Foundations of Social Order

Worship of the Condemned (Ephesus)

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Foundations of Social Order

Lesson: 5-19

Genre: Lecture

Track:

Dictation Name: RR126C5

Location/Venue:

Year:

Glory be to thee oh God who has called us to be citizens of the kingdom of heaven in Jesus Christ and hast made us in Him more than conquerors. We gather together our Father, to rejoice in the promises that are ours in Jesus Christ which are yea and amen, to praise thee as we ought, in Jesus name amen. Our scripture is from the second chapter of Galatians verses one through five continuing our studies in the counsels and creeds with Ephesus, the worship of man condemned. Counsel of Ephesus, EPHESUS, Ephesus, the worship of man condemned. Galatians 2:1-5. Then fourteen years after I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabus and took Titus with me, and I went by revelation and communicated unto them that gospel which I preached among the Gentiles, but privately to them which were of reputation, lest by any means I should run, or had run in vain, but neither (?) Titus who was with me, being a Greek was compelled to be circumcised, and that because of false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we had in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage, to whom we gave place by subjection known not for an hour, that the truth of the gospel might continue with you.

That which Saint Paul described, the attempt of false brethren, false Christians to destroy the liberty in Jesus Christ and replace it again with bondage was a continuing thing in the history of the early church as it is today. The early church had a major problem not only in the persecution of the empire, but in the attempt of humanism to infiltrate the church. All humanism is in essence man worship, and from the beginning humanism attempted to present itself as true Christianity. Christianity, the humanists declared is after all man worship, since it worships a man, Jesus, and the heresies tried to take over the faith by means of this approach, declaring after all that Christianity was the true humanism and the fulfillment of humanism, and that Christianity was in essence man worship because of Jesus Christ. This approach had been used by the imperial persecutors in the earlier period, thus we have a seriac (sp?) document concerning the trial of Habib, a deacon. When the governor, because Habib refused to offer incense at the imperial shrine, asked him how he refused to do so and on what grounds, when he already worshipped and honored a man Habib said and I quote: “I worship not a man, because the scripture teaches me cursed is every one that putteth his trust in man, but God took upon him a body and became a man, Him do I worship and glorify. There were two ways at the time in which man worship was being introduced in the church; the first was to deny the deity of Jesus Christ and to worship simply the man, Jesus. The second was to declare that there was a sense in which Jesus was God, but it involved a denial of the incarnation and it said that a man named Jesus exalted himself and by works ascended so high morally that he was able to unite his will with the will of God and become one morally with God, although different by earthen nature, therefor this man could be worshipped as God. Both these heresies were condemned as were other forms at the third ecumenical council, the counsel of Ephesus in 431.

The council of Ephesus had to deal most centrally with the issue of Nestorianism. Nestorius was the leading bishop of the day, bishop of Constantinople or patriarch of Constantinople, a favorite of the Roman emperor. When the council met, it had in the form of Nestorianism a threefold apostasy to deal with, and it enumerated these points of heresy, first: The denial of the incarnation, the second point: the worship of Jesus as man, and third: holding to the real substance in the sacraments which the council called cannibalism. One of the key words in the council of Ephesus which to this day is mistranslated and misunderstood was the word theotokos (sp?) and the issue was this: was Mary the theotokos or was she not, and the orthodox party spoke of her as theotokos. The charge by the heretics was that this made Mary the mother of God, and they insisted on rendering this word as the mother of God, and regrettably to this day it is very often in English so translated. Now Theos is God, but tokos is not mother and the orthodox party made it clear that the word could not be so understood and that it was heresy so to understand it. Theotokos means literally the bringer forth of God, and the orthodox party declared that the Virgin Mary was the theotokos, the one who in the incarnation brought forth God; whereas the heretic insisted that she gave birth only to a man, they denied the incarnation. The issue at Ephesus was this: if Jesus Christ was only a remarkable man in moral union with God by means of his moral excellence, then other men can achieve the same status of moral excellence and be worshipped with God. This meant two: that any order such as the state which attained the moral excellence of the day could be worshipped, as could the emperor, so that the door was opened wide to emperor worship and the deification of the state.

