Gordon Clark vs. the Bogeyman

A suggestion was made recently that Gordon Clark’s definition of faith as assent to understood propositions – and saving faith as assent to understood biblical propositions — smacks of  Sandemanianism.  Yet, the real anti-Christian mischief, as we shall see,  is done by those who maintain the traditional tri-fold definition of faith as a combination of understanding, assent and trust (which sounds so much more religions  and authoritative when said in Latin; i.e., notitia, assensus and fiducia).   Well, a number of years ago Banner of Truth Trust (the same people who butchered A.W. Pink’s Sovereignty of God) published a hatchet piece by some guy named Doug Barnes who tried, unsuccessfully, to link Clark with Sandeman.  They also published a piece by Geoff Thomas making the same, albeit, less sustained charge.  To Banner’s credit, they at least had the decency to publish a letter by Dr. Robbins setting the record straight (something I can’t say about the OPC rag, New Horizons, which refused to publish letters by both Dr. Robbins and I responding to a similarly distorted review of Clark’s, What is Saving Faith? by Alan Strange) .  Here is Dr. Robbins reply to Messrs. Barnes and Thomas in full:

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John Robbins, Ph. D.

Recently The Banner of Truth published two essays [this one above and the one entitled Sandemanianism at the Westminster Conference, dated 17/12/2004, ed] linking the names of Robert Sandeman, the 18th-century Scots preacher, and Gordon Clark, the 20th-century American theologian and philosopher. This is most unfortunate, for several reasons.

First, neither author of these essays, Douglas Barnes and Geoff Thomas, is qualified to make this comparison. At the time of their writing, neither had read the relevant works of Robert Sandeman, and one of them had not even read Gordon Clark’s book What Is Saving Faith? (Whether they have tried to do their homework since they wrote, I do not know.) Despite not having read Dr. Clark’s book, Thomas dismisses Clark’s view as “the erroneous teaching of the late Gordon Clark.” When I was a college professor, any student who made such claims, not having read the sources, would have flunked the course. Apparently seminary graduates and ministers are not expected observe even minimum standards of scholarship.

Second, these authors, Thomas and Barnes, have used Sandeman as a bogeyman to scare people away from reading Dr. Clark. In so doing, they have not only dragged a red herring through the discussion of Clark’s views, but they have libeled Dr. Clark.

Third, the authors of these essays, both seminary-trained men, both claiming to be Reformed, ought to know that the question is not, Does Clark agree with Sandeman, but, Does Clark agree with Scripture? For all Protestants that is the question to ask. To ask the question, Does Clark agree with Sandeman, and to answer it, Yes, he does, not having read Sandeman (or even Clark), is less than honest and worse than unscholarly. The long-term effect is even more serious: Such a question introduces into readers’ minds a standard other than Scripture for evaluating theological opinions. Tradition, regarded as either negative or positive, becomes the standard, and the Protestant rule of faith is eclipsed.

Let us turn to the body of Barnes’ essay. In his opening paragraph he describes Clark’s view: “For Clark, faith was none other than intellectual assent. Believe the proper things about God and Christ, and you were saved. Misunderstand, and all is lost. No heartfelt emotion or trust is needed…or even involved.”

In his essay, Barnes does not define the word “trust,” making it distinct from assent (which is crucial to his argument), so the reader must guess what he means. Unlike Dr. Clark’s careful definition of terms in What Is Saving Faith? Barnes makes undefined terms central to his argument. The result is that Barnes, quite literally, doesn’t know what he is talking about.

When he uses the phrase “heartfelt emotion or trust” that seems to be about as close as he comes to defining “trust.” Trust is a “heartfelt emotion.” Which emotion Barnes does not say. Perhaps it is a feeling of absolute dependence, as the German Liberal Schleiermacher said. (Barnes uses the phrase “trusting reliance,” which makes him sound like Schleiermacher.) Whatever it is, this heartfelt emotion, Barnes says, is what makes belief saving, for Barnes denies that believing the truth (see the quotation above) saves anyone. To be saved, one must also feel an emotion. But neither Christ nor the Apostles ever demanded that sinners have an emotional experience; they demanded that they believe the truth.

Barnes flatly asserts: “Faith alone is not belief alone.” Faith and belief are two different things in Barnes’ soteriology. It follows, does it not, that when Christ said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life,” that he was misleading Nicodemus? And when the Apostle Paul said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved” he was misleading the jailer? One might quote scores of similar verses, but these two will do to show how far Barnes is from Christian soteriology. According to the Scriptures, belief of the Gospel, and only belief of the Gospel, saves.

This point deserves some emphasis, for in his emotional zeal to charge Clark with error, Barnes attacks, repeatedly and emphatically, the notion that belief of the Gospel saves the sinner. This is a frontal attack on the Gospel itself.

In denying that belief of the Gospel saves, Barnes has apparently been misled by the Latin fides, a word not found in Scripture. Barnes refers to the “traditional threefold definition of faith as notitia (understanding), assensus (assent) and fiducia (trust).” He correctly describes this definition as “traditional,” but he fails to show that it is Biblical. And that is what he must show, if we are to accept his argument.

Contrary to Barnes’ preoccupation with Latin terms, Dr. Clark disposed of the misleading Latin definition by showing it to be tautologous, and then he examined the Greek terms of the New Testament, demonstrating by the meticulous exegesis of scores of verses exactly what the Holy Spirit meant by the words “believe” and “belief”: Belief is assent to a proposition. For example, John 4:50: “The man believed the word that Jesus had spoken to him.” John 2:22: “They believed the Scripture.” John 9:18: “But the Jews did not believe…that he had been blind.” And so on. Saving faith is not belief of any stray proposition, such as “he was born blind,” but belief of the propositions of the Gospel.

