Salvation and Godly Rule

Work

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Works

Lesson: Work

Genre: Speech

Track: 51

Dictation Name: RR136AB51

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our text is 2 Thessalonians 3:6-12, and our subject: Work. “Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us. For yourselves know how ye ought to follow us: for we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you; neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you: not because we have not power, but to make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us. For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat. For we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies. Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread.”

It is important for us always to understand the context of scripture. One of the problems that the apostles faced as they went out into the Greco/Roman world was the prevailing belief that to get something in this world, basically what you needed was luck, and if you pleased the gods, then the gods would give you luck. So that work and religion were not connected in their thinking, and if you had ahold of the right combinations, the right gods, then your problems were solved, and so it was that there were people who came into the church figuring, “I have all the answers to my problems here. This may be the new thing,” just as today, people go into the various charismatic groups figuring that, “Here is the answer to my problem,” and we see, every few years, some new wave of so-called Christianity come along in which people feel, “I have the answer here. Here is some gimmick. Here is some kind of enthusiasm which will answer my problems.” But we saw last week that our salvation means a return to reality, and that we again see the logical nexus between events and events, and between character and events. We see causality in the world. We see that the world is governed by God, and that it is not a world of man’s imagination, that people do prefer their dreams, and they go back to their dreams with an intensity, and there is an appeal always when a man offers, either politically or religiously, a dream world as man’s salvation.

This past week I was at Hillsdale College, together with a number of other men from all over the world, giving a series of lectures, and for me the high point of the week was a debate between Enoch Powell, a classical scholar at Cambridge and a member of Parliament, rated the second most popular man in England next to Prince Philip, and Hugh Gardner Ackley who has been a government economist, an official in the OPA during World War 2, and serving under the democratic president through Johnson in one capacity or another. On one occasion, as an ambassador to Italy, but usually it’s a government economist. It was very interesting to hear Ackley defend wage and price controls, to defend government interference, to defend the idea that the government by passing some kind of set of laws, could bring in utopia, and at one point, he actually made this statement in defending government actions. He said, “We can eat our cake and have it, too.” There we have one of the most influential economists of the past thirty years speaking, more than thirty years. There is no sense of reality there.

Now it is precisely this that is concerning Paul in our passage. To get these men who had crowded into the Thessalonian church after his ministry there to realize that reality and salvation are closely linked. If you have been saved, you live in a real world, and so the fact that he emphasizes over and over again is the fact that some are walking disordering or, St. Paul puts it, out of step. They’re not working, and so he says, We commanded “that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

Let us analyze the significance of work to see why it is so important in scripture, and why there is so much said about work from one end of the Bible to the other. In fact, if you go to the book of Proverbs, which is the summation of biblical wisdom, a very large percentage of it has to do with work. For the Puritans, a great sin was idleness. The dictionary defines work thus: “work is the generic term for any continual application of energy toward an end.” Work can be, as the dictionary goes on to say, mental, or physical, easy or hard, but it is the continuous application of energy towards and end, a goal, or a purpose. Because of this purposive nature of work, it is inseparable from true religion, because what religion gives us is the goal, the purpose, the meaning of life, and work is the continuous application of energy to that purpose, to that end, so that when scripture, having redeemed us, sets before us the calling of God, it then requires us to work to that end.

As about a year ago when we dealt with another aspect of work, we saw that work is despised the world over, and the productivity in non-Christian cultures is very, very small. Let us develop that point a little further this time. Work is regarded, in many cultures throughout history, as something to be done either out of necessity or if you’re in a position to do so, to assign it to a slave. In very many cultures to this day, mental and physical work are the duty of slaves, of underlings. In history books, we read about Arabic science. What the history books do not tell us is that the Arabs had science only as long as they had Christians as captives, and when the Christian captives and their children disappeared, there were no more scientists, no more engineers and artists, and Arab culture declined. The Babylonians, as we know from the book of Daniel and elsewhere, had most of their country run by captives, like Daniel. Daniel, Shaddrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and other young men who were captives like themselves, became rulers of provinces and in Daniel’s case, president of the counsel of the governor. This was routine in Babylonian religion and faith. They did the fighting and captured people, and then they sat back and told them to work. The same strategy was commonplace among the Turks, and many, many other cultures in civilization.

