Readings in Ethics, 1935 Pg. 12 Without definition there can be no knowledge.

Selections from Hellenistic Philosophy, 1978 Pgs. 243-244 Lines 17-28 give an excellent statement of the realistic theory of knowledge. Truth is the possession of the objects themselves, not the possession of their impressions, which act as a veil between knower and object. Sextus Empiricus, as a true skeptic, had assumed a division between knower and known. Plotinus, like any true realist, attacks the unexpressed basis of skepticism.

A Christian Philosophy of Education, 1988 Pg. 19 Now the study of the relationships among chemistry, Greek, and anthropology is not just another subject among many. While it is so listed for the convenience sake in college catalogs, philosophy is rather the subject that underlies our approach to and use of all other subject matter. Philosophy is the study not of a part but of the whole. And for the lack of serious study of the whole, American education has lowered its standards, compromised with commercialism, and distinguished itself by mediocrity. Pg. 31 In view of this pragmatic dealing with history, its positivistic denial of universal law, of metaphysics, of supernatural interpretation, it may be permitted by way of anticipation to suggest the conclusion that, instead of beginning with facts and later discovering God, unless a thinker begins with God, he can never end with God, or get the facts either. Pgs. 33-34 Basic worldviews are never demonstrated; they are chosen. William James and Bertrand Russell may believe in a pluralistic universe, but they can offer no demonstration of this, the most fundamental of their intellectual beliefs. The mechanist believes that all natural phenomena can be reduced to mathematical, quantitative equations, but he never gives a mathematical demonstration of his belief. So it is with every world-view; the first principle cannot be proved precisely because it is first. It is the first principle that provides the basis for demonstrating subordinate propositions. Now if such be the case, the thoughtful person is forced to make a voluntary choice. As a matter of fact, the thoughtless person as well is forced to choose, though the necessity to make a choice and the particular choice made may not be so obvious. It is obvious, however, that a thoughtful person, one who wishes to understand, one who wants to think and live consistently, must choose one or another first principle. Pg. 34 Etymologically a skeptic is one who seeks; but philosophically a skeptic is one who does not find. Or, rather, he finds that there is nothing to be found. There is no truth, and knowledge is impossible. Aside from the self-contradiction of asserting the truth that there is no truth, skepticism is not a world-view. In particular no theories or policies or policies of education can be deduced. Neither can objections against naturalism or theism be based on pure ignorance. It is therefore useless to spend further time on skepticism. Pg. 38 The atheist who asserts that there is no God, asserts by the same words that he holds the whole universe in his mind; he asserts that no fact, past, present, future, near, or far, escapes his attention, that no power, however great, can baffle or deceive him. In rejecting God, he claims

omniscience and omnipotence. In other words an atheist is one who claims that he himself is God; and the pantheist must be said to join him in the same claim. Pgs. 41-42 Still it remains true that no demonstration of God is possible; our belief is a voluntary choice; but if one must choose without a strict proof, none the less it is possible to have sane reasons of some sort to justify the choice. Certainly there are sane reasons for rejecting some choices. One most important fact is the principle of consistency. In the case of skepticism inconsistency lies immediately on the surface. Explicit atheism requires only a little analysis before selfcontradiction is discovered. Some statements of naturalism more successfully disguise their flaws. But all these choices are alike in that it is not sane, it is not logical, to choose an illogical principle. Consistency extends further than a first principle narrowly considered, so that it can be shown to be self-contradictory in itself; it extends into the system deduced from the first principle or principles. The basic axiom or axioms must make possible a harmony or system in all our thoughts, words, and actions. Should someone say (misquoting by the omission of an adjective) that consistency is the mark of small minds, that he does not like systems, that he will act on one principle at one time and another at another, that he does not choose to be consistent, there would be no use arguing with him, for he repudiates the rules, the necessary rules of argumentation. Such a person cannot argue against theism, for he cannot argue at all. Pg. 42 While consistency is one of the basic reasons for adopting a world-view, from a more proximate standpoint the world-view must function as a practical postulate. Pgs. 42-43 When now the theist speaks of theism as a practical postulate, he is not indulging in any as-if philosophy. He means that God exists and that one should conduct his daily life by that belief. It is called a postulate because it is an indemonstrable first principle and not a theorem derived from more ultimate premises. Pg. 43 It is better to say that the truth of the Bible is the basic axiom of Christian theism, for it is there alone that one learns what God is. It is there alone that one learns what man is. And what children are. And what college students are. And what education should be. There is still more but this chapter does not aim to give an account of the entire system. In conformity with tradition, the argument has centered on the question of Gods existence. As an axiom or first premise it is incapable of proof or demonstration. Right from the start, at the very beginning, we say, I believe in God the Father Almighty. Pg. 96

The Scripture speaks of the law of God as written on the hearts of men; it teaches that man was made in Gods image and has an innate knowledge that right is different from wrong and that God punishes wrong. But the Scripture also teaches that man suppresses this knowledge by his wickedness, that he does not wish to retain God in his knowledge, and that God has given him over to a reprobate mind. Pg. 105 The Christian system starts with God not just any sort of God, but with a very definite God, the God of the Bible. Pg. 129 That Christianity allows no flux in truth is clear from the immutability and omniscience of God, who is truth itself. If God is truth and truth changes, a particular revelation from God would be useless a few years of even a few minutes after he gave it. God would have changed; and no one, even if he knew what God wanted us to do yesterday, could guess what Gods truth might be today. Pg. 130 The cannibal morality of the Congo is different from the bull-fight morality of the Spanish Catholics. But is two plus two is four and Lincoln was President during the Civil War are true in America, while two plus two equals five and Lincoln was Pericles successor in Greece are true in Africa, while again two plus two equals six and Lincoln was the first astronaut to step on the moon are true in Asia, then there simply are no subjects such as arithmetic and history. And if moral principles differ from place to place, there is no morality. And if truth changes, there is no truth. And if there is no truth, the truth that truth changes is not true. Pgs. 137-139 This nontheistic, naturalistic view is difficult to accept because it implies that the mind, too (as well as the body) is an evolutionary product rather than a divine image. Instead of using eternal principles of logic, the mind operates with the practical results of biological adaptation. Concepts and propositions neither reach the truth nor even aim at it. Our equipment has evolved through a struggle to survive. Reason is simply the human method of handling things. It is a simplifying and therefore falsifying device. There is no evidence that our categories correspond to reality. Even if they did, a most unlikely accident, no one could know it; for to know that the laws of logic are adequate to the existent real, it is requisite to observe the real prior to using the laws. But if this ever happened with subhuman organisms, it never happens with the present species man. If now the intellect is naturally produced, different types of intellect could equally well be produced by slightly different evolutionary processes. Maybe such minds have been produced, but are now extinct like the dinosaurs and dodos. This means, however, that the concepts or intuitions of space and time-the law of contradiction, the rules of inference-are not fixed and

universal criteria of truth, but that other races thought in other terms. Perhaps future races will also think in different terms. John Dewey insisted that logic has already changed and will continue to change. If now this be the case, our traditional logic is but a passing evolutionary moment; our theories-dependent on this logic-are temporary reactions, parochial social habits, and Freudian rationalizations; and therefore the evolutionary theory, produced by these biological urges, cannot be true. The difference between naturalism and theism-between the latest scientific opinions on evolution and creation; between the Freudian animal and the image of God; between belief in God and atheism-is based on their two different epistemologies. Naturalism professes to learn by observation and analysis of experience; the theistic view depends on Biblical revelation. No amount of observation and analysis can prove the theistic position. Of course, no amount of observation and analysis can prove evolution or any other theory. The secular philosophies all result in total skepticism. In contrast, theism bases its knowledge on divinely revealed propositions. They may not give us all truth; they may even give us very little truth; but there is no truth at all otherwise. So much for the secular alternative. Pg. 142 Christianity, however, is intellectualistic. God is truth, and truth is immutable. Pg. 149 the chief objection to the theology of feeling is its assertion that God is unknowable. It should be perfectly clear that no man knows enough to assert the existence of an object of which he knows nothing. And not only so, but the assertion that an object exists of which nothing can be known reduces to skepticism. The right of each man to assert the kind of unknowable he chooses throws all objectivity into confusion; and the implicit contradiction contained in asserting that something cannot be known cuts the foundation out from under any and all knowledge. Pgs. 151 if reality is deeper than thought, it follows that thought is not real. Or, more clearly expressed, if thought and the object of thought are never the same, as he says, then we never know the object. At best we have only a representation of the object, but a representation that cannot be known to represent it. Pg. 152 Obedience to divine commands depends on a revelation that is intellectually grasped; it requires a knowledge of God; and hence alleged obedience must be judged by the norms of truth; but this makes truth and intellect superior to will. Pg. 155

There are such things as values, of course; but to be truly valuable, a value must first be true. Truth is primary, value secondary. And the supreme value in the life of man is to be sought in the activity of the intellect as it grasps truth. Pgs. 169-170 The single Gospel of John, which near its beginning describes Christ as full of grace and truth, contains a score or more references to truth. This truth, since it is the complex of propositions that constitute the mind of God, is fixed, final, and eternal. Pgs. 195-196 If truth is a system, as the omniscience of God guarantees, and if an institution of higher learning aims to transmit some truth, then a professor ought to have at least an elementary grasp of the system in order to locate the position of his subject as a whole. Pg. 219 thought and knowledge cannot be obtained from pure sensation; or, in other words, to preserve a connection between sense experience and rational knowledge, sensation must be understood as an incipient form of reason. The two types of mental action must somehow be united, and if empiricism in philosophy results in skepticism while in theology it removes revelation, the only possible expedient is to explain sensation in terms of thought rather than thought in terms of sensation. Pg. 226 Statements, propositions, predicates attached to subject, are true (or false). But how could a nocturne or one of Rodins sculptures be true? The sculpture might resemble its model, and the proposition the sculpture resembles its model would be a truth; but how could a bronze or marble statue be a truth? Only propositions can be true. If I merely pronounce a world cat, college, collage it is neither true nor false: It doesnt say anything.

A Christian View of Men and Things, 2005 Pg. 17 Philosophy, as the integration of all fields of study, is a wide subject, and if theism is to be more than imperfectly justified, it will be necessary to show its implications in many of these fields. A God, or a belief in god, that had no repercussions either in sociology or epistemology would be of little philosophic import Pgs. 19-20 A system of philosophy purports to answer certain questions. To understand the answers, it is essential to know the questions. When the questions are clearly put, there is less likelihood that the answers will seem irrelevant to important issues. Pgs. 22-24 William James, in his A Pluralistic Universe stressed the disconnectedness of things. Wholes are to be explained by parts and not parts by wholes, he said; one group of events, though interrelated among themselves, may be unrelated to another group; there is no dominating unity however much may be reported as present at any effective center of consciousness, something else is self-governed, absent, and unreduced to unity. In one place James denied the need of answering a question that many others have thought as important as it is difficult: Not why evil should exist at all, but how we can lessen the actual amount of it, is the sole question we need there to consider. Of course, if a question is literally meaningless (such as, why is music oblong?) it is really not a question at all and does not need to be answered. But if a question is not senseless, by what right can a philosophy rule it out of court? Even if it were quite trivial, it should find its place and its answer in some minor subdivision of the truth. Then, too, one might ask how James discovered that some groups of events are unrelated to other groups? Or, more exactly, since he allowed external relations and denied only internal relations, one might ask how James could discover that something is absent from and unreduced to unity by every effective center of consciousness? In other words, did James have a valid argument for the conclusion that there is no Omniscient Mind whose thought is systematic truth? He may then be caught on the horns of the dilemma he tried to escape. Irrational chaos and Hegelian monism were equally repellent to him. He wanted to find a middle ground. But perhaps there is no escape from irrational chaos except, not exactly Hegelian monism, but a logical completeness of some sort. It would be surprising, would it not, if social stability could be based on incoherence, or even large-scale disconnectedness? At any rate, the suspicion that the introductory questions are all related and that an answer to any one of them affects the answer to every other would accord with the theistic belief in divine omniscience. The discouragement, the reflection, the suspicion of the previous pages do not prove or demonstrate the existence of an omniscient God; but if there is such a God, we may infer that all problems and all solutions fit one another like pieces of a marvelous mosaic. The macrocosmic world with its microcosmic but thoughtful inhabitant will not be a fortuitous aggregation of unrelated elements. Instead of a series of disconnected propositions, truth will be

a rational system, a logically-ordered series, somewhat like geometry with its theorems and axioms, its implications and presuppositions. Each part will derive its significance from the whole. Christianity therefore has, or, one may even say, Christianity is a comprehensive view of all things: It takes the world, both material and spiritual, to be an ordered system. Consequently, if Christianity is to be defended against the objections of other philosophies, the only adequate method will be comprehensive. While it is of great importance to defend particular points of special interest, these specific defenses will be insufficient. In addition to these details, there is also needed a picture of the whole into which they fit. This comprehensive apologia is seen all the more clearly to be necessary as the contrasting theories are more carefully considered. The naturalistic philosophy that engulfs the modern mind is not a repudiation of one or two items of the Christian faith leaving the remainder untouched; it is not a philosophy that is satisfied to deny miracles while approving or at least not disapproving of Christian moral standards; on the contrary, both Christianity and naturalism demand all or nothing: Compromise is impossible. At least this will be true if the answer of any one question is integral with the answers of every other. Each system proposes to interpret all the fact; each system subscribes to the principle that this is one world. A universe, even James pluralistic universe, cannot exist half-theistic and halfatheistic. Politics, science, and epistemology must all be one or the other. The hypothesis of divine omniscience, the emphasis on the systematic unity of all truths, and the supposition that a particular truth derives its meaning or significance from the system as a whole does not imply that a man must know everything in order to know anything. It might at first seem to; and Plato, who faced the same difficulty, tried to provide for two kinds of knowing so that in one sense a man might know everything and in another sense not know and learn a particular truth. At the moment, let an illustration suffice. To appreciate an intricate and beautiful mosaic, we must see it as a whole; and the parts are properly explained only in terms of the whole; but it does not follow that a perception of the pieces and some fragmentary information is impossible without full appreciation. Or to pass from illustration to reality: A child in first grade learns that two plus two is four. This arithmetical proposition is true, and the greatest mathematician cannot disprove it. But the mathematician sees this truth in relation to a science of numbers he understands how this sum contributes to phases of mathematics that the child does not dream of and may never learn; he recognizes that the significance of the proposition depends on its place in the system. But the child in school knows that two and two are four, and this that that child knows is true. Omniscience, even higher mathematics, is not a prerequisite for first grade. Pg. 26 But what about these assumptions or axioms? Can they be proved? It would seem that they cannot, for they are the starting points of an argument, and if the argument starts with them, there is no preceding argumentation. Accordingly, after the humanist or theist has worked out a consistent system by arranging all his propositions as theorems in a series of valid demonstrations, how is either of them to persuade the other to accept his unproved axioms? And the question is all the more perplexing when it is suspected that the axioms were chosen for the express purpose of deducing precisely these conclusions. Pgs. 26-29

Skepticism is the position that nothing can be demonstrated. And how, we ask, can you demonstrate that nothing can be demonstrated? The skeptic asserts that nothing can be known. In his haste he said that truth was impossible. And is it true that truth is impossible? For, if no proposition is true, then at least one proposition is true the proposition, namely, that no proposition is true. If truth is impossible, therefore, it follows that we have already attained it. From this fact can be derived a method of procedure for discussing humanism and theism. If it can be shown that a proposed system of philosophy Aristotelianism or Spinozism, for example or if it can be shown that a particular proposition, whether it be a first principle or a subsidiary side issue, implies that knowledge is impossible, then that proposition or system may be eliminated from further consideration. Skepticism refutes itself because it is internally selfcontradictory. If skepticism is true, it is false. And when a more elaborate complex of ideas is internally inconsistent, the complex must be rejected. This is similar to the method called reduction ad absurdum in geometry. A thesis has been proposed for examination, for example, that the interior angles of a triangle are greater than 180 degrees. From this assumption a series of deductions is made, until finally it is demonstrated that this thesis implies that a right angle is equal to an obtuse angle. This conclusion is absurd of selfcontradictory; the logic by which it was deduced from the thesis is valid; therefore, the thesis is false. By this method the argument for a theistic worldview would be obliged to examine the absolute idealism of Hegel, the dialectical materialism of Marx, the systems of Berkeley and Bergson, and show them to be incoherent. The method of procedure stresses coherence or selfconsistency, and the implications of each position must be traced out to the end. A reduction ad absurdum would be the test. The legitimacy of such a procedure will cause little dissent, but objections will soon be raised as to its sufficiency. It is widely admitted that skepticism is self-contradictory and must therefore be false. Other views, especially subsidiary contentions, can also be eliminated. But suppose, what now seems likely, that after all these eliminations, three or even two imposing systems remain, each coherent within itself, either leading to skepticism, but mutually contradictory. What then? Now, there is a theory that the ultimate test of truth is coherence, and on this theory it would be impossible to have two self-consistent, mutually contradictory philosophies. A false statement, so it is said, will always, if pursued far enough, imply its own falsity. If this coherence theory of truth should be established, then we could rely with confidence on this application of the law of contradiction. Its sufficiency would be inherent in the nature of truth. The mere fact that the coherence theory of truth would eliminate a final impasse might even be reason enough for adopting it. One might holds that all other theories of truth lead to skepticism, and that therefore the coherence theory alone is coherent and true. Possibly all this is so, but surely it needs some more talking about. And in talking about it, there can be no logical objection to using the law of contradiction as far as it will go. Perhaps it will go further than is now expected. But suppose there still remain two or more fairly self-consistent but mutually incompatible systems of thought. This is likely to be the case even if the coherence theory of truth is correct, for the coherence theory cannot be applied with final satisfaction unless one is omniscient. Since life is short and since the implications of various propositions have not been exhausted, there

may remain false propositions whose absurd conclusions have not yet been deduced. We may therefore be left with large but incomplete worldviews. Instead of being thoroughly integrated. The opposing systems will lack some parts and connections. Nonetheless, they will be worldviews on a large scale. Each one will have its first principles, the outlines will be plainly drawn, the main figures will have been painted in, and considerable detail will have been finished. Even though the artists have had neither time nor genius to finish their pictures, the contrast between them is unmistakable. What must be done? Must anything be done? Can we not simply look at both pictures and go our way without expressing any preference? Most people, with their interest in comics, do not even look at these great works of art; and since the coherence theory of truth and dialectical materialism mean nothing to them, they are incapable of having a preference. And cannot students of philosophy, and even scholars, consider carefully and make no choice? But suspension of judgment is more difficult than it would at first seem. It is difficult because the situation goes beyond the esoteric futility of the proverbial armchair and ivory tower and involves the most intense issues of personal and social stability. To use William James language, it is a forced and vital option. Suspension of judgment may seem possible and even necessary in relatively trivial matters. One need not give immediate assent to the claims of a new toothpaste or to a new planetesimal theory. But even in these cases the refusal to accept the claims is not so much the absence or suspension of judgment as it is the acceptance of a different judgment. The belief that toothpaste advertisements are fraudulent is itself a belief. Instead of suspending judgment, one has judged unfavorably. Or one may use the toothpaste because of the judgment that it can do no harm and may possibly do some good. Even in these trivial matters suspension of judgment is not easy to achieve. In fact, it is impossible. Whether it is toothpaste of theism, one must either accept it or go without. Presumably the blessing of God rests only on those who believe in him. As Christ said, He that is not with me is against me, and He that is not against us is on our part. One must therefore be either for or against; there is no neutral or intermediate position. Suspension of judgment seems possible only when the practical business of living is excluded from consideration. If this unreal abstraction is repudiated, it will be seen that everyone lives either with the fear of God before his eyes or not. Our preferences, our standards of morality, our purpose in life accord with a theistic worldview, or they do not. And if they do not, we are acting on the assumption, whether we admit it or not, that there is no God to hold us responsible. Suspension of judgment, so-called, is but a disguised, if dignified, form of unbelief. A choice, therefore, cannot be avoided. The philosophically minded may be repelled by the notion of choice because it seems to smack of unphilosophical arbitrariness. The theory of vital options dimmed the luster even of William James in some quarters. But it is easier to be repelled by the notion of choice than it is to show that choice is not necessary. Yet also it must be admitted that choice is sometimes arbitrary and whimsical. The majority of the population choose religious, political, and philosophical beliefs that form the weirdest patterns. Still the choice of an ultimate principle or of a system of philosophy is not necessarily or ordinarily a personal whim or an arbitrary decision. Such a choice is the result of a long course of study to organize ones universe. It is made with a fairly clear consciousness of the implications in many fields of inquiry. A whim, on the other hand, is the choice of some special factor without regard to the rest of life or to ones other beliefs.

Choice, however, is unavoidable because first principles cannot be demonstrated, and though some choices are arbitrary, the philosophical choice has regard to the widest possible consistency. Choice, therefore, is as legitimate as it is necessary. Pg. 29 No philosopher is perfect and no system can give man omniscience. But if one system can provide plausible solutions to many problems while another leaves too many questions unanswered, if one system tends less to skepticism and gives more meaning to life, if one worldview is consistent whole others are self-contradictory, who can deny us, since we must choose, the right to choose the more promising first principle? Pg. 73 assertions relative to the species presuppose certain views concerning the genus. Pg. 79 Flux is often considered in relation to physical science; norms usually introduce questions of ethics; fixed and eternal truths concern epistemology and theology. Pg. 109 The more the various subjects are studied, the more their interrelationships will be seen. Indeed, the breadth of philosophic discipline as opposed to the narrow specialty of a single science depends on these manifold and intricate connections. For example, the reason that epistemology has been regarded as the crucial point and the most profound part of philosophy is that botany, sociology, physics, and literature furnish it with a common area of investigation. Pgs. 127-128 There are some philosophers who reject any view depending on innate ideas or intellectual intuitions. This epistemological problem would lead too far afield at the moment. Let it be granted that a system may have, if not immediate first truths, at least presuppositions, postulates, assumptions, or axioms. However, these must not be multiplied with abandon. Such primary principles must be restricted to a small number. The ideal in logical systems is to make as few assumptions as possible and to deduce as many theorems as possible. The British Intuitionists, unfortunately, were too liberal with their first principles. If this type of theory is to meet with general approval, it must be worked out on the basis of a single principle, or at most two or three, but certainly not two or three dozen. Pg. 146 There may at first be reluctance to face the question, What is fact? Yet, if facts are unyielding absolutes, it ought not to prove too difficult to show what a fact is.

Pg. 149 The scientist wants mathematical accuracy; and when he cannot discover it, he makes it. Since he chooses his law from among an infinite number of equally possible laws, the probability that he has chosen the true law is one over infinity, that is, zero; or, in plain English, the scientist has no chance of hitting upon the real laws of nature. No doubt that scientific laws are useful: By them the atomic bomb was invented. The point of all this argument is merely this: However useful scientific laws are, they cannot be true. Or, at the very least, the point of all this argument is that scientific laws are not discovered but are chosen. Pg. 170 As Kant showed, the cause of empiricisms failure was not its sensory definition of experience Locke in fact did not restrict experience to sensation but the impossibility of basing universality and necessity on momentary states of consciousness. The propositions of mathematics and the basic principles of physics are allegedly true at all times and in all cases. Such truths cannot be established on experience, not because the experiences are sensory, but because they are momentary particulars. Sensation failed to arrive at universality, not because it was sensation, but because it was contingent. Therefore, Brightmans wider definition of experience does not avoid the difficulty. If a sensation is a fleeting temporal event, a non-sensory state of consciousness is equally so. And from such, universal propositions cannot be obtained. This means that objectivity is left without foundation. If there are no a priori forms identical in all learning minds, the contents of experience will be so personally subjective that it will be difficult to escape solipsism. Pgs. 182-183 How then could God show to a man that it was God speaking? Suppose God should say, I will make of you a great nation...and I will bless them that bless you and curse him that curses you. Would God call the devil and ask Abraham to believe the devils corroborative statements? Is the devils word good evidence of Gods veracity? It would not seem so. Nor is the solution to be found in Gods appealing to another man in order to convince the doubter. Aside from the fact that this other man is no more of an authority than the devil, the main question reappears unanswered in this case also. What reasons can this man have to conclude that God is making a revelation to him? It is inherent in the very nature of the case that the best witness to Gods existence and revelation is God himself. There can be no higher source of truth. God may, to be sure, furnish evidence to man. He may send an earthquake, a fire, or still small voice; he may work spectacular miracles, or, as in the cases of Isaiah and Peter, he may produce inwardly an awful consciousness of sin, so that the recipient of the revelation is compelled to cry out, Woe is me! For I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips. But whether it be an external spectacle or an inward horror or great darkness, all of this is Gods witnessing to himself. Pg. 183

These are first principles which themselves are the basis or beginning of argument; and if they are the beginning, they cannot have been previously argued. To require a proof of a first principle is to misunderstand the whole procedure. Pg. 186 there is agreement that consistency is a test of truth, and in some philosophical writings consistency and coherence are synonyms; but insofar as Brightmans category of coherence is not mere formal consistency, it is so poorly defined as to be useless and even meaningless. Pg. 189 There is, to be sure, a more profound problem in the relation between Gods will and the law of contradiction. No doubt reason may be called an eternal attribute of God, and as such it is uncreated. It does not follow, however, that the laws of reason are independent of the will of God or in any way limit his power. The laws of reason may be taken as descriptive of the activity of Gods will, and hence dependent on it, though not created as the world has been created. This involves a view of Gods will, nature, and being that must be referred to later. Pg. 201 The question, How do you know? May seem simple enough; but the answer virtually controls the whole system of philosophy. Pg. 205-206 Now, any given word must signify one thing, or a finite number of things, or an infinite number of things. If the word has a finite number of meanings, then it would be possible to invent a name for each meaning, so that all words would have a single meaning. But if each word has an infinite number of meanings, reasoning and conversation have become impossible, because not to have one meaning is to have no meaning. But if a word has a meaning, the object cannot be both man and not-man. If the skeptic attempt to avoid the arguments, he might do so by saying nothing. In this case, however, there is no skeptical theory awaiting refutation. Or he might accuse Aristotle of begging the question by using the law of contradiction. But, then, if he says this, he has said something, and has himself admitted the force of logic. Pg. 206 The skeptics refer to propositions as false, doubtful, or probably; but these terms would have no meaning unless there is some truth. A false proposition is the contradictory or a true proposition. If one say a proposition is doubtful, one must recognize the possibility of its being true. And the probable or plausible is what resembles the truth. From all this it follows that unless a man knows the truth, he cannot know what it probable. Accordingly, if truth is not known, there is no reason for acting in one way rather than another. Life has become meaningless. Pg. 207

The theory of progress holds that all theories become false. From which it follows that if progress is now the truth, it will soon not be. Perhaps it is already false. Pg. 209 Relativism is always asserted absolutely. If it were not intended to apply generally, it would have no claim to philosophic importance. But if it is asserted universally, then its assertion contradicts what is being asserted. An absolutistic relativism is a self-contradiction. If it is true, it is false. Pg. 210 A sound epistemology cannot demand omniscience or complete freedom from error: Its aim is not to show that all men or any man knows everything, but that some men can know something. Pg. 211 words are instruments or symbols for expressing thoughts. The letters t, w, o or the Arabic numeral 2, are not the number itself, they are the visual or audible symbols used to refer to the intellectual concept. Pg. 222 The proof of Gods existence, which is not at all a logical demonstration, results from showing that consistency is maintained by viewing all things as dependent on God. In the present instance, what hypothesis provides a ground for the common possession of the categories as adequately as Christian theism does? Though the existence and nature of God is insusceptible of formal demonstration, yet if Christian theism is true, there is no mystery in the fact that all human minds use the same categories, and there is no suspicion that the objective world or some Ding-an-sich escapes their necessary connections. Pg. 223 What is true today always has been and always will be true. Any apparent exception, such as, It is raining today, is an elementary matter or ambiguity. Pg. 223 The idealistic philosophers have argued plausibly that truth is also mental or spiritual. Without a mind truth could not exist. The object of knowledge is a proposition, a meaning, a significance; it is a thought, And this is necessary if communication is to be possible. If a truth, a proposition, or a thought were some physical motion in the brain, no two persons could have the same thought. A physical motion is a fleeting event numerically distinct from every other. Two persons cannot have the same motion, nor can one person even have it twice. If this is what thought were, memory and communication would both be impossible.

Pg. 224 if one may think the same thought twice, truth must be mental or spiritual. Not only does it defy time; it defies space as well, for if communication is to be possible, the identical truth must be in two minds at once. If, in opposition, anyone wishes to deny that an immaterial idea can exist in two minds at once, his denial must be conceived to exist his mind only; and since it has not registered in any other mind, it does not occur to us to refute it. Is all this any more than the assertion that there is an eternal, immutable Mind, a Supreme Reason, a personal, living God? The truths or propositions that may be known are the thoughts of God, the eternal thought of God. And insofar as man knows anything he is in contact with Gods mind. Since, further, Gods mind is God, we may legitimately borrow the figurative language, if not the precise meaning of the mystics and say, we have a vision of God. Pg. 226 This chapter has tried to show by an application of the law of contradiction a law that is not merely formal but is itself and integral part of the system of truth that truth exists and that knowledge is possible. Knowledge means the possession of truth. It is not necessary to work out a philosophical system to demonstrate truths before having them. On the contrary, even in geometry, one usually has come into the possession of a truth before one attempts to demonstrate it; in fact, this will be seen always to be true if we do not restrict our vision to a narrow field. Demonstration and the arrangement of truths into a logical system is undeniably a desideratum; it is precisely the progress in such systematization that distinguishes the philosophical student from the intellectually dull; but philosophers are not the only people who can know the truth. Disjointed truths possessed are still truths possessed and are therefore knowledge. The man who has the truth that God exists, though his reason for believing are philosophically scandalous, is better off he knows more truth than the man who with the most erudite of arguments attempts to justify the false statement that God does not exist. And since the philosopher himself, in possession of many truths, never escapes all disorder, since his systematization is never complete, there is only a difference of degree between him and the common herd. If it be said that the latter have only faith and not knowledge, because their beliefs are not thoroughly integrated, the reply is that all knowledge is faith. Those opponents of theism who contrast knowledge and faith to the disparagement of the latter, and who like Carlson and Clifford deny Christians the right to believe, underestimate the limitations of their own integration. The important contrast is not between faith and knowledge, but between truth and error. This chapter, in fact the volume as a whole, has also tried to show that Christian theism is selfconsistent and that several other philosophies are inconsistent, skeptical, and therefore erroneous. With the presuppositions of Marx, Russell, or Spengler, history becomes meaningless; a humanistic utilitarianism and the Kantian autonomy of the will are equally incapable of justifying moral distinctions; and some forms of religious philosophy are inconsistent mixtures of naturalistic and theistic elements. As a contrast to these views, it has been argued that Christianity is self-consistent, that it gives meaning to life and morality, and that it supports the existence of truth and possibility of knowledge. Thus theism and atheism have been examined in considerable detail. It remains for each person to make his choice.

Thales to Dewey, 2000 Pg. 18 Perhaps the least misleading definition would be that philosophy is what this book discusses. It includes geology, astronomy, chemistry, and theology. In a sense the subject matter of philosophy is indeed everything. This includes a philosophy of life, too. But a philosopher is not supposed to know all the details of everything. Rather, he studies general principles and connects the special sciences with each other. The man who knows all about plants is not expected to know how botany affects political science; the chemist pays no attention to chemistrys relation to linguistics; a good psychologist need not be expert in economics. Yet all these sciences are related in some way to each other. Pg. 18 Why should one study the history of philosophy, when one can study philosophy itself? If the subject concerns the interconnections among the various sciences, why not study those relationships as they actually are, instead of as they used to be two thousand years ago? The answer is that the history of philosophy is not a waste of time. From a cultural point of view, quite aside from its usefulness to the graduate student in philosophy, a smattering of Plato and Aristotle is a pleasant thing to have. From a pedagogical viewpoint, the history of philosophy enables the student to see the problems in their simplest form. These problems have become exceedingly complex in modern times, too complex for first lessons. Pg. 19 To say that the study of philosophy should be preferred to the study of the history of philosophy is a false disjunction. This history of philosophy is philosophy. Pg. 19 Philosophy begins with the reduction of multiplicity to unity. Pg. 19 If the subject is sufficiently set apart, it is called science; if it is still general in comparison with the state of knowledge at that time, it is called philosophy. pg. 21 Now, it is true that an ability to think is more valuable than a collection of disjointed bits of historical information. And the study of philosophy in particular should give the student exercise in thinking and not merely memorization. The best way to study philosophy is to argue; argue with the professor in class and argue with fellow-students outside. Arguing, serious arguing, is philosophizing. But there remains a question whether a student can think or argue seriously with an empty mind.

Pg. 21 Philosophy cannot neglect any part of the world. Pg. 26 The logical purpose is to point out that in any system of philosophy the axioms assumed and the methods used determine the nature of the conclusions. More than once from Thales to John Dewey, intricate difficulties will be put aside as inconsequential because the real trouble lies in the starting point. Unquestioning acceptance of an original position, either through ignorance of alternatives or through refusal to consider them, not only leads to foregone conclusions any set of axioms does that but it leads to the acceptance of a system without taking into account several weighty objections that ought to be faced. Though a given philosophic method may allow for some choices and may reply to some objections, it may at the same time ignore and thus prejudge others. In this way opposing systems are not given a fair hearing. The point of departure has prevented their consideration. Pg.66 Such is the fate of all relativistic theories, ancient or modern. They are self-destructive because self-contradictory. When a Pragmatist asserts the impossibility of attaining the absolute, when an Instrumentalist with his emphasis on change deplores the dogmatism of unchanging truth, or when a Freudian dismisses conscious reasoning as hypocritical rationalization, he means to except his own view. It is absolutely true that we miss the absolute; it is a fixed truth that nothing is fixed; it is validly reasoned that reasoning is hypocrisy. Objections to dogmatism are always dogmatic, and relativisms are always asserted absolutely. For this reason the Man-Measure theory must be rejected, and knowledge is shown to be other than perception. Pg. 66 It was at this point that Plato had the exceptional brilliance to make a very simple logical deduction. By contradicting and interchanging the premise and conclusion, it follows that if knowledge is possible, there must exist unchangeable, suprasensible realities. Pg. 70 These definitions of Ideas were the realities composing the real world. Or, conversely, the real world, in contrast to the unreal world of perception, is composed of fixed, unchanging, absolute entities, called Forms or Ideas. Unless there are such entities, knowledge will be impossible. This theory of Ideas is Platos greatest contribution to the history of philosophy; and every passage in the Phaedo, or in any other dialogue, where the Ideas are mentioned, must be examined with care. Pgs. 75-76

When any hypothesis is accepted, the first thing to do is not to consider direct attacks against it; rather one must first deduce from it as many consequences as possible. If these consequences are incompatible among themselves, the hypothesis is refuted; if, however, they are mutually consistent, it is time to give a reason for or explanation of the hypothesis. This is done by assuming a superior hypothesis from which the previous one is an implication. This process is repeated until one arrives at a superior principle that is sufficient. In the Phaedo Plato does not say what this sufficient principle is, and interpretations may differ; but it is plausible to suppose that in an investigation of the beauty of a statue, the first hypothesis is the existence of Beauty in itself; the existence of this reality is an implication of the general theory of Idea that is, Beauty in itself is but one of the many absolute realities. But if the theory of Ideas is only a second-best attempt, there must be one or several superior hypotheses. The highest of all, so it would see, is the distinction between the truth and the false, or, better expressed, the possibility of knowledge. If knowledge is impossible, then nothing can either be affirmed or denied; all opinions are of equal value and the value is zero. Any objection to the theory of Ideas would on this basis be literal nonsense. But if the possibility of knowledge implies the existence of suprasensible realities, there can be no more compelling demonstration of their existence. Pg. 80 The participation of things in Ideas implies that everything is composed of thoughts but if this is so, then one of two alternatives follows. First, a thing composed of thoughts is naturally assumed to be a thinking thing, and so, everything would think; yet it seems untenable to maintain that even stones think. The other alternative is that things do not think, even though they are thoughts. Pg. 84 Based on observation of the world of flux, dependent on the deceptive processes of perception, science cannot transcend its baser to attain the Idea. At best it may approximate the truth, but it can never really know the truth. Pg. 87 although logic aims to discover the principles on which all true judgment depends, it is not a merely formal science of thinking; but rather, since truth requires a relation to reality, the laws of logic must be not only the laws of thought, but the laws of reality as well. Pg. 87 In view of the fact that the truths of logic and the principles of reality apply universally and are not restricted to any special field of study, Aristotle concludes that they belong to the same science. Pgs. 87-89

The most certain of all principles is the law of contradiction, for it is impossible to be mistaken about it. It is not an hypothesis, a tentative by which to rise to something more general, for a principle which everyone must have who knows anything about being cannot be so characterized. The principle is this: The same attribute cannot attach and not attach to the same thing in the same respect. Or, otherwise, contrary attributes cannot belong to the same subject at the same time. This principle, be it noted again, is stated not merely as a law of thought, but primarily as a law of being. The ontological form is basic; the purely logical is derivative: It becomes a law of thought because it is first a law of being. If anyone should object to the law of contradiction and should assert, as Heraclitus is supposed to have done, that contrary attributes attach to the same thing, it would be necessary to conclude that he cannot believe what he says. For if we have shown that the number three cannot be both odd and even, and that a stone cannot be both heavy and light, and so on, then it follows that no one can think that three is both odd and even, even though he verbally makes such an assertion. Anyone who pretended to believe that contrary attributes attach to the same subject would be affirming two contrary opinions at the same time; and these two opinions would be, as it were, two, contrary attributes attaching to him as a subject. But this is what the law of contradiction makes impossible. Not only has the Heraclitean coexistence of contraries been maintained, but there are some writers who, thinking that the above derivation of psychological from ontological impossibility is circular, demand that the law of contradiction be formally demonstrated. This demand, however, evinces their ignorance. The demonstration of a proposition, such as any theorem in geometry, is completed only when it is referred to the axioms. If the axioms in turn required demonstration, the demonstration of the proposition with which we began would remain incomplete, at least until the axioms could be demonstrated. But if the axioms rest on prior principles, and if these too must be demonstrated - on the assumption that every proposition requires demonstration - the proof of our original theorem would never be finished. This means that it would be impossible to demonstrate anything, for all demonstration depends on indemonstrable first principles. Every type of philosophy must make some original assumptions. And if the law of contradiction is not satisfactory, at least these Heracliteans fails to state what principle they regard as more so. Nonetheless, though the law of contradiction is immediately evident and is not subject to demonstration, there is a negative or elenctic argument that will reduce the opponent to silence. The negative method avoids the charge of begging the question, for it is the opponent and not oneself who makes the assertion. Of course, this depends on the opponents willingness to say something. The proof aims to show the opponent who attacks the law of contradiction that as soon as he says anything at all, he is recognizing the principle. If he should say nothing, we have neither an opponent nor an objection to face. Nor need we insist that he make some tricky admission that plays into our hands. All that is required is that he say something significant for himself and for us, for this is the presupposition of every understanding between two persons, or even of one persons understanding himself. Let the opponent then say something: that three is an off number or that Socrates is a man. It will always be of the form, x is y. Now, in the first place, the word is has a definite meaning and does not mean is not. Therefore, Protagoras was mistaken when he said that everything is and is not. But perhaps the argument will be clearer if we consider the x and the y.

In any sentence the predicate, the y, must have a single, definite meaning; and when we say that x is y, or that Socrates is a man, we are asserting of Socrates the meaning of man, whatever it may be two-footed animal, perhaps. Thus we assert something definite. The remark that words have several meanings will not damage this contention, provided the meanings are limited in number. Suppose the word man had ten different meanings: It would be possible to invent ten different terms so that each term would stand for a single meaning, and once more the predicate and the assertion as a whole would be definite. If, however, terms had an infinite number of meanings, then all reasoning would come to an end. For if a word is to convey a significance, it must not only mean something, it must also not mean something. If it had all the meanings of all the terms in the dictionary, it would be useless in speech. Therefore, if terms had an infinite number of meanings, no term would have one meaning; and not to have one meaning is to have no meaning; but if words have no meaning, it is impossible to argue with other people or even to reason privately with oneself. If we do not think one thing, we think nothing; but if we can think of one thing, then we can assign to it a single unambiguous term. On this basis it is impossible that being a man should mean precisely not being a man, or that perception should be nonperception, or that a wind should be both y and not-y. And this is in reality a justification of the law of contradiction. The Sophists both of antiquity and of the present, ignoring the ontological basis of this argument, attempt the reply that what one person calls a man, another may call a mouse and not a man. Hence the same thing would be both man and not-man. But this is elementary ambiguity. The question is not whether a subject can be man and not-man in name, but whether it can be so actually or ontologically. If man and not-man mean two different things, as was indicated above, and if man means a two-footed animal, it follows that anything that is a man must be a biped. But if this must be so, i.e. if this is necessary, the contrary is impossible. It is impossible that the subject should not be a two-footed animal, and hence the same subject cannot possibly be both man and not-man. Pg. 91 Suppose we ask the opponent if A is a man. He could answer, Yes, but he is also white and musical, and these are not-man; hence, A is man and not-man. This answer is correct to the extent that a subject may have an indefinite number of accidents; but so understood the answer is beside the point. Our original question was, Is A essentially a man? If the opponent ignores the essentially, as he did in the answer just given, he should list all the accidents all, and that includes the negative as well as the positive ones. He should therefore say A is a man, musical, white, not-green and therefore blue, not-ship and therefore house. For, if it is true that man is not-man, as the opponent claimed just above, it is all the more true that man is not-ship; but since house it not-ship and since on this theory contrary accidents attach, the man must be both a house and also a ship. Such a list of accidents would be infinite. Yet, if the opponent begins to list these accidents, he ought to continue with them. Let him give all or none. There is no reason for specifying only three or four. From which it follows that if he begins and continues, he will take so long that we shall be spared the trouble of answering him. In other words, if the opponent depends on accidental predication, if he repudiates the distinction between substantial and accidental predication, discussion ends. On this theory no predicate is definitive, and the metaphysical implication is that reality does not exist.

Now, to repeat a thought previously stated near the beginning of this analysis of the law of contradiction: This analysis or proof is a negative or elenctic one. It is not a demonstration based on more original principles. A careless reading might conclude that the law is demonstrated from the principle that every word must have a single meaning. But the truth of the matter is quite the reverse. Aristotle is saying rather that every word must have a single meaning because the principle of contradiction holds. He is applying the law to this particular case. And the particular case is chosen for the purpose of showing that an opponent cannot carry through his own theory. He becomes tangled in an infinite regress and must drop out of the argument. Therefore, if anyone, including the opponent, wishes to argue, reason discuss, or say anything meaningful, he must presuppose the law of contradiction. Hence, this law is not demonstrated from some higher principle, but Aristotle shows that it must be presupposed by anyone who wishes to speak intelligibly. Pg. 92 If knowledge is perception and all opinions are true, then all statements are both true and false; for it is Protagoras opinion that all opinions are true, and therefore this opinion is true; but it is Platos opinion that Protagoras statement is false; Protagoras statement is therefore both true and false. But this means that the same thing is and is not. Being is and is not. Since truth is a statement of reality as it really is, and since both contradictories are true, it follows that reality is and is not. Conversely, if reality is and is not, all opinions are true. Pgs. 101-102 Now since it is the conclusion of a demonstration that we are trying to prove, and since it is proved by giving the premises, it follows that the premises of demonstrated knowledge are better known than the conclusion. If we did not know the premises, obviously we could not know the conclusion. The conclusion cannot be more certain than the premises on which it is based. The premises are the cause of the conclusion, and therefore they must be prior to it. And also, in demonstration, although not in every formally valid syllogism, the premises must be true. For demonstration is knowledge, and there can be no known of the non-existent. The premises, therefore, must be statements of what exists or what is so, i.e., they must be true. Of course, there may be a chain of syllogisms in a demonstration, as there is in geometry. But the chain must have a starting point, and such a starting point must be, not only prior, causal, and true, but in particular primary and indemonstrable. It must be an immediate, basic truth. Nothing can be more certain than these basic truths, for if the least doubt attached to them, doubt would likewise attach to all the conclusions; and this would mean that science would be tottery. But the conviction of pure science must be unshakable. In the nineteenth century it was commonly believed that science was as unshakable as Aristotle could have wished; but the prevailing mood of the twentieth century is that science is tentative, and that laws stand in need of constant revision. Therefore, the current objection to Aristotle is that the science which he describes is non-existent. The formal validity of syllogisms may possibly be foolproof, but their applications to concrete material, and more especially the

premises on which they are based, are not completely beyond all doubt. To Aristotle this would mean that there is no scientific knowledge, as he defined knowledge. There was a similar difference of opinion in his day. Some said there is no knowledge; others said all truths are demonstrable. But Aristotle agreed with neither the one nor the other. Those who denied the existence of scientific knowledge argued that demonstration is the only method by which something can be known. But demonstrations depend on premises. And if the premises are to be known, they too must be demonstrated. This leads on back in an infinite regress, with the result that the demonstration is never finished, or more accurately, never begins. Accordingly, there is no scientific knowledge. The other group also held that demonstration is the only method by which anything can be known; yet they held that everything can be demonstrated because proof goes around in a circle: Every premise is a conclusion, and there is a finite series in which the end and the beginning are identical. Aristotle replies that a proposition cannot be both prior and posterior as this view requires. Since the exact number of terms is irrelevant, they may be reduced to three and the absurdity becomes apparent. Circular demonstrations would be equivalent to saying that A is B; Why? because B is C; Why? because C is A; Why? because A is B. With circular and infinite demonstration both ruled out, it follows that not everything can be demonstrated and that there must be first, indemonstrable truths. A philosopher of a different school, Hegel for instance, would no doubt admit that the three-term circle is an absurdity; but he might argue that the exact number of terms is no so irrelevant as Aristotle thought. A bad circle is a little circle; but if a circle can be drawn so as to include everything, it is a beautiful circle. In a rational universe everything is implicated in everything else; and precisely for this reason a three-term circle is absurd: It fails to show the other relationships of A, B, and C. Hegel might even attribute some very small and very bad circles to Aristotle himself: He might ask, Is Aristotles reply anything more than a two-term circle, in which demonstration is possible because there are primary truths, and there are primary truths because there must be demonstration? At any rate, against the two views, Aristotle asserts that not all knowledge is demonstrative. There must be primary basic truths because the regress in demonstration must end in these basic truths, and these are indemonstrable. Therefore, besides the scientific knowledge, which is demonstration, there is its originative source which enables us to recognize the basic indemonstrable propositions. Pg. 103 It has been shown above that scientific knowledge or demonstration is impossible without immediate premises. However, since these principles are indemonstrable, a knowledge of them cannot be scientific knowledge. There must therefore be another kind of knowledge, a knowledge that is actually superior to scientific knowledge because conclusions cannot be more certain than the premises on which they depend. Pg. 107

Can Aristotle prove the existence of this principle he calls nature? No, he cannot. He explained in the logic that not everything can be demonstrated; the conclusions of demonstration eventually rest on principles that are more evident and accurate than the conclusions themselves. These first principles are grasped not by demonstration but by intuition. Pg. 117 If reality were entirely physical, perhaps mechanism would be acceptable if it could escape sophistic skepticism; but if Ideas constitute reality, not only is mechanism out of place, but a much better possibility is provided. Mechanism does not explain Socrates sitting in jail conversing with his friends; purpose does. Similarly, weather, sensation, and all class concepts must be understood teleologically. The Ideas are purposes: Purposes are what we know when we know anything. Suppose the latest model automobile has a new gadget, and we ask what it is. If the salesman or engineer should give us its mechanical description down to the fraction of an inch, should reproduce its blueprint in words, should enumerate its wheels, ball bearings, electrical circuit, or whatever else it might have, we would still not know what the gadget it. But if he should tell us that it is a new windshield wiper, a better timer, or a stronger shock absorber, we would be satisfied. We would know it when we know its purpose. What is it? It is its purpose. The purpose defines it. The Idea is the purpose. Pg. 124 perhaps the Epicureans only admitted what is true of every system of philosophy: that there is an ethical motivation. Friedrich Nietzsche, who was not always insane, said, To understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at, it is always well and wise first to ask oneself, What morality does he aim at? If there must be indemonstrable assertions, as Aristotle admitted, can they be motivated by anything other than the conclusions to which they lead? Pg. 125 Now, skepticism is self-contradictory: One who knows nothing cannot know that nothing can be known. Pg. 131 When the skeptics complained that a criterion cannot be a criterion of itself, the Stoics replied that a straight line is the norm both of itself and of other lines, and a balance measures the equality of the weights in the pans and its own equality as well. Further, if the skeptic uses no criterion in his argument against the Stoic, his judgment cannot be trusted; but if he has a criterion, he contradicts himself by accepting a criterion in order to repudiate it. Thus, as necessary and self-authenticating, the comprehensive representation forces our assent and is the criterion of truth. Pg. 135

In Aristotles opinion, truth is a statement of reality, and reality is all past or present. The future is not real yet. Propositions in the future tense become true or false as time passes, but in the present, predications cannot be true. Common opinion, on the other hand, accepts predications as either true or false, and explains our inability to say which on the basis of our common ignorance of what will happen. Further, if a proposition in the future tense cannot be true, no syllogism could contain one. To argue that two days hence will be Friday because tomorrow will be Thursday would be impossible. Indeed, a true statement is understandable and a false statement is understandable but a statement neither true nor false seems like complete nonsense. Chrysippus therefore concluded that every meaningful statement is true or false. Pgs. 146-147 all propositions require a distinction between subject and predicate. Knowledge also requires the distinction, logical if not actual, between the person knowing and the object known. Pg. 151 In any system the ultimate principle determines the form of the whole and shows its implications in the details of ethics, physics, and epistemology. Pg. 152 The Ideas are Platos true reality, and the physical world is only half real. Pg. 155 The Christians did not gradually invent, they inherited the notion of a canonical set of writings. Pg. 155 The recognized canon of the New Testament may have developed over a century; but the idea of a canon did not develop. The idea of an authoritative canon was familiar from the beginning, and a book known to be approved by an apostle was immediately received as such. Pg. 155 Just as Platonism or the theory of Ideas is what Plato wrote, so Christianity is what the prophets and apostles wrote. Just as, also, the Platonic Academy, with its apostolic succession of presidents regularly inaugurated, diverged from the theory of Ideas, became skeptics, and ceased to be Platonists, so, too, many people who have some historic connection with the primitive Christian community have ceased to teach Christianity because their theories are not Biblical. Pg. 156 This is not to say that the Scriptures answer all questions and that we need be ignorant on no point; nonetheless, there are many points, the most important points, on cosmology, psychology,

philosophy of history, epistemology not to mention morality and religion on which the Bible protects the Christian against plausible but false theories. Pg. 164 In sharp contrast with the argument in the Parmenides to the effect that the Ideas must exist independently of and prior to Gods knowledge of them, Philo not only makes Gods subjective mental activity prior to the Ideas, but also in one passage seems to do away with all necessity for objectively created Ideas. In discussing the creation of this visible world, he remarks that a beautiful copy requires a beautiful pattern. Then to explain the formation of this intelligible pattern he uses the illustration of an architect who conceives plans for founding a city. Philo is very careful not to allow the architect a blueprint: All the details of all the buildings to be built are carried in the architects mind. Explicitly he says, the world discerned by the intellect is nothing else than the Word of God when he was already engaged in the act of creation; for the city discernible to the intellect is nothing else than the reasoning faculty of the architect in the act of planning to found the city. These words would seem to equate the World of Ideas with the mind of God and render an external blueprint unnecessary. From an independent philosophical point of view also, epistemological and cosmological requirements seem to be satisfied if the Ideas are eternally subjective in Gods mind. Pg. 168 That God is inapprehensible, that his nature is not to be spoken, that indeed he has no name this latter, based on Leviticus 24:16 interpreted as prohibiting the naming of God is supported by further considerations. Since God transcends the Good and the One, there is in him no distinction of genus and species or form and matter. God is not a supreme genus (in spite of Philos words that God is the most generic of all beings) of which other things are species, nor is he a species of some higher genus. This means that God cannot be classified. But is so, then God is unknowable, for all knowledge is expressed by classifying the subject term under the wider predicate. We can know what a lion or camel is by classifying it with other mammals or other vertebrate animals. Without such classification we would not know what a lion is. Or, in different words, what a lion is, is the definition of lion; and according to Aristotle a definition is framed by identifying the genus and adding the specific difference. Now, unless a nonAristotelian theory of definition be worked out, which Philo did not do, the conclusion will be that God cannot be defined and we cannot know what God is. Rather, one must speak of God as the Israelites spoke of the manna: They did not know what it was, and so they called is, what is it. More generally, all human knowledge is a matter of discerning likenesses. To call a lion a mammal is to assert its likeness to many other species. Whenever we learn anything about a hitherto it is by being told what it is like. But for Philo, God is unlike everything else. Pg. 169 On the assumption that God created man in his own image, it cannot further be asserted that God is totally other and unlike. Though Gods thoughts are from above our thoughts, though God is infinite and man finite, and even in spite of the intellectual blindness due to sin, a revealed religion must assert that man can know God.

