The Signs of John’s Gospel

Sign for the Future

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, & Sermons

Lesson: Sign for the Future

Genre: Speech

Track: 117

Dictation Name: RR125E9

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we come to thee mindful of all thy mercies and blessings, past and present, and we thank thee, our God, that our times are in thy hand. Teach us, day by day, to have our hearts fixed there where our true joys are to be found, even in Jesus Christ, our Lord, and to be mindful not of the power of the enemy, but of thy power, and to move not in fear of the enemy, but in fear of thee, and in love of thee. That we might worthily serve and magnify thy holy name. In Jesus name. Amen.

Our scripture today is from the Gospel According to St. John 21:1-14. Sign for the Future. “After these things Jesus shewed himself again to the disciples at the sea of Tiberias; and on this wise shewed he himself. There were together Simon Peter, and Thomas called Didymus, and Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two other of his disciples. Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a fishing. They say unto him, We also go with thee. They went forth, and entered into a ship immediately; and that night they caught nothing. But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore: but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus. Then Jesus saith unto them, Children, have ye any meat? They answered him, No. And he said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find. They cast therefore, and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes. Therefore that disciple whom Jesus loved saith unto Peter, It is the Lord. Now when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he girt his fisher's coat unto him, (for he was naked,) and did cast himself into the sea. And the other disciples came in a little ship; (for they were not far from land, but as it were two hundred cubits,) dragging the net with fishes. As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread. Jesus saith unto them, Bring of the fish which ye have now caught. Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land full of great fishes, an hundred and fifty and three: and for all there were so many, yet was not the net broken.  Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. And none of the disciples durst ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord. Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise. This is now the third time that Jesus shewed himself to his disciples, after that he was risen from the dead.”

This is the last of the series of miracles, the signs and wonders recorded by John. Miracles which were, themselves, prophetic, which were words spoken, in that they were spoken in action. They were revelations designed to further the Gospel. Jesus had risen from the dead. His disciples had seen him. They were in Galilee and his command to await him, according to Matthew 29:10, and their fishing now was not an act of disobedience. It was not reprimanded. Indeed, it was blessed. These were fishermen. This was their source of family income, and as a result, as they were waiting for our Lord to meet them in Galilee at some time, not specified, they went back to their trade.

They caught nothing. They knew the sea of Galilee, the best time and the best place for fishing, and they worked through the hours, the best hours, for their particular type of fishing, and we can understand that they felt no doubt felt very much frustrated as it began to be dawn. In the religious realm, things had not gone according to their expectation and hope. They had looked for Christ to be the king is Israel. Their hope had been, even though it was in part religious, basically a political hope. Indeed, they were glad that Jesus had risen from the dead, but in terms of everything they wanted to see happen in Israel, somehow things had gone down the drain. Now, in the natural realm, things again were not going according to their expectations. They should have been catching some fish and they hadn’t caught a one. They had worked hard all night long, and when it was morning, someone whom they could only see dimly on the short called out, “Children, have ye any meat?” The expression “children” there is comparable to “boys” in English. “Boys, have you caught anything?”

“They answered him, No. And he said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find. They cast therefore, and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes.” They had not recognized him immediately, but whether they recognized him before they cast on the right side of the ship or whether out of sheer frustration they cast, and then as it began to become more light, they recognized him, we cannot say, but they recognized him and came to the shore. They were quite close by, only about three hundred feet away, and when they came there, Jesus had already a fire, coals prepared, for the “fish laid thereon, and bread,” and he commanded them to “Bring of the fish which ye have now caught, and “Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise.”

What was the meaning of this sign? This sign echoes two previous signs. First of all, in the second verse, we are reminded on Cana, the first sign, because we are specifically told of Cana that Nathaniel came from there. Now, John gives us the reminder so we might remember what happened at Cana, that there Jesus performed the first sign, the sign of fullness, to declare unto them that they were coming to God, not merely to be provided with their needs, but also that their joys might be made full, that our Lord was not giving them the bare necessities of life, but providing, as it were, for the wedding banquet, for the luxuries, for the joys of life. This then, was the sign of the new creation, that the Lord gives not only to fulfill our needs and necessities, but to crown our joys, and second, by the bread and the fish, a reminder of the feeding of the multitude.

