Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 29:1 (Mar 1986)
Article: Memorials
Author: Anonymous

---

JETS 29:1 (March 1986) p. 121

Memorials

Gordon Haddon Clark

Early in the morning of April 9, Gordon Haddon Clark died at horne in his sleep after an illness and hospitalization of several weeks. His body was buried near Westcliffe, Colorado, in the Sangre de Cristo range of the Rocky Mountains. A more appropriate place would be hard to imagine, for it was the blood of Christ that Clark trusted for his salvation.

His death came at the culmination of a long and distinguished career of teaching and writing. Born in Philadelphia in 1902, Clark was the author of more than thirty published books at the time of his death, and several manuscripts remain yet unpublished. He spent some of his last days in the hospital correcting the proofs of Ephesians with the help of one of his two daughters.

During his career, Clark had taught at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1929; Wheaton College; Reformed Episcopal Seminary; Butler University, where he was chairman of the department of philosophy for 28 years; Covenant College; and finally at Sangre de Cristo Seminary in Colorado. His teaching career spanned almost 60 years, from 1927 to 1984, and the mark he has left on Christian theology will never be erased.

Not many histories of philosophy have been written by Christians in this century. Clark’s Thales to Dewey has been in print since 1957 and is a standard college text. A Christian View of Men and Things— Clark’s outline of his philosophy—has become a contemporary classic. At the time he died, Clark had just completed a manuscript on the incarnation, part of his major series of books on systematic theology, the first to be written by an American Calvinist in over a century.

Ronald Nash has called Clark “one of the greatest Christian thinkers of our century.” Carl Henry has referred to Clark as “one of the profoundest evangelical Protestant philosophers of our time.” Both assessments are true.

God has been especially gracious by giving us Gordon Clark for a short while; let us be especially grateful to God, and as zealous for God’s truth as Clark was while he was among us.

James Basford Crichton

James B. Crichton was truly a remarkable and unique man of God, provided at a particular time for a very particular work of establishing a college in Memphis that ultimately became known as Mid-South Bible College. Crichton was born on July 24, 1922, in Alhambra, California. He resided in California until the age of 15, and by that time both of his parents had died. He was brought to the faith and discipled in the faith by a Miss Lanham, who was a Methodist missionary who had returned from the mission field. She encouraged him to attend John...

visitor : : uid: ()