Foundations of Social Order

Communion of the Saints

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Sociology

Lesson: Communion of the Saints

Genre: Speech

Track: 133

Dictation Name: RR126G14

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture is Psalm 133, and our subject, The Communion of Saints. “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron's beard: that went down to the skirts of his garments; as the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion: for there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore.”

One of the commonly neglected articles of the Apostles Creed is the declaration, “I believe in the communion of saints.” This article does not appear in the Nicene Creed because there was no controversy over it, and so there was no need for any further statement of or further declaration of this doctrine. The few groups in the early centuries that had some of the extremely heretical ideas concerning the communion of saints were of no danger to the church. They were so deeply Gnostic that their resemblance to Christianity was too remote to be a consideration.

In the early centuries, therefore, the doctrine received very little attention on the whole because there was no challenge to it. The attention to it did not come until the later centuries. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, various heretical groups arose whose ideas are not unlike those of the beatniks, the hippies, the Vietnam protesters, the Sexual Freedom League, and others. Some of these groups were a radical patriot of the Christian faith, but claiming to represent the true communion of the saints, espoused communism. They espoused total sexual license. They staged nude parades in the various cities of Christendom, and in every way were a discouraging factor. These groups continued for a time after the Reformation and counter-Reformation, to be a problem, and as a result, attention was given to the doctrine of the communion of saints.

The matter was formally considered and defined by the Westminster assembly of divines, and the Westminster Confession, as well as the catechism, gives attention to the atricles of the Apostles Creed, the communion of saints. Chapter 26 of the Westminster Confession of Faith, entitled Of the Communion of Saints, reads:

“I. All saints that are united to Jesus Christ their head, by his Spirit and by faith, have fellowship with him in his graces, sufferings, death, resurrection, and glory: and, being united to one another in love, they have communion in each other's gifts and graces, and are obliged to the performance of such duties, public and private, as to conduce to their mutual good, both in the inward and outward man.

II. Saints by profession, are bound to maintain an holy fellowship and communion in the worship of God, and in performing such other spiritual services as tend to their mutual edification; as also in relieving each other in outward things, according to their several abilities and necessities. Which communion, as God offereth opportunity, is to be extended unto all those who, in every place, call upon the name of the Lord Jesus.

III. This communion which the saints have with Christ, doth not make them in any wise partakers of the substance of the Godhead, or to be equal with Christ in any respect: either of which to affirm, is impious and blasphemous. Nor doth their communion one with another as saints, take away or infringe the title or property which each man hath in his goods and possessions. “

There are three major aspects of this statement. First of all, the communion of saints has a God-ward direction. The saints are united to Jesus Christ and have communion with God in Christ. Second, there is a union and communion of all true saints, one with another, and third, the union of saints by profession and the communion, they are bound to maintain is carefully defined. Then, there is a three-fold aspect to this communion among the saints. The saints here is used in the broader sense which the New Testament uses it, as applied to all who are true believers of Jesus Christ.

First of all, the saints in their communion, are bound by a common worship of Christ. Second, they are obligated to spiritual services as tend to their mutual edification, and third, they have an obligation to relieve each other in outward things, according to their several abilities and necessities.

Now, the communion of saints, as I indicated earlier, was a doctrine that was in the 14th and 15th centuries, very, very much abused and misinterpreted, and the confession of faith that I just read defined the two areas in which this doctrine was abused. First, in the God-ward direction, the communion of the saints with God, and second, in the man-ward direction, the communion of saints with saints. False communion takes these two directions. First, in asserting that men are in communion with God, these heretical groups, through the centuries have asserted, as some groups do today, that man can become, or is of one substance with God. Mysticism, very early, made this assertion. Mormonism today, very pronouncedly {?}. It holds that men are gods and their own source of law. Mysticism, very quickly ran into the same heresy by insisting in many, many cases that the mystic was of one substance with God. Thus, one mystic, Angela of Filino{?}, who has been deservedly the object of some reprobation, wrote, “I elected to walk on the thorny path which is the path of tribulation. So, I began to put aside the fine clothing and adornments which I had, and the most delicate food and also the covering of my head. But as yet to do all these things was hard a change in me because I did not feel much love for God and was living with my husband, so that it was a bitter thing to me when anything offensive was said or done to me, but I bore it as patiently as I could. In that time, and by God’s will, there died my mother, who was a great hindrance to me in following the way of God. My husband died likewise, and in a short time, there also died all my children, and because I had begun to follow the aforesaid way, and had prayed to God to rid me of them, I had a great consolation of their deaths, although I also felt some grief. Wherefore, because had shown me this grace, I imagined that my heart was in the heart of God, and his heart in my heart.”

