Salvation and Godly Rule

Pentecost and Responsibility

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Doctrinal Studies

Lesson: Pentecost and Responsibility

Genre: Speech

Track: 63

Dictation Name: RR136AH63

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture lesson is from the book of Acts 2:32-35. Our subject: Pentecost and Responsibility. The culminating point in St. Peter’s message on the Day of Pentecost. “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear. For David is not ascended into the heavens: but he saith himself, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thy foes thy footstool.”

A recent book written by Malachi Martin, an ex-Jesuit who retired from that order recently, is entitled Three Popes and a Cardinal. Malachi Martin was very close, during his many, many years in the Jesuit order, to the Vatican and to every man of consequence in Rome. What he has to say, even though at times his book is a most irritating one, is all the same of very great importance, because Martin was on the inside of so much planning and thinking. He shared a confidence, in particular, of Popes John and Paul, and Cardinal Bea. He points out that the goal of Pope John XXIII and of the Vatican Council 2, was that they could create a new Pentecost, a Pentecost of love and peace. That by a great gesture on the part of the church, the world would catch fire with love, peace, and unity among all men as men, that Buddhists and Mohammaden, Christian, Animist, all religions would live together in love and peace.

John remarked once to Cardinal Tardini, if we could only step outside ourselves, outside our {?}, our rings, our rules, our protocol, our dignities and {?}, and love and feel and act out that love, we would see our truth in fullness. All men would listen. He also spoke of a longing for a mystical life which would bind all religions to their particularities, and bind all religions in love. The purpose of Pope Paul VI’s sixth visit to the U.N. was to promote not only the U.N. as an agency in this unity of all men as men, irrespective of race, color, or creed, but also to use that occasion to promote this same idea. In essence, what these men had and have, as so clearly appears in Malachi Martin’s book, is an idea of a humanistic Pentecost, in which all men, as men, without reference to race, color, or creed, would say, “We are all men, we are all brothers, let us be one,” and of course, this faith now brings the World Council of Churches in Rome closer and closer together all the time.

This idea of a humanistic Pentecost is not new. In fact, we must say that these men have simply borrowed what the humanists have been teaching and preaching all along. Perhaps the most beautiful expression of it was by a poet, Siegfried Sassoon{?} in his poem, “Everyone Sang.” Sassoon, in his poem, has a vision of the whole world bursting into song, and the song going from heart to heart until all men are singing of happiness, and love, and peace. Sassoon, at least had some excuse for his feeling because it was written on occasions of the Armistice at the end of World War 1. Sassoon was a soldier, and his hope was that the joy and the peace that the soldiers felt when they jumped out of their trenches and embraced one another would catch the whole world up in a burst of peace and love, and so he concluded his poem, “Oh but everyone was a bird, and the song was wordless. The singing will never be done,” but of course it was done in a very short time, and the world went on its way with all the problems of conflict through the singing{?}. It is interesting that Sassoon stopped writing poetry, and though he lived many years and may, for all I know, still be alive as a very old man, he abandoned poetry. The song was gone out of him.

The first and the Christian Pentecost, of course, took place in Jerusalem. It has long appealed to the imagination of men, and through the centuries, various humanists, it would take days to go into the history of how humanists have dreamed of another Pentecost, of hark back to it, and they have said, “If only we could have a non-Christian Pentecost. If all men would be caught up by this spirit of love and peace, and brotherhood. If only some way we could spark such an experience, then all would be well.” The humanist wants another, a second, a humanistic Pentecost to replace the Christian Pentecost.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that today, Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement have a great appeal to the humanism of our time. For such people who are interested in Pentecostalism in the charismatic movement, in the love, sweetness, and peace, and light, fundamentalism and neo-evangelism, ignorance is bliss. That is, ignorance of creeds., ignorance of the Bible, ignorance, of the difference that sets people apart. The idea of all these movements, imbibed from dream of a humanistic Pentecost, is to concentrate on the bliss of experience, on their idea of salvation, to rhapsodize about it, to love everybody, to see good in all, to regard any insistence on truth as unloving, as divisive, and to work to catch up everybody in this bliss of love, of ignorance and really, irresponsibility. This is they key: irresponsibility.

What the humanistic Pentecost wants is to say, “We will say there is no problem. We will all love one another. We will all insist on peace. We will sugar-coat all problems with bliss.” What they demand is an intellectual and a working irresponsibility to the day by day responsibilities of life. It is significant that men and women who are caught up in this movement are indifferent workers. They’re always trying to rise above details, to rise above the hum-drum things of life. They want to rise above and live on a higher plane continually.

