Salvation and Godly Rule

Progress & Providence

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Works

Lesson: Progress & Providence

Genre: Speech

Track: 26

Dictation Name: RR136N26

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name, and deliver us and purge away our sins for thy namesake. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man. O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man that trusteth in Him. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, once again with joy and thanksgiving we come into thy presence, mindful of thy greatness, thy goodness, and all thy mercies. We thank thee, our Father, that thou art He who dost reign, that thou dost reign, O Lord, and govern all things. Our times are in thy hands. The nations are before thee as nothing, and thou dost rule the hand overrule in the affairs of men, and dost bring forth thy destined purpose. O Lord, our God, we rejoice in thy government, and the blessed assurance of our victory in Jesus Christ, and the certainty, the inevitability, and the blessed assurance of thy grace. Bless us now by thy word and by thy spirit, and grant us thy peace. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Our scripture this morning is Romans 8:28-39. Progress & Providence. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified. What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The subject of progress is a very important one, as historians deal with history, they give us a picture of development and progress. They fail to say that their idea of development and progress is itself a Christian concept. It is a concept, however much debased in their hands, still has its origins in scripture. When we go to the ancient world and the world outside of Christ, we find that history lacks the same purpose, the same direction. Sometimes, some historians speak, for example, of the history of China as one of chronic stagnation; rightfully so. Wherever we go in the world, we find that man could not see any direction in history.

As a result, all that was in play was power, man’s lust for dominance, for power, and so it was that while in some parts of the world, certain wrongs reach great power, great wealth, there was no focus to what they were doing. When they were overthrown, everything crumbled and disappeared.

The characteristic view of history in the non-Christian world was brought to its highest focus in the Greco/Roman world. It is the idea that, instead of moving forward and upward, history was circular, cyclical. It was just an endless return. The universe developing, evolving, and then devolving, going back to nothingness, and again, an evolution taking place only to collapse again finally, in total nothingness. For them, thus, life had no meaning, no focus, no direction.

As a result, man, in the pre-Christian world and man, was unable to give direction to his personal life because he could see no cosmic purpose, no meaning beyond himself, and therefore, what little meaning he hoped for soon withered, because it was set in the context of a universal meaninglessness.

With the Enlightenment, the 17th and 18th centuries, man began to express great faith in reason, but the Enlightenment thinkers were very hostile to Christianity and regarded it as the great infamy, were unable to see reason as triumphant. Because of their strongly classical orientation, they held to the cyclical view of history, and life for them was meaningless. Some of you may recall that when we were studying world history last winter in our mid-week seminar, we saw how, in the 18th century as the Enlightenment feeling began to permeate the intellectuals, their despair finally reached the point where some of them were unable even to get out of bed in the morning, and just in hopelessness, stayed in bed and allowed the servants to feed them until they died. These were extreme cases, granted, but they were symptomatic of the loss of the will to live because there was a loss of meaning.

However, what happened in the latter part of the 18th century was, with the evangelical revival, and the development of an Armenian theology which broke with the reformed faith, which broke with the emphatic statement of our scripture concerning God’s predestination, there was a mingling of this evangelical revivalistic theology with the old Enlightenment faith, and as a result, there was a renewal of Enlightenment confidence in men like Hegel. With Darwin, who was a Hegelian to the core, who simply gave a biological formulation of Hegelian philosophy the secular, non-Christian doctrine of progress began to flourish in the last century.

We have, in recent weeks, cited Oliver Wendell Holmes, the senior Holmes, several times. Militantly Unitarian, anti-Christian, a Satanist through and through, he was also a very distinguished scientist in his day. His work today as a writer is somewhat better known, but his writing of poetry and non-fiction was really an avocation. His basic work was as a scientist, and in one of his works he commented, because it is a naïve and confident expression of this new faith in progress without God. Holmes wrote, “Did you ever read what Mr. Bancroft says about Calvin in his article on Jonathan Edwards, and mighty well said it is, in my judgment. Let me remind you of it whether you have read it or not. Setting himself up over against the privileged classes, he with a loftier pride than theirs, revealed a power of a yet higher order of nobility. Not of a registered ancestry of fifteen generations, but one absolutely spotless in inspection, pre-ordained in the chamber council of eternity. I think you’ll find I have got that sense right, word for word. Now, there’s a great deal more in it than many good folks who call themselves after the reformed seem to be aware of. The pope put his foot on the neck of kings, but Calvin and his cohort brushed the whole human race under their heels in the name of the Lord of Hosts. Now, you see, the plight that people don’t understand is the absolute and utter humility of science in opposition to this doctrinal self-sufficiency. I don’t doubt this may sound a little paradoxical at first, but I think you’ll find that it’s alright. You may remember the courtier and the monarch, Louis XIV, wasn’t it? Never mind, give the poor fellows that lived by setting you right, a chance. ‘What o’clock is it?’ says the king. ‘Just whatever o’clock your majesty pleases,’ says the courtier.”

