Salvation and Godly Rule

Facts

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Works

Lesson: Facts

Genre: Speech

Track: 24

Dictation Name: RR136M24

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts. A day in thy courts is better than a thousand. For the Lord God is his Son and shield. The Lord will give grace and glory. No good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly. O Lord of Hosts, blessed is the man that trusteth in thee. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we come unto thee, thanking thee for thy past and present mercies, and praying that, by thy grace, thou wouldst increase our trust in thee. Teach us, O Lord, day by day, to commit ourselves into thy hands, to know thy greatness, thy majesty, and thy loving-kindness and mercy, and to know that thou art our sufficiency, that thy grace is sufficient for us. So teach us, our Father, to grow in trust, in faith and in confidence in thee, that we might ever move as more than conquerors in Jesus Christ. In His name we pray. Amen.

Our scripture lesson is from Exodus 3:11-14, and our subject: Facts. “And Moses said unto God, Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? And he said, Certainly I will be with thee; and this shall be a token unto thee, that I have sent thee: When thou hast brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain. And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I am that I am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I am hath sent me unto you.”

In 1963, a very interesting booklet was published by a conservative group titled, “The Facts That Will Save America.” That title expressed a common faith shared by conservatives, liberals, and radicals alike. It presupposed that the mind of man was good or, at the very least, neutral, that the untainted mind of man, untainted by sin, needs only to be told the facts, and then it will stand for the truth. This, as Christians, we must hold is one of the great illusions of the modern age, whoever holds it.

In order to understand some of the implications of this very, very grave illusion, let us examine some definitions. Definitions, for example, of “facts.” Turning to the Dictionary of Philosophy, we find that Feebleman{?} defines facts as “an actual occurrence, an innubidible{?} truth of actuality, a brute event synonymous with actual event.” Then, turning to “knowledge,” the Dictionary of Philosophy defines it thus: “relations known, apprehended truth, opposition of opinion, certain knowledge is more than opinion, less than truth. Theory of knowledge or epistemology is the systematic investigation and exposition of the principles of the possibility of knowledge. In epistemology, the relation between knowledge and subject.”

We see, thus, how modern philosophy and the modern world views facts. Facts are truth, and by facts, they mean the brute facts of the natural world are truth in and of themselves. Now, it is important to know what the term used here, ‘brute facts” or “brute factuality,” means. A brute fact is definitely not a God-created fact. It is something that exists in and of itself. It is a thing in and of itself to be known only in terms of itself. Now, if that isn’t a clear definition, we will return to it subsequently in order to understand what is meant in the modern world by modern thinkers, by scientists, by the term “facts.”

Truth is a knowledge of these facts. Truth is factuality. Knowledge thus, is not facts, but it is a knowing of facts. Thus, when the obscene comedian who died a few years ago, Lenny Bruce, defined truth as “what is,” he was very much in step with the modern world. He said religious leaders talk about what should be. What should be has no truth, no factuality. Truth is what is. Truth is facts. Now, this same idea was basic to the Kinsey Report. The Kinsey Reports, there are several of them now on various subjects, have dealt with the facts of a certain area of sexual practice. This then is the truth about sex. What ought to be, for them, has no standing. To talk about “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is ridicules. That has no truth. Truth is factuality. Brute facts in and of themselves, and therefore, for the team of researchers that made up the Kinsey Reports, truth is precisely what’s going on in the world today, and anyone who pretends the truth about sex is something other than what is, is guilty of confounding reality. Truth, or facts, because truth and facts are one for them, is what is.

