Savannah Parker's first place essay

The Enemy Is Within the Gates

Savannah Parker

 

The majority of the American church is enervated, malnourished, and inept. Why? The enemy is within the gates of evangelical Christianity, where for a century they have been strengthening in power. This foe is Neo-orthodoxy, an insidious system that has depended on deceptive redefinitions of Christian terminology for its acceptance and propagation in the pews. This blend of nineteenth-century evolutionary and existential philosophy has been melded into mainstream Christian theology of the twentieth century. The Neo-orthodox rejection of the Bible as the Word of God is the seedbed of an assault on the entirety of Christian doctrine.

 

In each of the following redefinitions, which represent only a few out of many, the Neo-orthodox annul the validity of God’s revealing Himself to men in a way they can understand:

 

By refusing Scripture as true, they cannot have an unchangeable God.

By reinterpreting language, they cannot have a God who speaks.

By rejecting logic, they cannot have a God who communicates in a way men can understand.

By redefining truth, they cannot have a God who is capable of revealing the way things are to men.

By repudiating knowledge, they cannot have a God who is knowable.

By reinventing faith, they cannot have a God who is able to be trusted for any reason whatsoever.

 

The inerrancy of the Word of God is closely connected to all of these topics. The unfailing Bible is alone the source of the orthodox doctrines of Scripture, language, logic, truth, knowledge, and faith—all of which are done away with by Neo-orthodoxy.

 

Throughout the middle years of the twentieth century, Dr. Gordon Clark was one man who repeatedly picked up the gauntlet and challenged this enemy. He exposed the core of Neo-orthodoxy’s irrational teachings even while their redefinitions were attacking Christianity at its very foundation. His book God’s Hammer: The Bible and Its Critics[i] is a collection of his masterful assessments of Neo-orthodox devices. Out of concern for the church of Jesus Christ and from a love for the truth, Dr. Clark repeatedly uncovered the faulty foundations of the façade of Neo-orthodoxy’s devious teachings, which have wrought great confusion, and even apostasy, among the churches.

 

The foundation of all truth, the inerrant Scriptures of God, is where the Neo-orthodox begin their repudiations of orthodox Christianity. In their attempt to circumvent logic, they have made men unable to know God or truth, and thus have made His Word, God’s revelation of Himself in language, meaningless. Even while claiming the name of Christ and remaining within the churches, the Neo-orthodox reject the inerrancy of the Word of God because they have already rejected logic and truth. They claim authority, and even infallibility, for the Scriptures, but they only can do so if they use redefined terms. The Neo-orthodox reject the knowability and authoritative truth of God’s Word and replace it with an imagined non-propositional “truth,” which must be believed in a leap of faith, by a disavowal of reason. Such a truth, because it is not knowable by the mind, is no truth at all. In redefining the nature of logic, language, truth, knowledge, and faith, this enemy within the church rejects the very axiom of our faith, the unfailing truth of the Scriptures of God. By so doing, they call God a liar; and for this, Dr. Clark promptly took the battle to them. 

 

Why is the inerrancy of Scripture an issue?

 

“Christianity is supposed to be about Jesus, right? And about how we live for Him; so what is the big deal about the Bible? Why can’t it have mistakes? After all, the men who wrote it were fallible human beings.”

 

So run the simplest objections to an orthodox insistence on the inerrancy and infallibility of the Word of God. Those who say such things demonstrate that they are already under the influence of this dangerous enemy within the churches today, Neo-orthodoxy. 

 

The foundation of all Christianity is the doctrine that Holy Scripture “alone and…in its entirety…is the Word of God written, and therefore inerrant in the autographs” (52). Why is the Bible the foundational doctrine? This question is best answered by the asking of another. How do people know about Jesus Christ? Perhaps they learned of God and salvation from a preacher, or from their parents, or from a friend—but how did these people come to know about Jesus? Where did they learn of Him? Go back all the way and ask, “What is the ultimate source of men’s knowledge of God and of His Christ?” It is very obvious that people do not come to know about the redemption of God from the stars or the seas or the stones. They get this understanding only from the Scriptures.

 

Because the Bible is central to our knowledge of God, it alone is the foundation of all Christian beliefs about God, men, and things. Therefore, when the Neo-orthodox attack the full trustworthiness of the Bible, they are attacking Christianity at its very core principle. When we analyze a system of thought (a body of beliefs), whether our own or that of an enemy within or without our gates, we must begin at its methodology, at its epistemology, at its answer to the question, “How do you know?” We cannot start our theology (our system of beliefs) with the doctrine of God, because we first must establish how it is that we learn of Him. After all, we are not born knowing that Jesus Christ came to save sinners and that we ought to love Him above ourselves. Dr. Clark explains: “In a systematic treatment, the methodology ought to come first…[when] someone asks, ‘What is God?’ How can one go about answering that question? …A method must be chosen (or used unwittingly) before any answer is forthcoming…We cannot start with God; we must start with the Bible. Why not say so first and then proceed to the theology which the Bible teaches” (178). We cannot know the Christ or live for Him apart from God’s revelation in His Scriptures; this is why we must have the true Scriptures of God as the axiom.

 

Scripture Refused

 

Every system of thought is dependent upon axioms, unprovable first principles—including Christianity. Dr. Clark, an eminent logician, describes very clearly what this means; “even a Christian in his own thought cannot construct a formal demonstration of the authority of Scripture because all Christian syllogisms are grounded on that authority” (17). Every system of beliefs is a system of propositions we are asked to trust, whether philosophical, mathematic, scientific, or theological. 

