Truth

Three Johns: The real John; known only to his Maker. 2. John's ideal John; never the real one, and often very unlike him. 3. Thomas's ideal John; never the real John, nor John's John, but often very unlike either.

Three Thomases: 1. The real Thomas. 2. Thomas's ideal Thomas. 3. John's ideal Thomas.

Now you know what is happening. He is beginning to sophisticate reality. There are three Johns. The real John, known only to his maker, John as he thinks of himself, and John as the other person thinks of him. Well, there is some truth to that, but of those three Johns, within a few years, one of the Johns and one of the Thomases began to disappear as people played with this idea, and it was the real John and the real Thomas who disappeared. Why? Once you abandon the God of scripture, you abandon the world as well and reality as well, because what guarantee do you have that your sense impressions are real? After all, your mind cannot see. Your mind depends upon your senses, and as they began to point out, some people are colorblind. They look out there and they don’t see colors. We know that’s true of some people because there are some of us who are not colorblind, but what if all of us, all men as men, have certain blindnesses so that we don’t see what’s out there, or we project onto the world something that is purely in our mind? After all, they said, for what we know of animals in our study in the laboratory of their {?}, they don’t see the world as we do. They don’t see the sea colors as we do, they hear sounds that we cannot hear, so they live in a different world, and how do any of us know that the world we think we see is really out there, or is the real one?

Mary Baker Eddy, about the same time, concluded, and she did it on the grounds of contemporary philosophy, that there is no world out there, and there is no body here. There’s just mind, and that’s why, for Mary Baker Eddy, there is no death, because there is no “me.” Body, matter, the real world is an illusion, and I am an illusion. I think I am alive. I think I’m a person.

Now, of course, all of this is logical, very logical, if you deny God. Then, there is no guarantee that there is any reality to our thinking, or for our sense impressions. Darwin himself once remarked in his old age that he would not trust the thinking of a monkey, if a monkey could express itself as to what it had to say about the world, and he said that, Sometimes the thought comes to me that I am only a higher ape, and why should I put any confidence in anything I have thought or anything I have supposedly discovered. Total cynicism, and logically so, because God has been dropped from the world and therefore, the world disappears and truth also disappears. This is one of the problems of the modern university. It has become a relic of the past. Dr. Nesbit, perhaps the outstanding contemporary sociologist, has said that the university is a relic of the Middle Ages, that it is a Medieval institution because it still posits a world created by God which is a universe, which can be known. He therefore sees a crumbling and a disintegration of the university, and the very idea of learning and of knowledge, unless man recaptures some kind of faith, and I question whether Dr. Nesbit sees that as a possibility. You see, men began by saying, We will know the truth, and the truth is outside God and God is trying to keep Adam and all men after Adam from knowing the truth.

So, we’re going to have the world and truth without God, but very quickly in terms of their own thinking, the world is gone and truth is gone. By denying God, they have denied everything. This is their doing. It isn’t that we have pointed out them that this is the end result. This is their own conclusion. ]18:13]

The Greek philosophers retained God; Plato, Aristotle, and the others. They saw that God was necessary even though they had no use for Him, because someone had to guarantee knowledge. As Aristotle said, analyzing the world’s form and matter, or ideas and matter, there has to be, he said, a first cause. Otherwise, you have infinite regress if their every effect a previous effect or cause, and you go back and back and back ultimately, there is no beginning, and there is no understanding things, and if you have infinite causes, there’s no unity of knowledge so you can know nothing, and so, Aristotle and the others said there has to be a first cause, and we will call that first cause “god,” someone who started things. After that, we have no use for him, but let him start things so knowledge has something that can guarantee it, but since then, men have been unwilling to tolerate God even on those terms, and therefore, they have dropped God overboard, with the result that knowledge has disappeared. Truth has disappeared. They tried to reestablish truth and various treaties of truth have been propounded to avoid God. They tried to reestablish something that can be true without God.

The first, of course, is the correspondence theory of truth. The correspondence theory of truth says that a proposition is true if there is a fact to which it corresponds, a hard reality. If I say it is raining, and outside it is raining, that’s true. But again, their own thinking has destroyed this. To us, that’s true, yes, but if you deny the validity of sense impressions, if you have no god to guarantee that life is not a mockery, and that man, all men are not governed by some tremendous type of colorblindness, it makes them project into the world what’s in their mind. Then you have no truth.

