Foundations of Social Order

Man and the Creeds

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Sociology

Lesson: Man and the Creeds

Genre: Speech

Track: 138

Dictation Name: RR126K19

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Let us begin with prayer. Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee for the joy of salvation, and for the blessed assurance that in Jesus Christ, we are more than conquerors. We thank thee, our Father, in the face of all things we can stand firm on the assurance of victory, and so, our Father, encourage and strengthen our hearts. Make us bold as we confront the world and the flesh, and the Devil, that in all these things we may know that, because thou art near, and that thou would never leave us nor forsake us, we can stand in boldness and in confidence, knowing that thou, Lord, art our shield and our exceeding great reward. Our God, we thank thee. In Jesus name. Amen.

Our scripture is Psalm 8. Our subject today is Man and the Creeds. With this, we conclude our series of studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church. “O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger. When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas. O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!”

We have been studying for several months now, the creeds and councils of the early church, and in a sense, our study today is a very inappropriate one: Man and the Creeds, but the creeds do not talk about man. The Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, they make no mention of man. They speak of the triune God, of the doctrine of salvation, of eternal life, of the resurrection of the body, of forgiveness of sin, but not of man. Why then is it necessary to have, at the conclusion of our studies a kind of footnote or appendix dealing with man and the creeds? For a very good reason. Because in recent years, all the books on the Apostles Creed, for example, as they have been written by most of our churchmen today, insist that the creeds are talking, not about God but about man, that they affirm not our faith in God but our faith in ourselves. What they do is it take the plain language of the creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” and with their Existentialist contortions, they make this add up to an affirmation of faith in man.

One writer, for example, concludes a chapter, or concludes his book rather, on the Apostles Creed with a chapter on man in the Creed, and he declares in this chapter that what the Apostles Creed is talking about is the universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all man, and the divinity of all men. Now this may seem strange to us who have been repeating the Creed from childhood to find that these modernist doctrines are somehow in there.

Moreover, he says, as against a belief in the triune God and the doctrine of sovereign grace, and predestination, the Apostles Creed he declares, “Asserts man is essentially his own savior, himself divine and therefore, a kind of incarnation.” This, we are told is what the Apostles Creed is talking about. This involves, of course, a fantastic misinterpretation, and a deliberate one, of the plain language of the Creed, but it is so that they read all of scripture as well as the Creed, and they tell us, these people, because their perspective is Existentialist, that we have a choice between obedience to authority and responsibility to ourselves.

Now what does this kind of language mean? Responsibility to ourselves? This, of course, is an impossibility if man is not under authority, if man has no God above and over him. For a man to be responsible just to himself is tantamount to saying that man is his own god, and God is responsible to no one. Responsibility is the accountability of a subject to a superior. Children are responsible to their parents, to their teachers, to all their superiors, and to God. Wives are responsible to their husbands, to all duly constituted authority in church and state, and to God. Men are responsible to all superiors at work, and to any organization in church and state, and responsible to God. Responsibility means that we are under authority, and to speak of man being responsible only to himself is to deny the idea of responsibility, and this, of course, is exactly what they have done. Their purpose is to gain, for man, unlimited liberty, which means man is his own god, and of course, every attempt to put man in the Creed on the part of these men is an attempt to put God out of the Creed. When they declare this particular book I cited on the Apostles Creed that man is essentially his own savior, himself divine, and therefore, a kind of incarnation, they are writing God out of the Creed.

It is not surprising, therefore, that a few of the more honest churchmen today, like Thomas J. J. Altizer, who heads the Death of God movement, has said so openly. Altizer declared, at one university recently, “The Christian can rejoice in the death of God because he is free from any kind of ultimate norm and therefore, he is released to live thoroughly in the present. He is liberated.” This is the goal. To free man from any kind of ultimate norm, from any ultimate law, from any ultimate standards, to make man his own God, choosing for himself what constitutes right and wrong.

The motive for such thinking, I think, can be readily described. It is, first of all, the old satanic temptation. Satan tempted man, Genesis 3:5 tells us, saying, “Ye shall not surely die. Ye shall be as God,” every man is their own God, “knowing” (and the Hebrew word knowing has the force of determining), knowing, determining, or deciding for yourself, “what is good and evil.” Every man his own God, every man his own moral arbiter. It is the denial of ultimate norms for self-created ones.

Second, in such thinking, man identifies liberty and liberation as freedom from any kind of ultimate norm or law. Freedom is to be free from God, and this is exactly what the pulpit today is telling us on all sides. Man’s true salvation is not in and through Jesus Christ. It is in freedom from God, and so the whole goal of our present day preaching is to save man, supposedly, by liberating him from God. Hence it is that they talk about the death of God, and declare that we should rejoice in it.

Third, man is supposedly to be freed from God to create his own norms and to be his own ultimate law. Every man his own God and his own law. Such thinking takes two forms. One is anarchism, every man his own law, and you have a total anarchic world in which there is no law, and some have openly espoused this. No law against narcotics, no law against theft, no law against murder, no law against anything, because how can you legislate against God, and every man is his own God. There is a vast amount of literature along these lines.

The other alternative, when man is his own law and his own god, is total statism, in which the collective divinity of all men is incorporated in the state, and the state becomes the super-God, and the states becomes the absolute law. This, of course, is Marxism. It is Fabian socialism. It is John Dewey’s progressivism. It is Graham Wallace’s Great Society. It is what we see all around us. When they talk about putting man into the Creed, they are talking about abolishing God from the Creed, and the result is not the death of God, but the death of man, because when man is delivered from God into his own hands, it is the end of man. Man then has no appeal against injustice. How can man appeal against himself? How can man escape from himself? When man is his own oppressor, when man is his own burden, how can man escape from himself? There is then no source of help{?}, and if the state is the god and the ultimate law, then there is no appeal against the state, and you have absolute tyranny.

Moreover, when man places himself in the Creed and makes himself his own god, man makes himself, therefore, in fallible and perfect, but God is infallible and perfect, and then you deny progress. If Washington can take care{?} of states, or the U.N. can make no mistakes, then how can we have progress? The world can never change, can never move ahead, because it has no concept of anything past. The only way progress can be reintroduced into such humanistic thinking is to say that man is evolving to a higher state, and this is the only way they have reintroduced the possibility of progress. They declare, as Henry Still has, in Will the Human Race Survive? that man is simply a stage in evolution and we are going to develop into macro life, and macro life means that the whole world will be one state, and probably there will be a one interplanetary state, ultimately, which will be one life form, and what we call individuals today will then be no more than single cells in the macro life. Today, we do not consider the rights of the cells in our body, of the cells for example, in our nails, or in our hair, or in our skin, and we will have no more significance in this so-called glorious future in macro life because we will be, we are told, only cells, and the macro life can do with the cells as it sees fit.

This is what the new Creed amounts to. It takes the Apostles Creed and reinterprets the language to give man unlimited liberty, to make man his own god and his own savior, but the Bible declares that man is created a creature, and therefore, he has limited liberty and limited power, and man cannot be his own savior. Man cannot even determine the most simple things about his life. We can determine the day of his birth? And who can determine how tall he shall be, or what his aptitudes can be? Man is not free to be a god, but he is free to be the man God made him to be. For man to beat and escape from God is to seek the impossible. As David said in Psalm 139, “Whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, behold thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, thou art there.” Man cannot escape from God, but this is what the sinner seeks. As Dr. Cornelius Van Til has said, “If there were one button in the universe which, if man could press, could give him an experience isolated from God, an experience which would not involve God, which would involve him in total independence from God, man, the sinner, would eternally press that single button,” but there is no such button. In every point, in every experience, man is face to face with God, even in the innermost recesses of his being, he is face to face with God, because God made him, and the stamp of God and the testimony of God is on every single cell of his body, on every grain of dust, on every atom in the universe.

David, in Psalm 8, as he marveled at the handiwork of God, declared, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.” The glory of this indeed is amazing. Man was created by God in his own image, created to have dominion over the earth. Man, by sin, fell, lost dominion over the earth and over himself, but in Jesus Christ is recreated to have dominion, to have all things put under his feet, be priest, prophet, and king over the earth in Christ. This is man’s destiny. But how and where is man to be found in the Creed?

These people tell us man is in the Creed, and our answer is, “Yes, but not in the sense in which you declared.” Man was in the Creed but not as the object of the Creed, because the Creed is not about him, nor is he the subject of the Creed for the faith is the subject of the Creed. Man is in the Creed only as the believer. He appears in a single word, the first person pronoun, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” I believe. This is man’s calling. This is man’s place in the Creed, as the confessor. Man’s salvation is not to be of himself, but to submit to every word of God, “For man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God.” Man’s salvation is to believe in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, to declare the biblical faith, confess the triune God, to say, “I believe,” and to become the confessor of God’s glory and truth, and to become the recipient of God’s grace and prosperity. For the chief end of man, as the catechism long ago declared, is to enjoy God and to glorify him forever. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that thou hast called us by faith to be thy people, to confess thy name, to rejoice in the majesty of thy word, to stand in thy promises which are yea and amen through Jesus Christ our Lord. Our Lord and our God, we thank thee for so glorious a destiny. We thank thee that thou hast made us lords over creation in Jesus Christ, that thou hast put all things under our feet. Make us therefore, bold in faith, and confident unto victory. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] I am wondering if we could discuss Satan just a little bit. I was listening to somebody this week talking about the word Satan. {?} the faith in Jesus Christ {?} . I was saying to myself, Can you have that {?}. How can you have faith {?} somebody saying {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. A very good point.

[Audience] {?} in other words, from all the words {?}

[Rushdoony] The word “faith” has a variety of meanings, and we must, as you so well pointed out in your question, understand its ramifications. There is, first of all, the very purely going into some of the high points of what faith involves. There is first the purely human faith, which means basically self-confidence. You face the world with self-confidence. You have faith that you can do this or that, and this is an important factor in the life and experience of a man. They have found with tests run under hypnotism for example, that a man whose normal gripping power will test out to so many pounds, or a woman for that matter, they’ve tried it on both, will, under hypnosis, be told that he is a sick and dying man, have almost no grip, but if they tell him or her that they are Samson, the strongest man in the world, their grip will test out to a phenomenal degree. Now, faith in this sense is purely a human thing. It is self-confidence, and this is not what the Bible is talking about. So, when they are talking about faith in science and what is going to be done in the future, they are talking about this purely human faith, confidence in your abilities, either as an individual, or confidence in your abilities collectively as men. This has nothing to do with what the Bible is talking about.

When the Bible is talking about faith, it is talking about something that is supernatural. It is the gift of God, and in Hebrews, we are told, in Hebrews 11, some very important things about faith. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. “ So that, first of all, faith is the substance or ground, or confidence, and there have been some commentators in the past who’ve said that there is the connotation of title deed there. When someone gives you a title to something, it means you have title in that property although you have never seen it, and I know some people who have title to some very fine property that they’ve never seen, which they have inherited or which they have never been able to see since they negotiated it for{?}, but they have a title deed for it. They own it even though they have not seen it. So, faith is the substance. It’s the title deed. It’s the reality of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Our evidence again is a legal term, and evidence says that here is proof.

Now, the humanistic faith is self-confident. It may or may not be valid, but the Bible is talking about something that is a supernatural thing which is a matter of evidence, and God says it is. It is substance. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. So that faith witnesses to us that God is creator of heaven and earth, and that all things were made by him. So that faith is a form of knowledge. It is the key to knowledge. Then, in the sixth verse, we are told further that “But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” So that faith also brings us to God with the evidence that he is, with the evidence that he will reward us, so that we make our stand not in terms of being rewarded by men, but by our Father which is in heaven with an absolute confidence.

Thus, faith is the gift of God. It is a supernatural thing given by God. It is not a human affirmation or a human self-conscience. It is the grace of God in our hearts which makes us to respond to him. The Bible speaks of it as the difference between life and death, and St. Paul says, “Ye which were sometimes dead in your sins and trespasses are now alive in Jesus Christ.” What is the difference? Faith. Jesus Christ has saved us. We have been regenerated, and have faith, they are alive. So, this is the meaning of faith from the biblical perspective. Does that help clarify it?

[Audience] Yes, except {?} say that there is {?} faith {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. We know it, and we are the fruits of it, as well as God’s word, because we are alive in him. We ourselves are evidence of the grace of God.

[Audience] {?} unbelievers {?}

[Rushdoony] They have faith but it is not a supernatural faith. Their faith is in dialectical materialism, that everything is going to work out in terms of the determined plan, you see, a materialistically determined plan, so they have the blueprints. They’re moving in terms of faith, but it’s a faith without substance. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] They are then Existentialists, believing in themselves, you see.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Right. Existentialism is the reigning philosophy of the day, and you deny that there is anything in the world except yourself. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No. It goes back basically as far as to Satan’s temptation. The Tower of Babel was the affirmation of the same thing. Then this kind of faith is being formalized first in some of the ancient peoples, the Phrygians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Greeks in particular, and from then it infected Phariseeism, which is a product of such thinking, and the basic motif is still, to this day, pre-Christian pagan. It has captured Judaism. It’s captured the {?} as well, and the original pagan motifs are still very obvious, and the symbols also.

[Audience] But more specifically, {?} part of the reason that either of these cults, not just Phariseeism, but others, {?} followers, all of the followers, of course, are {?}. However, {?} of some others {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, but that was a very, very old belief, before they ever encountered it. It was a very old belief, and you have it in a highly refined form in some of the earlier societies. Yes?

[Audience] {?} Christian. If people cannot see a definite {?}, there is to be a {?} participate, {?} has no merit, because right now, they can’t see what its objective would be {?}. Is that a {?}?

[Rushdoony] It’s hard to say. It would depend on the person.

[Audience] But {?} a lot of hard work {?} but because {?} results of that effort, I wondered {?}

[Rushdoony] No, not necessarily, because we don’t always understand the meaning of what we are experiencing, and the purpose of it. This does not mean we are Existentialists. It means that we haven’t yet ascertained what God’s purpose is in this. We have all undergone some kind of experience or other, or a great many in our lives, and never understood at the time the meaning of it, but it has been a part of God’s separation of us for our work or for faith, or for a particularly responsibility, or perhaps for our responsibility and initiation{?} at the end of the world.

[Audience] {?} we don’t have to understand {?} analyzing everything {?} deciding what {?}

[Rushdoony] We should know he has a purpose, and we’re going to find out sooner or later, so very often there’s no point in trying to. Where we can, we should {?} to, but we need to take all things from the hand of God.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No. I do not. We shall be going into Daniel this time {?} next Sunday. We will begin that series of studies chapter by chapter in the book of Daniel and then Revelation, and in these studies, I hope your questions will not be geared against other opinions, because I’m not going to teach them in order to fight with anybody else’s interpreting Daniel, but just to understand it as I believe scripture should be understood, and so I hope in the succeeding weeks, in the first two or three weeks, there isn’t much that’s controversial, but there are controversies over the interpretations of certain passages, and I want our focus to be to understand {?}. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] The answer to that, I think, is this. Japan has better capacities for making the atomic bomb than most countries in the world, far better than, for example, France and Britain. The industrial potential is very great. Now, if they want to have the bomb as a deterrent, they can make it themselves this year. They can do it. If they aren’t interested in any such thing as a deterrent say, to communism in the Far East, well our gift of one or more bombs {?} gift. In other words, either Japan is going to see that it has to make a stand or it isn’t going to make a stand, and you cannot put a responsibility and a position on people if they aren’t assuming it for themselves. We have given a great deal in the way of {?} to a great many countries in the world, and all we have for it is the bill, no results. Are there any other questions?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?} Israel might again be {?} Arab situation, and anything to do with the {?}

[Rushdoony] No. First, I don’t think there are going to be {?} and second, I don’t see that it has anything to do with property. Yes?

[Audience] {?} if somebody dropped the bomb and {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Any other questions or comments?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, not in this series. Perhaps at a later time if you’re interested, I’ll take up the various Reformation Creeds. There are several outstanding Creeds. The Lutheran Serbs had several excellent ones, there are the various Calvinist {?} including the Westminster, the Scottish Creeds are especially fine, and of course, the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and if you are interested, some time in the future, after we go through this series, we could go into the Reformation Creeds. It would be a long series again, because there is a great deal of material there in the Creeds, very specific and detailed, and of course, we are getting some Creeds right now that are totally Bartian{?} and like the Creed of 67 which the Presbyterian church is adopting right now. It is a Bartian{?} creed which puts man in the center, which effectively dissolves the biblical faith and in favor of {?} Existentialism and social action, so that it will be really a social action agency, a revolutionary movement rather than a Christian church, and this is true of virtually all the churches. This is true of Kroku{?} and his new group such {?} major denominations into a super church as a first step toward a world church Everything in line for Kroku{?} (it would be easy to mispronounce that and come closer to the truth), hints of really a revolutionary social agency. Its purpose is the deception of the church.

We see, at the same time by the way, and perhaps some of you have seen a tabloid paper that McIntyre recent put out a special issue on the Internal Revenue Service. The Internal Revenue Service is cracking down on many churches now because they are not affiliated with the National Council, but if you give them the name of the church and tax exemption if they are disaffiliated, or have never affiliated.

[Audience] {?} the Jewish synagogue and the Buddhist {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, this applies to the Protestant churches primarily, because of course, these other groups are basically united already with them. The Buddhists, the Jews, the Catholic groups, are all united together in the United Nations organization, in UNESCA, they are all members together. So that there has been union effected of the sort already, and now there will be progressive unions down below. There are only a handful of small groups that are not involved in this.

[Audience] When you realize the infallibility{?} of the law of {?}, there must be a {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. The {?} movement is being taken care of progressively through things like this, and one such measure, of course, is precisely this Internal Revenue step, but it is also a fact today that any wealthy men who are taking steps to implement steps to resistance, are finding the government working on them night and day so that they will be too ties up legally to do anything, and some of their developments, we cannot really talk about publically, have taken place in just the last few days, are staggering, so there is a move to destroy any possible reaction by killing it at the point of origin. Yes?

[Audience] {?} these small groups?

[Rushdoony] There doesn’t seem to be any. The Internal Revenue is virtually a law unto itself.

[Audience] What specific steps {?} in this area? {?} Is it that it’s threatened or is it {?}

[Rushdoony] No, they’ve actually taken the tax exemption away from a number of churches.

[Audience] On what ground?

[Rushdoony] That the church is not a member of the National Council.

[Audience] It isn’t a subterfuge{?} or another reason given? That is the reason given?

[Rushdoony] That reason has actually been given in this tabloid, McIntyre a photocopy of one person’s tax returns where they had given quite a few thousand to a particular church, and the notation from Internal Revenue was, “Disallowed. Church is not associated with the National Council.”

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, if you write to Dr. McIntire and ask for his tabloid, a special tabloid in the Internal Revenue Service {?} and send some money, he’ll send you a number of copies, I’m sure.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Huh?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, they’ve taken a lot of {?} and I believe Billy Harvest’s is either taken away or in process of being taken away. The reason given in his case was that one or two of his {?} spoke critically of his {?} on prayer, and advocated {?} and a Mennonite{?}. This made them a lobbyist. Of course, the National Council is indulging in full time lobbying without any trouble. It just depends on what you’re lobbying for. The National Rifle Association, incidentally, is also in process of being examined. The Sierra Club has had its exemption taken away. Yes?

[Audience] One important point here is some folks don’t realize is that {?}

[Rushdoony] Not entirely so, John. The origin of tax exemption is this, and this is the reason why the early church was persecuted in the Roman Empire. The thesis of the Roman Empire and of every pagan {?} in Antiquity was this, that the state was god and savior, absolute lord over man. That every religion that existed had to be licensed, and it could not exist until it applied for permission, and then it was deemed, in effect, a branch of the Department of Public Works, of the state. Now, the church refused to apply to Rome for legality. The witness of the church was that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior. The Emperor is not the one who should give us permission to worship. So that we cannot go to the state and ask for the right of worship. This is required of us by God.

Now, at any time had the church gone to the Roman Empire and say, “We want to be licensed as a regular religion in the Empire,” then it would have been granted. They would have acknowledged the overall sovereignty of the Emperor, he would have offered incense to his image. Then he could have gone up and had what they would have called wrongly a Christian church, but the thesis of the church was simply this: we are the kingdom of Jesus Christ. We are independent of the state. The state has no jurisdiction over us, and they maintained what the Old Testament maintained, that the sanctuary was privileged grounds, that the officers of the state could not come into through the doors of the church to make any arrest, or to seize any person, because this was God’s territory, and therefore, it had, as it were, diplomatic immunity from the state.

Now, they fought and they won, and it was basic to our Western liberty, because of course, it led to the concept that is basic to the Bible. The state is to minister justice. It has no jurisdiction in any other realm. It does not have jurisdiction over the family. It has no jurisdiction over education. It has no jurisdiction over business. It’s not the overall institution, but it’s one institution among many. If you say the state or any institution has right over others, then tomorrow another institution might say, “Oh, but we have that right,” and the church did for awhile, and it said, “We have the right to guide, and direct, and lay down the law for every institution.” For awhile, in the later Middle Ages, the universities claimed that right and it’s doing it again, that it is the one that lays down the law to everyone else, and has a right to reorganize the world in terms of its own ideas, but according to God’s law, the {?} works out in Mosaic law, but is a ministry of justice, that is the state, and it’s concern is justice, just that. There is the ministry of grace, which is the church. There is the family, that’s an independent institution. It’s not under the church, and it’s not under the state. It is directly under God as church and state are. The school, or education, is directly under God, and it should not be under anyone else. And business, each businessman is under God. He is not under the state, and he’s not under the church.

Now, this kind of thinking is what made possible our liberties. Our country was established on this kind of idea, and the Puritans in the early days spoke of these as covenant spheres. The family, the church, the school, business, private associations, all these in the state were different covenant spheres. So a man entered into a covenant with God, and God promised him that if he obeyed him, that he would bless him in that sphere. If he disobeyed him, he would be under the curse of God.

Now, this is what we have to get back to, and we’ve had centuries of trouble in our Western history because either the state or the church is claiming to be the overall institution, and this business of tax exemption is precisely this. Originally, the Constitution gave the federal government income only from excise and import taxes. So that only duties on goods that went out of the country or came in, it is the only way the government could raise funds to support it. We’ve gone a long ways from that, and the purpose was deliberately to keep the federal government in its place. So that the farmer could be independent, the school could be independent, and the church, and business, and every other sphere.

Now, tax exemption originally applied, you see, precisely to those Christian institutions whose purpose was to do the work of God in the particular sphere, and only since, well, Carnegie in particular, have foundations been deflected to another purpose, but the purpose of foundations and tax exemptions for foundations, like that of tax exemptions for the churches was that this was an area that belonged to God, and man under God, and the state had no jurisdiction.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] You mean the

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] So that {?} the Protestant church, Mormon church is one of the biggest property groups in the United States. The Church of England, well over 50% of its income comes from business sources that it owns. However, these are not the churches that are having trouble. They are working hand in glove with the state, so that these who are abusing this tax exemptions are precisely the ones that are working with the state to destroy those who are Christian, so this move is not against {?} and business, {?} particular business. It’s against churches that are in Christian work. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Runaway inflation could wipe out these foundations very well, yes. Yes?

[Audience] A lot of foundations today are being set up as tax dodgers. I even know of a $125 million organization that was set up, and the only son of the fellow who left his money was named in the {?} the foundation as an administrative {?} available. He was better off {?} had the money, but there was no inheritance paid.

[Rushdoony] That’s true, but those who are being given these privileges are not those on our side, so it is becoming a {?}, and a very ugly one, but you see, legitimate organizations are denied what is their God-given right, {?} foundations under a law that was set up for Christian purposes.

Well, our time is ended, so we stand dismissed.

End of tape