For the feeding of the multitude, Christ offered not his deity for us to share in, but his perfected humanity. The blood had now been shed. Atonement had been made. Now, the perfection of humanity and the glorious destiny of mankind had been opened up.

God promises to his believers not an easy life, but he does promise a good life. God declares in and through all of these signs as they culminate in this sign that he is not stingy toward us. The disciples treated the resurrection as though it were a glorious thing indeed, but unrelated to their life. It was something that had happened to Jesus Christ, but if we are followers of Christ, the resurrection is not merely that something that happened to him, but something that happens to all of us, that affects all of us, that assures all of us of victory.

And so in this last sign, he brings home to them their destiny. They are to be fishers of men for him, and when they follow him and obey him, they are going to reap a rich harvest. They will throw out their nets at his command and they will harvest a large number of fish. Then, as he talked to them in the latter part of this chapter, he made it clear that their life was not to be an easy one, that Peter was to die for him, although John, despite all tribulation, would not be killed but die a natural death.

But, in spite of all these tribulations, the Lord would be rich and power in his dealings in, with, and through them. In other words, Christ made it clear, as Calvin stated, that we should learn to expect from Christ just as much salvation as there is power in God. We should learn to expect from Christ just as much salvation as there is power in God, and so with this concluding sign of the disciples, Jesus left this as a sign for their future. They would reap a harvest in him. They would, in the face of all kinds of trials and even death, become more than conquerors through Jesus Christ.

So the Christian future is one of intense struggle against the powers of darkness, bitter warfare, but one with the certainty of victory.

The disciples had not realized the relevancy of the resurrection to their favor. Their hope had been in a political kingdom, and not having realized that, God’s kingdom has no relationship to the earth. Indeed, Jesus is risen from the dead and we can rejoice, and we can live in hopes of heaven, but they did not see that Christ was Lord of heaven and earth, and therefore, he was able to give them a great harvest of fish, that he was able to give them all things in this world. Victory in every area. In the Sermon on the Mount, one of the key sentences is Matthew 6:33. Our Lord describes all things that the Gentiles see, and the world today does want paradise on earth. It wants to have all kinds of material blessings. It wants to realize peace. It wants to realize any number of things, but without any change in man, and our Lord said, “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness,” and all these things that the world hungers for shall be added to you, but only if you seek first the kingdom, and here we have the {?}, and at this point, not only do the ungodly go astray and all the socialists who seek first another kingdom, but many conservatives.

It is significant that in Ghana, Necruma, the former prime minister who fell from office recently, called himself the savior, and in the central square of the capitol, he had a statue of himself erected, and on the base, the foundation on which the statue was mounted, he summoned up the modern creed, and that inscription read, “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all other things shall be added unto you.” When the revolution took place there in Ghana recently, they toppled the statue and destroyed it, but not the base. They had not forsaken that way. They had abandoned Necruma, but they had not abandoned the faith in the political kingdom, and is not this {?} a sense of the faith of virtually everyone today? Necruma learned it in an American university, a university paid for out of church funds, supported entirely, virtually, by church contributions, by a church that has forsaken the faith and believes in the political kingdom, and this, in essence, is what the Civil Rights Movement, Socialism, Communism, Fabianism, virtually every faith of our day today declares. “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all other things shall be added unto you,” and this is, in essence, that which the greater majority of conservatives are interested in also. Seek ye first the conservative political kingdom, and all other things shall be added unto you. We are going to change the world if all conservatives get together and unite on a common platform.

I was told just within the past week at one meeting where I spoke by one very earnest man afterwards, that the answer to all our problems was for us to have a conservative center like the one in Santa Barbara, and for us to all join the American Civil Liberties Union and to take it over, and to organize and to move into every area of politics, as though the kingdom were by politics, as though man can be changed by new arrangements, as though you can make a good omelet with a different recipe for bad eggs.