There was also another central issue: is the approach to God through a man and by man or is through God to man, by grace? In other words, works or grace? Does God reach down to man in grace through His only begotten son Jesus Christ, or is it man who works his way up to God and becomes one with God. Again, Ephesus said to make the approach to God through man is heresy, it is humanism. For Nestorius, God was passive but man active, for him history is determined by man not by God, and ultimately God himself is determined in Nestorian thought by man. The council of Ephesus met to deal with these issues in 431. Saint Augustine was to have headed the council of Ephesus but he died in 430. It was a time of crisis, even as Augustine lay dying; the barbarians were at the gates soon to overrun the city. In Ephesus they were away some distance from the invasion, but the western portion of the empire was crumbling under the impact of the barbarians, within the empire the Nestorians, the humanists, were in power and the council was defying all the powers of the day in taking the stand that it did. The council was led by Saint Cyril of Alexandria. Saint Cyril wrote all the documents of the council, and we feel his impacts to this day in orthodoxy. Saint Cyril wrote the two great epistles and the twelve anathemas which the council pronounced. The council of Ephesus led by Saint Cyril affirmed several things to clarify the faith as against the new forms of humanistic heresy. First: it emphasized the reality of the incarnation, the literal meaning of the Nicene Creed, and it issued its twelve anathemas against Nestorius and other heresies which were humanistic attempts to undermine the faith. Second: the council of Ephesus forbade the worship of Christ’s humanity. This had been stressed earlier at Nicaea. When we worship Jesus Christ, it is His deity that we worship, not His humanity; we never are permitted by scripture to worship man. Third: the council of Ephesus formulated one of the most important doctrines of the faith, and one of the most forgotten doctrines: the Doctrine of Economic Appropriation. Now this doctrine is not taught today in any seminary anywhere in the world, and yet it is according to the councils basic to the orthodox faith, basic to biblical faith.

The last book dealing with it, a major work in four volumes dates from the period of the nineteen into the early nineteen hundreds, the work of the reverend James Crystal, a rector in the episcopal church in New Jersey, since then the doctrine has dropped out of sight. The doctrine however is a crucial one, it involved the subtle point: can the heretics, the humanists then as now make a great deal of to do raising all kinds of questions and refusing to wait for an answer, they accuse every orthodox believer of endless hair splitting, and with subtlety they try to drive a wedge between believer and believer. Now the approach of these humanists was a very simple one. At every point the councils were shutting the door in the face of humanism, how then was humanism to get a toehold in the church to destroy the church? Their reasoning was subtlety itself, they said in effect: let us affirm the orthodox faith, let us affirm the Nicene creed, let us affirm the incarnation, let us declare that we believe that Jesus Christ was very God of very God and very man of very man so that they cannot say we are departing from the faith, but let us say that in the incarnation there were times when the humanity of Jesus was uppermost, that there were times when he was more man than God, or this action or that action showed him as primarily human. Now this seems like an insignificant point, a trifling one, a foolish thing for a council to clash over and in sharp exchange with the humanists, but the humanists realized the philosophical implications, because if it were granted that for a moment in the incarnation the humanity of Jesus gained priority over the divinity of Jesus then it meant that there was a point in time when man gained the ascendency over God, it meant then the door was open to the philosophical possibility that man could get the upper hand over God and control God and that man was the ultimate God. The humanists saw the philosophical potentiality just by exploiting this orthodox doctrine, by warping it.

And so they said when Jesus wept, this showed he was more human than God, and when Jesus was deeply moved or when he suffered he was more man than God. This sounded logical, and simple people were ready to say oh yes that makes sense, not realizing the philosophical implications of that statement. In the doctrine of economic appropriation the real humanity of Jesus Christ was affirmed, it was a true incarnation; He was very man of very man, He experienced all things that man experiences, He was at all points tempted, life as we are, yet without sin but in that very real incarnation at all points, the deity of Jesus Christ was uppermost, was governing. Humanity can never govern deity, man can never govern God. In the name of affirming the faith, these heretics were trying to make humanism triumph over orthodoxy. The doctrine of economic appropriation declared that the orthodox faith held to the priority at all times, of the deity of Jesus Christ over his humanity, while affirming their true union and Christ’s very real incarnation. Fourth, transubstantiation was opposed by the council because it was held to be humanism, the conversion of Christ’s humanity into divinity, and fifth Pelagianism was condemned. Pelagianism was a heresy that Saint Augustine spent years in fighting; it was named after a monk, Pelagius; PELAGIUS, a British monk whose original name I believe was Morgan, who entered the faith, gave very little evidence of being a Christian, and as a very prominent monk taught that salvation was a matter of man’s work rather than God’s grace, that the sacrifice of our Lord had no other significance then as a moral example for men to follow.

