The Philosophy & Apologetic of Gordon H. Clark

Revealed Apologetics

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Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala, and today we have a special guest and we're going to be covering a topic that is of great interest to me as someone who is very much interested in apologetic methodology, presuppositional apologetics, the different schools within presuppositionalism, and so today we're actually going to be talking about the red -headed stepchild of presuppositionalism.

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Gordon H. Clark, and I say that completely joking. A lot of people know me as being one who is very much

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Vantillian in his apologetic methodology or Bonsonian. I very much am more in line with that school of thought.

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However, my deep down dark secret is that I really, really love

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Gordon Clark, and it is a crying shame that many people who do study up on presuppositionalism have not actually availed themselves of the work of Dr.

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Gordon Clark, and so I have a guest who has written the authoritative biography.

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The Graham Poomba, I don't even know if there's any other biographies on Clark written, but the guest that I have on today, his name is

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Doug Dauma, and he is the author of the Presbyterian Philosopher, the Authorized Biography of Gordon Clark.

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Now, if you think biographies are boring, let me tell you something. Once I purchased that book digitally,

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I could not put my phone down, my iPad down. I read that so quickly, and this is a big deal because I'm a busy guy.

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I usually don't have time to read in large segments, but I could not put that down.

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I got educated not only on the philosophy of Clark, his apologetic, the controversy surrounding him and Van Til, but I also got an awesome little history lesson on the development of the

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Presbyterian Church in the U .S., and so there's just so much fascinating things there.

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Doug is an engaging writer and definitely just a brilliant guy in his understanding of Clark.

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He's very humble. He'll come on and say, well, you know, I'm just gonna share my thoughts. Oh, stop it. He's got so much to offer, and I'm very excited to have him on, so without further ado,

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I want to, oh, just real quick, by way of a quick announcement. On Tuesday, I will also be going live, talking about the, maybe you guys have seen it on YouTube or other

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Facebook, social media. I'll be talking about presuppositionalism and the use of evidence, so be sure to tune in for that.

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That is on Tuesday at 9 p .m. 9 p .m. Eastern. Okay, so that out of the way, without further ado,

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I'd like to introduce Doug Dauma. Thank you so much, Doug, for coming on.

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I appreciate that you've taken the time out of your busy schedule to join me to talk about philosophy, apologetics,

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Gordon Clark. Thank you. Glad to be here. That intro was so good, I almost started clapping myself.

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That's right. Well, I meant every word of it. I don't read biographies.

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Like, biographies are boring, for the most part, for me, for me. But when I read your biography of Gordon Clark, I'm not trying to be nice.

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I couldn't put it down. I read through it very quickly and enjoyed just being caught up in the story, the history, learning about the kind of person

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Dr. Clark was. So I highly recommend that people pick that up.

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So for the folks who don't really know who you are, maybe they haven't picked up your book, they haven't heard of you. Who are you?

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What do you do? And what got you interested in studying the thought of Gordon Clark?

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Well, I appreciate that with the interest in the book. Dr. Frame, I've only spoken to him a few times, but he had the same reaction.

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He was one of my endorsements for the book, which was pretty cool because he's more on the Van Til side.

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But, you know, same kind of thing. Oh, I couldn't put it down because this is the history that sort of he came along after and had always heard about from other people.

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Sure. Hey, you're filling in all this stuff behind the scenes and you really, by going back through the records and compiling other people's letters and books and everything, you get a window into it probably better than Van Til himself or Clark himself or John Murray or anybody else involved because they have only their one perspective.

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So sure. It's like they say with the historians today of the Civil War know what was going on a lot more than the generals did at the time.

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They were lost a lot of times with all the troop movements. But a historian can come around later and make some sense out of it.

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So, yeah, I appreciate that intro. And I remember Henry Crobendom at Greenville Seminary. Same thing.

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He took my book and I think read it in about two hours sitting in his car one day between sessions at a conference and just came out with a whole flurry of questions for me.

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Another very interesting fellow that I recommend getting to know. But yeah,

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I'm a Bible Presbyterian pastor up here in New York, which I'm hoping to come over to Long Island.

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I've been there just once to visit another friend. Hoping to come there sometime to meet you in person as well.

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I really appreciated your podcast. It's funny when you asked me to come on and I looked at some of your previous guests and watched some of the episodes and I was like,

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I don't know, look at these guys. You have a pretty excellent track record there of professors and authors and various people.

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So as well, well, real quick. Yeah, go ahead. Real quick. A lot of people think I have all these fancy connections like, oh, well, you know, how do

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I get in? I was like, listen, the only reason why I've been able to get in touch with so many noted scholars was because of the pandemic.

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Everyone was home. Yeah, I thought you were going to say just because you asked. I used to figure that out.

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And I worked as an engineer for 10 years in mechanical aerospace type engineering.

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And I found oftentimes, I mean, it's just a matter of asking. You could get a hold of the president of a company. Usually you call up a company and you don't say you have a question.

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You say you have a technical question. And there's usually just a few guys that actually know what's going on. And you can write to them with a technical question.

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But yeah, most of us are pastors and theologians. I'm sure that people are glad to come on your show.

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So, yeah, as I mentioned, I worked as an engineer for about 10 years, went to seminary, came into the

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Reformed faith through the works of Dr. Clark to an extent, but certainly others as well, and have continued to really find an interest both in Christian philosophy and apologetics, but also in church history, which makes such an important setting for those discussions.

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So I was looking at writing about Gordon Clark's thought. I had read many of his books and said, we need to put this together.

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And as I did so, I realized it was better in the context of the history. And as you noted, and as I did in the introduction to that book,

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I said, this is really a history of 20th century American Presbyterianism.

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As Gordon Clark starts off in the original church, the PCUSA, and quickly finds himself in the

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OPC and the United Presbyterian Church and the RPCGS, RPCES.

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And finally, these discussions about the PCA, just as Dr. Clark passed from the scene.

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But to go through all of those denominations and to see all that history firsthand, being a friend of J.

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Gresham Machen, and having gone on long walks, talking philosophy with Van Til, writing with Buswell, and then his friendship with Carl Henry and various others.

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He was very well placed, not even so much well connected, but just sort of lucky in where he was established throughout his career.

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Lucky? Aren't you a Calvinist? We don't believe in that. I argue in other places that it wasn't so lucky.

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It wasn't so good because Clark for 28 years is at Butler University in Indianapolis.

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He's relatively secluded and he only had a few Christians come through while Van Til, John Murray, and the crew there at Westminster, this sort of all -star crew.

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They're the ones really influencing American Reformed theology through their work because they have the seminarians coming there and they're drawing sort of the most intellectual people as well, which, as you can attest to, has influenced not just the

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Reformed Presbyterian world, but into Baptist in other circles as well. That's right.

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That's right. All right. Well, let's dive into some specifics. My first question for you, and this is a good question for people who are like, well, who's

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Gordon Clark? Or if they knew a little bit about Gordon Clark, he's kind of this presuppositional oddity that people look at from afar.

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They'd be like, I've heard of him because when I read up on Van Til, Clark's name pops up every so often.

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But who is Gordon Clark and why should we care? Yeah, well, one thing

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I was thinking about when I realized I would end up, Van Til's name would come up in this discussion as well.

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And I did some research on that a while ago, wrote an article on Karl Barth and mentioned Van Til in some places.

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And it's interesting there with Van Til because, yes, he does mention Clark, perhaps as an occasional foe.

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He more often will mention Carnell, who was one of Clark's students, sort of an indirect appeal.

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But Karl Barth is the guy that Van Til wrote about more than anything else. So we might think of Van Til as an apologist or a churchman, like his biography says.

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But he's an anti -Barthian in more than anything else, multiple books, quite a few articles on Barth.

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So, yes, Van Til will mention Clark as well. And as you know from reading the biography just now,

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Clark and Van Til are there in that very early, small Orthodox Presbyterian church.

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It's this sort of lopsided, heavy intellectual church where you have

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Machen, Van Til, Clark and all these other guys coming out of the mainline church.

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And as Frame's article wisely calls it, Machen's warrior children.

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You have these guys and they're all anti -modernist, of course. Right. There's a lot of diversity going on in there.

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And so Gordon Clark is another segment of that diversity within the

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Reformed church. And I think what he looks to, to an extent, he perhaps exemplifies an older American Presbyterian tradition in certain ways.

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While many of the Van Til crew there at Westminster is, of course, heavily influenced by more of a, not a

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Scottish tradition, but a Dutch Calvinist tradition. And have come through the

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CRC channels, not just Van Til, but Stonehouse and Kuiper as well. So almost half the seminary there is

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CRC folks. Mm hmm. All right. Now, why should, you know, you told us a little bit about who he is, some of the people that he kind of crossed paths with.

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Why should people care within the Reformed community, people who are engaged in apologetics, who identify as presuppositionalist?

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What's the big deal with Clark and how can he still speak to us today, even in the midst of all of these methodological in -house fighting between the various groups that are out there?

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Basically, why should we care about what he has to say, what he's written? And I don't mean that sarcastically. I very much do care what he has to say, but I was hoping maybe you can share that with folks so they can see why he's, he's so important.

