Lux Lucet

Raphael’s The School of Athens, depicting Plato and Aristotle.

Last week I mentioned one positive lesson Christians can take from Karl Marx. That may seem like a strange statement at first blush. After all, Marx was an atheist, a collectivist, and a violent revolutionary. Hardly the sort of fellow a Christian should look to for philosophical guidance. And yet, there is one aspect of his program that does recommend itself to the Christian: he was a systematic thinker. He didn’t randomly throw ideas together, but sought to develop a unified worldview based on certain philosophic principles. Systematic thinking, systematic philosophy, has tremendous power. So much so, that even an evil system of thought such as Marxism can take the world by storm.

Christianity also is a system of thought. But unlike Marxism, or Kantianism, or Objectivism, or any other system developed by man – what the apostle Paul deemed “the wisdom of this world” – Christianity is a revealed system of thought. One could even call it a revealed system of truth. For Christianity reveals the mind of God, the truth that comes from God, in every area of intellectual inquiry.

But even though Bible-believing Christians would be the first to defend the Word of God as inspired, inerrant and infallible, too often their thinking, and thus their practice, betrays a certain amount of inconsistency. The Bible, in the view of many Christians, is good for learning about God, sin, and salvation in Christ. But when it comes to questions of philosophy, well, the Christian will have to go to the experts. This always means the secular philosophers.

Thomas Aquinas is the ultimate example of this approach. In his case, he attempted to combine revealed ideas from the Bible with the empirical philosophy of the pagan philosopher Aristotle. The resulting system called Thomism is now the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church-State. It is also, unfortunately, the philosophical system of many Evangelicals. Well known evangelicals such as R.C. Sproul and Norman Giesler both espouse Thomism. And while Aristotle and Aquinas were brilliant men, neither one’s system of thought was Christian. By following Aquinas, these Evangelicals unknowingly undercut their Christian witness.

In one of his lectures on philosophy, John Robbins made the point that a major weakness of the Reformation was the fact that it never produced a systematic philosopher. That is, no one, at least in any coherent way, ever attempted to apply Scripture to the problems of philosophy. That is, no one until Gordon Clark. With Clark’s work, Christians for the first time were furnished with a Biblical system of thought capable of meeting and defeating all rivals in all fields of intellectual endeavor. In some ways, it is hard to believe that it took so long for this to happen. Yet happen it finally did. And as Christians we can take great delight in this. My goal in this and in the next few posts will be to summarize the basic ideas of Christian philosophy using John Robbins tract What is Christian Philosophy? as my guide.

Philosophical Basics

Before reading the works of John Robbins, I never really had much interest in philosophy. Or perhaps I should put it another way, I never thought I could understand philosophy, and thus largely ignored it. In truth, long ago I had the beginnings of an interest in philosophy, but was always intimidated out of pursuing it. Philosophy seemed hopelessly incomprehensible for an average mortal such as myself. On top of that, the little that I did know about philosophy led me to think, accurately in retrospect, that secular philosophers were in the main hostile to Christianity.

In the providence of God, it was not until I started reading the works of Clark and Robbins that I began to develop even a basic understanding of philosophy. One of the most helpful things I learned, and this came from Robbins’ lectures on philosophy, is that philosophy can be boiled down into four basic disciplines: (1) epistemology: the theory of knowledge; (2) metaphysics: the theory of reality; (3) ethics: the theory of conduct; and (4) politics: the theory of government. Knowing this put me miles ahead of where I had been. Up until then, my attempts to read philosophy were hampered by my inability to see the big picture. I couldn’t see the philosophical forest, because my nose was pressed firmly against a tree. This is a clue for how we should approach any new subject. Start with the general and work to the specific. If you don’t have a good grasp of the general whole, you will quickly get lost in the details of any field of study.

Epistemology: Rationalism and Empiricism

As we have said, epistemology is the theory of knowledge. Epistemology answers this question, How do you know? This is the most basic question in all philosophy. For if a thinker cannot give a coherent account of his truth claims, there is no reason to listen to him.

In the history of philosophy, there have been two basic ways of answering the question, How do you know? One is called empiricism, and the other rationalism. An empiricist holds that sense experience furnishes us with truth. We learn truth by going out and making observations. For the rationalist, knowledge of the truth begins with ideas. The rationalist begins with certain basic ideas and deduces a system of thought from them.

