Lux Lucet

Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. (Col 2:8)

Before I came to the Scripturalism of Gordon Clark and John Robbins, my attitude toward philosophy was a mix of indifference, fear. Indifference, because I the little bit that I had been exposed to had left me baffled, fear, because I thought that I would be easy prey for deceptive teaching. So as is the case with many Christians, I labored hard to avoid the subject altogether, and Colossians 2:8 seemed make this avoidance easy to justify. “After all,” I thought to myself, “it tells us right there in Scripture not to be cheated by philosophy. So to ensure that I’m not cheated by it, I won’t study it at all.”

Of course, the verse says nothing about not studying philosophy, it simply enjoins Christians not to be cheated by it, which is a very different thing, so my conclusion really didn’t follow from the verse. But being ignorant of logic, it’s not surprising that I would fall into this common logical blunder.

Years later when I began to study Reformed theology, I met a Presbyterian fellow who intended to study for the ministry. He was in college at the time and studying, of all things, philosophy. This struck me as rather odd, since I had long considered philosophy the province of screaming atheist lunatics, not Christians. But while I was surprised at his major, I was intrigued by the fact that he believed training in philosophy would be helpful to him in his ministry. Not long after that, I was introduced to Gordon Clark’s work.

Clark was a whole new world for me. I was amazed at his grasp of secular thinkers, how he could summarize their ideas and demolish their arguments using the Scriptures. I had never read anyone with such great mastery of secular thought who at the same time was clearly a believer in the Lord Jesus. Clark’s work made clear to me one reason why it is important for Christians to study of philosophy: so they’re not cheated by it. The very opposite of what I had thought.

But enough about me, let’s hear what Clark has to say about the matter. In his commentary on Colossians, Clark, discussing verse 2:8, remarked,

“Sometimes this verse is used to discourage Christians from studying philosophy. One example is a seminary president who rigidly excludes from the curriculum any course in apologetics. Whether or not he quotes Tertullian’s famous phrase, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ it should be noted that Tertullian advocated a philosophy; and strange to say, it was a materialistic philosophy. If Tertullian had studied more philosophy, he might have avoided materialism. In fact those Christians who know little logic and less philosophy are precisely the ones who are most apt to be deceived by persuasive fallacies.”

That last sentence is a good description of my intellectual state before coming to Scripturalism. I really was a jumble of conflicting ideas. It turns out I was an empiricist who was somehow trying to reconcile the propositions of the Bible with the facts of sense experience. In short, I was an inadvertent Thomist being cheated by a philosophy whose principles I had never studied and existence I was unaware. That’s a dangerous place to be. And if it were not for God’s mercy, I would have languished there.

But thanks be to God who gives men wisdom liberally and without reproach. He not only saved me from my sins by teaching me the truth about Jesus Christ, but also used Clark’s work to open my eyes to the dangers of trying to combine Christian thought with the philosophical systems of this world. May he do likewise for many others.