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I'm trying to figure out the right word here to answer that. Okay. It seems so rather than figuring it,

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I can't figure out what the word is for Clark, but once you read Clark, everyone else feels sort of sloppy.

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So he, well, this guy's really thought this out. He's really thought this through more.

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And I identify some of those influences in the biography. I mean, he's sitting under a conservative

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Presbyterian minister father, and he's an only child. So he's learning the catechism.

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He's reading his father's books from a young age. Now, that father, of course, had quite a bit different views.

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He was more of a traditional Scottish common sense realism, Presbyterian and evidentialist, as we would say.

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But Clark sits under his teaching for much of his life, and then he gets to know

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J. And others uses Vantill's syllabi, even in some of his classes, which surprises people that Clark liked

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Vantill enough to use his materials, at least for a while. So Clark had this upbringing in the church, but then was fortunate enough to do a

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Ph .D. program in philosophy. So he's not sort of this is it's sad that it's this way.

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But a lot of Christian schools, Bible schools and Christian seminaries just aren't up to par with the secular university system.

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And so he attended Penn, one of the Ivy League schools, and got to,

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I'm sure, battle it out with the philosophy professors for years. But he also had some Christian influences in there.

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His dissertation advisor, a man named William Romain Newbold, was a

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Christian himself and I think helped formulate Clark's mindset as well.

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But Clark goes through this where he's in the PCUSA dealing with all these modernists, but also dealing with anti -Christians in the university.

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So he's not being just coddled in a Christian Bible college or seminary.

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He's heard all the arguments and he's been working on refutations of these.

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But it does. You're right. It comes out into this presuppositionalism, which I tried to identify. Well, what's the root origin of that?

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I mean, nobody sort of comes up with all of these ideas on their own. Sure. Very well read.

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And so I identified some background in Abraham Kuyper and James Orr and perhaps

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Vantill himself, where it seems to me that Vantill got into a presuppositionalism some years before Gordon Clark, at least according to the record.

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Sometimes there's things that maybe the guy didn't write. But you see Vantill presuppositionalism by about 1929, where you don't see it in Clark until about 1938.

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So I'm not going to be so pro -Clarkian that I'm going to claim that Vantill got his ideas from Clark.

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I would say they sort of developed, not even independently, perhaps bouncing some ideas off of each other.

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But they developed in that same period where the need for something other than just evidentialism was becoming evident.

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So now when I read Clark, what I appreciate about the way he approaches things, number one, you're 100 percent correct.

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When you read Clark and then you read other people, you're kind of like, oh. Not ill in terms of content, but like, yes, it's a very sloppy way of putting the thoughts together.

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Clark is so, and I constantly use this word, he is so refreshingly clear because he has so many good things to say and you're tracking with him.

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And he's obviously intellectually rigorous. He has a firm understanding of the history of philosophy, especially with regards to the pre -Socratics and the arguments that were used against empirical claims and things like that.

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So it's very good to hear him speak on those things. Even as a Vantillian, you can learn some great refutations of naturalistic philosophy from Clark because he's more clear in his application than Vantill when he's addressing those things.

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But when I read Clark, I always understood him to be a kind of all -encompassing sort of philosopher.

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I mean, he's written on a wide variety of things, applying his thought to areas that I think were ahead of its time with regards to applying it to those issues.

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So what were the different things that that Clark wrote about in which he tried to apply his form of presuppositional thought?

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Perhaps some people call it kind of a presuppositional rationalism or something like that. What are the different areas that he tried to touch on in his writing and how all -encompassing is it?

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I mean, why don't you unpack that for us? Yeah, it's certainly very broad, and that's been some of the challenge that I'm still working out the implications of this and still looking.

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Occasionally I'll write an article called Clark's View on Probability or one on my mind now is

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Clark's View on Causation, because each of these topics really come together in the system.

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And so he, through his 45 or 50 books, touches on some of these topics, but also wrote over 500 articles, some of which were basically lost to the history bin, kept just in the archives or just in a family records collection or something prior to my work on the biography.

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So I was able to bring a lot of these back out there and have those all online now, so they're searchable, so you can study each of these topics individually.

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So, yeah, Clark, I think more so than other Christians, he's looking at who are some of the secular alternatives, because if we jump into apologetic methodology, he wants to show the failure of those particular methods.

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Not just critiquing that with a all encompassing transcendental argument in which you don't even need to know anything about the opponent's view because they're just wrong, right?

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But rather, hey, I want to really understand what is Dewey saying, what is Sartre saying, what is

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Nietzsche saying? And so you can learn a lot of each of those philosophers from Clark.

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I've gotten to the point, of course, in trying to detail some things, especially his epistemology.

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As I try to detail it further, I'm sort of wishing there were more. I wish Clark would have written a whole book on Nicholas Malebranche or on St.

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Augustine or something like this. And I'm having to that's sort of my long term goal is to write a book on Christian knowledge, on epistemology, primarily using

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Clark, but also quite well benefited again by a Baptist, Ronald Nash, who was a colleague of Gordon Clark's, not quite a friend.

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I interviewed Nash's wife, Betty Jane Nash, a few years ago, and she said, yeah, my husband knew

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Dr. Clark, but it's not like they were hanging out together. So, but I find Nash to be particularly brilliant.

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And I'm always sort of amazed that it's Van Til or whoever becomes popular because me, it's always these other guys, right?

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Gordon Clark, Ronald Nash, a few other guys. I'm sure I can dig through my library.

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But oftentimes you have the real brilliant guys are sort of hidden somewhere, you know, they get overshadowed by the popular here.

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Here's what here's my theory. I suppose a lot of these big thinkers often require the bridge between their intellectual thought to the common person.

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So you have someone like Van Til, who's very difficult to understand, but then you have someone as charismatic as Greg Bonson, who in the classroom setting, he just connects so well with the average person.

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And then, of course, he's an excellent debater. So you get to see what he's saying, what it looks like in practice. With Clark, he did have some students that did write and try to communicate, but I don't think they've been able to do it with the same amount of success, in my opinion.

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Sort of funny to think of Clark's classroom behavior as well, because I know I've met some people who had him as a professor.

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A lot of them just love the guy and think it was hilarious. You know, he would constantly be bringing up jokes, particularly philosophy jokes, sort of are all through his works and through his lectures.

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And if you had to sort of sit through his class to understand the jokes, you know, talking about, you know, things like, oh, my publisher is as slow as, you know, the alley attic.

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You know, things like this, like the man who tried to prove that motion doesn't exist. He was very dry in his humor, but that's what made it made it funny.

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And he had a very, very voice like this. He's got a very funny way of saying, of speaking.

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Yeah, I think a lot of what we have of recordings, about 32 recordings are mostly later life.

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So, yeah, I don't know if he would have sounded different, probably not a whole lot different in his younger years.

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But yeah, in his classroom behavior, while he, I think, was loved by quite a few, there's a number of people who are just really upset with him still, like all these years later.

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Like Dr. Hart was so mean to me. I was just a little philosophy student and he's beaten me up in class.

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Wasn't Billy Graham a student of his? Wasn't Billy Graham? Yeah, I believe that he is.

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There's an interview of a Wheaton College student named Samuel Faircloth some years ago in the Wheaton Archives, who tells a great story that I have in the biography of Billy Graham coming up to Dr.

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Clark at the end of a class and saying, Doc, you're cold. And Clark, as a Calvinist, saying,

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I prefer to remain cold. Not being like some kind of Pentecostalist or emotional person.

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But, hey, we're thinking this through. This is philosophy after all. Right, right. It looks to me that Clark had

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Billy Graham. Now, some who are very interested in Clark's publisher,

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John Robbins, and his writings will note that somewhere John Robbins did say Billy Graham wasn't a student of Gordon Clark's.

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And I don't know if Robbins might even have heard, might have heard that even from Clark. And if that's the case,

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I think Clark would have maybe have forgotten or something like this. I don't really know why it is that there's this discrepancy.

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But this other man recalled being there with with Billy Graham and Gordon Clark. But, yeah,

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I mentioned another guy in the biography, a Wheaton student, an atheist still to this day, who didn't like Clark.

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And then I know someone at Covenant College where Clark taught at the end of his life who didn't appreciate

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Clark's aggressiveness. Yeah, although he usually was more

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Socratic in his teaching and was really trying to push people, I think sometimes would be a little mean, too.

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Yeah, yeah, it's all good. I found him I found him funny, but at the same time, informative. All right.

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So what are some of the key features of Clark's philosophy and theology?

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I mean, we know he's a Calvinist. What sort of Calvinist was he? A lot of people mistake him sometimes for like almost a hyper

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Calvinist or a someone who holds to kind of a strong determinism. And how did the

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Westminster Confession of Faith kind of influence his thought? And maybe we can get into some of his other interesting aspects of his philosophy, like his views of empirical knowledge or scripturalism or something like that.

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What are some of the key features that stand out to you in Clark's philosophical perspective? Well, I see him as a

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Calvinist Calvinist, and I see much of the Reformed world as having taken an unfortunate weakening of Calvin, particularly as things like the well -meant offer of the gospel.