 

“There,” someone might say, “then that solves the problem. We do not need to worry anymore about the inerrancy of the Bible! We have faith in God, so we do not need to worry about convincing anybody that we are right, especially if we can’t do it logically, as you say; and we all know that we cannot change other people’s hearts.” 

 

But he who answers this way has entirely missed the point and is showing his Neo-orthodox leanings towards a ‘personal-only’ idea of Christianity. As Christians, we have a special duty to be ready with an answer for those who ask about the hope that is within us (I Peter 3:15)—for our hope is not based on irrational belief. But how can anyone do this if he himself does not really know what it is that he professes to believe? How can he be settled in his own mind that the things he believes about Jesus are true and real? We know that we cannot change men’s hearts; but we also know that men can twist the truth into error very easily, so we should be very careful in receiving their words. Unless one goes to Scripture as a trustworthy source, how can he know whether the things he has been taught about Jesus are true? Wherever people look, whatever the topic, they must have some reason for believing something is true, despite what they may have been told about the paradoxical nature of faith. They could go to the few extra-biblical gospels and to any variety of cultic literature and ground their beliefs about Jesus in those contradictory accounts; but why should they not go to the Bible as truth, since it is a fully reconcilable collection of sixty-six books written over a span of more than a thousand years?

 

The test of logic, which demonstrates the self-consistency of a system of thought, is the only analysis through which reason can attest to the Bible’s truth. Faith and reason are not contrary here or anywhere else, for, as Dr. Clark succinctly states, “reason is identified as the laws of logic.” He goes on to explain that the substantiation of the Bible’s self-consistency is the only legitimate test of reason (79). The independent reasoning of men from nature alone is not a legitimate use of logic. Logic is a tool and a pattern; and as such, its use is not found by itself without context. The laws of logic will not manifest truth unless they start with the truth of God’s revelation. The logical consistency of a series of propositions is the only thing that makes them meaningful; and logical consistency “is exemplified in the Scripture” (82). It is as Dr. Clark says, “if propositions have no meaning, obviously they reveal nothing” (79). If the test of reason fails, if the revelation of God is not intelligible or if it is contradictory, it has no meaning and no truth. And if the Bible is not true, then surely, as the apostle Paul said, “we are of all men the most pitiable” (1 Corinthians 15:19). 

 

The Neo-orthodox enemies of the truth claim that faith in what the Bible teaches is irrational (logically impossible) because they ignore the witness of the Bible’s logical self-consistency and because they believe it to be full of mistakes and contradictions. But this brings up the obvious question that Dr. Clark asks so well, “Of what value would be an irrational or illogical revelation?” (77). If we cannot learn real truth about the Christ from it, what would it profit us if we put our faith in Jesus, as the Neo-orthodox urge us to do?  

 

Please let it be remembered that this test of logic is not a proof of the Bible’s truth, though it is evidence. Dr. Clark stated: “Logical consistency…is evidence of inspiration; but it is not demonstration [logical proof]” (16). There are many confirmations of the Bible’s trustworthiness, but these are not logically conclusive proofs. Indeed, there can be no proofs for the first premises of a system of thought, for then there would have to be still more basic premises for those proofs to stand on. It is for this reason that proven “first principles” are not first principles at all.

 

Dr. Clark says this concerning the Neo-orthodox, though it applies to anyone teaching doctrine, “Unless we know their method first, we cannot accept their theology” (184). If the method used by those who teach us our system of theology is not in accord with Scripture, we ought to be hesitant in accepting what they tell us. The Neo-orthodox pretend to base their theology on the Bible, but the evolutionary and existential premises of their method assume the Scriptures are erroneous before they ever open the covers. Whereas the Biblical method of perceiving true doctrine is the logical examination of the statements of and the inferences from Scripture with the illumination of the regenerating Spirit, the Neo-orthodox believe that truth is obtained by neglecting reason and relying on an emotional experience of some sort to convince themselves to believe something (not necessarily the literally stated or logically derived truth of the Bible). 

 

The Neo-orthodox argue that the Bible is not inerrant on the grounds that it is historically inaccurate. A cursory look at the history of archaeology demonstrates that quite often the Bible has been more accurate than the historians. In perpetuating this myth of the historical falsity of the Scriptures, they misrepresent both the Bible and a great body of scholarship. Emil Brunner, a prominent Neo-orthodox thinker, provides an example of this hostility towards the Scriptures as truth. He bluntly stated that the Bible “is full of errors, contradictions, erroneous opinions concerning all kinds of human, natural, historical situations (Philosophy of Religion, 155)” (113). Dr. Clark does not spend much time discussing the witness of history because his logical arguments are more than sufficient to destroy the inconsistent proposals of the opposition, without bringing in the many detailed examples from historical research. He nevertheless points out that “we are delighted with the trend of archaeological investigation. But it is not scientific or scholarly—indeed it is utterly illegitimate—to ignore what the Bible says about itself as [the Neo-orthodox teachers] want us to do” (54). Even though historical evidences of Biblical validity are worthwhile to study, the defense of Scriptural reliability can be taken deeper, against the very foundations of the arguments of Neo-orthodoxy.    

