Miscellaneous

The One and the Many

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Religious studies

Lesson: 5-18

Genre: Lecture

Track: 25

Dictation Name: RR107C5

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

George Wellwarth, in his study of the Theatre of Protests and Paradox, describes at length what some modern dramatists have had to say about modern man’s impotence. And in the course of his discussion of Eugene (Eneskow?), he points out how (Uneskow?) analyzes the impotence of modern man as he faces a world of growing evil, and his comment I think is very telling. He declares and I quote: “Having no belief of his own, he, modern man, represents a society that no longer has any rights to defend itself against evil, because it is not convinced that it is any better than the evil opposing it.”

This is our modern thought. Modern man, having denied the absolute law of God, no longer has a criteria whereby he can say to evil: “You are evil.” And therefore he has lost the capacity to fight it, and as a result, he compromises with it. The result is a growing collapse of law and order.

This was precisely the situation that confronted the Roman Empire. Because the Roman Empire by its philosophical skepticism had no belief in any law beyond the state, it had no law, no structure, whereby it could bind men one to another or give them a criterion for judgement. The more incompetent it became in the face of the evil around it and the growing lawlessness, the more it emphasized the divinity of the emperor and the state, none of which answered anything. It could not cope with evil, the evil group, the welfare mobs group. The answer was bread and circuses, catering more and more to the mob, it reached the point where in 274 A.D. The emperor to satisfy the mob that thereafter the right to receive welfare would be hereditary. It would no longer be necessary for the children of welfare recipients to go through the trauma of going to the welfare officials and applying and filling out forms. They had the right by birth. The mobs were happy, they proclaimed the Emperor as: “Our savior and our God.” The next year the poor man had nothing left to deliver, and so they killed him.

Rome was in process of progressive deterioration. It had no structure, no law. It turned progressively on the one element that did have law, the Christian church. The people of God. It finally reached the point in the great climatic persecution, where it became apparent to a few people that there was no future, that Rome was doomed. That its one plan, its one hope of saving the state was to recognize the Christians. As a result, very calculatingly, Constantine, a very brilliant and great man, felt it a necessity to recognize Christianity, to establish it as the religion of Rome, and so very dramatically from being the persecuted minority who had been sentenced en mass to death, the Christians became established by the state. That establishment however was not out of any real belief in the faith. I believe there is ground for believing that Constantine may have become more or less as convert before his death, certainly he did go through baptism at his death bed. But be that as it may, the basic policy of the empire, of the sons and the successors of Constantine was that “Society has deteriorated so far, what we need is social cement, and Christianity can provide that social cement, therefore it is necessary for us to recognize and to further Christianity. But let us have it in a denatured form. Not as ruling over us but serving us. Providing us with the law and order we need, the character that will make society stable, but not asserting the sovereignty of God over the state, not interfering with our private lives and our public lives.”

As a result, very early, the Roman Empire began to promote every kind of heresy imaginable, for the purpose of establishing a Christian religion that was not consistently, systematically Christian; of recognizing the God of Scripture without recognizing His sovereignty. Of asserting the lordship of Jesus Christ without acceding to Christ His divinity and humanity. The result was that Arianism was promoted.

We do not have the time to go into a detailed analysis of the theological implications of Arianism, it was a kind of Unitarianism, but the God of Arianism was a God who was unknowable. Arianism was not far from the position that later was formulated in Mohammedanism, which can be characterized as a form of Arianism. Its view of Christ was that he was less than God, but something more than man. But basically man. thus Christ was not very God of very God, but a created being. Second he was not eternally existent and third Christ was not of the same essence of the Father. Thus as against the orthodox faith, that faith that insisted that Christ was begotten and not made, begotten before all worlds and of the same essence of the Father, Arianism gave us a human Christ.

Similarly, while protesting that they affirmed the true sovereignty of God, even as Islam does: “God neither begets nor is begotten.” Islam says, echoing the Arian faith. Supposedly magnifying God, they say: “He is beyond man, so totally beyond man that to think of an incarnation of God is blasphemy.” And Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, stated his position in his work Thalia, I won’t read a long passage on God, except the first sentence. “God himself then, in His own nature is ineffable by all men. Equal like himself, he alone has none or one in glory, and in generate we call him, because of him who is generate by nature.” And so on.