Now, in a very ironic sense, Christians can agree with this position. Truth, indeed, is what is. But, what we must say, What is? What is? Only one fact can be so identified for the Christian: God. Now, this is the meaning of the name of God. When God called Moses, it was not that Moses did not know who God was, but he asked him his name. Define yourself. “I know all about what our forefathers had experienced and they have taught us. That you’re maker of heaven and earth, and all things therein, but I don’t understand you. Define yourself, relate yourself to me somehow. What is your name, name meaning, in Hebrew, definition, and God refused to define himself because all definitions are relational. When you define something, you are relating it to the things around it. When I define myself, I define myself as a male as against female, as son, a father, a husband, a writer. I am relating myself to a number of things in the world in terms of which I have meaning, so that when I define myself as a minister, you immediately think in terms of ministers, good and bad, and then you proceed by all the data which I give you, to try to identify me, to define me. It is a process of making connections, relations, and this God refused to do. God said, “My name is Jehovah,” or “I am that I am,” or it can also be translated, “He who is.” “I am that I am. I have being in and of myself. I cannot be defined. I am He in terms of whom all things are defined.”

Now, this brings us to the crux of the matter. God is the only brute fact in the world, the only fact that exists in and of itself. All other facts are created facts. God only is the existential fact, the brute fact. This is what existentialism is about. Existentialism says that you cannot define man. Man is the creature, Sartre says, that has being but no essence. He is, but he cannot be defined unless he chooses to define himself. In other words, the goal of Existentialism is to make man God, and Sartre says man is the being whose destiny is to become God, to define himself only as God.

Then, of course, this is the point that scripture makes. God says, “I am that I am.” God defines himself as He who is, and this we can never do. I can never say, “I am.” First of all, very obviously, I was born and I shall die, so I am not the “I am,” the existent one, self-existent. My life is not my own product, creation, or being. I was given life by my parents, ultimately by God, and my life will end whether I like it or not. I cannot speak of myself as “I am.” When I say “I am,” I must follow it with various words defining myself. “I am a man of such-and such and age, such-and-such a background, such-and-such marital and family circumstances, of such-and-such a professional background.” This is the only way I can speak of myself, and if anyone persists in simply saying, when they’re asked to define themselves, “I am,” we would be justified in feeling that they belong in an institution. Unfortunately, modern philosophy and modern psychiatry aim precisely at telling man that that’s the way he should speak of himself. “I am.” A brute fact, an existential fact, is something which is, in and of itself. It is.

We can see how deeply this existential mood, this desire of people to be existential, or brute facts, has permiated our age when we look at the common complaint of youth that they want to be identified in terms of themselves only. “I’m tired of being a child, a son or a daughter, a husband or a wife. I want people to know me as I am.” Now, that’s the essence of the modern move. The cry, “Know me as I am,” is the demand to be known as an existential fact, totally unrelated to God or man. I have meaning, it says, in and of myself, apart from God or man, but to be a brute fact, an existential fact, is to be meaningless, because man is not God. Man is not his own maker. Man does not establish meaning. God does. Facts are what God made them, or they are nothing. The cry “Know me as I am,” which is basic to the modern age, is a schzisophrenic fact. On the one hand, it is an existential fact, “Know me as I am,” and if you try to interpret me in terms of God’s laws, God’s rules, you’re doing me wrong. Yet, at the same time, this demand is a denial of existentialism, because when the modern person cries out, “Know me as I am,” he’s demanding that you relate yourself to him, of course, on his terms, but “Know me, I need you, I need to be known for what I am.” In other words, it is a confession of a need for interdependence, and so that it’s a very thorough denial of its own existential plane{?}.

Facts which need other facts and other persons are not brute facts, but created facts, dependent and interdependent. Thus, it is not surprising that Existentialism has been shot through with insanity, as indeed, the whole of the modern world, with its philosophers, writers, artists, is deeply saturated with a strong vein of madness. This is not surprising, because increasingly, the modern mood defines madness as the great step forward. Madness is existential, we are told. It is the forsaking of all other facts.

