Gordon H. Clark: The Reformers Were Scripturalists

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. -- Dr. Gordon H. Clark

The following is from God's Hammer:  The Bible and Its Critics, by Dr. Gordon H. Clark:

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.

      It is now fair to ask whether this construction is historically the Reformation viewpoint. Did Martin Luther and John Calvin accept the Bible as self-consistent, and did they recognize the sole test of logic?

      The first of these two questions is the easier to answer. That the Bible presents a self-consistent intellectual system, and that Calvin was convinced of it, has been made sufficiently clear in his Institutes and Commentaries. The Westminster Confession is additional testimony. The Calvinistic love of logic is well known; and, as has been seen, it was a distaste for Calvinism that led Brunner to reject logic. This point, therefore, is characteristic of the Reformed Faith.

      The second of these two questions is more complicated because the Reformers did not explicitly discuss logic as the sole test of a rational revelation. Their silence is understandable, however, for irrationalism is mainly a twentieth-century phenomenon that they did not anticipate. Nevertheless, that the preceding construction is implicit in their views may be plausibly inferred from their methods. They abandoned the scholastic philosophy; they spent no time attempting to prove the existence of God, much less the sensory origin of knowledge; the contrast between the Institutes and the Summae of Thomas is unmistakable. Hence they could not have used any “concrete and empirical reason.” Then, too, the principle that the Scriptures are their own infallible interpreter, and that what is unclear in one passage can be understood by a comparison with other passages, is nothing other than the application of the law of contradiction. Logic therefore must have been the only test that the Reformers could have used.  [See: Trinity Foundation:  God's Hammer].

The following description is accurate concerning Dr. Clark's book:

This collection of essays on the inspiration, authority, and infallibility of the Bible is one of the best volumes on the subject available today. In the sixteenth century, sola Scriptura was the rallying cry of the Reformers; but it is rarely heard today. In the twentieth century the Bible was subjected to relentless attack by those who wish to erect another authority -- the state, the clergy, tradition, or a professorial elite. It is at those Biblical subversives that Clark directs his devastating defense of the Bible.  [Ibidem].

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