God’s Hammer The Bible and Its Critics Gordon H. Clark The Trinity Foundation “Is not my word like a fire,” says the Lord, “and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?” Jeremiah 23:29 God’s Hammer: The Bible and Its Critics First edition copyright © 1982 John W. Robbins Second edition copyright © 1987 John W. Robbins Third edition copyright © 1995 John W. Robbins Fourth edition copyright © 2011 Laura K. Juodaitis Published by The Trinity Foundation Post Office Box 68 Unicoi, Tennessee 37692 www.trinityfoundation.org ISBN-10: 1-891777-33-5 ISBN-13: 978-1-891777-33-2 Contents Foreword by Harold Lindsell Acknowledgements Introduction by John W. Robbins 1. How May I Know the Bible is Inspired? The Biblical Claims The Meaning of Inspiration Plenary Inspiration Verbal Inspiration A Written Revelation The Proof of Inspiration The Testimony of the Holy Spirit The Factor of Sin 2. The Bible as Truth The Effect of Sin on Man’s Knowledge Man’s Epistemological Limitations Man’s Knowledge in Relation to God’s Truth Is Propositional 3. Verbal Inspiration Yesterday and Today The Biblical Claims The Dictation Objection Contemporary Theories 4. The Evangelical Theological Society Tomorrow The Bible’s View of Itself May We Appeal to the Bible? The Present Task The Blows of Battle Is Infallibility Useless? Evangelical Doctrines Biblical Authority Human Need The Criterion The Evangelical Theological Society 5. Special Divine Revelation as Rational Inadequacy of General Revelation Defense of Revelation as Rational The Medieval Scholastic Attempt The Renaissance Attack The Neo-orthodox Compromise The Reformation Way Some Contemporary Problems 6. Revealed Religion Strict Natural Theology Less and More Loose Natural Theology Encounter Verbal Revelation 7. Holy Scripture 8. The Concept of Biblical Authority A Little History What Is Authority? Inerrancy and Infallibility Jack Rogers Bernard Ramm David Hubbard 9. Hamilton’s Theory of Language and Inspiration Myth Human Language Revelation John Calvin Literal Truth Parable 10. What Is Truth? Epistemology Ideas and Propositions The Bible 11. The Reformed Faith and the Westminster Confession Atheism Neo-Orthodoxy Arminianism and Calvinism The Crisis of Our Time Intellectual Ammunition Foreword Today two areas of Christian doctrine are in the forefront for discussion by academicians in colleges and universties and by people in the pews: Christology and bibliology. The one has to do with the Word of God written – which is the Bible, and the other the Word of God Incarnate – which is Jesus Christ. At the heart of the Christological discussion lies the question: From whence do we get our knowledge about the person and work of Jesus Christ? The answer is simple enough. The only Jesus the Church has known or can know is the Jesus of Scripture. Thus if Scripture tells us what we need to know about the second person of the Trinity, we are still left with another question: Is the source ( i.e. the Bible and its sixty-six books) from which we get our knowledge about Jesus a reliable book? This opens the door to three possibilities: 1. The Bible is free from all error in the whole and in the part. 2. The Bible is free from error in some of its parts, but it is false in other parts. 3. The Bible is totally unreliable and cannot be depended on for any truth. Whoever chooses any one of these propositions depends on some basic presupposition from which the inquirer starts. In our modern world there are basically two ways men write theology, and each involves a presupposition which ends up in quite different ways. In all probability a majority of the scholars in the West today would choose option 2. Marxists and many people who adhere to the Unitarian Universalist denomination would more likely choose option 3. But whoever writes theology properly starts with the presupposition that the Bible is a divine book. They do not deny that there were human authors who were involved in the inscripturation of the Word of God. The writers of Holy Writ were divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit so that they were kept from writing anything that was false. The divine authorship by the Holy Spirit guaranteed that the final product would be the errorless Word of God even as the historical Jesus was the sinless Son of God who was conceived by the same Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Since God cannot lie, no part of Scripture is false. The omnipotent God of Scripture has not stuttered in his speech. This brings us to Gordon H. Clark and his many contributions to the defense of historic orthodoxy. In this volume the learned pen of this twentieth-century giant is used to explain and defend the doctrine of an inerrant Scripture. Dr. Clark’s insights are informed by Scripture. He is the quintessential man of that Holy Book, the Bible. There are few, if any, philosophical systems that have not come under the scrutiny of this man of