Some years ago, I had a very interesting discussion with a Pentecostal pastor, a very prominent man in his particular movement. He admitted very frankly that the people in the charismatic movement and movements were very frequently irresponsible, that there was a high proportion of immorality among them, that the kind of sexual immorality that you rarely ever found in say, a Lutheran or a Presbyterian congregation, or an Episcopal church, you would find as a routine thing, very common in their movement. Moreover, the people were very commonly irresponsible, that they were very poor workers on the whole, but having admitted this, he still refused to work for the kind of discipline most churches and most godly people seek to instill in their families and in their groups. His dream was that if they’d only work hard enough and prayed hard enough, and looked to the Spirit enough, they would have that full submission to the Spirit which would replace the need for discipline and somehow create a higher responsibility, and of course, the idea is ridiculous. You do not get discipline except through discipline, godly discipline, and somehow, they wanted to escape the need for discipline and get the same result as though the Spirit were going to do their work for them.

This same irresponsibility you find in all the “sweetness and light” people. They believe in rising above everything with love, to overlook conflicts, to overlook the fact of lies, to overlook everything, and this, in itself, is irresponsibility. It is an unwillingness to face the serious problems in life. They want to place powder and rouge over cancer and say, “All is well.”

Of course, the problem is this. Both the humanists, outside the church, and the humanists within the church do not understand the meaning of Pentecost, and as a result, they totally misinterpret its significance, and when they try to imitate Pentecost, they are imitating not the biblical Pentecost, but the Pentecost of their imagination. It would be worthwhile sometime to take a few months to go through the passages dealing with Pentecost. This would mean beginning with the book of Joel, and studying the whole of Joel because the book of the Prophet Joel is the prophesy of Pentecost. The very word “Pentecost” is very interesting. Pente, fifty. Fifty days after. It was a harvest festival which came fifty days after the departure from Egypt. It celebrated not only harvest, work, but also the giving of the law on Mount Sinai. So Pentecost is very closely related to the law, and this, most people, are unaware of. It is a rejoicing, therefore, in work, in responsibility in the law. This is its meaning in Israel. Then, when we study the book of Joel, we find that the whole point of Joel is this, and the whole point of all the prophets: Joel as a prophet, declares that the people have disobeyed the word of God. They have set aside his law and followed the imagination of their hearts, and God’s judgment is upon his people and upon all nations for their apostasy, and the time shall come when his judgment will wipe out, over a period of time, all the nations of the ancient world, and the Messiah will come, and the reigning powers of the world shall be darkened. The sun and the moon shall be shaken in the heavens. That is, the reigning powers of the world shaken, and a new power shall emerge, the people of God, all who call upon the name of the Lord, Joel says, and our Lord made it clear who these are. “Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father, which is in heaven.”

The meaning of Pentecost and of Joel’s prophesy concerning it, therefore, is that the old world is judged by God’s law, and it is set aside and a new nation, the people of God, is created as the new world power, which shall now pronounce judgment upon the nations, and work to conquer all things, and Joel declared, “Your son and your daughters shall prophesy. You old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” Now, what this means to us is rather different than what it mean to Joel, and to St. Peter, and to the men of the Christian Pentecost. As we read those words, we tend to think of them in terms of what modern Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement thinks it means, but as Joel intended it, and as Peter understood it, it means that all should become prophets. Men who speak in terms of the law word of God, and rebuke men and nations, saying “You have departed from God’s law. Repent and believe in God, and in his son, Jesus Christ, or you shall be judged, and you shall perish.” Now, this is the meaning of prophesy. This is what Joel declared it was, and this is why Peter got up and made the statement that he did.

In Acts 2, we have the first step in the missionary work of the early church. On the day of Pentecost, the whole point of Peter’s preaching to the assembled men is, first, to tell them of the prophesy of Job, then to declare that they have sinned, that they have taken the very son of God and crucified him, so that they have compounded all their apostasy, their disobedience of God’s law in the past, now with the crucifixion of his only begotten son. Then he speaks at the resurrection of Christ. “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear. For David is not ascended into the heavens: but he saith himself, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thy foes thy footstool.” God has raised up Jesus from the dead, Peter declared, and in terms of the prediction of David, summoned him to sit at his right hand in the throne of glory while his people work to make all Christ’s enemies Christ’s footstool.