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And that's where Clark comes to agreement with churches like the

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Protestant Reformed Church, which he doesn't seem to have any connection with. He didn't he never met

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Herman Hoeksema or knew any of these guys, but Clark had read a lot of church history and, of course, a lot of theology.

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And so he agreed with guys like John Gill and the Dutch theologian Simon van Velsen and many others through Reformed church history who have said, while the call of the gospel is universal to all people, we are to preach to all people.

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Yet it's not proper to say that God loves each and every individual or that God desires the salvation of each and every individual, but rather those would be almost an

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Amaraldian type position, or as the Protestant Reformed Church argues, is that starts leaning you over towards Arminianism.

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So yes, very much was a strong Calvinist, but he's right there along with Calvin, who argues in numerous places that the hardening of Pharaoh's heart was not just Pharaoh's own doing, but God is actively involved and not just not just in a passive way either.

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So, yeah, I think of Clark as a as a strong Calvinist, that the hyper label is kind of silly, in my opinion, of where you want to call someone a hyper

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Calvinist or not, then so philosophically, Clark's looking at a lot of a lot of different things, but what grew what

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I'm interested in, in particular, is what I started out many years ago is I just want to know the truth.

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I'm very interested in truth. And so he has this real focus, not in apologetics, but in epistemology, in the study of knowledge, and there's bits and pieces throughout his writings of his theory of knowledge, which emphasizes the role of scripture and revelation and God's activity in our cognition and in our process of learning.

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As opposed to any autonomy of man in sort of an empirical mode or an anti -revelation type philosophy.

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So these pieces are through there, but I think that it's not always as thoroughly laid out, at least as I would like, because he was spending so much of his life fighting the modernists.

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And then in the mid 20th century, getting involved in that, as Harold Lenzel calls it, the battle for the

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Bible, Clark for 20 years is involved in this inerrancy debates.

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And so it's sad when a guy isn't able to write more on what we're looking for, but he's there.

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He's fighting important debates about the inerrancy of the Bible, not satisfying our intellectual questions.

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Yeah. So people are going to look back on our times and say, oh, I really wish Joel Beakey and Eli Ayala would have written more on X, Y, Z, but here they are talking about wokeism or something.

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That's right. So, so how did the Westminster Confession of Faith, what role did that play in, or what influence did it have on the thought of, of not

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Vantill, I'm so sorry. See, look at that Freudian, Freudian slip of, of Gordon Clark, because I'm sure this, this kind of was a big deal for him.

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It was the confession that he held to. How did it affect what he, the kinds of things he wrote about and the sort of things that he addressed?

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Yeah, he, he has this, his character, as you'll, as you see through the book too, you know,

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I talk about the fact that he, he compartmentalizes his food as he eats, right?

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So he eats the peas and then he eats the potatoes, then he eats the meat. This, this left brain mindset that was, that was so strict that I think that when he, as a ruling elder first and later as an ordained minister, when he agreed to subscribe to the confession, when he took his vows, he meant it.

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So I think that's the best I can understand. So he's, he's throughout his career then defending the

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Westminster Confession of Faith and its views. He's doing so at Wheaton when they're trying to kick him out for being too strict of a

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Calvinist. He's saying, well, I just believe the confession and all these other denominations. He writes, he writes a list of like 12 denominations and he goes,

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I just believe what these guys believe. Well, the reality is, of course, is that a lot of people in those denominations had ceased to believe the confession of faith.

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So Clark remains one of these, I would essentially say a strict or full subscriptionist and writes two books on the confession.

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One is called What Presbyterians Believe, and then it's revised and called, called What Do Presbyterians Believe, later translated into Korean.

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I found a Korean copy once. Oh, OK. So he's very keen on the confession.

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I think, and I'm not able to identify them at present, but I think in time there might have been a couple nuances where he might not have fully agreed with the confession.

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OK. For example, the establishment clause, he ends up taking the American version, which is anti -establishment and not the original confession, which, which gives a role for the magistrate to call councils in the church.

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Hmm. OK. Now, OK, so he's a Calvinist. He is influenced by the

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Westminster confession of faith. Now there are two aspects, I think, that are very controversial about Clark.

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Um, well, there's more than two, but two in particular that, that, that stand out to me is his view on empiricism.

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I mean, he did not believe that you can gain knowledge through empirical investigation.

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And his philosophy of scripturalism, all knowledge comes from scripture.

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And maybe I'm defining that incorrectly and you can kind of clarify that. Let's, let's take those things one at a time.

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So empiricism, um, what was his deal with empiricism? How, how, how did,

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OK, how did Clark define truth, knowledge, how it's acquired and why empiricism doesn't get us there at all?

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So much so that even people on, on his team, other Calvinists, other

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Christians are like, come on, no empirical knowledge, Gordon, come on, let's go. So, uh, why don't you unpack some of that for us?

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Oh, wow. Well, that's, that's sort of like, if I knew all the answers to those, my book would be done.

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This is, I've been considering it like a 10 year project from here out. For one,

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I see a lot of, um, Christians pushing out books that I'm not impressed with. Um, and there's plenty of good books out there as well, but, um, books take time.

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So, yeah, these are a lot of difficult questions in the biography. I talk about some of his criticisms of empiricism, but basically he's just saying.

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These are the criticisms of the ancient Greeks and they've never yet been answered. So he's not really presenting his own.

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He's just showing that all Greek philosophy ended in skepticism and we are there as well.

32:01

And therefore we need revelation. We need God to reveal knowledge to us if we're going to acquire any knowledge.

32:09

And so, yes, the scriptures, the word of God is truth and the

32:15

Bible or the Bible alone is the word of God. And we get our knowledge from there, but also in Clark's philosophy, when we look there to the scriptures, there is a certain amount, as he would call innate knowledge.

32:28

There are certain things that man being made in the image of God knows from birth, such as the knowledge of the existence of God.

32:37

And so when he looks at the scriptures, both our natural, as Kelvin calls it, sensus divinitatis, as we have that in our natural self.

32:48

And when we look at the scriptures, God is assumed in scripture. So in neither perspective are we looking at arguments for the existence of God.

32:58

We all know that he exists in the scripture, assumes that he exists. So the empirical arguments are superfluous, as are all arguments for the existence of God.

33:09

So, so Gordon Clark would think that as a rationalist, he would identify himself as a rationalist, right?

33:16

He believed in, or you can correct that. He would say a

33:21

Christian rationalist or maybe even a Christian Platonist, something like this. I mean, he's giving a role to reason, which is what the confession gives, which is good and necessary consequence of deduction from scripture.

33:36

So reason is a good thing in Clark's mind, so long as what we mean by reason is valid deductions, valid logical deductions, and not some sort of, you know, reason is used in so many different ways philosophically.

33:53

And for many reason means like, oh, there can't be miracles or something else like this.

34:00

Like he's going to let his own views trump the scriptures. But Clark is very much looking at having a ministerial use of reason and not a magisterial.

34:09

There we go. That's what I was going to say. If you're making that distinction between magisterial and ministerial, but we would call him a rationalist in the sense that he held to the notion of innate ideas.

34:21

But not in the exact same way as say someone like Rene Descartes, maybe. Yeah. And that's, that's, what's interesting about Clark.

34:28

And I think he does this more consistently than others. So he, he looks at Augustine and says, Augustine made this jump from Plato saying that these initial things in our mind are not ideas, but propositions.

34:43

Okay. Clark knowledge is about propositions. And this, and this really is an eye opener because what does it mean to know grass?

34:52

What does it mean to know green? Right. It doesn't make any sense. Do you know green? Do you know grass?

34:58

But do you know that the grass is green? Right. A proposition actually is meaningful when we come into this.

35:05

So, so he would hold truth is propositional. That's it. There's no non -propositional truth.

35:12

Yeah. He would, he, he, in some places kind of says, I, you know, I'm waiting for someone to give me an example of a non -propositional truth that this is truth is by definitional, by definition, propositional, you know, certainly in our times too, other people have written books on personal knowledge and these various approaches, but I think they're dealing with something different than what

35:36

Clark is dealing with. Okay. So additions figure prominently where Augustine, it seems recognize that I'm not sure

35:44

Augustine always stayed consistent with that. Clark more often is yes. Saying propositions are that sort of base unit of knowledge.

35:53

Okay. So man is created with some inbuilt software of the knowledge of God and various propositions that are known innately.

36:03

There was an interesting thing I read with Clark where he, he spoke about Adam and Eve in the garden and God's command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

36:14

And then he reflects upon the question. If Adam was just created, how does he know what a tree is? Yeah, he, it almost seems as though the

36:21

Bible is indicating that there is knowledge prior to his experience such that he would understand what

36:28

God was telling him. So is that an example of, of Clark's understanding of kind of innate knowledge that man has just built with in light of the fact that he's the

36:37

Imago Dei, that, that census divinitatis that you mentioned before? Yeah. I think

36:43

I fully agree. I know more of that is, Clark talks about that in his debate with David Hoover at Covenant College.