Pg. 172 The last phrase of this prayer shows that Christ claims power equal with Gods to choose which persons shall understand the revelation and from which persons it shall be hidden, for all revelation had been delivered into the Sons hands. Pgs. 178-179 Certainly no one can be happy if he does not have what he wants. The seeker for truth professes to want truth. The skeptic, therefore, cannot be happy; he cannot accomplish the aim of his life. Nor can his useless search provide any guidance for day-to-day living. The skeptics wish to act on what is probable; but if probable means only what seems good to a person at the moment, a man might commit the worst crime without blame, provided he thought it was probably good. But probability may mean something more. It may mean approximating the truth. The skeptics call propositions false, doubtful, probable, and plausible. Their basic principle, however, does not in consistency permit them to use any of these terms. A false proposition is one opposite to the truth. How then can one say that a proposition is false, unless one knows the truth? A doubtful proposition is one that might possibly be true; a probable or plausible proposition resembles or approximates the truth. But it is impossible to apply these terms without knowing the truth by which they are determined. One might well ask, Is it true that a foredoomed search for truth is wisdom? The skeptic would have to reply that he did not know. Is it probable that such a search is wisdom? Or with respect to everyday living, is it probable or doubtful that eating lunch today is wise? Again the skeptic could not know. A theory of probability must itself be based on truth, for if the method of determining the probable wisdom of eating lunch is false, the conclusion that it is safe to eat lunch could not be known to be probable. Without the possession of the truth, therefore, it is impossible to act rationally even in the most ordinary situations. Now, fortunately, truth is not only possible to attain, it is impossible to miss. There are some truths indubitably certain. Even sensation is not uniformly deceptive, and, more to the point, thought is not altogether dependent on sensation. For example, complete disjunctions, such as, either you are awake or asleep, and implications based on them, such as, if there are only four elements, there are not five, are unquestionably true. Similarly, the law of contradiction, which underlies all logical forms, cannot be disputed; and at this point it might be well to review Aristotles pertinent remarks. Furthermore, the propositions of mathematics cannot be doubted; nor is this science any more than logic based on sensory experience. Even if it were possible to sense a given number, such as three, ratios, divisions, and the other operations cannot be perceived. Things perceived by sense, rivers and trees, do not long endure; but that the sum of three and seven is ten endures forever. There never was a time when three and seven did not add up to ten, nor will there ever be a time. Such inviolable, eternal truths cannot be abstracted from a mutable matric. Nor can the given numbers themselves be so abstracted. Three or, better, one, since the number series depends on one cannot be perceived by sense, for every object of sensation is many, not one. Bodies have parts innumerable; at least they have three dimensions, a center and a surface, a right and left side; and therefore no body can be one. If, therefore, unity pure and simple is not an attribute of body, unity cannot be abstracted from body; for we cannot abstract what is not there. The truths of mathematics, accordingly, are grasped, not by sense, but

by reason or intellectual intuition. And these truths are indubitable. But the most crushing refutation of skepticism comes when Augustine asks his opponent, Do you know that you exist? If he so much as hears the question, there can be no doubt about the answer. No one can be in doubt as to his own existence. We both have a being, know it, and love both our being and knowledge. And in these three no false appearance can ever deceive us. For we do not discern them as things visible, by sense. I fear not the Academic arguments on these truths that say, What if you err? If I err, I am. For he that has no being cannot err, and therefore my error proves my being. Thus in the immediate certainty of self-consciousness a thinker has contact with being, life, mind, and truth. Twelve hundred years later Descartes repeated the argument, Cogito, ergo sum; only Descartes, in order to appear original, altered its form and spoiled its force. Further, Descartes made this proposition the premise from which all other truths were to be derived. Augustine indeed derived many other truths, possibly too man, from this original certainty, but it was not the only original certainty. It is one case, a particularly obvious case, of intellectual intuition. Pgs. 180-181 The first condition of happiness, reasons Augustine, is that it be permanent. To love what can be lost is to live in fear. Freedom from fear, therefore, can be found only in the immutable possession of an unchanging object, and the only object independent of flux is God. To know and love God and to know oneself is the aim of philosophy. Nothing more is needed. These two knowledges, as John Calvin later repeated in the opening chapter of his Institutes, cannot be separated. I cannot know myself unless I recognize my relation to God; I must place myself below God but above the body and its passions. And the chief obstacle to this knowledge is the sin of pride. Man is unwilling to submit to a superior. He intends to be alone the captain of his soul. Thus philosophizing is fundamentally a moral activity, and knowledge has a practical purpose rather than being speculative purely. There is involved, basically involved the question of my destiny. This is not to say that Augustine was a forerunner of modern Pragmatism any more than he was a disciple of Protagoras. Man does not make and remake truth; truth is fixed and eternal; and there must be speculation in the sense of discovering and seeing the truth; but we want the truth because it alone brings personal happiness. That is, it will bring happiness if knowledge of God is possible. Pgs. 182-184 To the secular mind reason and faith are antithetical, the former good and the latter intellectually dishonest. How dishonest then must all secular minds be! Faith is not something strange or irrational, used only in accepting divine revelation; it is an indispensable mental activity. Faith is the acceptance of a proposition as true on the testimony of witnesses. If one has seen and measured the walls of Carthage, one may be said to know their height; but if a Carthaginian tells a Roman how tall they are, the Roman does not strictly know; he accepts the statement on faith and believes it. Nearly all the contents of even the most secular mind are matters of faith. Augustine uses this illustration: A young man believes that a certain older man is his father on the testimony of his mother; and even the identity of the mother is a matter of faith. Faith is the basis of family life and society. Granted that faith is not direct knowledge, still it is not irrational.

It is not blind. There are reasons for believing a witness. If a man had never seen the walls of Carthage, it might be irrational to take his word as to their height. But if he is an eyewitness and if he is trustworthy, faith in him is neither unnatural nor unreasonable. In fact, not only is most so-called knowledge faith, but also there can be no knowledge in the strict sense without faith. All knowledge begins in faith. Our parents and teachers tell us things, and we believe them. Later in life we may reason out some of this information for ourselves. But we could not have obtained the later understanding without the prior faith; and Augustine formulates a sort of motto, which Anselm afterward borrowed: Credo ut intelligam I believe in order to understand. Understanding as the goal is superior to faith as the starting point; but the start must be made. Only in writers who otherwise define faith, and who therefore are not talking about the same thing, or who do not take the trouble to define faith and who therefore do not know what they are talking about, can an incompatibility between faith and reason be found. For Augustine the two are intimately connected, and philosophy becomes the rational exploration of the content of faith. The application of this view to the existence of God is that the apostles were eyewitnesses of Christ; both they and he attested their divine message by miracles; and the message informs us that God exists. Once a person has divested himself of pride so as to believe this message, he can advance to a rational proof of Gods existence. In fact, although faith of some sort is prior to all reasoned knowledge, faith in the Bible is not a necessary prerequisite for avoiding skepticism, learning mathematics, or even proving Gods existence. Though not a necessary prerequisite, it is the easiest way, nonetheless; and we must remember that the eternal destiny of individuals, most of whom are not philosophers, is too important to hand on the accidents of formal education. There is a proof, however, and it leads from the possession of truth to the necessity of God. Skepticism, as indicated above, was refuted because the human mind as such necessarily possesses a number of indubitable truths. One cannot doubt that seven and three are ten. Intellectual intuition also reveals the moral truth that one ought to seek wisdom. Then there are the laws of contradiction and disjunction. And above all, I think; therefore, I exist. None of these truths, it will be noted, depends on sensation. The bodily eye frequently deceives us, but the eye of the soul, reason itself, does not. No one can be mistaken as to his existence. Hallucinations and doubts do not occur unless one is, lives, and thinks. These truths are therefore necessary. But if necessity, universality, and normative obligation cannot be based on sensory experience, neither can they be based on the subjective reason of an individual person. Were that the case, truth would change from person to person. But these truths are common to all men: They are universal. These truths are unchangeable: Human minds waver. While they exist in our reason, they are superior to it. If truth were inferior to reason, we would sit in judgment over it; we would say seven and three ought to be ten, and then we would make it so. But actually we judge that seven and three must be ten. We do not make these truths; we discover them and judge other things by them. Since these truths or this body of truth is the norm to which reason submits in judging, truth is superior to human reason and reason is inferior to truth. Yet reason is a very excellent thing; by it man is superior to the animals; and its abilities are awe-inspiring. If, therefore, truth is superior to reason, truth must be God. And therefore it is proved that God exists. If truth is not God, and there is something superior to truth, then this higher something would be God. So once again it is proved that God exists. However, since truth has been shown to be immutable and eternal, and since God alone is immutable and eternal, we may say that God

is truth. The conclusion therefore is that in grasping truth, the mind knows God. In making all knowledge a knowledge of God, in saying that Christ is the Light that lights every man, Augustine is not trespassing on the sphere of redemptive grace. All men are illumined by Gods light, but not all are saved. The present problem lies entirely within the limits of epistemology, and Augustine is far from denying that the heathen can have knowledge. The Scriptures say, In him we live and move and have our being, and this applied to the pagan as well as to the believer. God is the universal light for all men, and all see truth in this light. Obviously the skeptic is not a believer, yet it is he who is forced to admit the certainty of his existence. This is epistemology, not grace. Pgs. 184-186 Speech or communication, he argued, is a matter of words, and words are signs they signify something. The relation between a sign and the thing signified, the theory of semantics, forces the difficulties in the problem of communication, though Augustine went into more detail than is necessary for the present purpose. Ordinarily when we attempt to indicate what a word signifies, we use other words; for example, a city is a densely populated area. Thus one sign is explained by other signs, and if we are ignorant of the latter, the thing signified escapes. Of course, in the case of concrete nouns, like city or wall, it would be possible to indicate the things signified by pointing the finger at them. At least this is true for visible objects, though we cannot point a ginger at a sound, odor, or taste; and to indicate what is signified by prepositions is still farther outside the range of pointing. Then, too, it must be noted that while the wall itself is not a sign but is the thing signified, pointing the finger at it is as much a sign as a word would be, and as before we have used a sign to show the thing. It appears, however, that there are certain actions which can be shown without a sign. If one wishes to know what walking is, the teacher may indicate the action signified by walking, i.e., by the thing itself and not by a sign. And if the learner were still in some doubt, the teacher might walk a little faster. But just here is the difficulty. How could the pupil distinguish walking from hurrying? Or how could he distinguish between walking and walking ten paces? The matter is further complicated if we wish to explain, no talking, but speaking, not wall, but word, gesture, letter, and in particular the words noun and verb; for in all these cases the sign is a sign of a sign; and incidentally a written word is the sign of a spoken word. Thus noun, when spoken, is an audible sign of audible signs; whereas wall or city is a sign of a thing. Neglect of these semantic distinctions provided humor for an old Sophist who asked his victim whether what is expressed proceeds from the mouth. Upon receiving an affirmative answer, the Sophist turned the conversation so that the man pronounced the word lion; this permitted the Sophist to heckle him about lions proceeding from his mouth when he spoke. Yet nouns proceed from our mouths when we speak. What is lion? One answer is that lion is a noun; another is that lion is an animal. The distinction that the Sophist missed is that when lion is called a noun, lion is construed as a sign; but when lion is classed as an animal, it is construed as the thing signified. Returning now to the signifying of walking and speaking, Augustine concludes that nothing can be shown except by signs. Nothing can be taught or communicated by itself alone. But here arises the paradox. For it is equally evident that nothing can be taught by signs. When signs are used, the pupil either knows the thing signified or he does not. If he does not, the sign teaches

him nothing. It is as if the teacher said caput to someone ignorant of Latin. But if the pupil already knows the thing signified, the pronunciation of the sign does not teach him what it is. Quite the reverse: Because the pupil already knows what head is, the repeated pronunciation of the word leads him to associate the sign with the thing signified that he already knows; and he learns that the word is a sign only through knowing the thing. Otherwise it might be merely a noise without significance. The thing, therefore, must be known first; the sign is learned later. Communication is of course possible only by means of words or some other signs; but the words, instead of teaching anything new, rather stir up our memories of things we had previously understood. Thus, when a speaker says something, unless he is referring to sensory objects present at the moment, we consult the Truth within our minds to see whether or not he is telling the truth. In the Platonic dialogues a series of questions stimulates reflection, and the learning or assent comes from within. It is not the words of Socrates that effect the teaching, for had Socrates said, Do you not agree that two equals three? The pupil would have instantly replied, No, not at all. The pupils in the dialogues usually reply in the affirmative because they see the truth in their own minds. Instead of the pupils learning from Socrates, they sit in judgment over him. This is possible only through an understanding of the truth; and if the pupils do not understand, Socrates words are to no purpose. Peculiar situations can arise. Suppose an Epicurean, who does not believe in an immortal and incorporeal soul, should give an account of the arguments designed to prove it; the pupil might judge that the arguments are sound though the teacher believes them fallacious. Is it to be said that the Epicurean teaches what he himself does not know? The peculiarity only enforces the solution that communication and teaching, although making use of words or signs, is possible only because the mind possesses Truth. Socrates or Augustine is not really the teacher or master: The true master is Christ, who is the Truth and who enlightens every man. Pgs. 189-190 God is eternal, and eternity is not perpetual motion. Eternity is motionless; it permits of no succession; everything is present at once; there is not past or future. The literal and precise answer to the question, What was God doing before he made the heavens and Earth? Is, he was doing nothing. For if he had done anything, that thing would have been a creature. Obviously God could not have made anything before he made anything. It is not true that untold centuries passed before God created, for centuries could not exist before God created them. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo has as one consequence that time was created. Time is not an independent principle, or a Neoplatonic Darkness into which God projected the universe. What time is, we must soon see; but time like every other creature began. Hence it is absurd to ask what God was doing before he created; there was no before, for there was no time. What, then, is time? At this point, Augustine gives his famous answer, If no one asks men, I know; but if I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know. But this much is clear: If nothing had ever happened, there would have been no past time; and if nothing should ever happen, there would be no future time; and if there were nothing now, there would be no present time. Yet again, since past time no longer is, past time is not, does not exist; and since future time does not yet exist, future time does not exist. And if the present were always present, it would not be time at all, but eternity; therefore, since present time, in order to exist at all, must lose itself immediately in the past, how can we say that present time exists? Further, we speak of

the past or the future as being long, although the present cannot be long; but how can anything that does not exist be long? If we should say that the past was long, do we mean that it was long after it had passed or when it was present? But the present cannot be long and the past does not exist. The present cannot be long because the present century, the present hour, the present minute, are half past and half future. What is present, the now, is but a point in time, without duration, and therefore cannot be long; it cannot even be time, for it has no duration if it had any duration whatever, half would be past and half future. And yet we compare these nonexistent times and say that the past century was longer than next year will be. Stranger still, we compare or measure past times, not in the past when they were, but now in the present after they have ceased to exist; similarly, we measure future times or compare them with past times, not in the future, but only in the present now. How can we measure what does not exist? How can we measure yesterday today? It is not here and now for us to measure it. Worse, if the future does not exist, how could the prophets foresee the non-existent, and if the past does not exist, how can historians talk about it? Now, really, past and future must exist somehow, somewhere; and if they do not exist in the past or in the future, the must exist now in the present. The historian talks about past events because the past remains present in his memory; and the prophet who predicts the end of the world, the astronomer who predicts an eclipse, or even you and I who plan for tomorrow, have these future times in the present imagination or consciousness. Time therefore exists; it exists in all three modes; but it exists only in the mind. Of one thing Augustine is quite certain: Time cannot be explained by physical categories. Time cannot be identified with the motion of the Sun or of a planet, for even if a given motion ceased, time would go on. Nor can time be identified with motion in general, for motion takes place in time. The motion is measure by the time, not, as Aristotle claimed, the time by the motion. To identify a motion, one must specify two points in space, its beginning and its end. But this same motion between these same two points can be completed in varying lengths of time. The motion, therefore, does not determine or measure the time. Furthermore, a body sometimes moves from one point to another at unequal speeds, and sometimes remains at rest. Even its rest is measured by time. Time, therefore, is not the motion of bodies. What, then, is time? It is the activity of our minds, memory, and expectation, in which past and future exist. Time passes in the mind. And for this reason the original objections as to what God was doing before he created anything have no sense. There was no time before God created. Time and activity of a created mind begins only with the creation of such minds. Similarly with space. If the opponents ask, Why did not God make the world sooner, they may as legitimately ask, Why did he make the world here rather than there? This question also has no sense. God did not create the world in space any more than he created it in time. Space if a characteristic of the world and was created with it. The doctrine of creation posits God alone as the sole original principle. He created out of and into nothing. Any attempt to make space and time independent of Gods creation is inconsistent with the assumption of a single first principle. It would be a pluralism, like Platos, except that instead of Ideas, Demiurge, and Space, it would have Space, Time, and Deity. Pgs. 209-210

When one says that Plato is a man or is tall or old, what is the status of man, tall, and old? Since things, like stars and stones, cannot be predicates (for we do not say the heavy is stone or the old is Plato), realism which claims that the predicates are things or res must be rejected. But for precisely the same reason nominalism must also be rejected. The predicate cannot be a mere word, for a word or sound is a thing just as much as a stone is. The predicate, therefore, is not a vox, but, to invent a new term, it is a sermo. Abelards alteration of Roscellinus formula is for the purpose of indicating that a word, in addition to being a sound in the air, carries a significance; and this significance or meaning is the predicate. The process by which the mind produces the significance more fully determines the nature of universals. If we think of Plato, we have in mind a singular substance, and individual thing, Plato as Plato. But if we think that Plato is old or is a man, we have limited our attention to this or that aspect of Plato. We no longer think of Plato as Plato, but as a man; that is, we think of his rationality by which he belongs to a certain species; or we may think of his being old, or of some other quality which he has in common with other things. This process of selection or abstraction results in a concept. The common quality, therefore, becomes a predicate when it is abstracted and attended to. It is not a thing in nature like an individual, though it has its basis in the individual and is not an empty sound. Thus the predicate is in one sense in the thing, and in another sense it is in our mind. But in addition to the phrase, universalia post rem, which might be applied to nominalism, Abelard is also willing to asset universalia ante rem, the formula of the realists. For these universals also exist eternally in the mind of God. Conceptualism, therefore, is intended to salvage the elements of truth that we in the other theories without their indefensible flaws. Whether conceptualism with its sensory epistemology can escape Roscellinus difficulties with the Trinity need not now be examined; but from the more restricted view of logic and dialectic one may question the existence of a common quality. That there was such a common quality was assumed by both Abelard and by Aristotle. But if it is not implausible to suppose that every red rose displays a different shade of red, and that hence red, instead of being a common quality, is merely a name for a series of qualities in the spectrum, it is less implausible that men, who are more complicated than roses, have different shades of humanity and a wide variety of physical, mental, and moral qualities, and are therefore without a common quality. If someone should argue in favor of the existence of common qualities on the ground that we cannot perceive any difference in the red of these three roses, the reply could be given that a color-blind person would be less able to distinguish differences and would therefore find many more common qualities. But this would suspend the fate of the common quality upon defective vision; and it is hardly likely that Aristotle or Abelard would have approved of such a basis. At any rate, no defect can be attributed to Gods knowledge. If, therefore, God from all eternity planned to create Socrates and Plato, would he not have distinct ideas of these two men, and not confuse them in an undifferentiated concept of man? Perhaps, therefore, a common identical quality nowhere exists. Pg. 223 Of these arguments about imagination the first is undoubtedly strong; perhaps it is the strongest reason Thomas can urge in defense of his whole system; for no one can deny that bodily disturbances affect or in some way are related to the conscious thinking process. The relation of

body to mind has to be faced by every systematic philosopher and it will reappear in seventeenth-century rationalism. Pg. 229 Intellect and rationality are clearly subordinate to things known, and there can be no things to know unless God wills to create them. Only one apparent exception can be mentioned. It might be said that God first knows himself Pg. 232 It is a general principle that the more particular possesses a determination not found in the universal; e.g. to the genus animal one must add the difference rational to have the species man. Similarly, something positive must be added to the species man to get Socrates. As the specific form rational constitutes the species man, so the principle of individuation makes Socrates what he himself is. The comparison between species and individual can be taken one step further. As the species is specifically indivisible, so the individual, as was said above, is individually indivisible. But here the comparison ends because the species can be divided into individuals but the individual cannot be further subdivided. Pgs. 233-234 A word is predicable because it can stand for or be a sign of many things. Man is the predicate of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, because the word man can be put in place of these three men. Now, if there is no common quality, no universal really in the three men, a realist would raise the following objection: Could we not, he would say, collect a man, a tree, and a stone and let the term snark stand for this collection? In other words, classification is not so arbitrary as the predictability of terms seems to imply; there must be a real common quality in the things in virtue of which we bring them together and apply the same term to them. Because of this absence of a common quality in man, tree, and stone, no language has a specific term to stand for them. Pgs. 239-240 The genius of the Reformation was to avoid that skepticism that results from dependence on unaided reason and to accept truth as a revelation from God; whereas the philosophical development is an attempt to show that knowledge is possible without recourse to any special or supernatural revelation. Pg. 245 In the absence of truth, nothing is absurd. Pg. 246 The test of a true idea, Descartes constantly repeats, is its clarity and distinctness. This does not mean its vividness as a picture or image in the mind. Unlike Thomas, the rationalists show no

dependence on visual imagery. The clarity Descartes intends is a logical clarity. Consider a college class in Logic. The professor explains that all men are mortal and the Socrates is a man. Does it not follow that Socrates is mortal? At this point the football star, whose I.Q. is not half his weight, protests, I agree that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man; but I dont see that has anything to do with Socrates being mortal. Explain to me, please, why the third proposition follows from the first two. The challenge is too difficult to meet. Anyone but a moron can see clearly and distinctly that the conclusion must follow from these premises. Nothing else can be seen more clearly. This is logical clarity, and it is with this clarity that I see I think. Why, for example, is it so clear I think? It is not because thinking is such an intense psychological experience that introspection cannot fail to notice it; rather, the reason is that the proposition, I think, is one whose very denial proves it true. I do not have to walk in order to deny that I am walking, but I cannot deny or doubt that I think without thinking. Ambulo, ergo sum cannot be substituted for cogito, ergo sum. Pgs. 259-260 As was pointed out in the exposition of Descartes criteria of clarity and distinctness, nothing can be clearer than the necessary connection between premises and conclusion. Explanation consists in giving a reason. If it be asked why something is true, the answer is that the premises require it. Understanding comes only through reasons which show, not just that a thing is so, but that it must be so. The premises are the cause. Pg. 268 Only an omniscient mind could know it was free, for so long as any ignorance remains, it is possible that within the sphere of that ignorance a cause of the desire might be hidden. Pg. 282 Descartes indeed used the term innate very little, and Spinoza less. But if knowledge is not received through sensation, the mind at birth must possess something in the way of intellectual equipment the concepts of logic at least. In fact, since the theorems are deduced from the original axioms, there is a sense in which all ideas are innate. Plato in his own way would have agreed. Pg. 308 Sometimes we see ref and a moment later enjoy a taste; other times a loud noise follows. Empiricism therefore fails at the beginning: It surreptitiously furnishes its unfurnished mind with the use of time and space, while it professes to manufacture these ideas at a later stage of the learning process. Pg. 321 Certainly on the assumption that God has implanted aptitudes for knowing and has so ordered them as to harmonize with the laws of nature, Kant is patently mistaken in saying that the

conception of a causal relation under presupposed conditions would be false. When immediately he refers to this causal relation as arbitrary and subjective, it seems that he is depending on his previous assertion that a concept implanted at our creation cannot be a priori and innate. But such an assertion is without reason and implausible. And finally, Kant should be the last one to deplore the statement, I am so constituted that I can thinknot otherwise; for whatever value the objection may have, it applies with greater force to Kant than to theism. Is not the jelly glass so constituted as to shape its contents not otherwise? Pg. 322 Skepticism, as Plato and Augustine well knew, demands silence, or, at most, noise. Pg. 328 If knowledge is impossible, a man can choose only an irrational end and try to be successful by fair means or foul. But Augustine turned this view upside down and used the practical choices of human living to disprove skepticism. If thus skepticism cannot dodge the question of morality, a positive philosophy cannot want to. Whatever the epistemology or metaphysics may be, it has a bearing on the issues of life. Pgs. 376-277 if truth changes for Hegel, how much more must truth change in a dialectical materialism that has no absolute? If thought is simply the product of the brain, no doubt it cannot contradict nature; but then on this basis no thought can contradict nature, and insanity is as natural as any other state of mind. If all thought is thus natural, there is no logical reason to believe that some thoughts, ideas of dialectical materialism rather than of absolute idealism, are more natural, more true, or more valuable, than others. Marx himself seemed to have had some faint appreciation of this, in that he acknowledged that even pure science is given its aim through trade and industry. It seems to follow that science would be as little fixed as industry. Accordingly, while Marx may not be as self-consciously irrationalistic and as consistently inconsistent as some of those who came later, yet he rather clearly avoids a coherent explanation of the hitherto problems of philosophy. Pg. 380 If there is no objective truth, if the How supersedes the What, then can truth be distinguished from fancy? Would not a suffering Satan be just as true as a suffering Savior? Pg. 398 A further insuperable hurdle for rationalistic logic is a propositions meaning. The meaning of a sentence depends on its context. Logicians recognize this fact, but they identify the context as the

totality of knowledge. Hence, as is all too evident with Plato and Hegel, one must be omniscient to grasp the meaning of even a single sentence. This obviously rules out all human knowledge.

Karl Barths Theological Method, 1997 Pg. 21 The modernist minister has no lack of criteria. He tests his sermon philosophically for its epistemological, logical, and psychological content, or historically, or ethically, or politically. But his criteria are all substitutes for the missing criterion of the Word of God. Pg. 68 Freedom from internal self-contradiction is the sine qua non of all intelligibility. Pgs. 80-81 Now, since the testimony of Scripture is not a subjective experience, but, as Ritschl rightly saw even if only to reject it, the conviction of truth by the operation of a power independent of the believer, the position of Scripture in the formulation of theology must be that of an axiom. Pg. 94 Barth himself does not absolutely refuse to discuss whether God exists: He wrote a book on Anselms cosmological argument. What he must mean, or what a Calvinist hopes he means, is that God and his revelation, not the data of experience, are the axioms of Christian thinking. As axioms or first principles, they cannot be deduced from prior knowledge. Christianity, like every other system, is based on indemonstrable axioms. Refusal to deduce them, however, is somewhat different from refusal to discuss them. And because, ideally at least, the truths of Christianity may be ordered logically, Barth is entirely correct in insisting that dogmatics oppose unbelief all along the line, to use that favorite phrase of his. Necessarily it is polemical in every part. Pg. 96 Now then, if apologetics has the task of discussing secular systems, is not the apagogic method the best the method of reductio ad absurdum? Pg. 105 a Christian presupposition, first principle, or axiom produces logical consistency, while a secular presupposition can apagogically be shown to result in inconsistency. Page 108 Axiomatization is simply the perfecting and exhibiting of the logical consistency of a system of thought. In view of Calvinisms well known reputation for consistency, axiomatization and Calvinism should get along well together. The many theorems derived from the smallest possible number of axioms. This ideal, which Barth rejects, most evidently rules out a common platform or common set of axioms with unbelief. And since the axioms, if there be several, depend for

their meaning on their interrelationships, axiomatization would rule out the possibility of even a single axiom in common. Indeed, if axiomatization is rejected, how can a common proposition be effectively excluded? Is not axiomatization the only ideal that guarantees the independence of theology and apologetics? Pgs. 110-111 Nearly all discussions among men are thought to proceed on common presuppositions. This is normally expected. And when a discussion does not so proceed, when it deliberately rejects common axioms, the one party may indeed be confused. But he need not be deceived. He must be given a lesson in geometry. The process of the reductio must be explained to him. There are two parts to the process. First, the apologete must show that the axioms of secularism result in self-contradiction. On a previous page Logical Positivisms principle of verification was given as an example. Then, second, the apologete must exhibit the internal consistency of the Christian system. When these two points have been made clear, the Christian will urge the unbeliever to repudiate the axioms of secularism and accept Gods revelation. That is, the unbeliever will be asked to change his mind completely, to repent. This type of apologetic argument neither intends deception nor does it deny that in fact repentance comes only as a gift from God. A knowledge of geometry, of non-Euclidean geometries, contributes to the understanding of reductions ad absurdum and the significance of alternate sets of axioms. But the force of geometric examples may be missed because the subject is limited. Geometry treats of space only; theology, the theology here in view, covers the entire field of human knowledge: anthropology, history, and science. The axioms desired are axioms which will control all thought. Had Barth pressed his original insight, he need not have taken secular science and general anthropology so much at face value. Too often he gives the impression that science has ruled out the virgin birth as biologically impossible, that higher criticism has succeeded in obscuring the events of Christs life and in disproving many of the alleged facts of the Old Testament; but that this occurs only outside the church, and we are inside the church, and church tradition is as respectable as Aristotelian tradition. Thus the reader receives the doubtless unintended impression of a theory of two-fold truth. But this is an impression that axiomatization never produced, whatever initial implausibility of its own it may have. The initial implausibility of a thorough-going, all comprehensive system of axioms and theorems does not lie in the fact that it is a hitherto unrealized ideal. The implausibility rests on the contrast between the common opinion that the secular sciences are true, at least largely true, and the implication of Christian axiomatization that they are all completely false. Nor should this implausibility be disguised by assigning the sciences an independent truth outside the church. General anthropology, Hegelian philosophy of history, hermeneutics and higher criticism are not independently true outside the sphere of the church: they are false simpliciter. Faith does not have to shut itself up behind monastery walls and resign from the world at large. The axioms of faith are all-comprehensive and the sciences have no independent existence. This implausibility of theologizing arithmetic, chemistry, and biology, is, however, only initial. There is nothing more implausible in theologizing chemistry than there is in positivizing or hegelianizing it. Both are attempts to maintain the consistency of all truth. If the implausibility were read as an

impossibility, ones world would be split in two, each with its own truth, and each with its own schizophrenic logic. Once or twice Barth recognizes the all-comprehensive character of truth. It was seen previously how he suggested that general hermeneutics should conform itself to Biblical hermeneutics. This is one step toward making theology Queen of the sciences. More explicit is another reference. God is himself the truth. The truth not simply a truth. For the origin and substance of all truth lies in the fact that God is not hidden from himself but is open to himself (II, 1, 68). This quotation and its context contain certain complexities that are not pertinent here; the present point is simply that God is the origin of all truth. Then all truth is one and self-consistent. But if so, non-Christian systems of thought must be false all along the line. Pg. 113 To this point the present chapter has attempted to evaluate Barths views on prolegomena and apologetics. His main contention, or what has been taken as his main contention, has been endorsed; namely, that apologetics must be derived from revelation. At the same time what seemed to be a lack of consistency or resoluteness led to certain proposals for improving and extending his apologetic method. The proposals submitted stressed apagogic apologetics, the unity of truth and axiomatization as the most consistent denial of a common platform with unbelief. Pgs. 117-118 In Reformed theology the defaced but not annihilated image of God is sinful man was never conceived as being an axiom common to two systems of thought. The image is a psychological, mental, ontological reality. It is an existing part of human nature. Let us assure Barth that from this element an unregenerate man cannot somehow manufacture faith. The present criticism proceeds always along the line that Barths most cherished theses can be maintained, and maintained more thoroughly than he himself maintains them. Here he is worried by a nonexistent danger. Without falling into modernism or into Romanism one may hold that there is a sense in which man has a capacity for faith not shared by a tree or stone. When God gives the gift of faith, he is not miraculously raising up sons to Abraham out of the stones on the roadway. Faith is a mental activity and by definition presupposes a rational subject. Reason therefore can be considered to be an element common to believer and unbeliever; and if apprehension of the Word of God is the understanding of a divine message, then the image of God preserved from creation and the fall is a prerequisite thereto. Mans logical capacity is not the only constituent of Gods image. In addition there are a few simple theological and moral beliefs. In addition there are a few simple theological and moral beliefs. In the section last quoted (I, 1, 272) Barth wishes to do justice to these facts; peccator non capax must bow to actual faith. But there are other facts also. Unless everybody is to be included as a believer in the church, we must admit the existence of unbelievers who actually even if inconsistently believe a few divine truths. Two systems of thought as such cannot contain common knowledge. Based as they are on separate sets of axioms, they can have no proposition in common; and if one system is truth, the other must be false. However, living people are not so

thoroughly consistent as ideal systems. People are inconsistent; they believe contradictories without noticing the fact. Hence it is psychologically possible for an unbeliever and a believer to agree on a given proposition. And this point of agreement may be used as a point of contact for the Gospel. What is thus theoretically possible, the majority of exegetes have supposed to be declared actual in the first chapter of Romans. Does not Paul assert that the heathen have a knowledge of God? This knowledge may not be extensive, but its importance depends on its being the basis of heathen responsibility. Now, because such beliefs held inconsistently, the Gospel has a point of contact, and apagogic argumentation can be extended. Not only may the apologete show the self-contradiction inherent in secular axioms, as we said above; he may now stress the inconsistency of accepting both a secular axiom and a divine truth; and he may draw out the inferences of the divine truth and show its consistency with the additional truths of revelation. Pgs. 118 Now Paul indeed bases responsibility on knowledge, but he asserts that the heathen had knowledge, some knowledge at any rate; they tried to suppress it, but could not quite succeed. And even if it were Paul who awakened this knowledge in them, the implication would be that some remnant or potential knowledge had been lying dormant in their minds to be awakened. And, finally, to repeat, it is indubitable that the heathen and the unbeliever have this knowledge in common. Pg. 130 If we can contradict ourselves at one point, cannot we do so at any and all points? Pg. 144 the Scripture is perspicuous; it was addressed to ordinary people, the poor, the slaves, the uneducated in Corinth and Rome. God obviously intended that they should understand it. Pg. 146 Although not usually recognized as such, a certain claim to infallibility meets us in our everyday affairs. When an accountant balances his books, does he not assume that his figures are correct? When a college professor hurries to class for fear that his students will disappear if he is late, does he not make judgments as to the time of day and the proclivities of students? When a chess club challenges another to a match, does any suspicion of fallibility impede its action? Cannot this club distinguish the dogma ecclesiastica that there actually is another club from the dogma haeretica that no other club exists? Must not all people act on the assumption that their beliefs are true? Pgs. 149-150

Knowledge and meaning always have the form of a proposition or if significance is sometimes conveyed in an exclamation or a gesture, like shorthand, it may with little trouble be put into the ordinary sentence structure of a proposition. To prove that he knows botany, a student must make certain statements, often on an examination sheet, such as, apples grow on trees and belong to the Rosaceae. If he cannot make any such statements, he flunks and everyone concludes that he knows nothing about botany. It is no different when persons are the objects of knowledge, even though romanticists wish to defend a peculiar type of knowledge especially for persons, different in essence from knowledge of things. But they talk nonsense, and in another place Barth admits it. Although it is not true of God, he says, yet zwischen dem Menschen und seinem Werk zu unterschieden, ist eine unmgliche Abstraction als man ein Wek erhebt oder verwirft, erhebt oder verwirft man jeweils auch einen Menschen (P.T., 9). In English: The distinction between a man and his work is an impossible abstraction; when one praises or condemns a work, he praises or condemns a man at the same time. This knowledge is obviously propositional. To prove that he knows Karl Barth, a critic must make certain statements, such as, Barth is a Swiss theologian, a kindly old gentleman, who has written intolerably long volumes. If a critic cannot make any such statements, everybody concludes that he does not know Karl Barth. Naturally one man may know Barth or botany better than another man does, an one may know this while another knows that. This is because one has greater information, or at least more important information. An American critic may not know Barth nearly so well as Brunner does; yet, without ever having met him, he probably knows Barth better than does the janitor at the University of Basel. This is because he can formulate more, or at least more important propositions than the janitor can. Knowledge consists of propositions, of predicates related to subjects, i.e., of truths. The meaning which the words designate is the object of knowledge. To talk of a different inner meaning, not itself a proposition, never proclaimed or thought, is a trait of irrationalism. Pg. 162 Note here the representational theory of truth: We do not directly perceive the object of knowledge; we perceive it only in an image. This implies too that the object of knowledge is not a truth or proposition, but a sensible object, such as a color or sound, a tree or a song. And for this reason there will be great difficulty in explaining the possibility of a knowledge of God. There is also a great difficulty in the representational theory in explaining the knowledge of a tree or song. Pg. 169 How can knowledge, i.e., belief in or acceptance of a true proposition, depend on giving thanks or feeling awe? This is not true in mathematics. Nor can it be true in theology. Pg. 172 Science is tentative; its pronouncements change, and in the twentieth century they have changed with great rapidity, over a wide extent, and in the most important particulars. There is also little likelihood that what is now published in science textbooks will remain acceptable fifty years

from now. Hence science is not knowledge; and there is no general concept of knowledge that can include the changing opinions of scientists and the unchanging revealed truths of God. Pgs. 172-173 Various philosophers, and Barths phraseology sometimes suggests that he is among them, entertain an Eleatic concept of truth. They think of it as a Parmenidean unit, after the analogy of a physical thing. In opposition to subjective idealism Plato made the point, a good point too, that if we think, we must think something, and something that exists. But when this existing object of thought is imagined to be like a physical object, instead of being a truth or proposition, the theory becomes impossible. Botany is then treated as a plant, which we can see as a while, even though its smaller parts are obscure and out of focus. Instead of admitting a clear knowledge of some parts, or some propositions of mathematics, and also admitting complete ignorance of other parts or propositions, these philosophers speak as if they have a foggy view of the whole. The result of this type of epistemology is found in Plotinus. So impressed was he with the unity of the object of knowledge, that he had to rise above knowledge to experience the unity. For him the duality of subject and predicate in a proposition was a flaw and a sign of inferiority. But he was gracious enough to tell his readers that experience of the One was not knowledge. It was a mystic trance, inexpressible and unintelligible. Christianity, on the other hand, if the Bible is as authoritative as Barth often says it is, should develop its epistemology and theory of language from the information contained in the Scriptures. Aside from imperative sentences and a few exclamations in the Psalms, the Bible is composed of propositions. These are information about God and his dealings with men. No hint is given that they are symbolic of something inexpressible. No suggestion is made that they are merely pointers to something else. They are given to us as true, as truths, as the objects of knowledge. Let linguistics, epistemology, and theology conform. Pg. 187 The Scripture therefore is not the church talking to itself; it is a talking to the church, a criterion, a canon. Pg. 202 Two things are equally essential to Christianity: certain historical events and their correct theological explanation. If Jesus did not visibly die on the cross at a definite time and place, Christianity is false; but also Christianity is equally false if that event is not to be interpreted as a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice. Historical event and theological explanation are equally essential. Pg. 245 Second, Barth confounds the inspiration of the Scripture with the illumination of the reader. He commends Luther for insisting that the word of Scripture can be recognized as Gods word only because of the work of the Spirit which has taken place in it takes place again and becomes an

event for its readers. This second work is only a continuation of the first. Now, if this were so, the readers would soon be writing more Scripture; for since the first work of the Spirit, his work in the prophets, resulted in the writing of the Biblical books, a continuation of the same work would result in additional books of the Bible. Undeniably there is an illumination of some readers of the Bible. By the testimony of the Spirit a man is convinced that the Scripture is in truth the Word of God; by the Spirits illumination a believer may come to an understanding of a better understanding of this or that passage. Luther was right when he insisted that the Bible can be recognized as the Word of God only because of the work of the Spirit; but this is a totally different and distinct work. To recognize that the Bible is the Word of God is not to receive an additional Ten Commandments. Barth also quotes Calvin, Institutes I, ix, 3. But neither the quotation nor the chapter from which it is taken supports Barths view. Calvin is discussing the testimony and illumination of the Spirit, not the inspiration of the Bible; and he gives no hint that this work in the believer is only a continuation of that in the prophets. Quite the reverse: the chapter is entitled, The Fanaticism Which Discards Scripture under the Pretense of Resorting to Immediate Revelations. How better could Calvin deny that illumination is the same work as that which occurred in the inspiration of the Bible? Pgs. 249-250 To admit that we cannot know fully, to admit that we are not omniscient, does not imply that we are totally ignorant. Though we do not know everything, God has revealed some things, among which is the principle that he is the truth and cannot tell lies. Why should it be thought a thing incredible with Barth that God should speak the truth? Pgs. 260-261 Christianity is rational because the God who made the Bible his revelation declares that he is a rational Being of wisdom and understanding. He created man in his own rational image; and these two rationalities, if they are to communicate at all, must because of their nature communicate intelligible. Undoubtedly there exist religions of emotion and mysticism, nonChristian religions they are; but let them remain silent, for they have nothing to say, and any noise they make conveys no message. There are also devout but confused minds who, combining elements of different sorts, are inconsistent in their beliefs. Such minds, however refined and agreeable they may be personally, should either hate the one and love the other, or else hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and unintelligibility. Christianity is rational and rationality requires verbal inspiration. When God, the rational God, speaks to his rational creatures, he must, we insist, speak the truth. His word cannot be false. Barth has tried to ridicule this requirement, as if it gave man some sort of control over God. The shoe is on the other foot. Notions of God and practices of religion are subjected more easily to critical manipulation, once Scriptural authority is sacrificed. To insist that Gods words cannot be false, even to the jot and tittle, gives man no control over God; it is merely the expression of Gods nature and mans need. No rational ground whatever can support the proposition that God speaks falsities. Of course, a man of the Enlightenment, denying that God spoke the Bible, might construct a religion of human invention; but the Bible claims that its words are Gods truth words, so that no theologian can be both Biblical and rational if he rejects verbal inspiration.

What Do Presbyterians Believe? 1985 Pg. 18 You or I might be induced to accept the Bible by the testimony of the Church; but a Moslem would not. You or I might consider the matter heavenly, but the humanists would call it pie in the sky. The literary style of some parts of the Bible is majestic, but Pauls epistles are not models of style. The consent or logical consistency of the whole is important; for if the Bible contradicted itself, we would know that some of it would be false. Personal testimony as to the saving efficacy of the doctrine impresses some people; but others point out that queer people believe queer things and find great satisfaction in their oddities. How then may we know that the Bible is true? The Confession answers, Our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority [of the Scripture] is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit. Faith is a gift or work of God. It is God who causes us to believe: Blessed is the man whom thou choosest and causest to approach unto thee (Psa. 65:4). Logically the infallibility of the Bible is not a theorem to be deduced from some prior axiom. The infallibility of the Bible is the axiom from which several doctrines are themselves deduced as theorems. Every religion and every philosophy must be based on some first principle. And since a first principle is first, it cannot be proved or demonstrated on the basis of anything prior. As the catechism question, quoted above, says, The Word of God is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify Him. Pg. 38 God does not obtain his knowledge by watching how the world goes on. Not only is it unnecessary, or, better, impossible, that God should have to find out what happens; but Gods knowledge does not depend on his looking into the future to see what will happen. Quite the reverse. God did not decree that David would defeat Absalom because he knew ahead of time that David would do this. Rather, David did this because God had decreed it.

Historiography: Secular and Religious, 1971 Pg. 6 In the seventeenth century the opinion was current that sensation is little better than a source of error. Like the ancient Pyrrhonists these philosophers emphasized the illusions of perception and the impossibility of finding a criterion of truth in experience. At the same time Descartes and the lesser lights were delighted with the success of mathematical science. Now, mathematics is a thoroughly deductive, not an experimental, process. No illusions are possible. Would it not then be the part of wisdom to base all knowledge on such a sure foundation? To avoid deception, one should give assent only to those propositions that have been proved by logic alone. On this type of epistemology Descartes and Spinoza tried to work out a comprehensive system of human knowledge; but it should be obvious that history does not easily lend itself to this theory of learning. Spinoza was an even more consistent rationalist than Descartes. He too admitted that the reading of history reveals mens customs and motives and so is useful in making us more wary and circumspect. Bit truth is obtainable by logic alone. All knowledge must be rigorously deduced from an original self-authenticating set of propositions and this he proceeded to do in the style of a geometry book with its Q.E.D.s. Pg. 55 All statements, historical as well as physical, that claim to be true must be based on some theory of truth. All statements presuppose some sort of general epistemology. Pg. 179 One of the main points that the present volume wants to emphasize is the necessary logical connection of every proposition in an intellectual system with every other. Pg. 183 this entire volume has been insisting that everything is connected with everything else. Pg. 223 The representational theory, superficially more probable in the case of sensory objects than in the case of geometrical theorems, holds that the mind does not grasp the actual object of knowledge, but grasps only a copy of it. Pgs. 225-226 Reenactment of a thought is possible, nonetheless, because it can be separate from this immediacy without alteration. Not only so, it can be separated from other thoughts without alteration. Thus history becomes possible.

This self-identity of the act of thought has been denied by two extreme views. The first view is that of idealism, the theory of internal relations, the notion that everything is what it is because of its context. This makes history impossible. To know any one thing it would be necessary to know its context; i.e. to know the whole universe. Knowledge would thus be restricted to the explicit consciousness of the omniscient Absolutes; and Collingwood, though he may be Beckett, does not claim to be the Absolute. At the same time, a second view, the view that all acts of thought are atomically distinct from one another, is as erroneous as idealism. This view does of course permit the detachment of a thought from its context, for really there is no context; there is only juxtaposition with external relations. A science is merely a collection of things known and a mind a collection of acts of knowing. Pg. 227 A knowledge of geometry, a knowledge of anything, does indeed presuppose the possibility of detaching the given proposition from the several contexts in which it has appeared historically. Collingwoods argument against idealism is irrefutable. If one must know everythin g in order to know anything, one can know nothing. Pg. 334 What follows if it is true that psychological analysis presupposes a complete knowledge of the psychological possibilities of life? It would follow, would it not, that historical analysis also presupposes a complete knowledge of historical possibilities. In short, it would be impossible to know anything without knowing everything. Such a Platonic or Hegelian requirement of omniscience is a serious philosophical problem. It is not to be dismissed thoughtlessly. The meticulous scholar, J. H. Hexter, in his Reappraisals of History, castigates historical relativism as a fad and insists on the rudimentary distinction between knowing something and knowing everything. But he omits all philosophic justification for this distinction. Undoubtedly this distinction must be maintained, if a human being is able to know anything at all. Make omniscience the prerequisite of partial knowledge, and partial knowledge vanishes. But Bultmann, like Hexter, offers no help: less help, in fact, for Bultmann lets the requirements of omniscience stand. Pg. 370 Agreement can be obtained only by one partys repudiating his premises and accepting the others presuppositions. One of them must be controverted. One must be regenerated. One must be born again. And the change is something logic cannot do. God alone is able. Pg. 370

One who believes in the unity of truth may still believe that the false system entails contradictions; but to prove this is the work of omniscience.

Christian Faith and Modern Theology, 1971 Pg. 133 In a Festschrift for Heinrich Barth, his brother, he wrote that philosophers and theologians seek the same thing, the one whole truth, but they seek it in different ways. Neither method excludes the other. Neither is superior to the other. The one starts with God and descends; the other starts with this world, with the concept of causality, and ascends from experience to an overarching structure. All this sounds very much like the medieval theory of twofold truth: as theologians we believe Jesus was born of a virgin, while as philosophers we know that miracles are impossible.

First Corinthians, 1991 Pg. 45 It is undoubtedly true that we do not have all the mind of Christ and that we need more instruction, but it is also indubitably true that the doctrines already received are Christs mind. What we think and what Christ thinks (in these cases) are identical. Our concepts are not inadequate concepts (granting, of course, that we lack other of Christs concepts), nor are they analogical or similar concepts. They are indeed Christs concepts, His own mind, the very wisdom of God. Pgs. 56-57 In opposition to mysticism Paul has asserted that God revealed to us His secrets concerning the crucifixion of Christ. These secrets are the various intelligible propositions that compose the doctrine of the Atonement. Paul then, somewhat unnecessarily as some might think, defends the ability of the Spirit to make such a revelation on the ground that the Spirit is privy to all of Gods thoughts. What is more germane to the present subject is the added idea in 2:11 that no one by natural theology can know the thoughts of God. A man has this knowledge only by revelation. Now, we Christians have received the Spirit from God in order that we might know those [theological theses] which God has graciously given us. These are the doctrines we speak, not in didactic words of human wisdom, but in the didactic [words] of the Spirit, explaining spiritual [matters] in spiritual [words]. This passage shows clearly that spiritual matters can be explained in words. The words themselves are spiritual. They are also didactic. They are the words Paul spoke, and, we may add, wrote. All this fits in nicely with verbal inspiration, but is far removed from inexpressible, nonverbal, mystic experiences. The psychical man does not receive the [doctrines] of the Spirit of God. This does not deny that he understands them. Before his conversion Paul understood very well what the Christians meant by calling Christ Lord. Very probably he understood it better than most Christians did. But he did not receive it as true. It was foolishness to him; even more it was blasphemy. It could have been neither, unless he had understood it. Therefore when 2:14 says, the psychical man cannot know the divine doctrines, it is using the verb know in the sense of know as true. That this is the meaning is clear form the reason given for it: for they are spiritually evaluated. Pg. 58 Nothing in Paul suggests that the word of cooperative investigation (1:20) is more certain or reliable than the wisdom of God. Is it not strange that for any evangelical, for whom sola Scriptura is the formal principle of theology, should try to base the truth of Scripture on the conclusions of Dr. Albright and Miss Kenyon? For Paul revelation is self-authenticating. Athens, Oxford, and American universities have nothing in common with Jerusalem. Pg. 64

Now, a mind is what it thinks. If there were no thought, there would be no mind. The person would be mindless; that is, there would be neither person nor mind. Pg. 101 The doctrine of inerrancy guarantees the truth of all Scripture.

Horizons of Science, 1977 Pg. 267 Experimentation never discovers how nature works. Every law of physics is an equation and, if viewed as a description of natural processes, false. The law is indubitably unprovable; it may also be called false because, even aside from the theory of indeterminism, from a strictly mechanistic view, the chance of selecting the true description from all the laws observation allows is one in infinity, or zero. Pg. 269 Perhaps a simplified and artificial example will make it clearer how a series of numbers can accommodate a large, even infinite, variety of equations. Let us suppose that the first point is at 3, the second point is at 9, and the third point at 19. Now, suppose the experimentation has ended with the number 9. Experimentation must always end somewhere, for otherwise no time would be left to formulate a law. If, then, the last experiment gave the number 9, the law could be, and, in view of the scientists dislike for Rube Goldberg complications, would be x = 3n. The first number is three, the second is three to the second power, and the third will be extrapolated on the graph and predicted as 27. But in this example the experimentation did not stop at 9. The scientist went on to his third average of 19. Hence x = 3n is refuted. A new formula must be devised. Well, the scientist has an infinite number of choices, two of which are: X = 2n2 + 1 and x = n3/3 + ln/3 1 This artificial example should convince everyone that in scientific theorizing there are infinite possibilities for extrapolation. Every one of them describes the natural process equally well; that is, not one of them can be shown to be the true description. Hence every law of physics must be false, for science is always tentative. Pg. 271 This article concerns physics; and physics, with its derivatives of chemistry and biology, is totally, totally, incompetent, both positively and negatively, to make any metaphysical or theological pronouncement. Science is always false, but often useful.

New Heavens, New Earth, 1993 Pg. 9 Search the Scriptures is a command; and while obedience to it may require a sort of action, it is the action of sitting still, reading a book, and, presumably, thinking about it. Moreover, after searching the Scriptures and learning what they say, we are commanded to believe them. Believing is even less overt than turning the pages of a book, but it is obedience nonetheless. Pgs. 35-36 Now Christ teaches that knowledge increases and ignorance decreases the amount of the penalty. Some will be beaten with many strips because they have disobeyed a known command. Others, who have done wrong without knowledge, will be beaten with few. But they will be beaten nonetheless. Ignorance may lessen the penalty, but it does not abolish it. No doubt this is because no one is totally ignorant of Gods commands. When God created man he wrote into his being a knowledge of his law. Pgs. 48-49 If our attention should be directed to God rather than to ourselves, how may we know that we are coming into contact with God and are not deceiving ourselves with vain imagination? The answer is as easy as the question is natural, though first, the answer may be given negatively, using for concreteness and contrast an illustration from the Old Testament. The thirteenth chapter of First Chronicles shows that mere good intentions are insufficient to bring us into a blessed contact with God. The chapter gives an account of Davids first attempt to bring back to its proper place in Israel the ark of the covenant which the Philistines had previously captured. All the people were sincere in wanting to have again this symbol of Gods presence in their midst. The first part of the chapter gives a joyous picture of a multitude desiring to please God. Their intentions were very good. But when God showed his displeasure at their attempt their joy was turned to sorrow, fear, and dismay. While their intentions were good, they had failed to ascertain how God wished to be worshiped. They thought that good intentions were a substitute for knowledge. So long as they meant well, so long as their feelings were acceptable to themselves, it made little difference what God had objectively commanded. The situation has frequent parallels today. In the first place the religious liberal thinks he can come to God in his own way and can dispense with the blood of Jesus Christ, who is the only way to the Father. His intentions may be of the best, but they merit only Gods displeasure. In the second place, those who have trusted in Christ, those who are truly regenerated by the Holy Ghost, also on occasion disregard Gods commands and seek to please him in their own ways. The result can only be that instead of drawing near to God, they deafen themselves to his voice. This unfortunate result can easily be avoided. There is no good reason for remaining in ignorance of what God would have us do. So to change from the previous negative answer, a positive and definitely certain way of coming into the presence of God may be stated. And the more definitely we see God, the less we need to worry about our attitude. That sure way of coming to know God

is the study of the revelation of himself which he has made to us. Holy Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith and practice. In the Scriptures, and in them alone, do we have a clear and accurate concept of God. Our duty, then, is to study them diligently, carefully noting the attributes of God, the distinctions of his persons, particularly the person of the Son, and also all Gods works of providence. When we thus come to know God, then we, like Abraham, will naturally have a proper attitude before him. It will not result from a subjective study of our emotions, but from an accurate knowledge of God himself. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. Pg. 53 We may, to be sure, learn a theorem of geometry before having studied geometry. But because we learn the axioms last it does not follow that the axioms are based on the theorems. Pg. 62 The unregenerate retain, as Romans 1:20, 32 indicate, some knowledge of the power and deity of God and some sense of the distinction between good and evil. But since they do not care to retain God in their knowledge and since God gave them over to a reprobate mind, they succeed fairly well in eradicating or at least in distorting their knowledge of God. The heavens declare the glory of God, but men are blind. Pgs. 66-67 A smattering of philosophy or of Shakespeare may incline one to say: words, words, words. The intended implication is that words are meaningless sounds and cannot accurately express thought. According to the view that disparages words, the phraseology of the Bible halfconceals, half-discloses the thought of God. Somehow we must grasp the thought that the words do not quite express. But who are these that limit the power of words? Or, rather, who are these theologians who limit the power of God? If God has some thought that is not expressed in the words of Scripture, by what means could a man grasp such thoughts? Let those theologians who disparage words refrain from using them. Show me thy thought without thy words, and I will show thee my thought by my words; for thought without words is dead. But the words of God live and abide. Accordingly, if the Bible is not verbally inspired, can it be said to be really inspired at all? Words, words, words; true words, blessed words, wonderful words of life.

