In the previous section of this chapter titled The Questions of Philosophy, Gordon Clark raised a number of basic philosophical questions: What is the best kind of government? What is the purpose of life? Is there any distinction between right and wrong? As discouraging as it can seem to pose such questions – Clark points to the myriad sources of deception and distortion that make it appear hopeless to ever get a satisfactory answer to any of them – there is a benefit in asking them. Clark notes,

“Discouraged though one may be by this time and paralyzed at the immensity of the task, yet even the asking of these questions results in a gain. Throughout the pages ahead this point will be illustrated constantly so as to develop a detailed understanding of the matter; but the reflective reader must already see what had previously escaped his attention, that these questions are all interrelated. An answer to any one of them affects the answer to every other. And this is an extremely important conclusion.” (CVMT, 22)

For those new to Clark, note well what he says here: Truth is systematic. The questions of philosophy are not intellectual islands wholly unrelated to each other, but rather are linked together with the answer to one bearing on all others. For example, the political question “What type of government is best?” cannot be separated from the epistemological question “How do you know what type of government is best?” But while Clark is absolutely correct in what he says here, nevertheless many philosophers deny his point. One such thinker was William James, who, as Clark notes, stressed the disconnectedness of things. But if James is right, what hope do we have for regaining any stability in our civilization? The answer, it seems to me, is none. Or as Clark points out in rather understated fashion,

“It would be surprising, would it not, if social stability could be based on incoherence, or even large-scale disconnectedness?” (CVMT, 23)

One could make a good argument that the increasing instability of our civilization is due to the fact that the prevailing modern worldview sides with James rather than Clark. This disconnectedness shows up throughout our society. For example, I have long been of the opinion that the contemporary philosophical denial of systematic truth explains much of the decline in Western art over the past century. Modern architecture is unsightly, modern painting unattractive, modern music unlistenable.

In the case of music, I can draw on my own personal experience to provide a case in point. Back in the day when I was a music student, I used to play in the conservatory’s brass choir. One evening when I was approaching the rehearsal hall, I heard the cacophonous sound of a group of musicians warming up. If you have ever been to an orchestra concert, you know the sound. Before the concert starts, the musicians all show up on stage, each one playing by himself with the sound being something like a great roar. As I stepped into the rehearsal hall, I looked up and, much to my surprise, saw the conductor on the podium waiving a baton before an assembled group of musicians. The cacophonous roar that I heard, that was the sound of a piece of music. “Good grief,” I thought to myself, “if I can’t tell the difference between random noise and an actual composition, the art of music is in serious trouble indeed.”

In contrast to dissonant modern philosophical systems that offer us no hope – in art, politics or religion – Clark proposes a system of philosophy based on the idea that an omniscient God has furnished us with systematic truth. Clark writes,

“The discouragement, the reflection, the suspicion of the previous pages do not prove or demonstrate the existence of an omniscient God; but if there is such a God, we may infer that all problems and all solutions fit one another like pieces of a marvelous mosaic…

Instead of a series of disconnected propositions, truth will be a rational system, a logically-ordered series, somewhat like geometry with its theorems and axioms, its implications and presuppositions. Each part will derive its significance from the whole. Christianity therefore has, or, one may even say, Christianity is a comprehensive view of all things: It takes the world, both material and spiritual, to be an ordered system.” (CVMT, 23)

Good Presbyterian that I am, I’m not accustomed to outbursts of enthusiasm. But for all that, it’s hard to read Clark’s comments and not shout “Amen!” at the top of my voice. Seriously. What a blessed relief from the depressing nonsense you usually hear from philosophers. It’s like hearing a Bach sonata suddenly break forth from the midst of some awful 12- tone cacophony or a cool, watery oasis in a scorching, pitiless desert.