Thus ostensibly Arianism was magnifying God. But, in the course of magnifying God, they made any relationship between God and man virtually impossible. Why? Communication between God who is so ineffable, so beyond man, totally other, to use the Barthian phrase, made it impossible for that God to communicate with man. ultimately they ended up in their formulation with a totally unconscious God who could not express himself. They were a step away from the death of God philosophy. A God beyond man, totally other, incapable of any relationship, incapable of incarnation, incapable of expressing himself, unconscious, and therefore incapable of having a revelation. Thus, Arianism eliminated Christ as Lord, and eliminated God as anyone who spoke or gave a revelation to man.

All this in the name of criticizing Christianity for cheapening God. As against Arianism the Nicene Creed was formulated. Asserting the sovereignty of God, his true and full incarnation in Jesus Christ, truly God and truly man, and His declaration of Himself, in and through His Son, as well as through Scripture. Thus as against this infiltration of Greek philosophy, which again ostensibly in the name of magnifying God was reintroducing man, the church made a stand in the Nicene Council. We have seen something of the same movement in our day in Barthianism, against which Doctor Van Til has made so notable a stand. Barthianism talking about the totally other God ends up by enthroning man. God is so totally beyond, there is no way of God being expressed on human terms, therefore there is no infallible, inerrant word of God. There is no true incarnation in Jesus Christ. The virgin birth and the incarnation are merely sign and symbols, everything is relativized, man is exalted. God having been removed from the world as totally other, man takes over the world. This was the purpose of Arianism.

The church met this challenge of Greek Philosophy. It met it in triumph after severe and bitter struggle, it also met it by standing up to Arius and his associates in a battle that cost the lives of many saints, meant refuge in the desert for mean like Athanasius. Athanasius incidentally was persecuted bitterly for his stand. All kinds of charges were proffered against him, he was accused of raping a virgin, and the woman in question was a prostitute, who had been employed to make the charges. She had never seen Athanasius. When the trial was to be held before the authorities, Athanasius was pointed out to the prostitute. Unfortunately Athanasius at that time was talking with the prosecutor, and she mistook the prosecutor for Athanasius, and identified the prosecutor as the rapist. The trial somehow fell apart at that point. But every other kind of charge was proffered against him, of murder, they found the man he was supposed to have murdered, he was alive and in hiding, of every kind of perversion.

Arius too died a death that is notable, and which unfortunately history books do not tell us. At the time that Arius was recalled by the emperor to become primate of the Church in Alexandria, Patriarch; the then primate, Alexander, who was going to be deposed because he was orthodox, prostrated himself in the church in agonized prayer, and this was his prayer: “Oh Lord, if Arius comes tomorrow to the church, take me away and let me not perish with the guilty. But if Thou pitieth the church as thou doth pitieth, take Arius away, lest when he enters, heresy enter with him.”

The next morning, Arius was brought to Alexandria in a triumphant parade. With all the Emperors troops, and his hireling churchmen, the Arians marching with him. At a critical point, Arius was suddenly seized with an intense gastric pain. There was a construction job at the side of the procession, and the workmen who had been working there on the building had a privy erected there for their purposes, just a little walled area and a trench. Arius asked to be excused and went into that enclosed area, and the parade waited. After a while they became worried and concerned and they went in, and they found that he had died and fallen head long into the privy. It was an ignoble end for the champion of anti Christianity, and the true saints of God rejoiced all over Christendom and said: “So may all thine enemies perish Oh Lord.”

There are many such stories in church history, and I am sorry they do not appear in our modern textbooks, I think they would greatly hearten the saints of today, they might encourage us to pray in like terms, too.

The next great challenge to Orthodox faith came at Ephesus in 431, in the form of Nestorianism. Nestorius who was patriarch of Alexandria, converted the Orthodox faith into again a form of Greek humanism. He declared that Jesus Christ by his perfect obedience to God, was made God at His baptism. Now the implication of this was tremendous. It meant that man could become God. It introduced humanity into the heart of the godhead, so that contrary to the Orthodox Christian perspective, man again was the determiner of all things. Man again issued the eternal council, man again is the author of predestination. Because ultimately every philosophy has a doctrine of predestination. Predestination is an inescapable doctrine. It cannot be denied unless a person accepts absolute and total chance.

