Foundations of Social Order

Against the Hatred of Certainty (Constantinople I)

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Foundations of Social Order

Lesson: 3/19

Genre: Lecture

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Dictation Name: RR126B3

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Almighty God our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee­­­­­­­­ that day by day thou art our defender and our exceedingly great reward. We thank the that we have the blessed assurance in all things, that underneath are thine everlasting arms, and that thou wilt never leave us or forsake us so that we may boldly say the Lord is my helper, I shall not fear what man can do unto me. Arm us therefor by thy holy spirit and make us strong unto the end that in Christ’s name we may prevail and conquer, in Jesus’ name amen. We shall continue our studies of the creeds and counsels of the early church with a study of Constantinople, the first Constantinople in three eighty one, the first counsel of Constantinople, Constantinople against the hatred of certainty. Our scripture will be from Galatians 1:1-9. Paul an apostle, not of men neither by man but by Jesus Christ and God the father who raised Him from the dead, and all the brethren which are with me unto the churches of Galatia; grace be to you and peace from God the father and from our Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins that he might deliver us from this present evil world according to the will of God and our Father, to whom be glory forever and ever amen. I marvel that ye are so soon removed from Him that called you and to the Grace of Christ unto another gospel which is not another, but there be some that trouble you and would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel unto you then that which we have preached unto you let him be accursed. As they said before so say I now again if any man preach any other gospel unto you, then ye have received, let him be accursed.

The family weekly for January 22 1967 carried an interesting interview with Doctor Robert Walker junior by Jack Ryan. In the report of this interview, there was this interesting very brief paragraph and I quote: “After a film, Walker retreats to his new Malibu home with his wife Ellie, a former June Taylor dancer he married in 1961, and their two children, Michael 4 and David 3, we have a beachy home, walker says, we’re beach people; sun, sand and scuba. But if this house ever takes us over, ties us down, well we’ll burn it down.” This statement summarizes the view of humanism, of existentialism perhaps better than any other single statement. Humanism is characterized by hatred of roots, of certainties, of any ties, of truth itself. As one leftist existentialist student remarked to me on one occasion, “I hate people who know anything.” This attitude is basic to modern revolutionary movements, and it is the foundation of revolutionary activity. There is a deliberate hatred of any certainty, of any truth, any roots any ties, and so every revolution makes all things that are sure and established a target for destruction if you wonder why it that some of these revolutionary people are so hostile to things that certainly represent great cultural achievements, landmarks of civilizations, you must recognize that it is their total hatred of certainty and of roots. The past must be destroyed so that man can make his future as his own god. This hatred of certainty was a major factor in the Roman Empire at the time of our Lord’s life. It was basic to its subsequent anti Christianity.

We meet with this relativism, this hatred of certainty and of truth in Pilate, and it appears in Pilate’s contemptuous statement, what is truth. Truth was an irrelevant consideration. Humanism thus was widespread and in saddle when the early church entered the Empire, and humanism very rapidly began to infiltrate the church and begin to take over this great entity. We saw last week in our analysis of the counsel of Nicaea the confrontation with humanism at that counsel. Humanism did all that it could to turn the biblical certainty into uncertainty, to reduce every doctrine to vagueness, to make for example the doctrine of the trinity very vague, the doctrine of salvation uncertain, the doctrine of creation mythical, to reduce every biblical doctrine to uncertainty in order to replace it with a humanistic certainty. Walker expressed it very well, if this house ever takes us over, ties us down, well we’ll burn it down. Burn down your house if it ties you down. Burn down your marriage, all responsibilities, as ties which restrain and therefor impede you in your quest for godhood in a humanistic sense. The early counsels were called to meet this challenge of humanism. Now when we speak of the early ecumenical counsels of the Christian church we must realize that there is no real relationship between those counsels and our present day counsels of the church. First of all, the purpose of the early counsels was to defend and establish the truth, not to create a unity. This then was the fundamental point of difference between the counsels of that day and the church counsels of today, truth not unity. If there were to be unity it had to be on the foundation of truth, and every counsel of today is premised on the desire for unity at the price of truth. Thus between the counsels of the early church and our counsels today there is total warfare.