First John, 1980 Pgs. 18-19 A person is his mind. A person is his thoughts. The Apostle Paul said, We have the mind of Christ. Paul had the mind of Christ (in part) because he understood the atonement in 1 Corinthians 1, and the wisdom of God in chapter 2. Christ, too, is his mind, of which the gospel message is a part. God is a spirit, an intelligence, a mind; God is truth, and the message is a part of that truth. Therefore the proclamation of the gospel is the proclamation of Christ. As Westcott said, though perhaps more than he meant, In a most true sense Christ is the gospel. Pg. 20 Note that Christ very plainly said, If anyone holds my doctrine, he shall not see death, ever. It is this doctrine, these words, or, more accurately the thoughts symbolized by the words, which John proclaims or announces. This is life eternal, that they should know thee, the only true God and him whom thou hast sent, Jesus Christ. God is truth and is to be known. The verse now adds, which was with the Father. Whether he said it earlier or later, in the Gospel John uses the same proposition: with God. This is at least a hint that the subject in the opening lines of the Epistle includes the pre-incarnate Son: it is neither the incarnate Son as such, nor the message somehow distinguished from the person, nor the person somehow distinguished from the contents of his mind. Pgs. 27-31 To pierce, if possible, the biblical symbolism, one must study the Bible. First, the Old Testament: Psalm 4:6 says, Lord, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us. Here light symbolizes any one of a number of Gods favors. Peace, sleep, and safety are mentioned in the context. Psalm 27:1 is the well-known verse, The Lord is my light and my salvation. Safety from enemies is chiefly in mind. Psalm 36:9 is, In thy light shall we see light. St. Augustine uses this verse to teach that God is the source of all knowledge. This may not be very clear in the immediate context; but possibly other passages will support Augustines interpretation. Such support soon appears. Psalm 43:4 is, O send out thy light and thy truth, let them lead me. No one can rationally maintain that the word and connects two different thoughts here. The nouns light and truth are in apposition. The term truth explains what the term light means. Not all verses are so clear. Psalm 97:11 says, Light is sown for the righteous. The meaning is obscure, but at least we can say that light and righteousness are related; but if related, they are not identical. Then there is the comfortable saying of Isaiah 9:2, The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. It seems to indicate their rescue from death. But the context does not identify what the light is. The same prophet (60:1) also says, Arise, shine, for thy light is come. An alternate reading is Arise, be enlightened. This is contrasted with the darkness of the people. Yet out of this darkness the Gentiles shall come to thy light. This begins to look as if the light is the light of truth, the light of the gospel; and yet the darkness is paganism. It does not precisely say that God is light. Yet this may be the meaning, for in verse 19 he adds, the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, which words are also repeated in the following

verse. Psalm 19:8 does not use the word light itself, but it says that the commandments of God enlightened the eyes. Obviously the word eyes is a symbol for mind and understanding. See also 119:105, 130. In this last verse, words give light. Proverbs 6:23 says, the law is light. Light, therefore, is a figure of speech that means information from God. The information, necessarily, is a part of Gods mind. So much, then, for the Old Testament. Some verses in the New Testament have already been mentioned. The life that was in Jesus was the light of men; this light enlightens every man that comes into the world. Some commentators strain the grammatical construction and order of words to make it say, this light coming into the world enlightens every man. But first, note that this interpretation cannot get rid of every man. Second, if Christ enlightens every man, including Cain as well as Abel, the reference cannot be to Christs incarnation. The enlightenment was operative throughout the Old Testament. Hence, the interpretation is to be rejected. St. Augustine uses this verse to base all knowledge, even the knowledge that the reprobate have, on Christ. And the theme is clearer here than in Isaiah. The reading of Augustines De Magistro, especially the second half, is a requirement for the course. Admittedly, the knowledge of the reprobate does not do them much good. Theirs is the condemnation that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light. Once again, this coming is not the incarnation because the condemnation applies also to the antedeluvians. Perhaps we should not skip over John 8:12 and 12:35, 36, but some space must be reserved for the Epistles. II Corinthians 4:4 is a most important verse: if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost, in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds [noemata = thoughts] of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them. Let it be emphasized: the light is the gospel, the good news, a certain amount of information to be understood. The god of this world gives his slaves false thoughts noemata whereas the good news of Christ is true. This message, as the next verse says, is something to be preached. And the following verse uses the words, the light of the knowledge [gnsis] of God. Now we can return to First John and see that the light is the message he will preach in the Epistle. God is light because he is truth. The message is a part of the very mind of God himself. And in him is no error or falsehood at all. John Cotton helps to make this clear: Light is put for knowledge (Matt. 4:16; Eccl. 2:13). Hence ministers having knowledge are called lights (Matt. 5:14; Rom. 2:19). Your light is your doctrine and holy lifeGod is said to be light because he makes us so; men of knowledge, scattering the darkness of ignorance (Psa. 91:10) Hence at our first creation, gods image consisted in knowledge (Col. 3:10) and holiness (Eph. 4:24) God is essentially knowledge, and so his holiness is himself. (pg. 35) Pg. 33 God is truth; condemn the truth, and morality vanishes. Indeed, the first form of immorality that

John here condemns is untruth telling a lie. But if God were not truth, lying would not be wrong. Pg. 55 There is a good reason for asserting that the disobedient man does not believe the truth. The reason is that intellectual conviction inevitably controls action. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he; for out of the heart of the issues of life. A man may not openly express his conviction; indeed, he may assert opinions he does not hold in order to deceive his associates. But eventually his actions will reveal what he really though. Hence, by simple logical conversion, if a man disobeys Gods commandments, it follows that he does not know God. Our actions, as the result of our beliefs, reveal what we believe. As the old, tried and true clich says, actions speak louder than words. But this is very disturbing, for all of us disobey Gods commands. Can we then be assured that we have been regenerated? Maybe our faith is pseudo. Pgs. 78-79 In contrast with knowledge and truth, John makes the obvious remark that no lie is of the truth. The apostles emphasis on knowledge and truth, along with his condemnation of lies or false doctrine, is not welcome to American religious life in the second half of the twentieth century. Pg. 84 Eternal life is knowledge of the Father and the Son. Just because the Gnostics (those who know) were heretics is no good reason for deprecating knowledge. The trouble with the Gnostics was that they did not know. They had opinions, beliefs, theories, theology; but their views were false; their theology was error, not knowledge. As it is wrong to reject faith or belief, just because various people believe falsehoods, so it is wrong to belittle knowledge and theology. Yet this sort of pietism is, in various degrees, the chief weakness of present day conservative Christian. It behooves us to retain what we have heard from the beginning, to continue stedfastly in the apostles doctrines, to have the mind of Christ, for what eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, God has revealed to us, and we have received the Spirit so that we might know the things of God. Pg. 85-86 That the anointment is the gospel is clear from its being called true and not false. This applies to Romans 10:9-10. Admittedly, we sometimes talk of false disciples and true disciples; we can say that the Holy Spirit is true, but it is awkward to say he is not a lie, or not false. The wording of the verse scarcely allows any other interpretation. The simple, literal meaning of true and false attaches to propositions, and these have been identified as the doctrine of the Incarnation. So far as this unmasks the Docetists, no further teaching is necessary. How, then, does the unction teach us about all things? The previous sentence is one possible answer. It limits all things to the subjects under discussion. Or one could imagine that the

teaching actually given on the incarnation presupposes or implies all other scriptural teaching. Since God is rational, and not insane, truth forms a completely logical system. As geometry cannot exist without theorem 17, that is, one cannot establish theorems 2 and 20 without theorem 17, so, too, there is no incarnation without sanctification, and no Trinity without the priesthood of all believers. Pg. 91 No man hath seen God at any time; and theological skeptics use the doctrine of transcendence to claim that God is in himself unknowable. Or they say we cannot know what God is, though we can know that he is; or we can know only his manifestations. Against this irrational mysticism the Scripture says that even now we live and move and have our being in God, in his light we see light, from which Calvin concludes that we must know God before we can know ourselves; and further, that we shall in the future see God as he is in his very essence. Of course, God is incorporeal, a pure spirit. There is nothing to see in the sense of optical chemistry on the retina. This seeing is purely intellectual. We see the Truth in all clarity. Pg. 106 John arrogantly said we (in contradistinction to others) know because we love. Pg. 107 Here is the difficulty Hodge does not face. How can one know that his assurance is not a delusion? But where there is true faith, the want of assurance is to be referred either to the weakness of faith or to erroneous views of the plan of salvation. Many sincere believers are too introspective. They look too exclusively within, so that their hope is graduated by the degree of evidence of regeneration which they find in their own experience. We may examine our hearts with all the microscopic care prescribed by President Edwards. And never be satisfied that we have eliminated every ground of misgiving and doubt. Hodge continues by listing five grounds of assurance external, not internal grounds. But the reader must judge for himself whether or not Hodge has eliminated every ground of misgiving and doubt. In fact, while Hodges external grounds are exceedingly important, and usually underemphasized, ignored, or even explicitly denied in contemporary pietism, our text in Johns Epistle certainly seems to depend on internal factors and our mental ability to arrive at a correct psychological analysis of them. Does regeneration guarantee competence in psychology? It must be admitted, therefore, that these apparently simple verses are in truth immensely difficult. Pgs. 112-113 Now, it must be acknowledged that the context aims to give Johns addressees confidence before God, rather than to frighten them by stressing Gods severity. The first phrase is, By this we shall know that we are of the truth. A knowledge that God is more sever in his judgments of us

than we are, is hardly a ground of assurance of source of comfort. Yet what can he knows all things mean? Does it mean that God knows extenuating circumstances? This is something we know only too well, and the Scripture has little sympathy with extenuating circumstances. The nearest it comes is to assess responsibility and punishment in proportion to knowledge. And even here the ignorant servant is not excused; he is merely beaten with fewer strips. Pg. 113 With some diffidence and reserve because of the complex difficulties, I suggest the following: By loving in deed and truth we shall know that we are of the truth. Pg. 119 Belief is the voluntary assent to an understood proposition; and when we say we believe a man, or believe in a man, we mean we accept as true what he says. Pg. 121 What, then, about the Holy Spirit? The verse says that our knowledge of abiding in Christ comes from the Spirit. There seems to be just one explanation. Faith or belief, and repentance, are the gift of God. The man dead in sin cannot even prepare himself for conversion. He must first be regenerated or raised from the dead by the Spirit. He whose will is alienated from God and resists the gospel must be made willing; and it is the Spirit who does so. Thus, we may paraphrase the verse as, By keeping his commandments our knowledge of abiding in him comes from the Holy Spirit. Pg. 122 God is truth, not emotion. Pg. 128-129 Mans only way of knowing God is by the reception of theological information verbally revealed to him. The reception, that is, the assent to or belief in the doctrines revealed is the work of God, for faith or belief is a divinely given gift. Those to whom God has not given this gift do not hear us. Of course, they hear the words we speak; they may with some attention understand what we say; but they believe it false. We have the spirit of truth; they have the spirit of error. Although regeneration is the work of the Holy Spirit, and although he may be called the Spirit of truth, the two phrases here seem to indicate the true and the false opinions, or mind-sets, of the opposing parties. It is not that the Christian directly perceives the devil or even an antichrist, but rather that he perceives the falsity of the false prophets religion and infers that he speaks from the devil. We may read a book or hear a lecture, and at the beginning have no knowledge of the authors position. Then as he proceeds we come to see that his words are pervaded by error.

Some Christians do not grasp this very easily or very soon. False prophets are often persuasive and deceptive. They use evangelical terms, but are not evangelicals. They talk about the authority of the Bible yet their notion of authority permits the Bible to contain any number of errors. And thus they subvert seminaries, denominations, and simple Christians. The only protection the latter can have is a more extensive knowledge a knowledge of God and a knowledge of the wiles of the devil. The so-called neoorthodox may say, and some have said, I believe in the resurrection of Christ; it is an actual event; it is essential to Christianity. But then in the fine print you discover that for them the word resurrection means any putative Christians experience of encounter or confrontation. Of course, the resurrection is an actual event; it takes place just once once for each individual. But it is not the event of Jesus coming out of the tomb on a particular Sunday in a definite year a long time ago. Let it be pointedly stated that on the third day he rose again. It is not merely a dated event; it is that particular date. If, however, we know God, that is, the information he has revealed, and if we understand what the false prophet is saying, we ipso facto distinguish between the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. There is one detail that the previous paragraph does not make clear. In 4:4 John says you are of God. He is speaking of his followers, and by inference of us today. But 4:6 begins we are of God. Again by inference this applies to present-day pastors. But the immediate reference is to John himself, plus perhaps the other apostles, and even their assistants. In this verse the contrast is between two groups of religious leaders: the apostles and the false prophets. Pg. 132 it is no definition to say God is Light, for light is metaphorical and must be reduced to literal language. It is generally supposed to denote knowledge and righteousness. Since the blessed angels are perfectly righteous, this term, too, by itself, does not define God. One would have to add that God is the source of all righteousness. Probably Truth comes nearest to being a definition, for while mankind knows a little truth, a few propositions, God is Truth itself and is omniscient. The phrase God, who is truth itself comes from the Westminster Confession, I, iv. Pg. 133 Humanistic philosophers, indeed, relativists, of whom there are too many, and instrumentalists, have a wrong conception of truth. When speaking to them we must say, fixed truth, absolute truth, or something to that effect. Yet by their opposition to unchanging truth, they show that they know what the word truth ordinarily means. Pg. 142 The first half of the verse presents a point of dispute, which, though it depasses the common limit of commentaries, may at least be stated for those who wish to go deeper into apologetics. The question relates to the relationship of faith to knowledge. One might hastily conclude from this verse that knowledge precedes belief or faith. The trouble is that in the Gospel 6:69 John has the same to verbs in the reverse order.

The solution carries us further than ordinary exegesis. That is to say, a great deal of Scripture must be examined and more than the usual number of inferences must be drawn. From Augustine to the present, Christian apologetes and philosophers have argued about the relation of faith to knowledge, of revelation to reason, of evidences to presuppositions. Just recently a book on apologetics has accused the present writer of abolishing all knowledge in favor of unsupported faith, while other apologetes accuse him of being a rationalist. To many theologians a man could not be guilty on both counts. What is necessary in a debate of this sort is a clear and precise definition of terms. Many people use both terms with no clear idea of what they are talking about. Secular writers also, uninterested in Christian faith, debate the nature of belief. The solution requires a full-fledged epistemology; and most Christian apologetes simply beg the question. They do not settle the question between intellectualism and voluntarism; and in their concentration on the authority of Scripture or the possibility of knowing God, they fail to test their theory with respect to mathematics and physics. Some say that knowledge comes by revelation and other knowledge comes from sensation and observation. Some may also include innate or apriori knowledge. But in such a mixture, what has become of knowledge? What is the common question and ultimate source of these three knowledges? A theory of knowledge, no matter what it is, must cover all items of knowledge. Restrict or expand the scope of possible knowledge as you wish, but let us avoid at all costs a resurrected form of the medieval theory of twofold truth. Pg. 155-156 The final phrase of the verse is: The Spirit is the witness because the Spirit is truth. The word witness is a participle meaning he who witnesses. In a court trial a certain man is called a witness. The witness gives his testimony. He swears to its truth. Here the Holy Spirit is the one who witnesses, and he does so because he himself is the truth. Remember that God is Truth; Jesus Christ is Wisdom, Logos, the Truth; the Spirit is the Spirit of Truth. This is what so irritates the irrational neoorthodox, who make truth an emotional encounter. Wahrheit als Begegnung (Emil Brunner). An infinitely irrational passion (Kierkegaard). The idea that the Spirit witnesses to the truth puzzles some people. Romans 8:16 says that the Spirit himself witnesses (summarturei, witnesses with, not to) without our spirit. The Westminster Confession I, v says, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth [of the Bible] is from the work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts (cf. also I, x). Pg. 161 Assurance of eternal life can be deduced from a knowledge that one is a believer. Of course, as the negro spiritual says, Everybody talking about heaven aint going there. With constant frequency people are assured of many things untrue. Indeed certainty increases in direct proportion to ignorance. The less educated a man is, the more things of which he is certain. If this obvious truth disturbs anyone, he should also realize that assurance is not essential to salvation. Different people have different mentalities. John Bunyan was so morbid he could hardly have had much assurance. With others more careless, doubts never arise. But if one

knows, if one has a clear intellectual understanding that he believes, he should have legitimate assurance.

Bakers Dictionary of Christian Ethics, 1981 Pg. 45 Skeptics try to act on probabilities; but the calculation of probabilities presupposes knowledge of various factors. This makes skepticism self-contradictory. Pg. 46 Augustine does not crudely assume that knowledge is possible. He does not even restrict himself to proving that skepticism is self-contradictory. He positively defends knowledge on the ground that the laws of logic are indubitable. Mathematics also: we judge not merely that three times three is nine, but rather that it must be nine. It is a necessary truth. Pg. 313 The Biblical Doctrine alone makes eternal truth possible (and truth that is not eternal is not truth).

Gods Hammer, 1995 Pg. 1 When the Biblical definition of inspiration is used, there can be no inspiration without truth, even though there often is truth without inspiration. For the Christian, therefore, the question of truth is a prior question, and unless the Bible is true, there is not much use in discussing inspiration. Pgs. 1-2 In addition to historical evidence of the truth of the Bible, there must also be some logical support for the conclusion. If the Bible makes contradictory statements, then, regardless of archaeology and history, part of the Bible must be false. We may not know which half of the contradiction is false and which is true, but we would be logically certain that both parts cannot be true. It is not the purpose of this chapter to discuss in detail any of the alleged contradictions. Most of them are based on rather transparent misinterpretations. A few remain as puzzles because we do not know enough about ancient conditions. Though we may guess how they can be explained, we have no objective evidence that our guesses are correct. However, to convict the Bible of inconsistency, there should be (1) several, (2) clear, and (3) important instances. But the unsolved instances are not many, and they are either unclear or unimportant. We are at liberty therefore to guess that they will not ultimately prove insoluble. Pgs. 2-3 The first reason for believing the Bible is inspired is that the Bible claims to be inspired. When this reason is offered to an unbeliever, almost always his immediate reaction is derision. To him it is very much like putting a liar on the witness stand and having him swear to tell the truth. But why a liar? Do not honest witnesses also swear to tell the truth? Yet even a Christian with a smattering of logic may object to this procedure because it seems to beg the question. It is circular. We believe the Bible to be inspired because it makes the claim, and we believe the claim because it is inspired and therefore true. This does not seem to be the right way to argue. It must be granted that not every claim is ipso facto true. There have been false witnesses in court, there have been false Messiahs, and there have been fraudulent so-called revelations. But to ignore the claim of the Bible, or of witnesses generally, is both an oversimplification and a mistake. For example, suppose the Bible actually says that it is not inspired. Or suppose merely that the Bible is completely silent on the subject that it makes no more claim to divine inspiration than did Churchill. In such a case, if the Christian asserts that the book is inspired, the unbeliever would be sure to reply that he is going far beyond the evidence. This reply is certainly just. There is no reason for making assertions beyond those that can be validly inferred from the statements of the Bible. But because this reply is so just, it follows that the unbelievers derision at our first remark was groundless. What the Bible claims is an essential

part of the argument. The Christian is well within the boundaries of logic to insist that the first reason for believing in the inspiration of the Bible is that it makes this claim. Pgs. 4-5 Perhaps the Bibles best known claim to inspiration is 2 Timothy 3:16: All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, and so on. The English word inspiration, with its prefix in, gives the impression that after the Bible (or a book of the Bible) had been written, God breathed into it. However, the Greek word does not mean breathed into; it means breathed out. God breathed out the Scriptures. We might say metaphorically that the Scriptures are Gods breath. Thus the claim is actually stronger than it appears in English. Also to be noticed is the reference to all the Scripture. This idea we shall call the plenary inspiration of Scripture. God breathed out all of it. Differences in translation do not affect this point. The American Standard Version, Weymouth, and the German Bible have every scripture; the French translation, the Revised Standard Version, and Moffatt agree with the King James. It is a clear claim to plenary inspiration. To this verse may be added John 10:35, the Scripture cannot be broken. The precise point of Christs remark is that all the Scripture is authoritative. Pg. 10 God, who works all things according to his will and who has done whatsoever he pleased, for no one can stay his hand or say, what doest Thou, from all eternity decreed to lead the Jews out of slavery by the hand of Moses. To this end he so controlled events that Moses was born at a given date, placed in the water to save him from an early death, found by Pharaohs daughter, given the best Egyptian education possible, driven into the wilderness to learn patience, and in every detail so prepared by heredity and environment that when the time came Moses mentality and literary style were instruments precisely fitted to speak Gods words. Between Moses and God there was an inner union, an identity of purpose, a cooperation of will, such that the words Moses wrote were Gods own words and Moses own words at the same time. Pg. 12 The argument so far has shown that the Bible claims to be inspired, and in so doing has explained what inspiration is. If the reader already accepts the Bible as the Word of God, the question that forms the title of this chapter How May I Know the Bible Is Inspired? has been answered. But perhaps the I in the title, a reader of this chapter, does not accept the Bible as the Word of God. Such a person will say, No doubt the Bible claims inspiration, but is the claim true? The question then becomes, How may one prove Biblical inspiration to an inquirer? Pgs. 12-13 The point has already been made that to convince a person of the Bibles inspiration it is proper and virtually indispensable to show that the Bible claims inspiration. If the Bible made no such claim, it would be very difficult to defend the doctrine of inspiration. Now, although not every

claim is true (for some persons and some books make false claims) the manner in which the Bible claims to be inspired limits us to a very narrow range of choice. Only a minor fraction of the claims has been explicitly quoted in this chapter. If all of the Bibles references to its own inspiration were quoted, it would be clear that this claim is thoroughly pervasive. It cannot be regarded as an accidental blunder in one or two books, nor as an excess of temporary enthusiasm in one or two writers. The claim to inspiration pervades the Bible throughout. If Moses and the prophets were mistaken in making this claim, if the apostles likewise were deceived, and if our Lord himself entertained wrong notions of verbal inspiration, what assurance may anyone have relative to other matters about which they wrote? Is there any reason to suppose that men who were so uniformly in error as to the source of their message could have had any superior insight and accurate knowledge of mans relation to God? Why should we today believe that God so loved the world or that a sinner is justified by faith, if it was not God who gave John and Paul this information? And finally, who can profess a personal attachment to Jesus Christ and yet consistently contradict his assertion that the Scriptures cannot be broken? Therefore, one is limited to a very narrow choice. Either the Bible is a worthless fraud and Jesus was a deluded martyr, or the Bible is in truth the Word of God written. Pgs. 14-15 The harmony of the parts is a more valuable point. For although the unbeliever asserts that there are innumerable inconsistencies throughout the Bible, patient exposition might convince him that its teaching is more consistent than he thinks. But the modern public has an ingrained belief that the Bible is self-contradictory, and it is extremely difficult to convince them otherwise. Yet, for reasons that will become clearer as we proceed, the attempt to show the Bibles logical consistency is, I believe, the best method of defending inspiration. But because it is so intricate and difficult, one naturally wonders about an easier method. Pgs. 15-16 The more consistent unbelief is, the less can agreement be obtained. So long as the unbeliever is inconsistent, we can force him to make a choice. If he inconsistently admires Jesus Christ or values the Bible, while at the same time he denies plenary and verbal inspiration, we can by logic insist that he accept both or neither. But we cannot by logic prevent him from choosing neither and denying a common premise. It follows that in logical theory there is no proposition on which a consistent believer and a consistent unbeliever can agree. Therefore the doctrine of inspiration, like every other Christian doctrine, cannot be demonstrated to the satisfaction of a clear-thinking unbeliever. If, nonetheless, it can be shown that the Bible in spite of having been written by more than thirty-five authors over a period of fifteen hundred years is logically consistent, then the unbeliever would have to regard it as a most remarkable accident. It seems more likely that a single superintending mind could produce this result than that it just happened accidentally. Logical consistency, therefore, is evidence of inspiration; but it is not demonstration. Strange accidents do indeed occur, and no proof is forthcoming that the Bible is not such an accident. Unlikely perhaps, but still possible.

Pgs. 17-21 The first phrase in the quotation from Calvin includes and goes beyond what has already been emphasized. Reasons or premises by which to prove the authority of Scripture cannot be used because the consistent unbeliever will not accept any Christian premise. In addition, even a Christian in his own thought cannot construct a formal demonstration of the authority of Scripture because all Christian syllogisms are grounded on that authority. We can believe the doctrine of the atonement only on the authority of Scripture, but we cannot believe the Bible on the authority of the atonement. The second phrase in the quotation from Calvin says that, the mind can rest in this knowledge with greater security than in any reasons. This is obvious because the security of a conclusion can be no greater than that of the premise on which it is based. That the sum of the squares on the other two sides is equal to the square of the hypotenuse cannot be any more certain than the axioms from which it is deduced. But the third phrase of the quotation comes to the most important point. All along, the problem has been how to accept a premise. Conclusions follow automatically, but what makes a man accept an initial proposition? Calvins answer is plain: Belief in the Scripture cannot be produced but by a revelation from heaven. And on this most important point the possibility of misunderstanding is greatest. What is a revelation from Heaven? It could be a message delivered by angels, such as Abraham received. It could be the finger of God writing on tablets of stone or on the wall of a palace. It could be a vision, such as John had on Patmos. And such things, unfortunately, are what most people think of when they hear of the testimony of the Spirit. Unwise Christian workers, careless of their language, sometimes describe their experience in glowing terms and embroider it beyond reality. When younger Christians do not see such visions or dream such dreams, they suffer disillusionment. But there are other forms of revelation. Jesus once asked, But who do you say that I am? and Peter replied, You are the Christ. Then Jesus said, Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in Heaven (Matthew 16:15-17). Peter had had neither trance nor vision, nor had he heard an audible voice. In modern American slang we would say, it just dawned on him. What happened was that the Spirit produced this conviction in Peters mind. I should judge that Peter was not at all conscious of the Spirits working. Of course, Peter was conscious of having heard Christs sermons and of having seen his miracles. But the significance of all this just came to him at that moment. So too when anyone accepts the Bible as the Word of God, he is not conscious of any break in the psychological process. He has probably been reading the Bible for some time, or as a child he had listened to Sunday school lessons, and one day he realizes that he believes the Bible was given by God. The phrase it dawned on him is about as good a phrase as can be found in ordinary use. Many of the theologians compare the experience with sensation and perception. A high school student reasons out his geometry problem, but he simply sees the pencil and paper. Sight

therefore makes a quick contrast with reasoning. Nevertheless, when one studies theories of sensation and learns the several ways in which it is explained, and when sensation is distinguished from perception, this metaphorical use of sensation to illustrate the work of the Spirit is more confusing than enlightening. It is better (so it seems to me) to say simply that God produced the belief in the mind. So far, this exposition has been restricted to the logic of the situation. It has been a matter of the relation between premises (or reasons) and conclusions. Nothing as yet has been said about sin and its effects on mans mind. There were two reasons for this delay. First, the logic of the situation requires discussion simply because it is a part of the subject. It is moreover that part of the subject which has been least discussed by theologians. They have spent most of their time on sin, and of course this was necessary, but they have neglected logic. This neglect is unfortunate because in these days it is particularly the logic that is used against the Christian position. Christianity is often repudiated on the ground that it is circular: The Bible is authoritative because the Bible authoritatively says so. But this objection applies no more to Christianity than to any philosophic system or even to geometry. Every system of organized propositions depends of necessity on some indemonstrable premises, and every system must make an attempt to explain how these primary premises come to be accepted. The second reason for delaying mention of sin dovetails into the first. The situation in logic remains the same, sin or no sin. Adam faced it before the Fall. Of course Adam did not have a written Bible, but he was the recipient of a revelation. God spoke to him. How then could he attribute authority to Gods commands? Was it possible in the garden to do what is impossible now, to demonstrate Gods authority? Evidently not. To suppose so would be the same as supposing that Adam could deduce the axioms of geometry. Nor could Adam have asked Eve and taken her word for it. And surely he ought not to have appealed to Satan to establish Gods authority. Rather, because God is sovereign, Gods authority can be taken only on Gods authority. As the Scripture says, Because he could swear by no one greater, he swore by himself (Hebrews 6:13). However, sin is a factor now; and although it does not alter the basic logical situation, its complications cannot go unnoticed. Furthermore, it is in relation to sin and redemption that the Bible gives some important information applicable to the question of belief in inspiration. When Adam fell, the human race became, not stupid so that the truth was hard to understand, but inimical to the acceptance of the truth. Men did not like to retain God in their knowledge and changed the truth of God into a lie, for the carnal mind is enmity against God. Hence the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness, for the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God because they are spiritually discerned. In order to accept the Gospel, therefore, it is necessary to be born again. The abnormal, depraved intellect must be remade by the Holy Spirit; the enemy must be made a friend. This is the work of regeneration, and the heart of stone can be taken away and a heart of flesh can be given only by God himself. Resurrecting the man who is dead in sin and giving him a new life, far from being a human achievement, requires nothing less than almighty power.

It is therefore impossible by argument or preaching alone to cause anyone to believe the Bible. Only God can cause such belief. At the same time, this does not mean that argument is useless. Peter tells us to always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:15). This was the constant practice of the apostles. Stephen disputed with the Libertines; the Jerusalem council disputed; in Ephesus Paul disputed three months in the synagogue and then continued disputing in the school of Tyrannus (Acts 6:9; 15:7; 19:8, 9; compare Acts 17:2; 18:4, 19; 24:25). Anyone who is unwilling to argue, dispute, and reason is disloyal to his Christian duty. At this point the natural question is, What is the use of all this expounding and explaining if it does not produce belief? The answer should be clearly understood. The witness or testimony of the Holy Spirit is a witness to something. The Spirit witnesses to the authority of Scripture. If no apostle or preacher expounded the message, there would be nothing in the sinners mind for the Spirit to witness to. The Spirit cannot produce belief in Christ unless the sinner has heard of Christ. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God (Romans 10:14, 17). No doubt God in his omnipotence could reveal the necessary information to each man individually without a written Bible or ministerial preaching. But this is not what God has done. God gave the apostles and preachers the duty of expounding the message; but the production of belief is the work of the Spirit, for faith is the gift of God. Pgs. 25-26 Theories of truth are notoriously intricate, and yet to avoid considering the nature of truth altogether is impossible if we wish to know our meaning when we say that the Bible is true. For a start, let it be said that the truth of statements in the Bible is the same type of truth as is claimed for ordinary statements, such as: Columbus discovered America, two plus two are four, and a falling body accelerates at thirty-two feet per second per second. So far as the meaning of truth is concerned, the statement Christ died for our sins is on the same level as any ordinary, everyday assertion that happens to be true. These are examples, of course, and do not constitute a definition of truth. But embedded in the examples is the assumption that truth is a characteristic of propositions only. Nothing can be called true in the literal sense of the term except the attribution of a predicate to a subject. There are undoubtedly figurative uses, and one may legitimately speak of a man as a true gentleman or a true scholar. There has also been discussion as to which is the true church. But these uses, though legitimate, are derivative and figurative. Now, the simple thesis of this paper is that the Bible is true in the literal sense of true. After a thorough understanding of the literal meaning is acquired, the various figurative meanings may be investigated; but it would be foolish to begin with figures of speech before the literal meaning is known. This thesis that the Bible is literally true does not imply that the Bible is true literally. Figures of speech occur in the Bible, and they are not true literally. They are true figuratively. But they are literally true. The statements may be in figurative language, but when they are called true the term true is to be understood literally. This simple elementary thesis, however, would be

practically meaningless without a companion thesis. If the true statements of the Bible could not be known by human minds, the idea of a verbal revelation would be worthless. If God should speak a truth, but speak so that no one could possibly hear, that truth would not be a revelation. Pgs. 28-29 Let us grant that the Holy Spirit by regeneration enlightens the mind and leads us gradually into more truth, but the Scripture surely does not teach that the Philistines could not understand that David had killed Goliath. Such a view has not been common among Reformed writers; just one, however, will be cited as an example. Abraham Kuyper, in his Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology (110-111), after specifying eight points at which we are subjected to error because of sin, adds: The darkening of the understandingdoes not mean that we have lost the capacity of thinking logically, for so far as the impulse of its law of life is concerned, the logica has [sic] not [italics his] been impaired by sin. When this takes place, a condition of insanity ensuessin has weakened the energy of thought[but] the universal human consciousness is always able to overcome this sluggishness and to correct these mistakes in reasoning. In thus defending the epistemological ability of sinful man, Kuyper may have even underestimated the noetic effects of sin. Perhaps the human consciousness is not always able to overcome sluggishness and correct mistakes in reasoning. The point I wish to insist on is that this is sometimes possible. An unregenerate man can know some true propositions and can sometimes reason correctly. Pgs. 30-31 That there is a most important qualitative difference between the knowledge situation in the case of God and the knowledge situation for man cannot possibly be denied without repudiating all Christian theism. God is omniscient; his knowledge is not acquired, and his knowledge, according to common terminology, is intuitive while mans is discursive. These are some of the differences and doubtless the list could be extended. But if both God and man know, there must with the differences be at least one point of similarity; for if there were no point of similarity, it would be inappropriate to use the one term knowledge in both cases. Pgs. 33-34 If God has the truth and if man has only an analogy, it follows that he does not have the truth. An analogy of the truth is not the truth; even if mans knowledge is not called an analogy of the truth but an analogical truth, the situation is no better. An analogical truth, except it contain a univocal point of coincident meaning, simply is not the truth at all. In particular (and the most crushing reply of all) if the human mind were limited to analogical truths, it could never know the univocal truth that it was limited to analogies. Even if it were true that the contents of human knowledge are analogies, a man could never know that such was the case; he could only have the analogy that his knowledge was analogical.

Pg. 34-37 Verbal revelation with the idea that revelation means the communication of truths, information, propositions brings to light another factor in the discussion. The Bible is composed of words and sentences. Its declarative statements are propositions in the logical sense of the term. Furthermore, the knowledge that the Gentiles possess of an original revelation can be stated in words: Those who practice such things are worthy of death. The work of the law written on the hearts of the Gentiles results in thoughts, accusations, and excuses which can be and are expressed in words. The Bible nowhere suggests that there are any inexpressible truths. To be sure, there are truths which God has not expressed to man, for the secret things belong to the Lord our God; but this is not to say that God is ignorant of the subjects, predicates, copulas, and logical concatenations of these secret things. Once again we face the problem of equivocation. If there could be a truth inexpressible in logical, grammatical form, the word truth as applied to it would have no more in common with the usual meaning of truth than the Dog Star has in common with Fido. It would be another case of one word without a single point of coincidence between its two meanings. The five professors, on the contrary, assert, we may not safely conclude that Gods knowledge is propositional in character. And a doctoral dissertation of one of their students says: It appears a tremendous assumption without warrant from Scripture and therefore fraught with dangerous speculation impinging upon the doctrine of God to aver that all truth in the mind of God is capable of being expressed in propositions. To me, the tremendous assumption without warrant from Scripture is that God is incapable of expressing the truth he knows. And that his knowledge is a logical system seems required by three indisputable evidences: first, the information he has revealed is grammatical, propositional, and logical; second, the Old Testament talks about the wisdom of God and in the New Testament Christ is designated as the Logos in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge; and, third, we are made in the image of God, Christ being the light that lights every man. Certainly, the burden of proof lies on those who deny the propositional construction of truth. Their burden is twofold. Not only must they give evidence for the existence of such truth, but first of all they must make clear what they mean by their words. It may be that the phrase nonpropositional truth is a phrase without meaning. What I apprehend to be this confusion as to the nature of truth has spread beyond the group criticized above. The thought of Edward J. Carnell would presumably not find favor with them, and yet on this point he seems to have adopted much the same position. Consider his argument in A Philosophy of the Christian Religion (450-453). He begins by distinguishing two species of truth: first, the sum total of reality itself, and second, the systematic consistency or propositional correspondence to reality. It is not irrelevant to the argument to consider the correspondence theory of truth, but it might lead to a discussion too extended for the immediate purpose. Suffice it to say that if the mind has something which only corresponds to reality, it does not have reality; and if it knows reality, there is no need for an extra something which corresponds to it. The correspondence theory, in brief, has all the disadvantages of analogy. Carnell illustrates the first species of truth by saying, The trees in the yard are truly trees. No doubt they are, but this does not convince one that a tree is a truth. To say that the trees are truly trees is merely to put literary emphasis on the proposition, the trees are trees. If one said the trees are not truly trees, or, the trees are falsely trees, the meaning would simply be, the trees are not

trees. In such illustrations no truth is found that is not propositional, and no evidence for two species of truth is provided. Carnell then describes a student taking an examination in ethics. The student may know the answers, even though he himself is not moral. But the students mother wants him not so much to know the truth as to be the truth. Carnell insists that the student can be the truth. Now, obviously the mother wants her son to be moral, but what meaning can be attached to the phrase that the mother wants the son to be the truth? Let it be that thinking is only preparatory to being moral, as Carnell says, but what can be meant by being the truth; that is, what more can be meant than being moral? The student could not be a tree. It seems therefore that Carnell is using figurative language rather than speaking literally. He then refers to Christs words, I amthe truth. Now, it would be ungenerous to conclude that when Christ says I amthe truth, and then the student may be said to be the truth, that Christ and the student are identified. But to avoid this identification, it is necessary to see what Christ means by his statement. As was said before, the Bible is literally true, but not every sentence in it is true literally. Christ said, I am the door; but he did not mean that he was made of wood. Christ also said, This is my body. Romanists think he spoke literally; Presbyterians take the sentence figuratively. Similarly the statement, I amthe truth, must be taken to mean, I am the source of truth; I am the wisdom and Logos of God; truths are established by my authority. But this could not be said of the student, so that to call a student the truth is either extremely figurative or altogether devoid of meaning. Carnell also says: Since their systems [the systems of thought of finite minds] are never complete, however, propositional truth can never pass beyond probability. But if this is true, it itself is not true but only probable. And if this is true, the propositions in the Bible, such as David killed Goliath and Christ died for our sins, are only probable they may be false. And to hold that the Bible may be false is obviously inconsistent with verbal revelation. Conversely, therefore, it must be maintained that whatever great ignorance may characterize the systems of human thought, such ignorance of many truths does not alter the few truths the mind possesses. There are many truths of mathematics, astronomy, Greek grammar, and Biblical theology that I do not know; but if I know anything at all, and especially if God has given me just one item of information, my extensive ignorance will have no effect on that one truth. Otherwise, we are all engulfed in a skepticism that makes argumentation a waste of time. Pg. 38 In conclusion, I wish to affirm that a satisfactory theory of revelation must involve a realistic epistemology. By realism in this connection, I mean a theory that the human mind possesses some truth not an analogy of the truth, not a representation of or correspondence to the truth, not a mere hint of the truth, not a meaningless verbalism about a new species of truth, but the truth itself. God has spoken his Word in words, and these words are adequate symbols of the conceptual content. The conceptual content is literally true, and it is the univocal, identical point of coincidence in the knowledge of God and man. Pgs. 41-42 One should have in mind the hundreds of instances in which the Bible claims verbal inspiration. Now, to conclude this first section, this survey of elementary detail, I would like to ask a pointed

question. If the prophets who spoke, if the authors who wrote, and if our Lord himself are mistaken these hundreds of times, what assurance may anyone have with respect to the other things they said and wrote? Is there any reason to suppose that men who were so uniformly deceived as to the source of their message could have had any superior insight and accurate knowledge of mans relation to God? Still more pointedly: Can anyone profess a personal attachment to Jesus Christ and consistently contradict his assertion that the Scriptures cannot be broken? Pgs. 43-44 When God wished to make a revelation (at the time of the exodus or of the captivity) he did not suddenly look around, as if caught unprepared, and wonder what man he could use for the purpose. We cannot suppose that he advertised for help, and when Moses and Jeremiah applied, God constrained them to speak his words. And yet this derogatory view underlies the objection to verbal inspiration. The relation between God and the prophet is totally unlike that between a boss and a stenographer. If we consider the omnipotence and wisdom of God, a very different representation emerges. The boss must take what he can get; he depends on the high school or business college to have taught the applicant shorthand and typing. But God does not depend on any external agency. God is the Creator. He made Moses. And when God wanted Moses to speak for him, he said, Who has made mans mouth? Have not I, the Lord? Verbal inspiration therefore must be understood in connection with the complete system of Christian doctrine. It may not be detached therefrom, and a fortiori it may not be framed in an alien view of God. Verbal inspiration is integral with the doctrines of providence and predestination. When the liberals surreptitiously deny predestination in picturing God as dictating to stenographers, they so misrepresent verbal inspiration that their objections do not apply to the God of the Bible. The trouble is not, as the liberals think, that the boss controls the stenographer too completely; on the contrary, the analogy misses the mark because the boss hardly controls the stenographer at all. Put it this way: God, from all eternity, decreed to lead the Jews out of slavery by the hand of Moses. To this end he so controlled events that Moses was born at a given date, placed in the water to save him from an early death, found and adopted by Pharaohs daughter, given the best education possible, driven into the wilderness to learn patience, and in every way so prepared by heredity and environment that when the time came, Moses mentality and literary style were the instruments precisely fitted to speak Gods words. It is quite otherwise with dictation. A boss has little control over a stenographer except as to the words she types for him. He did not control her education. She may be totally uninterested in his business. They may have extremely little in common. But between Moses and God there was an inner union, an identity of purpose, a cooperation of will, such that the words Moses wrote were Gods own words and Moses own words at the same time.

Thus when we see Gods pervading presence and providence in history and in the life of his servants, we recognize that business office dictation does not do justice to the Scriptures. The Holy Spirit dwelt within these men and taught them what to write. God determined what the personality and style of each author was to be, and he determined it for the purpose of expressing his message, his words. The words of Scripture, therefore, are the very words of God. Pgs. 51-53 At our first meeting, which may be called our constitutional convention, we saw clearly that if the Bible is the Word of God a phrase even the Neo-orthodox sometimes use it cannot contain error, for the simple reason that God cannot lie. Conversely, if the Bible contains errors, it cannot, certainly not in its entirety, be the Word of God. Hence the basis on which the Society was founded, and the principle on which it operates to this day, and the statement to which we all subscribe is: The Bible alone and the Bible in its entirety is the Word of God written, and therefore inerrant in the autographs. Note that the statement was deliberately cast in the logical form of an implication. The premise of the implication is the proposition that the Bible is the Word of God written. Therefore the conclusion follows that the Bible is inerrant. God cannot lie. This platform of our Society is not the result of an arbitrary decision. We chose this basic principle because it is the Bibles own view of itself. In The Divine-Human Encounter, Emil Brunner says, The Biblecontains no doctrine of the Word of God (45). But Brunner is completely mistaken. The Bible has a great deal to say about itself. There is of course the well known verse, All Scripture is given by inspiration of God. This verse most obviously asserts plenary inspiration; and when we quote it, we often emphasize the word all. All Scripture is inspired. Plenary inspiration is important: We must insist that the Bible in its entirety is the Word of God. But what sometimes escapes notice is that the emphasis could equally well fall on the word Scripture. All Scripture is inspired. That is to say, this verse asserts the inspiration, not of the thoughts of the prophets though their thoughts may have also been inspired nor of the spoken words of the prophets though their official speech may have been inspired too but this verse asserts the inspiration of the written words on the manuscript. God breathed out the written words. This verse is no hapax legomenon. It does not stand solitary and exceptional. There are many passages in which the Bible describes its own nature. A dozen times or more the Bible prefaces or concludes its message with the phrase, The mouth of the Lord has spoken. In one place we read, The Spirit of the Lord spoke by me, and his word was on my tongue. Or, again, Lord, you are Godwho by the mouth of your servant David have said, and again, This Scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke before by the mouth of David concerning Judas. The meaning of these verses is unmistakable. No exegesis could make them plainer. They say explicitly that the words which proceeded from the mouth of David and were written on the manuscript were the words of the Holy Spirit. Since these words are the very words of God, we are fully justified in concluding that they are therefore true infallibly true. God cannot lie. Pg. 55

With infallibility gone, the other doctrines of Scripture automatically drop by the wayside. Pgs. 57-58 The argument that verbal inspiration is useless because a sinner can be saved without believing it is an argument of massive confusion. True, the thief on the cross did not know of (and therefore could not believe in) the virgin birth, the doctrine of sanctification, and the second advent. Is, therefore, the doctrine of sanctification useless? Are ordinary Christians, not to mention pastors and theologians, to restrict their knowledge to the limitations of the thief on the cross? Dare any scholar speak so stupidly? Must one teach again the rudiments of the first principles to those who ought to be teachers but who have regressed from strong meat to the milk of infancy? Surely theology is not to be limited to the minimum knowledge essential for the initial stage of any random individuals salvation. Pgs. 58-59 If the Bible in a hundred different passages is mistaken in its account of itself, why should the rest of its message be accepted as true? If the prophets spoke falsely when they said that their words were the words of God, put in their mouths by the Holy Spirit, so that the God who cannot lie was speaking through them if they were thus in error, what confidence can we have in anything else they said? If the words of David and Jeremiah are Gods words, then we are obliged to accept them. But if those words are only Davids or Jeremiahs, would it not be more profitable to study Aristotle or Plotinus? And if, as the new creed of the United Presbyterian Church says, the words of the Scriptures are the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought-forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written, and if they reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current, can the Bible be anything more than a source book of the sociology of ancient Israel? I think not. A book that gives a false account of its own origin and nature (or a prophet who mistakes the current views of history and the cosmos for the Word of God) is not a reliable guide in religion. Its doctrine of the atonement, its account of the resurrection, its promise of Heaven could not then be trusted. Pg. 59 If now anyone insists that a chance statement by Jeremiah or the doctrine of sanctification in Paul may accidentally be true and can be accepted even after rejecting infallibility, we would like to know on what basis and by what method these other doctrines are retained. It is not enough to claim that this verse and that doctrine can be salvaged from an erroneous Bible. Pg. 60 May we not legitimately ask how an erroneous book can be inerrant and spiritually authoritative? Pgs. 61-62

If the writers of the Bible were not infallible, could any of us be infallible percipients of our needs? Dare we claim to have made no error in our self-analysis? The Bible furnishes us with an analysis of human nature and need. It tells us that the guilt of Adams first transgression was immediately imputed to us with the result that we were born in iniquity and that our heart is deceitful above measure. If this Biblical statement is true, any merely human analysis of human nature is bound to be unreliable. And if the Bible is not true, what reason is there for thinking that we have a more accurate understanding than the prophets, who even on Neo-orthodox principles stood so close to the fountains of the faith? May I suggest therefore that anyone who says he does not need the doctrine of infallibility has misunderstood his own needs? Pg. 66 Again, the Hebrew-Christian view that the heavens declare the glory of God does not, in my opinion, mean that the existence of God can be formally deduced from an empirical examination of the universe. If on some other grounds we believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we can see that the heavens declare his glory; but this is not to say that a person who did not believe in God could demonstrate his existence from nature. Further reference to this point will be made a little later. Pg. 72 Epistemology is the attempt to show that knowledge is possible, and modern philosophy is heavily epistemological. Pg. 77 The chief law of logic is the law of contradiction, and it is this law that maintains the distinction between truth and falsity. If this distinction cannot be maintained, then (as the ancient Sophists showed) all opinions are true and all opinions are false. Any proposition is as credible as any other. If therefore Nietzsche or Freud have used reasoning in coming to their position, and if reasoning distorts reality, and if one theory is no more true than another, it follows that these men have no good ground for asserting their theories. To deny reason, in the sense of the laws of logic, is to empty conversation or argument of all meaning. Pgs. 78-79 The purpose of the whole argument to this juncture has been to make three points: Neoorthodoxys irrational defense of revelation is self-destructive; modern philosophys rational attack on revelation left itself without an epistemological foundation; and the kind of reason Thomism used to defend revelation was beset with fallacies. Pg. 79 In this case, a rational revelation is one that preserves the distinction between truth and falsity. It is in its entirety self-consistent. In other words, reason is identified as the laws of logic. Christianity is under no obligation to justify itself as rational in any other sense, for the history of philosophy has shown that all the other senses result in skepticism. Therefore, to claim that

election, or the atonement, or any other doctrine is irrational is nothing more than to assert that these doctrines are distasteful to the objector. The accusation is not a substantiated intellectual conclusion, but an emotional antipathy. If the Biblical doctrines are self-consistent, they have met the only legitimate test of reason. This test of logic is precisely the requirement that a set of propositions be meaningful, whether spoken by God or man. And if propositions have no meaning, obviously they reveal nothing. Pgs. 81-82 That Calvin did not base the truth and rationality of Scripture on external supports is better seen in an earlier chapter (I, viii). The title is: Rational Proof to Establish the Belief of the Scripture. In a twentieth-century setting this title is misleading. Today such a title would suggest an appeal to the superior authority of, perhaps, religious experience. This was not Calvins intention. He says that without a prior certainty of revelation a certainty stronger than any judgment of experience the authority of the Scripture is defended in vain by arguments, by the consent of the church, or by any other support. Faith is founded, not in the wisdom of men, but by the power of God. The truth is vindicated from every doubt, when, unassisted by foreign aid, it is sufficient for its own support. The thought of this significant sentence is repeated at the end of the same chapter. While there are many subsidiary reasons by which the native dignity of the Scripture may be vindicated, he says, such alone are not sufficient to produce firm faith in it till the heavenly Father revealing his own power therein (that is, in the Scripture itself) places its authority beyond all controversy. To these words of Calvin I should like to add only that the law of contradiction, or reason, is not an external test of Scripture. Logical consistency is exemplified in the Scripture, and thus the Scripture can be a meaningful revelation to the rational mind of man. Self-contradictory propositions would be meaningless, irrational, and could not constitute a revelation. Pgs. 82-85 Those who defend the Bible as a true revelation must insist that it conveys literal truth. This does not mean that God cannot sometimes use symbolism and metaphor. Of course there is symbolism in Ezekiel, there are parables in the Gospels, and there are metaphors scattered throughout. God might have used even mythology and fable. But unless there are literal statements along with these figures of speech or at the very least, unless figures of speech can be translated into literal truth a book conveys no definite meaning. Suppose the cross be selected as a Christian symbol, and suppose some flowery speaker should say, Let us live in the shadow of the cross. What can he mean? What does the cross symbolize? Does it symbolize the love of God? Or does it symbolize the wrath of God? Does it symbolize human suffering? Or does it symbolize the influence of the church? If there are no literal statements to give information as to what the cross symbolizes, these questions are unanswerable.

Let a person say that the cross symbolizes the love of God. However, if all language or all religious language is symbolical, the statement that the cross symbolizes the love of God is itself a symbol. A symbol of what? When this last question is answered, we shall find that this answer is again a symbol. Then another symbol will be needed, and another. And the whole process will be meaningless. This contemporary theory of language is open to the same objections that were raised against the Thomistic notion of analogical knowledge. In order to have meaning, an analogy, a metaphor, or a symbol must be supported by some literal truth. If Samson was as strong as an ox, then an ox must literally be strong. If Christ is the lion of the tribe of Judah, then something must be literally true about lions and about Christ also. No matter with what literary embellishment the comparison be made, there must be a strictly true statement that has given rise to it. And a theory that says all language is symbolic is a theory that cannot be taken as literally true. Its own statements are metaphorical and meaningless. Furthermore, a theory of language has to be taken as a part of a more general philosophic system. While some linguists may study a few minute details, a theory that concerns the origin, the nature, and the purpose of language presupposes some overall view of human nature and of the world in which mankind exists. The contemporary theories are often based on an evolutionary philosophy in which human language is supposed to have originated in the squeals and grunts of animals. These evolutionary theories of language, and some that are not explicitly evolutionary, reveal their connection with epistemology by making sensory impressions the immediate source of language. The first words ever spoken were supposedly nouns or names produced by imitating the sound that an animal or a waterfall made; or if the object made no noise, some more arbitrary method was used to attach a noun to it. When this view is accepted by Thomists, they inherit the problem of passing from a sensorybased language to a proper mode of expressing theological propositions. The logical positivists, on the other hand, conclude with more show of reason that this cannot be done, and that theological language is nonsense. But in any case, a theory of language must be set into a complete system of philosophy. It cannot stand in isolation. Both the naturalistic evolutionist and the evangelical Christian have their guiding principles. The former has no choice but to develop language from animal cries no matter what the difficulties may be (and they are insuperable). The latter, by reason of the doctrine of creation, must maintain that language is adequate for all religious and theological expression no matter what the difficulties may be (but they are not very great). The possibility of rational communication between God and man is easily explained on theistic presuppositions. If God created man in his own rational image and endowed him with the power of speech, then a purpose of language in fact, the chief purpose of language would naturally be the revelation of truth to man and the prayers of man to God. In a theistic philosophy one ought not to say, as a recent Thomist has said, that all language has been devised in order to describe and discuss the finite objects of our sense-experience (E. L. Mascall, Words and Images, 101). On the contrary, language was devised by God; that is, God created man rational for the purpose of theological expression. Language is, of course, adaptable to sensory description and the daily routine of life,

but it is unnecessary to invent the problem of how sensory expressions can be transmuted into a proper method of talking about God. This immediately overturns the objection to verbal inspiration that is based on the alleged finitude and imperfections of language. If reason, that is, logic, which makes speech possible, is a God-given faculty, it must be adequate to its divinely appointed task. And its task is the reception of divinely revealed information and the systematization of these propositions in dogmatic theology. To sum up: Language is capable of conveying literal truths because the laws of logic are necessary. There is no substitute for them. Philosophers who deny them reduce their own denials to nonsense syllables. Even where the necessity of logic is not denied, if reason is used in some other sense as a source of truth, the result has been skepticism. Therefore, revelation is not only rational, but it is the only hope of maintaining rationality. And this is corroborated by the actual consistency that we discover when we examine the verbally inspired revelation called the Bible. Pgs. 92-93 Though dim and restricted, this natural knowledge of God is not to be denied. Romans 1:20 may not guarantee the validity of the theistic proofs, but it plainly asserts some knowledge of God derived from the things that are made. Romans 2:15 shows a minimal a priori knowledge of moral principles. On such natural knowledge human responsibility depends. When Karl Barth argues that the heathen which Paul has in view are not the heathen generally but only those to whom he had preached the Gospel, so that all the others have no knowledge of God at all, we regret that his exegetical powers failed him (compare Church Dogmatics, II:1:119ff ). Yet this natural knowledge is minimal in extent and practically useless in communicating the way of salvation. Who can deny that the savage tribes of the jungles know very little about God? Pgs. 99-100 It is this inability to justify one decision in contradistinction to the opposite decision, it is the equal value of encounter with God and encounter with an idol, it is the emphasis on the How and the rejection of the What, that has in one form and another plagued the existentialist movement down to the present. Pgs. 101-102 Phraseology such as, We rationally analyze things, but we meet people, may be good rhetoric; but to deny that a person can be an object of thought flies in the face of our everyday procedures. Granted that although our best knowledge of persons comes not from our observation of them as physical objects but from their voluntary self-disclosure, this self-disclosure is best made by speaking and by speaking intelligibly. If a person should refuse to talk, what good would it do to meet him? This is equally true in the case of God. Granted again (or, rather, demanded and insisted upon) that any knowledge a man may have of God depends on Gods voluntary selfdisclosure, what good would it be for religion, for daily conduct, for theology or philosophy

to meet God if he disclosed nothing? Of course persons should be met, but they should be met in order to converse with them. Pgs. 102-103 Knowledge by acquaintance, in the anti-intellectual sense of encounter, Begegnung, or Erlebnis, will result in no religion other than some emotional entertainment. Theology there cannot be. This point needs some emphasis and repetition. A meeting in which no conceptual knowledge or intellectual content was conveyed would not give the subject any reason for thinking he had met God. Nor could such an inarticulate experience point to anything definite beyond itself. Though the experience might still be stubbornly called religion by those who think or, better, feel that emotion is the essence of religion, it could never be identified as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. These three require ideas a What, and not merely a How. Pgs. 104-105 By what standard do I determine the number of the sacraments and the forms of their administration? Apart from revealed information, can papacy, episcopacy, Presbyterianism, or congregationalism be defended or attacked? Is it not rather clear that anti-intellectual religion can settle the nature of the church only by an arbitrary decision on the part of its human officers? And for a final point, the same difficulty is found in questions of morality also. That this should be true of Sartres atheistic Existentialism need not be surprising. What is surprising is Sartres explicit recommendations of one type of life above another. If all is permitted, if man is the sole source of his values, if he is responsible even for his physic-psychological makeup and for the situation in which he finds himself (all of which Sartre apparently asserts), then how can Sartre implicitly require all men to choose freedom and live authentically? Pg. 105 The great difficulty, as should now be clear, is the refusal to accept the law of contradiction. Erlebnis, faith, or encounter curbs logic. The result is inconsistency beyond excuse. Only the people Alice encountered in Wonderland can believe contradictions and logical monstrosities. Pg. 106 The official doctrinal position of all Presbyterian denominations, it states that the Holy Scripture or Word of God (which it defines by naming the sixty-six books) is to be believed and obeyed because of the authority of God, its author. The Bible is to be received, continues the Confession, because it is the Word of God, who is truth itself. Since the whole counsel of God is found in the Bible, nothing whatever is to be added to it. In all controversies the church is to make its final appeal to the Bible, and the Supreme Judge by which all councils and opinion are to be examined is no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scriptures. To avoid the hypocritical objection that the Spirit may speak in some parts of the Bible but not in others, the Confession not only defines the Word of God as the sixty-six books but also later explains saving faith as follows: By this

faith, a Christian believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word, for the authority of God himself speaking therein. Pg. 110 Everything in the above quotation can be found in Luther himself. For example, The Scriptures have never erred, and It is impossible that Scripture should contradict itself; it appears so only to the senseless and obstinate hypocrites. Further examples are: The Scriptures are divine; in them God speaks and they are his Word, and Unless I am convinced by testimony from Scripture or evident reasons for I believe neither the Pope nor the Councils alone, since it is established that they have often erred and contradicted themselves I am conquered by the writings cited by me, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. Therefore I will not and cannot recant anything since it is neither safe nor honest to do anything against conscience. Detached from its context, this last quotation may seem to show that Luther could appeal to evident reasons in addition and out of relation to the Bible. An examination of the context and the historical situation requires us to acknowledge that evident reasons means correct deductions from Scripture, and that conscience means his conscience as bound by the Bible. The famous declaration therefore is an assertion of Sola Scriptura. Pgs. 111-113 It is to be noted, as orthodox theologians have repeatedly pointed out, that what God breathed forth were the words written on the manuscript. The verse does not say that God inspired the thoughts of the authors, nor even their speech. It is Scripture, the written words, that God breathed out. Of course the verse does not deny that God inspired the thoughts of the authors. The point simply is that, whatever else God did, he also breathed out the written words. Because of the liberals persistent misrepresentation of verbal inspiration as mechanical dictation, it might be well at this point to repeat that the prophets mental processes remained normal throughout. The idea that verbal inspiration would conflict with a prophets literary style depends on a deistic conception of God, which the liberals either hold for themselves or wrongly attribute to the orthodox theologians. This deistic conception of God pictures him in the role of a business executive whose control over the stenographer is external and limited. He did not direct her education nor does he control her every thought. None of her personality is transferred to the typed wording. But the Christian view of God is of one in whom we live and move and have our being. He creates our personality and forms our literary style. He foreordains our education and guides our every thought. Hence God, from all eternity, decreed to lead the Jews out of slavery by the hand of Moses. To this end he determined the date of Moses birth and arranged for his princely training and so on until, when the time came, Moses mentality and literary style were the instruments precisely fitted to speak and write Gods words. Between Moses and God Omnipotent there was an inner union, an identity of purpose, a cooperation of will such that the words Moses wrote were Gods own words and Moses own words at the same time.

