Written by R.C. Sproul |
Friday, February 18, 2022
The order of the process to destroy doubt is crucial. For example, the miracles of the Bible cannot and were never designed to prove the existence of God. The very possibility of a miracle requires that there first be a God who can empower it. In other words, it is not the Bible that proves the existence of God, it is God who through miracle attests that the Bible is His word. Thus proven, to believe the Bible implicitly is a virtue. To believe it gratuitously is not.

Spiritus sanctus non est skepticus—“The Holy Spirit is not a skeptic.” So Luther rebuked Erasmus of Rotterdam for his expressed disdain for making sure assertions. Luther roared, “The making of assertions is the very mark of the Christian. Take away assertions and you take away Christianity. Away now, with the skeptics!”
Doubt is the hallmark of the skeptic. The skeptic dares to doubt the indubitable. Even demonstrable proof fails to persuade him. The skeptic dwells on Mt. Olympus, far aloof from the struggles of mortals who care to pursue truth.
But doubt has other faces. It is the assailant of the faithful striking fear into the hearts of the hopeful. Like Edith Bunker, doubt nags the soul. It asks “Are you sure?” Then, “Are you sure you’re sure?”
Still doubt can appear as a servant of truth. Indeed it is the champion of truth when it wields its sword against what is properly dubious. It is a citadel against credulity. Authentic doubt has the power to sort out and clarify the difference between the certain and the uncertain, the genuine and the spurious.
Consider Descartes. In his search for certainty, for clear and distinct ideas, he employed the application of a rigorous and systematic doubt process. He endeavored to doubt everything he could possibly doubt. He doubted what he saw with his eyes and heard with his ears. He realized that our senses can and do often deceive us. He doubted authorities, both civil and ecclesiastical, knowing that recognized authorities can be wrong. He would submit to no fides implicitum claimed by any human being or institution. Biographies usually declare that Descartes was a Frenchman but his works reveal that he was surely born in Missouri.
Descartes doubted everything he could possibly doubt until he reached the point where he realized there was one thing he couldn’t doubt. He could not doubt that he was doubting. To doubt that he was doubting was to prove that he was doubting. No doubt about it.
From that premise of indubitable doubt, Descartes appealed to the formal certainty yielded by the laws of immediate inference. Using impeccable deduction he concluded that to be doubting required that he be thinking, since thought is a necessary condition for doubting. From there it was a short step to his famous axiom, cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.”
At last Descartes arrived at certainty, the assurance of his own personal existence. This was, of course, before Hume attacked causality and Kant argued that the self belongs to the unknowable noumenal realm that requires a “transcendental apperception” (whatever that is) to affirm at all. One wonders how Descartes would have responded to Hume and Kant had he lived long enough to deal with them. I have no doubt that the man of doubt would have prevailed.
There were clearly unstated assumptions lurking beneath the surface of Descartes’ logic. Indeed there was logic itself. To conclude that to doubt doubt is to prove doubt is a conclusion born of logic.
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Written by C. R. Carmichael |
Sunday, October 15, 2023
“All human systems fail because the trouble is within the people themselves, and external rules and laws and regulations cannot change them. It is not that we need better laws, but that we need better natures; not better instruction, but better spirits and better desires. And so all this human history comes to nothing. And yet these earthly authorities prohibit the preaching of the Gospel, the only thing that can save the situation.” Lloyd-Jones