Now, this is a point made often in scripture. Psalm 18:40, for example, says, “Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies that I might destroy them that hate me.” The very next episode in the book of Acts is the imprisonment of Peter and John in the first step of this battle against the world, that their assurance even in prison of victory in the war. Pentecost, thus, is inseparable from responsibility. The humanistic dream of Pentecost is one of religious irresponsibility, and it is not surprising that, in every age when you have had the humanistic dream of Pentecost prominent, whether in the Middle Ages, or in the early modern era, or today, there is not only this dream of responsibility in a humanistic Pentecost, but a corresponding character in people, an inability to work well. The humanistic dream in every age where you find the dream of Pentecost is one of “life is a continuous vacation.” They want the best job with the highest pay with the least responsibility. You find also at such times that what is called the “new morality” flourishes. Simply another name for the old sin, and the new morality is simply irresponsibility. The whole appeal of fornication and adultery is that it is sex without responsibility. It is a form of infantilism.

St. Peter, when he cited David, was quoting Psalm 110. The Psalm reads, “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.” In this psalm, Christ, the great priest-king is seen as the world conqueror, who conquers the world sitting from in heaven, on the throne of glory, and in every age, his people are those who are willing, who go forth in his power, and who have, as it were, the dew of youth, who come forever fresh and new, because they are filled with his power, and so, Christ can sit on the throne in confidence, in the absolute assurance that his people shall prevail, that he need not be troubled nor dismayed, not stand nor peace in anxiety {?}. He is portrayed as sitting on the throne in confidence. His people shall triumph.

The humanistic Pentecost of the World Council of Churches, and of Popes John, Paul, and others leads to Babel, not to Pentecost. It leads to destruction and lawlessness, not peace. The humanistic Pentecost, every day around us, is aggravating the problems of the world rather than solving it, but the Pentecost of Christ proclaims to us that Christ now sits, confident, on the throne of glory, knowing that his predestined army shall subdue all things. He shall prevail. Pentecost, therefore, gives us the fullness of responsibility, the fullness of God’s law, the fullness of his power and of his grace, and declares unto us that he is indeed victorious, and he is the one who has ordained all things so that he can sit confident on the throne of eternity, knowing that his responsibility is total, his government is total, and his word is sure, has created a responsible people, powerful people, people who have a sure word in Jesus Christ, their king and their savior, and they shall prevail. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto us{?} that we have Jesus Christ as our king, sitting in confidence on the throne of glory, our intercessor with thee, our glorious Lord. We thank thee, our Father, that his confidence is our confidence, and that we have been called to be a responsible and a victorious people, knowing that the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ. We thank thee, our Father, that it is thy Pentecost which shall prevail, and not the idle dreams of men. O Lord, our God, how great and glorious is thy word, thy government, thy providence, as we praise thee. Make us ever joyful in thy service, and confident unto victory. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions, first of all, on our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] What form of humanistic {?}

[Rushdoony] The most prominent form was that of Abbot Joachim of Florin who, in the mid-era of the Middle Ages, declared that there were three ages to the world history. First, was the age of the father and of law, the Old Testament world. The second era was the age of the Son and of the church, and a salvation by grace. This third age, he said, was the age of the Spirit, and implied the age of the death of God and the birth of man, in which love and spirit would now bind all men as men. Now there were various forms of this idea, but Abbot Joachim, who was a heretic and whose ideas were partially condemned, his thinking was extremely prominent. You find it in Dante who dreamed of a communistic world order, and said so, and you find Joachim’s thinking being picked up by Hegel and Marx, and it’s very prominent in our world today, the third world people, the death of God movement. It has a long, long history. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, that is more closely related to the power of positive thinking.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, that originated among the positive thinking people. Are there any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] In the prophesy that Moses gave the people {?} be blessed and wouldn’t be cursed, and he said you’re going to be scattered among all nations and you’re going to be brought back and {?}God, now did that, the description apply to apostate Israel, the ones who rejected Christ, and now, do you interpret it as the coming back of Christ into the church, and not to apostate Israel? Can you explain that?

[Rushdoony] It applies to everyone. It applies to Israel and to the church, and to all nations. In other words, all people are under judgment, and all people are blessed as they return to the Lord in faith and obedience.

[Audience] But, {?} said that, but didn’t say that you will be cast out among the nations?

