Foundations of Social Order

Ascension & Session

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Sociology

Lesson: Ascension & Session

Genre: Speech

Track: 134

Dictation Name: RR126H15

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Glory be to thee, O God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost who hast called us unto thee to be thy people, and hast surrounded us with thy mercies and protective care. We praise thee that we have a glorious certainty in Jesus Christ, that the gates of hell cannot prevail against us, and that we have the certainty of victory in time and in eternity. Therefore we come to praise thee and magnify thy holy name, and to rejoice in all thy blessings. In Jesus name. Amen.

Our subject today is the Ascension & Session. The scripture is Psalm 110. “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool. The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies. Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth. The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath. He shall judge among the heathen, he shall fill the places with the dead bodies; he shall wound the heads over many countries. He shall drink of the brook in the way: therefore shall he lift up the head.

On one occasion, Colini{?}, the great leader of the French Huguenots, found himself deceived and surrounded by Spanish forces, and the general of the Spanish force sent him an ultimatum. Surrender or be wiped out. Colini{?} expressed that tremendous and triumphant faith, which so often characterized him and led him at this point and at other points in his life to victory. His answer was a very simple one. He said, “We have a king.” This was his confidence. Christ was his king, and he served under a victorious ruler.

The Apostles Creed has this article: “He ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty,” and in terms of this, the church can say, age after age, we have a king, a king who sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. This article, the Apostles Creed, states two important doctrines which are very closely related: The doctrine of the ascension and the doctrine of the session. The ascension, “he ascended into heaven,” the visible passing of Christ from earth to heaven in the presence of his disciples on the Mount of Olives forty days after the resurrection, this is the doctrine of the ascension. The ascension was predicted by the Old Testament in many passages, such as Psalm 24:68, and in particular, Psalm 10 which we just read. It was predicted also by Jesus Christ, in John 6:32 and John 20:17, and elsewhere. It was also prefigured in the Old Testament by the translation of Enoch and also of Elijah. The doctrine of the ascension is a central doctrine of the creed and of scripture.

The doctrine of the session, “He sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.” This doctrine declares the perpetual presence of our Lord’s human nature in the highest glory of heaven, at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. The body of Jesus is therefore, locally and physically present in heaven. Hence, it is the Holy Ghost whom he must send to men.

These two doctrines have been, through the centuries, very much attacked. They were savagely and bitterly attacked in the early centuries by some of the Gnostics and Manicheans, and they propounded all kinds of peculiar theories, the central one being propounded by the Hermeans and Felucians{?} that Jesus Christ never was truly incarnate, so that his body was merely an assumed one, and in the ascension, he left his body in the sum{?} and his divine nature went up the heaven. Now this, of course, is the purest of nonsense. The purpose of this concept we shall see subsequently. It was identical with that which the humanists now assert when they doubt the ascension, and institute another doctrine.

The doctrine of the ascension is of critical importance to the faith. Without it, the life goes out of Christianity. The ascension is the presence of Christ in heaven, his exaltation. It marks the reversal of man’s verdict on Jesus Christ, and it was the open declaration before his disciples that whereas men thought they could bind him forever with death, he, in virtue of his nature and of his perfect righteousness, had destroyed forever the power of sin and death, and openly ascended into heaven.

As a result of the ascension and the session, the church, the redeemed of God, are brought into the divine presence in closest communion with God the Father. Christ, in his physical body, is locally present in heaven. He is at the right hand of God the Father. We physically are locally present here in this room, but by virtue of the ascension of Jesus Christ, we are also present at the right hand of God the Father, in that as members of Jesus Christ, in mystical union with him, as members of his perfect humanity. Where Christ is, there we are also. So that our prayers are heard as intercession is made possible. For when we pray “in Jesus name,” that prayer is heard immediately in heaven, and it is the prayer of Jesus Christ at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, and when Jesus Christ, at the Last Supper, spoke with his disciples concerning the necessity of that which must be, his trial and crucifixion, his death and resurrection, and his ascension. He said that the purpose of all these things was transcendental. It looked beyond the earth. It looked to his glorification, his exaltation in heaven. That “Where I am, there ye may be also,” at the right hand of power.