There are many who accept this for the purpose of argument only against Christians, none who accept this as a philosophy of life. Because to accept the total rule of chance is to say: “The sun indeed rose in the east, but it can set in the east tonight. Indeed I am year older now than I was last year, but a year from now I may be a year younger, because there is no law, no eternal council that governs the universe. The implications of a radical doctrine of chance no one accepts. What is the choice then? Either the total sovereign decree of the Triune God, the Biblical doctrine, or else an assertion that man issues his own decree of predestination in a world of brute factuality. Therefore man through the state must issue his own decree. This then is the purpose of scientific planning and prediction through the state, that man may issue his own decree.

This is why some of these people actually use the term predestination. This is their purpose. About a year ago I was engaged in a debate, chaired by senator Bradley of California in Northern California. And the speakers were Paulsen, formerly of the FBI, and (Jockovich?) of the Hoover institute and myself. It was on Christian education, Christian school, or rather education, and I took the position of Christian schools. When it was over a public school teacher came charging up to the front to tackle me, and she told me that I was nothing but a scoundrel and a fraud on the public, for talking about liberty and freedom as goals for man and society under God. Because she said: “In the modern world, freedom is obsolete.”

Why? That woman was intelligent. All the conservatives that were around standing there, their jaws dropped in shock and in horror, and they were switching on their tape recorders to catch her words. But that woman was intelligent, and I told her so, and I told her the implications of her position, why? Because if you are going to have a scientific perspective, and you want a scientific society, then that society has to be like a scientific experiment, with every factor controlled. Freedom is then obsolete. You have predestination by the sovereign scientific state. This is why, whether as a Fabian socialist or as a Marxist, their hand is raised against the Reformed Faith. They recognize in our faith their central enemy. Either you accept predestination by the sovereign God, or you accept it by an elite group of men, who are planners, who give you cradle to grave planning.

Now this precisely is what Greek and Roman philosophies sought to do, their philosophy being humanistic, the state was the agency of planning, and therefore somehow, the determination of time and of history, of men, had to be taken over by men. The way to do this therefore was to introduce man into the deity as man, therefore by active will, Jesus Christ as the representative man became God, ultimately the potentiality of all men, by their supreme obedience becoming God’s, was opened up by Nestorius. History therefore was to be determined by man, ultimately.

Behind Nestorius stood the emperors. Their attempt to revive again the central power of the state as the acting God in society, as the real, the de facto God. As a result the council of Chalcedon was also called in 451 A.D. to close the door against this Greek humanism. It did this by asserting faithfully in terms of scripture, the fact that the two natures of Christ are without confusion, and without any co-mingling. That Jesus Christ was very God of very God, and very man of very man, two natures in perfect Union, without confusion. So that, the deity of Christ was never confused with the humanity, and the humanity never made God. When we are made members of Jesus Christ, we are not made members of his divinity, we are partakers of it, we receive of its blessing, but we are made members of his true and perfect humanity. To do otherwise is to introduce man into the godhead, and to transfer the determination of all things.

The doctrine therefore of the two natures without confusion, so powerfully stated in the definition or formula of Chalcedon declares that: “That same Jesus Christ, Son, Lord, Only Begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.”

Now Chalcedon is the hallmark of Christian Orthodoxy. It was rightly stressed by Calvin of the critical doctrine as formulated by the church fathers, it is the cornerstone of Van Til’s philosophy of religion, and it is significant that Chalcedon, one of the great charters of western civilization, is today bypassed and forgotten, because it is the purpose of modern religion as well as of modern philosophy, to take away the determination of all things from God and to pass them on to man.

The Athanasian Creed which was formulated about the same time, it bears the name of Athanasius, but it is almost word for word the work of Augustine who had passed away also by that time, is a classic formulation of this same faith, and of the doctrine of the one and the many.

Now what was the formulation as it came through Tertullian and Augustine in terms of Scripture? The doctrine of the one and the many as formulated in the Athanasian Creed declares that we cannot affirm the ultimacy of either unity or particularity, of the one or the many; the group or the individual. Because both have equal ultimacy in the Trinity, three persons, one God. It is neither the triune aspect of the Godhead that is prior, nor is it their oneness that is prior, both are equally ultimate. Moreover there is no subordination in the Trinity, they are ontologically, all of them equally ultimate. Therefore as we face the world and we see the created one and many, the logical conclusion I that we cannot assert either the priority of the individual or of the state. Both are equally under God and equally important. We cannot say marriage is everything as the Catholics do, and those that are in the marriage are nothing, therefore no divorce.