Second, the early counsels had as their purpose the defense of the faith, not the establishment of an institution in a more secure basis. Our counsels today are church oriented; the counsels of the early church were oriented to the faith. We saw last week how the men who came to Nicaea were battle scarred men, three hundred and eighteen men met, in 325 A.D. men who came there with their arms paralyzed by the application of red hot irons to the nerves which controlled the arms, their right eyes dug out or their right arms severed for refusing to take an oath of the legions to the emperor and renouncing Christ. They were battle scarred men. A little more than half a century later in 381, when the counsel of Constantinople met there were no visible signs of battle, but the men had faced an equally severe battle and a more subtle one. Now the empire was ostensibly Christian, but it was actually Arianism, Humanism in the name of Christianity. They were no longer killing the saints of God because this made heroes of them, this made martyrs of them, they were instead prosecuting them on various false charges impuning their moral Character, trying to make them look morally degraded and contemptible in the eyes of people so that the men who came to Constantinople were men who had suffered imprisonment, fines, confiscations of property, disenfranchisement as criminals, men who had been subjected to all kinds of outrages whose purpose it had been to discredit them. Three hundred and eighteen met at Nicaea, a hundred and fifty at Constantinople. They came to deal again with Arianism, Arianism which was basically humanism, deistic rationalistic, Arianism which represented statism, which saw the state as man’s savior and politics as the means to salvation.

And they were not concerned with peacemaking, as they gathered together they made no attempt to say to the opposition party, to the humanists, come let us get together and find a common meeting ground, you give a little and we will give a little and we will come to a unity in the church. Instead they echoed the words of Paul and called these humanists in the church wolves in their synodical letter. And they expanded the Nicene creed one step further to its present form in order to counteract the heresies they were dealing with, and then in their first canon they condemned formally the heresies by name. There were five kinds of heresies that the counsel of Constantinople condemned. First: Sebellianism, or Marcellianism, Doctrines concerning God which basically are one with our modern evolutionary thinking. The Sebellians and Marcellians were people who claimed to be good Christians but they were basically humanists. They defined God as the great monad, the original substance of the universe, and they declared that instead of God having created all the being of the universe out of nothing, all the universe and all men had simply evolved and emanated out of God’s substance, that God in himself was original substance, unproductive, mindless, meaningless, until he evolved. And therefor God was not a conscious God, He was not a personal God, He was not a God who could speak, He was therefor a mindless, wordless God. The universe and all men were simply expansions of God’s substance, and the end of the world would be the contraction of all being back into the original monad. This then was Sebellianism and Marcellianism, forms of Arianism, humanism. Pretending to be Christianity and infiltrating the church. The counsel of Constantinople condemned them. The second form of heresy was that which dealt with the doctrine of God the son, eunomianism, EUNOMIANISM. Eunomianism denied the divinity of God the son, because they believe that God was incoherent, that He was mindless, that he was unconscious, He could not therefor express Himself. Since they did not have the doctrine of God as true God, therefor they could not have a doctrine of God the Son. Therefor the counsel of Constantinople added to the Nicene Creed those passages which spelled out more clearly the deity of Jesus Christ. The third kind of heresy condemned dealt with the Holy Ghost. This came from the semi-Arians, the Macedonians, the new (sp?) mah-maki, those whose name indicates that they spoke evil against the spirit. These men were followers of macedonius, the bishop of Constantinople who declared that the holy spirit was only a creature, God did not have any connection with this world, He did not speak in this world through the prophets and the various writers of scripture because God cannot speak. God has no relationship to this world, He cannot reveal Himself, so that in effect if there be a God He has no possibility of associating himself in any way with man or speaking to man. Therefor the counsel added to the creed I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life who proceeds from the father who is worshipped and glorified together with the father and the son, who spoke through the prophets. The fourth, the council also condemned the Apollinarians, APOLLINARIANS. The Apollinarians had the reputation of being orthodox and very zealously orthodox because they emphasize Christ’s deity supposedly so heavily. They spoke about God the son as being so completely God that they could not accept the reality of the incarnation. For them, it was impossible for God to become truly man because this would involve putting on sin.