The council of Ephesus deposed Nestorius; its work was bitterly opposed. The statists and the humanists did everything possible to undo the work of Ephesus, they did all possible to confuse the issues, the work of the council of course was now becoming more and more subtle, and so the humanists by clouding the issue confused many humble believers. The climax of their work came in 449, when a false council of Ephesus was called, without seeming to oppose the earlier council it sought in actuality to undo its work. After Nestorius had been deposed, his successor came Deflabian (sp??), a thoroughly orthodox bishop, but meanwhile Saint Cyril after his death had been succeeded by a humanist, Diocyrus (sp??). When the council met it was their purpose to confuse the simple believers by giving the impression that they were for the true faith, in fact they were for the first council of Ephesus. They condemned Nestorianism, but only to reintroduce humanism in another guise, the Monophysite heresy. What was this new form of humanism? They’ve said they believed in the incarnation, but after Jesus Christ became incarnate his humanity was transubstantiated and absorbed into his divinity so that he was no more man but was completely God so that to say that Jesus Christ was human was blasphemy. Now in effect they were saying by this that man could as he became a believer and a follower of Jesus be himself transformed and made into God, so that this was humanism compounded, it was declaring that the goal of salvation was deification, that the destiny of man was to become God.

The Orthodox bishops who attended this council sought to oppose this, but the longer the debate continued the more vicious it became and finally Dioscyrus with the help of a number of humanistic monks that he had brought with him and the imperial soldiers simply issued the order: “sign or else”. When Bishop Flabian refused to sign he was beaten to the ground in the council chambers, Dioscyrus the presiding officer jumped on top of him, the monks and soldiers kicked him and beat him as they did other bishops with whips, with chains, until many of them were very seriously injured, Flabian died within three days and many many others suffered seriously. As a result the forces of humanism triumphed in 449, but this was the triumph of force not of faith, and the triumph was so ugly a one that the council stood self-condemned. In two years’ time when the council of Chalcedon met in 451, the false council of Ephesus was condemned and the named it has gained in history is as the robber council. The humanist strategy had become a very subtle one, affirm the faith but twist it. Worship Christ as a man, or that door is shut in your faith as the God whose humanity is deified. The council of Ephesus was a great victory over these heresies, and the tragedy today is that its work is virtually unknown. Pick up the average history book, even a detailed one for graduate students and you find that they are vague in their knowledge of the work of the council of Ephesus. They are vague as to what Nestorian represented, and you find that there are many many scholars catholic and protestant who will defend Nestorius and say he was misunderstood. As for the doctrine of economic appropriation it is not even mentioned, but Ephesus laid the foundation, and if the church is to be rebuilt, if it is to clean house on the heresies, the humanistic heresies which are again flooding it, it must build on the foundation of Nicaea, Constantinople and especially Ephesus. This is the foundation of any true victory, the biblical, the orthodox faith, the true faith which according to the words of scripture alone overcomes the world.

Let us pray. We give thanks unto thee almighty God for thine infallible word and thine only begotten son Jesus Christ and for our most holy faith which is the victory that overcometh the world. We thank thee our father that thou hast raised up through the ages great saints to do defend the faith, Athanasius, Augustine and Cyril. And we pray our Father that we may be mindful of the richness of our heritage, and the certainty of victory and that we may stand fast in the faith once and for all delivered unto the saints in Jesus name, Amen. Yes.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Yes, it is a religious sect although it claims not to be, it is humanism compounded, it is a form of humanism which like others claims that man becomes a God. It is on top of that an esoteric cult; it believes that there is a hidden way, this power which only the initiates know. Yes.

(Audience unintelligible)

[30:34] (Rushdoony) There is no religion that wants to triune God except orthodox Christianity, and this business of saying that the god of Mohammedanism, the god of Judaism and of these other religions is the same as the God of scripture is nonsense. Basically it crept into Christian thought in the middle ages through a Jewish scholar Maimonides who was an Aristotelian (?) Jesus Christ, and the bible is right, there is none other name under heaven by which men may be saved.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Well, the point is there are very few good theologians around. First: they do not get much bible or real theology, that’s an important point. They get very little, they get training in churchmanship, how to organize a parish, how to keep people in line. Second: they busy themselves so much with building up the parish that they never sit down and study, so that each year as they get away from seminary they are a little rustier on that which they should preach. In fact, there are some clergymen who move every few years because when they left seminary they worked out a set of sermons and they would have to work out another set, and to avoid repeating themselves they go to another church. So it is nothing more nor less than abysmal ignorance. The work of the councils for example which is so basic, is unknown.

