Studies in Political Philosophy

The Truth

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: The Truth

Genre: Speech

Track: 15

Dictation Name: RR124H15

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our text today is the Gospel of St. John 14:1-6, verse 6 in particular. Our subject is Truth. “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

What is truth? This is an important subject for us to concern ourselves with because in our age, we tend to be primarily pragmatic in our approach, and because we are pragmatic and practical, we tend to neglect the basic philosophical issues for our time, and as a result, the foundations are being destroyed, and we are scarcely aware of it. What it truth? The future of civilization rests on the answer to that question. Every civilization rests on a conception of truth. Its life is this faith in action. It prospers all falls{?} in terms of its conception of truth.

There have been, in the history of civilization, a number of conflicting ideas of what truth is, and in our present world, we see these various historic conceptions of truth again coming to the fore, again pitted one against the other, contending for the mastery of the future, because we are at the end of an age, and the future is going to be dominated by whatever conception of truth prevails, and we are going to see the prevailing conceptions go down the drain, as the culture of which they are a part is destroyed.

The first of these basic conceptions of truth is the acts are given over and over again through the centuries by the varying forms of rationalism, and rationalism, historically, has seen truth as an idea and ideal of form, truth as the form of being. The first grade manifestation of this concept in Western civilization was in Ancient Greece, the platonic, the Aristotelian, and other Hellenic forms of the formulation of this basic rationalism. In every case, whether in Far Eastern or Western civilizations, the result of this rationalistic approach to truth has been either a basic contempt of matter and of the material world, or of individuality, or an ultimate relativism.

In the rationalistic conception, truth is often seen as the unity of things, the oneness, the converging, developing pattern that leads to a unification and a synthesis, and as a result, there is a basic contempt of everything that makes for particularity, for individuality. The classic document expressive of this is Plato’s Republic, which is a blueprint for the totalitarian state, for total communism, for an order in which the individual is nothing and the good is unity, the perfection of the whole, and today, of course, we see these rationalistic conceptions quite widely around us. In every instance, whatever the professed intentions of the individual, they are productive of the same sort of thing. In the Platonic tradition, there is this basic contempt of individuality, of particularity, in favor of oneness, in favor of unity.

In other forms, truth is seen as spirit as against matter, and the world of spirit is the realm of truth and the realm of matter is the realm of evil and of error, and of baser things, and of course, this inevitably leads, as it has over and over again in the East as in the West, to asceticism, to a contempt of this world and also with it, a contempt of individuality. The goal of being is to lose yourself in Brachma{?}, or in the mystical one, and the wise man is the man who forsakes the material world, the lower world, but from the Christian perspective, this, too, is fallacious, because the world of matter and of spirit was created by God wholly good. It is now fallen world and both mind and matter are affected by the fall, and alike evil apart from God and alike good when regenerated. This, too, must be rejected.

Then again, truth is often seen in this rationalistic perspective as the developing nature, or intelicea{?} being. Being is developing and as it develops, it manifests itself in a form which incarnates the truth for the day, and one of the more prominent thinkers of our day, Vogalin{?}, is the best expression of this philosophy. Vogalin{?} has quite a vogue among both thinkers of the right and of the left, but Vogalin’s {?} thinking is of ultimate relativism, because as he reveals in his study on order and history. There was a leak in being as it were, being manifested itself in a forward stride, and incarnated the truth of the moment in the Old Testament prophets, and then again, in Plato and Aristotle, when there was another leap in being, and there was another leap in being with Christendom, and then, no doubt, he will go on to say another leap in being with the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and perhaps the next leap in being is world Marxism. Who is to know? Because if there is this intelikey{?} of being and there is this continual leap in being, who are we to say that the thing we hate today cannot be the truth of tomorrow? And this doctrine, far from being anything conservative or conducive to Christianity is the epitome of radicalism.

This then, is in brief, the rationalistic approach to the idea of truth, and it is a barren and a desolate wasteland. We cannot allow ourselves to be beguiled by this answer, even though many very lovable and appealing figures have offered to be answered. One of the finest in our day, a very thoughtful and gracious man, Richard Weaver, in his various books, essentially expounded this conception of truth. Perhaps his best work was Ideas Have Consequences.

