Salvation and Godly Rule

Humanism

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Doctrinal Studies

Lesson: Humanism

Genre: Speech

Track: 68

Dictation Name: RR136AK68

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture lesson is from the book of Daniel 4:34-37, and our subject: Humanism. “And at the end of the days I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine understanding returned unto me, and I blessed the most High, and I praised and honoured him that liveth for ever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to generation: and all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou? At the same time my reason returned unto me; and for the glory of my kingdom, mine honour and brightness returned unto me; and my counsellors and my lords sought unto me; and I was established in my kingdom, and excellent majesty was added unto me. Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise and extol and honour the King of heaven, all whose works are truth, and his ways judgment: and those that walk in pride he is able to abase.”

When humanism entered into the church, it very quickly entered into all of life. In the 19th century, very early, revivalism became radically humanistic, and as a result, the churches as a whole became humanistic in their emphasis. Previously, it had been the standard position of all churches, that as the Westminster Catechism stated it, the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. All churches recognize that this was the essence of man’s calling, that man was to seek, as our Lord said, first, the kingdom of God and his righteousness, but now all these things became inverted. It became the accepted view that it was God’s chief end to glorify man, and to enjoy him forever. The first concern of man became his own salvation, not the glory of God, and when man’s salvation becomes man’s chief concern, then, as he approaches God, what he is basically and essentially concerned with is life insurance, or fire insurance. He wants a policy against disaster, against Hell, against trouble, and so he becomes self-seeking as he approaches Christianity. Salvation is important, but the glory and the will of God, the kingdom of God must come first.

As a result of all this, which began to take over the churches in the 1820’s, by the middle of the century, popular literature began to sing the glories of man, and of God’s duty to act as man’s faithful ally and servant. It was seen as Christ’s duty to judge man on man’s own terms. Let us examine one popular poem of the day, which expresses the faith of America in the latter half of the last century, a poem that was in textbooks, was exceedingly popular. It was poem by John Milton Hay, entitled “Jim Bludsoe of The Prairie Belle.” Now, some of you may recall this. Hay was a very important man. His thinking was a watershed of the popular thinking of his day. He was Secretary to Abraham Lincoln when in the White House. He was Assistant Secretary of State to President Hayes. Under McKinley, he was first ambassador to Great Britain, and then Secretary of State, and he was also Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State. He was a very important figure in formulating such things as the Open Door Policy in China, the acquisition of the Panama Canal, and many, many other things. His poem reflects not only his thinking, but the thinking of his era. “Jim Bludsoe of the Prairie Belle,” is a poem, a long one, about Jim Bludsoe, a riverboat engineer on the Mississippi, described as no saint, as a very profane man, with, “One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill, And another one here, in Pike,” a thoroughly profane man but, in his defense Hays says, he was no liar, and he writes:

“And this was all the religion he had,

To treat his engine well;

Never be passed on the river;

To mind the pilot's bell;

And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,

A thousand times he swore,

He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank

Till the last soul got ashore.”

Now, the Prairie Belle grew old, but Bludsoe still refused to be passed on the river. Then, along came the Movastar, a far better boat. It was obvious that the Movastar, as a far superior boat and a newer one, could beat the Prairie Belle, but Jim Bludsoe refused to be passed, and so against all commonsense, and in violation of everything that an engineer should do, he demanded that the stokers fire the furnace beyond all commonsense, to the destruction of the boat. He was determined he was either going to beat the Movastar or go down. The result was a fire and the end of the boat. Bludsoe headed the boat to the shore and everybody’s life was saved except Bludsoe’s, who was the cause of it all. He was a profane man, a godless man, a bigamist, a man who had just gambled with the lives of all the passengers, even though they survived except for himself. He destroyed the property of the owners and of all the passengers, but for Hay, one of the greatest men of the last century, Jim Bludsoe is still a hero, and he concludes the poem thus:

“He were n't no saint, but at jedgment

I'd run my chance with Jim,

'Longside of some pious gentlemen

That would n't shook hands with him.

He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,

And went for it thar and then;

And Christ ain't a-going to be too hard

On a man that died for men.”

Now, that sums up a very popular poem and faith of the last century. This was once in the textbooks. If you didn’t study it, your parents certainly did, and they read it in their English or American literature poems, in anthologies, memorized it. It summed of the faith of the day, and it is rubbish. Here is Hay’s version of Rousseau’s natural man, naturally good. No matter what he did, how could Christ refuse such a he-man. Why, he would happen to open up Heaven, rather than Hell, for Jim Bludsoe.