Clark continues,

“Consequently, if Christianity is to be defended against the objections of other philosophies, the only adequate method will be comprehensive…This comprehensive apologia is seen all the more clearly to be necessary as the contrasting theories are more carefully considered. The naturalistic philosophy that engulfs the modern mind is not a repudiation of one or two items of the Christian faith leaving the remainder untouched; it is not a philosophy that is satisfied to deny miracles while approving or at least not disapproving of Christian moral standards; on the contrary, both Christianity and naturalism demand all or nothing: Compromise is impossible…Politics, science, and epistemology must all be one or the other.” (CVMT, 23)

In my pre-Clarkian days I suffered from the false idea that while the Bible was authoritative in matters of salvation and morals, truth in politics, economics and science was found by reading real experts like Plato, Locke and Darwin. Nope, says Clark. There can be no compromise between the system of truth found in the Bible and the philosophical systems of the world. The Bible is authoritative in all areas of philosophical inquiry.

Finally, Clark ends this section by making an important point about the possibility of partial knowledge. Clark writes,

“The hypothesis of divine omniscience, the emphasis on the systematic unity of all truths, and the supposition that a particular truth derives its meaning or significance from the system as a whole does not imply that a man must know everything in order to know anything.” (CVMT, 23)

Suffice it for now to say that this statement has some bearing on the Clark-Van Til controversy that has plagued American Presbyterianism for nearly seventy years. Clark claimed that if a man and God held at least one idea in common, it could be said that their knowledge coincides. This is important for the reason that if God’s knowledge and man’s knowledge can be said to coincide at even one point, this makes it is possible for man to possess truth about God. God and man both know two plus two equals four.

Van Til, on the other hand, argued that God’s knowledge and man’s knowledge do not coincide at a single point, because God’s knowledge of a truth is infinite – he knows any given truth, two plus two equals four for example, in relation to all other truths – while man can never have this exhaustive knowledge of even one truth. This means that man can never know a truth as God knows it. But if God knows all truth, and man does not know any truth as God knows it, this implies that God’s knowledge and man’s knowledge do not coincide at a single point. And if God is omniscient, if he possesses all knowledge, this leaves man to wallow in complete ignorance. A depressing state of affairs, that. But then, I’m a Clarkian and not a follower of Van Til, so this is not an issue for me. To paraphrase Machen: I’m so thankful for God’s systematic, knowable truth. No hope without it.

When Ron Paul introduced the idea that America’s foreign policy should be based on the Golden Rule, he was nearly drowned out by boos from the crowd. They did not want to hear that the US should make it a policy to treat other nations the way we would like other nations to treat us. Yes, a Bible belt crowd actually booed the doctrine of Christ.

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, elicited wild cheers from the crowd the next night when a reporter from CNN opened the debate by quizzing Gingrich about comments put forth by his ex-wife that he wanted an open marriage. Gingrich, who seems to have perfected the art of playing the professional indignant, deflected the question by turning the issue of his marital fidelity into a referendum on the liberal media. The crowd ate it up.

As an Evangelical I have to ask, What’s up with that? What god do these people worship? Is it the Lord Jesus Christ or Mars the Roman god of war? Is it the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, or Priapus the Greek fertility god?

For more on the SC crowds booing of the doctrine of Christ, please see this article by a professed believer.

Clark provides an interesting quote from Blaise Pascal, a famous 17th century French mathematician and philosopher, in which Pascal states,

Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But though the universe should kill him, man would still be nobler than what kills him, because he knows that he dies; and the advantage that the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing of. Thus all our dignity consists in thought.

Pascal, as does Clark, distinguishes between men and things and holds than man is superior the inanimate universe. Anyone who has studied contemporary philosophy probably finds their view rather striking, inasmuch as a great deal of contemporary thought would subordinate man to nature. Several years ago there was a popular bumper sticker – popular at least in some circles – that read, “The earth does not belong to man, Man belongs to the earth.” For some people, this blatant paganism represented the very height of spirituality. Others, who were raised with some knowledge of Christianity and the Bible, perhaps found this statement absurd. But whether or not one agrees or disagrees with the notion put forth on the bumper sticker, that person must answer this question: How do you know?

I mention the matter of the bumper sticker, because it leads directly to a common objection to the study of philosophy: people believe that it has no practical value. Not only are many folks turned off from the study of philosophy because they think it is too complex, but also they believe that it is a waste of time. Much of this is the result of our contemporary educational system. Nearly all of us went to schools in which our studies were geared to train us to do some job or another, not to teach us how to think. In other words, we went to vocational school. And vocational schools have no time for philosophy. But think about it for a minute, if no one can provide an intellectually competent refutation of the bumper sticker blurb “The earth does not belong to man, Man belongs to the earth,” then there is no good reason not to follow the lead of the radical environmentalists and post haste put an end to modern civilization. This may result in many people no longer being able to practice the vocation for which they were trained.