Sometimes it is objected that the verse in 2 Timothy applies only to the Old Testament. Perhaps it does, but it is amusing to see the liberals so determined to exalt the authority of the Old Testament in order to debase the New. At any rate, the New Testament repeatedly asserts the truth of the Old. One can examine our Lords treatment of Scripture, that is, the Old Testament. He defeats the devil, confounds the Sadducees, and reduces the Pharisees to angry silence by quoting Scripture. The Old Testament also teaches its own infallibility, and this pushes the doctrine well into the past. In addition many instances of phrases such as The Lord has spoken and The mouth of the Lord has spoken, a composite Jeremiah 1:9 and Deuteronomy 18:19 will say, I have put my words in your mouth, and whoever will not hear my words, which he speaks in my name, I will require it of him. So much for the Old Testament. The question now is whether the New Testament makes the same claims for itself. In the first place, the New Testament pervasively presupposes its superiority to the Old. Explicitly, John the Baptist is said to be a greater prophet than those of the Old Testament, and the New Testament prophets are greater than John. The superiority, of course, did not lie in a greater truthfulness, for this they could not have. However, had they been less truthful, they could not have been superior. Note that Peter says, our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, as also in all his epistlesin which are some things hard to understand, which those who are untaught and unstable twist as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:15, 16). Here Peter puts all of the epistles of Paul into the category of Holy Scripture. Paul himself claims to be a prophet: When you read [what he had written before in a few words], you may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christas it has now been revealed by the Spirit to his holy apostles and prophets (Ephesians 3:4, 5). The term prophet puts Paul on a level with Old Testament prophets; the term apostle puts him above them, for God has appointed some in the church: first apostles, second prophets, third teachers... (1 Corinthians 12:28). If an almost exhaustive list of similar claims for the Scripture is desired, one may read Louis Gaussens Theopneustia. The small number quoted here only bespeaks confidence in the extremely large number easily located. But if anyone would prefer to have a final quotation, let it be 2 Peter 1:21: For prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Verbal and plenary inspiration that is, infallibility, inerrancy is the claim the Bible makes for itself; and if the Bible does not correctly represent itself, there seems to be no good reason for taking it very seriously on any other subject. Yet this doctrine on which all other doctrines depend is the one most viciously attacked of all. By a satanic instinct, the battle against Christianity is directed against its citadel. Pgs. 116-117

Different in nature from these historical and cultural items are the cases where the term contradiction is used in its strictly logical sense. For example, if one Gospel says there was one angel and no more at the tomb on Easter morning and another Gospel says there were two, this would be a logical contradiction. Or, again, if two passages differ as to the exact number of Jacobs family that went down to Egypt, the two passages would produce a formal logical contradiction. Such alleged contradictions, however, can be easily handled, even though in some cases we may not know which of two or three possibilities is the correct one. They are easily handled because in most instances the actual texts are not in formal contradiction. No Gospel says there was only one angel at the tomb all Easter morning. Pgs. 117-119 Since this denial that God can use words is another denial of his omnipotence, the question of religious knowledge must again be raised with increasing emphasis. Where do these theologians obtain their information as to what God can or cannot do? Their ideas do not come from the Bible. Have they then another revelation, or have they with Schleiermacher reduced God to a description of their own state of consciousness? Orthodox theologians do well to press this question and prevent the liberals from evading an answer. This orthodox strategy is sound because the liberal answers, when spelled out, are so obviously inadequate. In addition to entailing a non-Biblical concept of God, the thesis that God cannot speak depends on a theory of language. Human language, on this theory, is supposed to have evolved from the chirping of birds and the grunts of pigs, or at least to have had a totally sensory origin. Since, therefore, all terms derive from the visible and tangible things of the material universe, language is inadequate to express divine truth. When language is highly developed by figures of speech, metaphors, and analogy, words like atonement or justification can be used symbolically to suggest or point to something divine. But their literal meanings are spiritually false because they can never be completely detached from their origin in sensation. Wilbur Marshall Urban has a most interesting 700-page volume along these lines, and E. L. Mascall is a noted English thinker who vigorously supports such views. To defend the Bible as the Word of God, a reliance on Gods omnipotence is sufficient. It takes a very brave man to deny that God can speak. But it is more persuasive if a conservative theologian also furnishes an alternate theory of linguistics. The Scriptures lay down the principles of such a theory. Instead of language being an evolutionary extension of the chattering of monkeys, Scripture teaches that man was created in the image of God. Basically this image is human reason. And language is its expression. No doubt God intended language to be applicable to the visible and tangible parts of nature; but there is also no doubt that God intended language to be used in worshiping him, in conversing with him, and in his conversing with Adam and the subsequent prophets. Naturally a non-theistic linguistic theory has difficulty with a verbal revelation. Naturally also there is no difficulty on a theistic basis. Pgs. 119-120

Christianity claims that God is the God of truth; that he is wisdom; that his Son is his Logos, the Logic, the Word of God. Man was created a reasonable being so that he could understand Gods message to him. And God gave him a message by breathing out all the Scripture, having foreordained the complete process including the three stages of the thoughts of the prophets mind, the words in his mouth, and the finished manuscript. Christianity is a rational religion. It has an intellectually apprehensible content. Its revelation can be understood. And because God speaks in intelligible words, he can give and has given commands. We know what these commands mean, and therefore we should obey them. If, now, anyone prefers a symbolism that points to some unknowable, if anyone takes pleasure in irrational paradox, if anyone enjoys wordless encounters, further words and ideas will not change his emotions. Pg. 122 If the Bible is mistaken on geography, which ought to have been easy for the writers to put down correctly, it might very well be mistaken on theology, which is much more difficult than geography. Pgs. 122-123 The innuendo begins with the suggestion that attempts to explain discrepancies are (usually always) suspiciously twisted. Thus the mind of the reader is prejudiced against the truthfulness of the Scripture. The author hides the fact that the burden of proof lies on the critic to show that no explanation is possible. So many alleged discrepancies have by now been removed by archaeological discoveries that the person who accepts the Word of God needs no longer be terrified by the unsupported doubts of the unbelieving critic. There is also another flaw in the argument. The author suggests that there is no use discussing whether the alleged error was missing from the original until we have the original. This seems to betray a forgetfulness of textual criticism. The differences between the Greek New Testament which we have and the autographs are few in number and of slight consequence. Most of them are differences in spelling, or in word order, or in some small detail that does not affect the sense. To suppose that we are so ignorant of the original wording as this argument requires is to cast aside the whole science of textual criticism. Pg. 124 Suppose it were true that an infallible text required an infallible interpreter. Then, of course, the Bible would require a papal encyclical for its interpretation. But since the encyclical, on this theory, is itself an infallible text, it too requires an infallible interpreter. Whoever this might be, his interpretation, also infallible, would require another infallible interpreter; and so on ad infinitum. Pgs. 124-125

Now, Dr. Mays asserts that the Bible is authoritative. And in doing so, he makes some statements that are so commendable that he himself ought to pay attention to them. He says Presbyterians are supposed to build faith on the Bible, to get what is said in theology from Scriptures. And that includes belief about the Bible. We have to look at it and examine it to learn what it is right to say in faith. It is presumptuous to refuse to look and to tell God what we need without considering what he has, in his grace and wisdom, given us. This is excellent advice. But none of the four professors follows it. As is the case with Barth also, their theory of the Bible is not what the Bible says about itself. It is something they have imposed on the Bible from without. The quotation just made says that we should frame our view of the Bible its inspiration, its authority from what the Bible itself says. What then does it say? The Bible says that all Scripture, that is, all the words that were written down in the Old Testament (at least), is breathed out by God. Holy men spoke they spoke words as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The Old Testament has many instances of the phrase, the mouth of the Lord has spoken. Many other times we read, The word of God came to. Deuteronomy 18:18 says, Iwill put my words in his mouth, and a similar phrase occurs in Jeremiah 1:9. Everywhere the Bible speaks of itself, it teaches verbal inspiration. The words are the words of God. It is nowhere said that the words contain geographical discrepancies and theological errors. No examination of the text itself can produce evidence that the words are not inspired. If we take our belief about the Bible from what the Bible says about itself, we must conclude that the words are the words of God who cannot lie. Pgs. 126-127 Christs view of the Bible can very quickly be indicated. Christ said: It is written! If you do not believe Moses writings, how will you believe my words? For the Scripture cannot be broken. Do we need an infallible Bible? We need an infallible Bible, unless we are willing to contradict the teachings of Christ. We need verbal inspiration if we are to believe the call to repentance and the doctrine of justification. We need inerrancy if we are to have any confident knowledge of God. For, if the Bible is mistaken in its doctrine of inspiration, why should we think it correct in its doctrine of God, repentance, or anything else? Our only alternatives would be to believe nothing of what the Bible says, or as most liberals and Neo-orthodox thinkers do, to adopt some principle by which we determine what in the Bible we choose to believe and what we prefer to reject. In either case, we must admit that the Bible itself is no authority for us. We do not believe a doctrine because the Bible teaches that doctrine, but because on some other ground rational, mystical, or otherwise we acknowledge its truth. Our Lord held to a very different view of the Bible. He commanded his disciples to believe all of it (Luke 24:25). And if Christ does not tell us the truth when he says that the Scripture cannot be broken and that the words of Moses are as true as his own, why should we believe him when he says, Come to me, all you who labor?

By all means we should take our view of the Scripture from our Lord Christ and from the authority of the Scripture itself. And this is what the liberal critics refuse to do, even while saying that it should be done. Pg. 147 On page 116 Ramm writes, Sola Scriptura did not affirm that, with reference to the writing of theology, all knowledge other than biblical knowledge is unnecessary. Presumably he means that a knowledge of Greek grammar is useful in writing theology. So it is; but since the New Testament is written in Greek, one may include Greek grammar in the sphere of Biblical knowledge. If he means a knowledge of archaeology or the sociology of Hittite culture, we reply that Protestants accept Scripture as perspicuous and sufficient. All Scripture is given by inspiration of Godthat the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. Writing theology, orthodox theology, is a good work. Extra-Biblical knowledge is therefore unnecessary, even if it has some value of its own. Pg. 148 The Bible is itself revelation. God wrote the Ten Commandments on stone. Moses wrote them on some vellum. These two writings are, unless Moses was a liar, identical. They are both revelation, but the latter is the only revelation we have. Not all primordial (?) revelation was as direct as that to Abraham and Moses. The historical books are revelation, even primordial revelation, because God did not first write the events on stone; they are revelation therefore, and not reports of a prior revelation. But Ramm makes the Bible only a report, an erroneous report, of an otherwise unknowable revelation, so that the Bible is just a pointer or witness to an unrevealed reality. We therefore press the question: If the Bible is not revelation, but only a fallible witness, how does one discover what in the Bible is true and what is false? Pgs. 153-154 According to this the general populace, as well as Hodge and Warfield, do not know what the term error means. We common folk use Websters dictionary. My copy says, Error: Belief in what is untruea moral offense, sin. An act involving a departure from truth or accuracy. Hence people who use ordinary English, if they think that the Bible departs from the truth, say that the Bible contains errors. Since the Bible is a book, we do not say that the Bible sins. If the term error, contrary to both the dictionary and the New Testament, is restricted to overt sinful actions, obviously the Bible cannot be accused of error, because books do not sin. But if error includes any departure from truth, then a book can assert erroneous propositions. Pg. 155 Error is not simply overt acts of sin. Error and sin can be inward and mental. This is not just Merriam-Webster : It is the Bible as well. Even the verses Dr. Hubbard quotes include a reference to an incorrect inference based on a misunderstanding of the Scriptures. The error was a thought that was false. It seems strange that in this twentieth century, after two millennia of

Bible study, that one must labor to show that the Bible approves of truth and disapproves of falsehood. But the situation demands a reference to verses that Dr. Hubbard does not quote. Abraham twice told a half-truth and half-lie about his wife. Gods disapproval is evident. The Ten Commandments prohibit false witness. In 1 Kings 13:18 a false prophet lied and death resulted. Two verses in Job make an interesting comparison. Job 6:24 says, Cause me to understand wherein I have erred. Since this most probably refers to some alleged misconduct, Dr. Hubbard could use it as an example of his sense of error. But four verses below, Job insists that he is telling the truth: For I would never lie to your face. Indeed in verse 25 he says, How forceful are right words! It is clear that lies and falsehoods are reprehensible. And can we suppose that the Holy Spirit inspired his prophets to tell lies? Jeremiah condemns the prophets who spoke lies (5:31; 14:14; 20:6; 23:25). Conversely, God is a God of truth. Christ said, I tell the truth. Paul said the same thing in reference to a chronological detail (Galatians 1:18-21). Ananias and Sapphira lied about a financial transaction. And John says, There shall by no means enter [into the New Jerusalem] anything thatcausesa lie. Pg. 156 We know what we mean by error. False statements are errors. Pg. 160 It takes intelligence to construct symbols, and in particular before constructing the symbol the man must have something in mind to symbolize. A primitive man would never invent the sound or vocal symbol cat, unless he had first seen a little tail and heard its other end say, meow. Does anyone believe that he said to himself, Cat is such a nice sound; I shall use it to symbolize whatever I see tomorrow at noon? Pg. 161 Certainly the truth is what Cassirer denies: Man first understands the world and then invents symbols to express his thoughts. Pgs. 163-164 Before summarizing chapters three and four, one can well pause to consider the phrase human language. When Paul in human Greek says that God justifies believers, did he speak the literal truth or some other, unknowable kind of truth that is not truth at all? A phrase similar to human language occurs frequently in other authors. They contrast human logic with divine logic. But do they dare make explicit what this phrase means? Human logic says, If all men are mortal, and if Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. But if divine logic is different, then all men can be mortal and Socrates can be a man, yet Socrates will not be mortal. Or, again, if human mathematics says that two plus two is four, and if divine truth differs from ours, then for God two and two are five or ten or anything but four. The point here is that human logic and divine logic are identical. Human logic is a part of the divine image in man. It is Gods trademark stamped upon us. Only by rejecting the Biblical doctrine of Gods image can one contrast human language with divine language and divine logic with human.

Finally, if human language cannot be literally true, any assertion language is not literal cannot be literally true. The position is self-refuting, and one can have little hope of explaining how language formed on mythical patterns can convey Gods truth. Pg. 167 It is quite clear that Hamilton does not accept the Bible as the Word of God: The fact that words are in the Bibledoes not mean that our reading of them necessarily must yield authoritative statements that we can proceed forthwith to identify with the Word of God. Well, of course, not necessarily, for some people some of the time do not understand the words they read; so that our reading the words, if we are such people, does not necessarily yield correct propositions. The phraseology here is again propaganda, for the important question is not whether some people misread the Bible, but whether the words and sentences of the Bible are authoritative statements because they are true because they are the words of God. It is obviously poor thinking to attack a theory of the inspiration and truth of the Scriptures on the ground that some people do not understand the words. Pgs. 172-173 Of course there are figures of speech, metaphors, anthropomorphisms, and the like. But these would be meaningless if there were no literal statements to give them meaning. For example, 2 Chronicles 16:9 The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth is ludicrously ridiculous if taken literally: little eyeballs rolling over the dusty ground. But unless the statement, God is omniscient, is literal, the figure has nothing to refer to. Surely Hamilton did not publish his book to remind us that the Bible contains some figures of speech. And yet his argument here depends on the alleged fact that someone said all the statements of Scripture are literally true. Pg. 176 In conclusion, first, Hamiltons theory of language is destructive of Christian truth. Surely language, as Gods gift to Adam, has as its purpose, not only communication among men, but communication between man and God. God spoke words to Adam and Adam spoke words to God. Since this is the divine intention, words or language is adequate. To be sure, on occasion even on frequent occasions sinful man cannot find the right words to express his thought; but this is a defect of man, not an inadequacy of language. The Bible does not countenance a theory that originates language in pagan mythology with the result that divine truth is unintelligible. Similarly, second, on Hamiltons theory God remains unknowable. The chief difficulty with myths is not that they are literally false, but rather that their alleged non-literal truth is meaningless. Hamilton fled from myth to poetry to parable in order to arrive at some sort of revelation, but he never succeeded in showing how parables convey truth or what truths parables convey. Their message remains unintelligible.

Third, Hamilton has rejected the doctrine of verbal and plenary inspiration and places himself outside the bounds of historical Evangelicalism. Fourth and last, it is most appropriate for the Evangelical Theological Society to make note of this and reaffirm by its constant practice that the Bible alone and the Bible in its entirety is the word of God written, and therefore inerrant in the autographs. Pg. 178 Physicists used to say that light consisted of ether waves. Today it is generally agreed that the methods used were defective, and that light is something else (they dont quite know what). Hence even if botany or theology is written first, it cannot be accepted by a scholar until the crucial question is answered: How do you know? In a systematic treatment, the methodology ought to come first. Instead of asking, What is a cactus? or What is light? someone asks, What is God? How can one go about answering that question? Do we consult the Koran or the Vedas? Do we study the stars? Do we send a questionnaire to a thousand college professors? A method must be chosen (or used unwittingly) before any answer is forthcoming. Henrys method is to consult the Bible and from it deduce that God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable. We cannot start with God; we must start with the Bible. Why not say so first and then proceed to the theology the Bible teaches. Pg. 179 The term idea is too vague and in the Platonic sense incorrect. In Thales to Dewey Clark argued against Hegels view, and by implication against Platos, that reality consists of concepts or Ideas. Daane is indeed right that this is not a mere methodological quibble. It is no quibble: It is nonetheless methodological, and it distinguishes Plato and Hegel from Augustine and any others who rely on propositions or truths. Pgs. 180-182 The underlying point of contention is the nature of truth. Although Daane quotes correctly, he does not seem to understand the implications of Henrys and Clarks words. On page 28 at the top of column one Daane writes, Henry agrees with Gordon Clark that only propositions are the object of knowledge. Only propositions have the quality of truth, he says, explaining further that the only significant view of revelation is rational-verbal revelation (430). He quotes with approval what Clark says: The word truth can only be used metaphorically or incorrectly when applied to anything other than a proposition. In Thales to Dewey (455) Clark, after some pages of technical detail, arrives at the subhead Propositions and Concepts. But the simplest reason why truth must be propositional is that a noun all by itself can be neither true nor false. Suppose someone says, without any implicit context, Two, or Cat, or Star. No one could understand; neither truth nor falsity has been spoken. Only when a predicate is attached to a subject by a copula can the expression be true or false. Two is an even number is true; Two is an odd number is false; but just plain Two is unintelligible. Therefore, Clark insists that when a botanist says, A cactus has no true leaves,

he uses the word true in a metaphorical sense, contrasting the spines of a cactus with the ordinary leaves of an ocotilla or rose bush. What the metaphor means, a good botanist can explain in literally intended propositions. That anyone should take umbrage at a metaphorical use of the word truth is rather strange because both the Bible and our ordinary everyday language contain frequent metaphors. Yet when Daanes next sentence says, What then of Jesus claim, I am the truth, he seems to mean that this could not possibly be metaphorical. But does not Jesus sentence also contain the phrase, I am the way? Surely way is metaphorical, for Jesus was not a dusty road strewn with stones. If, then, way must be metaphorical, why is it impossible that truth be so too? Yet, by way of anticipation, truth in this instance may be literal in a sense Daane has overlooked. To proceed and develop this sense and to compare Daanes sentences with Scripture, note first that he says, The truth of the [Biblical] propositions is not that the proposition is, say, the resurrection and the life. Not to acknowledge this is on the one hand to deny that Jesus is the truth, and on the other to reduce truth to language, to verbal propositions, to thought that can be written. Here Daane both contradicts Scripture and falls into systematic confusion. Scripture says, The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life (John 6:63). This verse is all the more conclusive because Johns or Jesus word for words is rhemata, not logous. The latter could have been interpreted in some metaphysical sense, such as is found in Philo or Heraclitus; whereas rhemata carries the more literal connotation of words, exemplified by two, cat, or star that is, as sounds in the air or ink spots on paper. Not that Jesus actually meant ink marks on paper, but that Daanes insistence on literalism is more embarrassed by rhemata than it would have been by logous. Obviously, Henry and Clark do not reduce truth to language, especially not to sounds in the air and ink marks on paper. (See Clarks quotation from Abraham Kuyper in Language and Theology.) Before truths or thoughts can be written, that is, symbolized on paper, the thoughts must be thought. Different literal words can express the same thought. For example, Das Mdchen ist schn, La jeune fille est belle, and The girl is beautiful, are three different sentences with all different words, but they are the same, single, identical proposition. Daanes argument seems to be based on inattention to the distinction between thoughts and their symbolic surrogates. Pg. 183 Since propositional truth has the form of subject-copula-predicate, which Daane considers the lesser form, his higher form must be devoid of subjects, copulas, and predicates. The difficulty with a truth that has no subject becomes a major consideration in point five below. If Daane had said, a higher truth and a lesser truth, instead of a higher and lesser form, and if by these phrases he had meant that one truth may be logically subordinate to another truth, and Euclids tenth theorem is subordinate to his fifth and to his axioms, there would have been no confusion. No matter how subordinate a theorem may be to another, they not only have the same form, but they are also equally true. Hence when Daane accuses Henry of implying that the Bible as propositional is a higher form of truth than Jesus, a reader stumbles at the confusion, for Daane never explains what this strange form is. Pg. 184

If those who reject inerrancy claim that these verses are not errors, we ask, How do you know? By what epistemological criterion do you distinguish between the Bibles truths and the Bibles mistakes? For if the Bible makes false assertions, there must be a criterion independent of and superior to the Bible by which its assertions must be judged. We challenge our opponents to state their epistemological criterion. Unless we know their method first, we cannot accept their theology. Pgs. 184-186 The idea here, a confusion and an invalid inference condensed in the term reductionism, seems to be that the Clark-Henry method requires one to determine first, apart from any revelation, the nature of knowledge and then, again apart from revelation, to conclude that the nature of God must conform to it. Not at all; the actuality is completely different. One of the frequent criticisms against Clark, even by those who accept inerrancy, is that he restricts the scope of knowledge by limiting it to what is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture (Westminster Confession, I.vi). Did Daane fail to notice this rather prominent thesis? At any rate, when a man begins to read the Bible, he finds that it contains many propositions propositions about the stars, about Abraham, the Levitical law, the conquest of Canaan. He cannot go far, however, without learning something about God and man. He learns that God is a rational spirit, a God of truth, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. He learns that man in contrast with the animals is a rational creature, that man sinned, and that God has provided a method of atonement. But to return to the main subject: What one learns first from the Bible and what he learns second and third varies from man to man. One person begins with Genesis; another begins with Matthew. Similarly, a man may learn several propositions about God without reflecting on the method by which he learned them. Musicians and painters usually produce good works of art before they understand the theory. Hence in temporal psychology a knowledge of God precedes a knowledge of method. But to explain this process an apologist ought to start with the methodology. For while the unreflective reader may be unaware of the methodology he may not realize how he does what he does he nonetheless uses the method. And for Clark and Henry the method is Scriptural. Suppose a reflective and intelligent person begins with Matthew. He comes across the words genealogy, Abraham, begat, fourteen, and so on. He will then perceive that every sentence, indeed every word, in the Bible depends on the logical law of contradiction for its intelligibility. Without this law every word would have an infinite number of meanings: David would not only mean Moses and Judas, it would also mean sling, stone, atom, and typewriter. And God would mean devil. Apart from logic, a noun would mean what it does not mean; and if a word means everything, it means nothing. In order to mean something, a word must also not mean something. There is no meaning without the law of contradiction. Hence, in acquiring the knowledge that God is knowable, Gods rational creature so far as he can escape the misunderstandings and fallacies of the noetic effects of sin must use the laws of logic. Dr. Daane should try to answer the question, How can we know that God is knowable, or that he is omniscient, without using the rational laws of logic? If we did not (first) use the laws of logic,

how could we know anything about God? And first is the wrong word, for knowing God and using logic are the same identical act. Pgs. 186-187 First, one can easily state and explain the form of propositional truth. As said above, it consists of a subject connected by a copula to a predicate. By a clearly defined method we can arrange propositions into valid syllogisms and easily distinguish them from invalid syllogisms. But what is the form of personal truth? Are there universals and particulars? Are there valid and invalid inferences? Presumably not, for no one has ever derived twenty-four valid personal syllogisms nor 232 invalid ones. Personal truth can have no subjects, predicates, or copulas. What is it then? How does one distinguish between a personal truth and a personal falsity? When with Brunner one says that God and the medium of conceptuality are mutually exclusive, one makes God completely unknowable. If we talk about God, we are not talking about God. This is not what the inerrant Bible teaches. Then, second, underlying the above is a deficient or completely lacking concept of a person. For Plato a human person was a soul who knew the Ideas. The World of Ideas was itself a living mind, as he explained in The Sophist. For Aristotle, the soul was the form of the organic body, and its individuality depended upon its unknowable matter. Locke made the soul an abstract idea, a spiritual substance, also unknowable; he called it something I know not what. Hume reduced the person to a collection of sensations and memory images a collection which, according to Kant, had never been collected. For it, Kant substituted his transcendental unity of apperception also unknowable. Which of these does Daane prefer? Or does he have a different theory? I am afraid this is unknowable too. In 1 Corinthians 2:16 Paul says we have the mind of Christ. The word mind is nous. How is it possible for us to have Christs nous, unless his mind is the truth? We have Christs mind insofar as we think his thoughts. Of course we are not omniscient; we do not think all his thoughts; and worse, we think some false propositions too. We are what we think, just as Christ is what he thinks. His doctrine or teaching saves us from eternal death (John 8:51). He is the truth! Is this not what Scripture teaches? Christ is the Logos, his rhemata are truth; he is Gods Wisdom; and 1 Samuel 2:3 says, the Lord is the God of knowledge. Daanes theory seems to imply that these propositions are some of the errors in our untrustworthy Bible. Henry and I believe that the Bible is trustworthy. Pgs. 195-196 In one ecclesiastical meeting I heard a minister say the human mind possesses no truth at all. And last year in Europe I visited a certain professor who asserted that we can have no absolute truth whatever. When he said that, I took a piece of paper and wrote on it, We can have no absolute truth whatever. I showed him the writing, the sentence We can have no absolute truth whatever then I asked, Is that sentence absolute truth? Do you not see that if the human mind can have no truth, it could not have the truth that it has no truth? If we know nothing, we could not know we know nothing. And if there is no point of coincidence between Gods knowledge and ours, it rigorously follows, since God knows everything, that we know absolutely nothing.

With such skepticism, it is not surprising that their religion consists in a passionate inwardness that appropriates nothing objective. Unfortunately skepticism, particularly when discussed in such an academic tone as this address, does not provoke as passionate a reaction among the evangelically minded as it ought. But one ought to realize that even the most gentle and innocuous skepticism is sufficient to defeat the Gospel. To speed the dissolution of Christianity, it is not necessary to say that we know a contrary philosophy is true; it is equally effective to say that we do not know anything is true. The Gospel is a message of positive content, and whether it is dogmatically denied or merely silenced makes little difference. Pg. 199 First, our forefathers were convinced, the Westminster Confession asserts, and the Bible teaches that God has given us a written revelation. This revelation is the truth. As Christ himself said, Your word is truth. It is not a myth, it is not an allegory, it is no mere pointer to the truth, it is not an analogy of the truth; but it is literally and absolutely true. Second, our forefathers were convinced and the Reformed Faith asserts that this truth can be known. God has created us in his image with the intellectual and logical powers of understanding. He has addressed to men an intelligible revelation; and he expects us to read it, to grasp its meaning, and to believe it. God is not Totally Other, nor is logic a human invention that distorts Gods statements. If this were so, as the Neo-orthodox say, then it would follow, as the Neo-orthodox admit, that falsity would be as useful as truth in producing a passionate emotion. But the Bible expects us to appropriate a definite message. Third, the Reformers believed that Gods revelation can be formulated accurately. They were not enamored of ambiguity; they did not identify piety with a confused mind. They wanted to proclaim the truth with the greatest possible clarity. And so ought we.

In Defense of Theology, 2007 Pgs. 20-21 In geometry there are axioms and theorems. One of the early theorems is, An exterior angle of a triangle is greater than either opposite interior angle. A later one is the famous Pythagorean theorem: The sum of the squares on the other two sides of a right triangle equals the square of its hypotenuse. How theological this all sounds! These two theorems and all others are deduced logically from a certain set of axioms. But the axioms are never deduced. They are assumed without proof. There is a definite reason why not everything can be deduced. If one tried to prove the axioms of geometry, one must refer to prior propositions. If these too must be deduced, there must be previous propositions, and so on back ad infinitum. From which it follows: If everything must be demonstrated, nothing can be demonstrated, for there would be no starting point. If you cannot start, then surely you cannot finish. Every system of theology or philosophy must have a starting point. Logical Positivists started with the unproved assumption that a sentence can have no meaning unless it can be tested by sensation. To speak without referring to something that cannot be touched, seen, smelled, and especially measured, is to speak nonsense. But they never deduced this principle. It is theirs indemonstrable axiom. Worse, it is self-contradictory, for it has not been and cannot be seen, smelled, or measured; therefore, it is self-condemned as nonsense. If the axioms of other secularists are not nonsense, they are nonetheless axioms. Every system must start somewhere, and it cannot have started before it starts. A naturalist might amend the Logical Positivists principle and make it say that all knowledge is derived from sensation. This is not nonsense, but it is still and empirically unverifiable axiom. If it is not self-contradictory, it is at least without empirical justification. Other arguments against empiricism need not be given here: The point is that no system can deduce its axioms. The inference is this: No one can consistently object to Christianity being based on an indemonstrable axiom. If the secularists exercise their privilege of basing their theorems on axioms, then so may Christians. If the former refuse to accept our axioms, then they can have no logical objection to our rejecting theirs. Accordingly, we reject the very basis of atheism, Logical Positivism, and, in general, empiricism. Our axiom shall be that God has spoken. More completely, God has spoken in the Bible. More precisely, what the Bible says, God has spoken. Pg. 48 A word that means everything means nothing. In order for a word to mean something, it must also not mean something.

The Pastoral Epistles, 1983 Pgs. 109-110 The phrase who have corrupted their minds leads on to being robbed of the truth; but the participle itself, diephtarmenn, bears the literal sense of deterioration, or the decay of the body after death. As used metaphorically hear, it means these men have rendered themselves incapable of logical thinking. Then too they thought that their fallacious piety was a means of gain, if not monetary gain, gain in public repute. Overarching all is the concept of truth, not the ever-changing truth of relativism, not the logical-positivist truth of sensory verification, not even the absolute truth of Hegelianism, but the absolute, unchanging truth of Biblical revelation. Pg. 119 First, it is true that by studying Scripture we can come to know more and more of Gods truth, and by grace to practice his precepts more consistently. But this approaches neither Gods omniscience nor his righteousness. Though we learn more and more, though we make progress in understanding Gods truth why otherwise would he have given us a revelation? we cannot approach omniscience because omniscience is not the result of a learning process. God never learned anything. His knowledge is an eternal knowledge. To be sure we grasp or participate in Gods mind to a degree. In his light we see light; we do not sit in total darkness. The truth that God justifies by means of faith is a proposition that both God and we know. If our minds and Gods mind did not have some univocal content, we would know nothing at all. If he has all truth, we cannot know any truth except the truth God knows. But this does not mean we are twenty-five percent omniscient. The matter of righteousness is similar, but with a difference also. If we were once thieves, and have now repented and steal no longer, we have increased in righteousness. But neither the eighth commandment nor any other applies to God. God cannot steal for the simple reason that he owns everything. Obviously he cannot obey the fifth commandment. God is righteous in the sense that he determines the laws of righteousness; we are righteous in proportion to our obedience to those laws. But in the case of righteousness it is even clearer than in the case of knowledge that we do not approach Gods perfections. Pg. 166 Ordinary usage in both Greek and English, either by reason of ambiguity or more often by condensation, may easily result in misunderstandings, especially when the word in question is knowledge. Very likely some of Timothys opponents already had a fair knowledge of the gospel. Possibly some did not. Before his conversion Paul knew the basic truths of Christianity even better than those whom he persecuted. But he then, and Timothys opponents now, did not know that the gospel was the truth. They knew and understood the preaching, but they did not believe it. Pg. 166

The various Scriptural usages of the verb know raise a problem in apologetics to which a commentary can only allude in a footnote. The common meaning is exemplified in simple sentences, such, I know that there is a tree on the lawn, and I know that David was King of Israel. But sometimes, both in Hebrew and in Greek know means believe, obey, choose, have sexual intercourse. English too uses the verb in a variety of meanings. In their opposition to the intellectual emphasis on truth, experiential, emotional, mystical, and neo-orthodox apologetes have contrasted the intellectual Greek meaning with the (sometimes) sexual Hebrew meaning. This contrast is misguided because the Hebrew verb and the Greek verb are both so used. More serious than this linguistic incompetence is a flaw or a gap in the apologetics of these apologetes. It is well enough to point out the extended meanings of the verb. The verb is indeed so used. But such information is irrelevant as an argument against intellectualism and truth. The fallacy or defect is that these apologetes fail to explain knowledge in its basic sense. To insist on extended meanings of knowledge is no substitute for a basic epistemology. Pg. 203 The translation cannot lie has induced some unwary Arminians to doubt divine omnipotence: Here is something, they say, that God cannot do. Of course, Arminians were never favorably predisposed to exalt divine omnipotence. Whether they realize it or not probably not, for they are neither philosophers nor particularly bright their view logically posits a moral principle superior to God, which he cannot disobey. Leibniz, not an Arminian, but a Lutheran and a brilliant philosopher, worked out this theme under the phrase the best of all possible worlds. Its goodness is independent of Gods choice. Descartes held the opposite view, namely, that the world is good because God chose it. Similarly God cannot lie because whatever he says ipso facto determines the truth. Therefore instead of using the phrase cannot lie, it is both clearer and grammatically correct to translate the word apseud s as does not lie, or more literally the unlying God. Pg. 208 all sinning is the result of fallacious thinking. Sometimes the fallacy does not lie on the surface. Evil men can run through a long series of valid syllogisms. But away back somewhere they have had a wrong thought. The Scriptures teach that out of the heart, or mind, come all the issues of life; as a man thinks, so is he. Pg. 234 Some conservative exegetes take I am the truth to be figurative. The present writer to their dismay regards it as philosophically and theologically literal.

The Trinity, 1990 Pg. 93 there is no logical place for induction in presuppositionalism. One assumes or presupposes certain axioms and from there on everything is deduction. Pg. 97 starting points cannot have presuppositions. The term starting point is perhaps a clearer term than presupposition. One may say that Book Two of Euclid presupposes Book One. Hence a presupposition may be relative and not absolutely basic. But surely a starting point is a point from which the argument starts. If the starting point had a presupposition it would not be the starting point. Pg. 128 The Bible teaches that God is truth; and a single word, without unexpressed connotations, can never be true. A single word has no meaning. Truth is always a matter of the relationship between a subject and a predicate.

Logic, 2004 Pg. ix The first law of logic is called the law of contradiction, but recently some people have begun to call it the law of non-contradiction: The two phrases refer to the same law. Aristotle expressed the law in these words: The same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect. The law is expressed symbolically as: Not both A and not-A. Pg. x The law of contradiction means something more. It means that every word in the sentence The line is straight has a specific meaning. The word the does not mean any, all, or no. The word line does not mean dog, dandelion, or doughnut. The word is does not mean is not. The word straight does not mean white, or anything else. Each word has a definite meaning. In order to have a definite meaning, a word must not only mean something, it must also not mean something. The word line means line, but it also does not mean not-line dog, sunrise, or Jerusalem, for example. Pg. 1 logic is the science of necessary inference. From such and such premises, the conclusion necessarily follows. Pg. 28 A proposition therefore is defined as the meaning of a declarative sentence. Pg. 113 Nothing startling is involved in remarking that God is omniscient. This is a commonplace of Christian theology. But, further, God is eternally omniscient. He has not learned his knowledge. And since God exists of himself, independent of everything else, indeed the Creator of everything else, he must himself be the source of his own knowledge. Pgs. 114-115 This means that God is the source and determiner of all truth. Christians generally, even uneducated Christians, understand that water, milk, alcohol, and gasoline freeze at different temperatures because God created them that way. God could have made an intoxicating fluid freeze at zero Fahrenheit and he could have made the cows product freeze at forty. But he decided otherwise. Therefore behind the act of creation there is an eternal decree. It was Gods eternal purpose to have such liquids, and therefore we can say that the particularities of nature were determined before there was any nature.

Similarly in all other varieties of truth, God must be accounted sovereign. It is his decree that makes one proposition true and another false. Whether the proposition be physical, psychological, moral, or theological, it is God who made it that way. A proposition is true because God thinks it so. Perhaps for a certain formal completeness, a sample of Scriptural documentation might be appropriate. Psalm 147:5 says, God is our Lord, and of great power; his understanding is infinite. If we cannot strictly conclude from this verse that Gods power is the origin of his understanding, at least there is no doubt that omniscience is asserted. 1 Samuel 2:3 says, the Lord is a God of knowledge. Ephesians 1:8 speaks of Gods wisdom and prudence. In Romans 16:27 we have the phrase, God only wise, and in 1 Timothy 1:17 the similar phrase, the only wise God. Further references and an excellent exposition of them may be found in Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, chapters VIII and IX. From this distinguished author a few lines must be included here. God knows himself because his knowledge with his will is the cause of all other things... he is the first truth, and therefore is the first object of his understanding... As he is all knowledge, so he hath in himself the most excellent object of knowledge... No object is so intelligible to God as God is to himself... for his understanding is his essence, himself. God knows his own decree and will, and therefore must know all things... God must know what he hath decreed to come to pass... God must know because he willed them... he therefore knows them because he knows what he willed. The knowledge of God cannot arise from the things themselves, for then the knowledge of God would have a cause without him... As God sees things possible in the glass of his own power, so he sees things future in the glass of his own will. A great deal of Charnocks material has as its purpose the listing of the objects of Gods knowledge. Here, however, the quotations were made to the point that Gods knowledge depends on His will and on nothing external to him. Thus we may repeat with Philo that God is not to be ranked under the idea of unity, or of goodness, or of truth; but rather unity, goodness, and truth are to be ranked under the decree of God. Pgs. 116-117 The law of contradiction is not to be taken as an axiom prior to or independent of God. The law is God thinking. For this reason also the law of contradiction is not subsequent to God. If one should say that logic is dependent on Gods thinking, it is dependent only in the sense that it is the characteristic of Gods thinking. It is not subsequent temporally, for God is eternal and there was never a time when God existed without thinking logically. One must not suppose that Gods will existed as an inert substance before he willed to think. Pg. 117 This conclusion may disturb some analytical thinkers. They may wish to separate logic and God. Doing so, they would complain that the present construction merges two axioms into one. And if

two, one of them must be prior; in which case we would have to accept God without logic, or logic without God; and the other one afterward. But this is not the presupposition here proposed. God and logic are one and the same first principle, for John wrote that Logic was God. Pg. 117 Should we assume merely the law of contradiction, we would be no better off than Kant was. His notion that knowledge requires a priori categories deserves great respect. Once for all, in a positive way-the complement of Humes negative and unintentional way-Kant demonstrated the necessity of axioms, presuppositions, or a priori equipment. But this sine qua non is not sufficient to produce knowledge. Therefore the law of contradiction as such and by itself is not made the axiom of this argument. Pg. 121 We may assert that every proposition is true because God thinks it so, and we may follow Charnock in all his great detail, but the whole is based on Scripture. Suppose this were not so. Then God as an axiom, apart from Scripture, is just a name. We must specify which God. The best known system in which God was made the axiom is Spinozas. For him all theorems are deduced from Deus sive Natura. But it is the Natura that identifies Spinozas God. Different gods might be made axioms of other systems. Hence the important thing is not to presuppose God, but to define the mind of the God presupposed. Therefore the Scripture is offered here as the axiom. This gives definiteness and content, without which axioms are useless. Thus it is that God, Scripture, and logic are tied together.

Predestination, 2006 Pg. 31 Since God has created all things, we infer that God has a perfect knowledge of all his creation. Pg. 32 What is present to him, he knows. And while the verse mentions only human beings who might wish to hide from him, the implication is that God knows everything because he is everywhere. Pg. 34 Gods knowledge is eternal. If Gods knowledge were not eternal, then he must have learned something at some time. And if he learned it, he must have previously been ignorant of it. And if he had been ignorant and learned something, why could he not forget some things after a while? Pg. 35 If God is indeed as the Bible describes him, with eternal self-knowledge by which he creates and controls every particular in the world, obviously Gods knowledge depends on himself and not on created things. Gods knowledge is self-originated; he does not learn from any outside source. Pg. 53 In the discussion of Isaiah 46:10 it was pointed out that foreknowledge is not a matter of looking into the future and discovering what is there. God knows the future because he has determined it.

The Atonement, 1996 Pgs. 86-87 knowing is ipso facto intellectual. God is just is a proposition to be understood. No doubt sin hinders and even prevents a man from knowing this truth; but if we are at all to know that God is just, we must use our intellects, our minds, our understanding, for this is what knowledge is. One mans mind may be spiritual, i.e., illumined by the Holy Spirit, and another mans mind not; but whatever either of these men knows in known intellectually When the Holy Spirit controls a mans thoughts, the thoughts are still thoughts. To repeat, knowing or understanding is ipso facto intellectual; and false disjunctions are to be rejected because the distort the message of the gospel.

Todays Evangelism: Counterfeit or Genuine? 1990 Pg. 21 A command requires voluntary obedience. pgs. 57-58 It seems to me that a misunderstanding of science at this point has led the author into a misunderstanding of the Bible. If the Bible contradicts itself, as clearly as the wave theory contradicts the corpuscular theory, we will be forced to abandon the Bible. No one in his right mind can believe contradictions. In fact, if the antinomy is as he says it is, God himself is faced with an insoluble puzzle. And if something is insoluble for God, then God cannot be trusted. Packer tells us that God has given us this antinomy and if he has given it to us, is that not enough? Cannot we trust God? The answer is that we cannot trust contradictions and insoluble antinomies, no matter who gives them to us. If someone told me to believe that the number two was both even and odd, I would conclude that this someone was not God. God, anyone I could not think of as God, does not talk nonsense, and insoluble antinomies are nonsense. They are just as much nonsense as it would be to say that the path of a point equidistant from a given point has three right angles along it. But if we see what modern science can do with its two theories of light, and if we pay just a little attention to sovereignty and responsibility, these unfortunate consequences never arise. The laws of science should not be considered as intended descriptions of natural motions. They should not be considered as directions for operating in a physics laboratory. They are methods for producing desired results. This in brief is The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God. It is always possible to use either of two mutually exclusive methods for producing the same desired result. To cure milk fever in cows, one may use the antiseptic lugol, or one may use compressed air. Both work satisfactorily. Hence, in manipulating light, a physicist may use either one; or if for a particular purpose the two are not equally satisfactory, for lugol cannot do everything compressed air can do and vice versa, the physicist can use for one purpose and the other for another. Pg. 83 Clearly obedience is a matter of volition. Assent then is an act of will. Pg. 85 Even the intellectual work of coming to understand a sentence requires assent and volition. It does not require assent to the truth of the sentence in question; but it requires a voluntary act of attention, and assent to the truth of other propositions by which its meaning is uncovered. One of the important points to keep in mind is the object of assent in different contexts. Pg. 87

Great philosophic courage is required to say what the primary idea of truth is. Hodge treats the matter too easily. Plato and other ancients tried to define truth as what is, thus connecting truth with being. No doubt we can trust what is to be. But the primary idea is being. In modern language one might say that trust is what is so; or, truth is what is the case. Possibly these definitions are tautological. Maybe truth is indefinable. But in any case it is a misdirected analysis to shift from truth to trust in order to avoid assent. Pg. 94 Without minimizing the other items in this list, it is well to emphasize knowledge. If one wishes assurance, he will try to increase his knowledge. Knowledge is mentioned trice in the section. Therefore, if one wishes assurance that he is regenerated, let him ask himself, Do I study the Scripture? How much of it do I know? Some people know so very little; some people believe so very little; some evangelists must have so very little assurance. Pg. 111 No one more than I insists on the necessity of a single self-consistent worldview. Pg. 113 But if there is a revelation, there can be no criterion for it. God cannot swear by a greater; therefore he has sworn by himself. One cannot ask ones own experience to judge God and determine whether God tells the truth or not. Consider Abraham. How could Abraham be sure that God commanded him to sacrifice Isaac? Maybe this suggestion was of the devil; maybe it was a queer auto-suggestion. There is no higher answer to this question than God himself. The final criterion is merely Gods statement. It cannot be tested by any superior truth.

Bakers Dictionary of Theology, 1991 Pgs. 245-246 Plato and Hegel constructed theories of knowledge which, if pressed to their logical extreme, imply that man must be either omniscient or completely ignorant. If every item of knowledge is so intimately connected with every other that its true nature cannot be seen except in its relation to all, then either we know all or we know nothing. Plato and Hegel both had a hard time escaping this dilemma. Now Moses said, The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever (Deut. 29:29). The Bible, therefore, both here and everywhere, assumes that we can know some truths without knowing all truths. Accordingly it is incumbent upon us to develop an epistemology in which the relationships are not such as to limit us to the disjunction of total ignorance or omniscience. This epistemology may follow Augustines view that Christ is the light of every man: that is, mankind possesses as an a priori endowment at least the rudiments of knowledge, so that whenever anyone knows anything he is in contact with God. Or, the epistemology required may be more skeptical as to geometry and science and simply insist that God, being omnipotent, can be a verbal revelation make his truths understandable to me. Pg. 315 Now, obviously if man could know or understand nothing about God, Christianity would be impossible. It is absolutely essential to maintain that the human mind is capable of grasping truth. Incomprehensible therefore must be taken to mean that man cannot know everything about God. It is necessary to assert that man can know some truths about God without knowing everything that God knows. Pg. 533 Non-intellectual truth is unthinkable. It is not true that the common conception of truth as a fact or what is real has no moral or spiritual significance. Pg. 533 It is not a different meaning but precisely the same meaning when the veracity of divine revelation is asserted. God tells the truth; he tells us what is so; his assertions are correct. Pg. 533 Rather, all these usages are derivative from the basic meaning of the actual fact or the truth of an assertion.

Sanctification, 1992 Pgs. 87-88 If the divine incomprehensibility means that we do not know, and cannot know, everything that God knows, there can be no objection. This truth is all too comprehensible. But in an attempt to glorify God, some theologians exaggerate incomprehensibility and make God utterly unknowable. The mystics are the most consistent on this point: Barth makes God the totally other; but there are also some who even clearly assert that God can be known, and yet so emphasize incomprehensibility as to contradict their more orthodox assertions. One such theologian, who indeed uses the phrase thinking Gods thoughts after him, denies the phrase in another place by insisting that Gods knowledge and the knowledge possible to man do not coincide at any single point. Consequently if God knows that David was kind of Israel, we cannot know it. Indeed, since God knows everything, we can know nothing at all, for there is not a single point of coincidence between his knowledge and what we call our knowledge. But an essential part of divine worship is to know God and know Him correctly. That is why God has given us a revelation. What good is a revelation if it does not give us understandable truths?

Lord God of Truth, 1994 Pg. 1 That epistemology the study of how knowledge is possible is not foreign to the Bible, and is even fundamental, may be briefly, inadequately, and in an introductory manner, indicated by a few random verses. At this point no exegesis will be attempted: The immediate purpose is to collect just a few building blocks that can be used later in the construction of a magnificent edifice. John in his Gospel speaks of Christ as full of grace and truth. Later he quotes Jesus as saying, I am the way, the truth, and the life. In 15:26 he refers to the Spirit of truth. The Old Testament anticipated these pronouncements. Psalm 31:5 says, O Lord God of truth. Psalm 43:3 records the petition, Send out your light and your truth. Knowledge, or truth, is often by metaphor called light. Hence we may quote a pertinent verse full of meaning: In you light we see light (Psalm 36:9). John asserts that God is light (1 John 1:15); and in his Gospel quotes Jesus as saying I am the light of the world (8:12). This reminds us of 1:9 where Jesus is identified as the true Light which gives light to every man who comes into the world. This last verse is one of profound significance for epistemology. Pg. 13 With the exception of Parmenides, whom no one, I am sure, wants to hear about, the first source of the anti-empirical position is Plato; but since Aristotle has not figured too prominently it would be better to start with Augustine. His De Magistro, a small pamphlet which shows that college professors never teach their students anything and of this I am well convinced for a different reason aims to show that Christ is the only teacher. By anticipation he refutes Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, and the logical positivists in their dependence of ostensive definition. His arguments against the empiricism of the Stoics, along with his defense of the truth, and other scattered parts of his voluminous writings, are very valuable. He may not have purged his thought of all empirical elements, but he is surely closer to Plotinus than to Chrysippus. And he improved as he wrote more. For him truth was paramount. More single-minded than Augustines excursions into wide-spread interests (but in some places sadly unacceptable, yet throughout with brilliant insights), the French philosopher Nicholas Malebranche (1638-1715) developed non-empirical Augustinianism. We must credit him with opposing the empirical and political Jesuits, but the aim here, rather than giving a well-balanced account of his philosophy, is to illustrate the kind of language Christian rationalism can use. Pg. 16 With less literary flourish than Malebranches peroration one may summarize by saying that truth concerns Ideas, Ideas are in God, and the mind can perceive them only there. These Ideas are alone the objects of thought. Nor can sensory images in any way be transformed into truth. In the language of antiquity and of modernity, abstract concepts can never be derived from sensory images. Though different human beings may and must have different sensations for your pain

is not mine there is only one set or world of Ideas. It is the system of Gods mind, and we can see them only there. Pgs. 16-18 More surprisingly Jonathan Edwards, of all people, provides some support for Malebranches views. This is not to say that the great Puritan agreed with Malebranche in great detail. He does, however, provide some Scriptural support for the doctrine of divine illumination. The general Christian public, then, will be somewhat disabused of their anti-philosophical, pragmatic prejudices, and the apologetes will be warned not to strain out a Plato and swallow an Aristotle. Though there is enough in Malebranche that Edwards would not like, nevertheless in his sermon on A Divine and Supernatural Light Immediately Imparted to the Soul, Section three, he goes further than one might anticipate. Note the word Immediately in the title. The subhead to Section III refers to a spiritual light that has been immediately let into the mind by God. Hence sensation cannot be the means. This he supports by a number of Scripture verses: 1 John 3:6, negatively, Whoever sins has neither seen him nor known him. John 17:3, not obviously pertinent, And this is eternal life, that the may know you. More clearly pertinent is his comment, This light and knowledge is always spoken of as immediately given of God. Of Matthew 11:25-27 he writes, This effect is ascribed exclusively to the arbitrary operation and gift of God. I have italicized immediately and exclusively because apologetes, confronted with the Scriptures, make a last ditch stand and argue that God uses other and necessary means. Edwards continues with 2 Corinthians 4:6, For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God. Again he comments that this light is immediately from God the immediate effect of his power and will. There is also Psalm 119:18, Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things from your law. In paragraph 2 of his Secondly (pg. 18) he repeats: It is rational to suppose that this knowledge should be given immediately by God, and not be obtained by natural means. He then continues to stress its immediacy, using the word several times on this one page, and negatively adding, it should not be left in the power of second causes. Immediately by himself, as a thing too great for second causes to be concerned in. immediately by himself, according to his own sovereign will (18, 19). The empiricists, as hinted at above, will no doubt remark that the reference to beholding wondrous things in the Law shows that sensations of black on white are necessary second causes, so that our knowledge of divine truth is obtained by natural means. For the moment, and not to repeat or anticipate all the arguments against empiricism, it will suffice to say that Jonathan Edwards denies it. The empiricists may find some solace in Abraham Kuyper and Guido de Brs, who had some idea of divine illumination, but who did not go so far as Malebranche and Edwards. However, I neither assert that Edwards totally agrees with Malebranche, nor that the latter is infallible. But both men show that Christianity cannot be empirical. Pg. 18

Malebranche, following Augustine, defines the purpose of sensation to be that of preserving the body from danger. Pain may warn us that something is wrong. But pain does not inform us as to what is wrong. Pg. 23 The professor insists that sensation must play a role in knowledge acquisition. Of course it does! Breakfast plays a role too. If some people miss their morning coffee, they get so irritated and irritable that they cannot pay attention to their studies. Hence Sanka is the salvation of scholarship. Pg. 27 We now concur with the Islamic anti-aristotelian Al Gazali: God and God alone is the cause, for only God can guarantee the occurrence of Y, and indeed of X as well. Even the Westminster divines timidly agree, for after asserting that God foreordains whatsoever comes to pass, and that no purpose of yours can be withheld from you (Job 42:2), they ass, Although all things come to pass immutably and infallibly, yet by the same providence he ordereth them to fall out according to the nature of second causes. What they called second causes, Malebranche had called occasions. But an occasion is neither a fiat lux nor a differential equation. Pg. 35 To this point the discussion has covered two details on which empiricism has failed: images and causation. A third detail but note that the word detail does not imply something disjointed from all else, for everything is inseparable from everything else is the matter of induction and universal propositions. Christianity would be impossible without universal propositions. Pg. 35 Now whether the subject be theology, morality, or plain ordinary physics, empiricism can neither produce nor justify any universal proposition. The explanation is obvious: Experience is never universal. Pg. 39 We argue that logical positivism is irrational because it claims to establish universal laws on limited observations; and logical positivism argues that we are irrational because we use necessary inference. Now necessary inference does not produce as much truth as most people want. But unnecessary inference arrives at no truth at all. Pg. 40 If a system has no starting point, it cannot start, nicht? But a starting point cannot have been deduced or based on something prior to the start, for nothing is prior to the stat nest-ce pas? Every system, therefore, every attempted system, must have an original, undeduced axiom. Our

dear friend Aristotle noted this, for he argued that if all propositions had to be deduced, they would regress to infinity, with the result that nothing could be deduced. Since even Communism cannot prevent one from choosing whatever principle seems best to him, the Christian will choose the God of truth, or, if one prefer, the truth of God. He then proceeds by deduction, that is, by the law of contradiction, for the law of contradiction is embedded in the first word of Genesis. Bereshith, in the beginning, does not mean half-way through. That is to say, Scripture throughout assumes the law of contradiction, viz., a truth cannot be false. Since deduction is necessary inference, no further deduction let alone induction can disprove what has already been proved. Accordingly the knowledge possible for human beings consists of the axioms of and the deductions from Scripture. We can indeed entertain opinions about Columbus, and by accident or good luck they may be true; but we could not know it. Our dear pagan Plato, at the end of his Meno (98b) declared, That there is a difference between right opinion and knowledge (rtheme) is not at all a conjecture with me, but something I would particularly assert that I knew. Pg. 40 If a set of axioms includes contradictories, everything follows: Both Columbus discovered America in 1492 and Columbus discovered America in 1942; both Jerusalem is in Palestine and Jerusalem is in China; both 2+2=4 and 2-2=4. This means no less than that the set of axioms is devoid of meaning.