The Catholic divorce incidentally had grounds for divorce through most of the Middle ages. It was only as scholasticism formulated the doctrine of the one and the many on Aristotelian terms that they had to abolish divorce, because the particulars no longer were important, the oneness of things was basic.

Similarly, it is not a question with us of which is more important, the individual believer and his experience or the church and its unity, both. There is a balance in other words between the individual and society. You cannot go into either anarchism or totalitarianism. When you have the doctrine of the trinity, you maintain the equal validity of unity and particularity, individuality and collectivity. Only the doctrine of the trinity makes possible a social order which then has liberty, which preserves us from totalitarianism and anarchism, the twin evils that have always haunted society.

As a result, William Carrol Bark, a Stanford historian has called the thinking of these church fathers as the foundation of western liberty, and he has called them the frontier thinkers of the western world. They lay down the foundations for all the liberties we now enjoy. There is no answer to the problem of the one and the many apart from the Biblical doctrine of the trinity, and Doctor Van Til constitutes the great contemporary religious philosopher, who has restated in its Biblical Chalcedonian form, the doctrine of the one and the many.

In the second counsel of Constantinople, there was another attack on the entire Orthodox Faith, in terms of the Greek humanistic philosophy. This attack took a somewhat different direction. It is one that is familiar today and I’ll discuss it more in terms of the challenge that we face today.

There are many who wanted the simple gospel. But the simple gospel is a fraud. There is no such thing as a simple gospel, the word of God is stated thus instead, as simple enough for a child to wade in, and deep enough for an elephant to drown in. All its doctrines are profound and far beyond exhaustion by man. Those who insist on a simple gospel, end up by denaturing it. By working it out an excuse for their failure to study. There is enough in this gospel, in this word of God, for a man studying it all his lifetime to have room for growth. Never to exhaust the profundity of it. Thus the word of God speaks to us directly, so that a child can grasp, and yet grow all his lifetime in terms of it.

The intent therefore of every reduction to just a simple gospel is an attempt to get away from sound doctrine, from the necessity of growth, and those churches therefore that insist that they just teach the simple gospel, no creed but Christ, are churches that have no capacity for growth, where the membership is on a childish basis, and where experience is everything.

I believe the implications of their position are humanistic. This was a challenge the church also faced. There was a tremendous move as a result of all these hard fought theological controversies, where the issues were profound and philosophical, theological, for many, many people to say, and many preachers to say: “Let us get back to the simple gospel, John 3:16 is good enough for me.” That type of emphasis, which was indeed to surrender the faith.

Is it any wonder that Christian gospel today no longer commands intellectuals? It was put on the level of kindergartners, how could it appeal to intellectuals? I have heard churches say that all they want from the pulpit is John 3:16. I have heard officers who waited on their pastors if he started preaching too much at them. “Preach to the unconverted, even if there is only one unconverted person in the church, we will sit back and listen while you lay it out, while you pour it on the sinner.”

What is there to listen to after you are converted? Nothing for growth. This anti theological and anti philosophical impulse has over and over again been very powerful in the destruction of Christian vitality. Over and over again when the church has begun to decline you can see elements of this emphasis on simplifying everything, putting it on a childish level, instead of raising the people up to the level of a thoughtful Christian.

At the same time the (Monopolites?), those who wanted to continue the old humanistic argument, now that Chalcedon had formulated that the two natures were without confusion, they wanted to say that the two wills in Christ, the human and the divine will were comingled, so that again they could reintroduce the triumph of man over God. So that they could reintroduce humanity into the God head, and as a result the third council of Constantinople was called, 680 to 681 to formulate this.

The net effect of the entire humanistic thrust of that council which had to be met in answer was very similar to the modern death of God school. That ostensibly these men were insisting on the deity of Christ. They only said: “Well, the two wills were united, and in that union the human will predominated.” Therefore, man was the governor of God.

The man Jesus Christ had triumphed over God by his will, now ruled God in heaven. Therefore a man in Christ was the one who ordered God, commanded God, could proclaim the death of God, and His triumph over him.