Therefore, because of this doctrine, the church can declare the enthronement of Christ as mediator and messianic majesty. Jesus Christ, the perfect man, has been enthroned physically and locally, on the throne of omnipotence. St. Paul, in speaking of these things declare in Philippians 2:9-11, “Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

We, therefore as Christians, can never speak of being alone, and in the Old Testament, David in Psalm 22, expressed the desperation of loneliness, inspired by the Holy Ghost. He was a hunted man, a price on his life, hunted down like an animal, fleeing from cave to cave, from wilderness to wilderness, never knowing when he slept whether he would wake up again, and in his despair he cried out, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” and inspired of the Holy Spirit, the psalm expressed far more than his experience. It prophetically expressed the total isolation of Jesus Christ on the cross, and the agony of the crucifixion, but that cry can no longer, never again be the cry of the believer. Christ nailed it to the cross, experiencing it himself to the uttermost, and he as our head, our federal head, we as members of his body who is present at the right hand of power, are now immediately represented at the throne of God. In terms of the ascension, the exaltation, the enthronement of Jesus Christ, we are present with the {?}.

And therefore, Christ, with the triune God, is in warfare in all evil as it raises its hand against us, and is in judgment over it, and the whole of the book of Revelation gives us a picture, as Revelation 6:16 declares, of “the wrath of the lamb,” of the wrath of Jesus Christ, the incarnate one, against the ungodly who have declared war against his people. Therefore, he is at war with them.

Moreover, the ascension is the presentation of the firstfruits to God the Father according to 1 Corinthians 15:23. The presentation of the firstfruits is an important ritual of the Old Testament, one which is basic to the whole of scripture. According to Mosaic law, all firstfruits must be presented to God. They were brought, symbolically, to the temple. The first sheath of grain, the first basket of fruit, the first calf, the first lamb, the first colt, the first child, and if a man wished to keep these things for himself, he had to redeem the firstfruits by paying the full value thereof, and that which was not redeemed was under sentence of death, and his neck had to be broken, and what this mean was simply this: “The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world (the people), and they that dwell therein.” All things are the Lord’s, and therefore, everything must be presented to God, and the firstfruits stand for the totality.

So that, in the presentation of the first sheath of wheat, the whole harvest was dedicated to him. In the presentation of the first of the livestock, the whole was presented to him. In the presentation of the first child, all the children were presented unto God, and the tithe was the acknowledgement that these things were held as the trust from God, and one of the conditions of possession and blessings was that a tithe be returned to the Lord. It was his rest. There was no gift to God, except above and over the tithe. So that one could not speak of having given a gift to the Lord’s work unless it was beyond the tithe, the ten percent. The first of everything belonged to God. All things that were used apart from God were under God’s judgment, and man could not say of any corner of the universe, of any corner of his hand, of any piece of his produce, of any child of his household, “This is mine, and I am free to do with this as I choose.” All of it was under God’s law. The earth had to be used according to God’s law, as a stewardship. The produce thus, thereof, had to be used as a stewardship. Children had to be reared in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, according to his law, and therefore, all things belonging to God, the firstfruits {?} had to be presented to him. This is the meaning of baptism.

In baptism, children are presented to the Lord, and this is why they can be presented as infants, because they thereby are returned to God from birth, and the parents acknowledge, “This child I have received of the Lord, and therefore, I acknowledge that I can only rear this child under God. Under his word, under his law, because the child is not my property, but God’s gift to me, and is totally to be governed, not by my whims, but by the word of God.