 

The same “scientific method” so honored by these evolutionary thinkers uncovers testimony on top of testimony to the Scriptures’ truth. Nevertheless, the Neo-orthodox refuse to even consider the Bible’s witness of itself—even while they believe that Herodotus wrote a history of the Greco-Persian wars. It is very unscientific for these admirers of the scientific method to ignore the self-witness of the Bible. The Neo-orthodox, in their worship of all things bearing the name of “science,” also fail to realize that, if God is who He says He is in the Bible, then the Scriptures can only be believed on account of God’s authority, for there is none higher. Dr. Clark said this very plainly: “because God is sovereign, God’s authority must be taken on God’s authority” (19). There is no extra-Biblical method or witness that may give the Bible authority. Only God speaking in His Word has given it the final authority. Yet, even though they disbelieve God’s testimony of His own Word, its self-consistency, and the witness of history, the Neo-orthodox claim that the Bible has authority for Christians regarding salvation and morality. How can this be? They have already removed its authority by saying it is untruthful. Who will trust a book of unrecognizable and unknown mistakes for their eternal salvation? I ask with Dr. Clark, “May we not legitimately ask how an erroneous book can be inerrant and spiritually authoritative?” (60).

 

The Neo-orthodox can only procure authority for this stripped book by redefining what they mean by authority—and this they do. The Neo-orthodox replace the true meaning of inerrancy (and its synonymous infallibility) with a redefinition of infallibility. “Infallibility” is redefined to mean something like this: “The general meaning of the Bible is infallible, even though the statements are not necessarily true.” It does not matter whether what is said is correct for the “general meaning,” however an individual takes it, to be called “infallible.”  Under this definition, the church cannot live in obedience to Scripture by being of one mind because there is no appropriately appointed authority to determine the meaning of the Bible for all. It is impossible for there to be a unity of positively stated doctrine among Neo-orthodox-influenced Christianity because they do not hold, with the Bible, that “no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation” or that “prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20, 21). Their unity is rather in what they deny—the Word of God as truth.   

 

What this means, practically, is that, as the true concepts of infallibility and inerrancy have been banished from the thinking of Christians under the tutelage of Neo-orthodox-leaning pastors, the other orthodox doctrines have dropped from Christianity as dead leaves. It is as Dr. Clark said; when infallibility is cast off, the other Scriptural doctrines also go by the wayside (55). Because the true Scriptures, the support for the whole body of Christian doctrine, has been refused and removed, both orthodoxy and its accompanying Christian culture are dying. 

 

Language Reinterpreted and Logic Rejected

 

The Neo-orthodox will not accept that human minds think in concepts capable of expression in words (propositions—logical statements that can be true or false). They will not accept that God can be revealed through our languages, as the Scriptures claim to do. Because these enemies of the faith think that our logical human languages developed out of long eons of emotional animalistic noises, there is then nothing that inherently links language or logic with the image of God in men. Language itself is inherently logical; for without the law of contradiction (the basic premise of logic), language could have no meaning. Because of their evolutionary assumptions, they cannot accept that language, and therefore logic also, is of divine origin. In their way of thinking, language must have some primitive ancestry in animism. Therefore it follows, for them, that the mind of God does not use propositional truths expressible in language. Thus it is that they can say that “divine logic” is completely unrelated to “human logic.” In countering such an absurd idea, Dr. Clark challenges them to “state their own theory without making use of the law of contradiction” (49)—which of course they cannot do. In their system it is impossible for the Scriptures, which are full of propositional declarations, to be the true words of God. They say that human language “is incapable of expressing literal truth [a description of reality] about God” (163). Because language is human, then, God cannot speak. They have silenced the immutable One simply by redefining language.

 

If this is so, the Bible, all sixty-six books and all 1,500 years of it, is a joke. If God cannot speak to us because He is not able to be revealed in language because He does not employ logic because logic is human (the result of evolution), the word of God is not God’s Word. It then is simply the creation of several old men under the influence of who knows what. Therefore, the Bible is untrustworthy for eternal salvation—but the Neo-orthodox are unwilling to say this outright.

 

Nevertheless, men and women think with language and logic; we are the only creatures in the creation that are made in the image of the invisible God. The image of God (which is a metaphorical use of “image,” for God cannot be pictured) is not the shape of our bodies, it is not our emotional or chemical makeup at any given point, nor is it found in our cultural products or in our imaginations. It is the way that we think according the basic principles of logic: a thing is itself and is not something else. Other things that are also considered part of the image of God in man, like our immortal souls, our creativity, and the dominion given to mankind over all the Earth, are conjoined to our ability to know and reason. Dr. Clark gives three reasons why it is proper to ascribe to God a logical system of thought. First, the truth He revealed “is grammatical, propositional, and logical.” Secondly, the Bible speaks of the wisdom of God and of Christ as “the Logos in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Finally, Christ is “the light that lights every man,” all of which are made in God’s image (35). But perhaps when the Bible says that we are made in God’s image, it is only the mistake of a cracked old sheepherder. The Neo-orthodox can allow for this possibility, but they cannot tell us how to distinguish the literal, propositional meanings of the prophets from the personal meanings of God for us. 

 

Despite the necessity of logic as the image of God in man, and therefore, as an attribute of God (as the Bible teaches plainly), the Neo-orthodox have forsaken it as unnecessary to our faith and life. Taking their cue from anti-intellectual, anti-Christian existentialist philosophers, they have stated that there is no single point of coincidence between God’s thought and our thought. None of the content of our minds can be the same as the content of the mind of our Father. They say it is impossible for us to know anything that God thinks! If this were so, how then could we possibly think that He or ourselves existed? How could we think that it was His will to save anyone from sin and misery? That would be incredibly impudent of us!

