The Word of God
Bible Based Book Reviews
How do you know that you know the
Bible is true? How does knowledge affect the manner in which we think
about the reality of a biblical revelation?
The
Word of God and the Mind of Man
by Ronald Nash
P & R Publishing, Phillipsburg, NJ: 1982.
137 Pages, Paperback
What makes human knowledge of God
possible? Though this question regards "apologetics" and
"epistemology" respectively, I decided to add Nash's book to
this section since we are dealing with the Word of God and how we may
know things about God. This is an excellent introductory book to
the philosophical formularies which desire to overthrow the Biblical
record, especially on the basis of the Bible's attestation and truth-claims
concerning miracles. Nash covers Kant's wall and Hume's gap extensively,
and demonstrates the offshoots of their theology into more recent
times. What the Christian Logos is, and how Augustine understands
rationalism. He discusses reason and revelation, showing that the Bible
is utterly reasonable, and commits a chapter on Revelation and the Bible
concerning how propositional revelation and the Bible go hand in
hand. He shows the absurdities of men like Kant, Hegel, Hume,
Barth and the like, and demonstrates how they fell incredibly short in their
theological systems which do not stand up against the test of the Bible,
though many blindly hold to them nonetheless.
This is also an excellent book to help us
understand why the 21st century church thinks the way that it
does. After reading and studying this book, you will begin to
apply it in the irrational and Gnostic tendencies of Charismania, and
the sometimes prevalent Hegelian, Kantian or Humian ideologies which
seem to sneak up on us in Reformed Theology. This definitely a helpful
book, and is written in an easy to understand style even for the
beginner.
Some quotes:
"All who attempt to extend reason beyond its limits become involved
in absurdities and contradictions and become prone to the disease of skepticism."
"Jesus Christ, the eternal Logos of
God, mediates all divine revelation and grounds the correspondence
between the divine and human minds. This eternal Logos is a
necessary condition for human knowledge about anything. From the
beginning of Christianity, it was believed that reason and logic have
cosmic significance."
"Because humankind was created in
the image of God, the human mind is a secondary and derivative source of
light that reflects in a creaturely way the rationality of the
Creator."
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