Foundations of Social Order

Doctrine of Grace

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Foundations of Social Order

Lesson: 9-19

Genre: Lecture

Track:

Dictation Name: RR126E9

Location/Venue:

Year:

Our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that our times are in thy hands and thou doest all things well. We thank thee that all kinds of weather in our lives come from thee and thou dost send the storm and the rain, the sun and this rain, with our welfare in thee in mind give us grace our father to receive all things from thy hands, and in all things to thank thee and to acknowledge that indeed thou art a gracious God, in Jesus’ name, amen. Our subject today is the Doctrine of Grace, and our scripture Romans 3:19-31. The Doctrine of Grace, Romans 3:19-31. Now we know that one thing is sure of the law saith, it saith to them that is under the law that every mouth may be stopped and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefor by the deeds of the law there shall be no flesh be justified in his sight, by the law is the knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witness by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Christ unto all and upon all that believe. For there is no difference, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, thee justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are passed through the forbearance of God, to declare I say at this time His righteousness that ye might be just and a justifier of him that believeth in Jesus, where is boasting then? It is excluded, by what law,Of works? Nay. But by the law, faith. Therefor we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law, is he the God of the Jews only? Is He not also of the gentiles? Yes of the gentiles also. Seeing it is one God which shall justify the circumcision by faith and uncircumcision by faith, do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid. Yea we establish the law.

Throughout his epistles, the apostle Paul makes one point clear over and over again, by grace are ye saved, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. The Pauline message therefor emphatically is that salvation is the sovereign act of God, from start to finish the act of God, and that man is passive in salvation. This was not a new doctrine with Paul, it is taught from one end of scripture to the other, it is taught by Moses, it is taught by the prophets, it is taught by our Lord. The whole of the scriptures make clear that salvation is through the grace of God through the atoning work of Jesus Christ and in the Old Testament it was through the sacrificial system which set forth the work of Christ and in the new testament through His finished work. This too was the great doctrine which Saint Augustine defended. Indeed when we study the history of the councils and creeds, the one great figures that looms above and over all others is Saint Augustine. The mark of Saint Augustine’s thinking is apparent very definitely at the great councils of Ephesus and of Chalcedon. It is very definitely apparent also in the Athanasian Creed. It was very powerful in the council of Toledo, which came later. A great deal of his career Augustine devoted to fighting Pelagianism, PELAGIANISM, named after Pelagius, Pelagius. Of Pelagius we know very little; he appeared suddenly in Rome about the year four hundred, supposedly a monk from Britain. His name may have been Morgan, more than that we do not know. Where he was born and when he died we cannot say, he was an able speaker, he exercised a powerful influence in Rome and elsewhere, and for a time he threatened to capture the church. The persuasiveness of the man, the common sense approach ostensibly of his arguments were very convincing to many, but the doctrines of Pelagius were pure humanism, in particular with regard to the doctrine of man. Pelagius said: I say that man is able to be without sin, and that he is able to keep the commandments of God. This statement sets forth the heart of Pelagius’ thinking.

Man is able to be perfect, man is able to save himself, to be his own savior, so that for Pelagius God in effect was utterly unnecessary. Pelagius as he opposed the Augustinian teaching emphasized three points in particular, first: All men might be sinless and perfect if they choose. Second: each man is born without impediment of original sin or any kind of sinful predisposition or entailment or moral weakness, that is without any original sin. Third: man does not need God to overcome sin and to advance to become personally or socially perfect, to make of himself or the world around him a perfection. Thus Pelagius in effect said we do not need God. Man can do all things himself, perfect himself and the world around him, and it is offensive to man to talk in terms of original sin and total depravity, predestination and all these things which Saint Augustine and all of scripture declared. In opposition to Pelagius, Saint Augustine emphasized four points in particular. All men are sinners. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God, there is none righteous, no not one. All men of themselves apart from Christ are sinners. Second: Augustine emphasized with all of scripture the doctrine of original sin, that all of us as children of Adam share in Adams sin, and Adams depravity. We are born to sin and death, there is no man born who can escape sin and who can escape death. This is our destiny until we are redeemed by Jesus Christ. Third: Augustine declared man cannot save himself; salvation is the act of God by his prevenient grace. The meaning of prevenient grace we shall come to shortly. And fourth: in terms of these things saint Augustine emphasized also the biblical doctrine of predestination, that God is the absolute lord of all things, ordains and governs all things that come to pass, so that all things have their origin in the eternal decree of God. Pelagianism for a time threatened to destroy the church. it was Saint Augustine who standing in terms of the scriptures prevented the destruction of Christianity by Pelagianism. A century after Augustine, the council of Orange in souther Gaul, or southern France met, in 529 to condemn Pelagianism. Now the council of orange was dominated by men of an Augustinian faith. It was a regional council not a general or ecumenical council of the church. twenty five canons were issued condemning Pelagianism. The heart of these twenty five canons can be summed up in three heads, first: Adams sin affected his whole being, body and soul so that no part of Adam was exempt from his sin and from his fault, the taint of sin entered into Adams mind as well as his will was corrupted by his rebellion against God, his desire to be his own God.