36:52

This was another philosophy professor there at Covenant, more on the empirical side of things.

37:01

And Clark does point out some of that, what you see in the book of Genesis with Adam and Eve and their ability to note things.

37:10

It doesn't seem like they're hanging around for a long time and slowly placing grunts together and building up a language that develops over time in some sort of way that modern non -Christians would say, but rather they seem to be given knowledge and perhaps even language.

37:29

Okay. All right. So, so we mentioned his, well, what, how would he define truth?

37:36

Knowledge. I, that was the two I wanted to get that. So, so is, is knowledge for him something that is known with a sort of epistemic certainty such that if you're not epistemically certain about it, it's not really knowledge?

37:54

He distinguishes knowledge and certainty. He likes certainty as something like assurance.

38:02

And he says, this is a psychological phenomenon and that you can know something without being certain of it.

38:11

So, but I think in a, maybe in a more colloquial sense, yes, that because he looks at those ancient

38:20

Greeks and realizes everything comes to skepticism, how are we going to know anything at all? We need a more sure foundation.

38:27

So he looks at, we need to assume something as if you don't start somewhere, you'll never start at all.

38:34

So he looks at this assumption of the scriptures and says, well, what if we just assume this revelation from God and that all these things are true?

38:44

Then we have this, we have those propositions and what can be deduced logically from them.

38:50

And from that, we build up a large pool of knowledge and propositions.

38:56

So these truths are propositional. They're ultimately first in the mind of God.

39:04

And then can be known to man only as God reveals them to us, or I suppose, as they are innately placed into us.

39:13

So, so right there, when you say God reveals it to us, are you referring to general revelation, special revelation, both?

39:22

And if that's the case, if it's both general and special revelation, then what's up with this notion that he speaks of with regards to scripturalism?

39:30

Knowledge is, is only found to be in the scriptures or anything that can be logically deduced from the scriptures.

39:36

How does that work out? Because I'm really, I guess this is my own personal issue with Clark. It's not so much an issue.

39:41

It's, it's more of a, I'm not sure what he's getting at. Does he define knowledge and truth as something that must be known with almost like a

39:50

Cartesian certainty such that you can't be wrong about it? So if you could be wrong about it, it doesn't count as quote knowledge, but because the

39:57

Bible is the axiom. We start there and only that, and that which can be logically deduced from, from the

40:04

Bible is actually something that counts as knowledge. Am I, are you understanding the, where I'm kind of confused? Yeah.

40:10

Yeah, I am. I don't know if you've read Fesco's book on reforming apologetics.

40:16

You have to read that because it's, it's called reforming apologetics, but it's, I know I've read critiques about it, but I haven't had time to read it.

40:24

Subtitle is basically Van Til was wrong. So I have to recommend it strongly.

40:31

No. What, what I, what I see there with Fesco and I think so many others is they're looking at,

40:39

Fesco very strongly emphasizes two books, special revelation and general revelation, which I find is a, is a very strong way of, of putting it in the sense that that really puts scripture and general revelation at an equal level.

40:54

Which, okay. Maybe in one way that's okay. And so the distinction I think that I want to make and that Clark makes is that there is this form of general racial general revelation in our innate knowledge that God gives to us.

41:07

But Clark is not then willing to allow empiricism or the world to give us any additional knowledge.

41:15

So when we look to the heavens and see the existence of God, it's because we already know

41:20

God in us. That's why we see God's handiwork. That's why we see his power in the universe.

41:26

We can't deduce God is working when we look at something in the world, except that we already know that God exists.

41:35

So he would deny more general revelation than others would.

41:41

And I think that for me, that question is really out there. If you're going to accept it, you need some sort of empirical philosophy.

41:50

I've just never seen any type of empiricism actually work. I mean, how do you get from sensory images to actual knowledge?

41:57

It just seems absolutely impossible. Clark shows problems all the way down the line with each one of these steps.

42:05

But real quick, real quick though, I'm still not clear as to how he would define knowledge.

42:10

So for example, I speak to people sometimes who hold to a philosophy known as fallibilism.

42:15

Are you familiar with fallibilism? Yeah. So they'll define knowledge in such a way that gives room for this idea that we can be fallible in everything, right?

42:27

So like, is that really knowledge? If you just redefine it to fit that category, but then fallibilism doesn't necessitate that that which you claim to know is actually, in fact, the case.

42:39

You see what I'm saying? So what do you think Gordon Clark's response would be to the definition of knowledge as taken by a fallibilist versus his definition of knowledge?

42:52

So we had some interesting discussions in our Clark circle. And I mean, if you want a good time, you've got to join the

42:57

Clark circles. I got so many great friends. What is that on Facebook or something? Well, we have a Gordon H.

43:02

Clark discussions on Facebook, but there's other places as well. I say that in truth, but also in jest.

43:08

I have some fantastic Clarkian friends, and then I know some people who, you know, they're just they kind of bounce around and like philosophy and are some very peculiar characters that you have to be careful with.

43:20

OK, but in through some of these discussions, we've looked at that. And OK, so in some places, Clark says that truth is or knowledge is the possession of a truth.

43:31

But I think I think Clark can be shown to use the definition that knowledge is justified true belief.

43:42

Now, justification of knowledge is that which it has to either be in the scriptures or be deduced from scripture to be justified.

43:53

That's how that's how truth or knowledge for him would be justified.

43:58

And then that justification I call externalist.

44:05

So you don't always have to know exactly how you came upon this piece of knowledge.

44:12

But if you know it, that that qualifies. So we're not always aware of the fact that God innately placed this particular truth in my mind or revealed it through the scriptures or that I got it through some deduction of the scriptures.

44:28

That's something that I'm trying to work on to clarify more. So, yeah, that's

44:34

I guess I'm giving you a definition of knowledge, not a definition of truth. Now, a truth, as I mentioned before, it's at least it starts off as a proposition in the mind of God or a proposition that he declares to be true, because maybe there's false preposition propositions in God's mind.

44:53

But only not not false propositions in themselves, but only propositions that the Lord knows is false.

44:59

So all propositions in God's mind are true. Okay. All right.

45:06

So would truth I'm sorry, would knowledge be equated between Clark's understanding with a sort of Cartesian certainty?

45:19

Yeah, um, let me try to look up in my documents here.

45:27

I don't know if I can answer that. I'm not thoroughly knowledgeable on Descartes, but I think

45:36

I think you can see a certain amount of doubt there in Clark's doubting of all these other forms of knowledge acquisition and therefore the need for revelation.

45:47

In one of Clark's books, this one here, Introduction to Christian Philosophy, he says, a fortiori,

45:58

God can only be known if he's willing to let himself be known. This is something that seems to be of the very definition of God.

46:06

And I think if all knowledge is God's knowledge, we can apply that to knowledge also say we can only know something if God's willing to let us know that.

46:17

So in a sense, whatever paradigm you're looking at has to have a strong role for God or revelation in it.

46:24

We have to admit, certainly as Calvinists, we have to admit God's very strong role for God in that process.

46:34

So when various philosophers discount God, discount revelation, and come to these secular models,

46:44

I mean, these views like empiricism, this isn't at least originally developing within a

46:50

Christian framework. These are developed among non -Christians. And so I think from Clark's perspective, it's okay if a

46:57

Christian is an Aristotelian or picks up some other form of empiricism, they're picking up something that's not from the

47:06

Christian tradition or not from the scriptures themselves. So we want to have this strong distinction between what is the world saying and what is

47:14

God telling us in the scriptures. So the ultimate starting point for us really to distinguish that world attempt at knowledge from true revealed knowledge from God is to assume the

47:31

Bible. So we come back to that over and over again, just saying we need to start with the certainty of the scriptures.

47:39

We need to start with this as true. And therefore you really, in a sense, you just need to be, you need to be assured of that singular principle, and then you can be assured of every truth of the scriptures.

47:52

Okay. Now, the next line of question, I want to get into a little bit of the differences between Clark and Vantill in as much as you're familiar with them.

48:02

I mean, obviously your focus is Gordon Clark, but I'm sure you've read a little bit up on Vantill since they do cross hairs with regards to the controversy that was surrounding their disagreement.

48:15

When you said one has to be confident or have assurance of the starting point. Okay. On Clark's view,

48:23

I was always under the impression that he had no problem being identified as a fideist.

48:29

In which case it seems as though the question within arise, how can one have assurance of the truth of their axiom?

48:38

If by axiom for Clark, by definition, it's not something that can be demonstrated to be true in, in like that absolute sense, if I'm wrong, you can clarify, but that's a question that always comes up.

48:51

Well, yeah, I mean, that, that assurance is what comes ultimately from the Holy spirit. So there's these two separate questions is how do you, how are you assured of the truth of scriptures or how are you a

49:03

Christian or any of these questions are answered well by the work of the Holy spirit. But then there's a separate question.

49:10

Is there good arguments for the Christian faith? And then Clark would say, yes. So you can say in the one sense, arguments aren't necessary, but they can be used.