Now what Angela did was to identify herself as one substance with God, and to feel that her union was in the forsaking of all her duties. Indeed, had I been a district attorney at that time, I would have been tempted to launch an investigation. She certainly was on the whole, happy to see her mother, her husband, and all her children dead and in the grave. Now, we have communion with God, not by forsaking our responsibilities, but by assuming those responsibilities God has given to us, so our responsibilities are of the family and s work in connection with it, or in terms of our calling, or in terms of a Christian ministry. Then, that is our place. Our appointed place is the place where we serve God by faith and obedience, but the mystic approaches God as part of God, and so it is that these mystics characteristically approach Christ not from below as a sinner, but from above as gods.

Thus, we find, for example, in a very modern mystic, Evelyn Underhill of the Church of England, this statement:

“I come to Christ through God, whereas Christ obviously lots of people come to God through Christ.”

In other words, she being one with God, looked down and approached Christ from above, while the rest of us poor sinners had to approach Christ from below. In other words, man ascends out of history by mysticism to become one with God, and then descends with power as the living God and the living law. Now, what Marxism did was to take this pagan, mystical screen{?} which, through neo-Platonism, had been fed into the church, and invert it, and simply to say that instead of God being spirit up above, God was matter down below, and hence, its dialectical materialism, and therefore, in order to become one with God in the Marxist sense, man must descend to identify himself with the material force below, and the general will of the masses, in order to ascend with power as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Basic also to the Death of God School of Theology is this same false sense of communion. The Death of God School of Theology insists very strongly on the communion of saints. In fact, they believe this but not in God. Their god is not the true God, the transcendental God, but very definitely humanity. As a result, one of the writers declared, “I wish to make my position clear on the outset. God is one of the many different poetic expressions of the highest value in humanism, not a reality in itself. In this sense, therefore, many people in the pulpit today speak about God, but they are simply identifying it with the highest in humanity. But, of course, many of their radical Death of God theologians or philosophers identify it with all of humanity, and so you have the litany that is very extensively used whereby God is identified, and therefore, the communion of saints called for, with the Negro who is receive welfare, the prostitute, the homosexual, the secular city, the rampaging mob, the criminal, and we are told that we cannot truly have communion with God unless we have communion with all of these, and this then is the true communion of saints.

This is basically also the doctrine of the Civil Rights Movement, and so it is that some of its readers, such as King, do use the expression “communion of saints” commonly, a very startling, but indicative expression of this particular heresy occurred last Wednesday at San Quentin, when a vicious and depraved criminal was dragged screaming to the gas chamber, and his final words, screamed out were, literally, “I am Jesus Christ. Look what they have done to me.” He has very definitely learned the doctrine of those who are fighting to abolish capital punishment and to create this demonic communion, which they call the communion of saints.

This then is the one direction that the false communion takes, God-ward, except that their god is only man. The second direction of false direction is man-ward, by enforced unity. Throughout the centuries, and certainly since the Tower of Babel, men have imagined creating a one world order, a one world communion of all men, and they have very often, through the centuries, in heretical groups, brazenly called it the communion of saints as various groups do today, and they have formed secret fraternities of evil as against the fraternity, or communion of grace, but these secret fraternities and societies have always aimed at an enforced unity. The only communion they can visualize is one whereby the agencies of the state are tattered, and men are forced to come together in a union in which all distinction is obliterated. Their approach to the world, therefore, and to communion is statist. Men are sinners. They are at war with God, and because they are at war with God, they are war with men and also with themselves, and they are incapable of communion even with themselves, let alone their fellow men and with God.

Hence, the only kind of communion, fraternity, brotherhood, that they can imagine is an enforced one, but such a communion is a contradiction and that all members are a law unto themselves, and every enforced communion is simply collectivization. It is hostile both to true community and true individualism.