Second: Adams sin infected all humanity, his entire posterity. We have therefor a corrupted inheritance, we are born to sin and to die. No man can escape this, no child needs to be taught to sin, it is their nature, they think first of themselves their whole life moves around the satisfaction of their own wants and to learn the works of righteousness is something that they have to be drilled and trained and forced into until they become converted. Third: the council of Orange declared grace is prevenient. Prevenient means going before. That is, grace goes before our act of faith, it is grace that brings us to seek God, it is the grace of God within us that leads us to ask the right questions and to accept the right answers, to have faith and to pray, so that faith is not our act, but God’s grace within us so that by grace we are saved, it is not of ourselves as Saint Paul said, but it is the gift of God in us. So far so good. In declaring these points the council of Orange was faithfully biblical and Augustinian. But having issued its canons the council of Orange then passed three resolutions which in effect said now you Pelagians we are sorry that we were rough on you but we are not going to kick you out of the church entirely so that we will make room for man in the doctrine of salvation and we will say that we are not completely in agreement with Augustine by condemning predestination; so that the council of Orange conceded to Pelagianism, and weakened its own stand. Strict Augustinianism however continued through the centuries, it had a number of great figures, for example the Venerable Bede, Athwin who was so influential with Charlemagne, the great Isidore of Seville, and of course much later Luther and Calvin.

And Augustinianism of course was embodied in all the great confessions and creedal standards of the reformation, the Heidelberg catechism, the formula of Concord, the thirty nine articles and the Westminster confession. Pelagianism however has by and large triumphed in all branches of the church, so that the eastern churches, Roman Catholic church and Protestantism today are by and large Pelagian churches. What does Pelagianism involve when it is applied to the various spheres of life? Its implications are very far reaching, let us analyze first of all Pelagian political theory. For the Pelagians, first of all the state is not restricted as it is in scripture and in Augustinianism to the role of the ministry of justice. Instead the state, because there is a confidence in the plenary powers of man, and the plenary ability of man, is given plenary ability also. Now the word plenary is very significant, it means total or full, complete. We speak of the plenary inspiration of scripture, meaning that scripture is entirely fully thoroughly in its every aspect, in its every word inspired. Thus when Pelagianism insisted on the plenary ability of man it said that man in every fiber of his being was able to save himself, able to create a powerful true and perfect world order.