49:20

We, cause we can come to the faith apart from arguments. We can come to the faith because of the work of the

49:26

Holy spirit in us, but there are arguments for the faith. And that's where Clark looks, not at proofs of God's existence, but he looks at saying that this entire worldview or this entire system developed by the truth of the scriptures is consistent while other systems are inconsistent.

49:46

And the scriptures formulate a more thorough worldview that provides us with, with much more knowledge than these other areas.

49:59

So when I, when I came into reading Clark, I had been very interested in Austria, the

50:04

Austrian school of economics and there you're developing something very similar.

50:09

You have an axiom, human action, and you develop economics from that particular axiom by logical deductions.

50:17

This is very fascinating, but that's the extent of it is you can develop an economic theory.

50:24

I think what Clark shows is that you can develop from the scriptures in epistemology, a metaphysics, an ethics, a politics and aesthetics, everything.

50:35

So as my friend, Benjamin Wong recently wrote in an article I put on my blog, it's this sort of program for knowledge that it's so fascinating because we can use this idea of the scriptures and logical deductions to come up with a scriptural view of anything, anything that it talks about or anything that it, that it can be, the deductions can, can reach.

51:01

So you can see sort of that Kuyperian idea of like he wanted with the

51:09

Free University in Amsterdam to have Christianity affecting all of these different areas.

51:16

You don't just have a physics department or a psychology department, but you have these people teaching those subjects well -versed in the

51:25

Christian worldview and showing how these are dependent upon Christianity.

51:31

And Clark was looking at the same thing along with some of these other men in the

51:36

OPC in the 1940s. They were looking at starting a reformed university in America, which would have been modeled off of that Free University idea of Kuypers.

51:48

And of course, in the Clark -Van Till controversy, you read about this, it sort of fell apart as the men couldn't get along.

51:56

So the Clark -Van Till debates and battles was in a sense, a piece of a much larger disagreement going on at that time within the

52:09

Orthodox Presbyterian Church and other Reformed bodies. Just real quick, for those who are listening, if you guys are enjoying the content, please give this video a thumbs up, a heart, leave a nice positive comment.

52:22

And if you disagree, actually, in the comments, I always say this, feel free to write out your questions towards the end.

52:30

Doug will be happy to try his best to address some of the questions that you may have. So I just wanted to throw that out there to make sure that in the comments section, we will be addressing questions.

52:42

We will now be getting into the issue of the differences between Clark and Van Till in a limited sense.

52:49

I want to respect Doug's area of expertise and allow him to have the freedom to pull back and say,

52:57

I'm not sure about what Van Till believed, but here's what Clark believed. And that's fine as well. Well, one question before I get to that,

53:05

I lied. There was another question before getting into those differences. You forgot also, you told your viewers here to give questions.

53:12

You forgot to tell them to give answers. That's right. Give answers so we can just read it back. And that makes it easier.

53:18

As I'm sure in your circles as well, people have a lot of answers here.

53:23

And especially as they get a chance to think about things less on the fly than I am. So there's a lot of brilliant people in the

53:30

Clark circles, as I'm sure in the circles you are involved with as well. So a lot of what

53:38

I write is a collective project. I have four or five regular reviewers. I got some smarter guys behind the scenes that I'm sending my papers to.

53:47

No, that's awesome. And you know what? That's why a lot of these sorts of discussions are helpful as kind of an introduction.

53:53

But if you really want to get into the details, you got to do a little bit of the hard work and read up on the books where there's some good research and careful thinking that's laid out.

54:02

So folks who find this stuff like apologetics online, philosophy online, awesome, super helpful.

54:09

But let that not be your only avenue of thinking about these things. So I very much respect that.

54:15

But with regards to Clark's claim of the consistency of the

54:23

Christian worldview, was it Clark's position that all non -Christian worldviews are inconsistent in some way?

54:31

Or did he just think that Christianity just answers the problems of philosophy better than some of these other perspectives?

54:38

Well, I think that he realized that we can't know that all possible non -Christian worldviews are inconsistent.

54:50

So he did a lot of hard work looking at the main alternatives. That's why you find him writing about some of the major philosophers.

55:01

He's impressed with these guys like Blanchard, Brand Blanchard. And of course,

55:09

Aristotle and Plato and Kant and all of these others. These are some of the main alternatives.

55:14

And then same, of course, there's religious alternatives. And he was no fan of the Catholics and didn't write much about Islam or anything, but surely would argue that they had inconsistencies as well.

55:28

So there is a superiority of the Christian worldview.

55:34

And the fact that we can show that it is consistent. And then all the other known worldviews are inconsistent.

55:41

And that's where he ultimately says a choice has to be made. You will never be able to exhaust all alternatives.

55:49

And I think this is important because someone could develop, as they have throughout the centuries, somebody could develop sort of a

55:58

Christianity light that would be perhaps fully consistent within itself.

56:04

He talks about this like, okay, I'm a fundamentalist. I like the fundamentalists. They're good folks, but there's something better than fundamentalism.

56:14

There's the entire Westminster Confession. So we want to look at the entirety of the

56:22

Christian worldview, not some subset of it, nor some sort of deranged version, whether that's,

56:28

I don't know, the Schoenfelders or the Swedenborgians or something.

56:33

We want to look at Christianity really in its ascendancy and in its greatest form, which is the reformed faith.

56:42

Okay. All right. And from the Vantillian school, that would be a little bit of a difference with regards to what you said with not being able to refute hypothetical examples.

56:54

This would be a difference within, say, a transcendental argument that's presented by Vantill and Bonson.

57:00

We would argue that there is a way to create an argument such that it actually accommodates all future hypotheticals that you might think of, especially religious perspectives that look like Christianity, but aren't.

57:16

So that's kind of a slight little different there. But again, it is a valid thing to bring up when we, from the

57:23

Vantillian perspective, talk about the transcendental argument. That's a natural kind of thing that pops up. Well, how does this argument refute hypothetical worldviews that might be developed later on?

57:35

So these are super important issues. And of course, they can be addressed in a much more in -depth way, which we're not going to get into now.

57:43

But let's move on then. Gordon Clark and Cornelius Vantill. If you are sitting around the table talking about theology with your fellow theology nerds, okay?

57:55

And someone was like, but Doug, what's the difference between the apologetic methodology of Vantill and the apologetic methodology of Gordon Clark?

58:07

Or even not just their apologetic methodology, what are some key differences between their philosophy and outlook?

58:13

How would you respond to that based on your understanding? You always say buy my book, right?

58:19

That's the right answer. Well, yes, and again, I highly recommend that people do.

58:26

Even if people don't agree with Vantill or Clark or whatever, the topics they discussed are interesting and the interaction between them, although there's been a lot of heat within those schools of thought, if you can bypass all of that heat and what you do in the book is you really give this very good objective historical perspective,

58:46

I think there's a lot to be gained there. So yes, I highly recommend the book. And again,

58:52

I'm not just saying that to be nice. I really do highly recommend people take a look at that. But how would you answer that question in kind of a short snippet while also punting people over to some other resources that might be helpful in going deeper?

59:06

Yeah, well, I really like what you said there by saying philosophy rather than just apologetics.

59:11

And I think you've probably read, I wrote an article a couple months ago when you first brought up the idea of me coming on your show, you said, let's talk about Clark apologetics.

59:21

And I'm sitting here going, I don't know anything. So I wrote an article on Clark's apologetics.

59:27

And the first thing I noted in there is that when it comes to, well, the first thing

59:33

I noted was that apologetics, in my opinion, seems to have taken too large of a percentage of our time in the reformed world.

59:43

It doesn't mean that it's a bad thing, but I think that we've diminished the time that we spend on every other subject in the scripture.

59:53

Of course, apologetics gets around to very many subjects, but apologetics has become this big thing, especially with the internet, because we have more opportunity for debate.

01:00:05

So I love to find other topics like Rosaria Butterfield writes about hospitality.

01:00:12

I think a lot of us Christians know a lot about - Boring, I'm just kidding, I'm totally kidding.

01:00:18

It's like, what about making beds and serving meals and these types of things. That's right.

01:00:24

So I think for one, that we've overdone the apologetic discussions in some ways. Sure, sure.

01:00:30

And secondly, when you look at Clark and Van Til, especially in their controversy, it wasn't about apologetics.

01:00:37

In the entire controversy, that word, that concept never comes up. They were butting heads about different views in theology, essentially on the relationship of God to man, especially when we look in the first of the four views that happened in the

01:00:56

Clark -Van Til controversy on the incomprehensibility of God. So I detail that pretty well.

01:01:02

I think quite a few people have written on that. Perhaps better in some ways than I have, but I've gotten into more historical details.

01:01:12

And I've dug deeper, I think, into the archives on some of these subjects than anyone else has. I've long noticed some of the books

01:01:19

I have on my shelves and what would we do with these talks if we didn't have books behind us, it'd look really silly.

01:01:28

But some of these books on my shelves, they're entirely written based on secondary sources.

01:01:34

They're based on somebody read a lot of books. Well, what I did in the biography is dug in the archives, in the letters, in the unpublished papers, and interviewed people who were there.

01:01:46

So that's, I think, an encouragement. And what I say to people interested in writing in these areas of reformed theology and church history is get to the sources, get somewhere deeper.

