I’ve signed a contract with The Trinity Foundation to publish a collection of select letters of Gordon H. Clark. I expect we’ll get it to print within a few months. All permissions are in place from the various archives and individuals who’ve provided letters.
During my work on The Presbyterian Philosopher I began typing up some of Dr. Clark’s letters to make an easily-searchable collection. With the assistance of Jaime Rodriguez Jr., Samuel Colon, and Errol Ng, I now have all extant letters of Dr. Clark’s typed up.
There are about 915 total letters, which makes for a 1200 page volume far to large to publish. So I’ve selected the most important letters, about 145 of them, for the final cut into Selected Letters.
Why should you be interested in this book? Well, for starters, there are five letters between Gordon Clark and Cornelius Van Til. We’ve also included correspondence with J. Gresham Machen, J. Oliver Buswell, Edward Carnell, John Robbins, and a number of others. There are comments in these letters which will further your understanding of Dr. Clark’s philosophy and others that will give you insights into 20th century American Presbyterian history.
I’ll post again when the book is ready for sale.
9 thoughts on “"Selected Letters of Gordon Haddon Clark" to be published.”
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Terrific work, Doug. FYI: while getting counsel through my grief and looking for a new help meet a PRCA pastor asked me about your book: he is already half way through it and thinks its great. I thought Engelsma’s review was great except for the end. In any case, good work and know another minister out there in the PRCA is very impressed with your work.
Huzzah! More reading material! Thank you very much good sir. If only all 1,200 pages could have been printed… God-willing, someone may yet publish them.
David, I do have all of the letters transcribed. But there are a handful of them that I have not been able to get permissions for from all parties. The “selected letters” collection should be the most important letters; the business and day-to-day letters being left out. Since I have the letters transcribed, they are easily searchable. So if there is some particular question you’re interested in, I can search the collection and let you know what I find.
Why thank you Mr. Douma for that kindly offer. I can only think of one question at the moment -viz.- what authors and/or artists (if any) did Dr. Clark recommend to others in his letters? I have had the great pleasure of discovering so many solid authors (esp. from the 19th cent. and earlier) from researching the men Dr. Clark quoted and have even been able to acquire e-book editions of their work (thanks to archive.org and gutenberg.org). As such, I would be most interested in knowing who else Dr. Clark recommended. Many thanks, and God bless,
David
Unfortunately there isn’t a list of book recommendations in any of Clark’s sent letters. High on Clark’s list of recommendations would be Machen, Calvin, and Augustine. Clark does say in one place, “I find H.B. Smith’s First Book in Logic very satisfactory.” (1941 letter to C. Gregg Singer)
I know Clark’s personal library well. In addition to Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus (which Clark read in the Greek) he had a lot of John Gill, B. B. Warfield, Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, James McCosh, and Abraham Kuyper.
Thanks for the list. I was able to find Mr. Smiths works online at the following link:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Smith%2C%20Henry%20Bradford%22
As an aside, do you know what Dr. Clark read “for fun” (though I imagine that he would say that reading philosophy/theology is quite fun and I would have to agree).
Outside of theology (which was certainly fun for him), Clark enjoyed playing chess and he liked to paint. He owned a number of chess strategy books and a book about Bobby Fischer. He also owned a number of books on art.
Could I get the names of those books? I have a friend who enjoys chess and I would like to learn. I also could use a list of good works on art.
Thank you for your wonderful responses to my questions.
I’m no longer at the seminary where his books are housed, and I don’t have a detailed list of them unfortunately. I know for sure one book was “Fischer/Spassky, The New York Times Report on the Match of the Century” from 1973. If I’m not mistaken, I think one or two strategy books were by Edward Lasker.
Most of the art books contained pictures of art, not much text on theory of art.