 

We learn of our Creator God and of His will in the Bible, His own revelation of Himself to men; but the Neo-orthodox have cut themselves off from this certain knowledge. They have denied that God can speak to men in words, using logic (upon which depends the intelligibility of any statement), so they cannot answer when we ask, “How do you know? What is your source of knowledge about whether or not there may be eternal salvation?” Surely the stars did not whisper it to them, for even if that were so, in order to now be proclaiming it in words they must have been able to comprehend the concept being conveyed in a logical manner. 

 

Dr. Clark asks this pertinent question regarding logic and God and ourselves: “If we did not…use the laws of logic, how could we know anything about God?” (186). The understanding of anything requires the employment of reason. We could not know anything reasonably, nor could we even experientially know persons, if God had not given us logic. Further, if He had not given us His revelation alongside of logic, we could not know Him or of His salvation. “If logic founders,” says Dr. Clark, “We must therefore make a leap of faith and accept a revelation from God” (77). He also points out that because truth and falsity have equal value for the Neo-orthodox (because they try to annul logic in their thinking), their continued defense of revelation is self-defeating (78). Revelation has been made in propositions; so to deny the one and keep the other is impossible. By their claim that the Scriptures are erroneous they have destroyed the basis for all Christian doctrine, including the spiritual authority of the Bible. 

 

In witness to their low esteem for God and His truth and also to their evolutionary and existential predispositions, the Neo-orthodox teach that it is unnecessary for us to have an infallible revelation from our God. We only need something that can fulfill our spiritual needs—as if our spiritual need is not for truth. They fail to perceive, or perhaps purposefully forget, that the Bible so thoroughly declares itself to be the very Word of God that it is either what it says it is, the authoritative revelation of the Creator, or the whole book is a madman’s delusion, which entirely discredits and ignores its many witnesses throughout the ages. 

 

The Neo-orthodox willfully forget that the words they use are meaningful and comprise declarations that can be true or false. They forget, as Dr. Clark pointed out, that “every sentence, indeed every word, in the Bible depends on the logical law of contradiction for its intelligibility” (185). But if they did not banish the name of logic from Christianity, their system of religious skepticism would fail. In the beginning of the Neo-orthodox onslaught, the layman understood their Christian terminology in the familiar manner; but through long years of sitting under Neo-orthodox teachings, a great number of Christians today have come to understand these terms in a Neo-orthodox way. This bane of the churches has left them “spiritual,” though their teaching of the Scriptures are thoroughly helpless to equip the man of God for every good work in all of his life (2 Timothy 3:17).      

The Neo-orthodox teachers reject the inerrancy of the Bible. They do not believe that God has spoken to men in truth only. One of them has even said blatantly that God can just as well speak His Word to men through false doctrine as well as true (Brunner, as quoted by Clark, 38). But that is clearly nonsense. How can something be both true and false at the same time? Is not God a God of truth? How could He speak lies? But then, if their system were true, how would we know? The Biblical passages that speak of the unfailing words and entire truthfulness of God might just be some of the mistakes made by the ancient shepherds, priests, and fishermen who wrote the manuscripts of the Bible. 

 

It seems that those who deny the Scriptures’ trustworthiness have not faced this question: if the Bible is wrong about itself, why should any of the rest of it be accepted as true and worthy of belief? It would seem that, as Dr. Clark says, “A book that gives a false account of its own origin and nature (or a prophet who mistakes the current views of history and the cosmos for the Word of God) is not a reliable guide in religion” (59). “If the Bible does not correctly represent itself,” Clark says again, “there seems to be no good reason for taking it seriously on any other subject” (113). Again he asks them, “If the prophets spoke falsely when they said that their words were the words of God, put in their mouths by the Holy Spirit, so that the God who cannot lie was speaking through them—if they were thus in error, what confidence can we have in anything else they said?” (58). If Herodotus did not write the history book that bears his name, why should we believe any of the things he says that are not explicitly backed by archaeology? And if we deny that archaeology backs up Herodotus, as the Neo-orthodox deny that archaeology backs up the Bible, why should we believe a word he says? What basis do the Neo-orthodox have for trusting the Scriptures to reveal to them even their cherished, personally-derived truths regarding eternal salvation and moral standards? I ask with Dr. Gordon Clark, “By what epistemological criterion do they distinguish between the Bible’s truths and the Bible’s mistakes? For if the Bible makes false assertions, there must be a criterion independent of and superior to the Bible’s by which its assertions must be judged” (184). 

 

Truth Redefined and Knowledge Repudiated

 

Even though it seems as foolish to try to derive truth from error as it does to bring gold forth from the lead pot, the Neo-orthodox think they know how to do it. They begin their attempt to discover spiritual truth about salvation and morality from an error-filled Bible by dividing truth into unknowable “divine truth” and inexpressible “personal truth.” Logical truth—real, understandable truth—does not come into the picture. The Neo-orthodox do not grant that truth is propositional, i.e. that “only propositions are the object of knowledge” (180). They think they can discover something about salvation by dividing truth (which they have redefined to be irrational) into God’s truth and man’s truth. However, because it is impossible to reconcile or know these two truths, the Neo-orthodox and their followers are left in philosophical skepticism masquerading under Christian language.

