Gordon Clark: Icons (The Southern Presbyterian Journal)

1956. Icons. The Southern Presbyterian Journal, XV (33), Dec. 12, pg. 2.

Icons

During my recent travels I stayed one night in a seminary building used for classroom and dormitory purposes. The seminary is one that prides itself on its evangelical standing. No modernism is evident. The Bible from cover to cover is its standard.

On the first floor of the building was a small room, about six by ten. Against one of the longer walls was a sort of altar. Above this shelf, hanging on the wall, was a large picture of Christ. And in front of it was a prie-dieu or kneeling cushion.

Dr. William Childs Robinson, in a recent editorial here, was entirely right when he said, "It is un-Presbyterian to attach God's presence and power to a particular place or object such as an altar or icon. The popular pictures of Christ are… icons."

Not only is this un-Presbyterian. It is un-Baptist, un-Protestant, un-Scriptural, and ungodly.

There were also some other visitors at that seminary, every one a good evangelical, a Bible- believer, and one might even say, a fundamentalist. Yet two of these staunch conservatives openly denied the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures. One of them said that the thought was inspired but not the words.

From a number of such experiences, occurring in widely separated localities, one may conclude that some of the leaders of theological conservatism are not so conservative after all. They claim to defend the faith against modernism, higher criticism, and unbelief. But apparently they do not know what the faith is. They have read the second commandment, but they do not obey it; they can see what the Bible says about itself, but they do not believe it.

However, without further berating these lame leaders of evangelicals, we ought to observe the significance of all this for ourselves. Could it be that we too do not know what the Bible teaches? Have they alone succumbed, while we have escaped the secular and un-Christian influences of our educational system and materialistic society?

If anyone will take my most urgent advice and read some of the fine Puritan and Presbyterian literature of the seventeenth century, he will, I am sure, conclude that we too know all too little of God's revelation. G.H.C.