Links to all parts may be found here. This part will contain a review and evaluation of Mr. Lazar's sixth chapter in his book, Scripturalism and the Senses.
As I have now reviewed all the chapters in which Mr. Lazar intended to critique the epistemology and, at times, the larger philosophy of Gordon Clark, I now turn to the second part of the book, in which Mr. Lazar intends to present his own, positive epistemological views. Hopefully, the reviews will become shorter, as much of the material should overlap with chapters Mr. Lazar spent in reviewing Clark's views on the same subjects.
Reformulating the Master Axiom
In this chapter, Mr. Lazar tries to come up with a “Neo-Scripturalist axiom.” Ironically, I believe what he presents is essentially no different than what Clark himself taught. This is why, as I emphasized in an earlier review (link), Mr. Lazar should not have left it to "historians to debate" whether Clark agreed or disagreed with Crampton, Cheung, or Robbins. It is Clark whose views Mr. Lazar originally intended to evaluate, and he could have spared himself trouble by just sticking to evaluating Clark's views. In so doing, he would have found, I think, that there was little need to "reformulate" the axiom Clark provided. Granted, it doesn't hurt to discuss the most precise way in which to formulate the axiom, but Mr. Lazar should not act as if what he is presenting is novel or new (i.e. neo-Scripturalism).
Setting aside criticisms I've already made, Mr. Lazar's phrasing of his epistemic axiom - "The Bible is the word of God without error, true in all it teaches, affirms, and implies... let the Christian axiom be the truth of the Scriptures" - is quite in line with Clark's own thought. Mr. Lazar is right to note the self-attesting nature of the axiom of revelation: God speaks. God speaks to men. God inspired men to speak. God inspired men to write. What the Bible says, God says (in all of its details). The Bible is true. These are the beginnings of excellent, apologetic defenses for the sufficient epistemic foundation from which we ought to derive any other knowledge-claims (again, of a particular kind, which I will address in a later review).
Mr. Lazar even says, "Strictly speaking, truth is propositional. 'As Clark says, truth is a characteristic of propositions only... This clarifies how Scripture can be true.'" Amen! This indicates that Mr. Lazar does not recommend beginning with a physical, non-propositional text, as I also argued in the above link. But then, if we begin with the propositional revelation of God - and I think interrogatives and imperatives can be understood as propositional (link; although this is a minor aside, so far as I am concerned at present) - then Mr. Lazar really should understand why the "don't you have to read your Bible?" criticisms he himself made earlier are not so troublesome to a Scripturalistic epistemology (even if they may be troublesome for other reasons). Likewise, the criticisms regarding canonical or textual-critical issues (link) cannot be too serious for Clark, for it appears Mr. Lazar does not, after all (and contrary to the implications of his earlier arguments against Clark), appeal to a non-propositional, physical text as his epistemic starting point.
Finally, in one of his footnotes, Mr. Lazar affirms, against Clark, the correspondence theory of truth. I agree with Mr. Lazar (link), and his recommendation to substitute the word "food" for "reality" into one of Clark's quotes to show how it would have been a performative self-contradiction for Clark to eat food was quite clever. One can hold both to a correspondence and coherence view of the nature of truth.
In sum, Mr. Lazar’s problem all along seems to have been with expressions of the axiom of revelation by Crampton, Cheung, etc. - not Clark. It is not so much that Mr. Lazar is returning "to an earlier formulation of the Scripturalist axiom." Rather, it is that he is defending it against oversteps from other admirers of Clark.
In the next part of my review, I will turn to chapter 7, which Mr. Lazar calls What Counts as Knowledge?
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