 

Before we can talk anymore about how this bifurcation of truth bears on the question of the Bible’s trustworthiness, we must remember that unless truth is attainable by human understanding it does not matter whether the Bible is true or not. As Dr. Clark wisely points out, “the question of truth is a prior question, and unless the Bible is true, there is not much use in discussing inspiration” (1). Unless truth is knowable, inerrancy, like inspiration, has no meaning or purpose in the Christian’s life. If truth is inaccessible by men, the doctrines one believes make little difference.    

 

The Neo-orthodox believe that the human mind cannot know real truth. This demonstrates why they are unwilling to accept the axiom of Christianity—it is because they are unwilling to accept the axiom of all thought and logic, the law of contradiction, without which nothing is intelligible or can be true or false. Because they have rejected logic, they have rejected truth. Dr. Clark relates the following about a certain Neo-orthodox teacher; “The statement was made, questioned, and reaffirmed…that the human mind is incapable of receiving any truth; the mind of man never gets any truth at all” (34). If the Neo-orthodox doctrines are true, the knowledge of truth, that is, an understanding of reality, is inaccessible by men and women. What else is this but skepticism? Why does it even retain the name of Christian?

 

It is just as evident that we can know something of reality as it is that we cannot know everything about reality. These Neo-orthodox teachers are both dangerous and logically absurd when they say that it is impossible for us to know any truth about reality. If it is as they propose, the Bible is a big book of falsehoods because it purports itself to teach knowledge about God, men, and things. It is an effective denial of God, just as much as it is of His Word, to think that we cannot know the truth that God has revealed to us. In order to deny God and manifest the fruits of skepticism, someone does not have to teach outright that knowledge is entirely unachievable. He only needs to say that we cannot know anything for certain. The results are the same. Truth is made unknowable, life is made meaningless, and God as God is denied. Dr. Clark states this very clearly: “even the most innocuous skepticism is sufficient to defeat the Gospel. To speed the dissolution of Christianity, it is not necessary to say that we know a contrary philosophy is true; it is equally effective to say that we do not know anything is true. The Gospel is a message of positive content, and whether it is dogmatically denied or merely silenced makes little difference” (196).

 

By redefining familiar Christian terminology, the Neo-orthodox have deceived a great number of Christians. Many people in the pews are totally unaware of their teachers’ skepticism; but, even though they would disagree with it, they still use arguments based on Neo-orthodox premises. They do not know the foundations of their own statements. For example, if someone says this about the Bible’s doctrinal teachings, “Well, that may be the way you read it; but I read it this way, and it doesn’t really make any difference,” he is assuming that the Biblical propositions do not declare objective knowable truth, which all Christians are to believe and live by. His words presume that Scripture does not reveal the mind of the unchanging God in an accessible, understandable way. Rather, he is assuming the Neo-orthodox idea of personal truth. Because the Neo-orthodox are human and think with logic and still want to have the truth they have denied themselves, they have proposed a theory of personal truth. This idea is set against truth as propositional and it does not depend on the truth or falsity of the Scriptures, but on the emotional “faith” of the person having the experience.     

 

Before we go on to discuss personal truth versus propositional truth, we need to see what propositional truth is and why truth is propositional. Dr. Clark explains it easily: “the simplest reason why truth must be propositional is that a noun all by itself can be neither true nor false” (180). If somebody says the word “Bible” without any context at all, he is saying nothing. He is not making a statement that communicates anything. Children and students of a new language learn their pronunciation by saying words individually like this, but they do not communicate this way. The context of situation, body language, inflections, and the efforts of another person’s thought are what provide for communication when words are used separately; the word alone does not do so. Without any prior context at all, the word “Bible,” or any other word standing by itself, means nothing. Only a proposition (a statement involving “Bible”) can be true or false and convey a meaningful idea. 

 

Propositions are concepts expressible in words; but a thought, a proposition, is not bound by one language. Dr. Clark gives an example of this with the statement “the girl is beautiful.” When this idea is expressed and understood in different languages, the proposition in the mind is identical (181-182). It is just like this when God reveals His Word to us in a language in which we comprehend our thoughts. We may have the same concepts in our mind as He does because concepts are expressible in words and He has given us the logical ability to understand the words in which He has revealed His true propositions. The opponents of God as the source of propositional truth think that God is limited or hindered by expressible truth (Jewett as quoted by Clark, 152). But I concur with Dr. Clark’s response: “To say what the Spirit does is not to limit God’s power. Therefore emphasis on the propositions of Scripture does not prevent God from saying anything he chooses to: It only indicates what he has chosen to say” (166). Because the Neo-orthodox choose to reject logic, to redefine language, and to deny they can know the truth of God, they come to revelation willing to be deceived.