We have it very much with us today. For example, one scholar in writing about contemporary Ethiopia, tells us of the attitude of the Amharic people. The Amharic people are not Negroid. They rule over the Negroid people and they are the aristocracy of the people. There are three elements: the Amharics, the Arabs, and the Negroes. For the Amharic people, work is the ultimate in disgrace, and so today it is commonplace among the Amharic peoples if they are poor, to have apprenticed their daughters at the age of thirteen, to a house of prostitution and they work there until they are twenty and build up a dowry for themselves. The idea, of course, is there is no disgrace in this, but for them to be a typist, or a stenographer in any of the government offices is the ultimate in disgrace. After all, a prostitute can make a lot of money and she can buy a couple of slaves, that they usually do. The very same attitude prevails among the Arabs. Another scholar, O’Callaghan, writes of the Arab, “He is a proud man, too proud to do any menial work. From time immemorial there were slave of that type of work, and as long as the Arab has money to buy them, he will do so,” and the reason for the tremendous outburst of slavery in our modern world is that the Arabs are now oil-rich. Being oil-rich, there is a tremendous market for slaves, and as a result, the slave caravans are today moving into every part of Africa, buying slaves, and shipping them to the Arabian area. So that slavery is very much on the increase.

But, of course, the same attitude prevails among African Negroes. Thus, “Although the African male is attached to the soil, he does nothing to cultivate it. This is left to the women and children. They are beasts of burden. The mode of power for all agricultural operations, women in the African tribes are treated as little better than cattle. Indeed, in some tribes like the Mazdi{?}, the cattle are considered more valuable.

In many, many periodicals, including National Geographic, the Tuaregs of the Sahara Desert are portrayed in very favorable terms, and they are regarded as the knights of the deserts. The Tuaregs, who are in origin not Negroid, but who have become very black in the process, are extremely prone to regard even the slightest work, picking up the slightest thing other than a weapon, as the ultimate in that which is degrading. Thus, various scholars, Lord Shackelford of England, have called attention to what goes on there today, and no country in the world doing anything about it. in an address not too long ago before Parliament, which got nowhere, Lord Shackelford said, “Speaking of the Vela{?} people, a African people, they are afraid of the Tuaregs. These Vela{?}, men women, and children belong to their masters body and soul. I have lived in the Tuareg camps, and I have seen these slave girls and slave women working from dawn until dusk. I should explain that among the Tuareg women sadness is considered a sign of great beauty, so this is a sign of beauty because it means you don’t work. And the Tuareg women are not allowed to do any work even if they should want to. So there they lay, rather like felines in the zoo after feeding time, watching their slaves from behind the folds of their indigo veils, and doing nothing. Moreover, the Tuareg castes of nobles refer to and think of themselves as nobles, and nobles do no work, Nobles in the Sahara I mean to say. This is the Lord speaking. No Tuareg noble would think of handling a spade, erecting a tent, or carrying a gourd of water, and so they have these great herds of slaves, exactly as they have always had great herds of sheep, and in the great waste of the Sahara, they have been able to preserve this institution of slavery some sixty years after the French occupation put an end to slavery. I have lived in these camps and seen these little skinny boys with bellies horribly distended from malnutrition, going out in the morning before dawn with the herds, and I have known that until they came back in the evening, they would be in the desert without anything to eat or drink, and when they got back after the Tuareg nobles had eaten, and after their wives had had their ration of milk, if there was anything left, they would get. I have seen the marks of cruelty on their body. If they are disobedient or if they lose an animal by neglect, they are tied to a tree and lashed until they lose consciousness, and sometimes they do not recover and are just left to die.

Another scholar has given his report on what happens now as we pour money into these various new nations in Africa, and how they are reverting to a new kind of slavery and barbarism, and one scholar comments, “It was thought that when some of the African {?} became tribalized, this practice, that is, of slavery, would disappear, and that they would adopt the white man’s ways when they got moved to the city. Instead, the position became worse. They got jobs as taxi drivers, or in garages, or as houseboys, and probably for the first time owned some money. Saving this, the African went back to his tribe and with it, he bought a wife. He brought her to the city and {?} her in a shack and rented her out to his friends who could not afford a wife. Soon, he had the money to buy another friend which he duly did. He rented her out and bought a third. In the course of a few years, he had acquired nine or ten wives, all of whom were earning him a steady income. I know several taxi drivers in Nairobi who have several wives acquired in this way. They say, proudly, that there is now no need for them to work, that the taxis are useful for ferrying clients from the center of Nairobi to the brothel districts of Easlay{?}.”