Now the ascension, according to St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:23, is the presentation of Jesus Christ as the firstfruits. What does this mean? Paul explains this. The old humanity of Adam rebelled against God. It refused to present itself for anything that it did as the firstfruit of God. It said, in effect, “The earth is mine and I will be the Lord thereof.” Therefore, it is under sentence of death. The law says that that which is not presented must have its neck broken. It must perish, but Jesus Christ came as the last Adam, or the Second Adam, the fountainhead of a new humanity, and all who are members of Jesus Christ belong no longer to the humanity of Adam, to the humanity that is born to sin and die, but to a new humanity, the humanity of Jesus Christ, and we are now born in him, born again in him to life, and to righteousness, and are victorious over death, and Jesus Christ, having risen again from the dead, presented himself as the firstfruits of the new creation to God. That new creation which began with his resurrection and will culminate when the old creation is done away with and heaven and earth are made anew, and as Paul declared in Romans 11:16, “If the firstfruit be holy, the lump is also holy.” The firstfruits represented the symbolic presentation of the totality of all, so that when Jesus Christ presented himself to God the Father in his ascension, he presented himself as the one who had, in perfect righteousness, kept the law, who had destroyed the power of sin and death, and so all we who are members of his body, therefore have, in him, this perfect righteousness, this victory over sin and death, and therefore, can come boldly to the throne of grace, making all our wants and wishes known in prayer, because he hears us.

This was the ground{?} of confidence in the early church. Christ had ascended in triumph, and he is waging a victorious war against our enemies, all the saints are exalted in him. Every believer has the assurance of victory, and this is why the preaching of the ascension, the doctrine of the ascension, was a particular joy to the early church. It would take days to go through the sermons of the early church fathers, and to describe or to repeat their ascension sermons, because this was a subject they delighted to preach in. They were under savage persecution from the Empire, but in the face of that persecution they could say, an especially each year after Easter on Ascension Day, that Jesus Christ, having risen again from the dead, and having ascended into heaven, was their assurance of triumph, for he now had been exalted to a position of glory.

St. John Chrysostom declared in one such sermon, “We who appeared unworthy of earth, have been led up today into the heavens. We who were not worth of the preeminence below have ascended to the kingdom above. We have scaled the heavens. We have attained the royal throne, and that nature on whose account the cherubim guarded paradise, today sits above the cherubim.”

The doctrine of the session is closely related to this. It is impossible indeed, to discuss the ascension without the doctrine of the session. Jesus Christ is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, and the right hand is the position of trust and power. He is thus Lord and judge, and there is no limitation on his power. The session signifies the omnipotent power of Jesus Christ, the certainty that, because he is there, he shall wage war against all his enemies, against the enemies of his people, and in the great ascension and session psalm, Psalm 110, David declares, “The Lord said unto my lord, sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.” Your enemies shall be made your footstool. They shall be broken. They shall be humbled to become no more than a tool in your hands. Ye shall judge among the heathen. Ye shall fill the places with dead bodies. Ye shall wound the heads over many countries. Christ as our leader, as our king, shall convert all our enemies into his footstool, shall strike through them as a man strikes through butter with a knife. We, as Colini{?} said, have a king. We have a king.

Now apostate man, knowing in his heart these things, is of course, imitative of them. Man is not God and therefore, his thinking is not creative. It is {?}. He can only think God’s thoughts after him, either obediently or rebelliously, and so when apostate man plans a world order, it is as an echo of God’s kingdom, as a perversion of it. He dreams of a kingdom, a universal empire, but it is to be of this world, of man, in its origin, to be man’s creation and possession, held without benefit of God and with God at bay{?}. It is temporal and it is a unity and authority in history by man.