(Audience unintelligible)

[33:25] (Rushdoony) Yes, we are so thoroughly saturated with humanism that to be unkind to anybody including the Chinese Reds today is considered a sin, but to be unkind to God is nothing, you can despise his word, despise His God-given order and that’s nothing. Its man who must be obeyed, man who must be loved and served and worshipped. It is this total saturation by humanism that colors most churchmen. I would say that ninety-nine out of a hundred people in church today are humanists wrapped in Christianity and then Christians; because it is humanism they are exposed to week in and week out.

(Audience) How much of humanism can you absorb and still be a Christian?

(Rushdoony) Well that isn’t a question that can be readily answered, but the minute you begin to absorb humanism you are beginning to depart from Christianity. Its God or man, which do we worship.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Yes, we are saturated with it today, and this is why coexistence is so appealing a doctrine to people today. You can tell them and they know what communism has done, but humanism calls for coexistence because you’ve got to have peace with your fellow man. Now currently there is a tremendous drive on by various scholars as well as by politicians in Washington, Twineby (?) has recently written a very very major study calling for an end to the cold war and immediate union between the Soviet Union and the United States to establish world peace. Now he says of course this will bring about tyranny in the United States we are going to lose a great deal that we have here, but think of the incomputable benefits, humanity will be united. And when you consider that through history there have been centuries when people have been under tyranny it won’t hurt the people of the United states to live under tyranny for a few generations until this one world order can work itself out to this perfect society that is its goal, and after all, over there as well as here we are united in wanting that perfect world for man. Yes.

[36:24] (Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Of course, Yes.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Oh yes, but of course now it is a matter of national policy, it has been so stated by the president. So it is not merely a matter of the philosophers talking, it has been declared by President Johnson that the cold war belongs to a past generation. Yes.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) We are not told, there isn’t given any indication that it was a disappearance but that somehow miraculously he slipped through the crowd and lost himself in it, because His time had not yet come we are told. Yes.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Well the human elements in the sacrament are divinized. Yes. They become elements of God’s body; this was the statement that was made by the heretics. Yes.

(Audience) When you were describing the attempt of humanism to infiltrate the church, it sounded as the neo-orthodox do, this is the movement apparently that is really taking over. Is that correct?

(Rushdoony) Right, we are seeing the same thing today; in fact you might say they have taken over virtually every segment of the church today. Yes.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) I would say their education is behind us, they had been reared in a humanistic form of education, in state schools. As a result, everything in them has been converted to humanism and they maintain the façade of Christianity. So they try to reinterpret Christianity in terms of humanism. Now they are doing it naively, whereas these theologians then and theologians now, Carl Bart, Telic and others, are trying to do it with sophistication, but it’s the same thing. It is humanism, and they don’t realize it.

(Audience) Christianity is such a hard thing to follow that… (Unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Well of course they have not been taught; how much real teaching is there now in the bible and in the Christian doctrine? There is virtually none, virtually none. So, if the people are not fed how are they going to know?

(Audience) … I heard her say that the downfall of Christianity started with the Sunday school, that the parents gave up studying their own bibles and teaching their own children the bible, and they delegated it to the church. Now it comes that people couldn’t read their bibles anymore and that’s the reason they can’t (unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) There’s a great deal of truth to that, that came about at a time when you had several things occurring at one same time, you had the transition in this country from Calvinism and Augustinianism to Armenianism. We had the transition from Christian schools to state schools, you had the transition from family covenant teaching within the home of the faith to Sunday school teaching so that the family ceased to concern itself and put the burden on the Sunday school and on the public school for the moral and religious training of the child, the family abdicated, the church abdicated. Humanism triumphed. There are some questions here in written form that I would like to deal with now briefly; the first: does the spiritual compact form the basis of all societies worthy of being called a society? The answer to that of course is definitely yes, because every society and every state has a system of laws. And every law presupposes a morality, a law says something is forbidden, and something therefor is required. In other words, it deals with basic principles of conduct, and morality rests on religion, so that there is a theological premise to societies, and the premise is either Christianity or it is humanism or it is some other form of religious principle, so that a spiritual compact, the word that is used here, is in a sense the basis of all societies, it would be better to say there is a theological premise, a theological faith which undergirds every society.