In consequence of this, the church again had to make a stand, (Monopolotism?) was forbidden as a heresy. The determination of man, time and history is not by man, not even by the man Jesus Christ, but by God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost.

We need to restudy the philosophical implications of the 6th ecumenical councils. In my book, The Foundations of Social Order I do study the philosophical and theological implications, and I recommend the book to you, if you want to study the matter in greater detail, because basically the issue is what we face again.

Scholasticism subsequently corrupted the faith by reintroducing man to the Godhead, by reducing the God head to substance, structure, act. Various forms of analyzing the one substance of being. We will deal with that more tomorrow. But the implications of the growing scholastic philosophy as they were formulated by Abelard first of all, were again comparable to the death of God movement. Yesterday I cited the statement of Tertullian. “I believe, in order that I might understand.” This was again powerfully stated and formulated by Saint Anselm. Saint Anselm stated that “I believe, in order that I might understand.” Faith, the acceptance of God, and then thinking all things in terms of God and his word, this is the key that unlocks every area of knowledge. But Abelard in terms of Aristotle, deliberately turned this over, and said: “I understand in order that I might believe. I think, I challenge, I doubt. I bring all things to the bar of my reason, in order that I may understand.”

Now every time we have this kind of thinking, every man, as his own arbiter with his reason, creates as against a universe, a multiverse. And the implications of a multiverse are in every age, whether in Greece, Rome, the Medieval world, or in our own day, anarchy.

Some years ago the Irish poet, William Butler Yates wrote an interesting poem, I believe the title of it is the second coming. And in the climax of the poem, one of the most important theological poems of our age, he speaks of the beast, slouching towards a new Bethlehem, waiting to be born. Thus he himself as one of the thinkers who had rebelled against God, recognized that what they were looking forward to was a new incarnation of the beast, that is of a man, of a creature, as the new God, who was totally divorced from God, who recognized no God, no Law, no universe. And therefore in a sense the final word of Yates was: “After us, the savage God.” His literal words. After us the savage God.

Every man as the beast, every man with his hand raised against all law, against all order, total anarchy as the way of salvation. And this of course is the doctrine of today.

Henry Miller in his books portrays very powerfully this gospel. What is his dream of the future? 200 years of anarchy. 200 years in which man lives totally lawless, breaking every law, murdering at will, mating at will, committing every perversion, and he says at the end of the 200 years he trusts that there will be no trace of any race or color left, every man will have practiced every kind of perversion so thoroughly for so many generations, that man will have evolved to the point where he scarcely know he is male or female. “Then,” He says, “The new paradise can begin.” A paradise without God.

This is the new theology. One of the most discerning minds of our day was the artist Marcel Duchamp. His famous Nude Descending a Staircase Introduced modern art into America. Duchamp finally deserted art. He was trying to give meaningless art, and finally said that it is useless to give any kind of art, because it is then communication. So he set out to create a new language, why? Because he said: “All the existing languages reflect God. They all reflect purpose, they all reflect meaning. And I want to be the Adam of the new humanity.” And he had himself photographed with a woman, in the nude, as Adam and Eve to declare that he was beginning a new world, and set about to create a new language. He worked at it for along time, and then discarded it when he was finished. Why?

Because it would have to be a language in which no word had any meaning, because meaning has reference to transcendence, it could not be used to communicate with any man, because communication began to reestablish meaning, and some kind of communion, it could only be a language purely personal and for himself. So he created this new language without meaning, and destroyed it. And he stopped all communication with men.

We must give credit to Duchamp. He was a logical humanist. The illogical humanists are in the church, trying to have one foot in either camp, to have a word of humanism, and at the same time God. And this is an impossibility. Either we accept the sovereign God with all that he implies, his universe, his predestination, a world of total determination, or we have ultimately, no Gods but man, and no meaning.

This then is the significance of a consistent apologetics. The apologetics of Cornelius Van Til is a negative apologetics; its purpose is to show progressively, that if you push every other position to its logical implication, it ends in a world without meaning, that there is no possibility of any description, any meaning, any action, without God. That the scientist who works in laboratory does so on borrowed principles, he thinks in terms of a universe rather than a multiverse, because if the world were a multiverse he could not offer it. It pushes every man to his presuppositions, and the presuppositions of the humanist end up in Duchamp’s isolation.