How is sin to be dealt with? There are two ways. First by political action, by law, by saying that we are going to abolish sin by law and make men good by creating a new social order, and second, by the grace of God. Christian faith, then applied to church, state, education, business, politics, all things else. The disciples, as Israelites, had hoped for a political kingdom. They were glad that Jesus had arisen from the dead, but they did not realize that the kingdom was to come, not by politics, but by the grace of God through Jesus Christ, and everyone of the signs which John narrates, points as the way from the political kingdom to the kingdom of God, to faith in Jesus Christ. Every one of the signs declares unto us victory, but only through Christ. Every one, in effect, says what our Lord declares in the Sermon on the Mount. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

The signs of our Lord, recorded by John then, are a witness and a testimony to our generation, because in our day, it is not only the Socialists who are seeking the political kingdom, but too many conservatives as well, and this way lies only defeat, because sin cannot be dealt with by a new arrangement of bad eggs.

With this sign, John concludes his Gospel, and he declares, “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” And so John concludes with his “amen.” Enough has been said. He that will hear shall hear, and he that hath to him more shall be given, that he that hath not and refuses to have of the grace of God, even that which he hath shall be taken away from him, and this we shall see in the days ahead. It shall be taken away to those of us who have, unto us it shall be given. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee for thy sovereign word, and we thank thee for thy kingdom, which is a kingdom of truth and of power, and we thank thee that, having been given the grace of God through Jesus Christ, thou, O Lord, shalt add all things unto us, and in the days of shaking ahead, those who refuse to partake of thy word and of thy grace, shall be stripped even of those things even of which they have, that thy people unto the ends of the earth may be strengthened and enriched, and thy kingdom furthered and established. Our God, we thank thee. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] I thought there must be more. Why did Jesus say that in spoken parable, Let all {?}?

[Rushdoony] Yes, a good question, and I think it’s worth taking up again and again, because it’s one of the central points of the Bible. Our Lord summons men to believe by faith. It is not to be by sight of by works. So that when it becomes a matter of sight, they are blinded, and Isaiah said, in the sixth chapter, that when it reaches that point, “Hearing they shall not hear, and seeing they shall not see lest their eyes be opened and they see, and understand and believe,” and so it is our Lord says, that he spoke to them in parables, because those who would not believe were not to be warned. Those who would only wait until it was their skin, as it were, that was at stake, were not to be saved by God. They were to be saved only as they came to a recognition of their sins and repented, and put their whole confidence in God. Then, their eyes would be opened, progressively, and they would see, and so the parables were closed to the outsiders, but opened by grace to those within the faith, because God made it clear in the parables of our Lord what he purposed to do, the judgment that was coming, and so they only served to blind the blind further, but to open our eyes all the wider. Does that help? Yes?

[Audience] This morning I was listening to the KOAT{?} religion program, which I am quite sure {?}, but {?} the question I have, there was a man who called, apparently an older man, said he was blind and had a heart attack{?} but he lived in a neighborhood where there was some children who come to play, to visit him and talk with him, and {?} . For some reason or another, the children’s parents told them that he was a bad man, and he said that they called themselves Christian, and the idea of loving thy neighbor did not seem to express itself because the children, after this information, apparently {?} took his white cane from him, and he couldn’t get around, and then they would leave their bicycles in the way that might be inconsiderate{?}, and he might trip on them, and they made it pretty difficult for him, and yet, the question of one of the ministers, I don’t remember which one it was, what he should do? The minister said, {?}, but it seemed a little uncertain to me, {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, first of all, I would wonder whether this story were true, and assuming it were true, I would say the advice was probably right. First, what could he do under the circumstances?

[Audience] {?} parents {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, if he knew that the parents were responsible as he said, for the condition, would that help any?

[Audience] No.

[Rushdoony] No, so that in such a case all you can do is to turn the other cheek, and turning the other cheek is given as the only recourse of weakness. It’s not a policy to be used in all cases, but it’s one where, when you are helpless, you realistically bend with the situation, and that’s all he can do.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] And the police could not be there 24 hours a day. Yes?

[Audience] Rush, I was in the same program{?} , what really hit me was the {?} you know, the {?} and the {?} oh, definitely, definitely, but what he was going was being the forefront of this thing, you know, and I thought, boy, if that’s not pure humanism, man conforms{?} to man instead of to God’s law.

