# God's Hammer (G. Clark)



## RamistThomist (Mar 14, 2015)

This book is vintage Clark: remarkably clear, mostly solid, and occasionally “off.”

I do not have a problem with most of the book. Clark responds to and surveys the “inspiration” debates plaguing 20th century Evangelicalism. For those of us who are familiar with Carson/Woodbridge/Henry, we will recognize Clark’s arguments. 

The problems:

1. Does Clark deny analogical knowledge? It’s hard to say. To be fair, he does affirm analogical knowledge of a sorts: “Ordinary analogies are legitimate and useful, but they are so only because there is a univocal point of coincident meaning in the two parts” (Clark 33). Something just doesn’t seem right. Earlier Clark affirms a “most important qualitative difference between the knowledge situation in the case of God and the knowledge situation for man” (30). I suppose the question is this: what is this “point of contact” between God and man? What is the “univocal” element? If he says “knowledge,” then he begs the question. Which aspect of knowledge is the univocal point? 

It will help to remember Clark’s explanation of what makes something “true.” “Nothing can be called true in the literal sense of the term except the attribution of a predicate to a subject” (25). I don’t really have a problem with this. It’s basic logic and epistemology. Isolated terms are neither true or false. Nothing is being predicated of them. Fair enough. With this in mind I think we can answer the question. He concludes, “But if a predicate does not mean the same thing to man as it does to God, then, if God’s meaning is the correct one, it follows that man’s meaning is incorrect” (32). 

2. This is unsettling but we will move on. I think there is a more important issue in the following pages. Clark appears to deny the correspondence theory of truth. He writes, “Suffice to say, if the mind has something that only corresponds to reality, it does not have reality. And if it knows reality, there is no need for an extra something that corresponds to it” (36). And so we have abandoned all classical epistemology from Augustine onward. Keeping in mind the signa/res dichotomy, Clark has collapsed the sign into the thing signified. If we apply this method to ontology, all is collapsed into the One. If we apply it to the sacraments, we have transubstantiation. The sign is the thing signified.

It appears, then, that Clark opts for a coherentist model of truth. He doesn’t say so, but I think this would be his position. Coherentism isn’t ipso facto wrong, but it is insufficient without a correspondence theory. Coherentism only tells us of the doxastic relationships between beliefs. It doesn’t tell us whether (or how) a belief is true. Further, a belief can be coherent and not really bear upon other beliefs in question. I believe the proposition “my door is brown.” How does that cohere with the proposition “The Bible is axiomatically true?”

I don’t want to leave on a negative note. Clark anticipates a few moves in modern epistemology, such as the problem of criterion. Let’s look at the liberal claim that the Bible is “symbolic” of myth or something. This was sex-fiend Paul Tillich’s position. Let’s say the crucifixion never occured, but it symbolic of God’s love. Is that a literal truth or a symbolic one? If the latter, then God’s love must be symbolic of something, too. But this new term must be symbolic of yet another term, and on to eternity (48). 

He also deals with the inane argument “what good is an infallible bible without an infallible interpreter?” But as the history of post-Vatican II has shown, this is fraught with danger. If the Bible requires an infallible interpretation, then the supposed infallible encyclical or council would also need an infallible interpreter. Whoever this might be, his interpretation--also infallible--would require yet another infallible interpretation, and so on (124).

Conclusion

Can we recommend this work? We can recommend it provided the reader is already familiar with Bavinck. And while Clark anticipated modern epistemology in some areas, the discussion has come a long way.


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## Philip (Mar 14, 2015)

ReformedReidian said:


> “Nothing can be called true in the literal sense of the term except the attribution of a predicate to a subject”



That's a logical positivist definition. One wonders if a later-Wittgensteinian account of language would undercut Clark here. Which sense is the literal one here?



ReformedReidian said:


> “But if a predicate does not mean the same thing to man as it does to God, then, if God’s meaning is the correct one, it follows that man’s meaning is incorrect”



Why would God not communicate in human language? If the same term is being used equivocally, this means that two different language-games are being invoked, not that one is correct and the other is incorrect.



ReformedReidian said:


> Earlier Clark affirms a “most important qualitative difference between the knowledge situation in the case of God and the knowledge situation for man” (30). I suppose the question is this: what is this “point of contact” between God and man? What is the “univocal” element? If he says “knowledge,” then he begs the question. Which aspect of knowledge is the univocal point?



Here again I wonder if Wittgenstein might be helpful with his useful category of "family resemblance" which describes concepts that bear resemblance to one another, but which one cannot exhaustively define without excluding certain members of the set, as least as understood in ordinary language.

Question for further discussion: does Clark allow space for Divine Speech-Acts? What, for Clark, is the relationship between God's speaking and God's action in the world of time and space?


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## RamistThomist (Mar 15, 2015)

Philip said:


> ReformedReidian said:
> 
> 
> > “Nothing can be called true in the literal sense of the term except the attribution of a predicate to a subject”
> ...



That's an interesting question. I had not thought of that.


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## TheOldCourse (Mar 15, 2015)

ReformedReidian said:


> 1. Does Clark deny analogical knowledge? It’s hard to say. To be fair, he does affirm analogical knowledge of a sorts: “Ordinary analogies are legitimate and useful, but they are so only because there is a univocal point of coincident meaning in the two parts” (Clark 33). Something just doesn’t seem right. Earlier Clark affirms a “most important qualitative difference between the knowledge situation in the case of God and the knowledge situation for man” (30). I suppose the question is this: what is this “point of contact” between God and man? What is the “univocal” element? If he says “knowledge,” then he begs the question. Which aspect of knowledge is the univocal point?