The second answer to the question What is truth? Is the Burkian answer, and Burkian conservativism, so-called, has emphasized continuity and tradition, roots. We must pay our respect to Edmund Burke as one of the greatest analysts of the modern world, and certainly his contemporary follow, Russell Kirk, is again an able and discerning critic. But when we deal with what their answer to truth is, we come across something that must stop us short. What if your tradition be Buddhism is Islam, or it be cannibalism in Africa? Where are you then as a Burkian? Kirk has written in his book A Program for Conservatives, “the necessity to any high and just civilization, of a conscious belief in the value of continuity, continuity in religious and ethical conviction, continuity in literature and schooling, continuity in political and economic affairs, continuity in the physical fabric of life. I think we have neglected the principle of continuity to our present grave peril, so that with us, as Aristophanes said of his own generation, ‘World is king having overthrown Zeus.’ Men who do not look backward to their ancestors, Burke remarks, will not look forward to their posterity. If we retain any degree of concern for the future of our race, we need urgently to reexamine the idea of an eternal contract that joins the dead, the living, and those yet unborn. Even if we have lost most of that solicitude for posterity, still we may need to return to the principle of continuity out of a simple anxiety for self-preservation.”

According to his own words, this is a belief in the value of continuity, and as a consistent exponent of this concept of truth, Kirk has repeatedly made it clear that in 1776, during the American War of Independence, he would have been a Tory, a loyalist to Britain, and this is commendable honesty on his part, but let us add something further. Had he been in Jerusalem at the beginning of the Christian era, he would have been with the Sanhedrin and the mob crying, “Crucify him, because he is destroying our traditions,” and in the U.S.S.R. today, he would be a Stalinist with the old Bolshevik tradition. Over and over again, this has appeared, and over and over again, its impotence is apparent. It has all the fertility of a mute{?}. The Burkian tradition is that of a spectator on the sidelines, calling attention to the need for roots, but denying the truth, or bypassing the truth, that makes for roots, and perhaps the most devastating use made of the Burkian tradition was made some years ago by Harold Rug{?}, one of the most prominent of the leftist educators, because in his very, very important series of textbooks, which for years dominated the public schools of this country and set the pattern, what he did was to say, “It is the socialist tradition that has the roots in America, the stronger roots, because see what has happened then,” and he simply went back in his textbook series to the beginnings of America, to every socialist element, traced their roots to the present and said, “Thus you see how deep are the roots of this tradition, and if we are going to emphasize continuity and tradition, we must therefore,” he said, “in effect, be socialists.” This is the faith that has roots.

This then, is the second great answer to the question, “What is truth?” but there is a third answer, an answer that is becoming most vocal now a days on the campus on the part of the new student left. Truth as factuality. Factuality per se is truth. As one of the leaders of the movement has said, summing up the creed in four words, “Truth is what is.” Thus, homosexuality is the truth as well as normal marital relations. Every kind of perversion is equally the truth, and this thesis was given very vocal and scientific formulation by Kinsey in his reports, in which he equated every form of sexuality as equally normal, as equally true, because equally existed in nature. Anything that can happen is ipso facto natural, normal, and true. Truth is what is, and this creed is on the march all around us, and this conception of truth, truth is what is, is increasingly dominating our legal framework, so that you have a justice of the Supreme Court, William Douglas, declaring that every folk-way, every culture, every religious practice the world over must be preserved. Otherwise, we are guilty, the implication is, of genocide. How dare we try to, as Christians, eliminate cannibalism, or anything else. Truth is what is, and the cannibals, faith is equally true, with your faith in scripture, and the practice of every pervert is equally valid with that of every sink{?} of God. Truth is what is. This is the third answer that we have seen, a very vocal answer, and again we must pass on.

The fourth answer is that which we find in Frederick Nietzsche in his classic formulation, truth as beyond good and evil, “The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it. It is here perhaps that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species preserving, perhaps species rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions are the most indispensible to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not life, that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life, that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so has thereby alone placed itself beyond the good and evil.”

This then is the Nietzschian{?} position, and a contemporary philosopher, Levi, has very aptly characterized it as the will to illusion. The will to illusion. The falsest opinions, it is held, are the most indispensible to us, and this opinion, too, a truth beyond good and evil is all around us today. We find it in every church. There scarcely a church today where you do not find the scripture read, the Apostle’s Creed recited or sung, and the orthodox doctrines of the faith maintained, but not as the truth. They are used because these are indispensible. People like these illusions, and let us give them these illusions because lies are a part of the truth, an indispensible part, and we need these fictions in order to keep the world moving, and who are we to say that a lie isn’t the truth when it moves men and civilizations?

Instead of truth then, this view actually has men moving in terms of power, and indeed, power becomes the basic motive wherever men neglect the truth, but in the Nietzschian{?} view, they are more honest. They move openly in terms of power, and power ultimately becomes political in its interpretation, and politics draws in every age, and especially ours, such men whose lives are not grounded on truth. Therefore, the compelling force in their lives is power.