Charles Nodier, the teacher of Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and many other prominent Frenchmen of the past century, held that insanity represents an upward step in the evolution of conscienceness, and his point of view has become commonplace in many psychiatric circles, notable R.D. Lang of Britain, who is perhaps the most influential of the newer psychiatrists. Nodier wrote, “Lunatics occupy the highest degree of the scale that separates our planet from its satellite, an since they communicate to this degree with a world of thought that is unknown to us, it is only natural that we do not understand them and it is absurd to conclude that their ideas lack sense and lucidity, since they belong to an order of sensation and comprehensions which are totally inaccessible to us with our education and habits.”

Now those who followed after Nodier said that madness, like R.D. Lang of Britain today, is a bit for existential liberty, from God and man. It is an expression {?} desire to be a brute fact, and we can agree with that, but we cannot agree with their approval of it. Very interestingly, just as in the past few days, there was a review of Allen Harrington’s book, Psychopaths, in the Herald Examiner, and it pointed out that, increasingly, for modern thinkers, psychopaths have assumed a tremendous philosophical significance and a moral vacuum, because they are seen as the true existentialists, and the reviewer, Maddock{?} wrote, “One notes an appetite for absolute freedom, to do what one wants to do. One registers the preference for disconnected, spontaneous living. One senses the weakening of social contract, of responsiblity to any community except the community one improvises from day to day. Harrington, the author of Psychopaths, seems half thrilled, half horrified, at the prospect of a mental big bang. ‘It’s not so easy, not even good enough,’ he writes, ‘to take an overly righteous stand against the psychopath. Perhaps,’ he suggests, ‘history, frantically looking for its transition to the future, can find no other solution.’ His not-very-happy conclusion is perhaps a mad god, the psychopath, is better than none.

“For all his old fashioned moderation in presenting his theme, for all his sneaking admiration for the psychopath, he is, at times, a sort of fellow traveler, Harrington is finally panicked by the subject that confronts him. The comparison springs to his mind for a hoard of turned-on psychopaths; Genghis Khan’s Mongols. Yet, Harrington also knows how fatigued, how bored, the reasonable have become with their reasonableness, and so the world teeters between a scream and a yawn.”

And of course, this is the fact that is terrifying many of these people. The psychopath is the true existentialist. Are we moving toward a world of total control by psychopaths? Is the modern man increasingly going to become a psychopath? Is the modern school doing nothing but creating psychopaths? Their answer is a frightened “yes,” but no answer to it.

Since Darwin, man feels unrelated to God, and he moved into existentialism and into existential madness, into a world of madness. Modern existentialists are increasingly dominant in the field of psychiatry, and they are interested, they say, in man as such, in man as he frees himself from other people, and from God, who proclaims not only the death of God, but the death of man. He alone is, so that in his solitary madness, he says, “I am, and beside me there is none other.” This is the world of existential mass{?}. The goal is to be an individual without any relationship to God or man.

Thus, what modern man has done has been, in effect, to take our scripture text and to make it his own model. This is the essence of existentialism. This is the essence of progressive education. This is the essence of modern psychiatry. God said unto Moses, “I am that I am,” and he said, “Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, ‘I am, or he who is hath sent me unto you.’” God is, and beside him there is none other.

This means that modern man has no stake in existentialism except death, that it is suicidal, that indeed they are creating psychopaths who will fall under together with their world, the judgment of God, who will destroy themselves because God so ordains it, but it also means that when Christians worship God, God requires them to know Him as He is, not simply in terms of what He does for us. This is the fallacy of Armenianism. Armenianism is in the process of becoming existentialism. It denies that God is He who is, the sovereign self-created, self-existent eternal one, and it says God has no hands but mine to use. What does say and do? It converts man into the existential fact, and the blasphemers who say that are on their road to existentialism, and this is why evangelical circles today are so heavily saturated with Macionism, with the influence of Tilich, of Kirkegaard, of Sartre, and of others. This is why they are antenomian. There is no sovereign God for them who speaks infallibly and certainly and declares, “I am that I am,” whose word is unchanging, not dispensational, not something that moves with the times.