Ancient Philosophy, 1997 Pg. 141 Plato not only recognized, both in his admirable astronomical speculations and all the more in his less accurate medical theories, that his views were not final; he also saw clearly that no theories dealing with empirical material could ever be final. Empirical material is in constant flux, and the human mind cannot keep up with it. Knowledge is timeless and changeless and requires, not observation, experiment, and induction, but deduction alone. Pg. 145 Now, where the Ideas are important, everything is related to everything else. To use a crude example, the explanation of a desk lamp would require explanations of desks and lamps. The desks would then lead us into carpentry, labor troubles, kinds of wood, forestry, and governmental conservation. An explanation of lamps would include the laws of electricity, and so on forever. In fact, before one could understand a desk lamp, one would have to understand the universe. This stress on the interrelations of everything with everything can be developed in two directions. One may argue: Since we know this one thing, we can deduce everything else; or one may argue: Since we do not know everything else, neither do we know this. The first direction has appealed to Hegel, to Bonaventure, Augustine, and Plato. Pg. 199 As the study of geometry is begun, the major task is the grasping in detail of the proofs of the theorems. The axioms are given; very reasonable and self-evident they seem; and the standard theorems and originals follow with a strange compulsion. In time further reflection leads one to wonder about the source and authority of the axioms. Did Euclid snatch them out of the air? Or were they chosen because of their aesthetic appeal? If someone chose other axioms, what would be the result? If these queries arise in connection with geometry, they are all the more imperative when the methods of geometry are to be applied to science as a whole. Pg. 200 In the last chapter of the Posterior Analytics Aristotle raises the various questions usually asked about first principles. How do they become known? What ability or faculty of mind, what mental process, causes their recognition? Unless somehow first principles can be grasped, demonstration will be impossible. Pgs. 214-215 If the only things exist are corporeal, how, as predication requires, can one object be another object? When the objects of thought are immaterial concepts, they can coalesce or be included in one another. A quality can inhere a subject, or a subject can participate in an Idea. When, on the

other hand, all realities are corporeal individuals, these theories of predication become impossible. Pg. 229 The most elegant classification of Skeptical arguments was given by an otherwise insignificant writer, Agrippa (about A.D. 100), who reduced them to five basic types, some of which recall and reverse what Aristotle taught on demonstration. First, there are differences of opinion on all subjects. Second, to prove which opinion is true, philosophers have recourse to a previous opinion and so on in an infinite regress. Or, third, to escape the regress, they go round in a circle. Or, fourth, to escape the circle, they make an assumption, which is an elaborate form of begging the question. Fifth, all objects, sensible or intelligible, are relative to the subject, and hence nothing can be known in itself. Pg. 231 To be really consistent, the Skeptic not only must remain silent, but must refrain from doing anything at all. When he protests that he believes nothing, he doth protest too much, and not only do his words condemn him, but his life shows his insincerity; no matter what he does, [and he must do something], he believes it better to do it than not to do it. Pg. 263 Sophism, though refuted by Plato and Aristotle in the 4th century, made that century an age of secular individualism. In the 3rd century, credulity seemed to triumph. Pg. 274 Plato, interested in mathematics, science, and very particularly in ethics and politics, was obliged therefore to defend, first of all, the possibility of knowledge. His preliminary answer to Sophism was that it is self-contradictory. Since Protagoras holds that all beliefs are true, and since many people believe that Protagoras theory is false, their belief must be true and Protagoras must admit the falsity of his own position. Pgs. 274-275 At this stage of the argument, Plato makes his great, constructive contribution. When corporeal monism met its fate at the hands of Parmenides, the pluralists thought that the fault lay in the monism. When Zeno exploded pluralism, the Sophists gave up hope of rationality. Platos genius saw another possibility. If neither corporeal monism nor corporeal pluralism can explain the universe, the fault must lie in corporealism. Reality cannot be material. Or, conversely, if knowledge is to be possible, there must be a noncorporeal reality. Pg. 313

In words a skeptic may profess suspension of judgment, but the ordinary activity of living, or of committing suicide for that matter, shows that a judgment has in fact been made. Accordingly the skeptics advised conformity to convention why be an iconoclast if it is not true that idolatry is wrong? Or, they went a little further and posited the reasonable, or the probable as a practical criterion. Carneades is credited with escaping the difficulty with a thoroughgoing skeptical solution. Men act for no reason at all; it is not a question of truth and knowledge; action springs from natural urges and does not require and opinion. On the other hand Carneades is also said to have advised the preferable. It then becomes a problem to pass from what is doubtful, uncertain, or even untrue, to what is preferable or probable. It was on this point that Augustine later centered his famous argument for truth. If it is possible to arrive at a probability or at an approximation to truth, there must be truth knowledge of the principles of probability and a true judgment by which to determine approximation. Pgs. 343-344 In the case of Aristotle we are not dependent on fragments, for we have his complete works; we are perfectly familiar with the usages of his language; the only difficulty is textual, and whoever bases a skepticism on textual criticism asserts that not only nearly all philosophy, but nearly all history as well, before the Renaissance, is forever unknowable. This is a reduction ad absurdum. We can with tolerable certainty ascertain the exact wording of Aristotle; but to understand his thought we need also to know the arguments and discussions of previous men which were the motives to his solution. Are these unknowable? My answer would be, try and see. Of course there should be caution. Philological changes should be ascertained and if relevant taken into consideration. But a priori doubts with regard to the possibility of the problem do not provide the right approach. What is needed is a careful induction of the individual passages. If all of them are entirely buried in doubt and difficulty we are condemned to skepticism. But if the knowledge they give is slight, let us not for that reason despise it. Our conclusions may be far more limited than our desires, but I cannot consent to a complete skepticism. We must study each passage and in doing so determine the limits of our knowledge.

Against the World, 1996 Pg. 6 We are all familiar, no doubt, with the phrase, All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, but have we carefully read what follows? Of course, Scripture is profitable for doctrine, and for instruction in righteousness; but for what purpose? Note the next verse: that the man of God maybe perfect [or, perfected], thoroughly furnished [completely furnished, or equipped] unto all good works [unto every good work]. The statement is comprehensive: it includes every good work. There is no good work for which the Scripture does not prepare us perfectly. It is the law of God stated in the Scriptures that defines sin and good works. Pg. 15 John 5:39 does not disparage searching the Scriptures. Even if the first verb is declarative, you search, Harts implication cannot validly be drawn, for the last phrase is, they which testify of me. If the verb is imperative, as is more likely, still less does Harts implication follow. Furthermore, Jesus does not say or imply that the Pharisees were wrong in thinking that eternal life was to be found in the Scriptures. The other verse Hart cites explicitly states that if the Pharisees had understood and believed the Scriptures they searched, they would have believed Christ. Unbelief of Moses writings, even on parchment as they were, precludes belief in Christs words, spoken in the air. In addition to these two verses that Hart quotes and misunderstands, John (8:32) also says, Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Once again John (17:17) says, Sanctify them through thy truth; thy word is truth. Such verses as these assert that the message of the Bible is true. It is not some analogy of the truth outside itself to which it points. It is itself the truth that sanctifies. The Bible then is the truth and wisdom of God, the mind of Christ, the Scriptures that cannot be broken. Orthodoxy easily admits that the Bible does not reveal all the mind of Christ. The Wisdom of God contains secret things (Deuteronomy 29:29) that God has not revealed and may never reveal. But when James Olthuis (The Word of God and Hermeneutics, page 5) says, It is not that the Scriptures are one part of the Word of God and that there are other parts, he seems to deny the distinction in Deuteronomy. At any rate, this distinction plays no role in the AACS theory. But the Biblical teaching concerning the Bible on this point seems to be satisfied by maintaining that the propositions that make up the Bible are only some of the propositions in the divine system of truth. Thus the Bible is indeed a part of the Word of God and there are other parts. Pg. 21 The term Realism, as opposed to empirical and nominalistic epistemology, denotes any theory insisting that we know the real object, and not merely a sensory image or representation of it. Plato called these real objects Ideas. The argument is this: Suppose we have a lot of dice of various sizes. They all have the same shape. Now, this shape is something real. Even though the

shape comes in different sizes, it is the same identical shape. If sensory objects alone were real, there could be no idea of similarity or identity, for none of the individual dice is itself similarity. Nor is any one of the dice cube. If one of the dice were the cube, and if only sense objects are real, then no other die could be cube. Hence, there is a real object of knowledge, the cube. It is not a sense object, not only for the preceding reason, but also because this cube exists in many places at once, as no sense object can. Similarly, Plato united all men under the Idea Man, all horses under the Horse, and all beautiful things under real Beauty. With other arguments also Plato asserted the reality of knowable intellectual objects. The other part of Platonic theory that no Christian can accept, and Philos transformation of it, will be discussed in the next chapter. But without this part of the theory, viz., the assertion of non-sensory intellectual objects, it is hard to see how an understanding of the Bible would be possible. To begin with, God himself is a non-sensory object. So is the idea of justification by faith-as well as man and animal and cube. Empiricism would require all nouns to be proper names of individual sense objects; it can never account for the unity in this multiplicity, and therefore renders both communication and thought impossible. Pg. 24 Quoting James 2:19 about the devils, Manton remarks that the faith here is a bare speculation and cannot possibly save anyone. That this faith cannot save is very true. It is no more than a belief in monotheism. This the Moslems possess. But, however it may be with Moslems, it seems incorrect to call the faith of devils a bare speculation. This word often is used to refer to some proposition that is so unverifiable as to be more likely false than true. Granted, Manton also calls it a knowledge; and this is better, because on this point, if on nothing else, the devils believe the truth. Pg. 44 Christianity is not based on experience; it is based on a propositional divine revelation, the Holy Scriptures. Pgs. 78-79 In Book XI of the Confessions, Augustine raises the problem of creation. The question is, What was God doing before he did anything? Or, since the Latin facio has two translations, the question can be, What did God make before he made anything? Could God have forborne for innumerable ages from so great a work as creation? Augustine replies that the question is not well put. God is the creator of all ages. There could be no time before God created time. God surpasses all time by the sublimity of an ever-present eternity. To put it more clearly, time is not an independent reality, but a function of something else. To quote, If nothing passed away, there could be no past time; if nothing were coming into being there could be no future time; and if nothing were now, there could be no present time. What those things are, whose becoming and passing away makes time, remain to be identified.

To complete the identification, Augustine first rules out the Aristotelian theory. Time is not the motion of any body. The argument is somewhat as follows: When a body is moved, we measure how long it moves by time. We cannot measure how long, unless we know when it started and when it stopped. Therefore time is distinct from any motion, since we cannot measure a motion unless we first measure time. What then is time, if it is not the motion of bodies, but is nonetheless a change of some sort? Perhaps Augustine is not so clear as he might have been, but he clearly locates time in the mind or soul. Past time exists in our memory; future time is our present anticipation. When we measure time, therefore, we are measuring the passing ideas in our mind. To quote, It is in thee, my mind, that I measure times. The impression, which things as they pass by cause in thee [the mind] remains even when they are gone. This is it which, still present, I measure. Either then this is time, or I do not measure times (XI, xxvii, 36). Such is the basis for Augustines answer to the question, What was God doing before he did anything. The question is poor because there is no before in eternity. That time is a function of a created being-not a created body, but a created mind-is supported also by references to the City of God and the Commentary on Psalm 105. The City of God says, For if eternity and time be rightly distinguished, time never to be extant without motion, and eternity to admit no change, who would not see that time could not have being before some variable creature had come into existence? (XI, vi). This means that there could have been no time before the creation of the world. It also means that eternity is different from time because time is a function of change and God is immutable. This Augustinian view has in the main been normative for Protestant theology. I. A. Dorner, the great Lutheran theologian of the last century, wrote, In regard to space God is not extended, and as opposed to time, God is not successive. A kind of divisibility of God would arise in relation to time, if we thought of his Being not as eternally and absolutely realized, but as only gradually developing, as passing from the potential into the actual state by successive stages. This is essentially Augustinianism, and Dorner hardly deviates from it. However, although Augustinianism has been the rule, there have nonetheless been exceptions. The Danish Bishop Martensen, whom Kierkegaard lampooned, diluted his Augustinianism to a considerable and inconsistent extent. This audience, however, will be more interested in some references to Reformed views. Calvin unfortunately pays little attention to questions of time and eternity. He considers them useless. Notwithstanding his great authority, anyone who supposes that Scripture provides some implications on the subject cannot dismiss it as entirely unedifying. The Westminster Confession is of course a confession and not a three volume work on systematic theology; and yet for all its brevity it does not fail to note that God is a most pure spirit...without body, parts, or passions, immutable ... eternal. It may seem strange that the Confession does not specify that God is omniscient. However, the Larger Catechism, Q.7, after asserting that God is eternal and unchangeable, adds the phrase, Knowing all things. Charles Hodge wrote a three volume Systematic Theology. In Volume I, pages 385-386, he says, With him [i.e. with God] there is no distinction between the present, past, and future; but all

things are equally and always present to him. With him duration is an eternal now. This is the popular and the Scriptural view of Gods eternity. To him there is neither past nor future; ... the past and the future are always and equally present to him. This is indeed a good statement of the Scriptural position. It is not necessary, however, to follow Hodge when he asserts that time is dependent on space (387). Had Hodge anticipated the postNewtonian four-dimensional theory, and had he therefore added that space is also dependent on time, we might consider him ahead of his time. But in his historical space his assertion is at best extremely doubtful. Hodge further confuses the matter by positing a subjective or mental time in addition to objective or physical time. Thus he tries to merge Aristotle and Augustine, but how such a merger can be successful, he does not explain. In fact, he tries to describe Gods mind on the paradigm of a human mind. Thus he asserts a succession of thoughts in Gods mind, but he pays no attention to how this contradicts omniscience or even to its inconsistency with the quotation from page 385 and its repetition on page 390. He even says it is of minor importance to harmonize how these different things can be. This deviation from the Augustinian position seems unfortunate. When an author proposes an unusual and puzzling combination of discordant elements, he ought to give some hint as to how a harmonization is possible. But still more unfortunate is Hodges disregard of the necessities of omniscience. If there is a succession of ideas in Gods mind, then the ideas that succeeded today were not present yesterday, and presumably some of yesterdays ideas have now passed by. But this means that God did not know all things yesterday, neither is he omniscient today. Is it not clear that a temporal succession of ideas in Gods mind is incompatible with omniscience? Man is not omniscient precisely because his ideas come and go. Mans mind changes from day to day; God is omniscient, immutable, and therefore eternal. Pg. 80 The discussion here, however, cannot turn aside to word studies. Nonetheless, it may be acknowledged that even on Augustines definition-in fact, because of Augustines definition-the age to come is not eternity, but is endless temporal succession. Created beings, angels, and men, because of their created nature, will always have a succession of ideas. But it by no means follows that there is no eternity other than this. God has no succession of ideas. He is omniscient. He never receives from some other source or from his own inventive genius an idea he never previously had. Nor does he forget. His mind is completely immutable, for otherwise he would sometimes be ignorant. This then is eternity. Time came into operation with created minds. Eternity does not change. If, however, Cullmann or anyone else disagrees with this conclusion, he must tell us what time is before he can explain why he disagrees. Pg. 81 The present point is that for Dooyeweerd man is supra-temporal. If, however, time is the succession of ideas in a created mind, and if in Heaven man does not become omniscient, then man remains a temporal creature forever.

The only Scripture reference that seems to suggest the attainment of omniscience by man in Heaven is 1 Corinthians 13:12. Commentators hesitate to draw this conclusion on the basis of this verse, though they often fail to give good exegetical reasons for their hesitation. Meyer, however, notes that the text does not say, I shall know even as I am known, but rather, I shall know even as I was known. Be that as it may, it might require another complete lecture to exegete the verse against a vigorous claim that it teaches human omniscience. For the present, let the assumption rule that man never becomes omniscient. He learns more and more in Heaven, at what rate and with what interruptions we do not know. But if we learn anything, we remain temporal creatures. Pgs. 82-83 The phrase Totally Other is a denial of the image of God in man, with attendant confusion both in anthropology and soteriology. Further, if what God says is or may be false, there can be no sure word of prophecy. And if God and the medium of conceptuality are mutually exclusive, there is no use of trying to think about God, and neither Brunners literary output nor this lecture is worth the paper it is printed on. If God is omniscient, and Charnock thoroughly sustains omniscience, then God knows that Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt. But there is no reason why this item in Gods omniscience cannot be an item in the human mind also. Or, perhaps more cautiously we should say, if man can know anything at all, he can know something about the Exodus. That man indeed knows something or other is guaranteed by the doctrine of the image of God in man. Omniscience and eternality do not require God to be Totally Other. There can be a different point of similarity. If man cannot know everything, at least he can know some things, for man is a rational being and not a dumb animal. Rationality is this point of similarity. Without divine rationality, the supposedly omnipotent God could speak nothing, and without human rationality man could hear nothing. Therefore attributing eternity to God does not make him Totally Other or utterly unknowable. The less profound and less important objection to Gods being eternal-and because less profound an anti-climactic conclusion-is that eternity and immutability prevented God from knowing human experiences. It makes God external and foreign to man, incapable of sympathy, and therefore removes him as an object of worship. Systematically the reply to this contention is that one should first find out what the nature of God is and then worship him, rather than erecting an independent criterion of what is worthy of worship and then imagining some being that fits the criterion. On a less systematic level, one can ask Christians if indeed they think of God as suffering from a toothache. Can God see the color blue or have other sensations? If he can, he must be a bodily organism, for colors are supposed to be stimulated by pulsating waves of energy hitting the retina. Let us set aside the contemporary science that has cast doubt on the actuality of waves of light. But at least we may ask, Does God have retinas?

Such are the absurdities that result from assigning human experience to God. God indeed knows that we see blue, but God does not see blue. Nor does God have an abscess on his tooth, though he knows that we have one. Indeed, it was because the eternal nature could not suffer that the Incarnation was necessary. The Second Person of the Trinity took to himself a physical body and a human soul for the purpose of suffering pain and death, which in his divine nature he could not do. However, there is no time left to discuss the Incarnation and Christs two natures. Rather it is necessary to conclude quickly that according to the Bible God is without body, parts, or passions; and according to the Catechism he is spirit infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being; and for our devotions God is the blessed Trinity whom we worship. Pg. 126 So far as theology and preaching the Gospel are concerned, the difference between dictation and Gods actual method is insignificant. God foreordains whatsoever comes to pass. He makes it rain by sending Aristophanes clouds which he previously made. He makes the grass to grow by sending the rain. So too he predestined Moses style and Pauls choice of words. He predestined Moses style by giving him an Egyptian education; he determined Pauls choice of words by educating him under Gamaliel. To try to escape Gods control by refuting the dictation theory is foolish and futile. To rely on the term inspiration to turn attention away from the written words to the authors is deceptive. God controls everything; he certainly controls his own verbal revelation. He breathed out the Scripture, namely, what was written. Pg. 127 Does then the Bible claim to be inerrant? The passage before us says that every scripture, distributively every verse, has been breathed out by God. Is that not an assertion of inerrancy? Every verse is also useful for teaching, correction, for refutation of falsehoods, and so on. Would falsehoods be useful for teaching, for instruction in righteousness? The liberals, or semi-liberals who call themselves evangelicals, would be more honest if they simply said, The Bible contains errors, and this is one of them. The inerrancy of Scripture, as Quenstedt so carefully detailed it, is of fundamental importance. Nowhere else can we learn of salvation. Nowhere else could we learn of justification by faith alone. Nowhere else is there any information about Jesus Christ. Whatever later Christian authors have written about the virgin birth, the atonement, the resurrection, has its source in Scripture. If the Scripture is in error here and there, it is possible that it is in error here. Then too, from the standpoint of logic, there is a question the new so-called evangelicals are reluctant to answer. It is this: If the Bible contains falsehoods here and there, the theologian must have a criterion to distinguish the parts that are true from the parts that are false: What is the criterion? In a court of law, if the judge and jury detect a witness perjuring himself two or three times, or even once, they cannot accept any of the remainder of his testimony. If some things he says happen to be true, they must be proved by other witnesses. Therefore attacks on the evangelical position are obliged to state the criterion they use in separating the truths of the Bible from its

falsehoods. What is this criterion by which, from its superior position, it convicts the Scripture of error? Are the Assyrian inscriptions infallible in matters of history? Is Swedenborg an inerrant authority on Heaven and Hell? Bultmann at least had the consistency to say, We do not know a single thing Jesus ever said or did. Pg. 139 Since the verses in Genesis imply more than they state, and for the purpose of showing that Scripture defines the image as knowledge and righteousness, the first verse to be quoted is Colossians 3:10. The definition is derived by noting that the new man is such because God has renewed him after the image in which he was originally created. Ephesians 4:24 mentions righteousness, but Colossians has knowledge only. Its previous context speaks of the old man with his deeds. Then comes a contrast with the new man. In what consists the renewal that makes the old man the new man? The verse says, he is renewed to knowledge. He is renewed to knowledge according to the image of the Creator. That is to say, the image of God is the knowledge to which he is renewed. Thus the image of God, in which image man was created, is knowledge. Of course this does not mean that Adam was omniscient; yet he had some knowledge, and this is not said of the animals. Since this knowledge comes by the act of breathing into Adam the spirit of life, the knowledge must be considered-not as the result of observation, since Adam had not yet observed anything at all-but as the a priori or innate equipment for learning. Pgs. 139-140 The image must be reason because God is truth, and fellowship with him-a most important purpose in creation-requires thinking and understanding. Without reason man would doubtless glorify God as do the stars, stones, and animals; but he could not enjoy him forever. Even if in Gods providence animals survive death and adorn the heavenly realm, they cannot have what the Scripture calls eternal life because eternal life consists in knowing the only true God, and knowledge is an exercise of the mind or reason. Without reason there can be no morality or righteousness. These too require thought. Lacking these, animals are neither righteous nor sinful. The identification of the image with reason explains or is supported by a puzzling remark in John 1:9: It was the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. How can Christ, in whom is the life that is the light of men, be the light of every man, when Scripture teaches that some are lost in eternal darkness? The puzzle arises from interpreting light in exclusively redemptive terms. The first chapter of John is not soteriological. Obviously there are references to salvation in verses 7, 8, 12, and 13. It is not surprising that some Christians understood verse nine also in a soteriological sense. But it is not true that all men are saved; hence if Christ lightens every man, this enlightening cannot be soteriological. This is not the only non-soteriological verse in the chapter. The opening verses treat of creation and the relation of the Logos to God. If the enlightening is not soteriological, it could be epistemological. Then since responsibility depends on knowledge, the responsibility of the unregenerate is adequately founded.

John 1:9 cannot be soteric because it refers to all men. But this is far from showing that the light hits them in a merely external way, as it might shine on a rock or tree. The conclusion therefore is that creative light gives every man an innate knowledge sufficient to make all men responsible for their evil actions. This interpretation ties in with the idea of creation in verse three. Thus the Logos or rationality of God, who created all things without a single exception, can be seen as having created man with the light of logic as his distinctive human characteristic. Pg. 141 Now, it seems to me that even the skimpy material in Genesis is sufficient to refute empiricism with its blank mind. First, since God is a God of knowledge, eternally omniscient, how could a being declared to be his image and likeness be a blank mind? Even apart from the explicit statements in the New Testament, Genesis says that God commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply. Since at that time they had no sensory experience of other people, must they not have had some innate intelligence to understand this command? Of course, an empiricist might insist that they had learned the meaning from observing animals. But this assumes that a fair length of time intervened between the creation of Adam and Gods imposition of the obligation. One can better suppose that God gave instructions to Adam more immediately. This is rather obviously true of Genesis 2:16, 17. The command was given only moments after the creation. Of course, such a command was not a priori knowledge, but the intellectual equipment to understand it was. There is more, too. Adam not only understood the command: He understood that it was God who gave it. Are we supposed to believe that he laboriously worked out the cosmological argument, including the physics that underlies it? And did he derive the concept of moral responsibility from his sensations? Though the account is brief, it seems that Adam knew he was obligated to worship God and obey him. But empiricisms cosmological argument is surpassed in its fallacies by the impossibility of deducing moral evaluations from factual premises, even should these premises be true. If an empiricist insists that the Genesis account is too brief to support such an interpretation, we can at least rely on the Pauline epistles. Genesis is not the only book in the Bible. A subsidiary point is Cains fear of punishment after he had murdered Abel. Evidently God had given Adam and his boys what we call the sixth commandment. They must have recognized this as a moral imperative. But is it at all possible to develop the idea of a moral imperative by watching trees grow in a garden? Note the point: The commandment itself may not have been innate, but the idea of morality must have been or the import of the commandment could not have been understood. Sensation at best might possibly give some factual information; but though this would be knowledge of what is, empiricism can never produce acknowledge of what ought to be. Pgs. 142-143 In addition to the failure of empiricism due to universal propositions, there is an even more fundamental factor. Every statement, even if particular, depends on the law of contradiction. Truth and error are incompatible. If all marhoucals are rhinosaps, there cannot be a single

marhoucal that is not a rhinosap. We do not have to inspect the infinite number of the latter in order to assure ourselves that none can be found. Given the premise, we do not need to examine even one. That O ab cannot be deduced from A ab is a necessity of logic. And if our minds are not so constructed, we can never distinguish truth from error. But empiricism furnishes no necessity, no universality, no all, no none. Indeed, it furnishes no some either. Whether the logical form be universal or particular, the proposition must have a subject term. All dogs are vertebrates; some dogs are black. Suppose now that the subject term, dogs, had five meanings. This is not unusual for English words. Consult Merriam-Websters Unabridged Dictionary. Look up the words fast, curb, domestic, race, land-not to mention love, emotion, grace, religion, and virtue. Each one will have possibly four, five and sometimes six different meanings. This frequently introduces considerable ambiguity, with the result that an argument, apparently logical, is actually fallacious. The fallacy can be avoided, sometimes with a bit of trouble, by specifying meaning one, meaning two, and meaning three. But there is a deeper problem. Suppose a given word has an infinite number of meanings. The word fast would then mean every word in the dictionary from the article a to zyzzogetan, plus an unimaginable greater number. Fast fast fast fast would mean, Today is last Tuesday and Washington discovered America in 1066. That is to say, a word that means everything means nothing. But this which is so obvious could not be deduced from any finite number of observations. It is a principle which must be accepted even before the term observation could be given any meaning at all. Therefore the use of any single word in an intelligible sentence depends on an a priori principle. No blank mind could ever discover this principle. One could phrase the principle as a word, to mean something, must also not mean something; or, if a word means everything, it means nothing. Like the law of contradiction, it is a way of maintaining the distinction between truth and falsehood. And this distinction is the basic element in the image of God. Pg. 147 Because of the vexations and innumerable complexities of the problem-did I say 1000 discrepancies? make it 3000 in the Gospels alone-textual criticism is a very difficult and delicate procedure, quite unsuited to the purposes of the present study and admittedly beyond the competence of the present writer. The scholars material includes five thousand New Testament manuscripts, several ancient versions, and hundreds of quotations in the early church fathers. Such a mass of complications, requiring knowledge of a half dozen or more ancient languages, is no playground for the ordinary church member-nor for the pastors, who are supposed to know both Greek and Hebrew. Pg. 147 Enemies of the Bible occasionally try to destroy the faith of believers by emphasizing the impossibility of discovering what the apostles actually wrote. The four or five thousand Greek manuscripts differ in many places. Once when I quoted a verse from Johns Gospel to a modernist, she quickly replied, But how do you know that he actually said that? By the grace of God, I was able immediately to shoot back, How do you know Jesus said anything? The other faculty members at the lunch table gave vocal evidence of a point scored. The modernist

woman professor and missionary to India wanted to use some verses, but not others. But she saw then that if she insisted on her verses, she could not object to mine. At any rate the attempt to destroy Christian faith by an appeal to the difficulties of textual criticism has been based on considerable exaggeration. Pg. 166 Christ is the wisdom of God. Nevertheless Christ is also something else, something basic and more fundamental than wisdom. The New Testament uses the word 110 times, of which 25 occur in Johns Gospel. The scholarly existentialists or neo-orthodox, such as Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, and the totally unscholarly Pentecostalists unite in stressing emotion and ecstatic experience. But nowhere does Christ say, I am the Emotion. What he says is, I am the Truth. Many good Christians, indeed all good Christians, say that God is love; and so he is. But if it were not true, he would not be love. Truth is basic. Listen to what the apostle said. John 1:14. The Word [or Logos] was ... full of grace and truth. Three verses below, we read, grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. The third chapter of John, whose sixteenth verse is so well known, in verses 20-21 teaches that morality depends on truth. In his profound theological conversation with the Samaritan woman, who had five husbands and was then living with a man who was not her husband, Christ insisted that one must worship God in spirit and in truth. To some Jewish believers Jesus promised, Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free(8:32). Later in the same chapter, negatively, Jesus denounces the devil because he did not abide in the truth, because there is no truth in him (8:44). The next two verses continue the emphasis. Then there is the well-known verse, I am the way, the truth, and the life (14:6); and one may comment that if it were not true that Christ is the way, there would be no reason for walking that way. The Holy Spirit, sometimes called the Spirit of Christ, is three times called the Spirit of truth (John 14:17; 15:26, and 16:13), verses bearing directly on the doctrine of the Trinity. Christ also says that he himself is sanctified through the truth, as we too are sanctified through the truth (17:17, 19). If any Christians wish to increase in sanctification, they must learn more truth. The verses quoted are most of Johns verses that identify Christ as the Truth. Anyone interested can search out the remainder of the 110 verses in the New Testament and meditate on their truth. No one should be surprised that the Logos, the logic, the reason, the wisdom, the message, the language, the reflection of God is truth. Pgs. 192-193 Every philosophic or theological system must begin somewhere, for if it did not begin it could not continue. But a beginning cannot be preceded by anything else, or it would not be the beginning. Therefore every system must be based on presuppositions or axioms. They may be Spinozas axioms; they may be Lockes sensory starting point, or whatever. Every system must therefore be presuppositional. The first principle cannot be demonstrated because there is nothing prior from which to deduce it. Call it presuppositionalism, call it fideism, names do not matter. But I know no better

presupposition than The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the word of God written, and therefore inerrant in the autographs. Pg. 293 There is only one philosophy that can really unify education and life. That philosophy is the philosophy of Christian theism. What is needed is an educational system based on the sovereignty of God, for in such a system man as well as chemistry will be given his proper place, neither too high nor too low. In such a system there will be a chief end of man to unify, and to serve as a criterion for, all his activities. Pg. 299 Now, Kants terminology is not for children, but even children can understand when they are told that all men are born with the idea of God. They may not know the terms a priori and innate, but they can understand as well as they can understand anything else that men are so made as to think of God spontaneously: They are born that way. However, no particular stress will be laid on the argument that the book teaches a non-Christian empiricism. But stress, great stress, is to be laid on the omission of all reference to revelation. A true Christian, if asked how he has learned of God, will answer immediately, through the Bible, Gods word.

Christian Philosophy, 2004 Pg. 20 Practical successes (like Chamberlains?) do not prove the truth of physical laws. The argument is a logical fallacy. Pg. 20 Dogmatism does not conflict with truth from other sources because there are no other sources of truth! Pg. 21 Rationalism, then, is the theory that all knowledge, and therefore all religious knowledge, can be deduced from logic alone, i.e., logic apart from both revelation and sensory experience. Anselm and Spinoza are the most perfect examples, with whom Hegel should also be mentioned. The discussion now continues with some historical variations. One difficulty is that some theologians allow two sources of knowledge. Some knowledge we obtain by revelation; other knowledge we work out for ourselves like geometry. Augustine even admits some sensory knowledge. Or, there might be, though not under the present subhead, a theologian who accepts revelation and sensation, but denies that there is any knowledge based on logic alone. In all of these combinations the theologian must face the problem of the relation between the two sets of truths. This problem is most pointed when one considers the possibility that the two sets of truth are in actual conflict. During the Middle Ages there was a theory of twofold truth that allowed a man to believe in theology what he proved false in philosophy. In the present century Emil Brunner proposed the possibility that a man as a believer could be certain that Jesus was crucified, while as an historian the same man could be uncertain that the event ever happened. But even if the two sets of truth do not conflict, there is a technical philosophical difficulty. The question is how to relate, combine, and unify them. This is really to ask whether two methods are permissible. If one conclusion is obtained by one method and is called knowledge, and if another conclusion is obtained by a different method, can the latter be unambiguously called knowledge, too? If two propositions are the result of different procedures, can they have anything epistemologically in common? These questions involve the definition of the term knowledge. Can this definition be formulated other than as the result of a method? Spinoza and Hegel insist on a unitary method. Pgs. 22-23 Adverse criticism raises the possibility that they may conflict. To show that they do not conflict, does the exponent of one of these five cases appeal to reason or to revelation? If he appeals to reason, the truths of revelation disappear because they are no defended by reason. If he appeals to revelation, then it is a matter of revelation that the truths of reason are true. This illustrates the difficulty of acknowledging two types of truth.

Pgs. 24-25 Spinoza does it another way. He formulates definitions of substance, attribute, God, and some others; then he posits seven axioms (e.g., That which cannot be conceived through anything else must be conceived through itself; and, If a thing can be conceived as non-existent, its essence does not involve existence), from which, after the fashion of geometry, he infers that God exists. This actual existence in the conclusion presumably justifies the truth of the definitions and axiom. Whatever validly implies existence, it may be said, must be true. Yet, on the other hand, this justification of axioms seems to be the fallacy of asserting the consequent. If Alexander was killed at the battle of Thebes, Alexander died young; Alexander died young, therefore he was killed in the battle of Thebes. Spinoza then must somehow refute this charge of invalidity. Otherwise his assumptions do not depend on logic alone. Rationalism therefore faces some embarrassment with respect to its first premises. Dogmatism applies logic to premises given in revelation. Pg. 25 Dogmatism, accepting the unsystematic teachings of Scripture, not only puts them in systematic form, but also attempts to draw out further implications. For example, the Scriptures do not discuss realism, conceptualism, and nominalism by name. But most Dogmatists implicitly favor realism as against conceptualism and nominalism. This seems to be required by the Scriptural data. Pg. 27 The dialogue illustrates a similarity between Rationalism and Dogmatism in philosophic content. They both need what are often called Platonic Ideas or abstract concepts. Pg. 29 If, however, there is any logical necessity that distinguishes the extent of Rationalistic from Dogmatic truths, it would seem to lie in the impossibility of deducing historical particularities from universal premises. Logic also cannot demonstrate that there was a Moses, a David, or a Napoleon. In the nineteenth century this complaint was vociferously urged against the nonspinozistic Rationalism of Hegel; and Levy-Bruhl criticizes the earlier Cartesians as not merely distrusting history, but as having an actual antipathy toward it. For Christianity history is indispensable. Pg. 30 Philosophies must be evaluated on the ground of what they begin with. The starting point determines all that follows. It is quite clear how to test the validity of a syllogism, but how may one test the original premise? Should we begin by assuming the authority of sensation, the authority of logic, or the authority of God? The problem is how to start. Pg. 32

Historically and personally necessary or not, it is logically necessary to show that and how knowledge is possible before concluding that a particular religious doctrine (or, for that matter, a particular law of physics) can be known as true. Pg. 32 A proposition can be judged ridiculous only if it contradicts some exceptionally well-established truth. If nothing has as yet been established, Descartes demon cannot be known to be ridiculous. Pg. 33 In fact, Augustine is clearer and more explicit than Descartes. Descartes first truth is not really I think, as he said. His first truth is really the laws of logic. I think must be true because a person who denies it exemplifies them in his denial and so has contradicted himself. I think depends on the laws of logic. Augustine starts explicitly with logic. You may not know, he says in effect, whether you are awake or asleep; but you cannot help knowing that you are either one or the other. That is to say, the principle of complete disjunction cannot be doubted. The law of implication is also indubitable: If there are only four elements (earth, air, first, and water), there cannot be five. And he might have said, All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. Pg. 33 There is nothing more basic on which the axioms of logic depend. All explanation must use them. If an instructor explains a principle of economics, or of chemistry, or what-not, he says, Because: Such and such is true because and then the instructor gives a reason from which the thing is to be explained can be deduced or inferred. Therefore logic cannot be explained or proved or deduced from anything else because it is absolutely and without exception basic. Pg. 34 Then Augustine zeroes in: A proposition can be probable and known to be probable, only if it resembles or approximates the truth. A person who does not know what is true cannot know what approximates it. A theory of probability must itself be based on the truth. Pg. 34 Logic never began and will never end. Mathematics and morality likewise. Such eternal and immutable truths cannot be abstracted from any mutable matrix. They are not the products of the subjective reason of any individual man. There must therefore be an eternal and immutable reason in which these truths have their origin. Either the truths themselves are God and God is truth or if there be something superior to truth, then this higher being is God. In either case it is proved that God exists.

Pg. 37 If a definition is self-contradictory, there can be no corresponding object. Pg. 38 Augustine, recall, showed not only that truth was possible; he showed truth was inevitable and inescapable. If we think at all, we think the laws of logic. Truth is inherent or innate in the mind. But God is truth. Therefore it is impossible to annihilate God in thought. He exists so truly that he cannot even be conceived not to exist. Pg. 41 If a predicate can be attached to everything without exception, it has no distinct meaning, and this is to say that it has no meaning at all. Pg. 41 Anything exists, so far as the term has any faint meaning at all. But it makes a great difference whether God is a dream, a mirage, or the square root of minus one. Pg. 42 Dogmatism accepts revelation as it is. It then attempt to systematize it and draw out its unexpressed implications. Rationalism, on the other hand, does not accept an alleged revelation as written. It tests the documents claim to be a revelation. This test consists in determining whether the contents of the document (the Bible) are such that God could have revealed; for Rationalism believes that it can deduce by its own method what God can and cannot say. With this procedure Rationalism may turn out to have no revelation at all. Pgs. 46-47 In particular, the critics argue fallaciously when they say, if man is competent to discover one truth, he is competent to discover all truth and needs no revelation. The second half of the disjunction was: or else the evidence is dependent on the proposed authority itself, and the revelation fails, in consequence, to win its credentials as a reasonable source of trustworthy propositions. This disjunct faces two replies. First, it assumes that a first principle cannot be selfauthenticating. Yet every first principle must be. The first principle of Logical Positivism is that a sentence has no meaning unless it can be verified (in principle at least) by sensory experience. Yet no sensory experience can ever verify this principle. Anyone who wishes to adopt it must regard it as self-authenticating. So it is with all first principles. Ferr may not be a Logical Positivist, but he is an Empiricist of some sort. If the Dogmatist or Rationalist questions

Empiricism, Ferr can defend himself only by saying that experience proves that experience alone is reasonable. Here the word reasonable leads to the second criticism of this disjunct. It is vitiated by the same ambiguous use of the word reason that occurred in the veto argument. If the evidence for a revelation is internal, he says, the revelation lacks credentials as a reasonable source of trustworthy propositions. But this is just one way of saying that reasonableness can be had only on an anti-revelational principle. Thus, as Ferr wanted to restrict the honorable term philosophy to one type of philosophy, he also wants to deny reason and reasonable to those who reject his first principle. The absence of external evidences, the denial of other sources of truth, clearly does not prove a document to be unreasonable in the sense of self-contradictory or meaningless. The important and substantial question, therefore, concerns the existence of other sources of information. The Dogmatist can very well use reason against Rationalism. He can try to show that the theorems of Rationalism do not follow from its own principles. He can go further and try to show that religious content cannot be derived from empirical principles either. By reason he can also show, and very easily, that Dogmatism implies religious propositions. But he does not need reason for his choice of the Dogmatic principle. Reason gives no principles at all. Pg. 47 The reason Thomas could not deduce the Trinity was not any inherent incompetence of the mind, but the lack of the necessary axioms. Pg. 48 Belief comes first; understanding follows. For the modern Rationalists understanding comes first and belief is unnecessary. They claim to have demonstrated by logic alone both the existence and nature of God. With this knowledge they can test whether a document is or is not revelation because, apart from the document, they already know what God can and cannot reveal. Pg. 70 Religious authors and the general public still cling tenaciously to sensation. But if they do not meet the skeptical arguments in detail, if they refuse to examine them mirages, hallucinations, circumstantial variations, and even Descartes demon if they refuse to face their opponents squarely, skepticism must be adjudged the victor. Pg. 79 The reason Christians do not believe contradictories is that no one can. A non-Christian critic of Kierkegaard will soon discover that he, the critic, is rational and not insane. And unless one is insane, it is impossible by any act of will to believe both of two contradictories, knowing them to be contradictories. True enough, one may hold opposing opinions without knowing it; but when another points out the inconsistency, the victim will try to harmonize the two and argue that they do not conflict, or he will cease to believe one or both.

Pg. 84 The fatal flaw is his rejection of logic. When once a man commits himself to contradictions, his language, and therefore his recommendations to other people, become meaningless. Pg. 86 A rational life requires a purpose. Such a purpose must be regarded as a fixed truth. Can anyone justify life and bend all energies toward an end that he knows he will reject tomorrow? Pg. 87 Dogmatism, like Rationalism, posits a first principle. Whether or not Hegel is vulnerable to Kierkegaards criticism that reason cannot begin, that the System has no presuppositions, that there is an infinite regress, etc., Rationalism and Dogmatism are not in this respect vulnerable. Aristotle, Empiricist that he was, defended logical argument against the accusation of infinite regress. He insisted on first principles of demonstration. True, he made sensory experience prior to demonstration. In this his Empiricism must fail. Aristotles account of how a concept is obtained from sensation, or how one comes to recognize a principle as first, lacks all explanatory plausibility. Pg. 88 Although Aristotles Empiricism is a failure, if first principles can be had in some other way, demonstration and system escape infinite regress. Rationalism does not produce first principles out of something else: The first principles are innate. And this is not far removed from the Dogmatism or Fideism that simply posits them as Euclid did. Pgs. 88-89 Alvin Plantinga asked, Even if the Logical Positivists could formulate a principle that would separate sentences into meaningful and meaningless in a manner satisfactory to the Positivists, why should anyone accept it? Given this not-yet formulated principle, it would follow that Christian theology is meaningless. The positivistic inference would be valid; but why should one accept its premise? Beyond this the crushing reply to empirical verificationism is that on its own principle, it itself is meaningless. The principle, A sentence is meaningful only if verifiable by sense, can itself never be verified by sense. Thus by its own test Logical Positivism is nonsense. Attempts to avoid the technical difficulties, Plantingas unanswerable question, and the final objection have led to alterations so extensive that one may call the original view dead. Other principles have replaced it. Pg. 89

There must be first principles. A system cannot start unless it starts. The start is first. Therefore no one, since all must start somewhere, can consistently refuse permission to the Dogmatist to start where he chooses. Pg. 89 Everyone except the skeptic is an authoritarian. Even the least knowledge depends on a first principle. Pg. 90 A previous chapter pointed out that the common objection to the argument was the impossibility of passing from an image to a reality. But Rationalism and Dogmatism are forms of realism. Their epistemology is not representational. Every thinker must decide for himself whether the x that is immediately in the mind is the real object or a representation of it. Those who base knowledge on sensation have only two alternatives. They may, like Aristotle, assert that a sensory image is the result of a presents an external object. But in this case, as previously shown, there is no way to check the representation. Not only is it impossible to know whether or not the image is a faithful image; it is empirically impossible to know whether it represents anything at all. The second alternative is to deny the external object. Then we have images or sensations that represent nothing. Pg. 90 Dogmatism is otherwise. It is neither representational nor non-representational nominalism. Nominalism is an impossible view anyway. In assuming that individual sense objects are the only realities, it not only founders on the skeptical implications of Empiricism, it would in consistency require every noun to be a proper noun or name. We could call Timothy-Ticklepitchers by name, but we could not subsume him under the genus cat. Such a prohibition of universal concepts discourages conversation. Pg. 91 Thought and therefore intelligent conversation require something other than nominalistic proper nouns. This was the supreme triumph of Plato over the Pre-socratics. To be sure, Christian Dogmatism does not accept the unaltered World of Platonic Ideas. The Philonic interpretation is better. Still better is the replacement of Ideas (minus predicates) by propositions or truths. But in any case nominalism is to be rejected. Christian Dogmatism therefore must be realistic. The real object of knowledge is itself present to the mind. One need not (one cannot) pass from an image to the truth. One knows the truth itself. The real object is not momentary. It is not something that cannot return. Sensations exist only once. When my headache no longer aches and when I no longer see blue or taste sweet, the aches and the sweet simply do not exist. As individual events they are over and done for. An individual sensation never occurs again. But a truth is not a sensation. It returns and I can think it again

many times. Not only so, but you can have it too. Though I have it, though it is present to my mind, though it exists there, it is not so mine that you cannot have it too, at the same time. Your ache and mine can never be the same ache. Your truth and mine are identical. These objects of knowledge are not trivialities such as blues and sweets. They are truths or propositions. An example, one of these realities, a constituent of the noumenal world, is the proposition that God justified sinners on the basis of Christs imputed righteousness. This is not only a thought to which I may return time and time again. It is also a thought you and I can have simultaneously. Thus communication as well as memory is possible. There are of course other thoughts, objects, or realities. Every Biblical proposition is one. These never change nor go out of existence, for they are constituents of Gods mind. Knowing them we know God. To know God, we do not pass from an unreal concept abstracted from sensory experience to a different reality. We know God directly, for in him we live and move and have our being. Pg. 92 Every non-skeptical position, as was made clear earlier, must have a first principle. Rationalists are well aware of this; Empiricists usually ignore or deny it and claim presuppositionless objectivity. But it applies to them with equal force. They too must answer why they assign so basic a position to sensation. Hence there is a perfectly legitimate question, applicable to all types of philosophy, concerning the choice of a first principle. Pg. 92 Pascal, of course, was a devout Christian; but his Wager, although it escapes the accusation of irrationalism, is not the Christian answer to the problem. It is no answer at all to them problem, for it fails to explain a choice of the Bible rather than the Koran. Pg. 92 The problem also arises in science as well as religion. How does a scientist choose his first principle? Note well that he chooses or constructs it; he does not discover it. Pg. 95 Dogmatism applauds Mr. Poythress assertion that there is nothing more certain than the Word of God from which that Word now needs to be proved. His repudiation of sense data is quite in line with the preceding arguments in the preceding sections of the present volume. Pg. 96 Since it is easier to distinguish the difference between Christianity and Playboys obscenities than it is to distinguish Riemannian from Euclidean geometry, wisdom counsels us to rephrase the objection, to state what Dr. Montgomery intended to state, and then to answer what he meant

but did not say. What he obviously meant was that a priori principles, since they are not based on evidence, are arbitrary; and if arbitrary, the a priori of Playboy is just as legitimate as the fundamental principles of Christianity. Now, there is a certain sense in which this is true enough. If neither set of principles can be based on evidence, and if both sets are regarded by their advocates as the starting point for all demonstration and argument, then obviously no one can support either set on anything more fundamental. This is simply to say that every system of thought must start somewhere. Where then does Dr. Montgomery start? So far as I can understand him, he professes to base the truth of the Bible on archaeological and historical evidence. This evidence in turn is based on sensation or perception. Or, more philosophically, one may classify Dr. Montgomery as an Empiricist. As such he must hold that sensory experience is more reliable that a divinely-given revelation. He must hold that sensation is self-authenticating, and that the Bible cannot be selfauthenticating. Pg. 97 Dr. Montgomery is equally unable to provide any evidence for his own first principle. He failed to convince the three Westminster students. The reason he failed is that what he calls evidence is evidence only on his presuppositions as to what the nature of evidence is. Therefore, the objections he levels against presuppositionalism apply to himself with equal force. Pg. 98 This objection does not apply only to theism. Any system ends its regress in its first principle. This may not be a temporal end to regress, but it certainly puts an end to further explanation. Pg. 99 An explanation of a subsidiary phenomenon depends on a more general principle, until Kants own investigation ends in the categories. These are final. Are there no final answers? Must explanatory regress never end? Then we again have the skepticism that prevents us from even recognizing wind and water in the first place. Thus if there is a final answer or a first principle, investigation must stop somewhere; but if there is no final answer, there is no knowledge out of which to construct the objection. Pg. 100 If you did not agree with my axioms, I could not convince you. Now, in Dogmatism, a Christian cannot convince a Moslem because there is no agreement. The one accepts the Bible, the other the Koran. Since both are Dogmatists, neither can appeal to higher common principles. Pgs. 100-101

Empiricism has been demolished. Unless, therefore, one chooses a Dogmatic first principle, one must choose skepticism and irrationality. Neither of these has anything to oppose to Dogmatism. Sanity therefore must be dogmatic. So much then for the status of the argument. What now is the question to be answered? It is not, Shall we choose? Or, is it permissible to choose? We must choose; since we are alive we have chosen either a dogmatic principle or empirical insanity. The question therefore, urged by atheist, evangelical Christian, and evangelistic Moslem, is, Why does anyone choose the Bible rather than the Koran? The answer to this question will also explain how a Christian can present the Gospel to a non-Christian without depending on any logically common proposition in their two systems. Since all possible knowledge must be contained within the system and deduced from its principles, the dogmatic answer must be found in the Bible itself. The answer is that faith is the gift of God. As Psalm 65:4 says, God chooses a man and causes him to accept Christian Dogmatism. Conversely, the Apostle John informs us that the Pharisees could not believe because God had blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts. The initiation of spiritual life, called regeneration, is the immediate work of the Holy Spirit. It is not produced by Abrahamic blood, nor by natural desire, nor by any act of human will. In particular, it is not produced by arguments based on secular and empirical presuppositions. Even if there were a common truth in secularism and Christianity, arguments based on it would not produce faith. What empirical evangelicals think is most necessary, is most useless. Even the preaching of the Gospel does not produce faith. However, the preaching of the Gospel does one thing that a fallacious argument from a non-existent common ground cannot do: it provides the propositions that must be believed. But the belief comes from God: God causes a man to believe; faith is a divine gift. In evangelistic work there can be no appeal to secular, nonChristian material. There is an appeal it is the appeal of prayer to the Holy Spirit to cause the sinner to accept the truths of the Gospel. Any other appeal is useless. If now a person wants the basic answer to the question, Why does one man have faith and another not, or, Why does one man accept the Koran and another the Bible, this is it. God causes the one to believe. But if a person asks some other question or raises an objection, he will have to read the argument over again. Pg. 103 The Dogmatist does not attempt to prove the reliability of pottery dating, nor the contemporary principles of historiography. He is not really interested in them. In fact, he has, to his own satisfaction at least, shown that they are indefensible and untenable. But none of this vitiates his attempt to convict the Liberal of self-contradiction. And covered with contradiction, the Liberal and the Empiricist, not the Dogmatist, have been reduced to silence. Once this is done, there remain no empirical objections against the truth of Scripture. The apologetic task is completed. Pg. 112

From a logical standpoint, it is equal whether ones assumptions are philosophical or theological, Christian or not. If it is reprehensible to operate on Christian presuppositions, is it any less so on other presuppositions? Pg. 122 As Hegel insisted, every determination is a negation. Or, as Aristotle argued, a term not only must mean something, it also must mean not-something. After centuries of philosophic discussion it ought not to be necessary to defend the indispensability of unequivocal language, but such is the chaos in discussions in religion and such is the antipathy toward taking a particular point of view that the disastrous results of vague generalities call for emphasis. Let is therefore try to avoid confusion by being explicit. Most words in the dictionary have three, four, or even five somewhat different meanings; but if any word had a thousand meanings, or better, if any one word could stand for every other word in the dictionary, nobody could tell what it meant. If a word means everything, it means nothing. To have no definite or limited meaning is to have no meaning at all. Pg. 129 There is nothing irrational or self-contradictory, certainly nothing obviously self-contradictory, in maintaining the demonstrability of some truths and the indemonstrability of others. Even Hegel, who by exigencies of his system should have made everything indemonstrable, admitted the existence of contingencies in nature. In Hegels construction this admission may indeed be a flaw. Absolute Idealism presupposes that all knowledge is so interrelated that every part entails the whole. Pg. 130 As a matter of fact, acceptance of a revelation may not depend on any prior conviction of the existence of God. To be sure, a revelation presupposes God; but the acceptance of a revelation does not require a previous belief in God. A man might accept the Bible and in that very act be for the first time convinced of Gods existence. That is, he might find God in the revelation. Pg. 130 Logically, of course, the fact of a revelation presupposes that there is a God. To this extent Burtt is obviously correct. But this is not a damaging criticism, since Thomas would admit as much. It is entirely in accord with the distinction made by Thomas, but rather ignored by Burtt, between the order of reality and the order of knowing. In reality God comes first and everything else comes later; but the human process of learning, according to Thomas, starts with other things first and arrives later at God as a conclusion. For these reasons, complicated though they may be, Burtts criticism of Thomas must be judged unsound. Pg. 142

It is necessary to note just how Descartes has defeated the omnipotent demon. Had he said, I walk, therefore I exist, he would have failed. I can easily deny that I am walking without actually walking. It would be enough to sit in a chair and say, I am not walking. But it is absolutely impossible to deny that I am thinking without thinking. Since doubting is a form of thought, I cannot doubt that I think without thinking the doubt. I think, therefore, is an indubitable truth. How Descartes proceeded to build up his worldview from this point does not concern us here. What is important is his method. One must not suppose that the certainty of thought depends on any experienced vividness of thinking. If certainty depended on vividness, then lightning and thunder would serve to outwit the demon. Obviously they do not. The proof of the cogito depends on logic alone. I think is a proposition such that if it is denied, it is proved true. If I say, I think, it follows that I think; but just as well if I say I do not think, it follows that I think. This is not a matter of experience but of logic alone. Because of this method Descartes and his followers are called Rationalists. They depended on reason. But note, the reason on which they depended is not in the first instance a reason that is antithetical to revelation. This is not to say that a Rationalist, or Rationalism as a system, is the bulwark of revelation. Spinoza in particular had no love for the Bible. But the reason of Rationalism is in the first place a reason that is antithetical to and exclusive of sensory experience. Here reason means logic. All knowledge, on this rationalistic theory, is to be deduced as the theorems of geometry are deduced from their axioms. No appeal to sensation is permitted. The consistent application of the laws of logic is alone sufficient. Reason therefore bears the meaning of logical consistency. This explains why the Rationalists adopted the ontological argument for Gods existence. They needed Gods existences not only to rid themselves of an omnipotent devil, but, more seriously, to prove the existence of a world. Now, to fit their principles, the argument for Gods existence had to be so construed as to make a denial of his existence self-contradictory. As a person who denied that the interior angles of a triangle equal two right angles simply does not know what the concept of a triangle means, so anyone who denies Gods existence simply does not understand the term God. Thus Gods existence is proved by logic alone. Pg. 143 The important question is not whether or not the Bible is true, but whether or not all knowledge is deducible by reason, i.e., by logic alone. Pg. 147 If all knowledge is based on experience alone, then there can be no knowledge of any necessary truth. At most, experience could reveal that such and such truth is so, but not that it must be so. For example, sensation might tell us that doors have two sides, but it cannot teach us that doors must have two sides. Doors might, somewhere, someday, have only one side. No experience can disprove this possibility. Pg. 148

Christians are sometimes accused of being biased and of forcing their arguments to foregone conclusion. Yet this is no more true of Christians than it was of Kant or of anyone else. Kant knew that he wanted to work out a theory of categories, and he made repeated attempts to deduce them before he hit upon his final formulation. The conclusion was decided upon before the argument was worked out. This is true of every philosopher, although Christians are more often castigated for it than are other writers. Pg. 153 That relations are internal, and especially that the truth is the whole, are themes hard to deny. Yet their implications are devastating. So long as you or I do not know the relationships which constitute the meaning of cat or self, we do not know the object in question. If we say that we know some of the relationships e.g., a cat is not-a-dog and admit that we do not know other relationships e.g., a cat is not-an-(animal we have never heard of before) it follows that we cannot know how this unknown relationship may alter our view of the relationship we now say we know. The alteration could be considerable. Therefore we cannot know even one relationship without knowing all. Obviously we do not know all. Therefore we know nothing. This criticism is exceedingly disconcerting to an Hegelian, for its principle applies not merely to cats, dogs, and selves, but to the Absolute itself. The truth is the whole and the whole is the Absolute. But obviously we do not know the whole; we do not know the Absolute. In fact, not knowing the Absolute, we cannot know even that there is an Absolute. But how can Absolute Idealism be based on absolute ignorance? And ours is absolute ignorance, for we cannot know one thing without knowing all. Pg. 154 Neoplatonic mysticism, from which this Dionysius took his inspiration, told of trances in which ones personality merged into the perfect simplicity of an original One. In this One, the simplicity is so perfect that there is not even the dualism of subject and predicate. Therefore, in this realm knowledge is impossible, for all knowledge consists in the attribution of predicates to subjects: The cat is black, the number four is even, or William was a conqueror. But in the trance or absorption, there is not even and I and thou. There is only pre simplicity of the One. Pg. 165 Although Brunner has published many books, it is not profitable to examine any language unless truth is distinct from error. A writer who gives them equal authority has repudiated the law of contradiction and meaningful conversation ceases. Pg. 166 In the present chapter both secular and religious irrationalism have been examined. Not only Nietzsche and James leave us in intellectual anarchy, but Neo-orthodoxy also has concluded that human reason is a failure. Although these latter writers have a doctrine of revelation, even in it

they fail to distinguish truth from falsity. Instead of saying, Let God be true, but every man a liar; they say, Let God be false, and every man will be a liar too. This type of philosophic is selfcontradictory, self-destructive, and intellectually stultifying. Therefore I wish to suggest that we neither abandon reason nor use it unaided, but on pain of skepticism acknowledge a verbal, propositional revelation of fixed truth from God. Only by accepting rationally comprehensive information on Gods authority can we hope to have a sound philosophy and a true religion. Pg. 169 In the Psalms and the prophets the heart designates the focus of personal life. It is the organ of conscience, of self-knowledge, indeed of all knowledge. One may very well say that the Hebrew heart is the equivalent of the English word self. Pg. 175 Assurance and conviction are belief, strong belief, voluntary belief, and as intellectual as you please. They are intellectual because their objects are meaningful propositions. Their objects are truths. Pg. 176 The disjunction between faith in a person and belief in a creed is a delusion. None of us proceeds on such a principle in our human affairs. Trust in a person is a knowledge of a person; it is a matter of assenting to certain propositions. Pg. 177 To gather the complexities together, let it be remembered that the Bible teaches the unity of the person; that faculty psychology is unscriptural; that the Old Testament term heart is far more intellectual than its use in present day preaching; that faith is an inner or meant act, not properly compared with sitting on a chair; that Hebrews shows the necessity of creeds; and that belief in a creed is both intellectual and voluntary. Pg. 181 Since all attempts to obtain knowledge apart from revelation have failed, the Christian, in the next place, need only contradict Brightmans unsupported contention that experience cannot be judged by principles derived from revelation. The psychologists of today emphasize guilt and fear; the Existentialists confront man with death. Cannot these experiences be understood in the light of information God has revealed? This revelation need not be tested in fact, cannot be tested by reasonableness in Brightmans sense of the word, for Brightmans reasonableness does not exist.