Now, as these scholars point out, the net result of it is that they live off the tourists and take the income to enslave their people more and more, so we are seeing a massive return to slavery, and less and less concern about it, and of course, socialistic economies are nothing more than a modern form of enslavement. The world thought instead of becoming a world in which men worked in order to further the kingdom of God, to establish the rule of God’s law in one area after, work as slaves of other men, or as slaves of a socialist state.

But when we go to scripture, we find the proverbs and all of scripture emphasizing very strongly the necessity of work. Adam, in the Garden of Eden being assigned work, and the summation of the Old Testament attitude being that it was the duty of all parents to teach their children the law of God and some form of work, for if they did not teach him scripture and work, they taught him to be a thief. Now, it is interesting that the Puritans adopted this same standard in terms of their understanding of scripture, and a scholar of Puritan culture, Edmund S. Morgan has said, “The parents had to provide for his children because they were unable to provide for themselves. If he were ever to free himself from the obligation, he must see to it that they knew how to earn a living. If you’re careful to bring them up diligently in proper business, Benjamin Wadsworth advised parents, you take a good method for their comfortable substance in this world, and their being serviceable in their generation, you do better for them than if you should bring them up idly and leave them in great estate. According to Puritan law, every father had to see that his children were instructed in some honest, lawful calling, labor or employment, either in husbandry or some other trade profitable for themselves, and the commonwealth, if they will or cannot train them up in learning to fit themselves for higher employment.”

Thus, if parents fail to teach their children to work a trade, or some kind of calling were punishable by the state in the Puritan era, and the goal in rearing children was to make them serviceable in their generation. Now, since the Puritans saw that work was a calling of man, basic to his life, it’s not surprising that slavery had no roots in New Engl. Slaves were bought and. Slaves were bought and sold there, but the real work around the place the Puritans did themselves because they felt they could do it better than any servant, and so slavery could not take root in New England.

Not only so, but the Puritans developed a very, very interesting custom, very early in the child’s life to somewhere between nine and twelve, they traded children. The boys and the girls were put into another home, and children from another home were placed into theirs, and Dr. Morgan, in describing this, says the parents knew how much they loved their children and how it would be hard for them at some point to teach them as well as someone else could, and so they would trade children and then rear up the child that was placed in their home, very strictly, the girl in all kinds of housekeeping and the boy in whatever kind of work they were doing. They learned from experience, but a child gained better manners and work habits in a home other than his own, and since they took very seriously and made a law their society that an incorrigible delinquent should be put to death in terms of God’s law. They took pains to avoid fostering an ill-mannered and undisciplined child.

Now, when we come to modern society, the goal of life is to reach a position in which work is not necessary, when others can work for you, to be idle. So that, as one sociologist, Daniel Bell, in a book Work and its Discontent, has said, “The goal of modern man in Western society in the United States and Europe is conspicuous consumption. That is, instead of being a producer, to be known as one who could spend freely, who could consume freely, and conspicuous loafing. Let it be known that you can kill time, and he says conspicuous loafing is very marked, even in factories, that the worker who has stated among other workers is the one who can goof off more successfully than others, who can perhaps work quickly and do something, and then stand around and treat work with contempt.

Then, as Bell continues, the most significant form taken by the flight from work is the desperate drive for leisure. Work is irksome, but if it cannot be evaded, it can be reduced. In modern times, the ideal is to minimize the unpleasant aspects of work as much as possible, by pleasant distractions (music, wall colors, rest periods), and to hasten away as quickly as possible, uncontaminated by work and unimpaired by its arduousness. A gleaming two-page advertisement in Life magazine shows a beautiful Lincoln car in the patio-living room of an elegantly simple house, and the ad proclaims: ‘Your home has walls of glass, your kitchen is an engineering miracle, your clothes and your furniture are beautifully functional. You work easily, play hard.’ The theme of play, of recreation, of amusement are the dominant ones in our culture today. They are the subject of the hard sell. Sport clothes, travel, the outdoor barbeque, the portable TV set, all become the hallmark of the times. In this passivity, there are already the seeds of decay.”