Chinese philosophy, centuries ago, came to this conclusion, and that’s why China remains stagnant. Philosophers like Mozi said that How do I know that all of life is not like some dream, my dreams are so real, and what guarantee is that there is any reality to anything. I see something and someone else says they saw differently, and someone else disagrees. How do we know what is real? Are not all our minds somehow diseased, and the whole of mankind tainted by a diseased kind of thinking and a diseased kind of seeing, so that he sees things that are not necessarily real. Thus, the correspondence theory falls apart. You cannot have knowledge of a universe, of unclassified, unknowable facts, unless you have total knowledge of it. Now, if that sounds a little difficult to follow, let’s analyze it.

Knowledge alone leads to knowledge. In other words, if you have a difficult problem in trigonometry, you’ve got to know trigonometry to solve it. You have to have knowledge to gain knowledge, and if you begin without God and a given deposit of knowledge, you can never know anything. So the minute you dispense with God and say I know nothing and I’m going to start from scratch, you can never get anywhere, just as you can never solve a problem in trigonometry without a knowledge of trigonometry, so if you begin with knowing nothing, you can never know anything.

Knowledge opens up only to knowledge, and this is why man has to be taught, and this is why God, in the beginning, taught man in the Garden of Eden and then through his word, and guaranteed certain principles whereby man could know, could trust his senses, could trust his thinking when it is governed by God.

Then a second way of trying to reestablish truth was the coherence theory, that a thing must be systematic and coherent, but how do you get an idea of coherency, and if you begin by saying Nothing is true, I know nothing, how do you know that coherency is necessarily valid? And the very people who have proposed this have then gone to say about the coherence or the systematic theory of knowledge, to assume that there is any systematic character to reality or to truth is to presuppose God, and they’re right. In order to accept their theory, they first of all have to accept God.

Then the third theory of truth that has been proposed by unbelieving men in order to provide themselves with some kind of truth is the pragmatic theory. This, of course, was very powerful in the thinking of John Dewey, and it is the essence of progressive education and of the public schools and universities of our country. In terms of pragmatism, truth is what works, and this is what Nietzsche said. If a lie works, it’s the truth. If murder works, it’s the truth. This means that you cannot condemn any act in advance. There is no propositional statement of truth. A propositional statement of truth is Thou shalt not kill. You cannot say that in terms of a pragmatic theory. First, you kill and see if it works and if it’s profitable for you, and then you can say, “Well, that murder was the truth for me.” First you lie, and then you say, “Well, that like was (or was not) the truth for me,” and again, reality falls apart because this requires man first to act and then to decide whether his action was valid or not, and this is why you have, in the student movement today, the unthinking act. The act must precede the thought. Not until you have acted can you decide whether your act is right or wrong. The students are not stupid. They are intelligent, and they are doing exactly what they were taught to do. Everything the progressive education has taught before World War 1 to the present has conditioned all of us and our generation, and we have to fight this in ourselves, to act first and then think, and the students today, being most deeply infected by that, are naturally going to resent anyone who is going to say “think first.” Does what you do represent something that is right? Is it the truth? No, you act first and then you reflect, you analyze, you dissect what you have done, because then you’ll know whether it was right or not, and of course, such a position is anarchy.

For us, as Christians, truth is propositional because language is propositional. It communicates reality or it is not language. It is a lie. The principle word for truth in the Old Testament comes from a verb meaning “to support, to sustain.” In another form, the same word means “a pillar.” It means “made firm, fixed, morally directed aright, steadfast, stable.” Very important, the biblical meaning of truth is, the moral direction. Now remember we said at the beginning that in the world God made, there is a coherency in all things, everything is interrelated. Therefore, truth is not to be separated from morality. Nor morality and truth from salvation. That which is true is also that which is morally directed, and that which saves man is inseparable from that which is true, and that which is moral, and that which is sanctifying. Knowledge, in other words, and truth, are not neutral. They are moral. They are connected with redemption. They are aspects of God’s coherent reality.

Jesus Christ said “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” Ultimately, the truth is Jesus Christ, and therefore, as our text declares, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed. And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free,” to the extent that man is a disciple of Christ, to the extent that he is in the word of Christ and in Christ’s life, a part of his being, a member of his body, of his redeemed humanity. To that extent, man is free. To that extent, man knows the truth. Man’s awareness of truth, therefore, is a part and parcel of man’s growth in Christ, his growth in scientification, his growth in all things that are of God, because of the coherence of reality.