If anything, things have become far worse since then. That was humanism. Now we have humanism gone to seed, developed to its logical conclusion, so that now, Christ isn’t even in the picture to open up Heaven for Jim Bludsoe. Man as he is, we are told, needs no salvation. Whatever he is, he is good, and so the thinkers today and the humanists say that man’s only problem is that Christianity is trying to tell him he is a sinner when he is naturally good.

Since Kinsey, it has become a very common faith{?} that any and all sexual acts that man is capable of performing are therefore natural, and what is natural, Kinsey said, is moral, and one writer in the school of Kinsey today has recently said that man needs no saving except from Christianity, but for biblical faith, salvation is from sin into the service of God, to exercise dominion under him. For humanism, salvation is from the idea of sin now, and of being a sinner into the glorification and service of man, whatever he is and whatever he does. It is deliverance into going your own way, and doing your own thing.

Reece, a humanist of a generation ago, wrote in 1927 in a humanist declaration, “Humanism is the conviction that human life is of supreme worth, and consequently must be treated as an end, not as a means.” Moreover, so that we would not miss the point, Reece went on to say, “Man is not to be treated as a means to the glory of God. The Westminster Catechism said the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. This is typical of orthodox theologies, the glory of god is primary and man is made secondary. The result is that, today, in most religious circles, man is thought of only as an instrument in the hands of God. The event, likewise, is said to be in the hands of God.” Well, we can at least give Reece credit for logic. Events are either in the hands of God or in the hands of man. Either God is primary and ultimate, or man is. Humanism insists on the ultimacy of man. Reece tells us that humanism holds to man’s native and essential worth, as against the worth of God, and he says that man is not to be treated as a means to cosmic ends. Man must fix his attention, he tells us, on himself, and on no other standard, save himself.

Reece went on to attack the idea of a sense of ought, of moral imperative that there was something man had to do, some requirement he had to fulfill. The only ought, he said, is what man wills, so that there is no law beyond man, and what man wills.

Now, Reece was still ridicules enough to believe that out of this, he could bring forth some kind of good society. The Marquis De Sade, almost two centuries ago, is more logical. He saw that humanism requires total egoism and total anarchism. Polanie{?}, in discussing the personal and political moral nihilism which saturates our world, has written, “The two lines of antinomianism meet and mingle in French existentialism. Madame hails the Marquis De Sade as a great moralist when De Sade declares through one of his characters, “I have destroyed everything in my part that might have interfered with my pleasures.” And this triumph, over conscience, as she calls it, is interpreted in terms of her own Marxism saying, Sade passionately exposes the bourgeoisie hoax which consists in erecting class interests into universal moral principles.

Humanism, thus, logically leads to this conclusion. No moral law, no ought, every man his own god doing that which is right in his own heart, and this is the world today increasingly, but one of the great humanists of history, Nebuchadnezzar, said that he found his sanity and salvation in acknowledging the absolute sovereignty of God. Nebuchadnezzar tells us that, after a long period of insanity, when he lifted up his eyes unto Heaven, he says, “Mine understanding returned unto me, and I blessed the most high and I praised and honored him that liveth forever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion and his kingdom is from generation to generation.” Nebuchadnezzar who had earlier asserted his own sovereignty, his own ultimacy, and who had declared that there was no higher point in all of creation than himself, now acknowledges the dominion and the sovereignty of God, and declares that all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing and he doeth according to his will and the {?} of heaven and among the inhabitants of earth, and none can stay his hand or say unto him, “What doest thou?”

Nebuchadnezzar, in part here, echoed scripture. We fail to realize how well-informed Nebuchadnezzar was. We know from scripture and from other sources that Nebuchadnezzar had an excellent espionage network, so that he knew at all times, for example, when he was at war with Judea, what went on inside of the capitol, what went on inside the king’s palace. We was well-informed of the fact that the prophet Jeremiah was totally opposed to the policies of King Zedekiah and the war, and so when the war was over and Jerusalem fell, one of the first things that his officers did was to seek out Jeremiah, and extent to him their favor and their protection, because they regarded him as a potential ally.

Nebuchadnezzar, in order the understand any country he was waging war against, studied their religion, and so long before this event, years before, he had read the scriptures, and now as he speaks various verses, very obviously are echoed by him. For example, Psalm 145:13, “Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy dominion endureth through all generations.” Isaiah 40:17, “All nations before him are as nothing, and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity.” Isaiah 43:13, “Yea, before the day while I am he and there is none that can deliver out of my hand, I will work and who shall let it?” Isaiah 43:21, “This people have I formed for myself. They shall show forth my praise,” and so Nebuchadnezzar echoes scripture as he commits himself to the sovereignty of God, and he concludes, “Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise and extol and honour the King of heaven, all whose works are truth, and his ways judgment: and those that walk in pride he is able to abase.”