For them, finitude, creaturliness, humanity itself was sin, whereas according to scripture God created all things wholly good and sin is not the fact that we are human, but that man by his moral transgression of God’s law placed himself in opposition to God. In effect, the Apollinarians while affirming the deity of Christ were denying the incarnation, they were denying the virgin berth, they were denying the reality of our salvation, and they were saying indeed there is a God the son but He has no relationship to this world, and so Christ was to them only an idea of something that was vaguely out there in the beyond. Thus while claiming to be very zealous for the faith it was in effect absolutely denying the reality of the faith. The creed therefor was expanded with statements concerning the incarnation to rule out the Apollinarians. Fifth, the unity of the trinity was affirmed, its consubstantiality, and their first canon they affirmed the unity of the Godhead of the father and of the son and of the Holy Ghost. The Nicene Creed as it was originally written, and as it was amended or added to by the first counsel of Constantinople in 381 concluded with a passage of anathemas echoing the words of Saint Paul in Galatians 1:8-9 the counsel declared that all those who deny this true faith who sought to pervert it and to destroy it were anathema, were a curse to God unless they repented. Subsequently these anathemas were dropped from the Nicene Creed because they were all summed up in the Athanasian Creed, but unhappily in the Victorian era the Athanasian Creed was gradually bypassed as rather unpleasant to recite in church, don’t you know. It isn’t nice to say nasty things about other people. And so it was dropped from the book of common prayer of the Church of England and from various other service books. But it is impossible to affirm a faith if we affirm its opposite, nor can one defend the faith without waging war against that which opposes it.

Anathemas therefor are basic to Creedalism, and the anathema pronounced by the Athanasian Creed summing up all the anathemas, of all who deny the Apostles and the Nicene and Athanasian creeds is a fitting climax to Creedalism. Today we see an extensive attempt again by the same force, humanism, to free man from the biblical certainties, to burn down the house of faith. We see again the same hatred of certainty as it comes from scripture, and it is an attempt to flee from God. A flight from God is an impossibility, man was created by God, and every fiber in man’s being represents the handiwork of the creator so that man cannot renounce God without renouncing himself, the psalmist made it clear that thou he fled to the uttermost parts of the earth, behold thou art there. Though I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. There is no escaping God, anywhere in the universe or anywhere in our being. But, Robert Walker says, if this house ever takes us over, ties us down, well we’ll burn it down. But this is futility. No man can burn down God’s creation, and as long as we live in this creation and as long as we are God’s creatures, which is forever, we cannot burn down God’s handiwork, we cannot burn down God’s house around us. The existentialist rootless humanistic man is a myth, no such person can exist and the only burning which existentialist man shall know is God’s burning. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee for Jesus Christ thy son our savior, for thy word, thine infallible truth. For Godly saints of old who fought and defended the faith, and gave us an inheritance so glorious. And we thank thee our Father that thou hast called us and made us heirs and partakers of thine eternal kingdom, and given us so blessed an assurance and so marvelous a destiny in time and in eternity. Make us therefor confident and bold our father that we might be more than conquerors through Him that loved us, even Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray, Amen. Are there any questions now, yes? (Audience) Would you recite the Nicene Creed for us... (Unintelligible) (Rushdoony) Yes, the Nicene Creed in its completed form which represents the various counsels including Chalcedon as they developed it, it is basically an expansion of the apostles Creed. I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ the only begotten son of God, begotten of His father before all worlds, God of God, light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the father by whom all things were made, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the virgin Mary and was made man and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day He rose again according to the scriptures and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father, and He shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end, and I believe in the Holy Ghost the Lord and giver of life, who proceedeth from the father and the son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spake by the prophets and I believe one catholic and apostolic church, I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins, and I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come amen. (Audience) Thank you, and is that recited in any other (unintelligible) (Rushdoony) Yes there are a number of churches which use it, quite a number. Lutherans do, some Presbyterians do, and the Catholics of course use the Nicene Creed. There will be minor variations in various churches but the basic meaning is the same.