Now when you have a Pelagian view of man, and all men in themselves have plenary ability, and you add this up in the collective, in the form of a state, you have therefor a doctrine of state with plenary ability. If man by himself can create perfection in his life, how much more so the democratic state or the total state with all this plenary ability added up in it? As a result the state in the Pelagian state becomes mans mediator and savior, man through the state becomes his own God. Second, the Pelagian state offers cradle to grave security, the Pelagian state because it believes in its plenary ability is confident that it can abolish hunger, sickness, poverty, crime, all problems; there is nothing that the plenary Pelagian state does not face with confidence, and so its answer to every problem is itself, simply turn the problem over to us, the pelagian state declares, and we are able, all things all things are possible with us and with us there is nothing impossible; we can save humanity and create a paradise on earth. Third: the Pelagian state because it believes in its plenary ability asks therefor plenary power to do that which it has the capacity to do. As a result, the Pelagian doctrine leads inevitably to the totalitarian state. And fourth: because Pelagianism has no doctrine of sin, it has no doctrine of checks and balances, no breaks on the power of the state. And fifth: whenever and wherever in history there is a decline of the doctrine of sovereign grace, you have a rise of the totalitarian sovereign state, either God is man’s savior and sovereign, and sovereign grace predestinates man and saves him in his prevenient, or else the sovereign predestining, predestinating state becomes mans savior, and claims total power, the power of God over man. But, Pelagianism also has far reaching implications in the church. the Pelagian church first of all makes itself man’s mediator rather than Christ, and second: because the Pelagian church believes in its plenary ability it transfers the doctrine of infallibility from scripture to the church so that some aspect of the church becomes infallible, and the infallibility is transferred to the pope or the church councils or the church synods or general assemblies or presbyteries, whatever the case may be. The infallibility is withdrawn from God and His word and given to the church or an aspect of the church. Third: this means that the church has become the savior rather than Christ. And fourth: because Pelagianism is humanism the Pelagian church seeks power not through God, but through humanistic ways, through numerical strength. Since it does not recognize the power of God, the Pelagian church says we will be strong by adding numbers upon numbers, so let us lower the doctrinal standards, let us lower the membership standards, let us unite church with church and bring them all together and create a worldwide church which is a tremendous powerful law in every part of the world. And fifth: as a logical consequence of this the Pelagian church seeks power by alliance with the state in order to create what they both dream of; paradise on earth without God. The Pelagian church is essentially totalitarian, it has no distrust of human power since its faith and hope is in human power.

But Pelagianism also in education is a deadly thing in our midst. Pelagian education first of all is a program of salvation, and it is messianic in character, it is going to save man by means of facts. Second: because Pelagian education holds that knowledge is power, it makes the educator the key to social regeneration, man has a god like power to recreate the world and the educator and educaton is the tool by which means- by means of which man shall do this. And fourth: the Pelagius school makes an alliance with the Pelagian church and the Pelagian state to create this new world order. But Pelagianism also has implications in every other area, to cite but a few the Pelagian artist believes in the regenerating power of the aesthetic experience, the Pelagian woman believes in the power of women to save the world and you have feminism, the Pelagian economist believes that certain economic devices are going to be the salvation of man and abolish poverty and every problem forever. Pelagianism simply believes in any and every area in man’s plenary or total ability and plenary ability calls for plenary power, plenary planning, plenary controls, and its consequence is plenary tyrants and tyranny. This is Pelagianism, and we see it on all sides today. The doctrine of sovereign grace alone provides a bulwark against tyrants and tyranny and for liberty. It declares by grace are ye saved, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. The doctrine of sovereign grace demands a sovereign restraint on man’s potentialities and powers, it declares that to God alone belongs dominion, it declares that man must choose either God predestines all things or the state predestines all things, and that the triumph of Pelagianism is always the enslavement of man.

The council of Orange cam every close, but truth is precise and exempt, if I say ten plus ten equals twenty one, I am close to the right answer but I am still completely wrong. And when we are dealing with doctrine our answer may be close to the wrong answer, but if it is not the answer it is still totally wrong. And the council of Orange therefor in compromising the truth gave ground to falsity. But the doctrine of grace would not bend, and whenever triumphed in western history, it created liberty. Whenever it has gone under tyranny has prevailed. The doctrine of grace therefor is basic to the future, as no one can understand any area of liberty unless they go back to the biblical and to the Augustinian doctrines. A few years ago I heard Sister Margaret Patricia McLaren declare that if anyone wanted to understand American liberty they had better read Augustine, and rightly so. The doctrine of liberty is a product of sovereign grace. Let us pray. Almighty God our heavenly father, we give thanks unto thee that thou art sovereign, and by thy sovereign grace thou hast called us and set us apart as a people unto thee, established in liberty. Make us strong our father in this faith and grant our father that in our day this faith prevail, that Pelagianism be shattered and destroyed, and that thy word again govern and prevail in church state school and every aspect of life. Use us to this purpose we beseech thee in Jesus’ name, amen.