In other words, today, the reward is not for work in the eyes of modern man. Society honors him and respects him more when he runs from work and acts as though work is the last thing I need to do. The result is that society, which is as Bell said, defect{?} with the seeds of decay.

Now, it is interesting to see how we came to this position, and it can be very extensively documented. The present attitude, as I have said, was that the redeemed man is the working man, who now works out the meaning of his salvation, of his calling under God, by exercising dominion in every area of life. In the last century, men who were militantly anti-Christian systematically separated the doctrine of salvation and work. Karl Marx said that religion is the opium of the masses, and he said man can, by work, transform the world and change himself. So, work was separated from salvation, and the Marxists very emphatically developed a doctrine of work as the means of salvation. Now, the Puritans had said you are work{?} and that you are saved and then by works your sanctification is made manifest and the meaning of your salvation. It was not Marx alone who separated works from salvation, and gave a redeeming, a Messianic function, to work. It was done very extensively in this country by Taylor, the great efficiency expert, an engineer, and very definitely by a man who very American knows about, Henry Ford. Henry Ford wrote and published, in the twenties, a book which summed up his philosophy. It’s a rather rare book now. I’m fortunate to have a copy, and Henry Ford, in this book, has a chapter, the title of which is Machinery, the New Messiah. Now, says Ford, we have given Ford wings as it were, because we have machinery, he didn’t have the word automation, but this is what he was talking about. He was talking about the assembly line in the Ford Motor plant. We can accomplish so much, he said, that we will have a one world order of peace, of prosperity, and of plenty, and a United States of the world, and he said, “Ultimately it will surely come. How? Because work will accomplish it through machinery. Work will save the world.” So, he said, very emphatically, not only in his chapter, but throughout his book, man will be saved by machinery. Machinery, the new messiah.

Thus, first, the redeemed man, manifesting his sanctification by work, then Christ and redemption tossed out and work made the messiah, and then, beginning with the 1950’s, we see progressively work treated as a curse. Work as something to be rid of, and leisure, freedom from work, as the goal, and the result, of course, should not surprise us. Bell was right. This means the decay, the end of civilization. It means that work again becomes the function of slaves, because, in a society where men will not work you have slavery. Somebody has to work, and so the men on the top will enslave the rest and say, “With a gun or a bayonet, you work,” and of course, it should not surprise us that what I described earlier is now commonplace, an increase in slavery in Asia, and in Africa, and a return to slavery to the state on an unprecedented order as never before in history in the Iron Curtain countries.

But the Reformation saw the importance of work, and it saw a necessary connection with the doctrine of salvation. It was Luther who said, “A housemaid who does her work is no farther away from God than the priest in his pulpit.” But it is significant, as some scholars who are not Christian have admitted, that when men began to deny the scriptures and to deny that man has a life beyond the grave, the meaning of work disappears. If life is meaningless, then work is meaningless, and again, you revive the old Roman attitude: Eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow we die. After all, if nothing has any meaning, work is meaningless, too. Live it up while you can. Tomorrow you’ll be dead. That’s become the answer, and so the goal is no longer dominion under God, but domination over others to make them work so that you’re freed from work.

The people of Thessalonica were Greeks. They had the Greek philosophy, but it was a mark of a slave to work, and now that they were Christian and here was this marvelous messiah, Jesus, who performed such miracles, their attitude was, “Why work?” and because this attitude arose in their midst, the immediate reaction of Paul was, in very blunt language, “Throw them out,” because this is what he is saying, “Now, we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly (that is out of step), and not after the tradition which he received of us.” If anyone will not work, having nothing to do with him. It’s a test of their faith. If they quit their jobs and are coming around to be fed by the church, and they’re expecting Jesus Christ to return any day and take them out of a world of work or give them cradle-to-grave security, and this was the problem, because earlier in his epistle, Paul refers to a fraudulent letter sent in Paul’s name, propagating ideas that the marvelous, miraculous things were going to happen any day now with the second coming, that it was just a matter of days or a year or so away. “For yourselves know how ye ought to follow us: for we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you; neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; but wrought (that is, worked) with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you: not because we have not power, but to make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us. For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

Now, what is St. Paul telling us there? There are a number of passages like this in which he refers to the fact that he tells one church after another, “Now you know when I was there, I didn’t take any money from you, I worked, even though I was entitled to take it.” He did this, he says, for a number of reasons.

