This will be the sixth post in this series of reflections (link, link, link, link). The last 100 posts have come in the past 3 months. I did manage to find time to finish transcribing my personal notes on sermons preached at my church between late 2019 and 2021 (link). I've also been reading, writing, and correspondence on original sin (link), which is an area of interest at the moment. The majority of my time, however, has been spent continuing the Gordon Clark project I mentioned in post 500 on this blog, the most recent one in the above series (link).
An important update to this project is that last week, I was able to visit the J. Oliver Buswell library at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. I spent the whole week (and needed every bit of it!) researching what Clark material could be found there. I found several articles in their main library, one of which I shared with Doug Douma and has been posted here, another of which I have posted here. There will be several new Clark articles to come from periodicals that have been well known to contain material by him.
The bigger update, however, is I found that there is a huge amount of Clark material in the PCA archives - located under the main library - that, to my knowledge, has never been published. One can find an index of some of these items here. Mr. Wayne Sparkman, director of the PCA Historical Center - who was very hospitable and offered invaluable advice on where I might find Clark articles in the main library's periodicals - graciously allowed me to view the archives each day.
All said, I took 10,000+ (!) photos of material by Clark. Now, no doubt some of the photos are of material I might already have or has been published somewhere, for I was rather liberal in photo-taking for the sake of thoroughness. Nevertheless, I am quite confident that the vast majority of the photos are of material that most readers of Clark have never seen. It was certainly worth the trip to find these.
Out of respect for the purpose of the PCA Historical Center, I do not plan to publicly post entire documents from the archives here. I still plan to finish a chronological bibliography of Clark, full of embedded hyperlinks to places online one can find his works in a searchable format. This may take a while longer than I had thought, as I will need time to sift through and categorize the photos. Other phases of my research project outlined in my 500th blog post (transcriptions and book goals) remain unchanged.
One further goal I am entertaining is to write a book on something like: Select Sermon Notes by Clark. In itself, transcribing said notes will be time-consuming, as many of them are written in shorthand notation and require translation using a cipher I mention in another post (link; fortuitously, one of the archival materials contains Clark's own key to his shorthand notation and confirmed many of my inferences). As I plan to try to digitally transcribe all of Clark's material anyway for other research purposes, the time element is less of an obstacle to me. More important would be to obtain relevant permissions for such a publication as well as to find out if people would be generally interested in reading Clark's sermon notes. I confess ignorance on this point.
A final, somewhat long-term vision (one that might well extend beyond my lifetime) would be to see something like a Complete Works of Gordon Clark come to fruition. With the exception of what I found last week and books by the TrinityFoundation that have yet to be made into ebooks (which, to my understanding, will eventually happen), I've transcribed most of what has already been available. There are perhaps one or two dozen things left to transcribe aside from material from the PCA Historical archives. I haven't neatly edited my transcriptions, but I have kept them chronologized and broken down by decade, so perhaps that might someday function as a help towards this vision.
In all things, patience. If I transcribed one photo per day, it would take almost 30 years to complete. But I am trying not to make assumptions or take for granted God's blessings.
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