Gordon Clark’s Occasionalism

 

By Yuri Schein

Clarkians who lick the dust off Gordon Clark’s shoes yet sneer at Vincent Cheung—especially when it comes to occasionalism—should do themselves a favor and actually read Clark before spitting venom against Cheung. Because what they call “Malebranchian heresies” in Cheung, Clark had already affirmed plainly and unapologetically.

Clark, in Lord God of Truth, writes:

“What the Westminster theologians call secondary causes Malebranche calls Occasions.”

And here lies the crucial point: by recognizing that Westminster’s “secondary causes” are the same thing Malebranche called occasions, Clark is affirming that God is the only true metaphysical cause, and creatures are nothing more than providential reference points—occasions. This is not a metaphor: it is pure occasionalism, and anyone who denies it has to tear those pages out of Clark and pretend they never existed.

But the so-called “pure” Clarkians break into cold sweats when Cheung uses the same language. They accuse Cheung of being “excessive,” “non-confessional,” “Malebranchian,” even “blasphemous.” Yet if the issue is the use of the term “secondary causes,” I have bad news: Cheung himself also used it in several of his articles. The difference is that he doesn’t idolize the Westminster Confession as if it were a second Bible. Cheung is honest: the Confession is useful, but not inspired. He respects Westminster far more than modern theologians precisely because he doesn’t put it on the same level as Scripture, and instead grounds his writings in what he calls biblical deductivism.

Cheung’s critics, therefore, fall into contradiction. They want Clark without occasionalism, but Clark affirmed it. They want Westminster without occasions, but the Confession itself, read with open eyes, doesn’t deny that God is the first cause of absolutely everything—including sin.

The result is that by rejecting Cheung, Clarkians end up rejecting Clark himself. And by rejecting occasionalism, they end up rejecting Westminster, because “secondary causes” and “occasions” are two expressions of the same reality. At the bottom, the tantrum is against the idea that God causes evil without being guilty—but that is not Cheung’s invention: it is pure supralapsarianism, it is Clark, it is Calvin, it is Westminster.

So stop pretending Gordon Clark wasn’t na occasionalist. He was—metaphysically and epistemologically. And stop pretending Vincent Cheung is making things up: he is merely applying, consistently, what Clark and Westminster already said. What remains, then, is not Reformed theology—it’s just academic pride disguised as orthodoxy.