A Short Quote from Integrative Theology, by Gordon R. Lewis and Bruce Demarest

I found out today that Dr. Gordon R. Lewis passed away in 2016.  I bought and read Integrative Theology which he wrote with Dr. Bruce Demarest.   Lewis and Demarest worked together at Denver Seminary, which is a Calvinistic Baptist seminary in Denver, Colorado.  Although their systematic theology is not perfect, it does try to weave together systematic theology along with some biblical exegesis and apologetics, hence the title.  There are three volumes.  I no longer own the hardcover edition but I do have the Logos Bible ebook version of this work.  One of the reasons I was interested in reading it again is that somewhere or another Dr. Gordon H. Clark said that Lewis and Demarest had correctly identified his view.

After searching through volume one I found Gordon Clark and Carl Henry mentioned as "deductive rationalists".  It is unfortunate that Lewis and Demarest denigrate Clark, Henry and even Van Til and Rushdoony as presuppositionalists who have nothing original to say about the Bible:

In spite of the measure of validity and power in criticisms like these, some evangelical theologians have made few methodological changes, while others have made major changes without explicitly formulating a new method of decision making.

Apparently unmoved by charges like those above are presuppositionalists (such as Cornelius Van Til and Rousas Rushdoony)3 and the deductive rationalists (such as Gordon Clark and Carl Henry).4

Valuable as the contributions of these writers have been in many ways, their presuppositional and axiomatic methodologies remain unchanged. Consequently, charges of a priori assumptions of the things to be proved, eisegesis, insufficient attention to the history of the doctrines, closed-mindedness, indoctrination, and insufficient relevance continue to limit the extent of their outreach and impact.

 

Lewis, Gordon R., and Bruce A. Demarest. Integrative Theology: Knowing Ultimate Reality: The Living God. Vol. 1. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987). Print. Integrative Theology.  Pp. 24-25.

Demarest and Lewis think that the church should accommodate itself to the challenges of modernism, especially where modernist approaches to the Bible level accusations against dogmatic theology.  Unchanging methodologies that are not not relevant to the contemporary cultural situations in which the church finds itself in today are too stilted and unbending.  However, they are correct to point out that modern and postmodern theologians have replaced special revelation with psychology, sociology, philosophy of religion, etc.:

Instead of systematic theology, graduate schools and publishers by and large emphasized psychology of religion, philosophy of religion, comparative religions, Old Testament studies, the faith of Israel (as evidenced in stories or case studies), New Testament studies, and the faith of the church. Even Karl Barth, who tried to call liberalism back to the transcendent God of the Bible, failed to regard the Bible itself as a coherent, divine revelation and wrote his extensive series of volumes on church dogmatics rather than systematic theology.  (Ibid., p. 23).

The authors then go on to laud the systematic theology of Millard Erickson, who they admire for his innovative approach to the discipline of systematic theology instead of the old fuddy duddy approach of Van Til, Rushdoony, Clark, and Henry.  In my opinion, however, Erickson, who I heard speak once in a lecture series given at Southeastern University, Lakeland, Florida around 1989 or 1990, caters too much to neoorthodoxy and logical inconsistency.  One of Erickson's worst errors was his advocacy of the doctrine of kenosis in regards to the christological doctrine of the incarnation.  Erickson attempts to lessen the impact of such a doctrine on the doctrine of God, which he admits is problematic because obviously the divine nature and the human nature are incompatible:

In thinking about the incarnation, we must begin not with the traditional conceptions of humanity and deity, but with the recognition that the two are most fully known in Jesus Christ.  We sometimes approach the incarnation with the antecedent assumption that it is virtually impossible.  We know what humanity is and what deity is, and they are, of course, by definition incompatible.  They are, respectively, the finite and the infinite.  But this is to begin in the wrong place--with a conception of humanity drawn from our knowledge of the existential rather than the essential humanity.  Millard Erickson.  1983-1985. 4th printing. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1987).  P. 736.

I find it disturbing that Evangelical scholars are enamored with postmodernism and neoorthodoxy as a replacement for the traditional science of theology, which Gordon H. Clark called the queen of the sciences.   For one thing, Lewis and Demarest clearly do not understand Gordon H. Clark's apologetic method nor do they understand Carl F. H. Henry's approach to apologetics and theology.  The idea that presuppositionalism and deductive reasoning from the Scriptures is out of style is nothing more than dismissive thinking, not an actual critique of the approach.  For Clark if the Bible is propositional revelation then it logically follows that the propositions of Scripture can be fit together into a logical system of doctrinal and propositional truth.  Of course exegesis is necessary and Dr. Clark did not reject the historical and grammatical approach to hermeneutics and exegesis.  But does this mean that we should divide the Bible up into piecemeal as though none of the parts fit together into a coherent and consistent whole?  Too many Evangelicals today want to be respected by the secular academy instead of  approaching the secular scholarship with sharp criticism.