Westminster Confession declared that the double evil of this false doctrine of communion of saints is, on the one hand, they seek to make men partakers of the substance of his Godhead, or to be equal with Christ, and on the other, a communion which taketh away, or infringes the title or property which each man has in his goods and possessions. Thus, it is a destruction of both true community and true individuality, but godly communion of saints is a God-created loyalty to Christ, a God-given one. We see the world in terms, then, of God’s law, his word and his perspective, and we have a citizenship in heaven. It is also a God-created inner bond with all true believers, so that we are drawn together, often at a sacrifice of family loyalties and friendships, of old associations, drawn together by faith, by an inner bond, and we are governed by a moral unity, a doctrinal unity, one which springs from the heart. We are governed by the Holy Spirit.

Now, the basic doctrine which has perplexed philosophy through the centuries is a problem of the one and the many. How to have both unity and individuality without the one destroying the other? This ungodly communion actually the fraternity of demons, not the communion of saints, is both destructive of unity because it produces instead of unity, enforced collectivization, and it is destructive of particularity or individuality, because instead of individuality, it only creates anarchism. But the doctrine of the communion of saints is that doctrine which enunciates the true unity, the unity of God’s people in Christ, and true individuality in that, in him, we are regenerated. We become truly ourselves and know ourselves in terms of God’s calling, so that both the one and the many come to their fruition in terms of the doctrine of the communion of saints.

This doctrine is very beautifully illustrated by Psalm 133, the Psalm of David. David, in this very brief psalm of three verses only, pictures it as the joy and the fulfillment of man, and as an illustration of what it means to man, he uses Aaron’s consecration and ordination as high priest of Israel. The perfumed oil was poured upon his head, and from his head, it trickled down his garments to the very skirt of his garment, so that the fragrance was spread abroad. It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron’s beard, that went down to the skirt of the garment. This is how it is for men to dwell in this unity and this brotherhood, in the communion of saints and since the oil of anointing typified the conferring of the Holy Ghost, this, the communion of saints is the conferring of the Spirit upon the people of God, so that they are now governed by God and from above. It is also portrayed as the dew of Hermon, as the dew that descended upon the mountains of {?}, for there the Lord commanded the blessing, even {?} forevermore. It is something that descends from heaven like the dew. It is the creator’s blessing of the triune God. The world sees only its only power, its fraternity of evil, its fraternity of demons. For the communion of saints is hidden from the eyes of the world. It is an inner and invisible bond. That it is the real power in the world today, because God works not through the ones that are evil, but through his true saints, and so in this hidden communion, in this great body of believers, whose unity is in Christ and who had an inner bond that binds them one to another, and whose strength is not of themselves, but of God. In them is the real power in this world, and therefore, God can, with assurance, declare to his church, that the “gates of hell cannot prevail,” cannot withstand, the onslaught of the church, for this is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee for the communion of saints, for our communion with thee through Jesus Christ, and with one another in thee. We thank thee, our God, that thou hast called us unto thee, and given us an inner bond, and hast given us such great promises, so that the ends of the earth shall see the fulfillment of thy hope in Jesus Christ. Our God, how great thou art. How sure thy word and how certain thy promises. Therefore, we rejoice in thee and praise thee. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] {?} people {?} communicate {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Is that {?}

[Rushdoony] The word “communication” is a very important one in the modern idiom, because the {?} is to have this total communication in order to have total community. Therefore, you must be able to communicate, you see, with men like Mitchell. You must be able to communicate with the prostitute, with the pervert, and hence it is, for example, in the San Francisco church, concerning which I read some data a few weeks ago, {?} memorial, there was this session with the hippies, the homosexuals, and various other groups that are regularly brought in in order to establish communication. Now, of course, what we must say in terms of scripture, first, there can be no communion for those who are evil. Our communion is with the people of God.

Second, yes, in a sense there can be communication with these people, and the communication that you and I have by the grace of God been able to convey to Mitchell is the death penalty. In other words, those who will not communicate in terms of the grace of God, to them the law of God must be communicates. But, of course, those today are trying to establish this world community once this false communication, total communication, in which there is no good and evil, in which the world is beyond good and evil. Yes?

[Audience] When {?} communication, we {?} communicating through the arts, I would like {?} interest in the {?} writing of music.

[Rushdoony] The arts can be used to serve a variety of purposes. Today they are serving a humanistic purpose. They had, in times, served a very, very godly purpose. The greatest of all musicians is also the greatest Christian among musicians, Johann Sebastian Bach, a very, very great Christian, and clearly the greatest of musicians. I was interested yesterday, in hearing Carl Quincy, in introducing a Bach number, speak about the tremendous bulk of Bach’s writing, all of it great. He said that if a copyist sat down today and worked eight hours today, six days a week, it would take him seventy years just to recopy by hand, all of Bach’s compositions that we have, and when you realize that much of it has been lost, you realize the staggering genius of that man and the productivity, and when you realize that his counterpoint style has a mathematical precision about it, it is so amazing that people spend a great deal of time studying mathematically the intricacies of a single composition, you have an insight into the genius of Bach, truly a great Christian and musician.