This is a very telling confession and a very profound one, because here, Nebuchadnezzar strikes out at that which is the heart of humanism in every age, in which the existentialist philosophers in our time have formulated as their faith. Nebuchadnezzar declares of God that all his works are truth, because God is truth, and his ways, justice.

Now, the point we have been analyzing in our Thursday night classes on epistemology, the Biblical Theory of Knowledge, is that, according to scripture, God is truth. Truth is inseparable from God. Now, the beginning of modern epistemology, of humanistic epistemology, is to separate the idea of truth from God, and to say, “Yes, we will acknowledge that there is a god, this is a real possibility, but truth is something abstract and separate from God and man, so that man can tell the truth or know the truth, but he can also lie, and God can tell the truth and know the truth, but he can also lie.” This was the Tempter’s premise, “Yea, hath God said?” Had God necessarily spoken the truth? Truth is something that is separated from God.

Now, what we find when we pursue humanistic epistemology is that truth first is divorced from God, and then it is attached to man. Now, in terms of scripture, whatever God says and does is truth. Our Lord makes this emphatic. He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” but in modern epistemology, truth is now man. What man says and does. One school of contemporary epistemologists or philosophers in the field of knowledge have actually held to a theory of infallibility, the infallibility of man. Now this is logical. Infallibility must rest somewhere, and having denied it to God, these philosophers, who will not for a moment, admit the reality of God, they must ultimately ascribe it to something else. Some ascribe it to the state, but in dialectical materialism, you have doctrine of the infallibility of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In these humanistic philosophers, man is infallible. Man is truth. There is no standard above and beyond man, they hold. Sartre holds this. It is only logical then to say that if there is no standard outside of man, no judgment, no criterion outside of man, then what man is and what man does is truth, then justice, because no concept can be abstracted and allowed to judge man. Man is his own ultimate. Man is judge, law, truth, everything, but Nebuchadnezzar realized the impossibility of this. As a Babylonian, he had held previously to the ultimacy of process in the universe. Babylonian faith had its gods. It’s gods, too, were a product of process, and process incarnated itself regularly, it was a semi-Hegelian philosophy, Hegelianism before Hegel, and Hegel recognized the antecedents he had in such thinking, and so the high point in process was the Babylonian Empire in that day in Nebuchadnezzar himself. So, for Nebuchadnezzar, there was no law, no justice, no truth beyond himself. This was his faith when he confronted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and he declared, “Who is that God who is able to deliver you out of my hand? What kind of myth do you believe in? I am the high point of history, the high point of process, and there is no greater power than I.”

Now, Nebuchadnezzar was ready to recognize as a good Chaldean, or neo-Babylonian, that tomorrow there could be a new high point and he would be obsolete, but for the moment, he was the truth. Now, he forswears everything that his Chaldean or neo-Babylonian culture had taught him. “Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise and extol and honour the King of heaven, all whose works are truth, and his ways judgment (or justice): and those that walk in pride he is able to abase.” For humanism, all man’s works and words are true, arising out of his existential being. For man, the sinner, coming into a ready-made world, to claim his word as truth, is insanity indeed, but it is a greater insanity to try to confuse Christianity and humanism, and to make them one is sin and insanity compounded, and this is the offense of so much of what passes for Christianity today. It makes man man’s chief end. It makes man’s salvation the highest value. It treats God as though he were only there as a spare tire, as an insurance agent, someone to make sure that man can prevail. This is the ultimate {?}. This is indeed the implication and the conclusion of the Tempter’s offer. “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil, every man his own god.” Thanks be to God he is still on the throne and it is God who shall prevail, and we in him, when with Nebuchadnezzar we forswear humanism and acknowledge the sovereignty of God, God as our savior, God as our Lord, and our chief end, to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that it is thou who art on the throne, that thou art he who dost rule all things, and all the petty pretentions of man thou shalt confound and bring to nigh. Use us, O Lord, to rebuild all things in terms of thy word, in terms of thy kingdom, in terms of thy lordship. Bless and prosper us in thy service, and guide us day by day, in all truth and righteousness in Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all, with respect to our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] I was thinking about {?} the Roman Empire persecuted Christians so heavily and they triumphed, and in then like in Spain with the inquisition where they persecuted the Christians so heavily and they failed {?} Christian {?} Christian church. I read one comment, I think it was by {?} that they cited {?} they would have lost {?} Church of England, and like in the Netherlands where it was Protestant {?} in England and in Scotland, and yet in other places {?} Spain and England {?} difference between one system, like the Spanish do and {?} what’s the difference between [?]