Furthermore, saving belief is a species of the genus belief, and unless one knows what belief is, one cannot understand what saving belief is. What distinguishes saving belief/faith from generic belief/faith is not some additional subjective psychological factor, as Barnes asserts, but the object, the propositions, believed. It is not our subjective emotional state that saves us, but the objective truth. Saving belief is belief of the Gospel truth. Barnes’ subjectivism is subversive of Christianity.

Barnes asserts: “Clark simply has no place in his system for trust.” Well, Clark has no place in his system for undefined terms, and if trust remains undefined, then there is no place in Christian theology for it. But Barnes apparently did not read page 76 of What Is Saving Faith?: “If anyone wish to say the children [of Matthew 18:6 and Mark 9:42] trusted in him, well and good; to trust is to believe that good will follow.” Here Clark defined “trust” as belief of a proposition in the future tense, in this case, the proposition “good will follow.” To trust a person is to believe the proposition, “he always tells the truth.” To trust God is to believe the proposition: “God will be good to me forever.” Or as Paul put it more eloquently in Romans 8: “For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” But an undefined psychological state called “trust” has no place in the Gospel or in Biblical theology.

Barnes next misquotes and misinterprets the Westminster Confession: “Westminster Confession of Faith 14.2 declares that saving faith involves not merely believing God’s word and accepting Christ’s claims, but also ‘receiving and resting upon Christ alone for all that salvation entails.'”

Once again, Barnes’ un-Biblical view of faith leads him to assert that “believing God’s word and accepting Christ’s claims” is inadequate for salvation because it is different from “receiving and resting upon Christ alone.” When one recalls that Christ’s claims include this one, “No one comes to the Father but by me,” it is obvious that Barnes’ alleged distinction collapses. Believing Christ’s claims is ipso facto “receiving and resting on Christ alone.”

Here is what 14.2 actually says: “By this faith, a Christian believes to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word, for the authority of God himself speaking therein; and [he] acts differently upon that which each particular passage thereof contains, yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises of God for this life and that which is to come. But the principal acts of saving faith are accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life, by virtue of the covenant of grace.”

A careful reading of this paragraph shows that the Westminster Assembly first asserted that the Christian believes to be true whatever Scripture says, simply because God says it; and then Assembly identified the “principal acts of saving faith” as belief of the Scriptural propositions about Christ. Barnes imagines a contrast between belief (which he says does not save) and an emotional experience, but there is none in the Confession. It is all belief, all intellectual assent, and the contrast in 14.2 is between believing all the propositions of Scripture, and the “principal acts of saving faith,” which is believing the specific propositions about Christ.

Barnes makes a similar blunder with regard to the Larger Catechism, which in question 72 is not burdened with drawing a distinction between “assent” (a literal term) and “receiving and resting” (figurative terms), but with making clear that it is not merely the promise of the Gospel (eternal life) that the sinner believes, but also the doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ as the sole basis for pardon and salvation. Because of his subjectivist bias, Barnes misreads both these passages in the Westminster Standards, trying to make the effectiveness of saving faith depend on something inside the sinner, rather than on the objective work of Christ.

Barnes’ bias leads to his misreading of the Belgic Confession as well. He quotes Article 23, which contradicts his views: “We do not presume to trust anything in ourselves [that includes emotions] or any of our merits, ‘relying and resting upon the obedience of Christ crucified alone, which becomes ours when we believe in him.'” Admitting that this statement teaches “intellectual belief,” Barnes asserts that “relying and resting” involves “something more.” What this “something more” is, Barnes does not say. He asserts this because “Belgic 23 concludes that such a response to God [that is belief] frees one’s conscience ‘of fear, terror, and dread’ — emotions which rather clearly transcend the intellect!”

This is a most bizarre argument. First, Barnes told us that heartfelt emotion was necessary for salvation; now he claims the Belgic Confession supports him, even when it says that belief of the Gospel ends emotions!

Second, Barnes asserts that emotions “transcend the intellect,” a statement that betrays his fundamentally Antichristian and secular psychology. Barnes has absorbed more Freud that he cares to admit. He simply does not understand that emotions are reactions to beliefs, and that beliefs are more fundamental than emotions. That is why, as the Belgic Confession says, belief of the Gospel frees the sinner from these emotions.

Barnes’ appeal to the Heidelberg Catechism rests on the same subjectivist misreading of the document. Answer 21 is concerned to state first a general principle (“all that God has revealed to us in his word”) and then the specific propositions of the Gospel. Like 14.2 of the Westminster Confession, it does not use the word “trust.”

Barnes also cites several confused statements from a number of theologians. One of the benefits of reading Dr. Clark’s book is that he shows how the theologians speak out of both sides of their mouths, contradicting on one page what they had asserted on the page before. Clark easily can and does cite a Reformed tradition supporting his views, just as Barnes cites a tradition supporting his view. Such quotes settle nothing. Only Scripture is decisive, and Scripture says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.” To go beyond this, to assert that belief is not enough, is to deny the Gospel.

Therefore, when Barnes concludes, “Belief alone is not enough,” he denies the Gospel. And when he cites as a reason for this “inescapable conclusion” that man’s “intellect is just as polluted and helpless as his conscience and emotions,” one can only conclude that he has not understood anything in Dr. Clark’s book. His essay is merely an emotional rant against Clark.

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