 

“But,” cry the Neo-orthodox, “there is no single point of coincidence between God’s thought and our thought. We cannot know what God thinks!” Dr. Clark quotes Emil Brunner saying, “God and the medium of conceptuality are mutually exclusive. God is personal and discloses himself only in the medium of personality…. One cannot be related to God by way of thinking (Philosophie und Offenbarung, 50)” (100). That is, no one can think about God (or any other person) and have their thoughts be true about Him.  Words are unable to convey truth in Neo-orthodoxy. This is diametrically opposed to the Biblical system, in which truth is equated with God’s words many times (John 17:17; Psalm 119:30). Dr. Clark describes it this way: “God has spoken his Word in words, and these words are adequate symbols of the conceptual content. The conceptual content is literally true, and it is the univocal, identical point of coincidence in the knowledge of God and man” (38). Because the Neo-orthodox deny that God can use words, Dr. Clark’s query is very sound: “Where do these theologians obtain their information as to what God can or cannot do?” (118). Since they do not trust the Bible’s statements as a source of truth and knowledge (the basis of faith), what is the source of the infallible personal truth from it, which they believe? It cannot be the Scripture’s propositions. And how can they learn something (true or not) that they can think about, like salvation or morality, from a personal truth that is unable to be thought about? They never answer this question.     

 

What then is personal truth? “Personal truth” is really indefinable. Since the Neo-orthodox have rejected propositional truth and language as a medium of conveying meaning, they must say that the concepts of reality are incommunicable, that real truth is inexpressible. In this they are merely existentialists, and are not Christian at all. But because they want to be ‘Christian’ they teach, “Jesus is the personal truth of God.” If we know Jesus personally, we can then know the truth of God—we just cannot explain or discuss that truth (i.e. that experience), for then it would not be the real truth. If described in words, truth becomes falsity because truth is not propositional, but experiential. The real truth is the personal experience with God, not the concepts conveyed by His words. 

 

Personal truth is not an understandable statement of the way things are; it is better classified as individual spiritual encounters here and there. What hopelessness! They must then be always searching for some experience of the “truth”; but never finding anything solid that would have any bearing on their lives. Additionally, it surely is as Dr. Clark says, “a meeting in which no conceptual knowledge or intellectual content was conveyed would not give the subject any reason for thinking he had met God” (102 emphasis in original). Even though an experience might be called by the name of some religion or other, it does not deserve any proper title if there is nothing conceptually involved. Religions, including existentialism, demand more than passion; they demand that something in particular, a certain set of propositions, be believed.  

 

It is for the Neo-orthodox theologians who know the skepticism they have devised for themselves as it was for Kierkegaard, here described by Dr. Clark: “Religion is a matter of feeling, of anti-intellectual passionateness. What one believes is of no importance; how one believes it makes all the difference in the world” (95). Regarding the “how” and the “what” of belief, Dr. Clark brings up a very valid point: “Indeed, if there were no intelligible speech or thought, we could never know whether an encounter was an encounter with Christ the Son of God or whether it was Kierkegaard’s encounter with an idol. The very identification of Jesus as the Son of God cannot possibly be made without intelligible thought” (102). Since the Neo-orthodox despair of knowable truth they also must despair of knowing Christ, even by encounter. Because they have divided truth and insist that knowing God is only “personal,” and in no way conceptual, they have made both God and reality unknowable.

 

Dr. Clark explains the dichotomy of truth that characterizes the Neo-orthodox, Kierkegaard, and other existentialists’ ideas of truth. Because individuals are unique and the human mind cannot handle the unique, “we do not know persons the way we know things. There is an It-Truth and a Thou-Truth; there is knowledge about and there is knowledge by acquaintance. Now, God is a person. Therefore, we cannot know about him; we must encounter him in a face-to-face confrontation…non-intellectual truth, real truth…is not knowledge, but a passionate experience” (98, 99). This is completely opposite to all Biblical representation of any relationship between God and man, where knowledge of literal truth about God and His Word always precedes and accompanies any encounter, even with Jesus. 

 

Jesus Christ is the Mediator between God and man and the Revealer of the truth of God to man. He expressly said, “For this cause I was born, and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth” (John 18:37). There are a great number of other passages that say this same thing, i.e. that one of the deeds of the Christ was to teach men accurate concepts about God, men, and the universe—the truth. The Neo-orthodox like to think of Jesus as the truth incarnate, while explaining away the fact that truth is not personality, but proposition. Our Savior is a Person and, as such, He is not “truth,” but the Person who reveals truth. Truth itself is the meaning of propositions that make correct statements about reality, visible or invisible, concrete or abstract. All other uses of the word “truth” are figurative. John 14:6 stands as an example. If Jesus did not use “truth” metaphorically when He said, “I am the truth, the way, and the life,” He would have had to be a physical highway and a universal life shared by all things, as well as the whole system of true propositions. Nevertheless, the Neo-orthodox have been known to say that this was not a metaphorical use of “truth” and to use this figurative verse as grounds for their claim that Jesus was truth embodied. 

 

All personal relationships have been confused on account of the Neo-orthodox slant towards rejecting thought as capable of knowledge. By denying that we know persons through our conceptual perceptions of them (whether true or not), every relationship, including with Christ, has been reduced to irrational emotion. Responsibility, authority, and accountability are all laid aside in relationships if we cannot know people by thinking about them. Please let it be remembered that Brunner said that conceptuality and personality are mutually exclusive. This means that God’s children cannot know Christ through His Word or anything true about men and nature that can be explained or taught or communicated to another. Personal truth does not involve knowledge. To them, true knowledge of a person—a true relationship—is merely an emotional experience, and involves no real knowledge. This leaves a big question: when was the last time anyone met someone else or had an encounter with something and thought was not involved?