Armenianism treats God as a creaturely fact, that requires relationship. It talks about God only in terms of what He does for us, how gloriously the Lord has answered my prayers. I do believe in prayer. I do believe in answered prayers, but we can never think of God only in such terms.

God is He who is, and must be known and worshiped primarily as the sovereign one, our maker, not in terms of what He has done for us lately.

There is the story of the two businessmen, no doubt familiar to all of you, so I’ll summarize it briefly. The one man was in need of money, so he went to his friend and wanted to borrow $10,000 and the man turned him down, and he said, “But Joe, how can you turn me down. You have the money? Remember when you were hard up and you were going to be wiped out if you didn’t’ have $7,000, and I loaned it to you?”

“Yes.”

“And remember when your house burnt down and you lost everything? Who was it who put you up and gave you some money to tide you over?”

“Well, it was you.”

“And you remember another time when you were in very serious trouble, and you needed $5,000 immediately and I gave it to you?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Well, why won’t you lend me $10,000?”

“Well, what have you done for me lately?”

And of course, there, the whole point of it is, what have you done for me lately? And this is the attitude of faulty theology towards God. What has God done for me lately, or what has He done for me? In other words, trying to turn Him into a relational fact, something that is interdependent with us. I’ve done something for Him, He should do something for me. Works religion. All of these things try to reduce God to the same level of factuality as man, but God is the only existential fact. We should approach him with gratitude for all things that He does for us, but know Him first and foremost as He declares Himself. “I am that I am. Thus, shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, ‘I am has sent you.’” Until this faith resounds through the hearts of men, and from the pulpits of the churches, what they say and what they offers in the way of worship is blasphemy. God is the existential fact, and He demands that we know Him first as He who is. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of thy grace and mercy hast made all things, thou who are He who is, we come to thee, mindful of thy sovereignty, rejoicing in thy majesty and power, delighting that there is a supreme existential fact in the universe, that our lives are totally dependent on thee. Make us ever joyful in this fact, O Lord. Make us ever mindful that we are created facts, that we might ever praise thee, might ever look unto thee, might ever rejoice in what thou art. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus’ name. Amen. Are there any questions now, first of all, on our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Sanctified?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, but increasingly in the modern sense, the term psychopath means the person who willfully, deliberately does not relate to the world around, is in rebellion against it, who refuses to relate. Who tries to be . . .

[Audience] {?} someone who is confused.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Audience] Someone who is {?} deranged.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Audience] Someone who actively is {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, who refuses to relate to God and man. Who is lawless to the core.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] The question, is grace an individual thing, an individual gift to man or is it a national thing? The answer is it can be both. God gives His grace unto salvation to men and thereby, redeems them and makes them justified in His presence, but He also extends His grace to nations, and speaks, of course, supremely of Israel and then of the church as His covenant people to whom He has extended His grace, and He also indicates that, by His grace, He has raised up other nations from time to time, for short-term purposes. So, God’s grace is extended to men as well as to nations.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Grace is iresistible and it is abiding. When we are saved by the grace of God, it is not by our doing, and it is irreversible, when it is unto salvation. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, yes, these people have no real understanding of scripture, these Jesus-only people. First of all, very clearly, here it is God the Father that is speaking. Elohim is the term that is used. Then second, Elohim is a term that encompasses the entire trinity, so that God speaks for the trinity here. There is a plurality of persons. The Hebrew word for God in the singular is “El.” In the plural, it is “Elohim.” The Bible consistently uses “Elohim,” plural noun with a singular verb, indicating a plurality of persons in the godhead. Now, this appears from the very first chapter of Genesis. Therefore, in denying the doctrine of the trinity, they are denying, very clearly, the very word for God that’s used in the Bible. Then, very clearly, we are given the trinity throughout the scripture, and specifically, baptism, according to the closing verses of Matthew, is in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. This is Jesus’ statement. So, if they are going to go in terms of Jesus only, they’re denying our Lord, because He very clearly specified the trinitarian formula for baptism. He clearly defines God as a trinity.

