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.
Vincent Cheung rejects Gordon H. Clark by rejecting the Westminster Standards. Cheung has more in common with the Anabaptists than with Clark. Furthermore, Cheung is not trained in philosophy to the point of expertise of a Gordon H. Clark or even Carl F. H. Henry. Clark affirmed occasionalism. What he did not do is say that God is the author of our sins. God is only the author of sin in the sense of predestination or first cause. Man is the author of his own sins because God does use means or secondary causation to carry out His eternal decrees in providential and temporal time. Even John Calvin acknowledged that God is the author of sin in sense of primary or ultimate causation. See: Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 3, Chapter 23, Section 3. "Hence it appears how perverse is this affectation of murmuring, when of set purpose they suppress the cause of condemnation which they are compelled to recognize in themselves, that they may lay the blame upon God. But though I should confess a hundred times that God is the author (and it is most certain that he is), they do not, however, thereby efface their own guilt, which, engraven on their own consciences, is ever and anon presenting itself to their view."
ResponderExcluirI'm not sure who these alleged Clarkians are. However, I have read Cheung in the past. He's basically a charismatic, not a reformed theologian. According to Gordon Clark, the Bible is propositional revelation. All knowledge is propositional. So, how do you get charismatic experiences from logical and propositional revelation in the Bible? Everyone's experience is different. The Bible is the immutable and eternal word of God in written form. Psalm 119:89.
ResponderExcluirYour objection collapses the moment we distinguish between epistemology and ontology, something that should be elementary for anyone invoking Gordon H. Clark.
ExcluirFirst, you say Vincent Cheung is “basically a charismatic.” That label proves nothing. It is just another attempt to dismiss an argument by attaching a theological stereotype to the person making it. What matters is whether the position follows from Scripture and logical analysis, not whether it makes you uncomfortable because it resembles something found in charismatic circles.
Second, your appeal to Clark’s doctrine that the Bible is propositional revelation is correct—but your conclusion from it is completely wrong. Clark taught that all knowledge is propositional, meaning that knowledge consists of true propositions revealed by God and understood by the mind. But that says nothing about what God may cause to occur in the world. Clark’s epistemology concerns how we know, not what God can do in providence.
Confusing those two categories is a basic philosophical mistake.
A proposition in Scripture such as “the Holy Spirit distributes gifts as He wills” (1 Cor. 12:11) is itself propositional revelation. If the Bible asserts that God grants prophetic or linguistic gifts, then accepting that statement is not “mystical experience”—it is simply believing the proposition revealed in Scripture.
In other words, the issue is not experience versus propositions. The issue is whether the propositions of Scripture teach that such events occur.
Your appeal to Psalm 119:89—“Forever, O Lord, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens”—does nothing to advance your argument. Of course Scripture is immutable and eternal in its authority. But the immutability of the Word does not imply the nonexistence of the events the Word describes. The Bible is a book of propositions about historical acts of God. The proposition “God raised Christ from the dead” refers to an event. The proposition “the Spirit gives gifts to the church” refers to divine activity. None of this contradicts Clark’s epistemology.
What you are doing, therefore, is subtly turning Clark’s theory of knowledge into a cessationist assumption that Clark himself never logically derived from his own premises.
Finally, the irony is striking. You insist that knowledge must come from propositions in Scripture. Very well—show the proposition that says God has permanently ceased distributing all miraculous gifts. Not an inference, not a theological tradition, not an argument from silence. Show the proposition.
Until that happens, invoking Clark’s epistemology against Cheung is simply a misuse of Clark. Clark argued that knowledge comes from revealed propositions. If those propositions teach that God sovereignly distributes gifts by His Spirit, then the logical response is to believe the proposition—not to redefine it out of existence because it threatens a theological system.
So the problem here is not charismatic theology, and it is certainly not Clarkian epistemology. The problem is that you are invoking Clark’s theory of propositional revelation while simultaneously ignoring the actual propositions of Scripture when they refuse to conform to your assumptions.
I don't speak Spanish. Sorry about that.
ResponderExcluirI Speak Portuguese, but whatever
Excluir