Are there any questions now, yes.

(Audience) In the western (unintelligible) ambassador of (unintelligible) plenary power or whatever it is. (Unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Yes, yes. Plenary means full, total. Free hand to do as you please with all the power given to you, so that if you give plenary power to any man, what you are in effect saying is I will be crowned by what you do for me, and in my name. Any other questions? Yes.

(Audience) In church this morning I was told the church was built facing east for a reason. (Unintelligible) the rising sun? Now I had never heard that from the Christian faith. I had heard that the (unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Towards Mecca, Mohammedans yes.

(Audience) Do we have that (unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) There has been that opinion in some quarters, but it isn’t regarded as anything that has any great significance. But many churches are stationed er, so built so that they face the east. Now partly this began because so many of the Romans who were converted were sun worshippers, the sun represented the emperor and the one world order so that one way of worshiping the power and might and majesty of Rome was to do (?) to the sun, and pope Gregory the Great condemns so many of the people who came to church because before they walked into the church they bowed to the sun, they were going to play safe with both as it were. And this has crept in unfortunately so that we feel that we must observe some of these things. of course now it’s just a harmless relic, but really there is no significance to it, if the church faces north or if it faces south or west or east its all the same as long as the word of God is faithfully preached, but I don’t know think a church facing east is going to preserve you if you have a fallible (?) in the pulpit. Yes.

(Audience) Is Armenianism in any way related to Pelagianism?

(Rushdoony) Yes, Armenianism is a form of Pelagianism. Very definitely. Yes

(Audience) On a different subject, and that is if the new (unintelligible) you bring up the point of the true God and I was wondering how in the- what was the name, I’ll put it that way, of the religion prior to Christs appearance on earth?

(Rushdoony) Where, in which country?

(Audience) Well I’m thinking of the Jews. In other words they were those who supported the same (?) and supported the same God.

(Rushdoony) Yes. It was Trinitarian, now this is the strange thing that very few people realize. The Old Testament religion was Trinitarian just as ours is. They had God the father, they had God the word or wisdom as they call him, they had God the Holy Spirit. And when you go through the Old Testament you have for example over and over again the Holy Spirit speaking through the prophets, and the prophets speaking of the Holy Spirit as God, another person of the Godhead. Then you have references to the angel of the Lord and also the angel of the Lord is called God, and He is a person who manifested himself in bodily form over and over again on earth and is also is called the wisdom of God and speaks as wisdom, so that Solomon quotes wisdom as saying so and so. So you have the three persons of the Godhead there. Now what happened after the fall of Jerusalem was this, because the Old Testament was so eloquent against the Jews and because the apostles in their preaching and all you have to do is to read through the New Testament, the text in every sermon preached by the apostles was form the Old Testament, and they tell their Jewish listeners this is what you’ve been taught. Now here is the fulfillment. Therefor the whole interpretation of the Old Testament was changed by the Rabbis after the fall of Jerusalem and they denied the trinitarianism, they denied the meaning of the prophesies, they denied for example the fifty third chapter of Isaiah that it referred to the Messiah who was to come, and then gave it a radical new interpretation in terms of Phariseeism, and this was in essence humanism, so very rapidly Judaism as we know it developed; Humanism. And

(Audience) What was that about setting (?)

(Rushdoony) Very rapidly after 70 AD it developed. Now Phariseeism was a good example of this before, but it completely obliterated everything else and dominated Judaism, and became Judaism, and the Talmud of course is as I said a great humanistic document, and it’s no wonder that humanists like Earl Warren regard it very highly because it is one of the landmarks of humanism. Yes.

(Audience) I just finished reading Revelations (unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Yes, on British Israel he is very accurate.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Yes, he’s a very able man. Mhm. Yes.

(Audience) Is it true that the reason that the Jews were originally the equivalent of a nowadays Christian?