Now, the only way they can justify their position is really by recourse to the modernists, because the modernist insists on reading out of the scripture supposedly additions, all references to the trinity. Of course, every manuscript we have from Antiquity has those passages, so it’s because they don’t believe in the trinity that they go through and then say, “This has to be an addition.” So, basically, the Jesus-only people represent a modern addition to the world of Christendom, which is a post-modernist phenoninon. In other words, however Bible-believing they claim to be, they represent a very heavy influence of modernism.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. But, that has been dealt with more than once in answer to them. In Acts 2:38, simply speaks of baptism in the name of Jesus. Now, what are they going to say when they refer to that? Are they going to say that our Lord therefore, has no standing and what Luke has to say carries more weight? Acts 2:38 reads, “Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” Now, if you pit that, one scripture against the other, you’re going to have to say, “We don’t believe the whole of the Bible,” you see? They are saying very plainly that Matthew 28:19, where our Lord speaks, “Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” has no meaning. Now you can’t have it both ways. You cannot say you’re a Bible-believing Christian and you take one verse and you don’t take the other. Now, what is the meaning of Acts 2:38? Well, at that time, baptism was already practiced by the Jews. If you were a proselyte, that is, if you were say a Greek, or an Egyptian, or a Persian, you were both circumcised and baptized, because you were being baptized in terms of the coming of the Messiah as well as into the covenant of people, and they recognized from Ezekiel that the rite for admission into the covenant of the new age would be baptism. Now, the radical department of John the Baptist was that he began to baptize Jews as well as Gentiles. So, they immediately said, “Are you the Messiah? Are you the Christ?” because this was a sign of the new age, you see. Everyone being baptized, Jew and Gentile alike. Now, with Pentecost, Acts 2:38, the baptism is specifically specified in the name of Jesus Christ, you see, to indicate that the Messiah not only has come, but his name is Jesus Christ, so that there would be no mistaking. This is not the same as the Jewish baptism, whereby you are baptized into Christ, but it’s in the name of Jesus, the Christ, so there’d be no misunderstanding as to who the third person of the trinity was.

Now, that’s the meaning of it, and these Jesus people are Unitarians, not Christians. They’re denying Christ. Yes?

[Audience] {?} and also, be not conformed to the world, but it says, be transformed by the renewing of your minds. So, in a sense, {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, of course. The kind of non-conformity that is recommended by such people is a non-confirmity with the world of God, God’s reality. You have a fearful conformity of rebellion today, the rebels are conformists of a sort. They are conformists who, throwing over the world of law of God and man, so the Christian non-conformity is conformity to God’s world of law, and it’s a very radically different kind of non-conformity. Our time is very nearly up. I’d like to pass on a very interesting item to you.

There is a book just published by H.Z. Bennett, who is definitely not conservative in any respect, and the title is No More Public Schools. This is very interesting coming from the source it does, and it amuses me to no end, because it’s only nine years ago that my book, Messianic Character of American Education came out, and it was about three years before that that my Intellectual Schizophrenia came out, and at that time, it seemed crazy to some people to speak of the end of public schools, but this coming from a radical counsels taking your child out of the public schools. In fact, if you can’t put them into a private school of your liking, just take them out, and it gives advice as to how to break the law. Take your child out public school and tell the school authorities that you’re moving to another state. Take your child out of public school and tell the school authorities that you’re enrolling them in a private school. Never register your child in public school in the first place, or tell the authorities that you’re starting a school of your own, then put together a school on paper only. And so he goes on to state in a number of ways how to fool the school authorities and get your children out from under, and a little follow up. There is, if you do not openly defy them, and say you’re pulling your children out because you don’t want them there, you just go through this gimmick of supposedly transferring them to another school and there’s never any check, and advice is also given as what to do if you are walking downtown during the day with your child because you’ve taught him in the morning and you don’t need all day to do about it. He says, for example, “I know one family in San Francisco who simply never registered. The only problem they ran into occurred when they took the child to public places during school hours. Sometimes stranger, usually old ladies, came up and asked why the child was not in school. The mother developed a technique for putting them off. She whispered to the stranger, “Birth defects, they won’t take her.” This caused an embarrassed hush. For those who pursued the question further, the mother was always quick to reply, “Please, I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.” It always worked. The article goes on and on to say that there are a number of gimmicks you can use, and he says that California is one of the best places to use them, whereby you can avoid ever putting your child in a public school, educating him yourself, or putting him in private schools, whatever you wish, and his advice is it all costs to do that, because the last place for any child, the opinion is, is in the public schools.

