This is the second in a series of posts commenting on the book God’s Hammer by Gordon Clark.
Bible critics, who at sundry times and divers manners attacked the inspiration and truth of the Bible, have in these last days continued to press their case. This, of course, makes a defense of these ideas most necessary. In this chapter, however, Clark addresses the issue of inspiration only, reserving a discussion of truth for later chapters. Clark writes,
The question of this chapter concerns the inspiration of the Bible. It must be clearly distinguished from another question with which it might be confused: How may I know that the Bible is true? These two questions are indeed related, but they are not the same question. They have even been answered in opposite ways. A contemporary movement in theology called Neo-orthodoxy claims that the Bible is inspired, but also asserts that it is not completely true. And obviously some other book, such as Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, could possible be entirely true without being inspired. Such a book might even be called infallible. Truth and inspiration therefore must be distinguished.
Many authors, Christian or not, fail to distinguish and define their terms. Clark does not make this mistake, and this lends power and clarity to his writing. He continues,
The two ideas, however, are closely related, especially in the case of the Bible. The Neo-orthodox writers can hold to an inspired but mistaken Bible only because they have changed the meaning of inspiration. When the Biblical definition of inspiration is used, there can be no inspiration without truth, even though there often is truth without inspiration. For the Christian, therefore, the question of truth is a prior question, and unless the Bible is true, there is not much use in discussing inspiration.
A glaring problem with much of the theology written over the past one hundred years is that its language is fundamentally dishonest. Those who rejected Christ, wanting to cloak their unbelief behind a veil of Biblical vocabulary, deliberately used historic Christian terms while attaching new meanings to them. The Neo-orthodox theologians – of which we will have more to say later – were one such group. These men in the same breath could claim that the Bible was indeed inspired by God and that it was full of errors. They had a different definition of inspired than Gordon Clark. So then, whose definition was correct? Was Clark right or the Neo-orthodox? What does the Bible claim for itself? Does it assert its own inspiration? How does it define inspiration? Is the Bible even the place to look to answer these questions, or is it circular reasoning to defend the Scriptures by appealing to the Scriptures?
Lux Lucet 
“These men in the same breath could claim that the Bible was indeed inspired by God and that it was full of errors.”
This is very similar to the idea that the Bible is full of paradoxes, which I hear commonly on the lips of Presbyterian ministers today. It seems to me that what they mean by this is that the Bible full of mush – unintelligible sentences that no one can understand, or paradoxes. The end result is the same as the neo-orthodox/Barthians. The Bible becomes a next to useless book and we therefore need to seek truth from sources that we can understand – i.e. in many other fields, (particularly today in psychology, which, amongst other errors, has the visible christian church in its grip). So, under the guise of humility, (“the word of God is too profound for me to understand”) the Bible is jettisoned and we search for satisfaction in all the broker cisterns of men’s understanding that litter the landscape of this world.
I remember that in the Jack Lannom lecture on the TrinityFoundaton website he says that he was used to speaking to thousands that would be eating out of his hand by the end of his lectures on corporate culture, but when he spoke to christian conferences of 300 or less, after he finished speaking about Gordon Clark, they would all politely just get up and leave!
Thank God for men like Clark and Robbins who teach us the way of God more perfectly and give us definitions so that we can clearly understand what is being said.
Very well said. John.
It’s sad, but not surprising, that so many are eager to listen to business advice, but so few are willing to hear the word of truth.