Douma Quotes

Every social ethic is doomed to failure if it is blind to personal responsibility" (The Ten Commandments, 10).

And this is the worse part of it — when you realize that what separates you, someone who can leave, from someone who is trapped in Aleppo, or Homs or Douma or Darayya, is that you can walk away and go back to your home with electricity and sliced bread; then you begin to feel ashamed to be human.

Although Clark remains relatively unknown to most Christians today, he has received praise from a range of powerful voices in American theological circles. When asked which twentieth-century theologians will still be read 500 years hence, the well-known American pastor and theologian R.C. Sproul answered, “Gordon Clark.” Indeed,

In her book It’s My Turn, she recounted a time when she was experiencing doubt of her Christian faith. A fellow student suggested she see a particular professor who was known to be spiritual, but Ruth objected, saying, “He will talk with me, and pray with me, and it could even get a little emotional. I don’t want that. All I want are cold, hard facts.” She continued, “I wanted to go see Dr. Gordon Clark, known for his logic, his unemotional brilliance. I felt he would give me nothing but the cold, hard facts.

According to Brown, Clark would sit back while he (Brown) and another student debated philosophy vigorously. Brown recalled, “In class Clark would let a student go on a tangent and then when they were really proud of themselves, he would get a twinkle in his eyes just knowing what was coming next, and then he’d hit them with a one-liner which showed they didn’t know what they were talking about.

Clark often used chess as a means of fellowship with other students and professors, even if the matches were generally one-sided. One account of Clark’s chess prowess, given by family friend Tom Jones, is worth quoting at length: I bumped into Dr. Clark back in the late sixties when he was visiting his daughter Betsy on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, where Betsy taught at Covenant College. I knew he was a chess champion and suggested that it would be fun to play with him sometime. He was eager to do so, and later that week he dropped by our home for an evening of chess. My wife had gone shopping and left me at home with our two small children. We played two games. In the first game I thought I did reasonably well for about a half an hour but then, rather abruptly, the entire left side of my board seemed to collapse and Dr. Clark swept me away. So, we played a second game in which he defeated me unceremoniously in about ten minutes. Feeling properly humiliated I asked a question, “Dr. Clark, I want to learn from you. So, tell me if you will, in that first game I thought I did fairly well for a while but then you just clobbered me at the end. Can you remember anything about where I made my mistakes?” With that Dr. Clark proceeded to set up that first game and replay the entire thing. He reached a point where he said, “Now, at this point, I expected that you would move your queen thus so, at which point I was prepared to counter with my knight, like so, and then . . . ” (with this he made about six hypothetical moves which he had anticipated), “but you didn’t do that” (he said as he put all the pieces back in place). “Instead, you moved your rook over here” (and with that he finished the game, explaining each move in the swift demise of my game). It was by now at least forty-five minutes after the first game had been played and he had remembered every single move in that game! I was amazed and thoroughly in submission to the master by now. But the thing that humiliated me the most was that the entire time that we had been playing he was holding my four-year-old son, Bradley, on his lap and was reading a story book to him. He would glance up after my moves, take a brief look at the board, make his move nonchalantly, and go back to reading the story. HE HAD NOT EVEN BEEN PAYING ATTENTION! Or so it seemed. What a mind!

I call that knowledge, not what is innate in man, nor what is by diligence acquired, but that which is delivered to us by The Law and The Prophets.

If one goes back to the Westminster divines, to Calvin, even to Aquinas, and especially to Augustine, he will find that human nature is regularly divided into intellect and will. The point is important because faith in Christ is not an emotion but a volition. One does not feel for Christ, he decides for Christ.” —Gordon H. Clark, Lecture on Logos