[Audience] {?} to me {?} very well {?}

[Rushdoony] It’s tremendously moving and beautiful, but we need to study it and understand it sometimes to appreciate it. Yes?

[Audience] Regarding communication {?} of the church {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, there has to be communication with them, to them, but not as one people. In other words, St. Paul said if we are to separate ourselves from the ungodly we’ll have to go out of this world, and that’s not practical. We must live in their midst, work with them, but we cannot become one community with them. There is a strict line of division.

[Audience] Well then, regarding our communication either verbally or regarding our {?} the message to them should be the message of the Bible, should it not? Essentially, and not too much more. In other words, we’re not to have an interchange of ideas with them, as if to put their ideas of God on par with ours. We’re not asking them to, we can’t water down ours, the truth, to meet their {?}

[Rushdoony] We cannot. We have to deal with them intellectually, but we can never accord to them the idea that theirs is one idea among others, and it’s a smorgasbord and you take what you like. Yes?

[Audience] Well, I think in regard to this Mitchell, {?} society {?} and {?} answer to that question {?}

[Rushdoony] Our answer is that society has succeeded in relationship to Mitchell, because it gave him exactly what he asked for, because in breaking the law, he asked for death. There was an excellent editorial some time ago by a man who was neither a Christian nor a conservative, but a kind of hard-headed scientist, John Campbell, and he dealt with a racetrack, and he said the question which all about {?} conservative and liberal alike is this. He said what we face in civilization today and where we become too nice to face up to it, is that there are some, by choice and by character, and by nature, total barbarians. They have no desire to do anything but destroy, and what we are doing is to subsidize them more and more, so we are subsidizing, as it were, an army dedicated to our destruction. Now, his question is, what must be done with them? And he said, “Bear in mind,” in this editorial, “it could be that one of these barbarians might turn out to be your child, so you have to look at it personally as well as generally. Most of these barbarians come from certain classes of people, but they also spring up out of our midst. What is the answer to it?” He said, “Put yourself now in a position of total power, as a dictator. What is your answer to the problem of the barbarians?”

Well, I think the Bible gives us the answer, and the Bible says very plainly, and I mentioned this before, that if any juvenile proved to be incorrigible, that juvenile was to be brought up before the council for examination, and if he indeed proved to be incorrigible, he was to be executed. So must wickedness be put out of the land, and believe me, that this has been applied in this country, in the Colonial Period. When that law was passed, juvenile delinquency ended overnight. There is no point in subsidizing evil, and God has said this is what you communicate to such people. Dead. We’ve succeeded in Mitchell’s case, but the sad fact is that the number of people who are executed are decreasing each year. The number is decreasing rapidly. There were very few executions last year. We have sixty, approximately, in death row now. Everything will be done to prevent them from going to the gas chamber.

Fortunately, the public sentiment was so strongly in favor of Mitchell’s execution that the senate committee dropped consideration of the bill to repeal capital punishment. Politically, it’s dynamite. The people right now do want to see just punishment meted out. Yes?

[Audience] There’s one aspect of contention{?}. They common cry that you hear right now {?} is that four out of five have said that this man {?} You say that there are certain ones that are, by nature, {?} barbarians and this man was in prison more than he was out of prison. But we’re getting such an increase of delinquency and errency{?}. The reason that we’re getting that is not because society has failed, but because society’s failed because of {?}. Is that?

[Rushdoony] Yes. You have always had in the past, a vast number of people at the bottom who are, by nature, law breakers. Now, society has kept these people in line by force, by the fear of punishment, and today it is this that is gone. The number of people who go to prison for their few crimes, the fact that they get out so easily as only encouraged crime. The handcuffing of police, the handcuffing of district attorneys, all this is an inducement to crime. So we have seen, in recent years, a very direct correlation between the handcuffing of law enforcement agencies and the increase of criminology. Yes?

[Audience] One thing that bothers me is the privilege that politicians and diplomats in foreign countries. {?} I knew {?} for example that Negros {?} a lot of us embezzled $55,000 or $155,000, or whatever it was, if we embezzled $200 we would be in Leavenworth.