[Rushdoony] Yes, it is humanism, and as humanists, their Christ has no relationship to the Jesus Christ of Scripture.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh, of course. He will. He will be judged by him, and the Bible says judgment begins at the house of God. In other words, the sins of those who call themselves Christians, and especially those who call themselves leaders in Christ are the most fearful in the sight of God, and therefore, his judgment begins upon them. Now, we’ve seen this already in history, in the Bible in fact, in that in the Old Testament era, it was clearly said that before the coming of Christ, God would wipe away every false order that claimed to be the kingdom of God on earth, and where did he begin? He began with Israel and Judah. First them, and then the great powers and small powers of Antiquity were judged, and so God begins every judgment, either with the church or is most severe on the church, and the most fearful judgment in all history, without equal, and we are told there is never to be anything its equal is all of history, was the judgment on Jerusalem, which denied Christ. There has never, in any warfare, ancient or modern, been a disaster comparable with that. If you don’t believe me, read Josephus sometime on it and you’ll find it almost unbelievable, the kind of horror there and the total, total {?}, far, far more than any other thing in history, perhaps the most fearful other disaster in history was the totally uncalled for bombing of Dresden at the end of the war, which made Hiroshima, Nagasaki seem tame by comparison, and that was nothing compared to the Fall of Jerusalem, and it was fitting. They had denied Christ.

[Audience] {?} And he’d written to her in that {?} emulated Christ [?] and they were actually thinking {?}

[Rushdoony] Not {?} . But, of course, the word “beat” comes from Beatitude, from “holy,” the Latin word for holy. These are the holy ones of the new faith, so they very self-consciously are not emulating Christ, but are emulating holiness. They are saints of the future and of the present. Yes?

[Audience] Someone had told me that {?} Josephus {?}

[Rushdoony] There is just a passing reference, I believe, to Christ and the Christians, for good reason. Josephus did not believe in him and the policy of the Jews was, that something they could not explain, they were not going to mention. IN other words, here things happened. Someone raising the dead, healing the blind, causing the lame to walk, being crucified and resurrection. Well, how are you going to explain away things like that, especially when there were thousands, hundred of thousands of people up and down the lanes of the country who are witness of it, so you just walk around the back{?}. Also, Josephus had pretentions to being a messiah.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Just in an oblique reference.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No.

[Audience] Now, was Barbarus, was it Barbarus, or Barbarous?

[Rushdoony] Barabus.

[Audience] Was he the leader of a radical, patriotic group?

[Rushdoony] He was a revolutionary leader as well as a thief and a hoodlum, and a gorilla type man.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, except the politics were different then, but it was salvation by politics.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No.

[Audience] {?} There’s a {?} what you’d call it, down there in Santa Monica, where the beatnik surfers go. It’s a {?} people {?} and the surfers were quite welcomed there, they come in there and get out of the {?} hear about this {?} reaching the people {?}

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience] {?} several involved {?} concerning {?}

[Rushdoony] No, the {?} emblem for {?} had nothing to do with this. In fact, I don’t think it was a very good emblem and it had some pagan connotations. So that the use of a fish which came in much later had nothing to do with the fact that these early Christians were fishermen, totally different.

[Audience] {?} they used to {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, this has been overdone. There are evidences of the fish being used as an emblem for the Christians, but this has been very heavily overdone by our modern writers.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?} Christian symbol.

[Rushdoony] No, this is overdone. A lot of these symbols that are called early Christian symbols, you find that they occurred, but not in the way that our modern writers would infer. It’s just that they found occasional evidences of them. Yes?

[Audience] {?} the idea that in all {?} Christian foundation {?} How do {?} idea, or {?}

[Rushdoony] A good question. How well was the necessity for a thoroughly biblical foundation for every area of {?} education known? First of all, so many of the early converts came in from alien backgrounds. Some of the Pharisees became converts and tried to convert the whole of the faith into Phariseeism, so this was a major problem in the early church. Then, you had others who were Greeks, and they tried to blend Greek philosophy and biblical thought, so that you had Platonistic Christianity, just as in the Middle Ages you had Aristotelian Christianity, or Scholasticism. Then you had others who attempted to blend Egyptian and Syrian thought with Christianity, and the Esthetics represented strongly Egyptian and Syrian strains. The desert monks that {?} saints{?} called, were more than nine-tenths pagans. {?} who sat on a pillar was closer to the one of the Baal cults of Syria, than to Christianity, so you had a major struggle, of these various groups to take over the faith, and for example, Gnosticism, for awhile, almost took over the entire {?}, and it was comparable to modernism of today in that it was a mixture of Greek and some Jewish thought. It was trying to make Christianity scientific and it was a mish-mash of all kinds of weird ideas. A great deal of our modern subversive movements come from the Gnosticism, and Manichaeism, or dualism, which also attempted to take over the faith.

