Gordon Clark: What Is Essential? (The Southern Presbyterian Journal)

1958. What Is Essential? The Southern Presbyterian Journal. XVI(40), 8–9. Jan 29

What Is Essential?

In the writings of some of the neo-orthodox theologians, and of course among others of different labels also, there are statements that the Incarnation is essential but that the Virgin Birth is not. The Rev. Thomas J. Kelso, of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., who has recently been promoted to a better position with the approval of his Presbytery, had earlier published a statement denying the bodily resurrection of Christ. Perhaps he believes that some form of immortality is essential, but not a resurrection of the body. What then is essential: Incarnation and Immortality only, or Virgin Birth and Resurrection also?

Before this question can be answered, another must be asked. How does one distinguish between the essential and the non-essential? It would be relatively easy to decide which doctrines are essential, if we first knew what is meant by essential. Those who assert that the Incarnation is essential but that the Virgin Birth is not do not usually take great pains to explain how they arrive at their decision. It would help if they were more explicit.

Sometimes they drop a hint. Perhaps it is unfair to press a mere hint, but when that is all there is to work with, such must be our starting point.

Those who reject the Virgin Birth have often given as a reason the fact that Paul never mentioned it. It would seem therefore that one characteristic of essentiality is a mention by Paul. What Matthew and Luke mention could not be essential unless Paul repeated it. This seems to make most of the life of Christ unessential.

But these theologians would never admit that a doctrine is essential simply because Paul mentions it. Paul insists on the vicarious atonement; he teaches that Christ died to satisfy the justice of the Father, that God might be both just as well as the justifier of him who has faith in Christ. But the gentleman named above has "no truck" with the substitutionary atonement any more than he has with the Virgin Birth. Or, again, Emil Brunner is more willing to abandon the laws of logic than to accept the doctrine of predestination. Paul therefore cannot be the sole test of essentiality. Brunner loves to quote the verse, "The Word became flesh;" but why he chooses this verse rather than some other — or, since Paul speaks of the incarnation in slightly different words, why Brunner chooses this theme rather than some other — that is to say, what other tests of essentiality there are besides mention by Paul, I have not discovered.

Another confusion, induced by an omission, is inherent in these discussions. Those who deny that the Atonement and Resurrection are essential usually fail to explain what they are not essential to. If they meant that belief in these doctrines is not absolutely essential to entrance into heaven, no good Christian would object. The thief on the cross did not know of the Virgin Birth and could not possibly have known of the Resurrection. In this he held the same position as all the Jews down through the ages. I am not so sure that the Jews and even the thief on the cross were ignorant of the substitutionary atonement.

Do the modern unbelievers then mean that these events and doctrines are not essential to God's plan? If these events are rejected as fictitious and these doctrines as false, then of course they could not be essential to anything. And probably the denial of their essentiality is in most cases merely a veiled way of denying their truth. But if there are some who admit that these events happened, but that they are not essential, the meaning can hardly be that they are not essential to God's plan. Would not anything that God does be essential? In this sense Joshua's taking Jericho is essential.

Perhaps then the denial of essentiality means that belief in these facts is not essential to a mature Christian life.  But if these are truly facts and not fictions, then it hardly seems possible to make any great headway in the Christian life without knowing them.

Finally and most probably the denial means that belief in these facts and doctrines is not essential to ordination.

Well, it is to be admitted that by reason of its foundation principles these beliefs are not essential to ordination in a Unitarian church. There are also some other churches with no creed at all, and therefore nothing can be said to be essential to ordination in those churches.

This is not true of the Presbyterian churches. A learned body of devout men spent half a dozen years drafting the Westminster Confession as a written statement of what was to be believed and preached. It is incredible that they thought the Atonement and the Resurrection unessential. To suppose so requires massive historical incompetence. And such ignorance seems to me to disqualify a person for Presbyterian ordination.

I would similarly argue that belief in the third chapter of the Confession, Of God's Eternal Decree, is essential to a worthy Presbyterian ordination. But our present troubles are deeper than disloyalty to Calvinism. The Virgin Birth and the Resurrection are essential to Lutheranism as well, and, to collapse all church history into a few words, these beliefs are stated in the Apostles Creed. They have in all ages been the belief of the Christian Church — the belief of the ordinary members and not merely a requirement for ordination.

By what authority, now in the twentieth century, are they branded unessential?

— G.H.C.