Moreover, this new world order is to be the exaltation of man by man, in contempt of God and as an offensive action against God. It is a war against God as the ground of man’s exaltation. Moreover, humanism has its own doctrine of the session. Man as the lord of history, an elitist scientific planner in omnipotence and power, governing man and nature as absolute lord. History, therefore, involves inescapable warfare. Man was created to be a vice-jurant{?}, to exercise dominion under God over the earth, but he sought that dominion apart from God and in contempt of God, and in warfare against God, and therefore, there is warfare between God and man, and between God’s people and the ungodly, and there are two sessions. The triune God with the incarnate Jesus Christ is a counsel of war against the ungodly, and the counsel of peace for us, and on earth there is the humanistic counsels of war, against God the Almighty.

Humanism is the epitome of the enemy’s position. Its first inroads into this country were in the form of Unitarianism, and the Unitarians replaced the sovereignty of God with the sovereignty of man, and ultimately abolished God from the picture. One Unitarian poet and hymn write, William C. Gannett, wrote a poem on what everybody’s true last name is, and he said everyone’s last name is God, and he said in the concluding lines, “It’s Mary, John, and Katie, It’s Mary, Maude, and Katie, John God and Willie God.” In other words, this is our true name.

Another Unitarian poet, in the days just before the Versailles Treaty was signed, when the world was waiting for word of Versailles, spoke of this Treaty which represented to him the epitome of humanism, as to the new law and the new salvation of men, and a world of perfect peace was going to be made then and there in 1918 by the planners of Versailles, and he said, “Humbly, forgivingly, then shall the nations cease then together a Sinai {?}. Hear the new law in a {?} of the peacemakers. Frame a new world for the peoples of God.” More than that, he spoke of the peoples, not as the peoples of God, but as the new man God, who would go onward, upward, through the ages, shaping nature to its finest.

Other expressions of the same spirit have not been quite as poetic, because when man applies his humanistic dream to real life, he creates hell on earth, and the two major revolutions of the modern world have been products of this humanistic dream; the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. In the French Revolution, the revolutionists sat down and, having gained power, they in their session, began to decide how many people should we have to plan the future properly. Should we eliminate 50% or 75% or 90% of France, in order to have the necessary unit for effective planning, to rebuild the country anew, and then they proceeded with their executions in the reign of terror.

In the revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the same spirit and the same {?} was at work. Those whom you can change, educate, are {?} and those who cannot be change, liquidate and liquidate and liquidate, and they are still liquidating, and today we have the same humanists in our midst, reshaping this nation, planning to move peoples according to their whims, arrogating to themselves the right of God to decide concerning life and death. In a conference in the past two weeks in San Francisco, of scientists, Joshua Lederberg, a Stanford geneticist, attacked savagely the Christian prohibition of abortion, and insisted that science decree that an abortion was perfectly alright, and he declared, “We cannot insist on absolute right to life of a piece of tissue just because it bears a resemblance to humanity.”

And of course, if these planners have the right to say that of a fetus, they can say it of us. What absolute right to life do you have? Your God who says you do does not exist. Either Christ’s exaltation and his ascension and session are believed, or men will seek their own exaltation in an ascension into omnipotence and total power, and they will sit in session over us as the total judges of the earth, and a man must choose which he is to believe, and the ascension and session of Jesus Christ, or the ascension and session of the elite planners, a man cannot confess both Christ and socialism, and Calvin said concerning the ascension and session, “Christ was inaugurated into the government of heaven and earth. Therefore, man cannot be sovereign over heaven and earth.”

But this is the essence of the humanistic, socialistic state. It is the enthronement of man into the government of heaven and earth, and the consequence is warfare against God and Christ, but in this warfare, there is no possibility of victory for man. “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?” and they conspire when they “take counsel together, against the Lord, and his anointed.”

But neither is there any hope for men who, in the face of this great war, fail to see that a war is on, stand either in the direct line of fire or linger in the camp of the enemy{?} Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that in Jesus Christ we have been given a place in the divine session, that in him we can come to the throne of grace, bolding according to thy word, and make all our wants and wishes known, knowing that thou, O Lord, hearest us, and that thou art our shield and our defender, and our exceeding great reward. Our God, how great thou art, how glorious thy providential care, and we thank thee. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] In the newspaper {?} they have {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, because as I stated, it is because Jesus Christ is locally present now in heaven, as far as the physical body is concerned, he sent the Holy Spirit as his representative to be on earth, so that the descent of the Holy Spirit, of course, at Pentecost, followed the ascension. Yes?