 

One Neo-orthodox writer said this concerning our relationship with God: “Worship in spirit and in truth includes the recognition that human words are inadequate, so that our prayers must be given by the Spirit a meaning that we cannot verbalize” (Hamilton as quoted by Clark, 168 emphasis added). He is saying that the Holy Spirit transforms our prayers and praises so that God can understand them. Somehow, God the Spirit is supposed to “translate” our prayers, giving them another meaning so that God the Father can comprehend our praises and petitions. Though they probably will not say it quite like that, it is what they mean if they really believe any of the rest of the things they say about the disjunction between God’s knowledge and ours. It seems that those who would agree with Hamilton have forgotten to ask how it is possible for the Holy Spirit of the God of “personal truth” (i.e. encounter) to understand our propositional prayers in order to unverbalize them for God’s benefit. 

 

Thus it is that Neo-orthodoxy teaches people that knowing God is something that we cannot know. This is not the Scripture, which says that faithful obedience is loving and knowing God (Jeremiah 22:15, 16; Philippians 3:8, 10; 1 Timothy 1:5; 1 John 5:3; Psalm 119:142). Neo-orthodox ministers think that truth is merely an inexpressible encounter and that knowing God is to trust an unknowable Person without cause. Our thoughts and prayers in words are null and void because they are not strictly encounter. Neo-orthodoxy cannot well answer the immediately arising question: “But if we cannot think about God, how can we know if our encounter with truth was with Jesus? How can we distinguish between truth and error, good and evil, God and the Devil? How can we know there is even eternal salvation offered to us?”

 

Neo-orthodoxy’s attempt to answer how one may know there is salvation if God cannot directly tell us depends on yet another redefinition. Though they might think they have the answer neatly lined up, it is necessarily full of much-glorified logical paradox. They will say they have faith—but what they put their faith in is only an analogy. The Neo-orthodox think that all human knowledge is simply an analogy of what is in the mind of God. This they feel free to call the truth, regardless of the fact that an analogy of a truth is by its very nature not the truth. 

 

This claimed “analogical” knowledge of the truth, attained by men from a fallible Bible, is a total disjunction from the knowledge that God has. The conceptual content in the mind of man is totally unlike the conceptual content in the mind of God. Their use of the word “analogical” to claim this is self-defeating and displays yet another layer of redefining required by their first redefinition. They find it necessary to redefine “analogy,” as well as “knowledge” and “truth,” because real analogies depend on the existence of at least one concept that is identical in the minds of both parties. Thus, the “analogical knowledge” they propose is not analogous at all, but rather is an equivocation. According to Dr. Clark, their allegation that knowledge is analogical only disguises their skepticism. Although an analogy requires at least one point of coincidence in order for there to be any understanding communicated, the analogical knowledge taught by the Neo-orthodox has no such property (33). If there is no point of coincidence at all between God’s knowledge and our knowledge, there is no analogy and even less communication. 

 

Since the Neo-orthodox have set themselves independent from God’s knowledge, it is incomprehensible why they continue to say there is such things as eternal salvation or morality or such a Person as God. They can neither prove nor give any evidence (indeed, the evidence is against them) for a merciful God who has provided atonement to save many from sin and misery (though they redefine these latter subjects as well). The most devastating reply of all is Dr. Clark’s: “if the human mind were limited to analogical truths, it could never know the univocal truth that it was limited to analogies” (33, 34). The Neo-orthodox claim that “the human mind cannot receive any truth at all” is a claim to a universal truth, which is exactly what they are denying we can know. No philosophizing theologian, or anyone else, can escape the logical natures of language, truth, and knowledge in which they inherently function as creatures made in God’s image.  

 

Faith Reinvented

 

We have seen that the Neo-orthodox reject the possibility of God’s speaking to man because they have rejected the possibility of knowing the same thing that God knows—and yet they ask us to have faith in and enter into a relationship with this unknowable God. They go to great pains to show Him as incapable of communication, which is the essence of a personal relationship, and then they go out and call people to “have faith in Jesus.” What sort of false hope is this that they call men to? What do they mean by “faith”? Yet again, they redefine truth into error. 

 

This faith they speak of, this leap of faith to “believe” what is unknown and unknowable, is not at all Christian. Christian faith is firmly grounded in the truth of God. The Christian’s faith is his believing, through the effectual working of the Holy Spirit’s regeneration of his heart, that which he has heard and understood from the Word of God. Because all men are sinners by nature, Dr. Clark states, “In order to accept the Gospel, therefore, it is necessary to be born again. The abnormal, depraved intellect must be remade by the Holy Spirit; the enemy must be made a friend…a heart of flesh can be given only by God himself” (20). The Christian believes that the Holy Spirit of God opens the hearts and ears of those “appointed to eternal life” that they might believe the word of the Gospel, which they have heard (Acts 13:48), the testimony God has witnessed to His Son (John 3:33; 8:18, 47). As Dr. Clark says so well, “The witness or testimony of the Holy Spirit is a witness to something. The Spirit witnesses to the authority of Scripture” (21). And Scripture plainly teaches that the gospel of Christ is understood in the mind of the sinner before it is believed by faith from a heart regenerated by the Spirit of God (Romans 10:17). The person who submits to the righteousness of God then trusts Him and is brought into relationship with Him.

