Book Reviews

Bible Based Book Reviews – The Word of God and the Mind of Man
Reviewed by Dr. C. Matthew McMahon

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.”