[Audience] Jesus Christ represents symbolically the firstfruits of the new creation {?}. How about the Feast of the Weeks, the symbolism between that and the Holy Ghost {?}?

[Rushdoony] The Feast of Weeks symbolized the ingathering, the harvest, the celebration. It looked to the end achievement, so that the firstfruits symbolized the beginning. The harvest has begun. The Feast of Weeks comes at the end, so there is the ingathering, and it looks to the end, to the judgment, to the triumph.

[Audience] {?} in the {?}

[Rushdoony] Except that, of course, the Comforter is associated with all things and this is his triumph, the great ingathering. Yes?

[Audience] With reference to baptism, {?} offering, as far as I know and {?} the {?} of it {?}

[Rushdoony] Both the mechanism and the spiritual meaning are necessary. In other words, we must truly yield ourselves unto God and we must be baptized because this is a commandment of God, and the Great Commission was, “Go ye unto all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” so that both are necessary. Now, why it is necessary, you can see perhaps concretely through a simple illustration. It is not enough to say to a woman, “I love you spiritually, with all my heart, mind, and meaning.” The feeling is there. There must also be the external act of a wedding, or else you’re going to be dubious. So, you see, the two go together. You cannot separate the physical and the spiritual. Both are inseparably linked. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] I just noticed it this morning, but I didn’t have a chance to read it. I’m aware of this plan to produce such a Bible.

[Audience] It isn’t produced {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, re-edited then. Well, my question with regard to it is, the scholars are all in the liberal camp, so it will be neither a Protestant, nor a Catholic, nor a Jewish version. It will be a humanistic version, and it will attempt, as each successive version is done, to water down the meaning a little more, and you are getting increasingly the use of these very peculiar readings, some of which have not been introduced yet into the text. For example, one which I believe two years ago Easter was first used in many a Catholic church, in Alder{?} National Council of Churches, and radio programs, did not say, “He is risen,” but “He has been raised. He has been revivified,” and other similar perversions. Now, this is the kind of thing that is totally without warrant, but each new translation departs a little more from the received text and introduced as another heresy.

[Audience] But they show that when St. Jerome{?} was given the job of putting the books, the New and the Old Testament together, he had trouble with the New {?} with the old because they said they had the re-translation of the Christianized Jews, and then you have the {?} translation of the rabbis {?} their own version {?} different, the other books that were in the Greek that were not in the original {?}, and {?} apocalypse.

[Rushdoony] The apocrypha.

[Audience] The apocrypha. {?} or not, I mean {?} definitely were, you might say history relived, {?} so now in this new version, the revised standard version, they are all included {?} now, all of these books that were omitted from some of these earlier bibles are in {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. The books of apocrypha were included only for historical interest and for a limited amount of instruction, but they are definitely not a part of the Bible properly, and some of the material there is of interest. Some is of very mediocre caliber, but it’s historically important if you’re going to understand the four hundred years between the closing of the Old Testament canon and the writing of the New, and of course, the distinction is rapidly being blurred, and the Bible in the eyes of these translators is just one book among many, so why not add, really, some modern pronouncements to the Bible, because from their perspective, all of these things are the works of man. Yes?