One of Dr. Clark's strongest points in his approach to knowledge is that truth cannot be relative or changing.  To say that truth changes is a contradiction in terms.  Truth must be unchanging and absolute or else it cannot be true.  It is in this respect that Clark criticizes both empiricism and science.  Such approaches to truth are always subject to revision and refinement, leading Dr. Clark to quote the Bible and say that science is always changing and never arrives at the truth.  (2 Timothy 3:7).  If the Bible is just a disjunctive grouping of unrelated aggregates of truth or nuggets of truth that have no logical relationship to the rest of the Bible, then the Bible would be meaningless.  God's truth cannot be ever changing because God Himself is the truth and He is eternally immutable in His knowledge of the truth.

What is refreshing about Dr. Clark's approach is that he goes on the attack against the irrational philosophies of the world and reduces those points of view to absurdity.  While this approach in conjunction with the Socratic method can be offensive to those subjected to it, Dr. Clark was able to show that what is often assumed by the modernists and postmodernists is often patently contradictory and absurd.  Logical positivism, for example, said that all knowledge must be deduced from the five senses.  The problem, however, is that the first premise of logical positivism does not come from the input of sensory information but is instead the product of abstract thinking.  Clark famously accused the modernists and postmodernists of their own fideism because, according to Clark, everyone must start somewhere and these starting points are always assumed, not proved.  And so it was with logical positivism, which was promoted by the student of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig von Wittgenstein.  

Evangelicals have unwittingly catered to the attack on the Bible and the result is what we are witnessing today as an unprecedented retreat into apostasy by way of critical race theory and intersectionality.  The more wicked and oppressed a minority is the more authority they have to pervert the moral, political and sociological fabric of society.  Traditionally America has been a Christian country and the basis of our political system, the United States Constitution, was founded on a Christian worldview.  But of late that view has come under attack by the 1619 project and other Marxist and postmodernist ideologies which are promoted by atheistic intellectuals from minorities like the homosexual and transgender movements and by racial minorities like blacks and hispanics.  Whites and asians do not rank as high on the intersectionality scale of an oppressed minority.  

Clark's view was that instead of trying to accommodate to the atheists and the secularists, Christians should aggressively counterattack before these Marxists gain too much political power. In the foreward to Clark's book, The Biblical Doctrine of Man,  John Robbins issues a warning against the approach of these atheistic secularists is almost prophetic:

It is no accident that both Monod and Russell began by denying God and end by advocating the creation of a totalitarian world government.  Monod called for "some form of world authority" to manage a "stable-state society."  Russell advocated "the creation of a single world-wide authority, possessing a monopoly of all the more serious weapons . . . the vital point is the placing of irresistible force in the hands of the central authority . . .  The central Government may be democratic or totalitarian; it may owe its origin to consent or to conquest . . .  I do not believe that the human race has sufficient statesmanship or capacity for mutual forbearance to establish a world Government on a basis of consent alone.  That is why I think that an element of force will be needed in its establishment and in its preservation through the early years of its existence . . .  Modern man is the master of his fate."   

Gordon H. Clark.  The Biblical Doctrine of Man.  1984.  Second edition.  Foreward by John Robbins.   (Jefferson:  Trinity Foundation, 1992).  P. vii.

As the old cliche' goes, evil prevails when good men do nothing.  Our churches are being infiltrated by leftist ideology and so are our political parties.  Although former President Ronald Reagan fought against communism courageously, homegrown Marxists in our own country were working to undermine our constitutional republic.  These forces have taken over even the Fundamentalist and Evangelical denominations so that those who stand against homosexuality and transgenderism and socialism are demoralized and attacked as ignoramuses who cannot change with the times.  The Bible itself is under attack by the textual critics who insist that only modern translations and the critical editions of the Greek New Testament are relevant today as accurate representations of what the original autographs contained.  Unless Christians are given the grace to stand against this onslaught against our Christian worldview, which is deduced from the Bible, there will be violence and persecution waged against Christian churches and their membership.  The current Chinese covid-19 scare is just the pretext for the totalitarian oppression to come and the stealing of elections to accomplish the end is just one more sign of the communist takeover of America.