[Rushdoony] Yes, but the Constitutional provision there is a wise one. In the past, a problem that is often faced men in government has been this. If they had made a stand against tyranny or against evil, it has been easy to {?} them of crimes to tie them up in fighting something outside of the senate or the legislature, or whatever body they are in, by restricting prosecution to such time as they are not in session, or not in office. It has protected legislatures from this kind of harassment and persecution.

Now, the means taken to correct that was this. The senate and the house had the responsibility when such a thing arises to police their own members. So it has been a failure on the congressional level.

[Audience] The whole thing is open {?} and they don’t police {?}

[Rushdoony] Right, but we’re not seeing any policing anywhere, in the church or in the state, or in communities at large.{?}

[Audience] The whole county is kept {?}

[Rushdoony] Unfortunately.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] I asked you to comment on a letter to the Times. This was in {?} paper. It was written by {?}. For over four years I’ve lived {?} four years {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. I think it is his opinion and it’s nonsense. The fact is people don’t suddenly change. If you begin by being totally irresponsible, short of religious conversion, you’re going to go on being totally irresponsible, and one of our problems today is that so many of these people have matured and they are a strong force for a general irresponsibility in our society. One of our problems today, too, is that we have so many non-persons in society, and they’re {?} graduates from these older generation hippies. These non-persons are people who, very early, {?} organized society. They do not pay income tax. They are not registered for social security. They are not registered in the census. They are not registered for the draft. They just drift in a world of non-persons. They are completely unrelated to society at large, except that they prey off of it, and they make up your hoodlums. They make up your drifters who live by their wits, who when they work occasionally, will work for say, cash only, a day or two a week, and then drift the rest of the time. And you have, perhaps in a city like Los Angeles, a quarter of a million {?} non-persons, and these are becoming a growing menace throughout the country, and above them, you have those who at least are persons legally, but are still on the fringes of this kind of world, so that you have a vast segment of these older hippies who are constantly creating a barbarian segment in society.

Now, I went to Cal at a time when you had people who were drifters, who were going to live by their wits and did, and those who were communists and so on, I would say I have contacted over the years, bumped into them up and down the state, or read about them in the papers, a sizable number of those I went to Berkley with. Except for a very few, I would say virtually all of them are almost exactly what they were when they were in school, as far as their opinions, their conduct, everything else, and some of them look about twenty, twenty-five years older than I do because of the way they live, and a fair percentage are dead. The only thing I can say that involves any real change is this, some of this outlaw fringe today, a fair percentage is in some for of federal service. They are somewhere in the poverty program or something else. This drew them, those who have really been anything. Yes?

[Audience] As I listened to the {?} program, I know {?} I noticed that even the people who call in who are people of the Bible and the word of God have very great difficulty {?} as to understanding knowledge of the word, of confounding the arguments put forth by the {?} because the argument breaks down into about three categories. One, the death penalty has not worked as retribution, and they say, you know go back to their so-called {?} Rhode Island and so forth, so that when the death penalty was {?} in Rhode Island, there were some many murders and so forth, and then when it was done away with, there was no increase whatsoever. In fact there was a lessening of murders, and I was wondering if you’d back to the history of England where {?} times the death penalty was {?} just for stealing a loaf of bread, and rather than {?} crime increased {?} nature. Now, I have belief that {?} it is not the death penalty per se which is the deterrent to the crime, but only when the death penalty, as common knowledge, in conjunction with God’s law, {?} . The minute that {?} in other words, we can end the death penalty {?}with regard to law, my point is that {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, I basically agree with you, although I would say in spite of these statistics about these states that have abolished the death penalty, law enforcement men have gone to the same statistics and proved that there has been a change for the worse where the death penalty has been abolished, so that it doesn’t hold up, their statistical arguments, and another thing, when you have the death penalty removed supposedly for life imprisonment, you not only have the abolition of the death penalty, but you have a weakening of enforcement {?}, so that there are also fewer convictions for murder. It isn’t that fewer murders are committed, but they’re not only unwilling to sentence them to death, but they’re also not willing to send them to prison. You have sentimentality coming in. So that, statistically, their argument is not sound. Law enforcement men do not back it up. You are right, of course, that death having the penalty without a Christian social order, will not work, and what you had in 18th century England was, of course, virtually a total breakdown of Christian law and order. The Church of England was thoroughly corrupt. There were very few services where even a service was conducted because the clergy mainly got their office through political appointments, and {?} never visited their {?} more than once or twice in their lifetime. So, services were not conducted. The people were not taught. England was, to all practical intent, a pagan country, and there was nothing they could do to stem the tide of lawlessness, until they had both the Wesleyan revival (and I say this reluctantly because I don’t like John Wesley’s basic stand; he was very heretical at some points) and the Anglican revival. These two things really (credit must be given where credit is due) changed the face of England. Whitfield was the one in the Wesleyan revival who did the more solid work. Yes?