[Audience] At the point where Jesus calls to his Father {?} conversation {?}, I notice {?} I wish you would clarify {?} What actually occurred there {?} and therefore, God is {?} God at this point, and the principle of the two persons {?} Jesus {?} two persons {?}

[Rushdoony] Not two persons, but two natures. He is one person with two natures, the divine and the human, and they are in perfect union without any commingling of the two and without any division. Now, the second person of the trinity was present in heaven even when he was incarnate on earth in the person of Jesus Christ, but this incarnate person was, in a very real sense, isolated from God and experienced the pangs of isolation. This is a mystery. We cannot understand it because it is beyond us, but nonetheless, the scripture is emphatic, but at this point, this was a total isolation because he became the sin-bearer for man even though he was without sin, and felt the full weight of total isolation from God. Now, no man will ever experience this isolation, but becoming the sin-bearer for all the elect, he was therefore, feeling the full weight of their guilt. But, after this cry, there was also the note of victory. This was not the last word on the cross, and the last word was, of course, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit,” from Psalm 31, and that was the word of perfect peace and triumph, because it came from a Psalm which was the evening prayer of Israel, which every child learned at his mother’s knee, and said as his bedtime prayer. So there was both the total isolation and victory.

The best exposition of the entire of the Passion Week, is by Dr. Kay Schilder, in three volumes, and there are very few works written to equal that. There’s only one thing wrong with Dr. Schilder’s work, and that is you finish reading it, but so memorable an experience read is that you feel sorry when you come to the last page, but I recommend that for a very detailed analysis of this aspect as well as every other aspect of Passion Week.

[Audience] Would you repeat the title?

[Rushdoony] It’s Dr. Kay Schilder, three volumes on the passion of Christ, I believe Christ in His Suffering, Christ on Trial, and Christ Crucified are the titles of the three volumes. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, the origins of the Baptist doctrine, that you only baptize when a person is mature, come in basically a rejection of the Old Testament. The Old Testament, on the part of some people, is seen as the book that they accept only because it’s in the Bible, but you pay no attention to it, and you regard the law and everything in it as essentially Jewish, and also you don’t like anything that’s connected with the Hebrews, so therefore, you simply disregard it. You say, “Oh, yes, it’s a part of the Bible, but it’s not the part we pay attention to.” With some as the Disciples in the Christian Church, or Church of Christ, they are almost savagely hostile, some of them, to the Old Testament, and they seek a New Testament Christianity. This is all they really believe. So, believing just that, they don’t know the rest, and they don’t realize what the law requires and that baptism was simply the rite that replaced circumcision, and it was required of children, and therefore, instead of seeing the doctrine of the covenant, they put it on an entirely individualistic basis. They make salvation dependent on your personal act of faith and they do not see what St. Augustine taught, the doctrine of prevenient grace. So that “since you do it, you wait until you’re old enough to do it, and you don’t see God’s requirement of it. You don’t see its relationship to the covenant. You don’t see its relationship to the doctrine of the firstfruits, because you refuse to accept a good deal of the scriptures. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] He was circumcised. He was circumcised on the eighth day. Now, when he was baptized, it was by John the Baptist, and when John the Baptist began to baptize, and this was given as the sign of the new covenant by Ezekiel, everyone will {?} it, and John was out in the wilderness. He had gone out into the desert and was preaching there, because he was, in a sense, saying, “Your cities, your countryside, everything in the country is finished. It’s under God’s judgment. The ax,” he said, “is laid at the root of the tree. It’s going to cut off, from the root up. So it’s dead. Therefore, you must leave.” So he is pronouncing the death sentence on old Israel of {?}. Then, he was saying that the new age had come, and therefore, the new sign of the covenant which was to replace circumcision had now taken its place.

Now they were baptizing, in the Old Testament, Gentiles. Gentiles were baptized and circumcised, both, because this indicated that they were to come in, as it were, by Christ’s work even as the Jews through sacrifice, represented it, but the great ingathering of the Gentiles was to be with the coming of the Messiah. So, when John began to baptize the Jews and Hebrews alike, it created a sensation because they said, “Well, either the Messiah has come or this is the great prophet who is to be the forerunner of the Messiah,” but after that, baptism was of children, and of course, in the book of Acts we are told that the whole household, over and over again, was baptized, both old and young.