[Rushdoony] Well, first of all, we must disabuse ourselves by saying there is success in failure because we haven’t seen the end results anywhere. The weakness of man is that he expects everything to take place in his lifetime. I know that one man, a very fine conservative, a very fine man, a superior man, has spent millions in a futile effort to try to win this country back to old American standards in his lifetime. He’s wasted all that money. Why? Because victory means I’ve got to see it, you see, and this is a fallacy. This is a tremendous fallacy. We cannot judge the world today as a finished picture, and God’s timing sometimes, in some cases, in some situations extends over centuries. So, we cannot look back and say, “This happened and that happened, and why did this not work out?” Our sense of time is limited by our lifetime and our lifespan, and we want things now. We want quick accomplishment. Now, in a sense, that’s good if we recognize that it should be an incentive to work, to work harder to achieve things, but it is a serious limitation in that it leads us to waste a great deal of energy and effort in futile things which aim at instant {?}.

Now, this is one of the reasons why whenever you have a revolutionary temper in a society, you have, instead of progress, retrogression. The essence of the revolutionary temper is that is wants things at the latest today, and better, yesterday. The revolutionary mind says, “We will not wait. All evils must be righted, all wrongs redressed, or we will destroy everything.” Whenever you have that temper, we’re all prone to it, you only compound error, and as a result, our historical judgment must never be influenced by that type of thinking. Any other questions? Yes.

[Audience] {?} Legislature {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I was in Mississippi again this week, but I was at Southern Mississippi University in Hattiesburg rather than in Jackson, when I spoke before the House of the Mississippi State legislature earlier this spring, it was at the invitation of the Speaker of the House, who had been told of some of the writing and thinking I’m doing in the area of Christian Reconstruction. When I spoke before congressmen and legislative aids in Washington three weeks ago, it was at the invitation of the executive director of the American Conservative Union and Congressman Bill Crane, combined, and it’s usually when I speak before such groups, it’s at the request of someone in a legislative position who is familiar with my writings, and feels that since I’m going to be in the area, I should be asked to speak.

I was interested, incidentally, when I was in Southern Mississippi this past week, the news stories tend to condition our thinking about what constitutes reality. The flood is an old story to us now. A few months ago, but it isn’t in the flood country. {?} the delta country and some parts of Mississippi, as well as areas in many other states are still under water, and this past week, they had more heavy rains, so that whereas earlier, they were thinking, “Well, we cannot plant certain crops, we can still get soybeans in.” When I arrived at the beginning of the week this past week, their hope was, “Well, we can no longer get soybeans in, but there is one crop we can plant, even though it’ll bring only a fifth the income; cucumbers for pickling.” By the end of the week with the continued rain, it was apparent that a good deal of the land would never dry out this summer, and there would be no planting of any kind, and on top of that, if you notice from today’s paper, because when I was there they were beginning to get this, severe hail storms as well as more tornadoes, throughout the Middle West and into the South, so that the most significant thing in the president’s address the other night was that now, too late after the wheat has been shipped out, the statement that there might be restrictions on the exporting of food. Well, there’s a reason for this. We are facing very serious shortages in many, many essential foods.

On top of this, some weather forecasters are predicting that this season will be followed by droughts all over the world, which will aggravate the matter. I think this is all very important to think about, especially when you realize that, as I dealt with and I called attention to this before in The Biblical Philosophy of History. There has been a remarkable stepping up of the pace of natural disasters. Legally, nothing happens by chance. There are no accidents. Everything has a cause, and the {?} cause of all things is God. So, very clearly, there is a very real judgment all over the world developing in the form of natural disasters, and it would behoove us to think about it, because certainly the situation is a critical one, and in a year or two, it can be very serious. There were about seven to eight million acres that were flooded, countless acreage seriously affected by frosts{?}, now more tornadoes than ever before, and now, devastating hailstorms and more rains. There are many, many of those areas where farmers will not have a penny of income through this year. Consider what that would mean to you. Many of them have not been able to return to their homes. They’re still under water, and with any kind of normal rainfall throughout that area where they do get summer rains, their farms will remain muddy all through the year. It’s a disaster of tremendous dimensions. Very, very staggering when you are in the area and you talk to people and realize what is happening.

I have one announcement to make. We will have our class on Epistemology, The Biblical Doctrine of Knowledge this Thursday from 8-9 at the Gutierrez home. 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.