Lux Lucet

Does anyone write a better foreword than John Robbins? Of course, were someone to put that question to me, I would have to respond, “I don’t know, since I have not read every foreword by every author.” On the other hand, were someone to ask me whether I had ever read a better author of forewords than John Robbins, I could answer with confidence, “no.” I’ve been a admirer of Robbins’ work for over ten years now, and it all started with my reading his introduction to The Everlasting Righteousness. His writing was crisp, to the point and forceful. I was hooked at once. When I got to the end, I made a mental note to myself that the author was someone named John Robbins. “I’ve never heard of John Robbins,” I said to myself, “but that was really good; I’ve never read anything like it.”

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.