Consider, if you will, the accompanying picture at the top of the page. I had seen this picture for years before I ever knew what it was called or what it represented. As it turns out, it is a detail from a fresco by Italian artist Raphael called The School of Athens. The two gentlemen depicted are not, as I once thought, generic Greek philosophers, but are representations of Plato (left) and Aristotle (right). But what is really interesting about this scene is what each man is doing with his right hand. You will notice that Plato is pointing up, whereas Aristotle has his hand stretched out toward the earth. This is Raphael’s way of showing their respective epistemologies. Aristotle was an empiricist. He believe truth could be discovered by making observations of the world around us. Empiricism is the dominant epistemology of our day. Think scientism, the idea that science furnishes us with truth, as an example of empiricist philosophy. Most people, by default, are empiricists, even if they haven’t set out to articulate their beliefs in any systematic fashion. “Seeing is believing,” is a common way of saying one is an empiricist. Plato, on the other hand, was a rationalist. He believed that truth was found in the world of ideas. In rationalism, one does not start with physical sensations, but with ideas. Geometry, which starts with certain axioms and proceeds to the deduction of corollaries by way of logic, is an example of rationalism.

When reading a philosopher for the first time, it is a good idea to ask yourself whether he is a rationalist or an empiricist. Knowing just this one simple thing will go a long way to helping you understand his writings.

Scripturalist Epistemology

Gordon Clark never called his system of Christian philosophy Scripturalism, that term was coined by John Robbins. But it is an accurate description of Clark’s philosophy and one that is helpful in distinguishing his system from that of others.

For most of its history, Christianity has lacked a consistent Christian epistemology. This lack is not the result of any failure on the part of the Bible, for the Bible provides a us with the necessary information. No, the problem is not with the Bible, the problem is that for too long, Christian thinkers have failed to bring all their thoughts into captivity to Christ. Instead of getting their epistemology, as they should have, from the Bible, they instead borrowed it from the world. This has have serious repercussions for the Christian faith. It has too often led Christians into intellectual dead ends, robbing them of the ability to bring the Word of God to bear on the problems of their own time, and leading the general public to think that Christianity has no answers. It was, I believe, a 19th century Frenchman who said that the worst fate that could befall an idea was not to be brilliantly attacked, but to be incompetently defended. The failure of Christian thinkers to develop a competent, Biblical, epistemology on which to build a logically defensible Christian philosophical system is a major reason why Christianity is held in such low esteem today.

So what is Scripturalist epistemology? What is the Christian basis for any truth claim? What do you say to the Darwinist when he asks you why you believe the world was created by the Word of God’s power, in the space of six days, and all very good rather than the result of the big bang and billions of years of time and chance? In a nutshell you tell him this: The Bible tells me so. The basis for any Christian truth claim is that it is revealed in the 66 books of the bible. That is Christian epistemology. As Christians, we reject the notion that the senses (empiricism) or unaided human reason (rationalism) furnish us with truth. Truth is revealed to us as a gracious gift of God in his Word. What is more, Christian philosophy holds that not only may we know the explicit statements of the Bible, but we may also know the necessary implications of those statements.

Another way of putting it is to say that the Bible, the 66 books of the Bible as defined in the Westminster Confession of Faith, is the axiom of Christianity. An axiom is an unproven first principle. It stands first and is the basis for all proof, but is itself not subject to proof. The reason for this is simple. If an axiom could be proven, it would no longer be an axiom. Whatever was used as proof would then become the axiom. Some may be uneasy with this idea, supposing that this leaves Christians vulnerable to the charge of begging the question (assuming as true what ought to be proven). But this is not the case, for all systems of thought, all empiricist systems, all rationalist systems, have their axioms. All have unproven first principles. Therefore, secular philosophers have no basis for criticizing Christians for taking the 66 books of the Bible as their axiom. What’s good for the philosophical goose is good for the philosophical gander.

Conclusion

I do not have the reference handy, but somewhere in one of his lectures on philosophy, John Robbins had a brilliant insight on a passage in I Corinthians. Quoting Isaiah in I Cor. 2:9, Paul writes, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” Commentators generally hold that this passage refers to heaven only. But Paul places this quote in the context of his contrasting the wisdom of this world, which in truth is foolishness, with the wisdom that comes from God. In such a context, it is better to understand the primary referent of the quote from Isaiah, not as heaven, but as the truth of Christianity. “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,” is a denial that empiricism, sense experience, furnishes of with truth. Likewise, “nor have entered into the heart of man,” is a denial of rationalism. That is, man does not come the glorious truth of God by his unaided reason alone. Among the things which God has prepared for those who love him is the knowledge of the truth. And it is through revelation alone in the 66 books of the Bible that we find it. It turns out that just as we are wholly dependent on God for salvation, so too are we wholly dependent on him for knowledge