Are there any question now? We have a few minutes left. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, I read last night a very interesting critique, if you can call it that, it was an exercise in fantasy by Montgomery, writing on Van Til. And precisely what Montgomery fails to realize is the implications of a negative apologetics. Namely, that if you begin on any other presupposition than the triune God, his absolute decree and his infallible word, you have no possibility of any reasoning. Your reasoning continually on borrowed premises. But he asserts that it is impossible for man to have the whole world without God and still be logical. Now this is impossible. This is why of course Scripture portrays hell not as a community, but as the total isolation of man. It calls it Gehenna.

The dump heap of Jerusalem, a place of perpetual burning. In a dump heap, nothing is related to anything else, is it? In a dump heap all you have is trash, debris, without any meaningful relationship. You don’t go and arrange things in a dump heap, and say: “Now we are going to put these things in these category, and these in another.” No, they are just dumped there. And burned. So, it is a place where the worm perpetually gnaws, of burning, of perpetual isolation, precisely because no communion, no fellowship, no communication, nothing is possible apart from God, so to try to establish a philosophy without God, and to say: “I am going to have the ability to reason and to establish my logic without God.” Is an absurdity, you can’t. And this is why your modern artists are superior to men like Montgomery, because Duchamp and all the others who are like him, follow this to its logical conclusion.

One modern dramatist in a play of 1952 portrays the whole of the modern mood dramatically. He is very cynical about those who believe that there is answer to problems. There is no God, he believes, and therefore there is no answer. So you have this one man who has spent his entire lifetime developing what he believes is the answer to all the world’s problems, and to prove his unselfishness he is going to give it to humanity, and he finds someone who seems to listen to him and absorb it all, and then he ushers in all the leaders of the world, and they are brought in, the stage is empty except for chairs, and so the stage is empty, and so he is ushering people you don’t see to chair after chair. Because without God, man does not exist, this is what he is saying. He doesn’t want God, but he doesn’t like what he has got, this dramatist. So finally when all the chairs are filled with people who don’t really exist, the man jumps out of the window and kills himself, his last word as he steps out of the window is: “Now my interpreter will tell you all.” The secret the messianic secret. And when he kills himself, the interpreter steps forward and with motions indicates that he is deaf and dumb. There is nothing to communicate.

Now, I would say this far out dramatist of the new left, a Frenchman, a member of the theatre of the absurd, is far more perceptive than Montgomery. Because Montgomery wants the God of scripture, but he doesn’t want to follow the Reformed premises to their logical conclusion.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the review, I don’t recall all of it entirely, but the point that was made was, that, what did Van Til do having denied the law of contradiction? Having denied logic, how was he going to think? Well this is an old and a stale charge, but what he is criticizing there in Clark, in Carnell especially and in others is this: These men in terms of Greek philosophy assert that the Greek laws of logic must be brought to bear on all, of scripture. On God, on Christ, and Carnell at one point in one of his books said: “Bring on your revelations, and I will judge them with the law of contradiction.” If you bring God and His word to your bar of judgement, you are saying: “I am God over God and His word. My reason is the ultimate arbiter.”

Now as Christians, we must say and Van Til says: “There is a Christian law of contradiction, there is a Christian logic, but it is under God, it is His creation, it is not a judge over God.” And what Carnell and Clark are doing are taking a humanistic concept of logic and saying: “We will judge God. We will be God over God.” And this Van Til flatly denies. You must begin with the triune God and his word, or else you have denied Him. He is either your starting point or he is nothing. Ultimately in philosophy, your given is your entire world. We will this in a couple of days, but briefly for the present, what you begin with, your presupposition is all that you have. Thus when Descartes began with “Cogito Ergo Sum” I think therefore I am, ultimately the implication was existentialism. All that man has is himself, so that Sartre says, and I will go into this also, Sartre says: “To me God is no problem, but my neighbor is. I cannot account for his existence.” You see. “He exists, I think, I know I am, but you? What are you doing? What are you coloring up my world with? Because I am the total God in my universe. And somehow, you are an intruder, and you are a problem for me.”

Now this is the plain implication. Cornell tried to develop a Christian Existentialism, which is a farce. Because a Christian existentialism is the same thing as a Christian Atheism, it’s a monstrosity.

Well, I think its just exactly 2 now, so I believe our time is up.