But there is a fifth and a decisive answer to the question of What is truth? Our Lord declared it. “I am the truth.” Grace and truth came into being in Jesus Christ. By Jesus Christ declared the Apostle John. Truth is Jesus Christ, his person and his word, the scriptures. Here we have truth, ultimate, absolute, supernatural, a divine authority and standard, and every view which denies this must be to us a lie and equally an enemy. The truth must be Christ for us or we fall into these basically humanistic and anti-Christian schemes, for as St. John declared, “By him were all things made and without him was not anything made that was made.” Since Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, was the creator of all things, he therefore, is the fundamental principle of interpretation, by whom all things are to be understood, so that no realm is comprehensible apart from him, and the basic principles of knowledge in every realm are only to be derived from him. “By him were all things made, and without him was not anything made that was made,” and therefore, if this {?} be true, nothing can stand nor be understood, nor prosper apart from him. “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” Hence, our Lord declared, “If ye continue in my word, ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

There is no truth apart from Christ. Every attempt to build apart from him is under judgment, nor is there any way to any goal apart from him, nor any life apart from him. Since he made all things to be separated from him is to have only a living death with hell at the end. As the scripture declares, “weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth,” a picture which gives to us vividly and symbolically a picture of total frustration, of total meaninglessness, of total isolation, of no person related to anyone else, for the absence of Christ leads ultimately to the totality of hell, in this life in part and in the world to come in its fullness, in which there is no community, in which there is no meaning, in which there is no communication. Only total isolation {?} systems, for the word for hell in the New Testament is literally Gahanna, the city dump, the scrap heap of all creation.

All living apart from him has one goal, the scrap heap, but in terms of him, we are more than conquerors through him that loved us, and Jesus Christ comes as the logos, the very word of God, and is a destroyer of all rationalism, because rationalism, in that it begins with the autonomous human mind, denies reason, and as Dr. Van Til has shown in his various philosophy books, every form of rationalism ends in irrationalism, because it denies the very principle of reason, and Jesus Christ comes not only as the destroyer of rationalism, but as the destroyer of tradition, of the concept of continuity. He came and he ended the concept of continuity in Rome. He had to take the place. He was the living tree, the living vine, the living root, and no tradition apart from him could have any standing, and he went into Northern Europe, and into Britain, and Africa, and Asia, and into the Americas as the destroyer of the traditions that existed, and as the principle of the new life, and of the new era, and his claim is exclusive. “I am the Truth, I am the Door, there is no future in time or eternity apart from me,” he declares.

There are many today who say, “Lord, Lord,” but their lips have another conception of truth derived from rationalism or from tradition, or from various compounds of these concepts of truth, and however much we may respect and admire much that these men have to say, we must stand with Christ, or fall apart from him. The law unto the testimony{?}, if they speak not concerning these, there is nothing in them. There is no love, no truth in them. “Lord,” said the disciples of old, “to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. Thou art the Son of the living God.” Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that thou hast declared thyself in the person of Jesus Christ, the Truth, and we pray, our Father, that we may seek no other foundations, but that we may ground ourselves upon him that is the Truth, and day by day know that because we are established upon him, the gates of hell cannot prevail against us, for if thou art for us, who can be against us, for this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Our God, we thank thee, in Jesus name. Amen.

Any questions at this time? Yes?

[Audience] My {?} do you tell them that just because {?} Buddhist and so forth that he’s {?}?

[Rushdoony] Right. This is a very common opinion in our day and it is an opinion that was born with the Enlightenment, and has considerable respectability in our time. The answer to that is, of course, that we are not, because the goal of the Buddhist is extinction, Nirvana, oblivion, and his conception is first, that there is no God, and second, that there is nothing but a total meaninglessness to life, and the best hope that you can hope is to escape from life. Now, how can you say this person has anything in common with you who believe in truth, who believe that life has a meaning, and that you are not to forsake this world in terms of a quest for oblivion? Now, this is just Buddhism contrasted with our faith, and the difference is fantastic. If they say we are all going to the same end and have the same purpose, they are denying the total meaning of language, the total meaning of ideas. They are reducing all things to nothingness, and they are seeing that all things are equally meaningless, so that their position is nonsense.

Then you can tell them that if we’re all headed for the same thing, why aren’t you a cannibal? Because the cannibal’s way is equally valid with yours. You have equated as always equally one way, to God. Why don’t you take the cannibal’s way, and his answer will be, “Well, of course, I am in my tradition,” and you can say, “Then you’re saying the cannibal’s tradition is equally valid with yours? In other words, you’re equating all things so that you say there is no truth. If there is no truth, what need is there to change anything because everything is perfect as it is then. Everything is equally valid.” The position is logical nonsense, and such people are fools.

