Lux Lucet

Clark begins the introduction to A Christian View of Men and Things (CVMT) by stating,

“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.