Then, of course, you had Arianism for awhile, take over the church almost entirely, and a few men who were orthodox, like Athanasius, being persecuted. It was the Unitarianism of its day. So, after Christianity was the recognized religion of the Roman Empire, within a matter of ten or fifteen years, Arianism had taken over the church, so the church became the official religion and then the state, because it didn’t want orthodox Christianity, made Unitarianism official Christianity, so that Arianism was the religion within the Roman Empire, within Germany, and areas outside the Roman Empire for about three centuries.

Now, you had a few lone voices for orthodoxy. Then, during the early part of what was called the Middle Ages, you began again to develop Christian thinking. Anselm of Canterbury was a notable one, but immediately, you had subversive movements again, and coming right straight out of ancient Greek thinking, the Death of God School of Thought began to revive again, and one of the most prominent members of the school was an Abbot, Abbot Joachim of Flora, Italy, and Abbot Joachim said there were three ages to history. The first was the age of the Father, the Old Testament religion with its stern God, and its wrath and law. The second was the age of the Son, which was the age of Christianity, but it was still of an exclusive kind of religious faith. The third age is the age of the Holy Spirit, when we realize that God is all of us, and that all peoples and all ideas, and all religions are equally good and equally divine, and there is no God out there. The only God is the one that’s here, in mankind uniting.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] That was the god of this dead movement, and that was straight ancient Hellenic or Greek thought revived by Abbot Joachim, and it had powerful influence within the church. For a time, it took over the Franciscan order, and the spiritual Franciscans, as they were called, the followers of Abbot Joachim, had to be finally excommunicated and driven out of the church, but it infected a great many people and lingered on, and one of the people who seems to have been quite heavily influenced by this was a certain ship captain named Christopher Columbus, but as a result, you see, the Middle Ages ended up in humanism, outright humanism, and the popes would ridicule the faith. There were humanistic scholars. They were patrons of the Renaissance. There was nothing more embarrassing to them than anyone who took the faith seriously, and it was, well, Boccaccio was a far superior man to most of the clergyman when he wrote his Decameron, and what’s the Decameron but stories about the sexual misbehaviors of churchmen, and one of the first stories there is about the Jew whose neighbors were trying to convert him and they told him, and he said, “Well, I’ll believe after I go to Rome,” and they though, “Oh, when he goes to Rome and sees how the churchmen behave, he’ll never be a Christian, and he went there and came back, and became a Christian. And he said, “If God permits all these things to go on in Rome, and the flagrant immorality of these men, then they must be next to God.”

Now, that was a sinful statement, and it came from Boccaccio, a priest. So, humanism was in the saddle, and with Luther, there began, in the Augustinian order where there was a remnant of the old Christian faith still surviving, a protest against this, and you had a major battle against humanism, and of course, then the counter-Reformation within the Roman Catholic church also began a battle, in part against Protestantism, but also against humanism. The Enlightenment led to the defeat of this.

So, you had, in the early centuries, just a brief time when the Christian faith was vital. You had it for a brief time in the Middle Ages, in various parts of Europe. You had it briefly revived with the Reformation, and in America it was the one place where the Reformation did have a chance to develop before the Enlightenment captured it. So, we saw a clear development of some Christian principles, both of Medieval feudalism, which is federalism, and the Protestant Puritanism spirit here in America, but now, we are seeing, and this is why we should be hopeful for the future, more real Christian thinking than has gone on for centuries, and more of it concentrated in one time than ever before.