It's been many years since I've read this but I think here he's not so much trying to formulate a positive description of analogical knowledge but making an implicit critique of others' use of the term. He points out that the term analogical requires, by its definition, a univocal point of contact and so those who use the term either have to grant what they do not wish to (viz. some element of univocity) or admit that "analogical knowledge" as they use it is a misnomer. If the former, Clark has won the day, if the latter than he at least wins the argument as his opponents are working with undefined or vaguely defined terms (which was a huge deal to Clark).


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## Philip (Mar 15, 2015)

TheOldCourse said:


> If the former, Clark has won the day, if the latter than he at least wins the argument as his opponents are working with undefined or vaguely defined terms (which was a huge deal to Clark).



But there's a _tu quoque_ here. What precisely does Clark mean by univocality? There's an account of language lurking behind his criticisms that needs to be questioned.


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## TheOldCourse (Mar 15, 2015)

Philip said:


> TheOldCourse said:
> 
> 
> > If the former, Clark has won the day, if the latter than he at least wins the argument as his opponents are working with undefined or vaguely defined terms (which was a huge deal to Clark).
> ...



Given his statements elsewhere, I would suspect he means propositional equivalence since for him all truth was reducible to propositional content as I understand Clark (and I'm certainly no Clark scholar). He actually wrote a book on the philosophy of language ("Language and Theology") in which he interacts with Wittgenstein, Ayer, Berkeley, Fiegl, etc., but I've never read it so can't comment on his position there.


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## Philip (Mar 15, 2015)

TheOldCourse said:


> He actually wrote a book on the philosophy of language ("Language and Theology") in which he interacts with Wittgenstein, Ayer, Berkeley, Fiegl, etc., but I've never read it so can't comment on his position there.



It looks as if his main target is logical positivism, which means that the later Wittgenstein would not be in view.



TheOldCourse said:


> Given his statements elsewhere, I would suspect he means propositional equivalence since for him all truth was reducible to propositional content



But that's simply saying the same thing with different words. If we say "P has property X" and "Q has property X" does this mean that X has precisely the same sense in both cases if both propositions are true? But then what about concepts where X has few if any necessary or sufficient conditions for qualification? For instance when we say "chess is a game" and "soccer is a game" and "sudoku is a game" the word "game" is being used in the same way each time, yet we cannot come up with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that doesn't either exclude something which we consider to be a game or include something that we do not.

And if all truth is reducible to propositional content, then one has to reject the historic Christian position that truth is personal. The definition here is reductionistic.


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## RamistThomist (Mar 15, 2015)

Clark interacts with "I am the Truth" as Jesus is using truth figuratively not literally. Which seems a stretch.


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## TheOldCourse (Mar 15, 2015)

Philip said:


> TheOldCourse said:
> 
> 
> > He actually wrote a book on the philosophy of language ("Language and Theology") in which he interacts with Wittgenstein, Ayer, Berkeley, Fiegl, etc., but I've never read it so can't comment on his position there.
> ...



For Clark, perhaps confusingly, personality is seemingly reducible to propositional content as well, so he would evade that criticism (though undoubtedly his idiosyncratic definition of personhood opens him up to others). The propositions held by a mind are not distinct from the mind itself, so a person is characterized by the sum total of propositional content it holds. Thus a distinction between personal truth and propositional truth is nonexistent. 



> For instance when we say "chess is a game" and "soccer is a game" and "sudoku is a game" the word "game" is being used in the same way each time, yet we cannot come up with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that doesn't either exclude something which we consider to be a game or include something that we do not.



I would suspect that Clark would dispute the ordinary language philosophy assumptions behind (later) Wittgenstein's example and so deny that it can be the case that both the word is being used in the same way and the genus cannot be so defined. One or the other must be false regardless of common usage. Clark believed not only in the depravity of man but the "depravity of words". I'm not aware of Clark interacting with that school of thought, but one would think he must have since he was active academically in philosophy into the 70's.


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## Philip (Mar 15, 2015)

TheOldCourse said:


> For Clark, perhaps confusingly, personality is seemingly reducible to propositional content as well, so he would evade that criticism



That's not really an evasion so much as a retreat into nonsense.



TheOldCourse said:


> I would suspect that Clark would dispute the ordinary language philosophy assumptions behind (later) Wittgenstein's example and so deny that it can be the case that both the word is being used in the same way and the genus cannot be so defined.



I mean sure he can deny it, but at that point we have to ask whether Clark's account accords with the world as we know it and as we interact with it. The account of language that he is assuming is precisely a positivist one with Scripture substituted for verification.


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## jwright82 (Mar 16, 2015)

Clark did deal with the early and later Wittgenstein in his book on language, stating (if I remember correctly) that the early thought was better than the later thought. I think that Clark was so tied into an enlighnment way of thinking that he couldn't even conceive of something like the later Wittgenstein. I still wonder if some Clarkian will rise up and translate his thought into contemporary philosophy. I think that the man had so much to say to us but was so tied to a "philosophical" sinking ship that he abandoned both philosophy and Reformed theology. Could he square his own understanding of theology with our tradition on analogical knowledge? I don't know but it's up to Clarkians to decide that.


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