Finally, since the accusation of unreasonableness fails because the philosophies that make it collapse into skepticism, the Christian now need only identify reason with that which Brightman called abstract and formal. Brightmans terms in this connection are a little unfortunate, and the next chapter will show that the modern theory of logical formalism is not to be adopted. Nonetheless, reason may well be defined as logic. It should not be identified with experience. When a Christian theologian is deducing consequences from Scriptural premises, he is reasoning he is using his reason. To require him to test Scripture by sensation in order to avoid the charge of irrationality is itself irrational prejudice. With this conception of reason there no longer remains any conflict between reason and faith. The futility of Rationalism and the insanity of irrationalism are equally avoided. Truth becomes obtainable. And this, we believe, should constitute a strong recommendation for Christian revelation. Pg. 182 The conclusion of the previous chapter was the thesis that revelation is needed as the basis of a rational worldview. In the study of religion, and generally in modern philosophy, attempts to establish truth without a word from God have resulted in frustrating irrationalism. Hence constructive thought must presuppose information that has been divinely given. This is to assume that the Bible is the Word of God; and since God cannot lie, His Word must be the truth. Pg. 185 The doctrine of inspiration is not something tenuously deduced from two or three isolated verses. On the contrary, it is the explicit, the repeated, the constant, the emphatic declaration of the Bible in all its parts. Now, to conclude this survey of elementary detail, a pointed question must be put. If the prophets who spoke, if the authors who wrote, and if our Lord himself are mistaken about verbal inspiration if they are mistaken these hundreds of times what assurance may anyone have with respect to the other things they said and wrote? Is there any reason to suppose that men who were so uniformly deceived as to the source of their message could have had any superior insight and accurate knowledge of mans relation to God? Still more pointedly: Can anyone profess a personal attachment to Jesus Christ and consistently contradict his assertion that the Scriptures cannot be broken? Pgs. 194-195 In one sense of the term, a photo corresponds to or looks like its object, but no one supposes that a word corresponds to a thing in this way. Language is not a picture of reality. The letters c-a-t do not look like the purring animal. It is all the more true that words cannot possibly look like spiritual realities, if such there be, for these are not visible entities. But in a non-photographic sense a mathematical formula may be said to correspond to the motion of a freely falling body. Could not this be an absolute correspondence? Or, if the term absolute causes hesitation, could

not such a formula be or be understood as a literal assertion? Further, if the sound cat is essentially an arbitrary sign of the animal, what more correspondence could be desired? Pg. 198-199 We shall suppose that God Omnipotent has created rational beings who are not merely physical but who are essentially spiritual and intellectual; beings, therefore, who have the innate ability to think and speak. What then will be the implications relative to the problems of linguistics that can be drawn from this theistic presupposition? For one thing, this view places thought behind language and so contributes to the explanation of communication. Previous mention was made of Augustines De Magistro. Christ is the Logos or Reason who endows every mind with intellectual light. Christian theologians, even the poorer ones, have usually realized that in the moral sphere man is not born neutral. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. Men are not born morally good or morally neutral, but they are born depraved. Intellectually, also, men do not come into the world with blank minds. Inherited depravity only emphasized the presence of innate moral ideas. Those wicked Gentiles who did not want to retain God in their knowledge nonetheless failed to banish him, for they continued to know the judgment of God that those who commit such things are worthy of death. In addition to moral ideas, Augustine teaches that the presence of Christ the Logos endows all men with certain speculative or philosophic ideas as well. Communication, therefore, becomes possible because all men have these same ideas. The situation is somewhat like that of a cryptographer who can break any cipher. The symbols are at first unknown; but because the ideas expressed are common, the message can be understood. If language had no thought behind it, as the behaviorists claim, and if the symbols were just a random aggregate of marks, there would be no cipher to break. It follows next that language cannot be assigned a solely sensory origin and a primitively physical reference. Theism, of course, need not deny that the names of animals and things refer to spatially perceived physical objects; it need not deny that spatial relationships are well represented in language; it need not deny or distort any of our common gross experience. But it must assert that mans endowment with rationality, is innate ideas and a priori categories, his ability to think and speak were given to him by God for the essential purpose of receiving a verbal revelation, of approaching God in prayer, and of conversing with other men about God and spiritual realities. As a hymn says, Thou didst ears and hands and voices, For thy praise design. For this reason a theistic theory of language would not labor under the burden of giving a precarious derivation or development of spiritual meaning from primitive physical reference. The spiritual meaning would be original A dubious appeal to metaphor, symbolism, or analogy to explain this transition would be unnecessary. Pg. 199 Religious language is not essentially different from language on other subjects of interest. The position here maintained is not that religious language cannot utilize metaphor, but that the meaning of these metaphors, when one knows enough theology, can be stated less ambiguously in strictly literal sentences.

Pg. 200 In order for an assertion to be meaningful, it is not necessary that there exist situations in which it is true and other situations in which it is false. Such a criterion of meaning would prevent the assertion that water dropped into sulphuric acid produces a rise in temperature. Nor on such a theory could two and two always equal four. Meaningfulness does not depend on a statements sometimes being false, nor does falsity imply that a statement is meaningless. What is meaningless can be neither true nor false. Pg. 202 Unless religious language is meaningful, literally true, and thoroughly intelligible, it is meaningless and unintelligible, sound and fury signifying nothing. Pg. 203 And while there may be some meaning embedded in the language of a man whose ideas are not clear and distinct, the meaning would surely prove to be an hallucination if it could be shown that the words could not be made to correspond to some clear or distinct ideas. Furthermore, how can one construct a parable that relates a known object to something of which we have no concept at all? Meaningful analogies and honest comparisons can be made only if we know something about both terms. Unless a better defense of religious language and thought can be devised, the Logical Positivists, will not be greatly embarrassed. Pg. 203 The Logos is the rational light that lights every man. Since man was created in the image of God, he has an innate idea of God. It is not necessary, indeed it is not possible, for a blank mind to abstract a concept of God from sensory experience or to lift sensory language by its bootstraps to a spiritual level. The theories of Empiricism, of Aristotle, of Aquinas, of Locke, are to be rejected. The positing of innate ideas or a priori equipment does not entail the absurdity of infants discoursing learnedly on God and logic. To all appearances their minds are blank, but the blankness is similar to that of a paper with a message written in invisible ink. When the heat of experience is applied, the message becomes visible. Whatever else be added, the important words refer to non-sensuous realities. Pgs. 204-205 The Lamb is a symbol. A symbol is a sign, but not all signs are symbols. The plus and minus signs of arithmetic, even though they may sometimes be called mathematical symbols, are just arbitrary conventional signs. Marks of other shapes could have served as well. Crombie above, it will be remembered, tried to maintain that his words, names, and metaphors were not arbitrary; and in this example obviously and elephant as a symbol of Christ could not have served as well;

and a fish was later used only because of an acrostic. John the Baptists choice of a Lamb was not arbitrary; it was rooted in the Mosaic ritual. An arbitrary sign, whether a word or mathematical figure, merely designates the concept. When we are studying mathematics or reading a newspaper, we do not normally think of the shape of the sign, but rather give exclusive attention to the thing signified. In the case of the symbol, however, some of our attention is fixed on the symbol. If the Baptists had said, Jesus is Lord, no one would have given thought to the sound as such; and there is nothing in the situation except the sound and the meaning. But when he said, Behold! The Lamb, the situation included not only Jesus and the sound of the words, but also the lambs that the word Lamb summarized. To understand the Baptists message about Christ, therefore, it was necessary to think how literal lambs could symbolize Christ. This is not the case with a designatory sign. Pg. 205 Without such a background of literal meaning, one could hardly guess the point of the symbol. One would not know what the symbol symbolized. The symbol is merely a surrogate for something else, and what we want is the real thing and not the symbol. To be sure, the lamb is not an arbitrary sign, as the swastika was for the Nazis; but unless some literal information was forthcoming, Johns symbolic sentence could not have been understood. Pg. 206 On a theistic worldview therefore, a view which holds that God created man and revealed himself to him in words, language is adequate for theory. Linguistics, unless controlled by naturalistic, atheistic presuppositions, can therefore offer no objection to the doctrine of verbal inspiration. Pg. 208 Now, the Aristotelian logic, and in particular the law of contradiction, requires that a given word must not only mean something, it must also not mean something. The term dog must mean dog, but it must not mean mountain; and mountain must not mean metaphor. Each term must refer to something definite, and at the same time there must be some objects to which it does not refer. The term metaphorical cannot mean literal, nor can it mean canine or mountainous. Suppose the word mountain means metaphor, and dog, and Bible, and the United States. Clearly, if a word meant everything, it would mean nothing. If, now, the law of contradiction is an arbitrary convention, and if our linguistic theorists choose some other convention, I challenge them to write a book in conformity with their principles. As a matter of fact it will not be hard for them to do so. Nothing is more necessary than to write the word metaphor sixty thousand times: Metaphor metaphor metaphor metaphor. This means, the dog rand up the mountain, for the word metaphor means dog, rand, and mountain. Unfortunately, the sentence metaphor metaphor metaphor also means, Next Christmas is Thanksgiving, for the word metaphor has these meanings as well.

The point should be clear: One cannot write a book or speak a sentence that means anything without using the law of contradiction. Logic is an innate necessity, not an arbitrary convention that may be discarded at will. Whether it be the atheistic philosophy or A. J. Ayer or the pietistic depreciation of our fallible human logic, such theories make verbal inspiration impossible. But, fortunately, these theories make themselves impossible as well. They are self-refuting because they cannot be stated except by virtue of the law they repudiate. I conclude therefore that literal language, innate logic, and verbal inspiration have nothing academic to fear from such theories as these. Pg. 233 One cannot argue the truth of Christianity on the basis of its ethics; one must defend its ethics on the basis of its theological truth. The ethics is not a premise, but a conclusion. Theology is basic. Pg. 235 It was argued that God could have created a different physical word, had he so desired. Nothing was said, one way or the other, as to whether God could so desire. Possibly the immutability of purpose and the eternality of the decrees imply that this is the only possible world a Calvinistic twist to a Spinozistic phrase. Yet if this is so, and if it is meaningless to suppose that God could think differently, the argument remains that morality as much as physics is what it is because God thinks this way. As the Puritans used to say, Gods decree is simply Gods decreeing. Pg. 237 We are left with the definite commands of God. We have his complete prescriptive will in the Scriptures. Of course, if skepticism means that man without a supernatural revelation cannot establish the norms of morality, so be it. The analyses of the earlier sections are supposed to have clinched that conclusion. Neither Utilitarianism, nor Kant, nor Dewey can anticipate Gods standards or rectitude. But the failure of non-revelational ethics does not leave man without a knowledge of right and wrong. If skepticism means that man can have no knowledge, then an appeal to revelation, with its subordination of ethics to theology, is not skepticism. But everything else is. Pgs. 254-255 If man has free will, and things can be different, God cannot be omniscient. Some Arminians have admitted this and have denied omniscience, but this puts them obviously at offs with Biblical Christianity. There is also another difficulty. If the Arminian or Romanist wishes to retain divine omniscience and at the same time assert that foreknowledge has no causal efficacy, he is put to it to explain how the collision was made a certain hundred years, an eternity, before the drivers were born. If God did not arrange the universe this way, who did? Pg. 255

Then, second, if the universe is not Gods creation, his knowledge of it past and future cannot depend on what he intends to do, but on his observation of how it works. In such a case, how could we be sure that Gods observations are accurate? How could we be sure that these independent forces will not later show an unsuspected twist that will falsify Gods predictions? And, finally, on this view Gods knowledge would be empirical, rather than an integral part of his essence, and thus he would be a dependent knower. These objections are insurmountable. Pg. 261 Choice then may be defined, at least sufficiently for the present purpose, as a mental act that consciously initiates and determines a further action. Pg. 262 Free will is not the basis of responsibility. In the first place, and at a more superficial level, the basis of responsibility is knowledge. The sinfulness of the Gentiles, as stated in the first chapter of Romans, could be charged to them because although they did not like to retain God in their knowledge they did not entirely succeed in their attempt to forget him; throughout their sinning they still knew the judgment of God that they which commit such things are worthy of death. This knowledge no doubt is an innate knowledge; it did not come from the Scriptures, but is the remains of the original image of God in which he created man. Pg. 267 God is the sole ultimate cause of everything. There is absolutely nothing independent of Him. He alone is the eternal being. He alone is omnipotent. He alone is sovereign.

Commentaries on Pauls Epistles, 2005 Pgs. 25-26 Men may be prudent, but is it not a puzzling understatement, inconsistent with omnipotence and omniscience, to say that God is prudent? In the next place, although wisdom is indeed a divine attribute, the phrase all wisdom, every wisdom, every possible kind of wisdom, at least permits the idea that God has given to men every kind of wisdom a man can receive. This is not rendered impossible by Colossians 2:3, which says that in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge; for, first, wisdom has no modifier it is all the treasures, not all sorts of wisdom, and, second, Colossians does not mention prudence. Nor will Ephesians 3:10 make this interpretation impossible, for there the idea seems to be the manifold and intricate ways in which God makes known his wisdom. One may also stress the noun to which the relative pronoun refers: his grace with which he gave us all sorts of wisdom and prudence. If the emphasis falls on grace, on a divine gift, it is entirely appropriate to identify wisdom and prudence as the gift. The New Testament, a number of times, says that God has given wisdom to his elect; and this is confirmed by the negative in 1 Corinthians 1:17. Therefore, the translations of the Revised Standard Version, New International Version, and New American Standard are mistaken. The King James is ambiguous. This gift of wisdom and prudence came through Gods act of revealing or making known to us the secret of his will. Wisdom and prudence are the knowledge or comprehension of the Biblical message. This is what Paul means in 1 Corinthians 2:6-12. He contrasts the wisdom of men, which God will destroy as 1 Corinthians 1:19 says, with the wisdom that Paul preaches. Paul of course preached the Gospel, and the part of the Gospel most prominent in the first chapters of Corinthians is the doctrine of the atonement. This doctrine and all that goes with it is something that men cannot discover in experience: It is a secret that God reveals. God makes it known gnrisas and thereby makes us wise. These secrets, these doctrines, are the secrets of his will. But his eternal will or decree he has established them as truth. Established is not quite the correct term, for it connotes a time before a process of establishment was completed. These doctrines, however, are the eternal truth. Popular preachers frequently repeat that God is love; and this, if understood in its Biblical context, as opposed to Joseph Fletchers love, is correct. But many preachers, and in consequence their people also, fail to realize how definitely God is truth. God is not a corporeal being with a mind; he is a rational being without a body. The doctrines of the atonement and of grace are eternal constituents of Gods mind, that is, of God. Pgs. 27 If arbitrary means caprice, and if caprice, as usual, means disoriented, purposeless, ateleological, then most emphatically God is not arbitrary. Pg. 32

The term logos is poorly translated as word. In the Gospel of John it repeatedly means a sermon or discourse. And here is the emphasis that the sermon is the truth. Throughout the Middle Ages the Bible, however horribly they misconstrued it, was universally accepted as true. Today it is almost universally considered to be false, at least false in many of its statements. Therefore, inerrancy should be stressed much more now than it needed to be in the fifth or fifteenth century. Pg. 38 What the Holy Spirit of wisdom does in this instance is to give us knowledge of him. Or one may even say that God, in answer to Pauls prayer, would give us the Holy Spirit by increasing our knowledge. The him must refer to the Father, not only the nearer reference, coming after the mention of Christ, but also preceding that mention. Some commentators insist that the knowledge here (epignsis) is a much deeper knowledge than simple gnosis. Somewhere I have shown that prepositional prefixes in Hellenistic Greek do not have their original classic force, if indeed there was such a force in this case. It is not my intent to belittle knowledge, nor to restrict its extent in this instance. On the contrary, the anti-intellectualism of the present age, which has infected the majority of Christians, needs to be combatted by pointing out the New Testaments recurring emphasis on knowledge. As Peter says (2 Peter 1:3) all things that pertain to godliness come through knowledge (epignsis). If the preposition emphasizes it for some people, they are not mistaken except as to Greek usage. The knowledge is the knowledge of him, of God. At the present time there are Christian apologetes who wish to produce an epistemological theory that would justify a knowledge of botany or astronomy. In their view, if one cannot know ahead of time that the restaurant cook has not put arsenic in the food, ones epistemology and apologetics are incompetent. This was not Calvins position nor do I think it is the Bibles. Pg. 39 The figure of light regularly designates knowledge, and here the eyes stand for the mind. Quite evidently so, because the result is immediately identified with knowledge: that you might know. The heart, therefore, stands for the mind or intellect. Hendriksen remarks that the phrase indicates not merely a matter of the intellect, but far more than this was at stake. What this far more is, he neglects to say. The best he does is to use a few more metaphors as the fulcrum of feeling an the mainspring of words and actions. These metaphors convey no meaning. Alford better describes the eyes of the heart as the very core and center of life, where the intelligence has its post of observation. In spite of the mixed metaphors, Alford clearly identifies these eyes as ones intelligence. This must be correct, because the purpose of enlightenment is that we may know something. Here the verb is eidenai instead of epignsis. There is really little or no difference in meaning, for where oida is lacking some forms, ginsk is often substituted. Pg. 70 The word kinsman in the previous verse is connected etymologically with house or household. Hence, Paul can pass smoothly from co-citizen to a building with a foundation. This change of

metaphor results in an implication not so immediately obvious. Since the building is not merely its foundation, but has walls, rooms, and roof, and since the apostles are the foundation and not the roof, the implication is that there are no apostles today. The offices of prophet and apostle are things of the past. No Christian since A.D. 100 has inherited any such office. No one today receives new revelations from God. The canon is closed. Hence the claims of the pope and the Pentecostals are false. This implication is supported by two arguments. The first is the order of the terms in the verse: apostles and prophets. For all the unity of the Christian church with the church in the wilderness (Acts 7:38), the prophets referred to here are New Testament prophets. If Paul had wished to mention Old Testament prophets, he would have written prophets and apostles. Then, second, an overlapping reason, the church here mentioned contains both Jews and Gentiles, shortly or even already more Gentiles than Jews. Therefore, Paul is speaking of the church in his day, not the church in Abrahams or Moses day. Since now the foundation has been laid, prophecy can be said to have ceased by the end of the first century. The foundation was finished the process of building continues; but as there can be no second cornerstone, so can there be no other apostles and prophets. Some interpreters (for example, Meyer and Wilson, and also Alford with very poor reasoning) argue that the apostles and prophets could not themselves be the foundation of the church because 1 Corinthians 3:10, 11 say that Christ is the foundation. Alford avoids the ridiculous inference that the apostles had laid the foundation (they certainly did not put Christ into position) by interpreting the phrase to mean the Apostles and Prophets foundation that upon which they as well as yourselves are built. This would be similar to someone showing a visitor his church. All this complicated juggling is unnecessary when one realizes that figurative language is ambiguous and changes its meaning from one place to another. While 1 Corinthians 3:10 certainly pictures Christ as the foundation, Revelation 21:14 identifies the apostles themselves as the twelve foundations. Not only does a figure of speech have different meanings from one book to another, but one should note the alteration of imagery within these past four verses. In any case, Ephesians here makes the apostles, not Christ, the foundation, for Christ is the cornerstone. Students who like to delve into small details may observe that the last phrase of the verse can be translated in two ways. The usual translation is, Christ himself being the cornerstone. But the pronoun used for himself can be neuter as well as masculine; and hence grammatically one can translate the phrase as its cornerstone being Christ Jesus. The only grammatical argument again this second translation is that autou akrogniaion would have more clearly meant its, that the texts order of akrogniaion autou. This has some weight in favor of the usual interpretation, but it is far from conclusive. One must judge from the sense of the context. Pgs. 73-74 More important is the next phrase: according to revelation. The grace or unmerited favor which God gave to Paul was the knowledge of a divine secret. The particular secret here referred to is the union between Jew and Gentile in one church. That Paul was the recipient of a divine revelation is not an idea hard to understand. But its importance deserves mention. At the present time two opposite errors disturb the health of the church. One is the claim that God continues to

give revelation. The other is that Pauls message was culturally conditioned so that much of what he said cannot be accepted as binding on twentieth-century Christians. But Paul says that God revealed this information to him. Pg. 74 Paul wrote in order to be understood. People who study commentaries obey the implied command. Pgs. 75-76 In any case, God did not reveal everything at once, but at sundry times and in divers manners [God] spoke in time past unto the fathers by the prophets. If Eve could not have guessed a virgin birth, still less could she have known that the Messiah would be a descendant of King David. Revelation has an historical development. This does not mean that later revelations supersede earlier information. But rather, like the theorems of geometry, the next one is an addition to the previous one. True, the Levitical law was given as a temporary procedure, and it passed away; but the theology of Genesis remains true in Revelation. The apostles and prophets were able to proclaim Gods message because it was given to them by the Holy Spirit. In this connection we may note that Paul has just spoken of his holy apostles. Some Liberal critics have argued that the phrase holy apostles is an early Romish step toward devotional clichs such as Holy Baptism, and the Blessed Virgin. From which notion they infer that Paul in his modesty could not have written the epistle. On the contrary, however much Paul was personally modest, he vigorously maintained the unique prerogatives of the apostolic office. Here he refers not to himself exclusively, but to all the apostles and prophets, and as recipients of revelation they are to be recognized as holy, as set apart, and as unquestionably authoritative. Pg. 78 induction proves nothing whatever. Inductions are always invalid. Pgs. 82-83 Supralapsarianism, for all its insistence on a certain logical order among the divine decrees, is essentially, so it seems to us, the unobjectionable view that God controls the universe purposefully. God acts with a purpose. He has an end in view and sees the end from the beginning. Every verse in Scripture that in one way or another refers to God's manifold wisdom, every statement indicating that a prior event is for the purpose of causing a subsequent event, every mention of an eternal, all-embracing plan contributes to a teleological and therefore supralapsarian view of God's control of history. In this light Ephesians 3:10 clearly does not stand alone. The connection between supralapsarianism and the fact that God always acts purposefully depends on the observation that the logical order of any plan is the exact reverse of its temporal execution. The first step in any planning is the end to be achieved; then the means are decided

upon, until last of all the first thing to be done is discovered. The execution in time reverses the order of planning. Thus creation, since it is first in history, must be logically last in the divine decrees. Every Biblical passage, therefore, that refers to Gods wisdom also supports Ephesians 3:10. Pgs. 87-88 If one examines the term heart, even in Genesis alone, not to mention the remainder of its 750 instances in the Old Testament, one will discover that it chiefly means the understanding or intellect. It designates the process of thought. 1 Kings 3:9, 12 speak of an understanding heart able to decide judicial cases. Very infrequently does it mean emotion. Yet this is the only idea Eadie has of the heart, at least on this page of his commentary. As for the exegesis of the present verse, the mode of Christs indwelling in our minds is through faith. Faith is the belief in or assent to an understood proposition. Saving faith is assent to certain Scriptural propositions the good news of the Gospel, the information the Scriptures put before us. The power and strength we derive in answer to Pauls prayers come through and are proportionate to our grasp of Scripture. It is most unfortunate that our Latin heritage imposes the word faith. Had English been more receptive of the Greek in the New Testament, we might have been paying more attention to credo than to fiducia; we might have been using the more accurate terms, belief and believing, instead of the less precise term faith. Scripture tells us, if I may condense it, Believe and be saved. Believing is an intellectual process; emotion believes nothing. Pg. 90 all languages have words with more than one meaning and often enough use the two meanings in one sentence. Pg. 98 The apostles are, or were, the highest-ranking officers. One of their qualifications was that they had seen the risen Lord. Paul saw him on the Damascus road. Obviously no one after A.D. 100 was eligible for this office. One of their prerogatives or gifts was the ability to work miracles. No miracles have occurred since. Gods greatest gift to them was verbal revelation. God has revealed nothing to anybody since. Though lacking some of the apostolic prerequisites, the prophets also received revelations, none of which was written down. This office too ceased in the first century. Pgs. 99-100 The Gospel is good news, information, something to be learned. This unity is the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God. Hodge argues that the conjunction and indicates that faith and knowledge are two different things. He asserts, faith is a form of knowledgebut knowledge is not a form of faith (165). He tries to distinguish gnsis from epignsis as kennen versus erkennen, not merely cognition but recognition. This is unsatisfactory for two reasons.

First, Hellenistic Greek makes no distinction between gnosis and ginsk and epignsis. Second, while Christian faith is not secular knowledge, the knowledge here is explicitly said to be knowledge of the Son of God. There is also Islamic faith. Hodge seems to have restricted the term faith to Christian faith and extended the term knowledge to no matter what. In discussions on faith and knowledge one must keep the referents distinct. It is one thing to know of believe that the Bible teaches the resurrection of Christ. It is quite another thing to know or believe that Christ rose from the dead. The text says, the unity of the faith and of the knowledge. Let anyone make whatever distinction he can: He must acknowledge that the unity is one. Pgs. 103-104 The word for mind is nous, the intellect. The exegetes usually remarks that this verse begins a section on morality: They make the point that this is practical. So it is by the time we get to verse 19. But nous in this verse is the intellect, not the will, and certainly not the emotions. The term occurs twenty-four times in the New Testament. Not one of its six instances in Romans refers to the emotions or feelings. Indeed, Romans 11:34 speaks of the mind of the Lord, thus excluding human feelings. 1 Corinthians 1:10 connects mind with judgment. Twice in 1 Corinthians 2:16 we have the mind of the Lord, and the mind of Christ. The intellect is unmistakable in 1 Corinthians 14:14, 15, 19. It is most unfortunate that so much of todays popular Evangelicalism fails to recognize the supreme importance of the mind in Biblical psychology. Of course the unregenerate have minds too. But the activity of their minds is here described as vanity. Not necessarily in the sense of being conceited. Paul rather denounces their thinking as being in vain. Their plans are frustrated. Even if they achieve their immediate ends, their activity is useless. Not satisfactory purpose governs their conduct. Vanity of vanity. Life is not worth living. But Pauls sentence does not end here. 4:18 having been darkened in their reasoning, and having been alienated from the life of God, through their inherent ignorance, through the obtuseness of their heart This verse confirms the interpretation just given to the preceding. The terms reasoning, ignorance, and obtuseness directly refer to the intellect. Even in English today, when a man is ignorant of something, we say he is in the dark. He can reason, but he lacks appropriate premises. By some fallacious induction he concludes that a line of action will get him what he wants, but not having a divine revelation his life is not the life God requires. Perhaps not precisely the life God requires, but, better, the life which comes from God, the life God gives. The genitive would be of origin. Prsis, as Liddell and Scott show better than Arndt and Gingrich, means obtuseness. Pg. 105 morality itself, and even immortality, is not so much a function of the emotions as it is of the will. Action is volitional. Furthermore, volition depends on thinking. Hence, insistence on orthodox theology must precede exhortations to godly living. Indeed, it is only through revelation, intellectually understood, that one can discover moral principles. Neither social customs nor individual preferences establish any normative judgments applicable to all mankind.

Pgs. 107-108 The technical term habitus, used to explain what god does in regeneration, means, as one can guess, a habit. Habits are usually formed by practice and repetition. After hours and years the fingers of a pianist have something the rest of us lack. It is the ability to speed through a Mozart sonata. Regeneration is then explained as Gods instantaneous implantation of a new habit in our minds. It is as remarkable as if he had instantaneously made us able to run Mozarts scales. But this implantation is not a creation ex nihilo. God created the world in six days, rested, and has created nothing since. Paul then uses the word ktisthenta in a weaker sense as a strong, very strong, figure of speech. If the verse were taken literally, it would say that God had created a man, a new man, who had previously not existed, and then somehow a previously created man puts on this new man as one puts on a suit of clothes. The result would be two men in the same body. But if this were so, the first man would not have been regenerated or saved either, for this second man would not have committed the sins the first man had. All this is nonsense. There is just one person. The sinner himself has been regenerated. He remembers that he himself, now saved, committed sins in his earlier years. He is the same man. Although this verse does not strictly refer to the creation of Adam, yet the strong metaphor throws light on the original event. Here is says that the new man, after the image of God, was created in righteousness and holiness. If the creation in Genesis had not been in righteousness and holiness, there would have been no basis for the metaphor. Colossians 3:10 is somewhat more explicit: Put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to him who created. Him. The word renewed, while denying a literal creation, indicates that the new man is in some way similar to the original man. Some characteristics lost in the fall have been restored. These characteristics are knowledge and holiness. Then, too, the phrase according to the image of the creator, in Colossians, is a bit clearer than according to God in Ephesians. This identifies mans original and divine image as knowledge and holiness. The common translation true holiness has been changed here to the holiness of the truth. This follows the Greek more closely. Furthermore, the proposed translation makes a good contrast with the ignorance and deceit of the previous verses. So understood, it serves as a rebuke to an anti0intellectualistic age in which truth is de-emphasized. For the philosophically inclined reader, and in opposition to some apologists who may properly be called evidentialists or empiricists, let it be noted that knowledge is an endowment of creation itself. Neither Adam nor his descendants entered the world with a blank mind whose only knowledge would come from sensory impressions. Here, and in other places too, the Bible teaches an a priori philosophy, not an a posteriori one. Pg. 109 Perhaps we could surmise that the prohibition against falsehood comes first, since all sin is a denial of the truth. The thief operates, however unwittingly, on the assumption that God has not prohibited, nor will he punish, thievery. This is false, as is also every other presupposition of sin. Thus truth is basic.

Pgs. 117-119 Instead of darkness, empty words, deceit, fallacious reasoning, the converts are now light they now know the truth. They must therefore alter their speech and the thought on which it depends. To quote Hodge, As light stands for knowledge, and as knowledge, in the scriptural sense of the word, produces holiness, and holiness happiness, so darkness stands for ignorance, such ignorance as inevitably produces sin, and sin, misery (210). There is one point at which Hodges words can be improved upon. Not Hodge alone, but numbers of pastors today. I am sure Hodge would agree, only he did not express it here; and I surmise it is even more prevalent today than it was a century ago. It is common to speak of ignorance or illogical thinking as productive of sin. What is not so commonly understood is that ignorance and irrationality are themselves sin: If not ignorance per se, as if someone had a completely blank mind, but rather false ideas such as ignorant persons usually entertain. It is an ignorance of the truth, not an absence of ideas. These false ideas are, as Hodge says, productive of sin. But, as he does not say here, they are themselves sin. We must obey God in thought and word as well as in deed. This the Ephesian converts had begun to do. They had been darkness; they were now light in the Lord. They had learned what the Gospel was and had believed it. This, I take, is the implication of the words in the Lord. The Ephesians had not become light by accepting the 500-year old teaching of their Heraclitus, but by accepting the account of Christs ministry and especially Pauls explanation of the significance of his death and resurrection. They are no longer deceived; they are to make sure that they will never again be deceived; but rather they must conduct themselves as children of light, possessors of the truth. 5:9 - for the fruit of light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth The editors use dashes to mark this off as a parenthesis. Paul inserted it as an extra reason supporting the exhortation of the context. The noetic effects of sin, that is, the damage or deterioration sin has caused to the human mind, is such that most people find it difficult to think clearly. Students find mathematics difficult. Universal concepts, or more particularly universal propositions, are hard to grasp. What are referred to as abstractions convey no meaning. Now, the Bible was written for all people to read, contrary to the Romish practice of opposing the distribution of the Scriptures. The Romanists were right insofar as they recognized that the Bible contains many difficulties. But because addressed to all people and not the hierarchy only, the Bible by divine revelation often speaks in figures and parables. Such picturesque language is easier to remember, though it is really more difficult to understand. In fact, Christ used parables for the purpose of preventing people from understanding. To get the sense of Scripture accurately, the commentator or student must try to express the meaning in literal language. This is not easy. In some instances it is not easy to determine whether a verse is literal or figurative: for example, This is my body. The difficulty in this verse in Ephesians is not so serious as the one in John, but it is puzzling. The verse says that the fruit of light of course fruit here is not pears or apples, but results is truth. But if

light is a figurative expression for truth, then the verse says that the result of truth is truth. We have no difficulty in understanding that light or truth produces goodness and righteousness, but we do not like to say that truth results in truth. This is a bit too tautological, even though one truth can imply another truth. I have not read all the commentaries ever written, but none of those I have read pays any attention to the difficulty. Pg. 121 While it is true that belief in the truth inevitably produces a degree of righteousness, it is not true that every instance of light shining does so. Surely it does not make wrong right. Nor does it always make wrong-doers righteous. John 1:5 says, The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not grasp it. John 3:19 continues, Light came into the world and men loved the darkness rather than the light. Therefore Hodge and others are incorrect when they say, It illumines or turns into light all it touches or wherever it penetrates (214). Pg. 122 Christians should be wise, not fools. Instead of reacting emotionally to some situation, we are to think carefully. The light is truth and we are obligated to understand the truth and act wisely. Pg. 123 All Scripture is profitable for instruction in righteousness, and by Scripture, and by Scripture alone, is the man of God thoroughly furnished unto all good works. Nothing else is needed except an intellect to understand what Scripture says. Pg. 130 God intended us to understand what he said; nor can anyone believe and reverence what he does not understand. Furthermore a mystery is not something unintelligible or irrational. A mystery is a secret. It is something learned by revelation only. Whether it is hard or easy to understand depends on the subject matter. Pg. 133 Nothing in Scripture is beyond comprehension, for it was all given for our instruction. Pg. 140 The reason why we should be so completely armed as briefly stated in the previous verse is that our enemies are not human. The devil was mentioned, and here we find spiritual, heavenly, cosmic rules or darkness and evil. This worldview, in philosophic terminology a form of Idealism, though not at all idealistic in the common moral sense, is at odds with contemporary American and European theology. The Neo-orthodox want it demythologized.

The educational establishment pounds Behaviorism into students brains. Not only state universities but even Christian colleges teach much the same psychology. Donald M. MacKays The Clock-Work Image, claiming to be Christian, describes human thinking as a series of circuits in an electric sign board. Since their remains no message after the circuits burn out, there can be no immortality. The New Testament, on the contrary, and the Old as well, teach that the real word is not so much trees and rocks as it is souls, minds, and spirits. No doubt there is an Emperor in Rome and a proconsul somewhere, but the more important operators are heavenly evil spirits. No wonder we need the panoply of God rather than literal swords and atom bombs. Pg. 143 the Christian must study all the Bible. Memorize lots of it. And then when taken unawares, it will be given you what to say. But the Holy Spirit will not cause you to remember what you never read. Of course if you are afraid to meet the public, you can go and hide your talent in the earth. Pg. 158 The wording the word of the truth of the Gospel sounds clumsy in English. Ephesians 1:13 has a similar, though clearer, phrase: the word of truth, the Gospel of your salvation, These phrases are not to be taken to mean the true Gospel, as if distinguishing it from some inaccurate account of the Gospel. Even a Christian can speak of the true doctrine of Hinduism, if he wishes to correct a mistaken account of that religion. What Paul emphasizes here, on the contrary, is that the Gospel is true, as even the most accurate account of Hinduism is not. The Gospel, the good news, the doctrine (word) is the doctrine of truth. God is the God of truth; if we know the truth, the truth will set us free; as Jesus said, Sanctify them through the truth your word is truth. This truth is what the Colossians believed. Pg. 159 Contrary to the emotionalism of the Pentecostals, contrary to a quieter pietism, and as well contrary to the Neo-orthodox or dialectical encounter that annihilates two thousand years of time in the crisis of a moment, the Gospel is information, good news, truth. It is something heard, something to be known or understood. The grace of God comes in or by truth. It is something to be learned. As the Puritans used to say, Christianity is taught, not caught. It was Epaphras who had taught the Colossians. They learned the Gospel from him. Any denigration of the meaning the intellectual context, the truth of the good news is a rejection of the Gospel itself. Pgs. 160-161 Apologetics is a difficult subject. Thomas Aquinas, William Pale, and others have held that the existence of God can be demonstrated by a series of valid syllogisms starting with the data of sensation. Their proofs obviously depend on the possibility of knowing something about the

physical universe; that is, they depend on a certain amount of scientific knowledge. This knowledge is not obtained from Gods written revelation, but from laboratory experiment. Other apologists not only deny that the syllogisms in question are valid, but also take a skeptical view of science. Calvin seems here to limit knowledge, or right knowledge, to what may be deduced from the assertions of Scripture. Scripture is the only rule of right knowledge. Calvin is not willing to designate the changing theories of science as knowledge. Calvin may indeed be right. But this verse by itself does not prove that he is. Let us therefore see precisely what this verse says. The Apostle Paul was a very logical thinker. He takes care to show the relationships among his ideas. Verse 9 begins with therefore. What then is the connection between this verse and what precedes? Try the possibilities. It is no so much a matter of Greek syntax, but of logical connection. Did Paul pray for the Colossians because Epaphras told him about them? This makes good sense, for if Paul had never heard of the Colossians, or if knowing there was such a city, but not knowing of any Christians there, he could not have prayed for them. Pgs. 161-162 That Paul throughout the epistle emphasizes knowledge cannot be doubted. Indeed this is a point that needs emphasis in our pragmatic, anti-intellectual age. But so frequent is Pauls emphasis on knowledge that one need not resort to irrelevant etymologies. Actually, New Testament usage evinces little or no difference between the two terms. Of course the knowledge here in view is not a knowledge of botany or astronomy, but a knowledge of Gods will. One commentator (A. S. Peake) wises to restrict the knowledge of Gods will to knowledge of moral principles. That moral principles are included in quite clear in verse 10; but verse 9 is more inclusive. The knowledge of his will must certainly be the whole counsel of God, as Paul indicates in Acts 20:27. He would not make a truncated knowledge the ideal for the Colossians. Nor for us today. This idea of the greatest possible knowledge is emphasized by the phrase in all wisdom. The commentator just mentioned in disagreement is nevertheless allows that wisdom embraces the whole range of mental faculties, and understanding is the special faculty of intelligence or insight which discriminates between the false and the true. Thus Paul, like John in his Gospel, emphasized truth. Mere feelings and fleeting emotions cannot compare with absolute, unchanging, eternal truth. To repeat, in order to avoid all careless misunderstanding, Paul is not referring to botany or astronomy. He is speaking of the will of God, and hence writes in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; or equally correct, in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. Paul does not recommend a minimal, superficial knowledge. As he says elsewhere (1 Corinthians 3:2; see also Hebrews 5:12,13), mild may be fine for newborn babes, but mature men need strong meat. So here he does not prescribe a teaspoonful before meals. He wants us to be full of all wisdom and understanding. Pg. 164 Light often symbolizes truth, and darkness, error.

Pg. 173 It is more likely, though that is not saying much, that Paul is opposing the Stoics and Epicureans. At least he acknowledges their existence in Acts 17:18; but this was in Athens and not Colosse. However, even if he did not have these two schools in mind, since they both restricted reality to matter, that is, something that occupies space, Pauls words apply to them because he insists that spiritual entities are as real as physical objects, and indeed superior to them, for like God they are invisible. Pg. 174 If the universe was created and organized by him, there was a first moment for the universe, but no first moment for Christ. Strictly speaking, a non-temporal eternity is not temporally prior to anything; but for us who are essentially temporal creatures it is hard to think and express the relation of time to eternity. So Paul says that Christ was before all things. Pgs. 188-189 Once again, before changing the subject matter, we can observe that the idea of Gods administration of the historical development ties in with the predestinarian note in the preceding verse. That Pauls ministry was a matter of predestination is clearly evident from the asserted fact that it was according to Gods economy, dispensation, or administration that Paul became a servant and enjoyed even his hardships. The repetition of the term diakonos contrasts with princes of the Church, whose feet or ring the faithful servant must kiss (see Matthew 20:25). God did, however, give Paul a dispensation or administration. What was Paul then to dispense of administer? Of what was he a steward? How in particular was he to serve? The King James Version gives an easy answer: to fulfill the word of God. Well, no doubt Paul was going to fulfill some Old Testament prophecies. The Revised Standard Version translates it, to make the word of God fully known, a good idea, perhaps, but not a good translation. Luthers Bible says, das sich das Wort Gottes reichlick predigen soll, that I should richly preach the Word of God. Ostervald in French has the same thing. The Words to you perhaps indicate a rich preaching of the Word, rather than a fulfilling of prophecy. One does not quite speak of fulfilling prophecies to someone. Ministers certainly preach to people, but there may be something more here also. To fill up the Word of God may mean to complete the divine revelation. Protestants claim that the canon was closed or completed with the death of the apostles. Since then God has revealed nothing. Thus Paul is conscious that he is to fill up the Word of God. Should anyone say that John lived longer than Paul and wrote after him, so that Paul did not complete the Word of God, we may reply, first, that the dates of Johns Gospel and the Revelation may be much earlier than early twentieth-century suppositions put them; but second, and more likely, Paul regards this completion as a part of the apostolic office, so that his statement here refers not only to himself, but to the other apostles also. With this in mind, it is clear that Paul considers his epistles as the Word of God, its last chapter, so to speak. In the late twentieth century it has become popular to speak of Pauls writings as culturally conditioned, and therefore not applicable to us today, at least in this or that regard.

To decide which, if any, of Pauls sentences are not culturally conditioned, and therefore useful for the church now, it is necessary to frame some criteria on the basis of this centurys wisdom. Hence instead of the principle of sola Scriptura, and by saving faith believing to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word, for the authority for God himself speaking therein (Westminster Confession, XIV, ii), these people use their own authority and sit in judgment over the Word of God. Pg. 196 What does the wealth of a Christian consist of? Answer: It consists of the fulness of the understanding. Ones full conviction of the understanding is the settled and fixed persuasion that one comprehends the truth, and that it is the truth that is comprehended. Such a one is not blown hither and yon by every wind of doctrine. A person ever learning and never able to grasp the truth is not Pauls ideal. Pg. 196 Paul emphasizes understanding and intelligence, for after writing all the wealth of the full conviction of the intelligence, he repeats the idea in a parallel phrase, knowledge of the secret of God, of Christ. Some commentators (for example, Eadie and Lightfoot) take gnosis as plain knowledge, and epignosis as much fuller knowledge. That Paul is intensely interested in knowledge, in full knowledge, in strong meat rather than babies milk, is indubitable; but the point does not depend on the prepositional prefix. There is little if any discernible difference in usage. The idea of full knowledge comes with words such as full, all wisdom, mature or perfect, rather than with upon (epi, the prefix). Pg. 198 To return for a final moment to modern science, one notes that the word all implies that science is neither wisdom nor knowledge. Knowledge, in its objective sense of truth, never changes. Science has always been changing, with an ever-increasing acceleration. There is no truth in physics and chemistry. Pg. 200 This definite, or indefinite, man may succeed by his philosophy and empty deceit. Sometimes this verse is used to discourage Christians from studying philosophy. One example is a seminary president who rigidly excludes from the curriculum any course in apologetics. Whether or not he quotes Tertullians famous question, What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? it should be noted that had Tertullian studied more philosophy, he might have avoided materialism. In fact, those Christians who know little logic and less philosophy are precisely the ones who are most apt to be deceived by persuasive fallacies. As a non-theological layman can be deceived by Jehovahs Witnesses or some other heretical theory, so a person whose mind is formed by current opinion does not know the sources of his ideas and therefore dilutes what little Bible he knows with themes from Hegelianism, Logical Positivism, or, more usually in the present decades, Existentialism.

Pg. 201 Since Colossians is a religious and not a scientific production, some commentators take the term elements to mean cosmic spirits, or even demonic powers, who control phenomena. This interpretation gains some weak support from the principalities and powers of 1:16 and 2:10, 15. But, first, Paul never teaches that cosmic spirits and demons control phenomena. Second, the context indicates something different. Note that the phrase according to the elements of the cosmos better, the first principles of the cosmos is about instruction, philosophy, traditions, and persuasive paralogisms. Later in the chapter, 2:20-23, he is more specific. These verses concern the rudiments the same word elements of the world. Verse 21 identifies one. It is a maxim or precept. Therefore it is better to understand these worldly elements as being the axioms, presuppositions, or even the main theorems of false religions. Paul doubtless had Judaism in mind, but the exhortation is completely general. The contrast comes in theology, doctrines, beliefs, teachings, according to Christ. So once again the reader is returned to the great Christological passage in chapter 1. Pg. 204 No doubt we are filled with, or, better, from the fullness of the Godhead filled with the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. But the emphasis falls on him who fills us out of his storehouse of treasure. We have been filled by Christ. Augustine and Calvin did not fill us, though God surely used them as means. The analogy of the glass, like all analogies, is further defective. When a glass is filled, it does nothing itself. But our filling requires some activity on our part. We must read the Bible, pay attention to a sermon, follow the tedious intricacies of this commentary, and meditate day and night. No doubt God causes us to do these things; nevertheless, and therefore, it is we who do them. The verb here is not imperative. The verse is declarative: You have been filled. But even to receive information, it is necessary to pay attention. Pg. 210 Once more, modern readers need to be reminded that the universe is not restricted to rocks, trees, and stars observable by eyesight. The twentieth century is philosophically empirical and humanistic. Sensation is not only the test of truth versus falsity, but even the criterion of meaningfulness. In contradiction to this a Christian sees the universe sees, not with his eyeballs and retina, but with his mind as including angels, demons, spiritual beings, and sovereign over them all, the three persons of the Trinity. In the wars of religion the Christian may use ad hominem arguments based on humanistic presuppositions, but he must never be deceived into operating on these as if they were his own. Pg. 218 The context prevents the word elements from meaning the elements of the physical universe, the scientific principles of earth, air, fire, and water. Nor will it allow them to be spirits or demons,

as Moule seems to think. Rather, these elements are moral and religious principles which appear good to those minds that do not submit to Gods revealed Word. They are certain worldly decrees. To such decrees or taboos a Christian should not submit. If we died with Christ and were freed from the popular opinions of the world, and in this case particularly from the taboos of some sect, why should we live according to such standards? That Paul means moral opinions and standards, rather than either atoms or spirits, is clear from the example he immediately appends: Touch not, taste not, handle not. Pg. 228 The remainder of this verse is of considerable importance for theology. In what sense in the Christian a new man? Why does Paul mention the image of the Creator? The deity of Christ and his agency in creation were well motivated in 1:15 ff. But what in particular has creation now to do with ceasing to blaspheme and tell lies. The first link of the connection is the fact of regeneration. Regeneration is a second generation. It results in restoring to man, gradually, the original image of God that was defaced, defiled, deformed, depraved, though not destroyed. This verse fixes the chief characteristic of that image, namely, knowledge. In Ephesians 4:24 the new man is created in righteousness and holiness of truth. The text in Colossians does not deny that the image is characterized by righteousness and holiness. But it must be understood that righteousness is impossible without knowledge and truth. The non-rational animals cannot sin, because they have no understanding. God imposed no moral laws on them. He have them no verbal revelation. They and mankind are disparate species because man is Gods image a rational or knowing spirit. Sin damaged mans mind. Sin did not invalidate the laws of logic, for these are the laws of Gods own thought. Sin did not affect arithmetic. Two and two are still four; but on our check stubs we sometimes put three or five. The laws of thought are unaffected, but man as a sinner violates these laws. As with mistakes in arithmetic, so too men make mistakes in argumentation. They commit the fallacies of undistributed middle, the assertion of the consequent, and incomplete disjunction. Theology gives to such blunders the somewhat pedantic name of noetic effects of sin. Let it be noted that a logical blunder, wrong thinking, quickly and inevitably leads to overt sin. Before Eve and Adam bit into the fruit, they had swallowed a bad thought. Some exegetes reject the reference to Gods original creation of Adam and wish to restrict the meaning to his creation of the new man. The wording renders this impossible. The ana in anakainoumenon means over again. Man is re-newed. But a renewal presupposes a previous condition, and it is this previous condition to which according to the image of the Creator refers. The creation and the renewal are not the same event. The latter is possible only on the supposition of the former. God, of course, renews; God, of course, created. God created all; he renews only some. But these restrictions in no way remove from the verse the idea of the original creation. Man is renewed according to the original image, namely knowledge. Now Paul urges the Colossians to avoid falsehood, on the ground that they are men renewed to knowledge and truth in accordance with the original image of their Creator.

