Gordon Clark: Foreword to Erwin Lutzer's The Morality Gap, An Evangelical Response to Situation Ethic

1972. Foreword to Erwin Lutzer's The Morality Gap, An Evangelical Response to Situation Ethic. Moody Press.

Foreword

Three things can be said for this book.

First, it is interesting. No one will fall asleep reading it.

Second, and more importantly, no one can miss the author's point. Some authors gets so technical that they lose not only their readers, but also themselves in their own analytical machinery. Here the line of argument is as easy to follow as Interstate 70.

Third, and most important of all, the problem is one of the most pressing, most acute, and most tragic phenomena plaguing Americans today. A cult of antimorality is destroying society. Immorality in all ages has destroyed individuals; but now so many individuals are being ruined, that a nontotalitarian republic is becoming an impossibility.

This antimoral movement is not completely unorganized and spontaneous. Every social movement of like dimensions must have spokesmen with a rationale. One of the most popular exponents of contemporary depravity is Joseph Fletcher, professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Note that not only secularists such as Hugh Hefner of Playboy are attacking morality. But as with the ecclesiastics and the Popes of the Middle Ages, who were often the most depraved, so now the ecumenical churches are leading in advancing abortion and adultery.

The present volume draws an accurate blueprint of Professor Fletcher's thought and show just how his right angles are actually obtuse. More literally stated, Mr. Lutzer's analysis of Fletcher's arguments reveals that they are a combination of two mutually exclusive principles, plus dependence on the impossible calculations of Jeremy Bentham. That Fletcher should try to present his immorality as Christian ethics may at first astonish the reader, but he will see the consistency when he learns that Fletcher approves and advocates hypocrisy and deception.

A personal word. It is a pleasure to write the foreword for the first publication of one of my students. During my college days, Francis L. Patton was in old age; B. B. Warfield died; Robert Dick Wilson had only a few more years. Conservative scholarship, with very few exceptions, seemed near total eclipse. Today, however, I can name over five hundred college and seminary professors who hold that the Bible alone and the Bible in its entirety is the Word of God written, and therefore inerrant in the autographs. Now appearing in print is Erwin Lutzer, a young scholar, who, I trust, will stimulate a hunger and thirst for righteousness and for scholarship too.

Gordon H. Clark