Yes. (Audience unintelligible) (Rushdoony) Yes, as I indicated earlier all the counsels now are thinking in terms of the institution not the faith and unity not truth. This has been true for a long time now, so that every counsel today only compounds the evil. Yes. (Audience unintelligible) The Athanasian creed I will place in your hands fairly soon, you can find it in various manuals of the creeds, the Lutherans I believe still use it, so that you could find it in a Lutheran service book, but we shall have when the series is conclude, all the creeds mimeographed and given to each of you. Yes. (Audience unintelligible) Yes, that is not true; there are two versions of the Lord’s Prayer given to us in the New Testament. One is in Matthew and the other in Luke. In the version in Matthew, the doxology at the end is given. In the second version which our Lord gave on another occasion he did not include the doxology but went right on to an exposition of its meaning without giving the doxology. Both versions are biblical, and it is ridiculous to argue that the shorter version has to be the only version.

There is not the slightest ground for any such conclusion. Our Lord gave the longer version in the sermon on the mount and in a later sermon which Luke records he repeated portions of the sermon on the mount on another occasion but abbreviated it and went on to deal with other material, other subjects as well. Yes. (Audience unintelligible) Creedalism is well, creed comes from the word credo, I believe. A creed is a statement of faith; creedalism is simply the assertion or the condition of moving in terms of a specific body of belief, of doctrine. (Audience unintelligible) Yes, right. Yes, credence comes from credo as well, the same root. Yes. (Audience unintelligible) Yes, in just a moment the source in Luke for the Lord’s Prayer. Yes, chapter eleven verses 2, 3, 4, and he immediately goes in in verse five to deal with meaning of prayer, so that he stops at the conclusion of the petitions in order to develop the subject of the meaning of petition. Yes. (Audience unintelligible) Yes, there is a great deal in the bible concerning our relationship to the poor. Now it would take quite a while to go through all the laws concerning the subject, but first of all we are commanded to be charitable, we are commanded to be merciful, we are commanded to give justice, but we are never permitted to subsidize slothfulness or laziness. And I think the biblical perspective is summed up very well in Paul’s statement: He that doth not work let him not eat.

Which means if he will not work, let him starve. On the other hand, the poor who are ready to work were to be provided for, and in the early church this was summed up by a regulation whereby any member who was unemployed was to be given charity for one day, and then the church provided work for him. One of the members or the church as a group, something was done to enable him to work, and there was this obligation, that there was no obligation to keep him as a charity case. Now this basically sums up the biblical perspective. (Audience unintelligible) Well, justice is a big word and the justice in relationship to what? (Audience) Well, I read something that a minister said about the poor, God is demanding that the poor should have justice (?) and I was wondering, not being familiar with all the terms just where his source was (unintelligible) (Rushdoony) Yes, there are a great many passages in the prophets where God condemns the unjust treatment of the poor, during the times of ungodly monarchs, and these passages are extensively used by the social gospel preachers.

What these passages referred to are very real abuses of the poor by the courts. The courts were stacked against Godly men and against poor men; therefor one of the major problems dealt with by the prophets was the ungodliness of the courts, the injustice that men received from the courts. Well I would say that if want to do some preaching today they can, in the same direction, but their preaching is for more tolerance towards the evildoers by the courts. Rather than a defense of the poor and the Godly by the courts, so they are turning it upside down. Again, they preached against the exorbitant taxation whereby the poor were being steadily wiped out, and again we are seeing the same sort of thing far far worse than anything in the bible, because at least in the bible there was no property tax, and today we are seeing confiscation, but when they talk about injustice to the poor they don’t talk about this sort of thing you see. The injustice to the poor and to the Godly that the prophets spoke about came from the state. Now they talk as though the state were the God and the poor had to be protected from us, and what are any of us doing to the poor except joining them? (Laughter) (Audience unintelligible) Well human justice is political justice; its savior is the state. Yes. (Audience unintelligible) The heresies of that day, as your question indicated, are very similar to the heresies of today, so that you can speak of a real continuity, some scholars do maintain that there is a continuity between Gnosticism and Arianism, and the various heresies of today. Unitarianism for example is almost self-consciously in its origins Arianism.