Now, of course, Holmes point was that the scientific scholar had none of this arrogance of the kings or of those who believed in pre-destination. They had, he said, humility, the scientific humility.

Holmes was a naïve believer in hard facts. There was, of course, someone in his own native New England, Mary Baker Eddy, who was beginning to doubt those hard facts at the same time, and he felt it preposterous that people could doubt the hard facts of science, and he said, “But there are people, and plenty of them today, who would dispute facts just as clear to those who have taken pains to learn what is known about them, as that of the tides rising. They don’t like to admit these facts, because they throw doubts upon some of their cherished opinions.” Holmes was talking, when he wrote that, about evolution. It was hard facts, although of course, it’s very obviously hypothesis. No aspect of evolution has ever been proved. Every attempt is backed by it.{?}

Moreover, when he spoke of the absolute and utter humility of science, it really is amusing because he was talking about himself. He was a scientist, and he felt he was absolutely and utter humble, although a more arrogant man would be hard to name. He’s downright amusing in his absolute confidence that wisdom was born with him, and of course, he’s absolutely an utterly humble scientist since then have been talking about how stupid the rest of us are, and how we need brain implants, and how they should decide who should breathe and who shouldn’t. Maybe none of us should so that {?} man should take our place, and absolutely manufactured man, something of their own making. This is humility?

One non-Christian scholar, very recently in surveying the world, with some fear and trembling, has seen that the idea of progress has crumbled, has written, “Through the corruption of progress ideology, brought on by the very attempt to live up to the pursuit of truth is replaced by the quest for power. Power is the chief goal of all progress-oriented society. The reason for this lies deep in the structure of human nature. To understand the phenomenon of power, then presuppose an inquiry into the foundations of human nature. Social scientists, {?} scientists are ambivalent as to whether there is any such thing as human nature at all. In this book, I assume there is.” This man is Lionel Rubinoff, a contemporary scholar, and he is convinced that human nature is mad. At this point, he agrees with scripture, although not for scriptural reasons. He feels that man is still largely animal and is likely to continue so for some time, and therefore, it’s the animal in man that makes him so ugly, and as a result, he feels there is a problem.

The more people are progress-oriented, the more drive there is in a society, the more lust for power takes over and corrupts the will to progress. And so, he says, the lust for power is a very important part of man. He cannot escape it, and as he deals with the problem, and states it, his statement, I think, is worth quoting. He says, “I am concerned with two simple ideas, progress and power, both of which have had a deep and profound influence on the course of Western history. With the idea of progress came the idea, by identifying value with pragmatic and hedonistic goals, those which can be pursued only through the exercise of power. The Hedonistic dimensions of the pursuit of power, are what make this phenomenon such a potentially dangerous one, but it is still dangerous for still another reason. Progress posits a belief in transcendental goals, which both direct and supply the sense of history, but the irony is that the ideology of progress surreptitiously conspires to introduce the very opposite belief, namely the relativistic notion that truth is whatever happens to satisfy the needs of the moment, and wherever these needs conflict, power is again invoked as the soul arbiter.”

Now, I think this is a very interesting statement as is so much else Rubinoff writes. He is talking about God, but he never, never comes out and says that dirty word, because in his liberal vocabulary, to talk about God is the height of pornography. That’s the one concept you must never introduce to your thinking, but what he says is, that as long as man believed in God, someone above and beyond the universe, transcendental, and in the law of God, then with God and His law, there was predestination, there was direction, there was progress, but once you take that away from the world, you have total relativism. There’s no meaning, no purpose, no focus, no direction, and then, power disintegrates into lust. Progress disappears.

What Rubinoff wants is God without law. What he wants it transcendence without God, and how is he going to get it? His answer is a very interesting one. He says, “I am therefore concerned in this book that the self-destructive potential of power, as it affects man’s primordial tendency to evil, and with man’s inherent capacity, to transcend himself through the creative use of imagination. The main thesis of this book is that the most effective antidote for the performance of evil is the imagination of evil, and that the most viable therapy for the pathological abuse of power is accordingly, an imaginative critique of power.”