For example, in Europe, the School of Philosophical Presuppositionalists were totally Christian. {?} and Spear{?}, and Van Reisen{?} and others, and their writings are beginning to have some real inputs. In this country, Van Til is a leader of this sort of thinking, and the major outlet for this type of thinking, of course, is {?} press and Presbyterian Reformed, but it is beginning to have its influence, of all place, it appeared recently at Harvard where a student in either economics or political science began spouting this in one of the articles he was writing, a graduate student. How it ever got to him, I don’t know, but it is beginning to have its influence in various parts of the world, so I think we’re going to see more real Christian development in the days ahead than we have ever before.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Ambionic{?} Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] These words are spoken to the disciples specifically, and through them he performed all kinds of great miracles, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, so that they, too, raised the dead and healed the blind, and performed all kinds of miracles at which only a few are reported in the Book of Acts, and the Book of Acts should be properly titled, Book of the Acts of Jesus Christ Through His Apostles. In other words, the whole point of the Book of Acts was this: the disciples were proclaiming, “This Jesus Christ whom you crucified is not dead but alive and at work through us,” and so they performed the miracles. “In the name of Jesus Christ, I saw unto thee, Arise and walk.” It was always in the name of Jesus Christ. So that this witness was given to Israel as a final testimony before their judgment. After the Fall of Jerusalem, the miracles ceased.

[Audience] {?} she was saying that {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, she is applying to herself something that is applied specifically to the Apostles, who did have these special gifts of the Spirit. Yes?

[Audience] {?} which you {?} what do you think is the Jews’ relationship to {?} chance to accept Christ? {?}

[Rushdoony] No, no more chance than any unbeliever has in any age to accept Christ as an individual, but they do not aserate{?} at any special place any longer, I believe. Now, some disagree, but I believe that our standing with God is by grace alone, not by race. So that neither the Jew nor any other people have any special place in God’s plan apart from Christ, that they have a place insofar as they accept Christ, but it is entirely grace. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] “Therefore that disciple whom Jesus loved (that was John) saith unto Peter, It is the Lord. Now when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he girt his fisher's coat unto him, (for he was naked,) and did cast himself into the sea.” They were very close to land, about three hundred feet away, and they did not work with their outer tunics on. They would take it off and work either naked or just with a loin cloth, and Peter was working there and John recognized Jesus and told Peter, “It is the Lord,” and Peter, of course had betrayed Christ three times, and this was burning on his conscience, and he was anxious to go to Christ and ask for forgiveness. So, immediately he threw himself into the water and went to shore, but he didn’t get the opportunity, or our Lord did not allow it, until later when everyone was present. In other words, apparently Peter wanted to be able to go to Christ and ask his forgiveness privately, but our Lord brought up the matter publically since he had publically said, “I will never betray thee,” he publically had to now acknowledge his sin, and the latter part of this chapter is given to that. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] I found them very, very receptive, because I think most of them who are not on the left are very much shaken by what they see. They are getting a staggering attack from their faculty members and from their fellow students. I found an exceedingly receptive except where it was a church group, and then it was nothing but a headache. The worst experience I had was before a group that was supposedly evangelical. Every other experience was very favorable, and I had been unwilling to speak before such a group because I know, from experience, what they are like, but the so-called evangelical student groups on campuses are as anti-Christian as can be, by and large. So, there is no real witness on the campuses.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, most of these so-called evangelical groups on the campuses, and these are the ones that claim to be good Bible-believing Christians and so on, among the things they are bent on doing is to make the Bible tolerable to the students. So, they immediately begin by saying, “Well, you can believe in the Bible and in evolution, and we’ll walk around these passage which are difficult,” and so on and so forth. So they toned down the Bible thoroughly, and their attitude is, “We’re going to have our cake and eat it, too.” Now, you can talk to someone who’s decided in favor of the opposition. You know where he stands and he knows where you stand. So there is some possibility of argument. You’re arguing in terms of positions. You can attack his and defend yours, but someone who is supposedly a Christian and yet, at the same time, is making his peace with modern education and modern politics, and everything else, is going to be just angry and resentful and insulting if you tell him there can be such peace, that there has to be a division, and such people just become insulting. So that you find that, finally, when you’re through speaking and they listen with just ill {?} hostility, in the question period they’re all shouting at you because they’re so angry. You’ve confronted them with the fact they cannot be a Christian and profess to believe what they do, and this they cannot tolerate. They want to say that everybody in the university is a good guy, and Washington is full of good guys, and why do we have to quarrel? We can be socialists and we can be good Christians, and we can believe in evolution and we can be good Christians. We can believe the Bible is the infallible word of God and read evolution into it, and so on and so forth. These are the people that you cannot deal with. You might as well write them off, and as I say, I make it a policy to refuse speaking engagements with such groups, and I took this one just as a favor to someone, and it proved to him I was right. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, Thomas Boston was a Scottish Divine who wrote The Fourfold State of Man, the state of innocence, the state of sin, the state of grace, and the state of glory, and it’s an excellent description of man in these states. There is a beautiful passage in Boston, I wish I could recall it verbatim, but he speaks of these Christians who profess the faith but have compromised every point, and he says they are like Samson with his hair shorn and his power gone, but not knowing. They stand up and feel that, “I have the faith which will conquer,” they don’t realize they are totally without strength, and without God’s support.