God, and in every instance he has looked at them through the eyeglasses of divine revelation. He has the rare gift of being a consummate logician. He uses the law of contradiction with telling effect. He knows and employs all of the laws of logic, and he can detect an error in any syllogism which defies those laws. He is relentless in his pursuit of truth, and he brilliantly demonstrates the logical fallacies of those who denigrate Scripture or who by the use of hermeneutical casuistry undermine the Word of God and make it seem to say what it does not. It is signally unfortunate that those who oppose the view that the Bible is without error are not acquainted with or have not come to terms with the writings of this fearless expositor. Dr. Clark went to his eternal reward in his eighty-third year, but though he is dead he continues to speak through the legacy he has left us — a legacy that will stand the test of time until he who is the Truth comes again in glory. Harold Lindsell Acknowledgements Our gratitude is extended to the following copyright owners for their permission to reprint the essays included in this volume: The Moody Press, Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, for permission to reprint “How May I Know the Bible Is Inspired?” from Can I Trust the Bible? edited by Howard Vos, copyright 1963. Bibliotheca Sacra, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, Texas, for permission to reprint “The Bible as Truth,” copyright 1957. The Presbyterian Journal, Asheville, North Carolina, for permission to reprint “Verbal Inspiration: Yesterday and Today,” copyright 1956. The Evangelical Theological Society, Jackson, Mississippi, for permission to reprint “The Evangelical Theological Society Tomorrow,” copyright 1966; “Holy Scripture,” copyright 1963; and “Hamilton’s Theory of Language and Inspiration,” copyright 1972. Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, for permission to reprint “Revealed Religion,” from Fundamentals of the Faith, edited by Carl F.H. Henry, copyright 1969. Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, for permission to reprint “Special Divine Revelation as Rational,” from Revelation and the Bible, edited by Carl F.H. Henry, copyright 1958. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, Phillipsburg, New Jersey, for permission to reprint The Concept of Biblical Authority, copyright 1979. Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, for permission to reprint “What Is Truth?” from the Fall 1980 issue of Presbuterion. The final essay, “The Reformed Faith and the Westminster Confession,” is an address delivered in Weaverville, North Carolina, August 17, 1955. Introduction The twentieth century may be a pivotal period in human history, for the doctrines of justification through faith alone and truth through the Bible alone came under such a severe and sustained attack. That attack, which has been countered by only a few of the professed tens of millions of Christians in America, has come primarily from within the church itself. It indicated that the wolves are within the sheepfold, and in many cases, are actually posing as shepherds. Over the decades the greatest defender of the Christian faith in the twentieth century wrote a number of essays defending the authority, necessity, clarity, and sufficiency of God’s Word – essays which we have collected in this volume. The focus of this book is not on archaeology or history, but on the philosophical attacks which have been leveled against the idea of divine revelation, the adequacy of human language, the notion of literal truth, and the trustworthiness of human logic. The twentieth-century critics of the Bible have not been content merely to impugn God’s veracity, they have denied his ability to reveal himself to men in intelligible propositions and asserted that man’s mind is constitutionally unable to understand divine things. Here those critics are answered, and with devastating effect. The Bible is infallible, logic is indispensable, language is adequate, and God, being omnipotent, is able to reveal truth to men. Equally at home in secular philosophy and theology and Christian theology and philosophy, Dr. Clark hammers God’s critics with the tools of Scripture and logic. When he is through, the critics are flattened, their voices silenced. Dr. Clark, emulating Christ’s methods of dealing with his critics and defending the truth, achieves the same effect, which is the effect that all defenders of the Christian faith should aim to achieve: “And no one was able to answer him a word.” John W. Robbins March 1995 God’s Hammer The Bible and Its Critics 1 How May I Know the Bible is Inspired? The question of this chapter concerns the inspiration of the Bible. It must be clearly distinguished from another question with which it might be confused: How may I know that the Bible is true? These two questions are indeed related, but they are not the same question.