First, and foremost, “to be an example to you.” This is important to St. Paul. These people did not believe in work. Work was something to be ashamed of. You did it if necessity forced you to it because you didn’t own slaves who could work for you, and you had not inherited money, but as soon as you had reached the point where you didn’t have to work, you sat back and just managed the slaves while they worked, so Paul set an example of work. This is all the more important because what we should remember is that Paul was a very famous man in his day. This is why when he was at a hearing, not only the governor, but King Agrippa, came to see what Paul will say. What an amazing thing that so important a man in the Empire, coming from one of the great, wealthy families, a millionaire by birth, we know this about St. Paul from contemporary documents, is going around preaching for this little group of people who talk about Jesus having risen from the dead and being man’s savior. Why in the world would a man with all that wealth not only do this, but when he goes places, works as a saddle maker and tent maker? It attracted attention. St. Paul did it to set an example, an example of work.

Moreover, St. Paul wanted to teach these churches the whole gospel of God and knew how controversial what he had to say was. He was, after all, the target of hostility of the Judeizers who were going from place to place, stirring up people against him, so that St. Paul never had a single church where he didn’t have struggles, and so St. Paul made it a plan. He was not going to take anything from these churches. Now he felt he was entitled to and he tells the Corinthians, he tells the Thessalonians, he tells various groups, “I could have taken money from you. Instead I allowed it to be given for other purposes. I was entitled to, but I did not that I might have my full independence.”

Thus, St. Paul leaned over backwards to avoid being chargeable to any of the churches. When we realize what the standard of a church was, we realize how far backwards he leaned, how this did not keep him from trouble. He had trouble everywhere, but it gave him a stronger talking point in troubles. Today, we call any group that organizes in terms of a black book, or a red book, or a blue book, a church. Now, strictly speaking, these groups that call themselves are not churches in terms of the Old Testament and New Testament practice, in that a church was only a church when it was self-governing. Where two or three are gathered in the Lord’s name, there is the church, theologically, but institutionally, a church or a synagogue, because the difference was nil (one preached Christ and one didn’t, and we know that in Rome for the first century or so, most of the Christians called their church the synagogue, the meeting place). So as a church that could govern itself when it was self-supporting. Until it governed itself, until it was self-supporting, it could not govern itself, which is the same principle as in the family. You have the right to tell your child, “As long as I’m providing the roof over your head and the food on your table, and the cost of your schooling, you’re taking my word for things.” This is legitimate. It’s the kind of authority a parent should exercise. When he provides the care, he provides the government, now it doesn’t give him the right to be a dictator, his rule is under law. So it is with the church. The church that is responsible fully for its self-support, is alone the church that can govern itself.

Now, these were all missionary churches. Some had increased and were not, but St. Paul leaned over backwards doubly. First, he was not receiving anything from them, even though as a missionary station, he could still say you have no right to command me. In order to be able to teach them better by his example of work and by his independence from them.

“Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread.” It’s hard for us, since we are used to a world in which everybody, as soon as they grow up, goes out and gets a job and works, to realize what a key fact this was that St. Paul met the world of this day. Work, and especially to say that salvation means that man now works to exercise dominion, to subdue the earth, to be a responsible man with regard to his family. “If any care not for his own,” St. Paul tell us in another context, “he is worse than an infidel,” because he is now not only an unbeliever, but he’s an insult to the name of Christ which he professes. This was the significance of St. Paul’s message to the Thessalonians. A return to reality is a return to work to fulfill God’s calling., Enthusiasm, charisma are no substitution for work. It is revealing as to how seriously the Reformation took this principle that Calvin said that nonsupport was grounds for divorce. In the case of a man who was an alcoholic and was not supporting his family, Calvin said this is the same as desertion. He has deserted his responsibility. He is not working. He has deserted his responsibility in that he is not sober most of the time, so he told the wife. That’s desertion, even though he’s on the premises. If he had taken off for Italy or Spain it would not be any worse. It is desertion when a man forsakes his responsibility.

