be accurately taught, the more self-consistent and interrelated it is shown to be (and the better story it all the more becomes), making the idea of a single author increasingly reasonable. But the “pupil” is then increasingly faced with a choice. Either Scripture has the single divine author it attributes to itself while also mediated by numerous human writers, or the book is a rather freakish accident of self-consistent and interwoven stories with the same worldview—a self-perpetuating religious deception solely created by dozens of uneducated, mostly uncivilized and primitive authors or editors bridging a millennium of time as well as cultures as diverse as the Hebrew and the Greco-Roman to produce a theology and story that two-thousand years of Christian theologians have not been able to exhaust. As Clark notes, the more consistent Scripture is seen to be, the more it must either be accepted or rejected in whole—in other words, the more it all stands or falls together.

            But that is only the first and positive premise. The second, I suggest, is negative, and involves catechesis not into the Scriptural worldview, but the prominent non-Christian worldviews, and in the same detail. The suggestion that, to judge whether the claim that the Bible is inspired, one must know the Bible well and one must also know the available non-Christian worldviews well, too, is probably not surprising. However, I suggest that the main worldviews facing the individual, whether naturalism or Hinduism or Islam, be approached with a great respect and careful study, with an honest desire to learn them on their own terms. In our case in America, with the dominance of naturalism, the reader who wants to take in the full force of Clark’s argument has the task not merely of being catechized into Christianity, but into Naturalism as well, for the same principles apply. The deeper someone understands a worldview like Naturalism, the more he or she will be able to judge its self-consistency. This second premise is demonstrated (but certainly not exhausted) in Clark’s own work, primarily in his introductory history of philosophy and his surveys of non-Christian philosophies—especially epistemologies— in his other works. The best argument against a worldview like Naturalism is in the history of philosophy itself, Clark shows, and the self-consistent systematic narrative and history of the Bible stands alone.

            No wonder Clark says the argument is difficult and intricate, but his dedication to careful study of Christianity and non-Christian philosophies is a testament to the confidence he had in the truthfulness and power of Christianity in the face of the world’s strongest opposition. To best judge the depth of the self-consistency of the Bible, and judge whether it is alone in this or surpassed by that of other worldviews, one must immerse himself in a study of both – a catechumen of worldviews. But who will do this? What proponent of new atheism will seek out the answers Christian scholars have given to the challenges raised against Scripture and the faith, when few of them understand even the basic elements of Christianity? The same could be said for many Christians, not only in their understanding of, say, naturalism, but their very understanding of Christianity itself. Just as regrettably, who has the time to fully feel the weight of this argument for inspiration—indeed, for the Christian faith? Life is not long enough to exhaust the story and system of Scripture, after all, let alone other worldviews as well. We have a good deal to thank men like Clark, men whom God has raised up to dedicate their lives to defending and expounding Scripture, philosophy, and other religions, in the service of the church. And all the more we can thank God for the work of the Holy Spirit in the mind and hearts of believers, giving the testimony of the truthfulness and inspiration of God’s written revelation. Yet the task remains with much work still to do even after men like Clark. Any who wish to judge and decide could very well flip a coin, or they could study Christianity, Naturalism, and the other worldviews before him. There’s work to do, and we best get to it, as far as we are able.