RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
This book is both an expansion upon and condensing of Clark’s earlier A Christian View of Men and Things. It highlights key points made in that foundational work, and in allowing other scholars to critique Clark, it lets Clark clarify his main argument. The formatting of the book is both clever and confused. It highlights key sentences in the margins, and the margins are wide enough for notes. But the actual structure of the book is left unexplained.
Section one is Clark’s Wheaton Lectures, outlining his thoughts in A Christian View of Men and Things. The next 280 pages are critics’ responses to these lectures.
Clark’s Views in a Nutshell
I am not going to outline the whole book, but rather focus on the issues that drew the most attention.
(1) Aristotle’s problem of individuation (pp. 31ff). If things are simply aggregates of other things, then what is the primary individual? If matter is simply pure potentiality, then it is nothing. Clark brings it to a point: “Which then is the individual: rock, mountain, or range? The question is embarrassing, for the identification of individuals cannot be made on the empirical basis Aristotle adopts” (Clark 31).
(2) I think Clark created problems for himself on science. He should have said that scientism cannot justify itself and left it at that, rather than banking all on operationalism.
(3) The Axiom of Revelation: So what’s Clark actually saying here? Is he saying (3a) we can only know what can be deduced from the Bible (which is what Mavrodes claims Clark says) or is he saying (3b) that the Axiom makes knowledge possible? The former is indefensible. That latter just might work.
Let’s go to Mavrodes’ essay while we are at it. Mavrodes claims Clark holds to (3a). Clark rejects this. I tend to side with Clark, though Clark’s later disciples do hold to (3a). But Mavrodes goes beyond that, though. On Mavrodes’ outlook, it’s hard to see why he would hold to the truthfulness of the Bible. It got so bad that another critic of Clark, John W. Montgomery, actually took the time to rebut Mavrodes on the canon.
The other two important essays are the ones by Montgomery and Nash. Nash tackles Clark’s epistemology and Montgomery his view of history.
Section one is Clark’s Wheaton Lectures, outlining his thoughts in A Christian View of Men and Things. The next 280 pages are critics’ responses to these lectures.
Clark’s Views in a Nutshell
I am not going to outline the whole book, but rather focus on the issues that drew the most attention.
(1) Aristotle’s problem of individuation (pp. 31ff). If things are simply aggregates of other things, then what is the primary individual? If matter is simply pure potentiality, then it is nothing. Clark brings it to a point: “Which then is the individual: rock, mountain, or range? The question is embarrassing, for the identification of individuals cannot be made on the empirical basis Aristotle adopts” (Clark 31).
(2) I think Clark created problems for himself on science. He should have said that scientism cannot justify itself and left it at that, rather than banking all on operationalism.
(3) The Axiom of Revelation: So what’s Clark actually saying here? Is he saying (3a) we can only know what can be deduced from the Bible (which is what Mavrodes claims Clark says) or is he saying (3b) that the Axiom makes knowledge possible? The former is indefensible. That latter just might work.
Let’s go to Mavrodes’ essay while we are at it. Mavrodes claims Clark holds to (3a). Clark rejects this. I tend to side with Clark, though Clark’s later disciples do hold to (3a). But Mavrodes goes beyond that, though. On Mavrodes’ outlook, it’s hard to see why he would hold to the truthfulness of the Bible. It got so bad that another critic of Clark, John W. Montgomery, actually took the time to rebut Mavrodes on the canon.
The other two important essays are the ones by Montgomery and Nash. Nash tackles Clark’s epistemology and Montgomery his view of history.