(Rushdoony) Yes, Judaism in the Old Testament, or it isn’t Judaism then, Judaism is the term for what you have now humanism, but the Hebraic faith was really no different than ours. To be saved you had to believe in the atoning work of the sacrificial one of God, the one who was to come and to give His life as a ransom for many. You went to the temple or tabernacle with your offering, and you took that lamb or whatever the offering was and you laid it upon the altar and you confessed your sins, and you said in brief this, that you deserved to die because you were a sinner, but you accepted the sacrifice God had provided for you, the substitute, and by his death you gained not only forgiveness of sins but life, new life. And so the animal, the lamb was slain upon the altar and you went away forgiven. Now this of course is simply the essence of what the New Testament sets forth so that the doctrine of salvation is one in the old and the new testaments. It is simply fulfilled and brought out in its fullness in the new.

(Audience) Do the Jews now use the Old Testament as part of their religion? (Unintelligible) the Talmud.

(Rushdoony) They not only use the Old testament but they use it as reinterpreted because they made it clear long before this that the interpretation is more basic than the text, for example they no longer recognize that salvation is by God, it is by your own efforts, this is pure Pelagianism. The sacrificial system has no meaning. All you go to the synagogue for is a little inspiration and moral self-help teaching. Yes.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Yes, the book the Passover plot is really not worth reading, Schoenfeld who wrote it is a scholar in England who has certain abilities linguistically, but the book is sheer nonsense. And his thesis of course is that Jesus was not crucified, did not die, the whole thing was a plot to pretend that he was dead and resurrected and so on. There isn’t anything behind 9it except his imagination. But this is the kind of thing that has been said before, this is not new, its simply wishful thinking.

(Audience) (unintelligible) I mean, he claimed that he (unintelligible) on history.

(Rushdoony) Well no, you can document anything, for example you can document something this way: supposing you write that President Johnson is really not a man he’s a woman in disguise, and then I quote you and say three or four other people who print the same bit of nonsense and I say I have documented this with four or five authorities. This proves that I have a case.

Well all he has to document what he has had to say is what a lot of people of similar character said, just sheer nonsense. Utterly meaningless, but of course this is the kind of thing we are getting today, and what it represents is a moral and spiritual revolution. A new book has been published for example, which I think is a very good indication of what is in the (?). It is a book about hells angels, and the person apologizes for them thoroughly and he says they are slandered and misunderstood, of course they do go in for man’s rapes a lot of brutality and so on and so forth, and he tells us far more than we had ever heard about the hells angels, but we are misunderstanding them, and we are slandering them, and he gives us what is supposedly a sympathetic and understanding view. But all that adds up to is that he has no moral standards and he is asking us to have none. Now for example there was a radio interview the other day during a opera intermission with a very prominent singer who sings the role of Dialgo (?) in Otello. And of course Dialgo is a thoroughly depraved and vicious character, but when he was asked about how he played the role of Dialgo he said oh no he didn’t depict him as an evil man, he was a man just like the rest of us and you had to portray everyone sympathetically because he was what he was and so what he needed was in essence understanding. Now when you have this kind of moral rot abroad, you are going to unleash against the source of anything that will indict this moral rot all the hatred, all the destructive force you can. And so this book on the passover plot is just one of many books that are going to come out that will do nothing but try to eliminate any possibility of Christ being taken seriously. And of course we have been having these for some time. Albert Schweitzer had a psychiatric study of Jesus which certainly didn’t do him any justice and there have been a whole series of them and it’s just going to be stepped up now.

(Audience) Well I just though from what I heard about it that it was one of the most blatant examples of (?) Christ I had ever heard about.

(Rushdoony) Yes.

(Audience) Some months ago you recommended a book of poems by a young author (?)

(Rushdoony) I don’t recall, do you recall any of the poems?

(Audience) No. it was a young Christian.. oh yes.(unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) David Grey, the man who died young. Yes, the poems, the songs in particular of David Grey. Any other questions? Yes.

(Audience) (unintelligible) who was a neo orthodox, and we were talking about the bible and he would admit that he believed in the bible but he took the word of God and said that Christ, no Jesus, he didn’t say Jesus, he said Christ in the word. But he didn’t go on to explain. Now after having talked to him for a while I realized that he was guilty of double talk, and what did he mean by that?