To combat this notion that philosophy is of no practical value, Clark suggests that we first clarify the questions that philosophy asks. “When the questions are clearly put,” he states, “there is less likelihood that the answers will seem irrelevant to important issues.” Clark identifies some of the important questions in philosophy as,

• Which is the best kind of government?
  
• Where is history taking us?
  
• Is civilization on the verge of collapse?
  
• Has God revealed any answer?
  

These are hardly insignificant or impractical questions. In fact they’re some of the most important questions we can ask, and how we answer them will have a direct bearing on how we live our lives.

Since we’re in a presidential election years and the topic of politics is in the air, let us take a look at a few additional political questions raised by Clark. He writes,

“In studying the philosophy of history, and very obviously in the study of politics, it soon becomes evident that deeper problems are involved. Indisputable is the presence of ethical considerations. A declaration of war by Congress, a war launched without a formal declaration, the system of Communism based on the theory of the economic determination of history, and Stalin’s view of murder as a political instrument are not only matters of politics: They are matters of morality as well.

The totalitarian theory that the individual person exists only for the welfare of the state; the opinion that society is an organism in which a man is an expendable corpuscle of its blood stream; the denial of minority rights – or the assertion of minority rights; all these involve decisions concerning morality. They involve a theory of the value of life. Is life of so little value that an individual must be sacrificed for a group? If a high value is placed on life, is capital punishment wrong?

One important take away from the above quote is that political questions are dependent on prior ethical considerations. Ethics is one of the primary disciplines of philosophy. It answers the question, What should we do? In all there are four major disciplines in philosophy, and while Clark does not discuss them here, now is a good time to list them out. The four major philosophic disciplines are,

• Epistemology: Answer the question, How do you know?
  
• Metaphysics: Answers the question, What is the nature of reality?
  
• Ethics: Answers the question, What should we do?
  
• Politics: Answers the question, What form of government is best?
  

The most basic of all these disciplines is epistemology for the simple reason that if you cannot demonstrate how you know something, you have no basis for your knowledge claim. In the history of philosophy there have been two major schools of epistemology: rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism says that reason alone furnishes us with knowledge. The most famous proponent of this view is Plato. Empiricism holds that sense experience alone furnishes us with knowledge. Aristotle is history’s greatest empiricist. To shamefully short circuit the discussion for now, I will simply state that neither approach does what it claims to do: furnish us with knowledge. Gordon Clark’s greatest contribution to philosophy is that he proposed a Christian epistemology that does in fact furnish us with knowledge. It is this: revelation alone. And that revelation is found in the propositions – a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence such as “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” we say the meaning of a declarative sentence rather than simply the sentence itself because the same meaning can be expressed in different languages or in the same langue using different words – of the 66 books of the Bible together with their necessary implications.

Understanding Clark’s epistemology – all knowledge comes by revelation alone in the 66 books of the Bible – is the single most important step you can take toward mastering Clark’s philosophy. Grasp this one point and you are well on your way to understanding Clark’s system. More importantly, you are well on your way to grasping the mind of God on some of the most profound questions ever asked.

That’s what one write for Foreign Policy would have your believe as well. In his snarky hit piece on Ron Paul, Uri Friedman tries to tar Paul with the Fillmore brush. To Friedman’s credit, he does provide a rather extensive quote from Fillmore’s first state of the union address, which gives the reader ample opportunity to decide for himself just how foolish Fillmore – and by extension – Paul are. Here’s the Fillmore quote,