[Audience] How about the Jews? {?}

[Rushdoony] No, the Jew does not have the same God as the Christian. The Hebrews did, but Judaism left biblical faith. It makes no pretense now of being biblical. It has, since the 18th century, declared that its primary faith is in the Talmud rather than in scripture, and this was apparent even in our Lord’s time who said to the leaders of the people, “You make the word of God to none effect through your traditions,” and the Old Testament faith was clearly Trinitarian. After the Apostolic Age, Judaism became Unitarian and steadily humanistic, so that Judaism today is a form of religious humanism. It is the same thing as unity, basically. Unity is Judaism for the Gentiles. It is the same thing as the Unitarian church, as the Ethical Culture Society. There is no difference. So that God for it is just the word, whatever social process they want to give that name, and of course, many of these people today feel that they should drop the word “God” because it has too many connotations and it’s best to retire the word. Yes?

[Audience] I was wondering how many teach comparative religions in college today? I mean, do they really explore the different ones and what {?} approach do they have {?} come out {?} in this way. They’re all equal?

[Rushdoony] Yes, it tends to. I know that in one of the major universities of the West, the Department of Comparative Religions is headed by a man I used to know and studied under for a time, and this is his perspective: All religions basically are one. There are degrees of progress in these religions, but basically, he reduces them all to a mystical interpretation whereby man is striving for a higher goal, and it ends up looking very much like Hinduism, and his disciples have a disconcerting habit as far as their parents are concerned, of going in for a lot of Hindu exercises and Yogi practices and the like, so that even though these comparative religions departments, as this one, tend to equate all religions as one, they pick one particular one as the superior one.

[Audience] Not Christianity.

[Rushdoony] Not Christianity, no. They are uniformly hostile to it. What we fail to realize is that the great offense of Christianity is that it is God-centered, and it has been exceedingly rare in the history of mankind, and this may seem as a strange statement, but it is true for any religion even to have a god. Most religions have not been theistic. Buddhism has no god. Taoism has no god. Confucianism which began as a philosophy and became a religion has no god. Hinduism and Shintoism have no god, but they have many divine spirits, and all of us are divine spirits, ultimately, and you can go on down the line. You find that most religions have no god. About the only place you find anything that resembles a god is in something or other which is derivative from the Bible. Mohammedism has a god, Allah, but Allah has no resemblance to the biblical God, and Allah really boils down to find{?} and total determinism. Just a total mechanistic, deterministic power that’s at work, and ultimately, the personal things in Mohammedism came to be the Jins{?}, or the Gees{?}, or these many minor spirits, superhuman spirits that are revolving around the world and are involved in the affairs of men, because Allah is totally impersonal. He is a mechanistic force which totally determines all things, but really, basically, without personality.

[Audience] Well then, from the Scholastic viewpoint, even though it’s humanistic, do they pretend that we’re all speaking the same things, that we’re all looking for the same {?}, or are they honest?

[Rushdoony] They are, well, this is a generalization, because some are not honest and others are. For some, the only valid interpretation of Christianity is a mystical one. These people who wrote the Bible, they say, were naïve and simple-minded people, and if they only knew the truth, they would have know that, in the midst of all this nonsense they were writing, they expressed vaguely certain things which are possible to construe mystically, and we will put this mystical interpretation on it, and so they will interpret Jesus as one of the masters of India, and supposedly, according to some of these people, he went to India. You get into all kinds of nonsense here, but at all costs, it has to be reinterpreted, and of course, the present trend is not only to a unification of all the churches in terms of this one religion kind of faith, but a one world religion, and some have already outlined the holidays, as I have stated before, of this one world religion, the Feast of Weesak{?}, a Buddhist festival, the Feast of the Resurrection, a kind of a spring rites festival, the rebirth of nature annually, and the third, the Festival or Feast of Humanity, which is the basic one. All these faiths are basically humanistic, and they want to reduce Christianity to humanism. Yes?

[Audience] Do you believe that {?}, to {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, to leave it out entirely if it is to be taught as comparative religion, because comparative religion, as a subject, means that all religions are basically one. This is the presupposition of this entire school of thought as it developed in the last hundred to a hundred and fifty years. So the subject preconditions the conclusions. To study various religions, is another matter, individually, but comparative religions studies them all as one, so that you are studying Christianity, and Buddhism, and Shintoism, and Animism, and all of these as one religion. This is the unwritten presupposition.