And humanism of course is a product or post-relative of Unitarianism. Moreover, the type of approach is the same, you have the same approach towards God in evolutionary thinking, you have the same approach for example, to the Doctrine of Christ in Carl Bart’s as you have in Apollinairus, Carl Barts speaks about the divinity of Christ and the holiness of God and you would think he were an Orthodox believer, but the only trouble with his faith is that his God is way out there totally unrelated to this world, so you don’t even know He exists, he is wholly hidden. Completely hidden, so what’s he talking about? Something he knows nothing about. Well this you see is very similar to what we have been studying the last couple weeks with respects to the Arians, so that there is a very very real continuity and a great similarity between the old heresies and the new ones, and you have the same kind of hatred of certainty today that you had in the Roman Empire. The demand for every kind of sexual practice that is forbidden that was characteristic of the humanism then, it was the desire to break the old certainties of the law, anything goes you see. Again you have the same thing, it’s a repetition of the continuing humanism that has beset and plagued humanity since the fall. (Audience) So, that brings up the question to me, were all these heresies always with us? What about the justice for the righteous- (unintelligible) -what right do we have to do this? (Rushdoony) Well I’m not going to defend the inquisition.. (Audience) well not the inquisition, but Calvin’s stand against the (unintelligible) (Rushdoony) Servetus, well alright, let’s take it in the case of Calvin and Servetus, because I can speak more freely there, however there are some good books on the Spanish situation by Walt, which are well written, although that’s a more complicated situation.

Now, Calvin was called to Geneva as a pastor, he was not a person who held any political office so that the idea of Calvin as the dictator of Geneva who engineered the burning of Servetus is nonsense, it was not until Calvin was dying that he ever received citizenship. So he didn’t even have the right to vote. Second, Calvin was banished once from Geneva before Servetus arrived there, and when Servetus was there he had his bags packed, because he expected to be abolished from the city any time, he was that insecure even when Servetus was there. Now what was the situation with regard to Servetus, Servetus was, we would say, a Unitarian. Now, Geneva had picked out the old bishop as its ruler and become a self-governing state, and it wanted to be a Christian state, one of its problems had been that there was so much moral anarchy that the city was not functioning. Therefor they wanted Christian law and order primarily because it was good for business, so that the ruling element in Geneva was not too theologically minded, they were not too much interested in religion. For their time as compared to this time, you would say yes they were far more interested than the people in Washington today are, definitely, but their basic concern was they wanted an orderly state, a prosperous state, so they wanted social order. Now they recognized that some kind of religious establishment had to provide that kind of order. Today our religious establishment is humanism, it’s not providing any order, and so the answer is going to be increasingly total control as the alternative to any order it can create through the people’s faith. Calvin was therefor called in to establish a basis of operation for the churches whereby they could educate the people, create a social order out of the social anarchy and immorality that had prevailed. Now they were not going to allow Calvin too much freedom, in fact he was never given the freedom that he wanted to operate in order to conduct the church so you could say that the church never really achieved freedom in Geneva in Calvin’s lifetime. But they did want him to establish order, now this meant therefor that they had adopted as basic to their community certain presuppositions which were Trinitarian Christian. To be a citizen of Geneva you had to hold to a certain faith, if you didn’t hold to that faith and you worked to subvert it, you were overthrowing the constitution of the state were you not? You were guilty of either treason or subversion.

Now, in Geneva there was a party, the Libertines. And the libertines never published or freely revealed their hand but they stood for the relativistic anarchistic type of faith, and they worked secretly and powerfully to undo everything that the city council was doing, they even had power on the counsel from time to time, although their men avoided showing their hand until crucial votes. And they want to get rid of Calvin. Now into this situation came Servetus, the scholars deny who are humanistic, that Servetus was called in by the Libertines, or that there was any subversive purpose in his coming, I don’t think we will ever really know, because there is too much that’s been destroyed, but it’s curious that Servetus came into a situation where he was as it were sticking his head into the noose, because here was an explosive situation. A group of people trying to destroy and overthrow the government, and he very closely aligned this group, the libertines, and this group looking upon him as it were as a patron saint. Now, we cannot say he came in to work with them, but we can at least say that it was peculiar and suspicious that Servetus came into Geneva when he knew that it was dangerous for him to do so, that he would very clearly be linked with every subversive force. Well he was recognized and arrested, and of course immediately the Libertines did everything to make this a test case, if we can get Servetus acquitted, if we’ll mean we have the power to take over Geneva.

Now this was the issue. So, the case became a hotly contested one between the two factions, the burghers who governed Geneva and the Libertines who wanted to overthrow the established order. Now in this situation Calvin was called in as the theological expert to deal with the ideas of Servetus, but he didn’t know whether it was going to be Servetus’ neck or his own. So as I stated, he had his bags packed during the trial, and at one point he preached he thought might well be his farewell sermon. Well Servetus was condemned and executed, and of course historians have made a great point of saying that Calvin was the one who had him burned at the stake and this is utter nonsense. And this however is typical of our history books, so I think we need to take our history books, whether they speak about Servetus or the Inquisition which I don’t of course approve of or agree with with a grain of salt, because there is a vast amount of invention where anything Christian is concerned, but to say that Calvin had Servetus burned at the stake is simply not true. Now Calvin agreed with it, that’s clear cut. Calvin knew what was at stake, it was revolution versus order, the existing Christian order, and I think if we had been there, or if we had a similar situation here tomorrow, and we reached a situation where say, some communist agent who came into the country was on trial and the trial in a sense developed as a kind of a test case, and if they could get away with it it meant they had broken the power of government, we would say hang him.

Yes. (Audience) Um, Rush, should we fight the (unintelligible) (Rushdoony) Now, it depends in which form we encounter him, whosoever denies that Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh, John tells us, is an anti-Christ. (Audience unintelligible) Yes, we in dealing with such things have to assess each one realistically. Our Lord tells us that we must be wise as serpents and gentle as doves, and he never asks us to do something where there’s little chance of winning, we have to asses each situation concretely, there’s no point in forever charging into a situation when there is no possibility of accomplishing anything. I cannot speak for this situation, I think each of us have to asses a particular situation, and those who are closest to it may know it best, but we have to assess each situation realistically. We are not here to make martyrs of ourselves or to take a beating, God doesn’t ask us to do that, in fact our Lord told his disciples that if there was any opposition in one place to shake the dust off their feet and move on to the next, he wasn’t asking them to stick around just to be punished. (Audience unintelligible) Yes, Right. And you have to begin with those who are first of all involved with students. If the students whose money is being taken against their will to publish the Daily (?) will not protest, if a group of them will not head it up, then it’s going to be futile because it’s their money first of all that’s involved. Yes. (Audience unintelligible) Surely. The reason for that is that it can also be translated as trespasses, and some versions do translate it as trespass. It comes from a Greek word that has that complex meaning so that it can be translated either way. Yes. (Audience unintelligible)

Yes, forgive us our sins, in the Luke version, for we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us, and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, so the passage is dealing with sins or with trespasses. Yes. (Audience) Can you tell us when did the… why it says thy kingdom come thy will be done *in* earth as it is in heaven, yet in all the apostate churches it says thy kingdom come thy will be done *on* earth as it is in heaven. Now, in my understanding that in earth would be in us, instead of on the earth it is in us that we.re made of earth in the beginning. (Rushdoony) I never have noticed that, no I’m glad you called it to my attention. (Audience) In the (?) council of churches all of them, who’ve thy will be done on earth, but that goes along with (?) whoever’s saying.. (Unintelligible) (Rushdoony) Yes, that’s an interesting point; I’ve never noticed that before. (Audience unintelligible) Yes. They are reconstructing history in terms of their humanism rather than in terms of God’s reality. (Audience) Do they know what they are doing or are they basing all their research on other liberals? (Rushdoony) They know what they are doing, yes. They know what they are doing, they are reconstructing history. For example, I think some of you have read the book Christ in seasons. Now the one thing that is apparent in that book is that religion was basic to the Roman Empire, it was the religion of humanism; it was political salvation by the state, by the emperors. It’s also apparent that Julius Caesar saw himself as a messiah, as a savior, but this is left out by the humanists completely, they know it’s there, but they will not include it because they want to take away the religious dimension from life, they want humanism to be adopted but without reference to the fact that it is their religion, and they want eliminate anything that refers of course to God.

So their history is a reconstruction, and especially in view of the Marxist influence on historians, they see history as economic determinism, so they are going to rule out everything that is not conducive to their theory of economic determinism. (Audience) They don’t use existentialism in their views do they, (unintelligible) (Rushdoony) So far, existentialism has not in its more modern forms influenced history, however Marxism is a form of existentialism, and as Marxism, existentialism has influenced history writing very heavily. Yes. Well, our time is up and we stand dismissed.