Now, the Baptist church as you have said, most Baptist churches, not all, many of the Baptist churches began to realize that their doctrine of baptism was not altogether correct. So about a generation ago, some of the churches began to take a step towards infant baptism with the dedication service of children, which is a kind of a forerunner of baptism in their thinking, and is connected with it. So it was a halfway acceptance of this.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, so in the dedication service, you see, they go through everything that infant baptism calls for, except that they won’t call it baptism and they won’t baptize. So they’ve taken a halfway step towards it. Now, the kind of thing I described does not characterize such Baptists. Those who believe in what I described as the historic Baptist position will have no dedication. They are the ones who reject the Old Testament thoroughly. Now, not all Baptists and apparently those you grew up amongst, reject the Old Testament, but the Disciples Group, for example, are most emphatic about it, most emphatic, and some are extreme at this point. I had a talk in the past couple months to some who, their attitude is that if you quote from the Old Testament, you aren’t a Christian. How dare you use such books. It’s just retained because it was inspired by God, but it’s totally without any significance for us now, because it belongs to the Hebrews, therefore, no Christian can use it. Now, this is the historic position, but most Baptists have outgrown it very marvelously in recent years, so that which I described and that which you experienced are different. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] The sacrifices were declared ended at the crucifixion of Christ, because he was the great and the true sacrifice, and all these works typical are symbolic of his sacrifice. Therefore, there could be no more sacrifice of bullocks, or lambs, or kids, or anything else.

Now, the temple continued the sacrifices until it fell in the Jewish/Roman war in 66-70 A.D., but when Christ died on the cross, do you remember the veil of the temple was rent in twain. The temple was declared desecrated by an act of God, so that its work was thereby finished, ended. Yes?

[Audience] Wasn’t Calvin, and {?} the others {?} put to death for Judaizing? {?}

[Rushdoony] No, they were not put to death, and there were a few accusations of Judaizing, but that charge was leveled by heretics against the church throughout the centuries. It was leveled against the church in the early period, in the Medieval period, in the Reformation period, and it isn’t Judaizing to accept the word of God. One thing more, just a minute or two, and then we will be dismissed, I picked up recently a national fourth reader. I had previously the fifth reader. This was the series used before the Civil War in this country. This particular edition was a revised one just after the Civil War, and the kind of reading that characterized a fourth grade reader is really quite surprising because the lessons are from Washington Irving, from Charles Dickens who was then just a young writer, from Longfellow, of course, from Samuel Johnson, from Thomas Dequincy{?}, from James Fenimore Cooper, Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, and this is unfortunate, Channing, the Unitarian, from Joseph Aditson{?}, one of the great English writers, from quite a number of prominent writers of the day and earlier. William Cullen Bryant, Procter{?}, Reed, and also from Whittier, Hanimore{?}, William Cooper, James Montgomery, Thomas Moore{?}, and also from Shakespeare. They read, in the fourth grade reader, three parts of Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King John. They also have a poem here by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, also some by Tennyson, The Charge to the Light Brigade. That was in the fourth grade reader a century ago.

[Audience] Public or private schools?

[Rushdoony] Public, oh yes. Public and private, you see. In those days, almost all your schools in the country were private, or Christian schools. The public school movement when these readers first came out was not more than about ten, fifteen years old, and these were used in all schools alike, but as the public school movement took over education after the Civil War, these national readers were dropped, and you developed another series, and by the end of the century, you had, of course, the McGuffey Readers, which was the further drop, but compared to what we have now, the McGuffey Reader, of course, is quite advanced. This is why, in those days, when you graduated from the eighth grade, you had a good liberal arts education. You were better educated, very often, than your college graduates today are. You have a better command of the English language. You have a better knowledge of the great classics.

[Audience] {?} high school {?}

[Rushdoony] I’m quite sure of it. Well, with that we stand dismissed.

End of tape