 

Dr. Clark explains that at the moment of conversion Christ does not impart new knowledge to a person, but rather causes him to accept and believe that which he has heard and understood. Since this is the manner in which the Spirit witnesses to the previously communicated message, strong emphasis must be placed on the work of the Holy Spirit in every discussion of faith in God and in His Word (22). It is only the Holy Spirit who can make a friend and a believer out of natural men, whose minds are natively hostile to God and His revealed Word regarding Himself, men, and things. Even so, faith is the righteous and only rational response to the Scriptures. Unbelief is a wicked and irrational response because the Bible is found to be clear of any charge of inconsistency in either doctrine or historical account. The Spirit of God who gave it works faith in some who hear its words and leaves others in rebellion, to blatantly and absurdly jump to the conclusion that it is false. 

 

“But faith is the response that is supposed to be like a leap,” many people would say. “Faith is something miraculous, and has nothing to do with logic. It is by faith that we love and trust Jesus, without having to have reasons or answers.”

But do you ordinarily trust a stranger? How do you know about God? How do you know that the Jesus you love and trust is the real Jesus? How do you know Him? This is why the doctrine of the inerrant Holy Scriptures is so very important for Christians to understand, believe, and steadfastly hold. Though the Bible is the source of our knowledge of God and our faith is the gift of God, the Neo-orthodox do not like to think of Scripture and faith being connected with such an unbreakable bond as the Spirit of God. In their anti-intellectualism they would personally prefer a faith that is logically paradoxical, and thus groundless. Clark quotes Brunner: “The paradoxes of faith…are not merely problems difficult to solve but are ‘necessary contradictions in themselves and therefore also contradictions against the fundamental law of all knowledge, the law of contradiction, ergo no knowledge’ (Philosophie und Offenbarung 34)” (101). The “faith” of Neo-orthodoxy has no basis. It is emotion without cause.    

 

The veracity of the Scriptures has no part in Neo-orthodox faith and life like it has had throughout the history of God’s people. The Bible’s primacy is forgotten. Dr. Clark states that each system of thought “depends of necessity on indemonstrable premises, and every system must make an attempt to explain how these primary premises come to be accepted” (19). In Christianity, faith is the means by which the primary premise of the Scripture as the sufficient Word of God is accepted. The Neo-orthodox take issue with this because they have rejected the Scripture as the Word of God, logic, language, truth, and even knowledge itself. For them, faith is irrational, and thus meaningless. Without logic, nothing (even God’s own revelation) has any meaning whatsoever, truth is fallen in the street, and language and knowledge are laid in the grave without mourners. Only passionateness is left, aimless and impersonal; for without logic even relationships are no more. Under the influence of the Neo-orthodox, the Christian faith has necessarily become a useless blend of confusing contradictions. Without rationality, no one can know anything, all relationships are dead, there is no truth, and nothing is really real.

 

In all their arguments and paradoxes, there always remains one little thing which the Neo-orthodox have not been able to redefine away, and that is this: if their system was true and things are as they claim—if we only had analogical knowledge, if emotion was faith, if the mind of man could know no truth—this truth also could not be known by human understanding. In facing this, they are left with two options, neither of which they will willingly choose: either God is not God at all and their salvation and faith is void—or they are wrong. If their basic univocal truth-claim is right and there is no univocal truth that both God and man can know, how do they know this?   

 

For the Neo-orthodox, God is a Liar

 

There is, then, for the Neo-orthodox, no real communication between man and man or God and man (i.e. no true revelation or relationship); God is unknowable and His Word a lie. One can believe it in whatever way he wants to, for it is an untrustworthy source of knowledge. But before anyone disbelieves it, they ought to remember Hebrews 12:25, a word from the unfailing God of truth, whose word breaks the rocks: “See that you do not refuse Him who speaks. For if they did not escape who refused Him who spoke on earth, much more shall we not escape if we turn away from Him who speaks from heaven.” Nevertheless, as Dr. Clark says, “If, now, anyone prefers a symbolism that points to some unknowable, if anyone takes pleasure in irrational paradox, if anyone enjoys wordless encounters, further words and ideas will not change his emotions” (120). Though we may lay out indisputable reasonings regarding the inerrancy of God’s Word, we cannot coerce the Neo-orthodox to believe the truth because faith is from God.

 

The Neo-orthodox teachers are unwilling to accept that God can speak to men because they are unwilling to be God’s creatures, made in His image. These enemies of God’s truth disbelieve the inerrancy of Scripture because they do not believe we can know any truth; and they disbelieve truth because they have cast aside logic, the image of God in mankind. It is for these reasons that the Neo-orthodox influence in the church has been so very harmful and weakening, as it has diverted many from true faith, knowledge, and life in the Spirit. For truly, as Dr. Clarks says, “if skepticism prevails, if there is no truth—no gospel that the human mind can grasp—we might as well worship idols in a heathen temple” (197). Though this is so, we may take comfort in these words of Dr. Clark, drawn from his logical analysis of the Scriptures and his faith in their righteousness: “A satisfactory theory of revelation must involve a realistic epistemology…God has spoken his Word in words, and these words are adequate symbols of the conceptual content. The conceptual content is literally true, and it is the univocal, identical point of correspondence in the knowledge of God and man” (38). Scripture, faith, and reason agree in testifying that God’s words are sufficient for His revelation of Himself, that we have been given the ability to know them, and that, by His saving grace, we have also been given faith to believe them. Let us say with the Psalmist, “Forever, O Lord, Your word is settled in heaven…I will never forget Your precepts, for by them You have given me life” (Psalm 119:89, 93).



[i] All quotations other than Scripture (NKJV) are from God’s Hammer: The Bible and Its Critics, 1995.