We thus, as we live in a generation that has turned its back on work, have all the more a tremendous responsibility and the key to power. Work always commands the future, and as the people of God, the working people, as we work and as we rear up our children and children’s children in terms of the word of God, redemption through the blood of Jesus Christ, work as the means of demonstrating our calling, and our election. Dominion exercised in one area after life through work. We are thereby the conquerors of the world. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that we have been redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ and called to work under thee and to establish they dominion. We thank thee that our labor is not in vain in the Lord, and that thou hast given us such a glorious destiny in thee. Make us ever mindful our Father, of the certainty of our triumph in Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.

We have time for just one or two brief questions. Any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] As the Puritans did, you mean? The question is, is it a lack of responsibility to pass the children on to someone else? No, the Puritans saw that as a fulfillment of responsibility because their belief was that just as we are sometimes likely to be a little more indulgent about our children, so children are sometimes a little more prone to take advantage of our love, but if a child is in a friend’s home, it’s a work situation. It isn’t a home situation. They know they’re there from morning till night to work, that as soon as they come home from school they have work to do, and so they thought it was an aspect of their responsibility, to rear up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord as clearly and as effectively as possible. We’re all on our best behavior before other people, and as a result, when children are put in that situation, the Puritans did demonstrate that they picked up work habits very quickly. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Exactly. As you see, being sinners we can abuse things, and it’s much easier to put up with something sometimes with your child, and it’s easier for him to take advantage of you, but if you’re with someone else, you cannot do it the same way. Just as, for example, the behavior of husband and wife will be much more restrained in public than it is at home. You can let your hair down at home, and you’ll say things you’ll never say in public. Now, it doesn’t mean you don’t love each other, but there is a relaxation of standards to a degree, but a child that is in another home, there is no relaxation of those standards. They cannot indulge to say themselves to the point of saying, “Oh, I don’t feel like doing it.” They get up and do it. They don’t give any sass, in other words. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] This has been demonstrated over and over again. We will obey someone else more readily. We are more inhibited about loafing or disobeying. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. The books of the Apocrypha are not part of the Bible. They are not inspired. They never have claimed to be. They were not normally a part of scripture. Some of them are full of myths and legends. Some of them are good history. Some of them are a summation of biblical teachings. The problem that the Council of Trent faced was that it had to try to answer the reformers in terms of the Bible. Later, they developed the idea of tradition, but at the time, they were trying to answer the Protestants that prayers for the dead, the question of merits of the saints being applied to people today, and so on, were not scriptural. Well, by going to some of the Jewish literature, they found some of these things. So, they took and included, in the canon, those books of the Apocrypha which gave them some ground for saying, we have the matter of the question of merits and of prayers for the dead in scriptures. So, they added them to the canon at the Council of Trent. Since the Council of Trent was an answer to the Reformation, what then happened was that the reformers and their heirs rather, because the reformers were mostly dead by that time, felt that the thing to do is to include these books of the Apocrypha in our editions of the Bible so that we can enable the people to see what they are, and to answer the Catholic apologists when they debate with them, when they meet them in the course of their work. So, its inclusion was very definitely for strategic purposes, but not as a part of scripture, and in their confessions.

For example, the Westminster Confessions lift every book of the Bible in the very first chapter, and distinguishes between the Apocrypha and the canon so that there would be no misunderstanding among the people as they say these books included between the Old and New Testaments, that these books were not a part of the canon. They were there for reasons of debate and purpose, or information, so that the believer would know what it was that provided the basis. So, they could examine those books and see how different those books were from the Bible, and then after this kind of argument began to wane, and after the theologians, especially in the last 100 years, began to develop the thesis that Cardinal Neumann{?} was most famous for: tradition, and the development and growth of tradition, justifying things that we would say are new in the faith, then the importance of the Apocrypha declined, both for Catholics and as far as Protestants still needing it in their Bible, so it was dropped.

Well, let’s bow our heads if there are no further questions, for the benediction.

And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape.