In 1946, the General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) was going through one of the most controversial events in its history. Formed a decade earlier in 1936, the church was still young, and its founder, the Princeton professor of New Testament, J. Gresham Machen, was dead. In his wake, a younger generation of theologians had followed him to Westminster Theological Seminary and the OPC, including the renowned apologist Cornelius Van Til. The controversy in 1946 had to do with the ordination and theology of a notable professor of philosophy from Wheaton College, Dr. Gordon Clark. The event itself later became known as the Clark-Van Til Controversy.

This is the subject of the recent biography by Douglas J. Douma, The Presbyterian Philosopher: The Authorized Biography of Gordon H. Clark. In this work, Douma sets out to vindicate Clark from the charges surrounding the controversy and portray him as the one who got it right over and against the faculty of Westminster. In particular, Douma addresses in detail the accusations leveled against Clark, including the charge of rationalism and Clark’s denial of the free offer of the gospel. Douma himself does not make much effort to hide his sympathies with Clark’s views, which becomes evident in his account very quickly.

There is a lot of background information in the book about Gordon Clark’s life, including his rearing in the Presbyterian tradition and his time at the University of Pennsylvania. Douma does a good job of showing us Clark’s intellectual development and journey from the University of Pennsylvania to Wheaton College in Illinois. Most readers are not familiar with this part of the story and Douma is able to provide some of this as context for the controversy. The narrative takes a turn, however, when getting to the events of the controversy, where he focuses the story.

He identifies four causes of the controversy and four theological issues. The four causes were Clark’s philosophy, his desire to work more closely with the fundamentalists, his stance on alcohol consumption for ministers, and the oversight of Westminster Seminary’s theology. The four theological issues were the incomprehensibility of God, the faculties of the soul, divine sovereignty and human responsibility, and the free offer of the gospel (110–27). Though much can be said about each of these issues, it is evident from reading Douma’s account that the issues most important to him are theological, and among those: the incomprehensibility of God and the free offer of the gospel. For that reason, I will spend most of my review addressing these issues.

First, he argues that Clark’s view regarding the incomprehensibility of God was logically coherent and that Van Til’s was not. He also reiterates the belief that Van Til’s affirmation of the traditional Reformed archetypal-ectypal distinction was not supported by Scripture and was a novel view. He writes, “Clark believed that for man to know any truth at all, there must be a common point of contact between man’s knowledge and God’s knowledge. This point of contact was, for Clark, the proposition known. He believed that the propositions which man knows must be identical to the propositions which God knows in order for man to know anything at all” (111). Douma also writes that Clark’s distinction of God’s knowledge and man’s was a distinction in terms of quantity, where human knowledge is limited to some of God’s implications, while God’s is unlimited. The qualitative distinctions for Clark were in the “mode or manner of knowing.” While God knows all truth by the fact of his being, man knows truth through God’s revelation and deductive reasoning (111).

Although Clark considered these distinctions orthodox, the complainants were right to challenge them as rationalist. His assertion was a denial of the archetypal-ectypal distinction regarding Christian knowledge and God’s knowledge. Clark met opposition to his ideas by Van Til, R. B. Kuiper, and Ned Stonehouse because of this. Douma also appears to accept Clark’s charge that Van Til’s use of the archetypal-ectypal distinction was a novel view, when in fact that assumption was wrong (102). This is demonstrably false, since the Reformed orthodoxy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also employed these categories. Take for instance, Franciscus Junius (1545–1602), who taught at the University of Leiden, among other schools. In his A Treatise on True Theology, Junius argued explicitly for the archetypal-ectypal distinction.¹ Junius wrote, “Archetypal theology is the divine wisdom of divine matters. Indeed, we stand in awe before this and do not seek to trace it out.”² Of ectypal theology, he wrote, “Ectypal theology, whether taken in itself, as they say, or relatively in relation to something else, is the wisdom of divine matters, fashioned by God from the archetype of Himself, through the communication of grace for His own glory.”³ If Van Til was attempting to import novel ideas into the Reformed tradition, he was not doing a very good job.

Second, Douma defends Clark’s denial of the free offer of the gospel. His account of this issue is worth considering because he invokes support for his argument from the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in the eighteenth century. It was here that the Scottish Church condemned the Marrow of Modern Divinity by Edward Fisher as an antinomian book that contradicted the Westminster Standards. According to Douma, the OPC should have adhered to the ruling of the General Assembly because of its Presbyterian roots and standards. Also, according to Douma, Van Til, Ned Stonehouse, and R. B. Kuiper were importing ideas from the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) that the OPC should not have considered (122–23). His account rests on an incompatibility between the Presbyterian churches and the Dutch Reformed tradition, which he largely blames on Abraham Kuyper’s theology of common grace.

Douma’s justification for attempting to vindicate Clark’s view was Clark’s argument that the free offer of the gospel was logically incoherent with the Calvinist system and unfaithful to the Bible’s teachings. Douma writes, “Historically, those who agreed with the Free Offer of the Gospel contend that God has both a perfect will and a permissive will. On the former (perfect will), God has certain desires for what should occur in the world, but on the latter (permissive will), he allows other events to come to fruition—events he does not desire in his perfect will” (123). To support his view, Douma invokes the support of Herman Hoeksema and John Gerstner, two well-known Reformed ministers who agreed with Clark and lamented the fact that the Westminster faculty affirmed the free offer of the gospel (126).

His account essentially approves of Clark’s rationalism and evidences an ignorance of historical theology. Philosophy and logic were the driving forces in their thought, while the historic grammar of the Reformed churches was lost on them. When Clark stated his belief that Calvin was “with [him]” on the free offer issue (124), one can only conclude that this is sheer ignorance of Calvin’s theology. Douma’s description of the complainants in the controversy also exposes his leanings when he writes,

The complainants, however, did not believe Scripture was inherently and systematically understandable to man; they denied that consistency was always to be the rule of interpretation. Rather, they held to a theory of paradox, or apparent contradiction. In other words, they held that from man’s perspective, some doctrines of Scripture appear contradictory and irreconcilable, but are, nevertheless, reconcilable to God. (125)

Yes, and this distinction is called the archetypal-ectypal distinction, and it is the distinction that the Reformed churches have maintained going back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To deny this and argue otherwise, which Clark did, is to employ rationalism.

On the charge of rationalism, Douma seeks to absolve Clark on this issue: “Clark was not a rationalist according to the philosophical definition of ‘one who bases knowledge on human reason,’ for he clearly bowed to Scripture as his base” (127). But that is also how Douma has described Clark’s approach to Scripture and theology when he emphasized logic and coherence over apparent contradiction. Clark’s inability to render certain things as mysterious and his need for certainty in his system evidences a sense of rationalism that is hard to deny.

Douma’s account is more of an attempt at arguing theology through the person of Gordon H. Clark as opposed to a serious evaluation of Clark’s ideas and engagement with the primary sources of Reformed orthodoxy. It also shows that there is a group of ministers in the Reformed churches who have not engaged with the traditional categories of Reformed theology regarding the knowledge of God, and who have instead reinforced a modern, deterministic understanding of the Reformed tradition that would be unfamiliar to the theologians of the orthodox era.

Notes

1. Franciscus Junius, Willem J. van Asselt, and Richard A. Muller, A Treatise on True Theology: With the Life of Francsicus Junius, trans. David C. Noe (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2014). Editor’s note, for more on the archetypal ectypal distinction see R. Scott Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2008), 87–88, 143–51. On the relation of this distinction to question of the free offer of the gospel see R. “Janus, the Well-Meant Offer of the Gospel and Westminster Theology,” in David VanDrunen, ed., The Pattern of Sound Doctrine: A Festschrift for Robert B. Strimple(Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2004), 149–80. There is no relation between Gordon Clark and R. Scott Clark.
2. Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, 107.
3. Junius, 113.

Douglas J. Douma, The Presbyterian Philosopher: The Authorized Biography of Gordon H. Clark (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017).

© David Mendoza. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• David Mendoza

  

  David Mendoza an educator at a classical academy in California and a contributor for Young Voices. He holds a B.A. from The Master’s University and an M.A. from Westminster Seminary California. He is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

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