(Rushdoony) Yes, now Logos in the Greek is translated as word in English, and Saint John begins in the beginning was word and the word was God. Now the word in that sense and the word of God in the sense of scripture are two different things, so that we have the enscriptured word of here in the bible, when they say I believe in the word of God, Jesus Christ or Christ, the answer to them is how can you believe in a word you do not know, if this word is not trustworthy? Because of course if the written word is not trustworthy then the living word Christ is exactly want to make of him, and having abolished this word then their Christ is exactly the one they want him to be, he is in favor of Martis of Salma, he is in favor now of boycotting the Eastwin and Kodak (???) company, he is of course marvelously represented today in the figure of Saul Alinskey who gets more money out of the churches than any other single man, and who is going to establish his headquarters in California, a school of revolution probably in san Francisco supported by the Californian churches, this is what they will make of the word of God if they deny the enscriptured word. Yes.

(Audience) Rush, in my job I heard that Saul Alinskey is not only (unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Yes exactly. He is one of the most powerful men in the poverty program and his purpose is to organize every one of the poor for social revolution, and he has made it clear that it is his purpose to organize the have nots to take it from the haves, so that the poverty program is planned revolution.

(Audience)Joined with the minority group revolution and he plans to coordinate with the minority group (?) and the union, and the (?)

(Rushdoony) Yes. Yes.

(Audience unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Yes, I read something you remember a few weeks ago on the myth of the population explosion, since then the statistics that have been revealed indicate that our birth rate in sixty-six was the lowest since thirty-six, and it is dropping rapidly every year all over the world, and we are likely in a very short time, in a very few years to have empty schoolrooms up and down the state of California, because we have been overbuilding steadily and are still overbuilding, and as a result we are going to face a vast surplus of schoolroom space. Now such a statement has been made by a member of the committee on school construction in the state of California, that there is no heading off the drive to build because it is a way of spending our money. I ran across a couple of things that I thought were rather interesting, this is from the February 20 US news and world report, February 20 1967 page seventeen, and it discusses the Washington national crime commission studies, our police reaching a breaking point.

And it goes on to say the police men are harassed almost to the breaking point regularly by large angry crowds that suddenly gather at the scenes of arrests and shout brutality and curses almost before the police get out of the car, and as a result their life is a very difficult one, tremendously subjected to pressure, to harassment and so on, but this is what the crime commission has to say: all five observers contacted said they found surprisingly wide spread bigotry, quote: “Nearly every white policeman revealed strong prejudices against Negroes in private conversations, one of the observers said.” Now isn’t this amazing, the poor policemen are kicked, they have bottles thrown at them, they are sworn at, they are abused, they find nothing but depravity day after day, and the crime commission of Washington DC, the national Crime Commission, is shocked that they don’t regard the Negroes more highly. This is insanity. It doesn’t say just someone appointed apparently by congress or the commissioners of Washington DC or the president, then this in an indication of what we may be facing in more than one place across country from the wall street journal, Wednesday March first 1967 page 22. And I’ll just read a couple of items from it and the headlines: Ohio could issue bonds without calling a vote if proposal is adopted. An Ohio capital financing plan that would erase the need for public approval for bond issues is nearing passage in the general assembly, but the proposed constitutional amendment may be headed for trouble at the special election tentatively for May. Democratic leaders are putting together plans to fight the republican back constitutional proposal sponsored by Governor Rose.

Now what kind of a country would be when bonds can be issued without any vote and of course we have created already in this state an agency that can do the same, the water authority that is to bring water south, which would be a more powerful government than the one in Sacramento. Yes.

(Audience) One of the (unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) It would be a good check, buy no bonds. A very good one. Yes.

(Audience) Well the same subject was discussed at the (?) city council and the city (unintelligible) that this might be alright and this might be perfectly legal, but then again it may not be. (Unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Of course it is Pelagianism in politics with a vengeance. Yes.

(Audience) the movement to cut more of the taxes on the state level and to still call (?) is the same as the movement (?) really no check on the increase of expense on the schools, it’s a dangerous thing (unintelligible)

(Rushdoony) Yes, very great (?) danger. Well our time is up and we stand dismissed.