Now, coming from the people who, a few years ago were 100% behind the public schools, this is a very interesting development, and a very significant one. It does indicate that the days of the public schools are very definitely numbered. It isn’t going to be a quick collapse, but it is collapsing, and some of the new experiments in education that are being worked out in desperation to save the public schools are already, despite advanced claims to the contrary, proving to be not only failures, but very costly failures, and increasingly, there is a flight from the public school across country. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, of course, their idea is of a very far-out, liberal type of education.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, but they feel that the public schools are destroying the child. This doesn’t mean that theirs does not, but I guess they’d rather destroy them themselves, I guess. Yes?

[Audience] Aren’t you nervous that Montesorri {?}

[Rushdoony] I’m not surprised. What is happening increasingly is that private schools are experiences very serious problems, and are folding across country for the simple reason that, where there is no Christian education, the discipline is collapsing. Now, some of the schools which, up until a year or two ago, had waiting lists. These were schools that were regarded as so elite, there is one here in California, for example, if you went to this school, it was more important thereafter, to identify yourself as a graduate of “X” school than to say you went to Harvard, or Stanford, or Columbia, or Yale, or Princeton, and it produced a very sizable if not most of the ruling elite of the West Coast, from Mississippi to California. That school, people would register their boy for, if they had the right connections, soon after he was born. For the first time in their history, they face not only a full quota of students, but they are going to have a lack of students, a serious lack, this coming fall. It has never before happened in their history, and of course, while they say it’s because their price is too high that this is a problem, it’s $4,000 a year, the real problem is that they cannot produce the disciplined child as well as the highly cultured and educated child that they were producing some years ago, and as a result, cross country, these private schools are folding rapidly, and their failure will continue. This failure, by the way, is now hitting the universities. It used to be that if the big name universities, the Ivy League type school in the East, had a long waiting list, and it was difficult to get in. Now, they are out soliciting students, and straight-A students can just about write their ticket with all kinds of scholarships and get in. The reason for their ability thus, to recruit students is their ability to bribe them, and this they get from all kinds of endowments as well as from various foundations which are pouring money into the major universities to prop them up, all kinds of funds for scholarships and the like, and research grants so that some students go there to get these grants. So, on the university level, it is this outside money that is propping them up, but there is a collapse everywhere of so-called public and private education. It’s Christian education that alone that is making the headway.

Now, it should be added that the so-called, I have mentioned this in some meetings before, the so-called private education today is largely federal education, so that you have state colleges and federal colleges. Schools like Stanford and Columbia, University of Chicago and others are not state schools, but they are federal schools because so much of their money today comes from federal grants so that this is why they can thumb their nose at their alumni who say, “I won’t give if you continue your present policy.” They’re getting the money from the federal government. However, even they are having trouble now, increasingly, and they have been the target of all kinds of problems; demonstrations, riots, and the like. There are some who feel that next year, the incidence of this sort of thing may again increase, that some of the student leaders are again talking about activism. Whether this is true or not, I cannot say, but at any rate, they are beset with very serious problems. There is no where else in our world today where more collapse and change is underway than in education at every level.

Well, our time is up. Let’s bow our heads 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.