[Audience] {?} the statement {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience] To touch on last week’s lesson, {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. The foundations of social order are, first of all, law, which rests on {?} which rests on religion. Second, the doctrine of the state. What is your doctrine of the state? Then third, it is your doctrine of grace, what you regard as grace and the other is the doctrine of sovereignty, what you hold to be the doctrine of sovereignty. Where is your sovereign? In heaven or on earth?

[Audience] {?} creed {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, these are all creedal aspects. In other words, your morality and religion, that’s creedal, your doctrine of sovereignty is creedal, your doctrine of grace is creedal. Your doctrine of the state is a creedal matter. So that all these things are aspects of creedalism, and the point is that there is a creedal foundation to social order. Yes?

[Audience] {?} dates back {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, I think this one does, just because they are pleasures. Because God wants us to enjoy life. The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever, so that there is no evil in pleasure and {?}. We are as creatures, we were created to enjoy life, and God set man in a paradise, and we are told that “The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich, and he added no sorry to it,” so that God’s purpose was that man be prosperous, that he be in good health, that he enjoy life, but of course, first things first. To glorify God is our first responsibility and then to enjoy all these things in him.

Now, when this question was raised in our Lord’s day, he dealt with it on a number of occasions, but I think he summed it up best in the Sermon on the Mount, and he said that all these things to the Gentiles, this is what their whole life is given to a pursuit of, but he said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” So that God wants us to enjoy these things. Now it was basically a product of the Greek culture, neo-Platonism in particular, that led to this temperament, and the Greeks held, you see, that there are two kinds of being, basically: related and intermixed. Matter and spirit, and you had to leave matter for spirit in order to become truly holy, but from the perspective of the Bible, man, body and soul, is fallen, apart from Christ, and then he is regenerated, body and soul, by Jesus Christ, and the ultimate goal of body and soul is the resurrection of the dead, and you find that some of these ideas that pleasure was wrong were, when they supposedly came into the church, basically pagan.

For example, Simon {?} was closely connected, and that’s why the church never really recognized him, and regarded him with suspicion, with a Syrian {?} cult, a Baal form of worship, and he is the one who was on the pillar, you know, and lived there for so many years, and he actually had this belt around him, his flesh began to rot, and he would pick up the worms and put them back in, and say, “Eat worms, destroy this foolish flesh,” and so on. He had quite a following and his following was primarily pagan. The pictures we get today in our textbooks are perverted. They speak about the glories of Greece, and its emphasis on the body and material pleasures. Well, there was an emphasis on perverted pleasures, but not healthy ones, and Greek culture turned this {?} basically on the body, on the material world for the realm of ideas, and this sort of thing crept into the church for awhile, and then it was forsaken. Yet a major conflict in this, in the height of the middle century, between the regular clergy and the secular clergy. Which truly represented the faith? And the secular clergy finally triumphed, and the regular clergy has steadily receded, because the regular clergy emphasized that the emphasis of the regular clergy was not fully and authentically Christian. This has been a controversy for a long time and it hasn’t been entirely clarified, but we are coming closer to a clarification, and the textbooks have hurt greatly because they give us the idea that this renouncing of the material world was Christian when it was basically pagan. Yes?

[Audience] At which point {?} Greek philosophers {?}

[Rushdoony] Socrates was executed for perverting the use of Athens, and everything in the trial records indicates he was definitely guilty, but he was thoroughly a masochist. Every opportunity was made for him to escape. They were ready to help him out of his cell before the hemlock was given so he could walk out and run off, but he wanted to put on a scene and a dramatic one, and so he stayed in the cell and rather than go out and live. He was guilty. Not only was he guilty by the records, but his own disciples like {?} and others in their records, Plato, talk about the public acts of perversion that he and others were involved in. He was tried as a corrupter of youth, and he was guilty. And yet he’d tell about {?} one of the great philosophers of history.

Well, our time is up and we stand dismissed.

End of tape