Pg. 229 The image of God, rationality, is the distinctive characteristic of the whole human race. Pg. 237 Surely Paul sees no paradox in explaining Gods secrets in public. God revealed the secrets so that at first the Jews and later all nations should understand them. Paul labors under the necessity of explanation. This is how he must speak. Paradox? No; utter clarity. Pgs. 239-240 As the epistle approaches its last line, the wording becomes very concise. The meaning obviously is that the Laodiceans are to send to the Colossians a letter they have. This letter might be a now lost Pauline epistle. But not necessarily. If the epistle to the Ephesians be a circular letter, the Laodiceans may have had a copy that Paul here requests to be forwarded to Colosse. The text does not identify it as a letter to the Laodiceans, but a letter from Laodicea. This from can hardly be a letter from Laodicea to Paul, nor surely to Colosse; it is simply a letter that is now in Laodicea and should be sent from there to Colosse. Pg. 257 The next phrase speaks of much assurance. To repeat the context: knowingyour election of God, for our Gospel camein powerand in much assurance. But what was so assured? One commentator says that Paul preaches with much assurance which no one can doubt that he did and another says that the Thessalonians were assured of the truth of the Gospel which indeed they were. It is possible, but very doubtful, that Paul meant both. It seems best to take verse 5 as reasons why Paul knew that the Thessalonians were an elect people. The first reason was that the Gospel came to them in power; the second is the assurance of the Thessalonians themselves. The following expression bears out this interpretation: assurance as you know what sort of men we were. These words make two things clear. First, Pauls assurance could not be based on their knowledge of what sort of man he was. Second, that is precisely the reasonable basis for the Thessalonians assurance. Then Paul, recognizing their assurance, was convinced of their election. Pg. 259 From verse 5 on, Pauls intention is to show how he knows that the Thessalonians are Gods elect. He gives two chief reasons: his own character and powerful preaching; and, second, the response of the Thessalonians. Pg. 272 One cannot escape the conclusion that the so-called main line denominations are apostate. Paul in these verses said that his preaching was not the word of man, but, as it is in truth, the Word of God. There is a tiny bit of interesting emphasis here. One might expect you received it not as

the word of menbut as the Word of God. Neither as is in the text. Read it again. Furthermore, (kaths, just as) does not serve as an as in the phrase as the word of men, but introduces and is limited to just as it is in truth. The King James at least italicizes the first as. The inerrancy of Scripture is foundational to Christianity. If Pauls assertion that his Gospel came from God is false, we have no means of knowing how often he and the other Biblical writers have deceived us. But what criterion could we determine that John 3:16 or Genesis 1:1 was truth? Was it Bultmann who somewhere admitted, We cannot know a single thing Christ ever did or said? In his Vie de Jsus, Renan pictured him as a teacher of innocuous moral platitudes. But aside from the impossibility of knowing whether the Bible reports the platitudes correctly, Renan gives us no reason for supposing the advice is good. Today churches receive and ordain homosexuals. O Sodom, O Gomorrah! Here a philosophic note on ethics is pertinent. Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and even some minor Christian apologetes of the empirical school think that they can establish norms, called natural morality, on the basis of experience. It is very easy to show that this is impossible. A basic principle of logic is that a conclusion must not contain any term not already present in the premises. If the premises are concerned with dogs only, the conclusion can say nothing about cats. Now, in empiricism all the premises are allegedly factual statements of observational data: The cat is black, Jesse James was an outlaw, Louis XIV ruled France in the seventeenth century. But from such purely factual or observational propositions no evaluative conclusions can ever follows. Where there is no ought in the premises, there can be no ought in the conclusion. Empirical propositions can have only the copula is. The Logical Positivists of the mid-twentieth century recognized this and concluded that ethical statements are neither true nor false: They are simply nonsense. Even when Kant develops concepts by applying the categories to chaotic sensations, God, freedom, and immortality are beyond the range of knowledge. When society accepts such theories, what it needs is the Word of God. Pg. 279 The Bible does indeed exhibit logical levels, just as mathematics includes first grade arithmetic, high school trigonometry, and college calculus. Similarly, the doctrine of the Trinity is fundamental; the crucifixion and resurrection are essential; and other doctrines provide a moral accurate understanding of these. Pg. 286 Here there is a distinct break in the subject matter. For moral injunctions Paul turns to eschatology. Yet the break is not total. Even if the connection were more obscure than it is in this passage, we know that God is a God of truth and wisdom. He is not scatter-brained, and every part of his revelation fits together in a great logical system. Pg. 309 Some descriptions are less serious than others, though the deceived can be deceived as to which are which. When a deception becomes widespread, even on a minor point, it can become

dangerous. In our day the anti-Scriptural contrast between the head and heart has vitiated the personal Christianity of thousands of believers. Finally this widespread denigration of the intellect, and therefore of the truth, has resulted in minimizing all deception on the ground that knowledge is worthless, while feeling, emotion, ecstasy is the essence of sanctification. Because of this anti-intellectualism, we should note that Paul said, Let no one deceive you in any way. Pg. 312 Parenthetically, it is worth noting that one commentator uses our ignorance of Pauls meaning as an argument proving the unreliability of tradition and the necessity of a written revelation. Pauls own converts knew what he had said; they presumably told the next generation of converts what Paul had said; but within 350 years or less the information had been lost. It is highly likely that traditions which have survived have been altered in various ways. We therefore thank God for a written revelation. Pg. 314 The subject of Satanic miracles has modern repercussions too. A recent book on Classical Apologetics tries to prove the divine origin and infallibility of the Bible on the premise that the Bible contains accounts of Gods miracles. This is circular reasoning: How do you know the Bible is Gods Word? Because it contains accounts of Gods miracles. How do you know that the accounts are true? Because they are in Gods inerrant Scripture! If anyone wish to prove that the Bible is a divine revelation, his premise cannot be the Bible itself. One does not prove the Pythagorean theorem on the basis that the squares of the other two sides equal the square of the hypotenuse. Pg. 314 In contrast with the false wonders wonders done in support of falsehood the verse continues with the love of the truth. This is not a New Testament novelty. Psalm 119:97 asserts, O how love I your law! It is my meditation all the day. And in verse 165 the Psalmist adds, Great peace have they which love your law. This love of the truth is, naturally, and in this verse explicitly, denied of those who are perishing, because they did not receive the love of the truth for their salvation. Pg. 315 people who really believe in God, that is, people who believe in the real God, must, unless deranged, believe in unchangeable truth. This emphasis on God as truth gives many Fundamentalists a case of schizophrenia. They will admit, indeed insist, on the truth of the virgin birth and the atonement, but then true to their antiScriptural contrast between the head and the heart they deteriorate into illogical emotionalism. To one of these strongly evangelistic pastors I quoted Romans 10:9-10: If you shall confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved. He reacted with positive negativism. On no, he said, its nothing like that; and he went

on for a few moments with unintelligible twaddle. The Bible definitely states that if one believes these two truths, these two propositions, namely, that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead, that one shall be saved. Lest anyone misunderstand, let it be noted that the term confess implies sincerity. And, we may add, believe presupposes understanding. A true Christian, by definition, loves the truth. He must oppose both the existential emotionalism of the so-called Neo-orthodox and also those scientists who have a zeal for truth but do not have the truth. One further caveat. Some insist that God is love. So he is. It is true that God is love. But in many cases these people do not know what love is Biblical love, not television love. In the history of Christian theology love has always been a volition, not an emotion. Paul in the passage from which, at least seemingly, we have diverged, describes the perishing as those who did not receive the knowledge of the truth for their salvation. They did not will to know. To support the truth of this verse in Thessalonians, a few corroborative passages can serve to conclude this section. The Gospel of John is full of grace and truth. The Logosfull of grace of truth (1:14). Grace and truth cam be Jesus Christ (1:17). You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free (8:32). I am the way, the truth, and the life (14:6). The Comforterthe Spirit of truth (15:26). Sanctify them through your truth: Your Word is truth (17:17). These should be enough, but many people will fail to feel their force. Pg. 319 Since God is omniscient, which a pastor of the Moody Church in Chicago discreetly but in consistency denied some fifty years ago, since, therefore, all his plans form an inviolable system, his choice has several determinate results. Here Paul mentions two: first, salvation in the form of sanctification; and second, belief in the truth. Pgs. 320-321 The original Protestant position was to reject all Romish traditions and accept the Bible alone. Even in Pauls day Christ had already condemned the traditions of the Jews. Jesus pointedly asked the Pharisees, Why do you also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition? You have made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition (Matthew 15:3, 6). Mark also has a paragraph ending with in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of menmaking the Word of God of none effect through your tradition (7:313). Can Paul then place his stamp of approval on the traditions Rome would later impose? No, not at all, for Paul puts a strict limitation on his exhortation: hold the traditions which you have been taught either by word or by letter from us. This limits his intention to his own preaching and his own writing. Any subsequent adumbrations invented six or eight centuries or six or eight days later are excluded.

Modern Philosophy, 2008 Pg. 24 the possibility of intelligible speech presupposes the existence of entities that remain unchanged for some finite time, and conversely the theory of universal change makes speech and knowledge impossible. Pg. 27 Every philosopher and every system of philosophy must start somewhere, and obviously nothing can be prior to the starting point. Pg. 27 No doubt something must be a self-evident indemonstrable starting point; but is it self-evident that natural motion cannot be explained by collision and impact? Pg. 28 This is a constant trouble with philosophic subjects. One hardly begins a topic before one discovers that another matter calls for prior attention. We are always being pushed back or forward, until it seems impossible to solve any one problem without solving all. Omniscience is the prerequisite, and omniscience is hard to come by. Pg. 58 Fixed and eternal truth is not to be discarded. Pg. 69 When a philosopher asserts that all knowledge is relative, he fails to recognize that he violates his own principle by asserting it. This statement he never considers relative and tentative; this statement he never intends to replace by its contradictory. Hence, the relativists are absolutists in spite of themselves. Pg. 105 After complaining that one of his critics refuses to identify any sort of motion of atoms with a thought, and this makes the whole thing trying (36), Singer seems to fumble in describing the position of his opponents. In desperation, so to speak, he explains, Will any theory that substitutes a Ding an sich for observable phenomena ever win to extinction? (37, 38). This is not an error when it is directed against theories that posit unknowables. A transcendental unity of apperception, if it be a Ding an sich beyond the reach of logical categories is useless. Hegel once and for all disposed of Kants unknowable, but this did not make Hegel an empirical Behaviorist. An attack on Kant does not refute Augustine or Calvin, any more than it refutes Hegel. In these

latter the soul or mind is not a Ding an sich. If there be any Ding an sich around, they are more likely to be the so-called observable objects. Singer may have disposed of Kant, but he leaves Plato untouched. One thing is indubitable: Singer in his refutation documents the Behavioristic thesis that thought is some kind of atomic motion. Pg. 133 Without universals, such as courage, liliaceae, and even red, the contents of the mind, if there be a mind at all, do not merit the name of knowledge. Without subjects and predicates there is no truth, and every predicate is a universal. Pgs. 141 Experience is always finite and induction is always a fallacy. Pg. 150 Regardless of science, however, there are absolute reasons for rejecting every theory of two-fold truth. There are indeed different areas of truth. One may speak of botanical truth or astronomical truth. Within any single science there are a thousand objects to be known. But an epistemology must justify all truth on the basis of a single system under pain of suicidal schizophrenia. Pg. 168 The exposition of Russells philosophy, for the present purpose, ought to stay close to his views on language. But any theory of language soon merges with psychology, logic, and perhaps metaphysics, not to mention epistemology. Pg. 174 Now, first, the brief intellectual biography at the beginning noted that Russell early renounced Hegelianism and became an empiricist. This change started with an attack on Bradleys, and Hegels, theory of internal relations and the substitution of an atomic theory of external relations. The former, holding that everything is implicated in everything, results in an absolute monism. The definition of cat, for example, is part of the definition of dog, and also of Betelgeuse. For Russell, relations are external to the objects related. These relations, though it seems strange because it is hard to see what color above and to the left of are, or to hear what noises uncle and is greater than give off. However, such are the atoms of Russells world. In conformity with this, propositions are true in isolation. A proposition is true if it corresponds to an atomic fact or a combination of them. The car is in the garage is true if we see a car, a garage, and an in. Thus, language consists of words, each of which designates a sensory individual. To be fair to Russell, one must acknowledge that he later modified such an absurdity. He came to doubt the reality of is and the, if not in. The non-realities he then explained as the Logical

Positivists did later, as parts of a logical framework without objective referents. This framework became his symbolic logic. Pg. 175 Is any proposition true in isolation? Would an atom by itself be the same regardless of how the rest of the world might change? There are plausible examples that it would not. Here is a rock that weighs six pounds. But if an astronaut carries it into space it weighs approximately zero. When he drops it on the Moon, it weighs one pound. The truth of these propositions depends of the relation of the rock to the other parts of the universe. No one is true in isolation. Obesity is cured by a trip to the Moon. Another example is a piece of canvas painted half red and half green or any other two colors. Through these two halves of the canvas paint a stroke of gray, a mixture of black and white; but it will not be gray on the canvas. The single stoke of paint will be one color on the top half and a different color on the bottom half. Since everything seen has a background, its color is a function of its background. It is false to say it remains what it is no matter how the rest of the universe changes. One further example. It there were no sense of sight, there would be no sense of hearing. If there were nothing hard, there would be nothing soft. If there were no animals, there could be no plants. The reason is that each of these terms expresses a distinction from its opposites. Sight is a form of non-hearing. Were they the same, we might have the term sensation, but we would not have two terms of different meaning. The terms plant and animal would not apply to different objects, if there were no different objects. There might be living beings, but no plants and animals. Similarly, there would be no living beings, if there were no non-living beings. This should be sufficient to dispose of logical atomism. Pg. 179 Now, Russell openly admits some metaphysics; Wittgenstein does so less openly; but the strict Logical Positivists, as will be plain and evident in the next section on Carnap, abhor all metaphysics with a holy hatred no, unholy, for holy is too theological. But the theory of a pluralistic universe is itself metaphysical. As a universal proposition it cannot be established by finite observations. As metaphysical it should be ruled out by Positivistic theory of language. But it permeates Logical Positivism. Pg. 181 Other minor criticisms may surface on later pages, but here two fundamental objections demand attention: One has to do with the idea of picture, and a second with the idea of representation or correspondence. This second point, the correspondence theory of knowledge, faces the insuperable objection that it disallows any knowledge of reality at all. Whatever reality may be, whether individuals like trees and rocks, or Platonic Ideas, or whatever, this theory provides us only with pictures of them. The object of knowledge is therefore a representation and not the reality itself. Since the mind contains only the picture and never the thing, there is no

possibility of knowing whether the representation is similar to the object or not. To recognize a similarity between two things, they must be compared, and hence both must be in the mind. But if the reality is in the mind, the picture with its similarity is useless. If the reality is not in the mind, the picture, so far as we know, is a picture of nothing. There is hardly any more objection to empiricism more fundamental than this one. Pg. 195 Does not the very possibility of tautology depend on the law of contradiction? Deny contradiction and its obverse, the law of identity and tautologies cannot occur. But if this be so, logical principles cannot be independent of each other: they must form a system of obversion, contraposition, transitivity, and so on. Pg. 225 without the intuition of an object, there would be no stimulus to expression. Why or how could anyone invent a word, other than a nonsense syllable, if he had nothing to express? The meaning must come first and the symbol second. As electricity was being studied in early modern times, the experimenters noticed certain relationships. To that date, no names had been given them. They had not been known before, so that there was nothing to name. But when the intuitions occurred, the scientists took the name of three of their own number, Volta, Ampre, and Ohm, and assigned these names to the level of energy, the quantity of current, and the resistance. Only after a person has a thought can he give it a name. Pg. 226 Neo-nominalism abolishes all substantive: All is flux and names distort reality. If universals are unreal, individuals are too, for the mere naming of a thing is a minimal universal. Neonominalism therefore has no things, but only events. But this makes nonsense of (1) perceptual meaning; (2) value meanings; and (3) descriptions; then (4) because it makes nonsense of metaphysics, it makes nonsense of all empirical meaning, for the former conditions the latter Pgs. 226-227 Sometimes Urban is not only perceptive, but witty as well. The several theories of truth, he says correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic cannot be shown to correspond to truth. Coherence coheres with nothing. And the Pragmatic theory does not work. Therefore the neoPositivists conclude that the meaning of truth is a meaningless question, for if meaning is always in reference to a sensory object, truth can have no meaning because it refers to no object: The truth of the criteria is truth only of interpretation. Pg. 231 Any theory of language depends on a view concerning the extent of possible knowledge and the methods of learning.

Pg. 232 A noun all by itself is neither true nor false. Knowledge (and is not knowledge the possession of a truth?) always comes in propositions. Otherwise language could not express a truth. Therefore the intellect does not grasp individual material things. It is also impossible to know mental things, if there are such. Is the concept of two an individual thing? Whether or not, the concept of two, all by itself, is unknowable. One plus one equals two can be known, and we assert it as a truth; but the number two, alone, like the oak tree, is neither true nor false. The content of knowledge is always propositional. This view allows the intellect to do something besides drawing conclusions. It can know premises as well as conclusions. Call is simplex intuitus, or contemplation, or understanding, it is different from drawing an implication. Axioms can never be conclusions. But all truth comes in propositions. One can somewhat anticipate how this view of truth can apply to a theory of language. Pg. 236-237 Bushnell raised a question as to how a code could originate. It is a legitimate problem. But there is no difficulty in defending the adequacy of codes. The letters d-o-g and the letters H-u-n-d and the letters c-h-i-e-n are all adequate to represent a certain type of animal. Symbols are always adequate, just because they are symbols. It seems useless to question the adequacy of theological language. If theological thought can be defended, the language will take care of itself. A person may indeed think of cat or God at the wrong time; and he may say chien when he means chat, but this is no defect in language as such. Therefore, if one has an idea of the shapeless number that solves the equation x2 + 1 = 0, any symbol will do. Pg. 254 It takes intelligence to construct symbols; only because man is distinguished from other animals can he do so. Moreover, before a man constructs a symbol, he must have something in mind to symbolize. A primitive man would never invent the sound or symbol cat, unless he had first seen a twitching tail and heard its other end say meow. Pg. 255 the idea that if God speaks in words, he is somehow bound by an alien force, is a thoroughgoing misrepresentation. The words themselves are mere signs or symbols. They designate ideas or truths. If God cannot use symbols to express his truth, he is indeed bound and gagged. A God who cannot speak is not omnipotent. In fact in such a case God would be more limited than man, for a man can speak. Pg. 263 Propositions, not concepts, are the objects of knowledge because only proposition can be true. Pg. 265

Because animals are non-rational, they cannot sin. Man could and Adam did. The very possibility of sin depends on a law that God imposes and that man can understand. Pgs. 265-266 Urban distinguished between signs and symbols. If this distinction be accepted, words are signs. Even if his onomatopoeic words are symbols, it does him little good, for there is no inherent quality in the sound of dog, chien, or Hund to make them mean a certain type of animal. Any sign would be adequate. The real issue is: Does a man have the idea to symbolize? If he can think of God, then he can use the sound God, Deus, Theos, or Elohim. The word makes no difference; the sign is ipso facto literal and adequate. Those who resort to myth, parables, or imagery pictorial symbols used for inconceivable objects and who declare that that language is inherently inadequate and the mind inherently incompetent to speak about God, deny that God is able to attach signs to thoughts and to create a mind that can understand the thoughts. Pg. 267 To repeat, even if it seems wearisome: Logic is fixed, universal, necessary, and irreplaceable. As such its laws cannot be deduced from nor abstracted from experience. If dog, cat, typewriter, as well as Wort, Geist, and That, all mean the same thing as they must apart from the law of contradiction empiricism can express nothing. Pg. 267-268 Perhaps the problem of communication has here been somewhat neglected in the effort to defend logical thinking. But if symbols are always adequate simply because the thinker chooses an otherwise meaningless sound or mark to designate his idea, there remains the difficulty of communicating the idea by means of the symbol to another mind. This is a point dear to the heart of Christian empiricists. Dont you read your Bible? they ask. Dont you see the words on the page? Now, these questions deserve an answer, and it shall be given. But note first that the empiricist has a harder time explaining communication than the rationalist or intellectualist has. How can sensationism produce a sound that conveys a meaning from one mind to another? Since my sensation is never yours, how can you ever know what the sensation is to which I attach to a sound or ink mark? The empirical apologists usually evade this problem. Augustine, with his Platonic background, did not evade. His discussion constitutes the second half of his tractate De Magistro. The good bishop showed, conclusively I should say, that the ostensive definitions of Logical Positivisms protocol sentences are failures. His solution was, briefly, not that two minds had the same sensations, but that two minds have the same idea. The ideas are common because Christ is the Logos that lights every man that comes into the world. In him we live and move and have our being. Malebranche, perhaps not to be followed in every detail, for no mere man is, used the figurative phrase, We see all things in God. Perhaps a modern example will prove useful.

Pg. 270 one should note that no one can ever hear a piece of music or a line of poetry. Our opponents, who insist on sensation as the origin of knowledge, cannot well object to an instance taken from experience. Augustine pointed out that to hear music or poetry, one must at least perceive the rhythm. But there is no rhythm in a single sensation. Even beyond perception it is necessary to have memory before a line of poetry can be recognized as poetry. A single sound has no rhythm or meter. The first sounds of a line must be remembered until the last sound occurs; note also that the first sound longer exists when the last sound sounds. Therefore no one ever senses music or poetry. This Augustinian remark should satisfy any empiricist; but it is not exegesis. Pg. 272 Explicitly in I John the object is the truth or proposition, God is light. This proposition cannot be seen in any literal sense. Therefore, since words are arbitrary signs, whose meaning is fixed by ordinary language, the hundreds of Scriptural verbs to which empirical apologetics refer do not support the role of sensation which presumably though they are never clear on what this role is those apologists desire to give it. To finish, once and for all, with the question Dont you read your Bible? Abraham Kuyper in The Work of the Holy Spirit (I, 4, 57), beginning with a quotation from Geuido de Bres, says, That which we call Holy Scripture is not paper with black impressions. Those letters are but tokens of recognition; those words are only clicks of the telegraph key signaling thoughts to our spirits alone the lines of our visual and auditory nerves. And the thoughts so signaled are not isolated and incoherent, but parts of a complete system that is directly antagonistic to mans thought, yet enters their sphere. The analogy may still be too Behavioristic, but the main thought is sound. One or two other points that Reymond makes are also worthy of mention. I have mentioned that, taking the Scriptural truths as axioms, all knowledge is deducible from them.* * A technical qualification is that some Scriptural truths may be deduced from other. In such cases the former would not be axioms. Pgs. 273-274 The one piece of ignorance that Reymond seems most anxious to press against my view is knowledge of oneself. Self-knowledge has indeed been a philosophical ideal ever since Socrates said, Gnthi seauton. But it is very difficult. Plotinus Enneads, the extreme difficulty of which philosophers all acknowledge, can be understood as a gigantic attempt to achieve selfknowledge. Even those who think the ideal is possible of attainment must wonder whether anyone has succeeded. Now, Dr. Reymond laments that, on my theory, Reymond is unknowable to himself and to everyone else except God (110). He very correctly and adequately explains my reasons for saying so. I might add that I would be delighted to know

Reymond myself, for he is a most interesting and gracious conversationalist. But two factors preclude this desideratum. First, Reymond is not a simple object of knowledge. Reymond is a name given to a very lengthy complex of propositions. On Reymonds position it must be possible to know some of these propositions without knowing others. On his position, if I dare guess at it, this must be the case. It is only a guess because he never says who or what he is. So perhaps Reymond does not know himself. This is not too surprising. Pendennis did not know himself. Or if this literary reference is not sufficiently classical, neither did Oedipus Rex. But these are only irritating ad hominem remarks. Like the Duchess little boy, I only do it to annoy, because I know it teases. Second, the Scripture says, The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? Did Peter know himself when he said, Although all shall be offended, yet will not I? Did Dr. X, who as a young man strenuously championed the truth in his epistles, know himself? Did Mr. Y, a good seminary student, know that he would die an alcoholic? Did tragic Z, a most faithful servant of the Lord for many years, know that he would be a suicide? Who can know himself? Maybe God is merciful in not revealing that knowledge to us. In addition to the two Scriptural references in the precious paragraph, consider Psalm 139:6. The Psalm as a whole extols the knowledge of God; but in doing so casts doubt on a mans knowledge of himself. O Lord, you have searched me and known me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. If anyone dislikes this verse, or to put it more politely, dislikes my use of this verse, he should set down on paper the knowledge of himself he claims to know, and then demonstrate conclusively how he obtained that knowledge. Otherwise, objections to my view a simply begging the question. Pg. 275 First, language is a bearer of meaning because words are arbitrary signs the mind uses to tag thoughts. Second, communication is possible because all minds have at least some thoughts in common. This is so because God created man a rational spirit, a mind capable of thinking, worshiping, and talking to God. God operates through his Logos, the Wisdom that enlightens every man in the world. Third, language is logical because it expresses logical thoughts. Not to deny the noetic effects of sin, examples of which are incorrect additions and various fallacies in reasoning, man is still a rational or logical creature and hence he cannot think three is four or that two contradictories can both be true. Language therefore is built upon the laws of logic. Pg. 285 Now, spiritualism divides into two species, one more intimate and monistic, the other less intimate and dualistic; the former is pantheism, the latter is theism. Pg. 288

Absolutism, and theism, too, hold that everything must be related to everything else in some way; there are no two things utterly independent, though in spite of Lotze, they may nonetheless be distinct. Pg. 291 Theism might suppose that God is a mental agent who unifies in one vision the contents of our several minds. Pg. 301 Once again James contrasts the hypothesis that the unity of the universe is found in an omniscient knower with the opposite hypothesis that the widest field of knowledge still contains some ignorance. Pg. 302 if the laws of logic were artificial constructs, then a philosopher could accept both monism and pluralism, both rationalism and empiricism; and every implication would be both valid and invalid at the same time. Pg. 305 A. E. Taylors definition of truth as the system of propositions which have an unconditional claim to be recognized as valid is circular at best. Pg. 305 Now, no doubt the name of a constellation is quite arbitrary; and in a purely semantic sense triangle and circle are arbitrary, for the word three might have meant four and the word straight might have been applied to curves. But we cannot arbitrarily carve a circle out of the lines of intertwined equilateral triangles. Straight lines are not quite that malleable. They are somewhat fixed in a rationalistic sort of way. Pg. 367 if we deny that a term can at most mean a finite number of things, we stipulate that a term can at most mean an infinite number of things. Perhaps it will be replied that there is another possibility: The term may mean nothing at all. So be it. The two possibilities are identical, for a term that designates everything designates nothing. Pg. 369 The reader is left with a choice, a choice between unintelligibility and fixed principles. If thought has meaning, then there are eternal truths; and while a monograph on Dewey is not the place to expound it, eternal truths require an Eternal Mind whose thinking makes them so.

Clark and His Critics, 2009 Pg. 28 Disconnectedness is no virtue; logical inconsistencies cannot be defended, so that to the limit of our abilities we should endeavor to cover all the problems in a systematic unity. Pg. 28 In the popular mind, philosophy is often considered as a general theory of the universe. It is expected to say whether the world is material or spiritual or both. Hence the terms materialism, idealism, and dualism come to mind. Discussions of these topics are called metaphysics, and for many philosophers metaphysics has been the fundamental subject. Metaphysics and philosophy have been virtually identified. But before any type of metaphysics can be accepted, another and far more crucial question must be asked and answered. After someone asserts that the universe is nothing but atoms in motion, or that the universe is an Absolute Mind, or even that planets revolve around the Sun, we may properly ask, How do you know? A theory that tries to explain how knowledge is possible is called an epistemological theory. This is where we must begin. Pg. 29 On one major base some sort of theory of Ideas stands impregnable. It is the necessity of similarities and classifications. Unless we can use concepts and talk of groups of things, philosophy would be impossible. If only individual things existed, and every noun were a proper name, conversation and even thinking itself could not be carried on. Neither the medieval nominalists nor Bishop Berkeley, who tried to get along without abstract ideas, was able to explain the reason we classify men as men and horses as horses. Classification requires Ideas, and zoology requires classification. So does mathematics. Cubes vary infinitely in size, but they all have the same identical shape. Not only are there ellipses and parabolas, but there is also an invisible, eternal, unchangeable general conic. Theology, too, uses the classes Jew and Gentile, saint and sinner, not to mention God and man. All thought and speech depend on classification, and no epistemology can succeed without something like the Platonic Ideas. Pg. 30 But though there may be Ideas of some sort, when Plato leaves mathematics for politics the plausibility of reminiscence vanishes. The slave boy was easily able to remember the square on the diagonal, but neither the Athenians nor the Syracusans could remember justice, not even with the lengthy stimulus of the Republic. Justice, of course, is a matter of ethics and politics; and more will be said about ethics later. But the definition of man as a two-legged animal without feathers is another case where reminiscence did not work too well. The difficulty is that, after one grants the existence of suprasensible Ideas, sensation stimulates different notions in different people. Whether the subject is justice or piety or the planetary spheres, Plato had to reply on procedures of ethics and science that cannot be completed.

The failure of Platonism to descend from Heaven to Earth, or, if you wish, to ascend from Earth to heaven, leaves the theory ineffective. Man before birth may have been omniscient, but here below the Platonic cave in which man is a prisoner actually has no opening. Platonism therefore cannot be accepted as the solution to our problem. Pg. 31 Unless we had the concept or category of quality, of quantity, of relation, we could not think of botany, baseball, or anything else. Pg. 36 From this historical survey, all too brief, the conclusion is inescapable that secular epistemology is a failure. Chaos is not a philosophy. Eternal principles, especially the law of contradiction, are the prerequisites of all argumentation. If Nietzsche, Dewey, and Sartre wish to make intelligible objections to any philosophy, they must use the law of contradiction. They must proceed on the basis of the fixity of that law even in order to object to the law itself. Without logic everything is chaos, and all conversation is the chattering of monkeys. We need logic. We also need the similarities Nietzsche denied. Every common noun and every verb designates a similarity. Or, as was said earlier, discussions about the general conic show that no epistemology can succeed without something like Platonic Ideas. Pg. 48 Because of these considerations, the conclusion now is that secular ethics is a failure. The various systems all fail on the two points at which failure is fatal. First, they do not furnish a systematic, consistent set of universal principles. Or, to speak more clearly, they do not justify a single norm of conduct. Then, second, they give no guidance in making the concrete decisions of everyday living. Pg. 51 The argument of the initial lecture supposedly has established at least two conclusions. The first is that no construction in philosophy is possible without some sort of presupposition or a priori equipment. This point was defended in the criticism of Aristotelian epistemology. Aristotle denied a priori forms on the ground that they would distort whatever is received by sense. Such Empiricism requires all universal judgments to be conclusions drawn from experience. But experience cannot give universal judgments. As Hume amply showed, our experience is limited in the past and non-existent in the future, with the result that we cannot know that all bread is nourishing, or all arsenic is poisonous, or that all motions requires a cause. Not only so, but even the law of contradiction is supposed to be an empirical discovery. That such a discovery is impossible is the lesson to be learned from Nietzsche, Dewey, and Sartre. Learning therefore requires a priori equipment.

Pg. 53 But that revelation should be accepted without proofs or reasons, undeduced from something admittedly true, seems odd when first proposed. It will not seem so odd, however, when the nature of axioms is kept in mind. Axioms, whatever they may be and in whatever subject they are used, are never deduced from more original principles. They are always tested in another way. If a philosopher ponders the basic principles of Aristotle, Kant, or even Sartre, he will do so by considering how well the author succeeds in solving his problems. If the problems are such as confront us all, and if the basic proposals succeed fairly well, a philosopher is inclined to give his assent to them. He cannot by strict logic be compelled to assent; he makes a voluntary choice, induced by the successful solution of the problem. So too it should be with Christian revelation as an axiom. We must ask, Does revelation make knowledge possible? Does revelation establish values and ethical norms? Does revelation give a theory of politics? And are all these results consistent with one another? We can judge the acceptability of an axiom only by its success in producing a system. Axioms, because they are axioms, cannot be deduced from or proved by previous theorems. Those who dislike systematic philosophy, systematic theology, or system in general, for example, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and the pietists, should be pressed to prove the virtue of disjointed truths. Can the philosophy of time be disregarded in eschatology? Does Behaviorism have bearing on religion and politics? Is it possible to speak about zoology without suggesting views on creation? Of, vice versa, can we assert creation without implying something about zoology? No, truth is not thus disjointed. It is systematic. And by the systems they produce, axioms must be judged. Pgs. 53-54 A fortiori, the notion that God can be known only through revelation seems to be essential to the very concept of God. To try to extort knowledge of God from an unwilling God is impossible, if God is the supreme omnipotent Being. Therefore, if we profess a God who is infinitely superior to man, we should not be surprised by the necessity of a revelation, if we are to know him. Or, to put the matter in other words, we are confronted with an alternative: We can either deny God and accept atheism, or we shall have to try revelation. To the same effect, it may be pointed out that if God is supreme, as we claim, there can be no higher source than self-disclosure. God cannot be deduced from any superior principle. Therefore, the same conclusion follows: Either revelation must be accepted as an axiom or there is no knowledge of God at all. Pgs. 54-55 As a matter of fact, the doctrine of the image of God in man, a doctrine learned from Scripture, is an assertion of an a priori or innate equipment. As such, it will receive emphasis. But only as such, for so precarious are arguments otherwise based that there would be little confidence in the existence of an a priori and no possibility of identifying its forms, were it not asserted in a verbal revelation.

A systematic philosophy must take care of epistemology. Knowledge must be accounted for. It may be that the a priori forms cannot be listed; it may be that botany or some other subject remains obscure; but knowledge of some sort must be provided. Hence the postulate here proposed is not revelation as natural theology, not revelation as ineffable mysticism, not an inexpressible confrontation, but a verbal and rational communication of truths, the revelation of Scripture. Pg. 55 Any axiom eliminates its opposite. The Christian system is no more indefensible on this point than any other system. Therefore, the more serious reply to the charge that the axiom of revelation begs all questions is that the objection fails to distinguish the status of axioms and the status of theorems. Obviously a first principle or a set of axioms covers all that follows. Indeed, that is why first principles are asserted. It is their function to cover all that follows. But this is not to identify the axioms with the theorems. Euclidean geometry may have six axioms and a hundred theorems. The axioms imply the theorems, to be sure; but the theorems are not axioms. The distinction between axioms and theorems is for the purpose of arranging derivative truths under a basic or comprehensive truth. Were a geometer to assume one of the Euclidean theorems as his axioms, he would, except in very special cases, deprive geometry of many of its propositions. Thus an all-inclusive axiom that swallows everything at one gulp is most desirable. Pg. 56 Admittedly, the Bible gives us some theology; granted, it contains some history; but how from the Bible can one get the rest of history; all of science, and even logic and mathematics? As this objection is obvious, so it demands a clear answer. One is immediately forthcoming. As has been shown, secular epistemologies cannot provide for any knowledge at all; therefore, whatever knowledge revelation gives us, however restricted, is to be received with thanksgiving. Pg. 65 While no act of will can be moral in the unregenerate man, it does not follow that no intellectual argument can be valid. True enough, fallen man is deceived by fallacious thinking, and he makes mistakes in arithmetic. But even the most hardened sinner sometimes constructs valid syllogisms and sometimes gets his bank account correctly balanced. Morally his every act is sinful. As the Scripture says, a farmer commits sin just by plowing his field. Undoubtedly his use of valid syllogisms is sinful too, but nonetheless the syllogisms are valid. Therefore, in order to assert that the image of God has been completely annihilated, stress must be laid on its component of logic and reason. Pg. 67

If God is omnipotent, he can tell men the plain, unvarnished, literal truth. He can tell them David was Kind of Israel; he can tell them that the divine image consists in reason. He can tell them all this in positive, literal, non-analogical, non-symbolic terms. Then it is objected that man is a sensory creature, that all his language derives from the things of sense, and that therefore he has no literal words to speak about God. But for what reason do these theologians answer thusly? If God is omnipotent he could have made man capable of receiving literal truth. God could have equipped man with a capacity for language and a source of knowledge other than sensation. Pg. 69 that papal infallibility is the logical result of a desire for an authoritative revelation is hardly tenable; for, if a man cannot understand words spoken by God, who must granted an understanding of what he intends and an ability to express it, why should it be assumed that a man can understand a papal encyclical? Pg. 73 Religion, or to speak clearly, the Christian religion, is not an affair of the emotions, at least no more so than politics and economics are, but fundamentally an acceptance of an intelligible message. The acceptance of this message is offered as a first principle, an axiom or postulate on which a superstructure of knowledge can be erected. Pg. 74 The thousands of Biblical propositions need not be construed as an immense set of axioms. The peculiarity is in the opposite direction. What annoys Euclid and Spinoza is that this theology can operate on a single axiom. The single axiom is: The Bible is the Word of God. But though single, it is fruitful because there is embedded in it the law of contradiction, plus the nature of God, as argued above, plus the thousands of propositions thus declared true. Pg. 74 However, this is still far from a completely syllogistic theology. Neither Turretin nor Charles Hodge achieved what is usually meant by axiomatization; not all propositions are fitted into a deductive system. Karl Barth rejects axiomatization even as an ideal. Yet there is no method of understanding superior to deduction. For some restricted purposes, particularly for elementary religious needs, knowledge that something is so is sufficient. But a greater degree of faith, belief, knowledge, and understanding requires a grasp of why something is so. And since Gods revelation is rather ample, it would seem that he wishes us to have an ample understanding. Axiomatization, deduction, systematization are therefore to be considered desirable. Pgs. 75-76

There is a story that at the birth of Louis XIV, Marie de Medici gave birth to twins. Father Joseph wrote a not to Richelieu, who imposed perpetual silence on the midwife. But a Spanish plotter picked up the discarded not and kidnapped the second twin. After training the younger twin, and after Richelieus death, the Spaniard managed to catch Louis XIV alone, put him in the Iron Mask, and the twin reappeared as Louis XIV. Granted, it is unlikely that anyone should go to such extremes to substitute another woman for the wife of an unimportant theologian or philosopher. But how do you know? So long as substitution is possible, certainty is impossible. Nor is substitution the only danger. For those whose philosophic preparation rises above the level of Alexander Dumas, there are always the prior difficulties of solipsism, subjective idealism, and, let us remember, Descartes malignant demon, who, so potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive us. Modern philosophers prefer to ignore rather than to confront him. With this result the previous question returns. What account shall be given of everyday knowledge that common sense thinks it silly to doubt? Dont I know when I am hungry? Cant I use road maps to drive to Boston or Los Angeles? Indeed, how can I know what the Bible says without reading its pages with my own eyes? It was one secular philosopher criticizing another who said that knowledge is a fact and that any theory that did not account for it should be abandoned. But all such criticisms miss the point. The status of common opinion is not fixed until a theory has been accepted. One may admit that a number of propositions commonly believed are true; but no one can deny that many such are false. The problem is to elaborate a method by which the two classes can be distinguished. Plato, too, granted a place to opinion as distinct from knowledge; he even admitted that in some circumstances opinion was as useful as knowledge with a capital K. But to dispose of the whole matter by an appeal to road maps that we can see with our own eyes is to ignore everything said above about Aristotle. For one last time, therefore, we must summarize and emphasize the whole argument. Consider the philosophy of science outlined in the preceding lecture. There it was claimed and argued that experimental science produced no knowledge whatever of the processes of nature. The laboratory can devise no method for determining whether the Earth moves still while the Sun stands still or whether the Sun moves while the Earth stands still. Nor can the greatest amount of experimentation explain why two smooth pieces of marble adhere so stubbornly to each other. Neither can physics observe anything moving in a straight line. It is incorrect, therefore, to complain that the axiom of revelation deprives us of knowledge otherwise obtainable. There is no knowledge otherwise obtainable. Pg. 78 Every system must depend on first principles, not deduced from any prior proposition. Pg. 78 The postulate of verbal revelation is an epistemological success because the revelation is itself knowledge.

Pgs. 80-81 Now, if logic were conceived as a branch of human psychology, there would be some reason for placing it above life and sensation and under language and history. But aside from general arguments against reducing logic to psychology- which would see in a valid syllogism no more than the way in which a small part of the population happens to thinking Dooyeweerd himself does not intend any of his fifteen aspects to be merely subjective ways of viewing things. They are all ontological laws. They describe the real world as it actually is. But if this is so, the laws of logic must be an aspect of number, space, and motion, and must be put at the very base of the system upon penalty of declaring that mathematics is irrational. Pg. 98 In opposition to this subjective religion that discards information, intellect, and truth, the axiom of verbal inspiration implies a religion that consists of something intelligible. Pg. 99 Since revelation is propositional and true, it also follows that the laws of logic are applicable and legitimate for the purpose of validly deducing the implied conclusions. The Westminster Confession, which Dr. Hendry so woefully mutilates, clearly asserts that, The whole counsel of Godis either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequences may be deduced from Scripture. The Protestant Reformers and the Westminster Assembly were not so afraid of logic and truth as todays theologians are. In any case an intelligible religion will most strictly prohibit the assertion of contradictories. The use of straight-line logic is a virtue; curbing logic and proclaiming paradoxes is a sin. Pg. 99 Secular philosophy with or without presuppositions has been shown to be a failure. The verbal revelation of the Bible solves the problems of epistemology, history, ethics, and religion. It distinguishes truth from error. It preserves intelligibility. Pg. 142 Perhaps I owe one word of apology or of explanation to Nash also, and to my readers in general. Thales to Dewey and Karl Barths Theological Method had to contain a great deal of exposition naturally. Now, it happens that much of what Aristotle said about the law of contradiction and of what Barth said about Modernism seem useful to me. Yet I had to express their views in their terminology, and occasionally words are used that I would not have chosen. Readers are therefore understandably puzzled when they try to separate my sentiments from the expositions. Fortunately, Nash surmounts this difficulty quite well with respect to Aristotle and logic. There is, however, a theologian in the country who might think otherwise. This gentleman distinguishes between logical consistency and a coherence view of truth. Since he stresses the latter rather than the former, he might think that Nash rates me too highly by asserting that I hold to coherence.

However, neither Professor Nash nor I acknowledge this distinction, and while I now prefer the word consistency for claritys sake, I have no objection to Nashs statement at this point. Pg. 143 An acceptance of a priori forms does not entail acceptance of the precise list in this paragraph. As Nash had just noted, I do offer any complete list; and if I were to work on the problem, I would probably be satisfied with the forms of logic without adding Kantian deductions. Pgs. 144-145 Plato in his theory of reminiscence may have used a myth to describe the disembodied soul of man contemplating the Ideas directly. This might be taken to mean that each soul is omniscient. In the Christian system this is not needed. Perhaps I have said that truth is the whole; at least I have insisted that all truth form a consistent system and have their meaning as parts of that system. But this does not entail human omniscience. At first it might seem to, for the New Testament makes our contact with the Realities more intimate than Plato does. In Acts 17:28 we read, In him we live, and move, and have our being. This could be made to sound like pantheism, and indeed the apostle connects his own statement with a similar sentiment in a pantheistic poet. When I have dared to connect some of my views with excerpts from pagan philosophers, I have at times been subjected to severe censure from certain quarters. But the New Testament is clear: We live and move and have our being in Gods mind. The Old Testament also in Psalm 36:9 says, In thy light shall we see light. Therefore I reject Nashs conclusion, buttressed by a quotation from Etienne Gilson, that The problem cannot be avoided simply by saying that man is in contact with divine Ideas in the mind of man. These words really misstate the situation, for our existence in the mind of God puts us in contact with Ideas in the mind of God, and not simply in the mind of man. The scripture presents the relationship between the mind of God and the mind of man as a much more intimate relationship than is commonly believed. In 1 Corinthians 2:16 the apostle says, we have the mind of Christ (Noun Christou echomen). On this verse Meyer comments, Since Christ is in themtheir nous, too, can be no mental faculty different in kind from the nous Christou, but must, on the contrary, be as ideally one with it, as it is true that Christ himself lives in them. See also Philippians 2:5, Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. Of course these verse do not equate the person of Christ with our person, either pantheistically or existentially. Their meaning is that our mind and Christs mind overlap or have a common area or coincidence in certain propositions. Thus objections taken from the Parmenides are inapplicable to the New Testament. Note that Christs mind and our mind only overlap: they are not coextensive. Plato may require omniscience, but Christianity uses revelation; and man knows only so much as God has revealed to him. In my publications I have never claimed more than a partial knowledge for man. Pgs. 145-16

It is very convenient to use the illustration of a first graders arithmetic and a mathematicians calculus and beyond. It is also convenient to refer to two plus two as a fixed truth. The convenience depends on the fact that most people regard the illustration as fairly clear and intelligible. But Professor Nash sees an inconsistency in my use of mathematics. He writes, In your early writings, you do hold that man can have knowledge apart from propositions deducible from the Bible. e.g. you admit that 2 plus 2 equals 4 is something man can know, but this knowledge and the science of mathematics are not deducible from revelation in the Bible. In answer to this observation, I wish to make three remarks. First, Nash does not quote any passage in which I make this admission. Perhaps I have allowed such an impression to stand, but the context and qualifications should be observed. At any rate, in the absence of a verbatim quotation, I cannot remember having used the words not deducible from the revelation of the Bible. The second and third remarks may somewhat complicate the convenience of mathematical illustrations, but I believe they satisfy all the necessary requirements. The second is that Scripture does indeed teach a bit of arithmetic. Numbers, additions, and subtractions occur: After Judas hanged himself, there remained eleven disciples. Multiplication occurs and there are divisions by five, seven, and ten. If, now, mathematics can be logically developed out of its principles, then mathematics can by good and necessary consequence be deduced from Scripture. The third remark is perhaps not so important. Mathematics, unlike history, is a purely formal science. If two is defined as one plus one, and three is defined as two plus one, one being indefinable, then the truths of mathematics are tautological. It is similar to the formal logical truth that All A is A. This formalism is not any more inconsistent with the occurrence of mathematics in the Bible than it is with its occurrence elsewhere. Pg. 146 True enough, I have in many places distinguished the created world from the Creator; but I do not remember saying that the created world is an imperfectly real, unknowable object. Is it not clear that I am an epistemological realist? My realism is so pronounced that everyone but the most enthusiastic disciple would call it extreme. A few lines further on I repeat, what I have often said, that even dreams and hallucinations are real; and although this statement is a criticism of the category of Being, it is pertinent here because it erases the distinction needed to assert an imperfectly-real world. Hence it would seem I escape this anti-platonic objection. Pg. 148 Aristotle admitted that individuals cannot be known. Hegels fault, or one of them, was to make the concept rather than the propositions the object of knowledge. But a concept is as unknowable

as an individual. Pen is neither true nor false. Only a proposition can be true. The pen belongs to Herr Krug may be true; it may be false; but a concept in isolation is not an object of knowledge. Truth always comes in propositions. Two quotations from Leibniz enforced the application of this principle to persons. In fact the citations will do double work. They will show that knowledge of a person is propositions (and thus they bear on what several of my critics consider paradoxical, to wit, persons are propositions), and at the same time they will bring home the lesson from Plotinus that knowledge of oneself is no easy, off-hand, immediate experience, but of all things immensely difficult. Pg. 149 Far from my making it impossible for God to know human beings, it is rather Professor Nash who does so. His view of the self is that of some Ich-an-sich. Leibniz suggests that the ego is a complex definition, including the life history of the person, and no doubt his state in a future world as well. This definition is not unknowable in essence, and God knows it because he determined what it should be. On the other hand, it is something that the person himself does not know, at least in this life. Pg. 150 The word truth can be used only metaphorically or incorrectly when applied to anything other than a proposition. The third point has to do with an absolute world and the avoidance of skepticism. I avoid skepticism by asserting revealed, eternal truths. I do not insist that one should know all truths; I do not deny a large area of ignorance; but if even one truth is known, skepticism is removed. Pg. 150 In the absence of a revelation to the contrary we may suppose that God created everything just a moment ago: trees with rings and people with mental notions called memories. There is no empirical evidence that can verify the truth of any statement in the past tense. Pg. 178 A person hears the Gospel and learns as much of its logical consistency as his academic abilities allow; although the preaching and exposition never base Christian premises on secular propositions, the Holy Spirit upon the occasion of preaching regenerates the individual, changes his mind, and causes him to believe axiom and theorem alike. Pg. 202 Since in a logical system all the theorems come from the axioms, and from nowhere else, since indeed the meaning of the theorems depends on the axioms, a particular theorem cannot be found in two different systems. When such a theorem seems to occur, there is either an inconsistency in

one or both systems, or the systems overlap in which case at least one of them is not a universal system. Pgs. 205-206 One of the confusions that Professor Holmes has fallen into, along with many others who do not accept my views, is the confusion between a system of thought, as logically developed as possible, and the actual thoughts of a sometimes inconsistent individual. In my debates with some who deny it, I have maintained that Christians and non-Christians have certain common ground. That is to say, a regenerate and an unregenerate person may believe the same proposition. But this by no means implies that a given proposition can be deduced indifferently from Christian and from secular presuppositions. Hence, the statement that We can properly learn about the form of logical reasoning, therefore, from non-Christian philosophers, misses the point. In the case of logic the unacceptability of secular logic becomes clearer than in the case of Aristotle when Dewey brings logic into a more consistent connection with his secularism by denying logics finality and arguing that the principles of logic, like the principles of grammar, change with use from age to age. Therefore, I should disagree with the idea that we can learn logic from Dewey. The principle involved in my argument is that incompatible axioms do not imply identical conclusions. If the words sometimes sound similar, the intellectual content is not. Pgs. 206-207 Along with adduction Holmes wishes to substitute symphonic coherence for logical consistency. He says, Geometrical systems do not provide the only kind of logically coherent view. Well, of course, geometry is not the only coherent system; it is only of the best examples of logical consistency. Newtonian science is another fairly good example. But the logic in geometry and in any deductive system is indispensable. In a symphony there is neither method nor logical consistency. Take a theme, and a composer can work out his movements in any one of a number of ways. The theme does not require one variation to the exclusion of some other. But differing sets of theorems cannot logically be obtained from a set of axioms. If it were true that some philosophers have symphonized, though Plato is not the best example, the result may be musical or literary, but it is not logical. There are no necessary relations among the parts. There is no method. The theme therefore does not require acceptance of the variation. Pg. 207 Holmes admits that Gods mind is a monolithic system. God knows all truth; God is rational; God cannot be a pragmatic pluralist. Nevertheless, Holmes wants us to repudiate the divine ideal and opt for pluralism. It seems to me, on the contrary, that Christianity requires us to choose and approximate the divine ideal rather than to achieve the position of William James. Pg. 208 Second Timothy 3:16-17 say, All Scripture is given by inspiration of God that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished to all good works. Holmes words imply that Scripture is

not sufficient to furnish the man of God for the good work of philosophy. Perhaps Holmes said more than he intended. We all do at times. But it should now be clear that pluralistic tradition and non-Scriptural rules for life are not logical parts of the Christian system. Pg. 209 While I do not particularly object to the term Idealism, for my emphases rest on spirit, will, intellect, and mind, the term Realism, if taken in its ancient sense, is more appropriate. Realism is the view that the mind can actually possess the truth, the real truth. Representationalism holds that the mind has only an image, a picture, a representation, an analogy of the truth, but does not have the truth itself. Realism charges its opponents, not with the danger that our propositions might not be wholly true in all respects, as Holmes writes, but that they can never be true, for they are something different from the real truth or the truly real that never itself gets into the mind. Nor can these representations (to repeat an argument of long standing) ever be known to resemble the truth because we never have the truth to compare it with its alleged image. Thus the objection to representationalism is not, like the objection against Kant, that it asserts an Unknowable beyond our grasp, but that it makes everything unknowable. Pgs. 232-233 Of course, in What Do Presbyterians Believe?, I have indicated (without using standard-form categorical syllogisms) the deduction of various doctrines from Scriptural statements. What Mavrodes seems to mean, however, is that I have not deduced the several verses from the Axiom. This criticism, so it seems to me, proceeds on the assumption that the Bible is just a word a sound in the air, to use a nominalistic phrase. Apparently Mavrodes thinks that I would be better off technically if I made every verse a separate axiom. To me this seems like more machinery, which can be obviated by referring to them all under one name, the Bible. Similarly, the proposition Everything God says is true, need be a separate axiom, only if God too is just a word. But if the word has a meaning, the Biblical meaning, then it is analytically certain that everything God says is true. Indeed Mavrodes acknowledges this in his immediate discussion; and that is why these initial criticisms cannot be taken seriously. At the end of Part I is an argument alleged to show that the Axiom is useless. I am not sure I understand it. It seems to say that since P5 tautologically implies P5, it is useless to contend that P1 P4 P5 imply P5. My reply is that although P5 implies P5, this implication does not show that P5 is true. David was prime minister of Babylon implies that David was prime minister of Babylon. This too is a tautologically valid inference. But without the Axiom it cannot be shown that P5 is true. Pg. 233

Suppose we make the following list: David was King of Israel; hydrogen is a chemical element; and Jim likes peanuts. With these as axioms what can be deduced? Granted, Jim likes peanuts implies that Jim likes peanuts; but, point one, there is no explicit assertion that the axiom is true, and the implication remains valid even when the proposition is false; and, point two, nothing in addition to the three axioms can be deduced, for no two of them imply anything. Pg. 235 The point at issue is not whether somebody believes that David was King; the question is, How can we know that David was King? No secular historiography (as I hope to show in a future volume) can validly give us that proposition. Nor can secular or empirical epistemologies give us the Atonement. In answer to the question how we may know these things we can reply only that God has so revealed them. One sentence in the objection (unintentionally no doubt) reinforces my position. Mavrodes notes, It is a common tactic of Christianitys opponents to direct some of their first and most effective attacks against the Axiom. In this tactic, so it seems to me, there is a satanic wisdom that passes by derivative propositions and fixes on the very basis of Christianity. These opponents know or perhaps dimly but rightly surmise that if they can destroy the foundation, nothing remains. Pgs. 235-236 Part III of the critique faces a major problem squarely. Here useless machinery is left behind. The substantial question is how do we know the contents of the Bible. If Louis XIV or my wife could be replaced with an imposter twin, then maybe the Bible in my hand is a cunningly devised substitute. Mavrodes lays this on rather heavily, and I am glad that he does. So few people are willing to give the point any serious attention. He also mentions, and I wish he had discussed, solipsism; there are also the skeptical arguments of Carneades and Aenesidemus; and as well Descartes omnipotent deceptive demon. In fact, until these arguments are successfully circumvented, no one has a firm basis on which to object to my general position. If anyone tries to avoid this material and, relying on common opinion, charges me with paradoxes, he has failed to grasp even the first point. With great reluctance, for I sincerely admire the considerable talent of my present opponent, I must point out that he has not met the issue when he says, Sense experience is required for the derivation of such [Biblical] beliefs, and every consistent epistemology which assigns a role to the Biblemust assign a role of equal scope and in precisely the same area to sense perception. To make such assertions presupposes satisfactory answers to Aenesidemus and Descartes demon. Can it be shown that an imposter twin is impossible? Can we be sure that we have not overlooked a not in the sentence? There are even greater empirical scandals than these. How can one prove the reliability of memory? Any test designed to show which memory is true and which is mistaken presupposes that a previous memory is true and this is the point in question. In large measure the psychological force of my position derives from the impossibility of empiricism. Pgs. 237-238

With commendable perceptiveness Mavrodes notices that Abraham also poses the same unanswerable question: How did Abraham know that it was God who called him to Mt. Moriah, rather than the devil? But though Mavrodes candidly admits that he cannot answer, an answer is required. Carnell once tried to answer it by appealing to anticipatory ideas of decency; but rather clearly such ideas would have led Abraham to conclude that the command to sacrifice Isaac came from Satan. Mavrodes still further generalizes the question: How [do] we come to know God? This question too, as it includes its subsidiary forms, is one to be emphasized. Until a theologian has answered this question, he has no ground for objection to any view. He may express dissatisfaction with the Westminster principle; he may say, I just dont believe it; but he can have no logical reasons or well-based objections. Dissatisfaction, if it occurs, should rather be directed against failure to answer these questions. To sit speechless cannot be accepted as our goal. Those who discuss religious problems, whether they are Calvinists or humanists, must be pressed to explain how God can be known or, in the latter case, how values can be known when there is no God. The battle is between views or answers; the battle is not between a view and silence. Now, as it appears, I have a view to propose. It is the Westminster Principle, or the Axiom, for I believe they are identical. This Principle, so my argument runs, does not founder on the contradiction Mavrodes indicated. Recall that he set in opposition the Principle that all truth must be deduced from Scripture and a list of canonical books for which no verses can be cited. This seems to me to be a misunderstanding of the Confession. There are two reasons why this seems to be a misunderstanding. In the earlier part of this reply, I argued that Mavrodes treated the Axiom as if the Bible were a mere word without content. Obviously from a word, nothing can be inferred. But such a nominalistic procedure is clearly not intended. Similarly, the Confession, when it says that all things necessary for the glory of God can be deduced from Scripture, does not use Scripture as an empty word. The Confession goes further, as I did not, and defines what it means by Scripture. The canonical list therefore is not a theorem deduced from the Axiom; it is a part of the Axiom itself in that it is the definition of its chief term. Hence the related objections fall away. Although this seems to be sufficient to answer Mavrodes logical difficulties, there is a second point necessary to remove some lingering dissatisfaction. Mention has been made of Abraham and his conviction that God, not Satan, was speaking. This is essentially similar to the conviction that the Bible is the word of God and not the lying words of the devil. Pg. 239 The statements of these creeds mean that adherence to Scripture is not a deduction from sensory experience, neither is it the result of anticipations of decency, nor even of archaeological confirmation. Confidence in Scripture is the result of the inward working of the Holy Ghost. Note particularly that this illumination of the Spirit is not an additional revelation. He does not give us any additional information. He does not witness to our spirits, but with our spirits

(Romans 8:16), and here explicitly by and with the word (compare Can I Trust My Bible, chapter one, How May I Know the Bible is Inspired, Moody Press, 1963). This too is how Abraham knew it was God and not Satan who commanded him to kill Isaac. Pgs. 239-240 This work of the Holy Spirit does not occur without preaching and argument. Though belief is caused by the Holy Spirit alone, the content of the belief is presented by human messengers. Abstractly God might have used some other method of propagating the Gospel; to say this is the way it is done is not to limit Gods power it merely describes his method. This method, which becomes the method of the preacher, needs one final clarification before the concluding paragraph is reached. The difficulties with the canon are well known; destructive criticism is our daily enemy; archaeology gives us cause for rejoicing. But if we depend on the testimony of the Spirit, can we discuss these details with non-Christians, or must we ignore the objections? Does not Reformed theology cut the lines of communication? To which my reply is: Let us use as much archaeological evidence as we can find. Let us go into great detail on J, E, D, and P. We shall discuss the presence of camels in Egypt in 2000 B.C., and the hypothetical council of Jamnia. But our arguments will be entirely ad hominem. We shall show that the principles our opponents use destroy their own conclusions; that their critical procedures on Genesis cannot be applied to Homers Iliad; that their historiography ruins Caesars Gallic Wars. The argument is ad hominem and elenctic. When finally the opponent is reduced to silence and we can get in a word edgewise, we present the word of God and pray that God cause him to believe. Pg. 255 To say that a concept is true or false is utterly implausible. None of my critics has given a convincing argument; in fact none has given any argument at all, to show that an individual concept can be true. Pgs. 257-258 Now it is quite true, as I wrote in Religion, Reason, and Revelation, that the Bible does not explicitly say that God put language into Adams soul. The circumstances, however, the doctrine of the image of God, and the conversation between God and Adam entitle us to infer that speaking, as an expression of thought, is an ability or habitus innate by creation. The Bible does not explicitly say how long after creation God commanded Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; but since this command was given, apparently, before Eve was created, it seems incredible that Adam should have survived the several centuries or longer required by evolutionary theory to develop words from inarticulate sounds. Possibly Adam took years to invent names for all the beasts of the field and the fowl of the air; but command, obey, good, and evil words or thoughts that could not be abstracted from experience were included in his original vocabulary.

Pgs. 258-259 my skepticism ends where divine revelation begins. Therefore the second and final point is that divine revelation is far more extensive that most of my critics seem to realize. Mathematics, they say, and innate ideas, linguistics and the income tax are not discussed in Scripture. This objection cannot be made without a tacit claim to omniscience. If from the six or so measly little geometrical axioms one can not only deduce the Pythagorean theorem, but can inscribe the five regular solids in a sphere, how many deductions, think you, can be made from ten thousand propositions? One might very well doubt that Chinese history could be deduced from Scripture; but when there is so much language in the Bible, does it not require an exhaustive knowledge to deny that one can deduce a linguistic theory? The justification for such a universal negative requires the knowledge of all possible deductions and the discovery that no linguistics is to be found among them. I have never claimed omniscience; my position is that of partial knowledge a knowledge skeptical enough of all secular claims, but asserting nonetheless that rational man, created in the image of God, could think and speak from his first moment. Pgs. 287-288 The substantive point needing discussion is whether the law of contradiction is the one and only test of truth. Ideally or for God this seems to be the case. Since there is nothing independent of God, he does not conform truth to an alleged reality beyond truth and beyond him. Since there is no possibility of vertical (to use Carnells terminology) coherence, the horizontal test, or, better the horizontal characteristic of logical consistency seems the only possible one. Weaver correctly notes that I do not claim for human beings the ability to apply this test universally. In this sense it is a negative or, better, an incomplete test. For this reason it must be supplemented some way or other. Perhaps Weaver does not concede as much value to the test of logical consistency as I do; yet I appreciate his early remarks on my arguments against mechanistic scientism. But when later he describes my supplementation of the law of contradiction as being the same as Professor Carnells vertical appeal to facts, he does not quote a pertinent passage. May I here parenthetically point out the confusion introduced by the use of figurative terminology? It would seem to me that logical consistency ought to be called vertical, because axioms are at the top and the deduced theorems proceed downward. Similarly facts are spread out horizontally on the Earths broad plateau. But Carnell adopts the reverse terminology. This is an evidence of how little figurative language adds to ones understanding, or how much it subtracts. At any rate Weaver quotes no passage to show that I have made use of Carnells appeals to facts. The quotation he makes is actually inconsistent with such an appeal; it is an admission that under

the exigencies of life one must choose on the basis of promised, hoped for, but presently incomplete consistency. Pg. 288 Just how it could be possible to formulate reasons prior to any logic remains unexplained. It seems evident to me that any set of reasons or any argument for creation ought to make use of and therefore presuppose logic. Pg. 289 In any case, if God is the presupposition of an argument, the conclusion would have to be something else, for there is no point in deducing a proposition from itself. Pg. 290 Have I not referred to the first chapter of Calvins Institutes and expressed agreement with his Augustinian position that the knowledge of God comes first and that all other knowledge depends on this? Pg. 290 Undoubtedly I hold that truth is a consistent system of propositions. Most people would be willing to admit that two truths cannot be contradictories; and I would like to add that the complex of all truths cannot be a mere aggregate of unrelated assertions. Since God is rational, I do not see how any item of his knowledge can be unrelated to the rest. Weaver makes no comment on this fundamental characteristic of divine truth. Rather, he questions whether this characteristic is of practical value, and whether it must be supplemented in some way. It is most strange that Weaver here says, I must agree with Carnell, as if he had convicted me of disagreeing with Carnell by providing no supplementation whatever. Now, I may disagree with the last named gentleman on many points, but since it is abundantly clear that I supplement consistency by an appeal to the Scripture for the determination of particular truths, it is most strange that Weaver ignores my supplementation. Pg. 290 In the same paragraph my critic questions ones right to work out a worldview or system of philosophy. In my opinion a sinner, until he becomes a Christian, has, not only a right, but also an obligation to decide on what worldview to accept; and after he becomes a Christian he has an obligation, consistent with his academic ability and vocation, to elaborate a worldview as best he can. Pg. 291

I do not deny a that secular philosophies often attain a degree of consistency. Bertrand Russell was certainly consistent in deducing despair from his cold, dead, purposeless world. But Bertrand Russell is a very poor example if one wishes to mention a fully consistent secular philosopher. He has contradicted himself more often than Ayer and Wittgenstein. Even beyond this, I admit that there might be a secular system so carefully constructed that I could not discover the inconsistency. This in no way proves that error is consistent or that truth is inconsistent. How could my limitations imply that consistency is not the test of truth? And, I may add, my critic has not shown, nor even tried to show, that a given secular system is completely consistent. Only if he did would he have a basis for his criticism. The last two paragraphs of this section are full of confusion. Professor Weaver refers to assumptions lying behind the law of contradiction. These assumptions are, he says, the consistency of truth, personal identity, and a fixed ontological frame of reference. How Professor Weaver can discover any one of these three things before he uses the law of contradiction is something he nowhere explains. It would seem to me, contrariwise, that the law of contradiction lies behind or is presupposed by these three. At least I suppose that personal identity is a case of All x is x, and this is an expression of the law of contradiction. If he wishes to oppose my analysis of the situation, he should make himself clear and explain how the identity of a term can be maintained prior to any logical law. Then he writes, If he [Clark] allows the unbeliever to use it [logic] as if it were independent of God in order to test revelations and their implications, it seems he has made a fatal concession. The unbeliever will use it to deny the truths of Christianity. Now, just what is so fatal about this? Does anyone deny that unbelievers use logic as if it were independent of God? It is not that I, Clark, allow them to do so. This is what they actually do. Further, whatever Professor Weaver means by the unbelievers testing revelations, I would be only too happy if the unbeliever would test his implications by logic. Pgs. 292-293 Professor Weaver says, as if it were something I omitted to say, or perhaps denied, that general revelation is adequate for their condemnation. But on page 103 of Karl Barths Theological Method, the very page from which Weaver quotes a few lines earlier, my words are this knowledge may not be extensive, but its importance depends on its being the basis of heathen responsibility. Rather naturally the question of epistemology comes to the surface. In the immediate paragraph he questions the definition of knowledge as the possession of truth, and in a later paragraph calls it an imported unargued assumption. But if Weaver dislikes this definition, he should suggest an alternate. Is falsehood the object of knowledge? Is possession of the truth ignorance? Professor Weaver does not tell us what his objection is. Pg. 326 Parenthetically I suggest that a fact is an arithmetic mean with a variable error of zero, and that therefore science never discovers a fact.

Pg. 326 It is always necessary to begin with some apriori proposition that cannot be deduced from anything more fundamental. Pg. 328 Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and presumably even Newton all acknowledge the necessity of ideas, abstract concepts, or general notions. Without some such universals it is impossible to think. Pg. 330 A mathematical law is an abstract, general, or universal expression, a sort of Platonic Idea. To be sure, particular values can replace the variables, but the law itself is general and does not describe any individual process. Pg. 330 Toward the end of the criticism there are several further epistemological observations. He assumes that the objects known are other than propositions, namely, persons and thing. He assumes an unexplained theory of predication. Here he accepts the concepts he previously denied in favor of particular images. Concerning all this epistemology I hope, but I doubt, that I have said enough in the other replies. Even his remark that only God can know the truth, denying as it does the possibility of revelation, a possibility and actuality on which I have laid so much stress, came up with reference to Platos Parmenides. Surely I have said enough on this point at least. Pg. 331 Our discussion of equations has to do with saying different things in the same language, not the same thing in different languages. I do not care what language one speaks French, German, or Mathematics but I am concerned about the truth or falsity expressed. Pg. 387 So far as one may surmise, it may be possible for a non-Christian system to be free from contradictory pairs. Spinoza made a determined attempt, but seems not to have succeeded. Euclidena, Riemanian, and Lobachevskian geometries are each alone free from contradiction. The reason is that they are geometries and nothing else. But a comprehensive non-Christian philosophy, such as Kants or Hegels, without internal contradictions, would be hard to find. Remember the quip: Without the Ding-an-sich one cannot get into the Kantian system, and with it one cannot stay in. If the God of the Bible is Truth, one can at least expect that somewhere a non-Christian system will run into difficulties. It is worth ones while to search for them. For example, Logical Positivism with its denial of all non-observational propositions is based on the non-observational proposition that all truth is observational.

Pg. 389 The main and more philosophic reply to Reymonds widely-accepted view, that sensation must play a role in the learning process, is directed against two words, sensation and role. Clarks reply to both is the same; viz., they convey no meaning. Like nearly all (one could actually say all) Clarks empirical critics within the evangelical movement, Reymond refuses to define sensation. If it be defined as Aristotle and John Locke defined it (though these two did not completely agree) there is no such thing. Augustine made that quite clear. We never see a poem with our eyes nor do we ever hear a tune with our ears. A single note may be a sensation, but it is not a tune. In ordinary parlance we must hold in mind, remember, compare, judge a series of notes in order to hear a tune. Similarly, no one has ever seen a tree. Pg. 391 Clark based all his positive views on Scripture, insisting that it is God-breathed and furnishes all knowledge necessary for every good work Pgs. 393-394 Colossians 3:10 indicates that the image consists in knowledge, and Ephesians 4:24 adds righteousness and true holiness. But if God created man in knowledge, Adam could not have had a blank, empirical mind. Indeed, a blank mind cannot be the image of the omniscient God of truth. Pg. 397 Clark never had much to do with ta meta-ta-phusica. His province was ta pro tn phusikn. Pg. 398 Clark proposes to obtain all truth possible to man by logical deduction from Scripture. Pg. 399 One cannot know what is false Pg. 399 Now, it is true that Clark pointedly attacks Logical Positivism, and some other philosophies also, on the ground of their self-contradiction. But he explicitly acknowledged that Russells symbolic logic (maybe with a minor slip or two) is not self-contradictory. His criticism is that Russells system is truncated. Pg. 399

The very first sentence of Lewis Evaluation (119) is a total misunderstanding. Lewis wrote, Suppose for the moment that consistency is the sole test of truth-claims as Clark asserts. Clark never made such an assertion. In fact, he denied it. His contrary example is the three competing forms of geometry. Each one is totally self-consistent, but if they are supposed to describe twodimensional space, at least two of them, and possibly all three are false. Lewis has confused the proposition, all inconsistent systems are false with all false systems are inconsistent. Pg. 402 If now Clarks failure to deduce this or that theorem on subjects of great interest to Lewis and to many others, reduces his system to total skepticism, then Lewis failure to understand, deduce, or induce the law of gravitation will have the same tragic end. Lewis is assuming that in order to know any truth, a person must know all truth. Pg. 406 For the final section of this diatribe there is one constantly repeated objection to Clarks system. It is the general problem of individuation, though most of the apologetes recognize only some particular cases. For example, several complain that Clarks theories do not provide for the possibility of a persons knowing himself; and they talk as if they very definitely knew themselves. Others note that the axiomatic system prevents knowing their views or friends. A few, but very few, see, and only dimly see that Clark can furnish no knowledge of any individual not merely individual persons, but an individual stone or star. Pg. 411 The history of philosophy exhibits three main theories of individuation. The Aristotelian and empirical view has been sufficiently discussed. Kants space-time view has only been mentioned. The third view, which is not so fond of the word individual, because it is commonly attached to the empirical theory, explains what people call an individual as an infima species. This means that an object (man or tree) is an individual because it has, or is, a complex of qualities that no other individual has. Pg. 414 To avoid and to confute Clarks position, some of Van Tils disciples contend that God does not think in propositions, and hence dependence on mere human logic is an untrustworthy crutch. To this Clark has made two replies. First, he remarked that his opponents cited no Biblical passage in which this is stated, nor did they deduce it by any good and necessary consequence from a group of such premises. Indeed, since the Bible is ninety percent propositional commands and ascriptions of praise being the exceptions it would be rather peculiar if the Bible would deny its own truths. Then, second, if God does not think in propositions how could he have given us all the information now contained in the sixty-six books? If he does not think that David was the Kind of Israel, how could he have framed that proposition for our instruction? Or, worse, if we say that God cannot think in propositions, we deny his omnipotence. And if we think in propositions and God does not, then Van Tils statement will be

true, that Gods knowledge and ours do not coincide at any single point. Since we know that David was the King of Israel, God cannot know it, and therefore it is false. So are all the Gospels, and Christianity is a delusion.

Against the Churches, 2002 Pg. 31 How can we know anything? The answer to this question, technically called the theory of epistemology, controls all subject matter claiming to be intelligible or cognitive. Pg. 33 When the law of contradiction is deliberately repudiated, the distinction between truth and error vanishes. Pg. 34 The argument is that every philosophy must have a first principle, a first principle laid down dogmatically. Empiricism itself requires a first non-empirical principle. This is particularly obvious in that most extreme form of empiricism called logical positivism. To say that statements are nonsense unless verifiable by sensation, is itself a statement that cannot be verified by sensation. Observation can never prove the reliability of observation. Since, therefore, every philosophy must have its first indemonstrable axiom, the secularists cannot deny the right of Christianity to choose its own axiom. Accordingly, let the Christian axiom be the truth of the Scriptures. This is the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura. Evangelicalism historically meant two things: It meant justification by faith alone, of course, but it also meant the scripture alone - sola Scriptura and sola fide. Faith alone, scripture alone. These were the material and the formal principles of the Protestant Reformation, and anyone who denies either of those two has no historical business calling himself an Evangelical. The principle is sola Scriptura. This is a repudiation of the notion that theology has several sources such as the Bible, tradition, philosophy, science, religion, or psychology. There is but one source, the Scriptures. This is where truth is to be found. Under the word truth there is included, in opposition to irrationalism, logic and the law of contradiction. Whatever contradicts itself is not truth. Truth must be consistent, and it is clear that Scripture does not both affirm and deny an atonement. God is truth. Christ is the wisdom and Logos of God. And the words he has spoken to us are spirit and are life. Pg. 35 God is rational. His truth is rational, and we must be rational to receive it. Pg. 35 The whole Bible, every part of it, is revelation because it is rational and because we are rational. Deny the law of contradiction, abandon logic, insist that we must believe the absurd, and nothing in the Bible remains. Nothing whatever.

Pg. 54 The reason that philosophy is so important in understanding a civilization, the reason why therefore philosophy is essential to anyone who wishes to influence society is simply that on the whole philosophy controls the thoughts of men. People may not be aware of the factors which influence their thinking; they may never have heard of the worlds greatest thinkers; but over a period of time the theories of philosophers are popularized, publicized, and are then incorporated in the thinking of ordinary citizens. Pg. 55 If logical principles are arbitrary and tentative, either because they are the procedural stipulations of the analytical school, or because they are the conventions of a society, or because they are behavioristic muscular habits, and if therefore it is conceivable to employ different linguistic conventions, it should be possible for these philosophers to invent a different convention and to abide by it as they express their views. Can they do so? Now, the Aristotelian law of contradiction which they reject or which they assert can be rejected requires that a given word must not only mean something, but it must also not mean something else. The term dog must mean dog, but also it must not mean mountain; and mountain must not mean metaphor. Each term must refer to something definite and at the same time there must be other objects to which it does not refer. Suppose the word mountain meant metaphor, and dog, and Bible, and the United States. Clearly, if a word meant everything, it would mean nothing. If, now, the law of contradiction is not a fixed truth, if it is merely tentative, and if another form of thought is conceivable, I challenge these philosophers to write a book in conformity with their principles. That is, I challenge them to write a book without using the law of contradiction without insisting that words have definite references. As a matter of fact, it will not be hard for them to do so. Nothing more is necessary than to write the word metaphor sixty thousand times. Metaphor metaphor metaphor metaphor. This means, the dog ran up the mountain; for the word metaphor means dog, ran, and mountain. But unfortunately the sentence Metaphor metaphor metaphor metaphor also means, Next Christmas is Thanksgiving; for the word metaphor has these meanings as well. The point should be clear. One cannot write a book or speak a sentence that means anything without using the law of contradiction. Logic is neither a procedural convention, nor a product of society, nor a muscular habit. Logic is an innate necessity. Whether it be the secularism of John Dewey and A. J. Ayer, or the religious theory of the Neo-orthodox, or even the frequent pietistic depreciation of our so-called fallible human reason, this irrationalism makes all intelligible religion impossible. Each definite doctrine singly and the sum of them as a verbal revelation are emptied of all meaning. But fortunately this irrationalism makes itself impossible also. The theories of Nietzsche, Dewey, and Ayer are self-refuting because they cannot be stated intelligibly except in virtue of the law they repudiate. Pgs. 64-65

It is not really necessary to write a refutation of eighteenth century rationalism. It refutes itself. It has no philosophic basis and rests on nothing but erratic individual preferences. Discarding rationalism and its twentieth century progeny, Christianity must have a philosophy that can meet all the errors of the ages. This is not the place to expound and defend such a system in all its detail. But a concluding paragraph can briefly mention a few of its basic principles. First, one must wipe the slate clean of all empiricism. Whether it be the moral preferences of the pietists, or the immoral preferences of Bolingbroke and Voltaire, or the more philosophical sensory theories of Locke and Hume, all must be discarded, both because of their philosophical inadequacy, but also because Scriptures say that man is the image of God, and God is not a blank mind. Second, Christians must acknowledge the impossibility of demonstrating the inerrancy of Scripture. If any devout Christian thinks he can, let him try to prove that the list of names in Genesis 36 is without error. Third, one must come to realize that a system of truth must begin somewhere. For that matter, a system of error must also begin somewhere. If it did not begin, it could not continue. This is to say that every system of philosophy must have a first indemonstrable axiom. Empiricists can only assume, they can never demonstrate from some more remote proposition, that sensation is trustworthy. Nothing can precede the starting point. Now, fourth, the Christian should, though many do not, choose as his axioms the propositions of Scripture, and from these axioms he may develop an orderly system. Upon hearing this, many friends and enemies alike will object that this begs the question. It does not. The question is, Where shall we start? Some say sensation; I say revelation. One does not beg the question by answering the very first question. Of course, it is permissible for the opposition to argue that his opponents axioms result in selfcontradiction. And of course that is precisely what the seventeenth century rationalists, the nineteenth century higher critics, and the twentieth century existentialists have done. But the Hittites destroyed the higher critics, and the law of contradiction destroys the existentialists. If anyone wish to pursue this in detail, there are various volumes within easy access. Pg. 67 From the fact that God is the author of the Bible, a most important implication may be drawn. If these words are the words of God, what they say is true. If the Bible is Gods book, it is true. Pg. 68 One reason for taking the Bible away from the people and even for burning those who read it was the idea that the Bible is too hard to understand. The further idea arose that God had entrusted his message to the priests, and no one else was ever to read it. But this contradicts what the Bible says.

Now, it is true that some parts of the Bible are hard to understand. It is also true that scholars who study it for long hours and long years know it better than someone who reads it only fifteen minutes a week. But even the hard parts were addressed to all the people, and all of it is profitable. Pg. 86 If God knows what will happen, what He knows will happen and nothing else. Calvinists believe God knows what will happen because He ordained it so. But aside from this, foreknowledge indicates that the future is certain. And if it is not God who made the future certain, we must return to the dualism of Plato. But let it pass; if there be an omniscient God, the future is certain. Pg. 128 Since no one of us is omniscient, or even inerrant, it is not surprising that our volumes of theology contain blunders, mistakes, and stupidities. Pg. 132 On page 476 Ladd has several paragraphs under the sub-head Mind. Paul often speaks of the mind (nous), by which he designates man as a knowing, thinking, judging creature. This statement, in my opinion, is absolutely and completely correct. Pgs. 135-136 However, in Ladds attempt to defend eschatology - the distinction between olam hazeh and olam haba - his view of a present Heaven becomes clouded. It almost seems as if he denies that anything is eternal, or at least it is hard to believe that he allows for a World of Ideas after which this ephemeral world is patterned. True, amid his numerous references (574) he allows that Hebrews conceives of an invisible Kingdom already existing in Heaven. But this admission is modified toward the bottom of the page by the paragraph beginning Furthermore, it is not accurate to say that Hebrews, like Philo, contrasts the phenomenal world with the noumenal, regarding the former as unreal and ephemeral. If the sentence, with the words like Philo, means only that some points in Philo are not found in Hebrews, we can grant it: Philo wrote many volumes; Hebrews is scarcely twenty-five pages long. But if Ladd means that it is not accurate to say that Hebrews contrasts the phenomenal world with the noumenal, regarding the former as unreal and ephemeral, some questions must be asked. First, must the ephemeral be unreal? It is really ephemeral, is it not? Ephemeral means lasting but for a day. If refers to something passing away; and such is this visible olam hazeh. In any case, Ladds own references show that in Hebrews This age will end with a cosmic catastrophe by which the present world order will be shaken (1:11-12; 12:26) and the true eternal kingdom of God, now invisible, will become visible. Is it not clear that there could be no temporal, eschatological dualism without a Philonic, Platonic, thoroughly Christian dualism between the eternal non-ephemeral God and the world that is passing away?

If the reader is getting bogged down in too much detail and wonders where the logical flaw is in all this, the answer or a part of the answer is that Ladd either has not defined his essential terms or has changed some of their meanings from page to page. It makes no difference that Hebrews applies the idea of two worlds primarily to the Old Testament cult (574). The point is that the Old Testament teaches a Platonic-Philonic view of a supersensible world as well as an eschatological olam haba. Both the Old Testament and Hebrews indicate that the earthly tabernacle was the physical copy of a heavenly form. Note that the true tabernacle was pitched by the Lord and not by man (8:2). The earthly tabernacle was a shadow of heavenly things, for God had said to Moses, See that thou make all things according to the pattern in the mount (8:6; compare 9:9). Keep in mind too that this Platonic or Philonic spatial dualism comes from Moses, not from pagan Greek philosophy. Indeed, if we accept the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, Jacobs dream in Genesis 28 and his wrestling with the angel in 32:24ff. exhibit this dualism of the above and below. That Hebrews is primarily concerned with sacrifices and the tabernacle does not preclude an underlying and more inclusive dualism, even of a Philonic type. Logically, it is a case of both-and, not eitheror. A sentence only five lines below elicits the same comment; There is nothing ephemeral or transitory about Jesus life and work. There certainly is! His birth was ephemeral - it occurred on one particular day; his death on the cross was transitory - it was completed in six hours. That such events are transitory does not detract from their eternal significance; but if there were nothing ephemeral or transitory about Jesus life, as Ladd indicates, Jesus could not have lived an earthly life at all. Strangely in this paragraph Ladd says, What Jesus did, he did once for all, without realizing the meaning of his words. Hapax is an important word in Christian theology. Along with the several very true and very important points Ladd makes, one may surmise that he has not sufficiently fixed the definition of some terms such as ephemeral; also that he substitutes an either-or for a both-and; and third, that his shaky logic is the result of an inability to conceive of a non-spatial, non-visible reality as a pattern of something physical. A blueprint is the physical pattern of something to be constructed in three dimensions. A Tinkertoy, itself in three dimensions, can be a pattern of a larger physical body. But can a spiritual, intellectual, invisible, incorporeal Philonic Idea be a pattern of a three dimensional tabernacle? Can the things that are seen (phenomena) have been made of things which do not appear (noumenal)? Read 11:3. Yes, Hebrews 11:3 is an interesting verse. First, it must be translated. The King James, the New American Standard, Rienecker in his Linguistic Key to the Greek New Testament, and a similar work by Hughes, all agree on essentially the same translation: so that what is seen has not come into being from things which appear. The Roman Catholic New American Bible has the more positive rendering, what is visible came into being through the invisible. The Jerusalem Bible has a looser insipid translation: so that no apparent cause can account for the things we can see. Owen in his immense commentary remarks that these words...have much of obscurity and difficulty in them. The King James and the New American Standard are grammatically correct. I might put it a little more crudely, What is seen is that which has not come from phenomena. The New American Bible is not an accurate translation, but it seems to be an excellent interpretation. And the interpretation is not so difficult as Owen leads us to believe. Especially when compared with verses in the Pentateuch the words strongly suggest that the visible world came from a suprasensible, ideal world. The term noumena is not in the text; but

what else could to me ek phainomenon mean? Phenomena come from noumena. Certainly the verse in Hebrews does not forbid this interpretation. Now note the confusion of the true and the false on page 575. Referring to 9:24 Ladd acknowledges that the true sanctuary is in Heaven and that Christ did not enter into the earthly copy of the true one. He then immediately adds, However, it is difficult to think that the author of Hebrews conceived of Jesus after his ascension realistically entering a literal Holy Place in Heaven.... One commentator says, We cannot explain verse 23 in a satisfactory manner. Ladds trouble seems to be that realistically means physical, so that spiritual things are not real. The Tinkertoy is real, but the suprasensible Ideas of Gods mind, so he suggests, are not. As if to explain the inexplicable Ladd uses the neo-orthodox phrase, Eternity at this point intersects time (575). Since a point has no dimensions, no historical event can occur in it. Yet the last sentence of the paragraph is, Here in history on Earth is no shadow, but the very reality itself. This type of neo-orthodoxy contradicts Scripture, contradicts Hebrews itself, for it implies that God and angels are unreal. Fortunately its defense is illogical. Of course The heavenly tabernacle in Hebrews is not the product of Platonic idealism (576), as the liberal C. K. Barrett insists. Platos trinity had one person who was not omnipotent, one person who did not fashion the visible world, and a third everlasting principle that was not a person; but this in no way eliminates the eternal ideas which are Gods mind. Hebrews has both worlds, and their relationship is not inexplicable, as Hering suggested. Ladd attempts to solve the original problem by obscuring or even denying the noumenal world; but this is not a solution - it simply discards half of the Biblical material. He lamely concludes, If Hebrews makes use of Philonic dualistic language [Does this imply that references to the Divine Mind are mere metaphors and symbolism?] it is thoroughly assimilated to a Christian worldview of redemptive history with an eschatological consummation. Emphatically true: but why did not Ladd show the assimilation instead of casting doubt on the reality of the suprasensible world of which the visible world of sense is an ephemeral, transient copy? My aim, here, as said before, is not to pillory Ladd, but to defend the supersensible. Perhaps I have been too harsh on Ladd by using him for two extended examples. He is free to publicize more than two of my own numerous mistakes. But let us now choose another victim, this time nameless. This will enable the champions of Ladd to complain that I do not identify my sources. O tempora, O mori. Pg. 137 More often truth, first or ninth, presupposes an immaterial mind. Anyone who thinks otherwise bears the burden of proof. Pg. 137 There is another meaning of the term first. In addition to temporal priority there is a logical priority. The axioms of geometry are prior to the theorems. That is to say, the axioms imply the theorems. Temporally and historically Pythagoras developed his famous theorem long before Euclid catalogued the axioms. But logical priority can even less imply a materialistic soul. This discussion and this subject needs a first Truth, such as the law of contradiction, in respect of which the term passive is entirely inappropriate. The law as such does not suffer distortions or

modifications as the gentlemans term implies. The term active is also peculiar, for though the law organizes our thoughts, this is not an action in any ordinary sense of the word. It is better to identify the law of contradiction as the first Truth because it is the form of the mind itself, all of whose constituent thoughts, if true, must conform to it. But this can neither presuppose a material soul nor even be possible in any materialistic scheme. When this theologian speaks of a truth prior to consciousness, he seems to be confusing temporal priority with logical priority. Temporally, in a childs mind, the law of contradiction organizes, and correctly organizes, many of his thoughts, even though the child may have no explicit consciousness of the law he is using.

The Answer, 1944 Pgs. 9-10 Dr. Clark contends that the doctrine of the incomprehensibilty of God as set forth in Scripture and in the Confession of Faith includes the following points: 1. The essence of God's being is incomprehensible to man except as God reveals truths concerning his own nature; 2. The manner of God's knowing an eternal intuition, is impossible for man; 3. Man can never know exhaustively and completely God's knowledge of any truth in all its relationships and implications; because every truth has an infinite number of relationships and implications and since each of these implications in turn has other infinite implications, these must ever, even in heaven, remain inexhaustible for man; 4. But, Dr. Clark maintains, the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God does not mean that a proposition, e. g., two times two are four, has one meaning for man and a qualitatively different meaning for God, or that some truth is conceptual and other truth is non-conceptual in nature. Here is the crux of the issue. By insisting that God's knowledge is qualitatively different from that of man and that his knowledge and our knowledge do not coincide at any single point, the Complaint is advancing a theory of a two-fold truth; while Dr. Clark holds that the nature of truth is one, that if man knows any item of truth, both God and man know that same identical item, and that on this item God's knowledge and man's knowledge coincide. According to the Complaint man can never know even one item of truth God knows; man can know only an analogical truth, and this analogical truth is not the same truth that God knows, for the truth that God knows is qualitatively different, and God cannot reveal it to man because man is a creature. To repeat: the truth that God knows and the truth that man knows are never the same truth, for they do not coincide at any single point. God's knowledge therefore would be incomprehensible to man for the specific reason that God could not reveal any particular fact about it without destroying the Creator-creature relationship. Dr. Clark holds that God can reveal any item of knowledge in propositional form without destroying the Creator-creature relationship, and that such a revealed proposition has the same meaning for God and for man when, as is sometimes the case, man understands it. Pgs. 11-12 It is pertinent to ask just how the distinction between the Creator and the creature would be destroyed, if God made man understand some given item of knowledge so that God's knowledge and man's knowledge coincided at the point revealed by God to man. Of course God's knowledge of the subject would not be exhausted by what he revealed to man, but insofar as man understood the one revealed truth, his knowledge would coincide with that part of God's knowledge that God has chosen to reveal. The given proposition would be true both for God and for man; but what God does not reveal remains incomprehensible. Pgs. 12-14 Brief reference should be made to certain passages which among many others more pointedly support Dr. Clark's contention that God is truly knowable insofar as he reveals himself to

man. John 17:3 says, This life is eternal that should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ. Knowing God is said to be the essence of eternal life. No limits are placed on the amount of knowledge man may have about God. Other verses teach that man can know only what the Son reveals, but the assumption is clear that the Son can reveal to his people whatever he chooses. And it is assumed that such knowledge is true and valid for both God and man. Doubtless it would be only such knowledge as a creature could comprehend, but no limit is set for the comprehension of revealed truth. The manner of God's knowing would of course be different, and would eternally remain incomprehensible to man, but there is no evidence that there are any items of knowledge about God which God could not reveal to us, did he choose to do so. The second passage is John 7:17: If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching whether it is of God. Here we have described the true way to true knowledge of Godrevealed doctrine. Willing to do God's will is the way of knowledge of God's revelation. Certainly knowledge of God-revealed truth is here set as a goal before the man who wills to do God's will. Man may never reach the goal of perfect knowledge of revealed truth, but no barrier of mystery is here set forth in divine revelation that is quite beyond the powers of the finite mind to comprehend. On the contrary it is implied that there are no such barriers in revealed truth for the one who wills to do God's will. The third passage is: Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning (Romans 15:4; cf. 1 Corinthians 10:11). Insofar as God has revealed truth to man he clearly intends man to strive to understand God's meaning. The Presbytery finds nothing in Scripture implying that God places a different meaning on a proposition from that which he intends man to understand. When Scripture says, Ye shall know the truth (John 8:32), certainly the assumption is that it is the same truth for both God and man. When Christ told the disciples Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth is come, he will guide you into all truth (John 16:13), he certainly implied that under the Holy Spirit's guidance man can investigate all revealed truth, and the assumption seems to be that the Holy Spirit could, if he chose, reveal any particular truth to man. That is not to claim that man can sometime in eternity become omniscient by the comprehension of one truth after another as God reveals them to him. Man's knowledge would always be temporary, and could never include either the immediate, intuitive knowledge of God, or the knowledge of all the relationships and implications of any and all propositions. The necessary content of omniscience includes knowledge of what is to man the infinite future, the past in all its content, and all the infinite relationships and implications of all items of knowledge, past, present and future, as well as the infinite self-consciousness of God, both of his own Triune nature and of the manner in which he knows the universe, including the knowledge that God has of what is possible for him to do but which he will never do. Man can never become omniscient by adding one item of knowledge to another throughout eternity. Several other passages of Scripture set forth Dr. Clark's view of the matter. Psalm 36:9, In thy light shall we see light, does not say that we shall see merely some analogical reflection of the light. A similar meaning is embedded in Psalm 43:3, Send out thy light and thy truth, let them lead me. Particularly significant is 1 Corinthians 13:12, Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as I am known, for no limit is placed on the knowledge redeemed men man acquire in heaven. If the redeemed are to know as God knows them, it would seem that God will reveal a

much greater amount of knowledge in the future life than we now expect. Furthermore this verse implies that though our present knowledge is partial, it is nevertheless true knowledge of the same meaning that God has. Pg. 16 Dr. Clark believes that the preaching of the gospel, not without the regenerating or illuminating power of the Holy Ghost, is for the express purpose of teaching man what to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man. Since Scripture is in propositional form, the assumption of the Complaint that no statement in the Bible can reflect or inspire any recognition by man of his relation to God is both absurd and unscriptural. The second part of the same sentence purports to give a reason for the first part: propositions cannot inspire recognition of God, for the simple reason that propositions have the same content, mean the same, to God and man. The complainants therefore deny that propositions have the same meaning for God and man. But this denial nullifies the Bible from cover to cover. Pg. 17 There is no single passage from which by exegesis one can deduce that truth may always be expressed in propositions. But it must be insisted upon that the Bible as a whole is written in propositional form. The propositions of the Bible are not propositions about propositions; that is, the Bible is not a textbook on logic. But the Bible is logical; its teaching is propositional; and in view of the fact that God chose words and propositions for his revelation, in view of the fact that God did not choose some non-propositional form of revelation, one should be cautious of disparaging propositions. There is therefore Scriptural support, even if not exegetical support, for the propositional view of truth. Pg. 19 Intellectualism, as opposed to pragmatism, holds that truth is immutable and independent of man. Dr. Clark holds the usual form of intellectualism, that truth is indeed independent of man, though not independent of God; and this position coupled with Dr. Clarks acceptance of the Scriptures as the only rule of faith and practice disposes of the added charge of rationalism. Pgs. 22-23 On the complainants' theory the proposition the truth man has is analogical is itself only an analogy. It is not the truth that God has. Nor could man know that it was God who was revealing such a proposition, for again the proposition God is revealing that truth is analogical is only an analogy of the truth. One can only be sure that such a proposition is not God's truth. On the complainants' theory there is no way of ever crossing over from an analogy of truth to the truth itself. All our thinking is shut up in analogies and resemblances and cannot coincide with God's truth at even a single point. This position really cuts all connection between God's knowledge and man's knowledge and plunges us into unmitigated skepticism.

If the complainants cannot know what God means, how can they know God does not mean this or that? They affirm that there is a resemblance or analogy between the truth God knows and the qualitative different truth man knows. But by what right do they assert a resemblance when they cannot describe the qualitative difference? Or, how can they assert that two things resemble each other when they have never known and can never know one of them? One can say that two men resemble each other if one has seen both men. But one cannot legitimately affirm a resemblance between a man one has seen and a man one has not seen. Similarly, if a man knew God's meaning, he could compare it with his own and remark the similarity or difference. If I know your opinion, I can say it is similar to or dissimilar from mine. But if I do not know your opinion, I have no way of knowing whether your opinion is the same or contradictory of mine. Similarly if man's knowledge and God's knowledge do not coincide at any single point, then for all we know, perhaps Christ did not die for our sins. Pgs. 32-33 Fifth and last: the Complaint asserts (P. 10, 2; O. 40), Dr. Clark does not deny the necessity or fact of regeneration but he makes no absolute qualitative distinction between the knowledge of the unregenerate man and the knowledge of the regenerate man. With the same ease, the same 'common sense,' the unregenerate and the regenerate man can understand propositions revealed to man (p. 20; 28:13-16; 31:13-17; 34:13-35:2). If the complainants had quoted these passages from the transcript instead of merely referring to them, everyone could have seen that all but the last have nothing to do with the matter of regeneration, and that the last is contradictory of their assertion. The discussion had centered on the proposition two times two equals four. Dr. Clark had asserted that any man who knows this proposition knows it by means of the definitions of the numbers and by the laws of logic. Then the transcript continues: Q. Where do we get those laws of logic? A. 'Every man that cometh into the world.' (Obviously the transcript omits part of the quotation.). Q. Is it possible that by the effective sin, man will not be able to deduce by the propositions concerning God? A. That is often the case. In other words, the complainants imply that Dr. Clark holds that regeneration does not renew the mind or that sin has not affected it; whereas Dr. Clark said specifically that sin often causes men to commit logical fallacies. Thus the complainants cite evidence that is not only irrelevant, but also evidence that contradicts their charge. Some further study of the knowledge of a regenerate man and of an unregenerate man might prove profitable, but the subject can be accorded only the briefest mention. Both the regenerate and the unregenerate can with the same ease understand the proposition, Christ died for sinners. Regeneration, in spite of the theory of the Complaint, is not a change in the understanding of these words. The difference between the regenerate and the unregenerate lies in the fact that the former believes the proposition and the latter does not. The regenerate acknowledges Christ as Lord; the other does not. The one is a willing subject; the other is a rebel. Regeneration is not necessarily a change in understanding propositions. An unregenerate man may understand the proposition that Christ died for sinner, but far from knowing it to be true, he thinks it to be false. Strictly speaking he knows only that the Scriptures teach Christ died for sinners. When he is regenerated, his understanding of the proposition may undergo no change at all; what happens is that he now accepts as true what previously he merely understood. He no longer knows merely the Scriptures teach Christ died for sinners; he now knows Christ died for sinners. Nothing in these considerations is intended to suggest that regeneration is here completely described. These remarks only bear briefly on the change of knowledge involved in

regeneration. The renewal of the original image of God and the Spirit's implantation of new habits would require extended treatment. Pg. 35 How can anyone suppose that God would reveal to man something irrational or nonunderstandable? To be sure there are some things hard to be understood, but if the Bible actually reveals God, it cannot be non-understandable. God commands us to search the Scriptures; we are encouraged to understand. Calvin, Institutes, III, xxi, 3, replies to those who think one ought not to investigate the doctrine of predestination, by pointing out that such an attitude is in effect a charge that God did not know how much he should reveal. No doubt this doctrine, and all doctrines, should be studied with care and caution; but the Scriptures nowhere prohibit us from attempting to solve revealed paradoxes. Nearly any two propositions could appear contradictory to someone, the less a person has studied the Bible, the more likely he is to encounter difficulties; and the advice usually given is to study further and understand more. Pg. 36 anyone who argues that a given revealed paradox cannot be solved is virtually claiming omniscience. He who says a given paradox cannot be solved, logically implies that he has examined every verse in Scripture, that he has exhausted every implication of every verse, and that there is in all this no hint of a solution. Such a person must have a tremendous knowledge of the Bible.

The Bible Today 42.3, December 1947 cf. pgs. 67-70. In this philosophical discussion it has seemed important to me to distinguish between a system of thought and an actual person. Since everyone is fallible, since some people hold more erroneous views than others, it is clear that a given Christian does not have all the truth or all the system. Some of the system he must believe in order personally to be a Christian; some of the system he may not know at all; and some parts of the system he may consciously reject. For example, Calvinists and Arminians accuse each other of rejecting parts of Biblical teaching. Therefore what is true of an inconsistent person is not necessarily true of a consistent system. And I have maintained that there is a common ground among persons, but not among systems.

The Bible Today 42.4, January 1948 cf. pgs. 109-114. the point must be emphasized that a Christian, even a true Christian, and Christianity are two different things. The Christian is inconsistent. Christianity is the whole consistent truth. Similarly an atheist and atheism are two different things. Atheism, a system, is as consistent as any false system can be. But an individual atheist not only may, but does believe propositions inconsistent with his professed atheism. cf. pgs. 109-114. When unbelievers object to Christianity on the basis that it views the world on the basis of undemonstrated hypotheses, the reply should plainly be made that everyone more or less consciously bases his conclusions on undemonstrated assumptions. There are no facts, no meaningful facts, apart from presuppositions.

The Bible Today 42.6, March 1948 Cf. Pgs. 173-177. the word system can be used in the sense of a perfectly consistent series of propositions. Cf. Pgs. 173-177. The basis of the notion of system and its importance for the Gospel is seen most directly in the doctrine of Gods omniscience. When a certain fundamentalist minister writes that there are some things God does not know, he is not preaching the Gospel. But when the Bible ascribes wisdom to God. when John identifies Christ as the Logos, when it is revealed that God sees the end from the beginning and works all things after the counsel of his will, more is meant than that God knows a collection of items. It seems to me that the implication is that Gods mind is a system. Dr. Buswell says The truth is a perfectly consistent system in the sense that it contains no logical contradictories, not in the sense that every element is implied by the system (January, Editorial Note). Now, it seems to me that Dr. Buswells remark is decidedly inadequate. For example, a series of statements such as, two and two are four, Columbus discovered America, David was King of Israel, the Hudson River is in New York, is perfectly consistent in the sense that the series contains no logical contradictories; but such a haphazard collection I should not care to call a system. Gods mind is not a haphazard collection. While Dr. Buswell objects to the idea that every truth in Gods mind implies or is implied by every other truth, yet this surely is nearer the truth than Dr. Buswells (possibly haphazard) collection of non-contradictory items. Everything in the Bible seems to me to imply that Gods mind is an orderly, completely integrated system. The integration may depend on teleological relationships rather than on formal deduction, and in this sense the word implies may convey a wrong meaning; but in popular terms every item of Gods knowledge must surely fit in with every other item. This also seems to me to solve the philosophic problem of truth. The three chief contenders in this field are the correspondence theory, the coherence theory, and the pragmatic theory. For reasons too numerous to include here, I believe pragmatism leads to complete skepticism. The correspondence theory would require us to compare an idea we have in consciousness with some utterly unknown object. This is impossible. The coherence theory remains. It cannot be charged with skepticism. If it is objected that it requires an impossibility, viz. that a man be omniscient, the reply is that its Hegelian form may involve such an impossibility; but this impossibility does not occur in the Christian system where an omniscient God makes a definite revelation to man. Hence, it is not necessary for a man to know everything before he knows anything. The subjective knowledge of any man depends not on his own complex of thoughts but on Gods system and on the fact of revelation. And contrary to what seems to be Dr. Buswells opinion, this is not at all inconsistent with Gods sovereign grace. Cf. Pgs. 173-177.

Christianity, I have tried to say, is not only a but the perfectly consistent, integrated system of truth.

The Witness, June, 1948 Pg. 5 The solidarity of the family rests on faith. We display faith whenever we eat in a restaurant or whenever we eat at home, for that matter. We need faith to drive a car. We need faith to study a g text-book on physics. Pgs. 5-6 Scientific law depends on experimentation in which lengths are measured. It may be the length of a column of mercury between two marks on a bar of steel; but there must always be a measurement of length. Inasmuch as a human being, even with the aid of microscopes or the most delicate electrical devices, cannot perceive differences in length when they are very small (difference threshold), it follows that the experimentation permits the scientist to choose any one of an infinite number of laws as the explanation of his problem. He is not compelled to choose one rather than another. And as a matter of fact it often occurs, and particularly in the twentieth century it often occurs than on scientist chooses one law and another scientist sometimes chooses another. For some purposes a physicist will adopt the nineteenth century theory of the wave motion of light; and then the same man will later choose the newer corpuscular theory. Only it is not newer; it is the theory of Newton that was discarded in the nineteenth century and has again become popular. The army doctor asked, In what language are faith and proof synonymous? Unless he is willing to agree that faith and proof are synonymous in every language, he will be faced with the problem of identifying an actual proof somewhere. Certainly he can find no proof in science, for the history of science is but the replacing of one theory by another theory. Science is essentially tentative. The science of today will be antiquated tomorrow. And in view of this indisputable fact, one should be wary of claiming that todays science has been proved. This line of argument, this type of problem, leads to the most involved speculation. It is in reality the problem of what is knowledge. And no philosophical problem is more technical, more complex than this. The army doctor unsuspectingly assumed that there is a clean-cut distinction between faith and proof, between religion and science. But is there? What is proof? And, for that matter, what is faith?

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society Volume 20, September 1977 Pg. 268 Evangelicals assert the inerrancy of the whole Bible on the ground of its own claims. The Biblical teaching is axiomatic. It is not deduced from previous external axioms. But this does not make evangelicals conveniently blind. They are very happy to face the facts of Assyrian inscriptions and other archaeological debris. But what they find in them is neither proof nor disproof of Biblical infallibility. What they find in them is ad hominem arguments discomfiting to the liberals no more, no less. Of course, evangelicals have a priori axioms. The liberals also depend on indemonstrable assertions. Every philosophic system must have a starting point, or else it does not start. But some-times the liberals talk as if they had discovered facts without starting from historiographical assumptions. Pg. 272 If infallibility is ascribed to persons, and if infallibility means that the person has never made and never will make an error, then infallibility belongs to God alone, unless we wish to include the righteous angels also. On the other hand, if infallibility is asserted of a document, then it means merely that that document teaches no error. Believers believe that such is the case with the Bible. Believers do not believe that Isaiah and Paul never made false assertions. Paul clearly made many before his conversion; nor do we say he never made any afterward. We do not attribute infallibility to Paul. It is the Biblical text that is infallible. Nor need one insist that the Bible is the only infallible book. A first-grade arithmetic book may be infallible or inerrant. Pg. 277 The evangelical premise is, God cannot lie. We have no objection to or apology for this verse in Numbers. We do object to the resulting impression that this is the only verse on which to base inerrancy. Gaussen gives a hundred or more. To ignore all these may hide them from uneducated readers, but it does not diminish their logical force. Again, we agree that God can hardly be charged with the defects of the authors unless God guaranteed the truth of what they wrote. And that is precisely what God did. One of Gaussens hundred verses is, Thou, God..., by the Holy Spirit, through the mouth of our father David, said.... This is what God said, and the God of truth cannot lie. Pg. 278 The evangelical will agree that the purpose of the Bible is to present us with the truth. To give content to this very general principle, the evangelical appeals to the phenomena of the Bible. Beegle dare not object to an appeal to the phenomena. These phenomena include Numbers 20 and Judges 10. Or, upon our recommendation the reader may open his Bible and read the remarkable chapter, Genesis 36. What is the purpose of Genesis 36? One might facetiously say that God included that chapter in his revelation for the express purpose of refuting Beegles

theory. Nor is this altogether facetious. Genesis 36 shows that God places a value on historical information. To assign to the Bible a purpose that would make half of it useless is to impose an alien, secular a priori on the sacred text. The purpose of Scripture should be discovered in it, not imposed on it. Pg. 282 Philosophically, knowledge of a person, his mind and will is itself propositional information. We know a mans mind when we know what he is thinking, and we know God by receiving a statement of his ideas or doctrine. That God is merciful, that he forgives sin, that he is just and punishes the impenitent these are all propositional pieces of information. Pgs. 284-285 How can anyone deny that knowledge of persons is rational, intelligible, understandable, and ascertained by reason? If I listen to John Doe as he talks about his politics and religion, about sports and about his favorite restaurants, and if as I listen I think and reason out that he must be a man of such and such a character, then according to Beegle my knowledge is impersonal. But if I do not think, do not reason, do not understand, what sort of knowledge could I possibly obtain? Irrational knowledge, unintelligible truth, is simply not knowledge or truth at all.

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society Volume 24, June 1981 Pg. 166 The presuppositionalist, at least some of them, would insist that truth is very real and that only propositions can be true. Pg. 166 What is real? What is a particular state of affairs? What is given? Are dreams real? They are real dreams, are they not? Are mathematical equations real? The logical positivists, if they used the word real, would say no. Are propositions real? By giving propositions referents, and with other wordings, the author seems to exclude propositions from the real, objective world. In that case we can never know the state of affairs but only a replica, symbol, or picture of it. No extrasubjective reality could be in ones mind, could it? A picture of a reality is not that reality, is it? If the picture is in our mind, the thing itself is outside and unknown unknown, because whatever is known must be in ones mind. One further question: Is the sensation of red or the taste of chocolate real? Realism, whether Platos intellectual realism or the physical realism of the 1930s, insists that man can know reality and not just a mental reproduction of it. Hannas position, even though he may not recognize or acknowledge it, is that a state of affairs is unknowable. Pg. 167 Aristotle, though far from being a presuppositionalist, in Book Gamma of the Metaphysics showed how the principles of logic are embedded in every intelligible sentence. He also argued that unless an argument went back to first principles and stopped there an infinite regress would be necessary and therefore the justification could not be completed. Pgs. 167-168 As briefly indicated in the previous reference to Aristotle, the laws of logic are themselves embedded in every declarative sentence throughout the Bible. Since, however, they are not stated explicitly, as they would be in a logic textbook, a learner may come to know them only after he has read and thought upon various Biblical passages. Most people, in reading any book, are interested in its explicit subject matter and do not consciously repeat to themselves the laws of disjunction, conjunction and implication. So too with the Bible. But this does not mean that logic is a neutral criterion, a set of non-Biblical principles. God is truth, and Christ is the wisdom and logos of God. One may admit that the axioms of logic are of more universal application than many other Scriptural axioms. One may also admit that the other axioms could not be true without these all-embracing logical forms. But since the other axioms cannot be deduced from the forms of logic no axiom can ever be deduced from another they too remain axiomatic. At any rate logic is Biblical, not neutral. Pg. 168

If truth is a logical system, its first axiom must be the law of contradiction, or of identity, which is really the same thing. Even nonpropositionalists and non-Christians try to axiomatize logic. The formula (a<b)<(b<a) is either itself an axiom or deducible from simpler axioms. The meaning of E can with the principle of obversion be deduced from the definition of A; but the meaning of A is an irreducible definition. Strange to say, in this same paragraph he describes the law of contradiction as a given. Since he has said it cannot be axiomatic, the term given cannot be applied to axioms. But what is a given? Earlier he seems to identify gives as the referents of sensations. Does he now admit that propositions can be given? If so, how can such a proposition be dependent on a referent-given? Can other propositions be gives? Then propositions must be realities, and at least these realities are mental. What then becomes of his insistence, if I understand him, on reality as independent of and external to a mind? I am afraid I do not understand him, for I think he is confused. His reply to me is that I am patently absurd (p. 98). Following this charge of absurdity he claims that the laws of logic are not derived from the Bible. His argument requires the assertion that the laws cannot be so derived. My answer is that every declarative sentence in fact, even questions and commands are examples of logic. Not only so, but my brilliant colleague J. C. Keister has deduced detailed arithmetic from the Bible, and we are both confident that he will succeed in deducing calculus also, in detail. Pg. 170 Brunner held that God and the medium of conceptualist are mutually exclusive. But other presuppositionalists I would not call Brunner a presuppositionalist presuppose the inerrancy of Scripture. The find the norms of logic embedded in the Bible, and therefore they regard God as a rational rather than as an irrational being. Hence they do not use human criteria to judge divine revelation. Christ is the Logic and Wisdom of God. His mind is revealed in Scripture. We were created as the image of God that is, as rational beings.

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society Volume 25, June 1982 Pg. 201 In the first place I use geometry only as an example of logical thinking. There are many other examples, but geometry is one of the best and should be well known. If anyone objects to the procedures of geometry the deduction of theorems from axioms he is in reality objection to logical thought as such and is justifying fallacious argumentation. Pg. 201 it seems inexplicable to me that anyone with an IQ above 80 can fail to note that my axioms are the Bibles and not Euclids. Pg. 202 Two persons may understand the same proposition, but the subjective accompaniments the proposition may make one person happy and another sad cannot be common.