Prayers for John

Please pray for John, his wife Linda and the rest of his family. I just received word that John has contacted hospice and will start receiving care in his home. Tom, his son-in-law, said that John’s hope is that he would remain mentally sharp until the end. I also pray that the Lord will be merciful on him as he prepares to return home and that he might not suffer much.

“And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen and establish you. To Him be dominion forever and ever. Amen.”

May the Lord greatly bless his servant John Robbins in these final days and be there waiting to welcome his faithful servant into paradise. Praise be to God.

“His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

Clark Not-So-Quick Quote

I realize that it’s back to back Clark Quick Quotes (can you really get enough), but I was recently in a very short and not very productive discussion/debate with one of the more thoughtful Vantilians I’ve met and never got around to sharing this excellent quote from Clark below.  So I thought I would do so here.  I should add that by “thoughtful Vantilian” what I mean is that he, among other things, rejects VT’s indefensible rejection of any univocal point of contact between God’s thoughts and man’s and even agrees with Clark that the conclusions of inductive arguments are not cognitive; i.e., they don’t provide knowledge.  Yet, in spite of the significant common ground I have with this particular Vantilian, and given his rejection of most of Van Til’s epistemological errors, he still maintains that sensation is a medium by which we come to know any number of things and that sensation plays a role in the acquisition of knowledge.

Now, while it may be the case that we were simply talking past each other, most who are familiar with Clark will immediately recognize that Clark was a thorough going anti-empiricist and assigned no role whatsoever to sensation in the acquisition of knowledge.  For whatever reason this is an unfathomable position to the minds of many who believe that sensations, whatever they may be, are reliable and are means to knowledge.  Admittedly a common problem, but not a view that should be associated with Clark.  I mean, how many times did Clark have to address in one form or another the question, “don’t you know you have a bible in your hands?”  Among a number of other references where Clark answers this objection, I pointed out Clark’s reply to Robert Reymond in his posthumously published, Clark Speaks From The Grave. In response to this reference, and after insisting that he was completely familiar with Clark’s reply to Reymond, my interlocutor replied:

Clark’s writing the book actually presupposes that he believes that the senses play a role in knowledge acquisition! His issue with the role of sensory perception was that it is not what some make it out to be. It’s a medium and no more. Again, I’ve pointed this out above so I won’t rehearse it again here. Even if we disagree on Clark, you might want to decide for yourself whether your senses played any role in your salvation. Remember the verse: “How can they hear without a preacher?” Did your ears or eyes play no part in your coming to know your savior lives?

The Gaffin Question

Lane Keister recently issued a “friendly response” in order to gently rebuke Dr. R. Scott Clark for providing some very pointed, much needed and well overdue criticisms of Richard Gaffin and his 30 plus years on the wrong side of the Federal Vision controversy.

Consider some of these points raised by Clark . . .

. . . Gaffin defended Norm Shepherd’s doctrine of justification by grace through faithfulness for about 30 years. As late as 2000 Gaffin endorsed Shepherd’s book on covenant and justification. Not long after that he defended OPC elder John Kinnaird’s fundamentally wrong-headed two-stage doctrine of justification. In more recent years, however, Gaffin, who served on the OPC justification committee, has distanced himself from Shepherd by supporting the OPC committee report. I haven’t yet read his most recent book or his essay in Justified in Christ, so I don’t know how those pieces fit into this puzzle yet but it seems fair to say that Dick’s legacy on justification is mixed.

Jesse Helms – Conservative Warrior – RIP