01:01:57

So yeah, in those debates, it wasn't about apologetics, it was about epistemology.

01:02:04

And I think maybe some of that discussion of apologetics comes on a little bit later in that,

01:02:10

I kind of call it Clark -Vantill Round Two when Bonson and Robbins are like about to kill each other.

01:02:16

This is sort of a low point in the Clark -Vantill relations.

01:02:22

And apologetics becomes a deeper discussion at that point. Of course, apologetic methodology depends on some of those theological and epistemological differences that Clark and Vantill had.

01:02:36

So yeah, and to summarize the differences there, in the biography, I talk about the four that happened at the controversy itself, the incomprehensibility of God, the free offer of the gospel.

01:02:49

It's been a few years since I looked at these, I can't remember them all anymore, but they're talked about there. And then the issue of like the transcendental argument, that only comes up later.

01:03:00

And it really isn't even discussed much between Clark and Vantill. It's basically left off with Clark saying,

01:03:09

I've been waiting for 30 years for you to show me the argument, Aurelius.

01:03:15

So where is the actual argument? And so I've twice tried to write a paper on the transcendental argument and have concluded in my own personal failure both times and have opted not to post it.

01:03:27

But as you look through that history, you see there by Clark, Vantill, as they both passed away in the 1980s, that's where it's sort of left in these

01:03:36

Clark, Vantill discussions is, show me the argument and Vantill not sure if the argument can be shown.

01:03:44

And I think some Vantillians aren't sure if you can show the argument, but your podcast with James Anderson was fantastic.

01:03:51

And he talks about how the argument can and has been shown. So that moves us into a new period.

01:03:58

Clark and Vantill are both deceased and we actually have the argument written out. So now we have something to look at.

01:04:04

Something to actually add on. Yay, we finally made some headway. I mean, you'd think this would be like step one.

01:04:11

It shouldn't have taken so long, but it's there. Write out the argument and then they die and you have to wait for a

01:04:19

Revealed Apologetics podcast, an interview with James Anderson. Finally, something. Yeah, and so of course

01:04:25

Clark had a number of problems against arguments for the existence of God in general.

01:04:31

And as I was trying to write this paper too, there's this question of whether it's a proof or an argument or what the differences between these things are.

01:04:40

And so I certainly don't think there are proofs in that sense. And if someone wants to leave it as just an argument,

01:04:46

I'm sort of befuddled and saying, well, what is an argument that's not a proof?

01:04:51

That's not a very good argument. So why should I believe it? So I don't buy on to the transcendental argument.

01:04:59

I understand to an extent what's trying to be done there.

01:05:06

And it would be fantastic if we just had to swing that one hammer at people. Transcendental argument, everybody.

01:05:14

But I think apologetics requires quite a bit more than that.

01:05:21

Okay, all right. Well, thank you so much for that. We are just creeping over the hour.

01:05:27

So what I wanna do is I wanna transition a little bit to some of the comments and questions on the side.

01:05:33

Now, these comments, sometimes they are random and have something to do with what you said and sometimes they're not.

01:05:40

And so we'll do our best through some of them. Parker, sorry. Parker says,

01:05:47

Doug is the freaking man. Pop says, hey, Doug. There you go. You gotta love the internet, right?

01:05:53

I have to give a shout out there for his father. He is an author himself.

01:06:00

So if you're interested in Parker's father's books, look up Frankie Chocolate. He's written 50 or 60 books all on Amazon.

01:06:09

Frankie Chocolate, they're pretty funny. He's a good guy. Awesome, awesome. Now, this is a comment which

01:06:15

I think was related to what you said with regards to not knowing specifically where the presuppositionalism in Clark or Van Til really came from.

01:06:24

And this person is suggesting that could it be that presuppositionalism goes back to the German idealists?

01:06:31

Now, I don't know what this person, where specifically they're coming from, but why don't you speak to that?

01:06:36

Maybe I'll share some of my thoughts as well if you don't cover what I think you might. Yeah, I don't know that many people have written, if anyone has, other than the one chapter

01:06:46

I did on the origin of Clark's presuppositionalism. When it does come to Van Til and his views, idealism often comes into play, particularly their look at Timothy McConnell's dissertation,

01:06:59

I believe at Florida State. He writes on the origins of Van Til's presuppositionalism.

01:07:06

That one's really excellent. And yes, he does track into some of the idealists but yeah, the extent of the dependence, that's not something

01:07:21

I can speak to intelligently. Yeah, and when we talk about idealism, the concept of idealism is very much linked with Van Til because he was interacting with idealistic philosophical perspectives.

01:07:38

And so what we gotta be careful with though is that we have to understand, and of course I'm more of a

01:07:44

Van Tilian and so I would say this, but just to keep this in mind, that the utilization of idealistic terminology in Van Til does not so much show a dependence upon idealistic philosophy for his thought, but rather it is a utilization of the language of the philosophical schools that he is interacting with.

01:08:02

So we wanna make sure we keep that distinct. Now, whether one agrees with Van Til or not, I would argue,

01:08:08

Van Til would argue, Bonson would argue, and those who are in that school would argue that what

01:08:14

Van Til is saying is grounded in scripture, but because of the interactions that he's having in his particular historical context -

01:08:22

Yeah, I agree there. I'm having a little bit of issue here. I'm gonna real quick - Sure, sure, yeah.

01:08:30

Let's see here. How about I remove you and then you can come back in and hopefully there'll be a better connection, okay?

01:08:37

Well, now it's working. I'll be patient. We'll try it again here. Okay. Well, what

01:08:43

I was saying is that Van Til would argue that his presuppositionalism is grounded in scripture, but it is bathed and clothed with idealistic language because in his writings where that's found, he's interacting with idealistic philosophy.

01:08:57

And so there is mentioned in the literature of the importance of adopting the language of the philosophers if those are the ones you're interacting with.

01:09:05

Now, there are those who agree or disagree with that, but those would be my thoughts with regards to the relationship between idealist and Van Til's presuppositionalism.

01:09:13

All right, let's see here. Let's see, let me see. Find a question in the midst of this.

01:09:24

Okay, maybe you can speak to this as a comment. Charlie says, empiricism contradicts man as innately endowed with the image of God and the ability to think.

01:09:33

Man is not a tabula rasa. What would be your views on that,

01:09:39

Doug? Or maybe if Clark, would Clark agree with that kind of brief comment there?

01:09:45

What were Clark's view with regards to empiricism rather and the innate knowledge of God?

01:09:53

Yeah, Charlie's right there because most are all empirical views.

01:09:58

They don't want your mind to modify what's coming to it from the world.

01:10:05

So if you have something other than a blank mind, then you're not receiving what's out in the world. You're receiving some altered view of it.

01:10:12

So if we see in the scriptures that we are indeed given a mind and innate knowledge, then we no longer have a blank mind on which the world can write itself.

01:10:25

But rather we have a divinely given mind, an actual mind. And so at least a pure empiricism is rejected because of that.

01:10:37

You might still be able to pull together some role for the senses in knowledge acquisition, but certainly the

01:10:46

Aristotelian or other traditional empiricists have to be ruled out scripturally speaking.

01:10:52

And I think probably a lot of apologists and Christian philosophers would understand that.

01:10:59

I'm just not sure that people really question this. That's what

01:11:04

I see when I look at Van Till and others. I just say like, well, what is their epistemology? They don't often get to that subject.

01:11:12

And there can be a lot of implied use of the senses which

01:11:19

Clark certainly rejects thinking that the role of the senses is something other than knowledge acquisition.

01:11:28

So yeah, that becomes a very interesting topic and something that I'm trying to sort out better for writing a book on it.

01:11:35

The role of the senses is something huge and something we really, I think, need to look to Augustine and others for some direction.

01:11:45

I'm wondering, Doug, now that I'm listening to you talk about that, have you read Debating Christian Religious Epistemology?

01:11:52

It's called, it's entitled Debating Christian Religious Epistemology. And there's a segment there where Scott Oliphant contributes a description of or an explanation of the revelational epistemology.

01:12:03

And of course, Scott Oliphant is a Vantillian. And so he goes very much into the nature of revelational epistemology in detail.

01:12:09

His particular article is just about that. So you might want to check that out if you're interested in that perspective.

01:12:18

Debating Christian Religious Epistemology. It's an introduction to the five views on the knowledge of God.

01:12:28

Available at Kindle and localchristian .com. Yeah, I'll be right back. Oh, I thought you were writing something.

01:12:37

Okay, let's see here. We're going to get to another question. If you can compare

01:12:42

Vantill with Kant in terms of taking knowledge as a given, can you compare Clark with Descartes in terms of questioning the possibility of knowledge?

01:12:51

Well, let me remove this from the stream here. Let me see. I'm going to kick from the studio.

01:12:58

Doug will be removed from the studio. If you want to prevent this person from joining, you should ban them instead. I've never done that before.

01:13:05

Okay, so real quick. Obviously, when Doug comes back on, he's having some technical difficulties.

01:13:10

I'll let him answer the Clarkian part. But with regards to comparing Vantill and Immanuel Kant with taking knowledge as a given, we want to be very careful, as I said before, with regards to Vantill's interaction with idealistic philosophy.

01:13:24

Vantill is not a Kantian and his transcendental argument is not identical in every way with Kantian transcendentalism.

01:13:34

So you want to keep that in mind. But I think your question is a good one, whether we can compare Clark with Descartes in terms of the questioning of the possibility of knowledge.

01:13:44

Clark definitely utilized a lot of the skeptical arguments of the ancient Greek thinkers.

01:13:51

And I would argue that that's a useful tool when thinking along the lines of Cartesian philosophy, when he's doubting whether knowledge can be ascertained through various means.

01:14:03

But Doug is connected back on. Let's see if he can share his thoughts there. All right, there you are.

01:14:11

Okay, so here's the question. Thanks, I appreciate you being patient for me there, a little bit of a hiccup. No, no problem, no problem.

01:14:18

I heard most of the first one. As far as the debating Christian religious epistemology,

01:14:23

I have not read that. I can acquire a copy and add it to the dangerously tall stacks of to read material.

01:14:34

Well, Olyphant's section is actually quite manageable. You could just read his section just to get his perspective.

01:14:41

I mean, it's not a book necessarily meant to be read in chronological order. I mean, they have the views there, but you can read

01:14:46

Olyphant's in like, you know, very quickly. So that might be helpful. So you don't have to add another because the book's pretty thick.

01:14:53

Yeah. But here's a question. Perhaps you could share your thoughts. So someone says here,

01:14:59

James says, if you can compare Van Til with Kant in terms of taking knowledge as a given, can you compare

01:15:06

Clark with Descartes in terms of questioning the possibility of knowledge? I'm not sure

01:15:13

I have much to intelligently contribute to this question other than what I said before about Clark's views on certainty.

01:15:22

So I'd have to think about this one more, but I definitely, I see where he's going. And that's a very interesting question.

01:15:29

I did a conference at Covenant College a few years ago, and a number of philosophers were there asking great questions.

01:15:37

And like a week later, something came into my head. But at the time, philosophy just doesn't work very well on live on YouTube.

01:15:47

Yeah, I got you. I got you. Someone asked the question, was Clark a rationalist? And we did address that very briefly, but why don't you explain the sort of rationalism that he held to?

01:15:58

You said that he was a Christian rationalist. Why don't you break that down for us? Yeah, just that he would approve of the use of reason as it applies to proper logical deduction, but certainly not approve of reason in some of the ways that other philosophers and other thinkers have saying,

01:16:22

Jesus couldn't have been born of a virgin because that's not reasonable, right? So he certainly is not a rationalist in overpowering the scriptures in a magisterial way, but I really think does use reason in a ministerial way to go from the scriptures to logical deductions.

01:16:42

Okay. Here's a question that we didn't cover, but it's a Gordon Clark -y question. Clark -y,

01:16:48

Clark -ish kind of question. Baptized by Jesus says, question, what's

01:16:53

Gordon Clark's idea of the baptism of the Holy Spirit? Well, I'm not sure that he wrote on this much.

01:17:01

I mean, he's just gonna be taking the historic Presbyterian position here. So yeah, nothing particularly notable.

01:17:09

So his view would be a sort of like cessationist view if he doesn't associate that necessarily with like speaking in tongues.

01:17:16

And he would probably say that that was something for the early church. So would he take a cessationist view or would he even relate the two?

01:17:25

Yeah, he's a cessationist. And I think that is necessary in his principle.

01:17:31

Okay. I mean, that's essentially what he's saying in his very starting point is there is no other form of revelation.

01:17:40

There is no knowledge coming to man in other ways other than by the scriptures or through the scriptures.

01:17:48

Okay. All right. Very good. So someone's asking the question, so we can know propositions as God has them.

01:17:56

That was a debate issue between Van Til and Clark. Why don't you unpack what

01:18:02

Clark believed about our propositions and God's propositions and how that differs slightly?

01:18:09

Well, how it drastically differs from Van Til's more analogical reasoning. Yeah. Well, the answer to this question directly is no, we can't know propositions as God knows them because he knows them intuitively.

01:18:23

We know them discursively. He knows them all at one time. We know them one at a time, these types of differences in the way that we know them.

01:18:32

But what Clark is arguing for throughout those debates is that we can know the propositions that God knows.

01:18:40

And his argument is that if God knows everything, if we're gonna know anything at all, it has to be something that he knows.

01:18:48

We can't divorce those propositions from the propositions that God knows without ending up in a complete skepticism where we can't know anything at all.

01:18:59

All right, very good. Someone says, Clark sounds like a universalist. Was Clark a universalist? You can answer that question very quickly.

01:19:05

You should read his book on predestination. He's a very strong Calvinist. Okay. There is no love for the universalism or Arminianism or even that hypo -Calvinist well -meant offer stuff you hear these days.

01:19:19

Okay. Okay. I like comments like this. These guys define faith as a belief system.

01:19:25

Wrong. Is that how you define faith? I don't.

01:19:33

Neither do I. Okay. So there we go. Let's see here.

01:19:39

I got to distinguish between the questions here, the comments and questions. Suspiciously.

01:19:47

And I apologize if I skip over someone's question. It's kind of hard to differentiate the comments.

01:19:55

Okay. Here we go. You know, half of these people are me under other names, given my. Imagine. All right.

01:20:02

Here's a question from Jimmy. Doug, what about the charge that Clark was Nestorian in his

01:20:07

Christology, right? Can you elaborate the differences between Clark's view and classic Nestorianism?

01:20:13

And does Clark's view contradict his affirmation of the Westminster confession of faith? If you're able to answer that question, great.

01:20:18

If not, no worries. I can't do any better than what I did. And I think the last chapter of my book,

01:20:25

I discussed this question some. And I also reference a paper that Ken Talbot and Gary Crampton wrote and published with Whitfield Media on that very question.

01:20:36

I know, I think he's probably familiar with that paper. Maybe he's not satisfied with it or maybe he's not satisfied with my book.

01:20:42

And I'm heartbroken. Do you know, Jimmy? Yes. Yes. Okay. All right.

01:20:48

Okay. So read the book. That's the answer to the question. Read the book. Someone asks, does

01:20:54

Clark effectively limit the apprehension of truth exclusively to believers? No, because of the innate knowledge that I was discussing before.

01:21:07

So unbelievers surely don't have very much truth, but it seems that they know a few things.

01:21:17

I have this letter here. This is something I was hoping to show. I've probably quoted in other places, but this is fantastic.

01:21:23

This is the kind of stuff you find in the archives. Okay. I should have a, you'd bring me on just to discuss letters someday.

01:21:29

I've got great letters like Van Til saying, I wish that rush duty guy would stop saying he got these ideas from me.

01:21:38

You know what? Maybe we can do that here. Give me one second. Maybe we can do that. That would actually be a lot of fun.

01:21:44

Let me see here. All right. I'm sorry. You're bringing out your letters. I have to nerd out and have my autographed copy of Defense of the

01:21:54

Faith. Okay. I thought you were going to pull out an autographed copy of the letters of Gordon H.

01:22:01

Clark. See, I want a physical copy of that. I have to order one. I know you gave me the digital copy.

01:22:06

Yeah, Tom and I at the Trinity Foundation compiled these together and had them printed.

01:22:12

And I'm not sure if this one's in there or not, but there's this interesting letter here. And in this,

01:22:17

I forget the name of the publication. They're available. Wayne Sparkman has made these available on the

01:22:23

PCA Historical Center website. There's some discussion between Clark, Van Til, and Buswell in a small publication where they talk about presuppositionalism.

01:22:35

So you have these two different schools of presuppositionalism in Clark and Van Til. And then you have

01:22:41

Buswell holding to an evidentialist type view. And so I have this letter here as Clark sort of responds to,

01:22:48

I think it was actually just Buswell and Van Til debating with each other. So here Clark sort of chimes in via letter and he writes to Buswell in November of 1947.

01:23:00

And it's related to this question you're asking about common ground. This is one of the debated phrases throughout the 20th century as presuppositionalism was coming together, common ground.

01:23:13

And so Clark says to Buswell, it amuses me somewhat to compare what you say of my thought with what

01:23:19

Dr. Van Til says. You complain that I do not allow for a common ground while Dr.

01:23:25

Van Til condemns me because I do. Probably I suffer from an inability to express myself clearly.

01:23:33

So Clark, it discusses this problem, this common ground between believers and unbelievers that Van Til, Clark and Buswell each seem to have some different views or talking past each other.

01:23:45

And then finally in the letter, Clark explains his view, which I think he does so well here.

01:23:51

He writes these letters, I have a collection of Clark's letters and sometimes he must've written multiple letters in a day, but they're written better than I certainly write.

01:24:00

It's book level. So he says, I hold that Christ is the light and logos that lighted every man that comes into the world.

01:24:09

I hold that every man is made in the image of God and that every man has what may conveniently be called an innate idea of God.

01:24:17

All this is common ground between the Christian and the unbeliever, but there is no common ground between Christianity and a non -Christian system.

01:24:26

It seems to me that it is wise to keep distinct what is true about a system and what is true about individual persons.

01:24:33

Systems attain a high degree of consistency, people often do not. So there is a modicum of common ground between believers and unbelievers in that we are both made in the image of God.

01:24:49

And so have some innate ideas there, but our worldviews are entirely at odds with one another and the actual knowledge available to a

01:25:00

Christian, so many multitudes surpasses that of what an unbeliever can know because we believe in the scriptures.

01:25:10

So we don't have just some tiny little spark of divine light showing us that God created the world, but we know everything about the

01:25:20

Lord Jesus that has been revealed to us and therefore we can know salvation which the unbelievers don't.

01:25:27

So, yeah, I think that the Christian amount of knowledge so dwarfs the unbelievers' knowledge that it almost is as if the unbeliever has no knowledge at all.

01:25:39

Okay, okay. Dr. Roberts asked, please ask Doug how Clark and Van Til differed on the issue of common grace.

01:25:48

Well, in the PRCA debates, the Protestant Reform Church, of course, that's a big discussion, the three points of common grace in the

01:25:59

Synod of Kalamazoo in 1924. Well, that issue comes over into the Clark controversy.

01:26:05

As I mentioned, you have these professors, Van Til, R .B. Kuyper, and Ned Stonehouse who had come from the

01:26:11

CRC and were very interested in that discussion on common grace. Well, at Clark's controversy, it wasn't so much the two of those questions about common grace and how it applies to the unbeliever or society, but it was primarily that question of the well -meant offer of the gospel that came into the

01:26:35

Clark -Van Til debate. And that's the question is, does God desire the salvation of those whom he does not save?

01:26:41

And for Clark and Hoeksema and many other Calvinists, it just seems like an obvious answer to a silly question.

01:26:50

And it would be clearly contradictory to say anything other than no, that God truly just desires the salvation of those whom he does save.

01:27:02

So that question is more focused on in Clark at that time and a little bit in some of his later writings.

01:27:10

But I don't know that he actually addresses anywhere else the question of common grace as far as unbelievers being empowered by God's common grace to make advances in science or something else like this.

01:27:27

Clark doesn't get into those discussions the way that the Dutch churches do. Okay, all right, very good.

01:27:34

There are a couple of things here, I suppose. Tag, transitive argument is a rational argument proving

01:27:41

God exists. It is basically a convoluted ontological argument. No, it's not a convoluted ontological argument.

01:27:49

There are some differences there. Although there are some connections with some of the ontological aspects. John Frame points out some of the possible similarities there.

01:27:58

And even Bonson admits that in a sense, it can be formulated as a sort of ontological argument.

01:28:04

But it's by no means a convoluted version of it. A transcendental argument is whether people debate how it can be stated is one thing, but it's not convoluted.

01:28:15

It's a very simple concept. Whether it can be worked out is the issue. And I think it can.

01:28:22

And to be perfectly honest, when I've used it with unbelievers, I have not heard any good responses.

01:28:28

So that last part I just said actually will respond to this comment here that the tag argument is dead.

01:28:36

Well, it's very much alive and still argued in the literature. And so I don't know what the second part of the philosophy, there's several gods.

01:28:44

I don't know what that means, but yeah. Maybe you've heard this discussion some, but it might be something interesting for you to work on.

01:28:54

I don't know if you have an answer right away, but the question of whether tag is or should be the impossibility of the contrary or the impossibility of the contradictory.

01:29:05

So that's a question that's been brought up in Clark circles is, are Vantillians confused between the contrary and the contradictory?

01:29:14

And which one should the argument truly be? Yeah, I'd have to think, I've never heard it phrased that way.

01:29:19

So I'd have to think about what that means. What we would say as using the transcendental argument, we would say that the

01:29:29

Christian worldview is true and it's denial in any manifestation that it comes must assume our point, that were the

01:29:39

Christian worldview in order to try and refute it. And it's more than simply a claim within the context of the apologetic encounter.

01:29:48

We try to draw that out. And that's done through worldview analysis, internal critique, which

01:29:54

I think is something that Dr. Clark was really good at. But then the extra added feature that I think is different than Clark is that we also tried to show not simply inconsistencies within the unbeliever, but the transcendental necessity of the

01:30:07

Christian system and whether someone is able to successfully do that is a point of debate, but I do think that it can be done.

01:30:14

Although I think we can do a better job in the way that we explain it and use it within the context of various interactions.

01:30:20

Okay. So I hope that's helpful here. So there's a couple of things here, but we're creeping up on the, well, we just reached at 1 .30.

01:30:28

So I don't want to, we can technically go forever. I would take a couple more questions and then we'll close it up here.

01:30:37

Here's a question here. I feel apologetic. If you haven't already, will you please give a few examples of proximate presuppositions and ultimate presuppositions?

01:30:47

Yeah, this is a distinction that's made by Van Til and Bonson where we are talking about the starting points or intellectual starting points.

01:30:55

So we'd say something to the effect that the God and his revelation are our starting points.

01:31:01

They provide the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience. And then oftentimes the objection comes, well, you have to start with your own mind first before you start with God because you have to think about these things before you could even reflect on those other things.

01:31:16

And Van Til would make a distinction between proximate starting points and ultimate starting points. For Van Til, this was not even a point of conflict for him.

01:31:24

Our proximate starting points are our own minds, obviously. I mean, he didn't deny the fact that you have to think about these things, right?

01:31:30

But in a ultimate context, the proximate starting point would not even be able to be intelligible without the metaphysical and epistemological realities given the

01:31:42

Christian worldview, namely the triune God that grounds being and his revelation, which is both immediate and mediate, that grounds our epistemological ability to gain knowledge about reality.

01:31:53

So I would say that those are the differences between my rational capacity would be a proximate starting point.

01:32:00

I need to start there. But my ultimate context, my ultimate context is the triune God who reveals himself.

01:32:06

He is the one in whom I live and move and have my being. And because I'm made in the image of God and I'm surrounded by the environment of his revelation, we exist quorum deo before his face.

01:32:20

So that's a very important aspect when understanding these different issues of starting points. That's a great question.

01:32:26

Let's see if I can find one more here. This one's for you. There we go. There we go. Can scripturalism deduce from scriptures that self -knowledge is impossible?

01:32:37

And with this, we'll end. Oh, Clark quote. So make it good. Make it good.

01:32:43

Yeah, Clark quotes from the scriptures here and says, where is it?

01:32:48

Man is sinful above all else who can know himself. I forget the exact quote, but yeah,

01:32:56

I'll have to find that exact quote somewhere. But yeah, that's the extent of what

01:33:07

I know of Clark's response to that question. Okay. All right. Well, listen, I really highly recommend folks pick up Doug's book,

01:33:16

The Presbyterian Philosopher, The Authorized Biography of Gordon Clark. And I promise, I promise, or your money back.

01:33:22

No, I'm just kidding. I can't do that. I promise that you will not be disappointed. It is a very, very interesting read and it's a wonderful glimpse into a brilliant mind.

01:33:33

Gordon Clark was brilliant. Even though there are some disagreements in areas of controversy, he had so much to give to the intellectual life of the

01:33:43

Christian mind. And so I highly recommend folks pick up that book and pick up some books by Gordon Clark. You know, definitely not, it shouldn't be your introduction, but you might want to pick up a

01:33:55

Christian view of, there we go, a Christian view of men and things and his magnum opus of philosophical work,

01:34:03

Thales to Dewey. Definitely not light reading, but some good resources there. Doug, would you like to share anything before we close here?

01:34:10

Yeah, I just wanted to give 52 book recommendations, the entire corpus of Gordon Clark's writings.

01:34:19

So come visit me if you want to borrow one. Well, if I borrow one, you might not see them again.

01:34:25

Yeah, piece them together. And some of the early ones are hard to find before he's writing with a

01:34:33

Christian publisher when he's just writing in academia on the early Greeks.

01:34:38

That's right. Probably didn't make a lot of copies of those. Right, right. But definitely good stuff. Listen, thank you so much, man.

01:34:46

It's a pleasure to finally like talk to you face to face and I'm looking forward to hopefully one day meeting you face to face and just getting to know you a little better.

01:34:55

So I thank you so much for your time and I hope you have an awesome rest of the day.

01:35:00

Thank you so much. This was great. I appreciate it and blessings on your continued work with the podcast. I know it's been, like I mentioned, the people you've been getting on here for the most part.

01:35:10

There's a few exceptions. For the most part, they're pretty well. Okay, that's right. That's right.

01:35:16

Well, thank you so much, guys. That's all for today. Stay tuned for Tuesday at 9 p .m. We'll be talking about presuppositionalism and the use of evidence and then stay tuned for some upcoming interviews that hopefully, based upon who contacts me and says they're good to go,

01:35:30

I'll let you guys know what's in store for the future. I'm also creating an online course in which

01:35:37

I'll be recording lessons, teaching presuppositional methodology and the different ways that it can be applied. And so I'll let folks know that and the

01:35:43

Revealed Apologetics website will be launching in a few weeks. So all that, that's it for today.