How often do you think about the Roman Empire? Recently Forbes reported that, according to a bizarre new TikTok trend, men think about the Roman Empire more often than you would expect. As Conor Murray, a “trends reporter” for Forbes, explained this phenomenon: “TikTok users are asking their boyfriends, fathers or any other man how often they think about the Roman Empire—and surprisingly, some say they think about the fallen empire daily or even more often, sparking online confusion and launching a TikTok trend that’s garnered more than a billion views.”
Strangely enough, this peculiar focus on the Roman Empire was once also on the brilliant mind of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Many decades before TikTok, social media or even the internet, Lloyd-Jones was forcibly struck by the tragic similarities of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and the collapse of Christian influence in the West.
Sadly, things have only gotten worse for our Western society since Lloyd-Jones’ observation—and surely, if alive today, he would point to this current obsession with the Roman Empire to suggest that maybe the thoughtful men in our day are, consciously or not, harboring grave concerns about the similar trajectory of our failing society and wondering what they should do to stem the tide for the sake of their faith and family.
Here, then, is what the great Welsh evangelical minister would no doubt tell them, which is exactly as he addressed this issue during his many years of proclaiming and promoting the Gospel of Jesus Christ prior to his death in 1981. Said Lloyd-Jones on various occasions:
“Why, in spite of all our efforts and endeavors and great advances, is the world still in trouble? Why is every advance followed by regression, every rise by a decline and fall? Why do our attempts to govern the world end in disaster? What is the matter? And there is only one answer. It is due to the fact that men and women have sinful and fallen natures; it is due to their estrangement from God; and, more, it is due to God’s wrath upon humanity in its sinfulness and arrogance. But the tragedy of the world is that it does not realize this.
“I was reading again, only the other day, and it struck me forcibly, the explanation given by that great historian Edward Gibbon, who was not a Christian, for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And if his explanation is not also true of this country today, then I am completely ignorant!
“Here are the five reasons Gibbon gives:
One: The rapid increase of divorce and “the undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis of human society.” Now that is not being said by me, a little evangelical preacher—that is the great Edward Gibbon, and, of course, he is right. The home is the fundamental unit in society and once the home goes, everything will go, sooner or later.
Two: “Higher and higher taxes and the spending of public monies on bread and circuses.”
Three: “The mad craze for pleasure and sport; sport becoming every year more and more exciting and brutal.”
Four: “The building of gigantic armaments when the real enemy is within—in the decadence of the people themselves.”
And Fifth: “The decay of religious faith; faith fading into mere form which has lost all contact with reality.”
“The Roman Empire was a wonderful civilization. Those Romans were perhaps the greatest experts the world has ever known on local government and on legal systems. The Roman system—that was real civilization.
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All proclamations of God’s word in our context should contain within them a gospel call, freely offered to all present in that place. We are never to be under the assumption that every person in the hall that day knows the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior, even, or maybe especially, if it is the officers, elders and ministers, of His Church. An ARP Church must be a gospel, fire-breathing, house of hope for sinners. Not a lecture center of Reformed theology, but a place where men and women can come with the assurance that they will hear, with no strings-attached, the free offer of life eternal found alone in the Redeemer.

For the next couple of months in this space where we have been taking some time to consider ways to help our prayer and worship life we are going to begin a spring series thinking through some of the unique things that were, and still should be, the identifying markers of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. I am ARP on purpose. I am an ARP minister for the same reason I am not a Baptist, Methodist, or Lutheran, because I believe that the warp and woof of the heart of the ARP, found in its history and confessions is the most Biblical form of the Church found on this side of Heaven. I also am firmly convicted that you should be ARP as well. If I didn’t believe that I’m not rightly sure I could keep my vows. Pragmatism or its dastardly cousin, convenience, have no place really in my soul or when it comes to what I’ve been called to do, nor should it in your heart. That may seem rude, but it is not.
To fulfill that mandate I will give y’all some history and background, quotes from ARP men, either Scottish Seceders, or American-born ministers from our denominational past and explain more about whatever subject is on tap for that week. We’ll take a look at matters like how the gospel is preached, how we understand the biblical covenants and their relation to life today, and the manner in which Presbyterianism is practiced. I hope you find the time we spend on this helpful. The goal here is also to help people within and outside the ARP know more about why we are and who we are.
It makes sense that to start this we need to begin with what is most important, and that is the gospel. Christ dead for sinners, raising them from the spiritual darkness, washing them in His blood, forgiving their trespasses, and making them new creatures in the restored light of Jesus’s countenance. That’s the main message our Lord gave to His infant bride in Matthew 28.
To begin let’s consider first what it is we mean when we say that in the ARP we believe in the “free offer of the gospel”. One of the earliest charges against Ebenezer Erskine and others rallying at Gairney Bridge was that they were being fundamentally “Arminian” in the way they presented the good news of Jesus to the lost.
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