Now, I think it is well to note what Gordon Clark, one of our better, philosophers today, although I don’t agree with Clark in many areas, but Gordon Clark has stated that there is no such thing as religion. There are religions, but what can you identify as religion? What do they have in common? And his answer is it is impossible to say, because you can’t say they have a belief in God in common because most of them don’t. What do they have in common? A belief in a life after death? Many of them don’t. A belief in truth? Well, many of them deny that there is such a thing as truth. What do they have in common? And he says, nothing. There are religions, there is no such thing as religion, and comparative religion says there is a religion behind all religions and this is what we are teaching you. Thus, I would approve of the teaching of courses in Buddhism, or in Shintoism, and so on, but not in comparative religion.

[Audience] Some of us do object {?} most of {?} humanism {?} each focusing {?} humanism {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, humanism, of course, epitomizes the comparative religions’ perspective. Yes?

[Audience] Rush, when they ask you the truth of creation, as challenged by the alchemists, do you say the relation to the alchemists of yesterday was the synthesizing today of the DuPont Laboratories {?} bring {?}

[Rushdoony] Very, very discerning question. The alchemists are again very popular and are receiving extensive study on the part of scholars today, because the attitude today is the alchemists were basically right, but they were very crude and foolish in their method. The basic principle of the alchemist was that there is nothing fixed in nature, that it is basically a developing, changing thing, that it can change from one form to another, and therefore, it will be easy to take one thing and make it another. Now, this is, in essence, what the modern scientist believes. His perspective is totally evolutionary. There are basically no laws there for him. Nature is malleable. He can make of it what he will, and the thesis is man can now make himself as one book has stated in its title, because he can control his own evolution, and he can remake the whole world of nature because it is totally malleable. There is no form there, really. No law. Therefore, it is totally open to his control, and they are alchemists by intention, but they are far more sophisticated alchemists, and they believe they are going to make what they want out of nature, out of creation, and this stems from their total contempt for creation.

We referred some time back in our discussions, to this problem with regard to operations. For example, these animal parts that they put in men. Now, they know what they are doing. They know that every fiber of our body is absolutely different from everyone else’s, so that not only are you different from every other kind of creation, you are different so that a piece of your skin, a few cells of your body, are discernibly male rather than female, but you’re also different from every other male, totally unique, and your body continually resists any invasion by any other alien organ, and so it rejects a transplant. So, what they have to do is to bombard your blood, either by radiation or by chemical therapy, to break down its resistance, but what happens is that, ultimately, the person dies. They manage to keep him alive sometimes for months, but his body rejects this alien organism and this alien organism is at war with his body, because it’s not it’s own body, and the two are at war, but they know all of this and yet, their thesis is, We’re going to break it down somehow. We’re going to be alchemists, you see, with the human body, because we deny that there is any fixed law in nature that we cannot change, and if we only unlock, for example, the genetic code, we’re going to do this and that, and we’re going to produce geniuses at will, and the super man, but we are the modern alchemists. A very good question because the Optimists certainly are among the most highly respected persons today, and it is significant that one of the most notorious, or as you will, greatest of Optimists, Peristalsis{?}, is having his complete works reprinted in a special edition because of the extensive philosophical and scientific interests in what he represented. The edition of Peristalsis{?} is not a cheap thing to publish, and I think it will cost $75 or $100 to buy the four or five volumes of his works, but it is a testimony to the tremendous interest in alchemy. Yes, one more question.

[Audience] Is there any medical reason why a person would be a homosexual? I’ve talked to people who believe that they {?} sinful, that they lack real medical, scientific opinion that there {?} and so forth.

[Rushdoony] Yes, this constant attempt is to find a medical answer to what is basically a moral problem in order to escape and evade the fact of human responsibility, and this is a very enticing kind of thesis, because first, it makes the person no longer guilty for his condition. It’s a medical thing. It’s an accident of hormones or body chemistry. Then, it becomes a medical problem to cure, you see. Then, you reduce evil and sin, generally, by this thesis, problems in mental health, you know, to a matter for experts rather than individual responsibility and you turn over society to the social engineers, and this is the basic thesis of all these opinions. All our problems are ultimately reducible to matters which are {?} to the social engineers. Therefore, let us destroy the biblical doctrine of the responsibility of man, of man as a sinner, and we will say it is a problem of environment, of chemistry, of heredity, and so on, and then the social engineer can deal with it, and when you’ve said this, you have destroyed what we know to be civilization, and you’ve supplanted it with total statism, the rule of the social engineers, and this is, of course, what is being preached, this kind of doctrine, by the churches today, more than anyone else, I would say, and by the state schools and on all sides. It is a deadly doctrine, and it is a doomed one. It is {?}. Well, our time is up and we stand dismissed.

End of tape.