[Rushdoony] Yes, and they were. Yes, they were, literally. So, its primary application was to historical Israel in the Old Testament, but it has a broader application in that it applies to the church and it applies to all peoples.

[Audience] But when you say the nation of Israel coming back, that that would be sort of prophesy {?}

[Rushdoony] No, I don’t think so. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] What do you think about these, especially the {?} coming out, so many people, you know {?} it’s no {?}. What’s behind that?

[Rushdoony] Well, there are many, many groups promoting Bibles today, Bible translations. Various scholars who are competent have given reviews of these particular translations and pointed out how defective the translating is very often, but there is a very, very great impetus always to promoting a particular translation. The King James Version has no copyright. Anyone can publish it, but if you make a new translation, you can copyright it, and since the Bible is always a bestseller, the money in promoting a new translation is enormous. Now, that’s it very simply. You and I tomorrow can form a company and start publishing King James Versions. The moment we do, we enter a highly competitive market, because there are numerous firms, here and in England, publishing English versions of the English editions of the King James, but when you publish a copyrighted Bible, you immediately get into an area where you have a big market with a monopoly. This is the reason why there is no end of new translations, all claiming that they have improved on the existing ones. Usually, they have been getting worse, but the money is enormous. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, very good point. The more we are on a movement, very definitely wants a humanistic Pentecost, and it wants to bring various religions together. Back in the thirties especially, when it was new, some of their statement I recall, at that time, on various campuses, were very all about this, very extreme. They came to be criticized quite a bit in the fifties and sixties, and they pulled in their horns on that. They have been not quite as active in the last four or five years. They have not had quite as much in the way of funds, but they are still very powerful.

I’d like to share something with you now. One of the books, I was looking for a book on my shelves the other day, and I just happened to run across one I read many, many years ago, and it’s not a great book, but it’s a very delightful book; The Life of an American Workman, by Walter P. Chrysler, of Chrysler Corporation. It was first published in 1937, and the book brings back many memories. It was an associate of Chrysler’s, V.F. Hutchinson, his treasurer, whom I happened to meet in Minnesota, who was kind of amused by me, and interested, and got friendly and started writing with me, and sent me this book. At any rate, the thing that appealed to me was the old fashioned character of Chrysler who grew up in a very old fashioned, stern, German family in this country, and he said, I’d like to quote something about his background. His folks made him stay. He wanted to go to work immediately for the railroad as his father worked, but his folks made him stay through high school, which he finished when he was just barely 17. He writes, “Our first Ellis home, the first of three, was of the plainest kind. It was badly put together and in winter, through its cracks, the snow intruded. It had a little porch though, and two bedrooms outside the combination kitchen/dining/living room. A railroad shanty? Oh, no. It was Hank Chrysler’s home, a house to swell my mother’s heart with pride as she showed it off to neighbors who were still living half buried in the prairie earth in houses made of sod. We were lucky. Because my father worked for the railroad, we were privileged to buy some of his coal when certain other people had no fuel except the dried dung of buffalo or cows. Out hunting, I warmed my hands over a quick burning fire of cow chips, oh many times, when my fingers got too numb to feel the shotgun trigger. But at home, we had a shed full of coal to burn, along with kindling that my brother, Ed and I were required to find and cut. When we neglect this, or when we disobeyed her slightest order, our mother spanked us. The mace of her authority was a hairbrush. Corporal punishment? When my mother flailed me on my rear, it seemed to be inflicted by a major general at least. Once against my private person, that hairbrush was jarred from all its bristles, but it was kept in spanking service until I was nearly 17. I was not docile then, or ever, but my mother had the strength to put me, big as I was, and spank me until my roars convinced her that I was blushing in my pants and improved in my intentions.”