The second: if so, what was the spiritual compact of the United States and when did it die out? The answer to that again is that in its origins the United States began on a theological foundation, thoroughly Christian, and when the United States came into existence, it presupposed and accepted this theological foundation. There was no religious statement in the constitution because the constitution was not the basic government, the states and the counties were, and every state had a theological premise, in every state you had a clearly Christian principle. For example we assume very often that the New England states yes they were very Puritanical but this was not true with Virginia where you had the cavalier tradition. Well the reality is that when the Constitution was adopted and for some time thereafter in Virginia you could not be a citizen nor a voter if you denied the infallibility and the doctrine of the trinity. In fact if you denied these things, you could even have your children taken from you for their welfare. You could not testify in any court as a witness for someone else if you did not believe in Christianity. The laws with regard this testimony have only been struck down within the last two or three years in some states. Now this premise gave way to humanism, so that whereas the established religion of the United States was Christianity, even though no church was established. The established religion of the United States in terms of Supreme Court decisions for a good many years now has been humanism. This began after the civil war, and it has been moving very steadily since.

I deal with one aspect of this, the transition from common law which was Christian law, to statute law in one of my broadcasts which will be given in two weeks from tonight. The real legal revolution began when that transition was made, and it was made very rapidly after the civil war in this country, when the late chief Parker said we have witnessed a legal revolution. What he was speaking about was the tale end mopping up action of that legal revolution. Third, since it has died out and authority recognized by society at large along with it, leaving only sheer power as authority, is not the Christians role to be that of a prophet rather than a conservative? For what or who can he appeal to for a tradition of authority or moral standard in an age when society has no common spiritual basis? That is a long question and there are a number of parts to it, but briefly: society today has a common spiritual basis, it is humanism. Humanism is the established religion of the United States and of the several states, of the Supreme Court and of the public schools and of the churches. Certainly the Christians role is that of a prophet in the face of this, but also that of a conservative, because the legal background is still there to a degree, for example the constitution. Now a liberal like Edward S. Corwin, in his book the Higher Law Background of the U.S. Constitution admitted that the constitution presupposed the higher law of God and God as the ultimate appeal. This was the background. This was the presupposition. We still have a background of common law, it has not been entirely abolished, so that we can be conservative, in other words we have enough there legally that we can hark back to, attempt to reestablish and strengthen. We need to be prophetic however in speaking for God against the humanistic establishments which are crowding out the Christians.

Now we have sheer power as an authority because sheer power is the product of our new establishment, humanism. When humanism says that man is god, man is ultimate, then there can be no law above and over man and the will of man is the only law, man is over law rather than under law, and sheer power is therefore the product of humanism. As a result, we do have a major task. Statism is again reestablishing itself because wherever you do not have orthodox Christianity, you have a revival of statism, the state as man’s savior versus Christ as savior. Our role in this situation therefor is to both conservative and prophetic. Yes.

(Audience) Well you couldn’t possibly be a conservative, a true conservative if you didn’t have a Christian.. if you weren’t Christian.

(Rushdoony) Right.

(Audience) Now a lot of these people say they are conservative but they don’t have any real philosophical basis.

(Rushdoony) Exactly, a true conservative must be a Christian, because if he is trying to conserve anything here, it has to be the Christian background. Now many who call themselves conservatives are basically humanists, but they are conservative humanists; that is they prefer the humanism of a generation ago to the extreme form of our day. Now more than a century ago Sterner wrote a book on humanism; The Ego and His Own I believe, and he ridiculed the halfway humanists, and he said you are for abolishing God, and you are for abolishing the church and all moral teaching, but you are not ready to take the logical step and confirm there is no law. You are not ready to say that marriage must be abolished, that any kind of sexuality including the perversions and incest are thereby legitimate. You are cowardly humanists.

You simply want to abolish God but to maintain some of the forms that God was established, and he said you won’t be allowed to. And he was right. What these conservatives are doing, these so called conservatives, is to affirm humanism but they want it to retain the Christian virtues without Christ. And this is ridiculous. Of all the people on the current scene, these non-Christian humanists are the most ridiculous.

(Audience) You spoke of this premise of our forefathers that our government was based on the Christian faith, there is a residual effect in the constitution in the preamble, it speaks of blessings on mankind, and the word blessings are gifts of God, so it would have to be, and then in the conclusion of the constitution… (?) In the year of our Lord. So at the very beginning and at the very end you see that (?) and how there isn’t any direct relationship, its still observable in the constitution.

(Rushdoony) One of the points which for generations revealed the intensely Christian country most was the presidential oath of office. Now the oath of office is still taken on the bible, but we have forgotten what an oath means and what it involved in taking it. I think it is tonight and next Sunday night I will be dealing with this subject, not directly with oaths but what an oath involves. It involves invoking either the blessing of God for obedience, or the curse of God for disobedience. Now this is the meaning of an oath, so that when an oath of office was taken it was on an open bible, usually opened to Deuteronomy 28, open that and read and you’ll see what it involves, and I believe it is tonight I am dealing with that. You invoke the blessing of God if you obey him, blessed be thy going in and thy coming forth, the fruit of thy body and the fruit of thy field and so on, and if you disobey you invoke the curse of God upon yourself, your going in and your going out, upon the fruit of your cattle and the fruit of your field and the fruit of your body. This is the meaning of an oath of office, so the oath of office was an intensely religious affirmation, an oath simply meant that.

It was a covenant act with God and nothing else, so that the word itself has lost its meaning and its meaning in the last two or three generations, since the civil war in particular, but prior to that they knew what an oath meant. Yes.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Yes it did not come into the church until the thirteenth century.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Yes, well he also said I am the door you see. Now if you take the one as meaning literally physically, this is flesh and meat, then you have to say it is literal in the other statement which he made you see, at the same time. Now this is a point at which of course the church has extensively debated and been divided, and both Lutheranism and Catholicism and some of the Eastern churches very definitely hold to some form of transubstantiation. But, this was a doctrine that came in much much later; it was not a part of the original orthodox belief. Yes.

(Audience) I noticed.. (Unintelligible) or did I misunderstand you?

(Rushdoony) Yes. The Ephesus council? Yes, it was the third Ecumenical council.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) I don’t know unless they began numbering from the Vatican as the councils of the reorganized, reorganization after the promulgation of the doctrine of people and infallibility. This was a Vatican council, and the first Vatican council was in 1870 this is the second Vatican council in terms of that. But the ecumenical councils of the church which alone have authority over every church are these early councils.

(Audience) I knew that and yet at the same time I wondered why it is being called the second knowing.. (Unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Yes, it’s in terms of the numbering from the Vatican council. You see—

(Audience) They did call it the Ecumenical council; I think they did call it the second ecumenical council.

(Rushdoony) Well, the council you see, is now summoned by the pope, and it is summoned at his call, it was previously but not to the same degree. It is no longer under the charge of the bishops who elect a presiding officer and meet, but it is at the call of the pope, so there is a new numbering in terms of that.

(Audience) (Unintelligible) .. They think that they are going to be.. (Unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Well of course..

(Audience) I believe this both.. (Unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) I would possibly agree yes. And certainly the ecumenical movement is closely watching the effects of the Vatican council; they are very closely connected with it in their deliberations. Any other question, we have time for one more.

(Audience) I’m a little bit confused about when we should (?) the same as we are learning in our class.. (unintelligible).. the ideal situation. Would this information (Unintelligible)

What would be the ideal way?

(Rushdoony) To learn this? Ideally if we had a Christian order, you would be taught these things in school as a part of your history because this is basic. You would- I would say you should get this first in grade school in very simple form you should get in again in High School, in University, you should have it in adult classes in church and go into some of its meanings more thoroughly, because the implications are far reaching, we’ve just touched the surface of these councils, and it is tragic that that which should have been taught to the grade school children is not only not taught but it is unknown even to clergy today. When you realize the vast amount of money that is spent by various foundations today, in translating all kinds of documents, soviet documents, red Chinese documents, all kinds of literature from contemporary Europe that is trash, and you realize that the vast part of the minutes of some of the councils has not been translated, some of the great church fathers have not been translated, there’s so much that just has not been touched, that is essential. We are in ignorance about our history, and of course this is not unintentional. We have a great deal to do to recover our heritage. Well our time is up, and with this we stand adjourned, you are dismissed.