None of the Pharisees objected saying, “We be Abraham’s seed and we’re never in bondage to any man. How sayest though Ye shall be made free?” Jesus answered them, “Verily, verily, I say unto you whosoever committed sin is the servant of sin, and the servant abideth not in the house forever, but the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore, shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” The greatest slavery our Lord said, is to sin, because it separates you from God and therefore, from truth, therefore, from salvation, therefore, from all things. It is a blinding thing. It is a destroying thing. Therefore you are indeed slaves. You are indeed not free. You do not know the truth. Our Lord interweaves all these things together. No man can be apart from God, and be near the truth.

“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. If you continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that in Jesus Christ, thou hast made us free. Thou hast set us on the way of truth, of sanctification, of righteousness, of holiness, of all things that are of thee, and we pray, our Father, that thou wouldst prosper us in this the way, that thou wouldst prosper us in this, thy life, that we may abound unto thee and may bear fruit unto thee, and that we may bring all things into subjection to Jesus Christ, our Lord. In His name we pray. Amen. Are there any questions now, first of all, on our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now, that is a good modern statement. Very good. How can I tell what I say until I say it? Yes?

[Audience] {?} law {?} salvation {?} However, {?} getting to the point where {?} law, otherwise {?} humanist law does the same thing, and {?} myself.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The law, like the truth, like everything else is from God, and therefore, the law, like everything else, points us to God. It condemns man in his sin, and acts as a schoolmaster to him. It makes clear to him how futile everything he does is. Then, in Christ, it provides the way of righteousness, so that everything is a part of a seamless garment. This is the coherence of reality. This is why we speak of a universe, not a multi-verse. This is why, apart from biblical faith, man always falls into polytheism. Many gods, many worlds, you see? Do your own thing, because everything is right. Do your own this is a polytheistic thesis.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, whatever a man does is going to end up in total futility if it is done apart from God. Yes, and the ground will be cut out from under him by the logic of his own thinking. He will find he has nothing. There is a magnificent poem that speaks of this futility of everything apart from Christ; “The Hound of Heaven,” by Francis Thompson. “All things betray me when thou betrayest me.” Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. In my Mythology of Science, I point out that what has evolved has to be involved. In other words, this is why they are increasingly turning on their own thinking, some of these evolutionary thinkers and philosophers. In order to have evolution, you have to presuppose that the original atom out of which the whole universe began or molecule, has everything in it that God has, you see. What has evolved has to be involved, or else you have a Marcionism{?}, acquired characteristics, and this is why Freud turned from Darwin to LaMark deliberately, because he realized that, in terms of Darwin, you could not escape God, and while Marcionism was nonsense, you had to assume it, and this is why Lysenko{?} in Russia adopted the same thing and why Stalin backed him, because it had to be that way or else you left the door wide open to God.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, but then they have to turn on their own thinking, you see, because logically, you can’t allow that. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. von Mises{?} is basically humanistic, but his problem is that he presupposes the whole world of God, and the God of scripture, and this has been pointed out to him by a Calvinistic thinker whom he knows and respects, and he admitted it was so and that there was a contradiction, but he didn’t do anything to correct it.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, his thinking does presuppose that somehow this didn’t happen accidentally, but he doesn’t want to admit. Yes. He has admitted to this man that his thinking does involve such a presupposition, but he doesn’t want to get involved in the hard facts of admitting the reality and the claims of God.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, I think he is deistic, vaguely deistic rather than theistic. Any other questions? If not, I have one announcement to make, that on the evening of Tuesday, September 12th, if you’ll make a note of it in your calendars, the moral advancement branch of the Christian Freedom Foundation which puts out “Christian Economics,” will have a dinner meeting in Orange County somewhere, at which I will be the speaker. The general subject will be the importance, theologically and socially, of capital punishment. So, I recommend both the group and the meeting to you. The Christian Freedom Foundation publishes, as you know, “Christian Economics,” which will change its name soon to “Applied Christianity,” and will come out in magazine format, and the indications are this will greatly increase its scope and popularity. A trial run was mailed out and the response was very good, and a large number of subscriptions did come in. Let us bow out heads now for the benediction.

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

End of tape