Now, one of the most delightful parts of Chrysler’s book is what he has to say about his wife, because he went to work for the railroads and he became quite a whitey sort of workman in some respects, in that working as a mechanic, whenever he found there was a job somewhere else, whether it paid more or less, sometimes less, where he could learn something new, mechanically, he dropped everything and grabbed that job, so that he would be barely improving himself in one place and he was tearing off some distance to get another job so that he might learn something more mechanically, and of course, it was this background that enabled him to become the manufacturer he was, and on this one occasion, he gave up a job where he was really doing quite well. So he went to try to explain to his wife how he could bare to take her and the baby into such a very poor shelter as he would have in this new hot job, and she said, “Dad, if you think that is the place for us to go, don’t worry about me. I’ll be happy anywhere you think you ought to be to get ahead. There was never a time when my wife batted an eye to keep me staying on any place on her account. I’ve had friends whose wives literally spoiled their careers just by their whines and chronic kicking. Suppose some time my wife had said, ‘No, I won’t expose my child to the danger of living in such a place. I think you’re foolish and selfish to try to drag me down to such a hole.’ Well, then I would have stayed in Trinidad, or Salt Lake City, or else, probably I’d be there yet, but I’d be pretty riskful. Nothing in my life has given me more cause for pride and satisfaction, in the way my wife had faith in me from the very first, through all those years when I was a grease-stained roundhouse mechanic. So we went to {?} down in Texas. The time came {?} furniture was getting shabbier with each move we made, and the house at {?} we had the rug turned so that the place most badly worn was under the bed. It had not been good furniture when we bought it in Salt Lake City, but after long journeys in freight cars in addition to the normal wear and tear, it was getting pretty awful. Yet I never heard my wife say, ‘This is not the sort of furniture I used to have in Ellis.’”

Well, one of the interesting things in the book is when he gets his first car. They’re new, they’re just coming out, and he took all the money he had to buy a car, because here was something new, mechanical, that he didn’t know anything about, and he wanted to study it. So he went to her, “’Della, I’ve bought an automobile.’ I told her all about it, that I spent our cash reserve and gone in hock for more money than I’d make in a year. She did not scold me, but it did seem to me that when she closed the kitchen door, it made a little more noise than usual. Maybe, just maybe, she slammed it. The automobile arrived in a freight car anchored to the floor. I did not know how to run it, but I certainly was not going to allow another person to be the first one behind its wheel. I arranged for the teamster to haul it to my house and put it in the barn. I cannot remember that I have ever been more jubilant than when Della, with her niece in her arms, and Thelma, jumping up and down with excitement, saw me steel that horse-drawn car into the yard. If it had been a jewel of fantastic size, I could not have been more careful of it. Now my wife was wild with enthusiasm and wanted to take a ride immediately, but I put the car in the barn and it stayed there so long that she despaired of ever getting a ride. Sometimes she came and sat in it when I cranked up and let the engine run.

“Night after night, I worked in the barn until it was time to go to bed, and some nights I did not leave the automobile until it was long past my bedtime. Saturday afternoons and all day on Sundays I worked on that car. I read automobile catalogs. I studied sketches and made still other sketches of my own. Most of the time, the innards were spread apart on newspapers on the barn floor. There was not a single function I did not study over and over. Finally, I proved to myself that I knew and understood it, because I had put it all together, had the engine tuned so that it was running like a watch.

‘Dad, what is the use of having an automobile if we are never going to ride it?’

‘Now, don’t be impatient, Della.’

‘Impatient? You had the car three months and it’s never been out of the barn.’

It was a Saturday afternoon and so hot that I had taken off my coat and rolled my sleeves up. I finished eating.

‘In the barn three months, you say? Well, this afternoon she’s coming out. Come look.’”

Well, unfortunately, he knew the car backwards and forwards, and never learned how to drive. So, when he took it out, he took out a lot of fence, chewed up his cigar and came back a badly shaken man, but that was the beginning of his interest in cars and he went to Detroit for a job, and in no time at all, was running General Motors, and Durant, and several others, and then started his own company which, in his lifetime, was second only to General Motors in sales, but then he comments this,

“But suppose in the 1950’s, scheme of taxation had been in force in that time, when he was working and made tremendous sums of money, almost entirely tax free. Especially those provision of the tax law which limit radically the income any individual may receive. What then? To me at least it seems most unlike that Walter Chrysler would then have exposed his established reputation to great risk of failure. There would have been no Chrysler Corporation. The whole automobile industry would have been poor and less effective now, if during the preceding quarter of a century it had lacked the stimulus provided by the aggressive, imaginative competition of Walter Chrysler’s company.” That’s a footnote at the end by someone after the death of Chrysler. It’s a delightful book, as I said, and it does tell us about quite a very remarkable man, and his inordinate curiosity and how once a man could work his way up so readily and out of a savings, establish what he did.

On announcements, the Chalcedon Guild installation meeting and dinner will be at the Hamilton home this afternoon, and Thursday, our study group from 8-9 at the Gutierrez home, continuing our studies in the Biblical Theory of Knowledge. Let us bow our heads now 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