Among the acknowledged rights of nations is that which each possesses of establishing that form of government which it may deem most conducive to the happiness and prosperity of its own citizens, of changing that form as circumstances may require, and of managing its internal affairs according to its own will. The people of the United States claim this right for themselves, and they readily concede it to others. Hence it becomes an imperative duty not to interfere in the government or internal policy of other nations; and although we may sympathize with the unfortunate or the oppressed everywhere in their struggles for freedom, our principles forbid us from taking any part in such foreign contests. We make no wars to promote or to prevent successions to thrones, to maintain any theory of a balance of power, or to suppress the actual government which any country chooses to establish for itself. We instigate no revolutions, nor suffer any hostile military expeditions to be fitted out in the United States to invade the territory or provinces of a friendly nation. The great law of morality ought to have a national as well as a personal and individual application. We should act toward other nations as we wish them to act toward us, and justice and conscience should form the rule of conduct between governments, instead of mere power, self interest, or the desire of aggrandizement. To maintain a strict neutrality in foreign wars, to cultivate friendly relations, to reciprocate every noble and generous act, and to perform punctually and scrupulously every treaty obligation — these are the duties which we owe to other states, and by the performance of which we best entitle ourselves to like treatment from them; or, if that, in any case, be refused, we can enforce our own rights with justice and a clear conscience. (Emphasis in the original)

Yep, that Millard Fillmore. What a dunce. He just didn’t realize the great benefits that can accrue to a nation for killing lots of people in foreign entanglements. He was so stupid he actually believed Christ’s golden rule has “a national as well as a personal and individual application.” Outrageous! Unthinkable! Clearly the man had no business in the White House, just and Ron Paul clearly has no business in the White House. As Friedman sees it, the problem with these gentlemen is that they just don’t want to kill enough people. But thankfully, Friedman is on the case to make sure we stay on the warmongering straight and narrow.

Please click here to read Friedman’s piece in full.

Baucham writes,

Dr. Paul does not beat his Christian faith like a drum in his public/political life. Unfortunately, that is off-putting for the “Christian Right”. However, in a world full of ‘posturing’ in an effort to win over evangelicals, I find Paul’s public demeanor refreshing. And it is not as though he is a ‘closet Christian,’ either. “I have accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior, and I endeavor every day to follow Him in all I do and in every position I advocate,” wrote Paul on his Web site.[5] I have also had the privilege of talking with both him, and one of his five children about his faith and how it influences his policy positions.

Please click here to read the rest of Baucham’s article.

• Bain Capital is boring. It’s the sort of “controversy” that makes me want to tune out the first time I hear it.
  
• The discussion about Social Security is a good example of what’s wrong with the political debate in this country. The candidates spent a lot of time going back and forth about what type of government plan is best. In other words, they were all about rearranging the deck chairs why the Titanic sinks. How about this guys: get the government out of the retirement business altogether.
  
• Mitt Romney showed his jackboot tendencies by supporting the National Defense Authorization Act. It is frightening to think that we now have a law that gives the federal government the power to arrest and hold indefinitely an individual on suspicion that he is a terrorist. Romney promises that he will use the law with restraint. This is unconvincing. No president, no government should have such power, and it is an outrage that a presidential candidate can advocate the use – albeit responsible use – of unconstitutional police state powers and still receive broad based public support.
  
• I’m not interested in Mitt Romney’s tax returns.
  
• Don’t you just hate it when politicians boast about how many jobs they have created?
  
• Ron Paul dominated the Twitter results. Given that he tends to do better in these types of polls than in the actual primaries, it’s hard to say whether this means anything regarding his chance of doing well in SC.
  
• I thought Ron Paul seemed indecisive at times. His response to the defense spending issue seemed a bit convoluted, he came off weak on bin Laden, and his conclusion that the high arrest and incarceration rate among blacks is evidence of discrimination in the judicial system struck me as a bit too pat. He offered no evidence that this is the case.
  
• Paul was very good on the income tax question, however. “Zero” was his answer to the question of how the maximum tax rate should be. Those other guys seemed to be pulling their figures out of thin air. They sounded sort of like, “umm, uhh, 25%, yeah, 25% sounds good to me, let’s go with 25%.”
  
• Santorum sounded silly attacking Paul on gun rights. The Second Amendment has no better friend than Ron Paul.
  
• Santorum’s response to Ron Paul’s negative campaigning was classic lawyer stuff. Santorum didn’t deny any of Paul’s charges, he simply got all huffy that Paul had cited left wing sources for his information.
  
• I’ve heard the guy in many debates now, but I couldn’t really tell you what Santorum stands for.
  
• Rick Perry seems to have gotten past the deer-in-the-headlights look he had earlier in the campaign and managed to do a respectable job tonight. He was right to say that the government should get out of the housing market. The problem with him is that while he can make good comments in isolation, he lacks any coherent philosophy of liberty. Then again, the makes him no worse off than the rest of the field, Ron Paul excepted.
  
• Why is Perry defending the Roman Catholic Church-State? Why do people applaud his defense? Rome takes tax dollars from the US government. The rule is, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Rome has fed at the public trough for years, and now that its fascist politics have backfired on it, are Christians to rise to its defense? Why not decry the giving of taxpayer money to Catholic Charities? That’s what I resent.
  
• Gingrich showed his rhetorical chops tonight. I’d never support the guy in an election, but I have to admit that when given the right question, Gingrich he can a home run.
  
• Did anyone miss Jon Huntsman? I noticed that in leaving the field, he threw his support behind fellow Mormon Mitt Romney. No big surprise there.

“A stable civilization, so it is plausibly argued, always rests on a substantial unanimity of thought. But when ordinary differences of opinion multiply, widen and deepen, when educational systems have contradictory aims, when class consciousness divides the people, and when nations support irreconcilable ideals, the results are war, revolution, brutality, and chaos.” (CVMT, 15)

Hmm. Does any of this sound familiar? If you live in the United States – for that matter if you live anywhere in the western world today – you can see the very situation Clark described playing itself out in the daily headlines. In the US there are many signs of increasing political and class tension, the Occupy Wall Street movement being the most visible manifestation of this.

In the opening section of the introduction to CVMT titled “The Purpose and Limits of This Book,” Clark nicely diagnoses the reason for the mess in which we find ourselves and offers the antidote needed to correct the downward spiral. Here, Clark makes three major points,

1. During the nineteenth century in the US and Great Britain, a broadly Christian philosophy or world view was taught in the schools and universities and served as a unifying principle for society. The result was peace and prosperity in those nations.
   
2. This unifying Christian world view no longer holds sway in the educational institutions of those nations. Humanism, has taken its place and the resulted in societal breakdown.
   
3. In order to defeat the humanists and reconstruct society along Christian principles, Christians thinkers must develop a systematic Christian philosophy. The purpose of this book to lay the groundwork for such a system.
   

My late twentieth century school experience certainly could not be described as Christian in any way, and at times I have secretly found myself wishing I could have lived in an earlier era when the broadly Christian philosophy that Clark mentions held sway in the university. Of course there were problems with this broad system, and it was in part due to these problems that the system eventually collapsed. Chief among those problems was that the philosophy taught was not thoroughly reformed.

The Reformation produced many excellent theologians, but it never produced a systematic philosopher, someone who applied the teachings of the Bible in a systematic way to every area of thought. For example, Joseph Butler, whom Clark mentions, was a hugely influential Christian thinker who at the same time took his apologetic method – by this I mean the system Butler used to defend the truth of Christianity – from the Roman Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas. Thomas was an evidentialist. An evidentialist is someone who attempts to defend Christianity, especially the existence of God, principally on the basis of physical evidence. It is beyond the scope of this post to discuss the problems with the evidentialism, for now it will suffice to say that evidentialism is not a Biblical method of apologetics and is wide open to attack from rival systems of thought. As it turns out, Butler’s system was crushed by the advance of Darwinism in the late nineteenth century. The intellectual defeat of Christianity at the hands of humanism and naturalism has radically altered the schools and universities over the past 150 years.

Western civilization, the civilization that came about as a result of the Reformation, was built on a Biblical world view. Now that humanism has replaced Christianity as the intellectual king-of-the-hill in the West, it should come as no surprise that the civilization of the West is breaking down. Clark comments,

“The present ills of society have resulted from a general repudiation of the theistic philosophy on which Western civilization was originally erected.” (CVMT, 16)

Clark cites what he believes are some hopeful signs that things could take a turn for the better by citing three examples of atheist intellectuals who came over to some form of theism. I’m not sure how encouraging Clark’s examples are. Two of the three by his own admission simply came to the point that they abandoned their atheism and admitted there is a god of some sort. The third example Clark holds forth is C.S. Lewis of whom he states, “he has completely repudiated his earlier naturalism to become the proponent of what many would call a very orthodox faith indeed.” To Clark’s credit, he attributes the notion that Lewis came to an orthodox understanding of Christianity to others. A careful reading of Lewis indicates that he did not.

Finally, Clark tells us that his purpose in writing CVMT is, broadly speaking, to outline a new systematic Christian philosophy. Clark begins by saying,

“Philosophy, as the integration of all fields of study, is a wide subject, and if theism is to be more than imperfectly justified, it will be necessary to show its implications in many of these fields. A God, or belief in God, that had no repercussions either in sociology or epistemology would be of little philosophic import.” (CVMT, 17)

Clark, of course, very much believed that the God of the Bible indeed matters in all areas of life, and proposes to demonstrate this in CVMT by,

1. Taking the existing elements and implications of theism and adding to and improving them.
   
2. Clarifying theism by contrasting it with the mass of naturalistic writings across a broad range of intellectual disciplines, and,
   
3. Putting his book into the form of an introduction to philosophy.
   

Lord willing, in the next installment we shall look at the questions in philosophy that Clark proposes to answer.

While reading Augustine’s major work City of God, I came across the following passage in which Augustine lays out his views on grace and predestination in what must be one of the clearest statements on these issues by any theologian before the time of the Reformation. He writes,

“Now Cain was the first son born to those two parents of mankind, and he belonged to the city of man; the later son, Abel, belonged to the City of God. It is our own experience that in the individual man, to use the words of the Apostle, ‘it is not the spiritual element which comes first, but the animal; and afterwards comes the spiritual’, and so it is that everyone, since he takes his origin from a condemned stock, is inevitable evil and carnal to begin with, by derivation from Adam; but if he is reborn into Christ, and makes progress, he will afterwards be good and spiritual. The same holds true of the whole human race. When those two cities started on their course through the succession of birth and death, the first to be born was a citizen of this world, and later appeared one who was a pilgrim and stranger in the world, belonging as he did to the City of God. He was predestinated by grace, by grace a pilgrim below, and by grace a citizen above. As far as he himself is concerned he has his origin from the same lump which was condemned, as a whole lump, at the beginning. But God like a potter (the analogy introduced by the Apostle is not impertinent but very pertinent) made ‘out of the same lump one vessel destined for honour, and another for dishonour’. But the first one made was the vessel for dishonour, and afterwards came the vessel for honour. For in the individual man, as I have said, the base condition comes first, and we have to start with that; but we are not bound to stop at that, and later comes the noble state towards which we may make progress, and in which we may abide, when we have arrived at it. Hence it is not the case that every bad man will become good, but no one will be good who was not bad originally. Yet the sooner a man changes for the better the more quickly will he secure for himself the title belonging to his attainment and will hide his earlier appellation under the later name.” (Augustine, City of God, Book XV, Chapter 2, Henry Bettenson trans.)

Impressive work, that.

Robbins was a remarkable scholar. He had an extraordinary ability to present systematic truth in a way that is accurate and understandable. I’m convinced that one could spend years reading through whole libraries of books and come away with less sound teaching than he would get reading one or two essays by Robbins. As a personal testimony, I can say that the Lord has been taught me more truth from his Word through the ministry of John Robbins and The Trinity Foundation than any other source. It’s not even close.

I mention all this as a way of introducing A Christian View of Men and Things (CVMT), because it was John Robbins who wrote the foreword to the book, and I think it wise to start by looking at what Robbins wrote before diving into the text of CVMT proper. Robbins foreword can be summarized thus:

1. The West is collapsing and many have noticed and commented on this ongoing collapse, but few understand the reason for it;
   
2. The West is collapsing, because Christianity, the foundation of Western Civilization, has all but disappeared from the West;
   
3. Clark argues in CVMT that if the collapse of the West is to be stopped and reversed, Christian, not secular, philosophy must be used to answer contemporary questions of history, politics, ethics, science, religion, and epistemology;
   
4. CVMT is an outline of Clark’s Christian philosophy;
   
5. Clark argues that the reason Christianity ought to be believed and other philosophies rejected is because Christianity is true and other systems of thought are not;
   
6. Christianity has a systematic monopoly on truth;
   
7. Because Christianity has a systematic monopoly on truth, it is impossible to successfully combine the Christian system of thought with any other non-Christian rival;
   
8. The collapse of the West can be seen as the collapse of Thomistic philosophy’s attempt to do this very thing – combine Scripture with secular philosophy, in this case the attempt is to combine Scripture and the empiricism of Aristotle – and the West’s choosing of secular philosophy rather than Christ.
   

Whew! That’s some heavy stuff. For someone not acquainted with philosophy in general or Clark’s work in particular, Robbins’ foreword may seem a little intimidating. If this is you, I would encourage you to stick with the book anyway. You won’t get everything in CVMT on the first reading, but Clark’s work does reward careful study. What’s important in reading Clark is that you keep your eye on the big picture. If some of the details seem hard at first, don’t obsess over them. Word on getting the big picture first. The details will come in time. For now, let’s look a little more closely at some of Clark’s big ideas set forth in the foreword.

1) The West is in collapse, but not many know why. If you’re reading this blog, this probably doesn’t come as news to you. What may surprise some, however, is that the collapse has been going on for more than a century. Depending on how far back you care to trace things, one could argue that it’s closer to 200 years, perhaps longer. At any rate, to see how far the West has fallen, one need look no further than the financial condition of the West. The truth is, the entire western world is already bankrupt, but chicanery in high places has so far masked this ugly truth. I suspect, though, that not even the wizards at the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank will forever be able to hide this fact.

Few of those who have commented on the sorry state of the West understand why it is collapsing. If you talk to politicians, they’ll tell you the government hasn’t been given enough money and authority to fix all the problems in society. “We need a bigger bureaucracy,” they tell us. Civil rights leaders and the ACLU chalk up our problems to racism and various other sorts of bigotry. “There ought to be a law,” is their cry. Central bankers like Ben Bernanke think that the problem is that there are not enough dollar bills in the world. They say, “Give us a printing press and we’ll fix everything.” None of these people has a clue as to the real problem. Educators, religious leaders, historians and philosophers are likewise without answers.

2) The West is collapsing, because Christianity, the foundation of Western Civilization, has all but disappeared. It is important to keep in mind that Robbins uses the term Western Civilization in a different sense than what the secular writers do. Secular writers tend to speak of the West as something going back to Greece and Rome and embracing the history of the whole of Europe since then, but Robbins reserves this term for the post-Reformation civilization that developed in northwestern Europe and its overseas offshoots such as the United States. If there were no Reformation, none of what we take to be the hallmarks of the West – property rights, peace, prosperity, written constitutions, the rule of law – would have developed. Western Civilization is a by-product of the Reformation. It is no accident that the founding of the United States came 250 years after the Reformation. Ideas, as Richard Weaver famously stated, have consequences. And when the West rejected Christ, it rejected the foundation of its civilization. If the foundation is destroyed, how can the civilization on which it is built hope stand?

3) The secular world, especially the secular academy, if it discusses the Bible at all, for the most part does so only to dismiss it. This is to be expected. But even Christians who reverence the Bible as the Word of God often fail to appreciate the fact that it is far more than a book telling us how to get saved. The God of the Bible is a God who matters in every area of life. In the Bible and the Bible alone are found answers to philosophy’s most basic questions: How do you know? (epistemology), What ought we to do? (ethics), What type of government is best and what should government do? (politics). In CVMT, Clark brilliantly discusses and demolishes secular answers to these and other philosophical questions and lays the groundwork for a thoroughgoing Christian philosophy.

4) CVMT is an excellent way to get a good high-level overview of Clark. On way people go wrong in their study of philosophy is that they begin in the wrong place. They will try to master some small detail of the field without first getting the big picture. CVMT provides the reader the critical big-picture overview of Clark that will serve him well in when he begins his study of Clark’s other works.

5) Americans are a practical lot and we tend to believe that if something works, it must be true. For example, science works in that it has provided us with many remarkable benefits, therefore, people conclude, science must be true. This is called pragmatism. But while pragmatism may sound promising at first, in the end it is not very pragmatic, for it fails by its own standard: it doesn’t work.

Clark does not argue that Christianity ought to be believed because it works – however one cares to define “works” – he argues that Christianity ought to be believed because it’s true. This is called the primacy of truth.

6) “All law, all philosophy, and all ethics are in Holy Scripture,” said John Wycliffe. This is same idea expressed by Robbins when he wrote in the foreword, “Christianity has a systematic monopoly on truth.” This is one of Clark’s biggest, most important teachings. If we want to find out what kind of government is best, what should be done to fix our broken financial system, what to do about immigration etc. we don’t turn to secular economists or political philosophers. We turn to the Scriptures. And if you understand this one simple point, you are ahead of 99% of Christians in pews and seminaries across the country and have taken a major step toward understanding Clark’s philosophical system. Later, John Robbins named this system Scripturalism.

7) When surveying the Old Testament, the reader is struck by the great emphasis on the need for Israel to be separate from the other nations. In like fashion, it is important for the Christian philosopher to draw water only from the well of Scripture. To the extent Christian thinkers attempt to reconcile the system of truth revealed in Scripture with various pagan ideas such as the empiricism of Aristotle, to that degree they dishonor God and show themselves to be the double minded men James condemns.

8) Thomas Aquinas, the 12th century Roman Catholic scholar, did just this: attempt to combine the empirical philosophy of Aristotle – empiricism is the idea that sense experience alone furnishes us with truth; this stands in opposition to the Christian idea expressed in Scripturalism that all truth is given by revelation alone in the 66 books of the Bible – with the teaching of Scripture. But like oil and water, Scripture and Aristotle don’t mix. For all his brilliance, Aquinas’ system had several obvious flaws. And to the extent that Aquinas’ teachings have been held up as representative of the Christian system, to that extent those who have refuted him feel free to reject Christ and to look for truth – if they even believe there is such a thing as truth – apart from the Bible.

That’s enough for now. I apologize for the length of this post, but it seemed best to treat the foreword as a unit rather than break up the discussion over multiple posts. May the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom in the coming week.

This is anathema to El Rushbo. Rush would have us believe that if Democrats vote for a Republican in large numbers, they would do so only for purposes of sabotage. No other explanation is possible or permitted. This puts Limbaugh in the position to spin the caucus results any way he wants. If Ron Paul does well in the caucuses, it’s obviously Democratic conspiracy designed to undermine the Republican party by voting for an unelectable candidate. If Ron Paul does poorly, this is evidence that Paul is just a fringe wacko whose appeal is limited to the tinfoil hat brigade. Heads Rush wins, tails Paul loses. What a deal!

But here’s another way of looking at it. What if a whole lot of Iowa Democrats come out and vote for Paul, not because they want to sabotage the Republicans, but because they actually like Ron Paul and support his ideas. Can’t happen, you say? Naive, you say? If this is what you think, I have two words for you: Reagan Democrats.

See, I’m old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. He won the election in a landslide over Jimmy Carter in part due to a phenomenon called the Reagan Democrats. The Reagan Democrats were for the most part blue collar folks who got fed up with Carter’s lack of leadership, his depressing incompetence, and the general “malaise” felt by much of the nation at that time. For more on the Reagan Democrats, please click here. These traditional union democrats crossed over to large numbers to support Reagan in the general elections of 1980 and 1984.

Now as anyone who’s followed Rush even a little bit knows, Ronald Reagan is one of Rush’s heroes. Rush loves to brag about Reagan and has himself touted Reagan’s crossover appeal as a sign of the Gipper’s greatness. So how is it that if Reagan attracts Democrats, Rush finds that a good thing, but if Paul does likewise, it’s proof positive that the good doctor is a crank? Instead of bashing Paul for attracting Democrats, by his own logic, Rush should be one of Paul’s biggest supporters.

Could it be that Paul’s crossover appeal in Iowa may be a sign, not of his weakness as a candidate, but of his strength? Could it be that in the general election large numbers of Paulian Democrats may seriously undermine Obama’s electoral base and usher in a Republican landslide? Could it be that these Paulian Democrats may even turn out to benefit the Republican party in the long run by increasing the breadth of its appeal? I know, I know, in Rush’s cloistered world behind the golden EIB microphone, this is unthinkable. But it the real world, who knows, stranger things have happened.