In his book, Three Types of Religious Philosophy, Gordon Clark concisely and cogently exposes the bankruptcy of any religious philosophy that does not measure all truth-claims by the Bible and the Bible alone. This amazing book is as relevant today as when it was first published in 1973, and it provides the only possible solution to the philosophical dilemmas that have plagued mankind for millennia.
2000 years ago, a skeptic by the name of Pontius Pilate sarcastically asked, “What is truth?” (John 18:38). As a man of his times, he was skeptical that objective truth could be known. As a highly educated man, he had likely studied the brilliant rationalist and empiricist philosophers of the previous centuries and had witnessed first hand the insuperable flaws in every philosophical system. In his mind, all that was left was irrationalism. In any case, his doubt about the existence of objective truth parallels postmodernism’s disillusionment with the modernist quest for certainty and shows how there is nothing new under the sun.
While modernism (covering the era from the eighteenth century Enlightenment to the mid twentieth century) saw either science (empiricism) or logic (rationalism) as the source of truth and the answer to all of life’s questions, postmodernism has recognized the dead end of that optimistic pursuit, and has once again adopted Pilate’s irrationalism. If the dogmatism of Biblical philosophy is abandoned, there are no other alternatives than the failed philosophies that Gordon Clark’s book destroys. Read it. You will love it. Gordon Clark will reawaken a confidence and faith in objective truth.