[Audience] Can you make a comment, I was reading {?} and he was speaking about {?}

[Rushdoony] Right, and the millions of Christians who’ve spent the last few years studying the enemy and what the enemy is doing. But, this is silly, documenting it endlessly, reams and reams and reams of stuff. Well, we know what the enemy is going to do: they’re going to have total planning, total socialism, total control. Alright. What more do you need to know? Now what are we going to do? That’s the question, and fighting them isn’t enough. We’ve got to start constructing something ourselves. Free schools, Christian schools. Free institutions of various sorts. This is the only way to do it. We’ve got to start building the institutions of liberty and training people up in it, but if you are going to spend all your time watching what the opposition is doing, you’re in for a bad time.

I know groups of conservatives, in fact, one of the reasons why it was a pleasure to leave Northern California was that almost all but a handful of conservatives there were swallowed up in this sort of thing. Their biggest pleasure in life is documenting what the opposition is doing, and if the opposition does something especially terrible, “Oh, this is wonderful!” They’re going to be the first to come out with a report on it, and I think their greatest day will come when they can get up and report, “We’re the first to tell you, they’ve taken over Washington. We’ve got a beat, a scoop on this.” They’ll be happy then.

[Audience] Well, lots of times people {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Exactly, yes. Well, one more and our time . . .

[Audience] What do you mean by free schools? What do you mean by that?

[Rushdoony] Free schools, schools that are controlled neither by church nor state.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No. Schools that are not under the church nor under the state.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] The Land of the Free is where your money buys it and where your money kills it, and a free school is one that you control with your money, and no church keeps it alive, and no state keeps it alive, but your tuition check. That is a free school.

[Audience] What other institutions {?} other than the church, the {?} church {?} school.

[Rushdoony] Yes, we need free schools. We need free churches. We need also free businesses that will not say, “I want a government contract,” and today, most of our big business is socialist business, and one of the silliest things I’ve seen lately was all the criticism by the conservatives on the airlines strike, as though the unions were to blame. Well, just look at the list of board members on these airlines if you want to find a collection of socialists. Somebody told me recently that one of these airlines that a fine conservative president, and we were flying on this particular airline, and I picked up their paper and went down the board members, and guess who was one of the first names I saw? Peter Sallinger. Well, in this airline strike, those poor machinists, some of them were not making as much as our Los Angeles garbage men, because the machinists have one color and the garbage men another color, and a lot of conservatives were saying, because these men were union members they were in the wrong. The government should do something about. Well, we need free business.

Then, we need, and we’re a long ways from it, free private associations, charitable and otherwise, and our charity today is increasingly dependent upon government, and our private associations are dependent upon taxes. Where, for example, do many of your religious groups in the poor sections get their money? From the federal government. Where does your chamber of commerce get its money? From taxes. The chambers of commerce increasingly depend upon tax support to maintain themselves. Now, you can go down the line in every area of life, and they’re socialistic. They’re not free agencies any longer. That’s why they’re not expressing anything that stands for freedom. We need free agriculture, very definitely.

Well, you can go and extend the list, our time is

End of tape