So, Rubinoff says, we must become like gods ourselves. He goes back to ancient Gnostic philosophy. We are the creators of things, and therefore, what man should do is to gain the power to exorcise, to cast out the evil in him. He must imagine all the evil possible, give free reign to his imagination and to his lusts, and as it were, like a god, create, and God said, and there was, and God thought, his thought was being creative, things came into being, and so he says, man, since he has no god in this world but man, can exercise the same creative power and imagination to create evil intellectually, and to cast it out, and so he looks to men like Nietzsche, Jean Jene{?}, and Norman Mailer{?}, and he says, what is lacking in our world is not violence, terror, and death, but creativity and life. Thus, Mailer concludes if one is to make one’s way back to life and restore creativity into the world, the violence and irrationality from which we now flee must somehow be passed through and digested instead. In short, says, Mailer, the way to transcend violence is to commit it, get it out of your system once and for all. The decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself. But how does one commit violence? To commit it, in fact, is to surrender to it, to enter it through the imagination, however, is to transcend it. The existential moment is therapeutic, precisely because it is imaginative.”

Now, in recent weeks, I’ve quote from several books with the same thesis, that we must encourage the psychopath in us. We must become like devils in order to become like angels. That’s their thesis, and you can see precisely where this leads to. Rubinoff cites Normal Mailer, in the process of doing this, imagining evil, stuck a knife into his wife and killed her. He didn’t have anything against her, he just said he was imagining what it would feel like to stick a knife through her ribs. We can also see, with this kind of teaching dominating in liberal arts, in psychiatry, in psychoanalysis and elsewhere, what the results are, why we have the problems we do, why the psychopath is increasingly regarded as the true man and the normal man. Why we are getting a society so thoroughly addicted to violence. It is seen as the way of salvation. In fact, Rubinoff says, “The salvation of our age then lies in nothing less than the speed in which the imaginative celebration of evil can superseded the pejorative of evil through the exercise of power.” That is all he says. Indulge ourselves without any restraint in imagining people, and somehow, we’re going to cast it out of ourselves that way. This is the rationale that is used by scholars when they go before legislative committees and before courts to defend pornography. They feel it is the way to purity. In fact, Rubinoff says, if we try to act like angels, we will end up as devils. We must therefore, act like devils and think like devils, so that we can end up as angels. If this sounds insane, it is, but it is a part of ancient Gnostic philosophy, that one creates out of his own being like a god, that which he wants to pass out of himself, by fully indulging it, and of course, the answer to it is do we get rid of hatred by indulging hatred?

Rubinoff wants progress, and he wants to purge the world of the lust for evil power so that progress can be reintroduced. He recognizes that progress requires transcendence, a god. Let man be the god then, and create, and cast out of himself evil.

The answer, of course, is so ridicules that if it were not for the fact that it is so powerful in the world of existentialist thought, which is the world of modern education, which is the world of modern psychiatry, that we cannot avoid considering it. It is creating systematically, purposely psychopaths in our world today, as supposedly the way to salvation, and the world “salvation” is their word also. We can see what kind of progress it will result in.

Progress, as we indicated earlier, becomes meaningless. The idea perishes. It disappears whenever and wherever men depart from biblical thinking, within a generation or two or three, the belief in progress dissipates. Charles Beard felt that scientific technology would preserve the idea of progress against destruction. He recognized what the roots of the idea of progress were, that men could no longer believe in God and therefore, no longer hold to an idea of progress which was, in essence, a product of Christianity, but he said scientific technology, which is now arising, writing in 1928, will give us an automatic assurance of progress, that even as he was writing, Joseph Stalin was using technology to further evil, and it was only five years to Hitler and his use of technology, and not too many years from the use of technology from moderns states to increase their tyranny.

Gordon Park, in commenting on the idea of progress, has said it is a denial of providence, in a sense. He is right, because the older term which was used was providence. Progress simply meant providence, and men preferred to use the theological term, and apart from the theological term, progress loses its meaning.

The great statement of providence in scripture is Romans 8:28, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.:” The universe was not an accident. It was created by God, and God not only foreknows or foreknew the purpose and the goal of all things, He also did predestinate all things, so that all things move in terms of an established purpose, and man therefore, has the assurance at all times that the providence of God rules and overrules in every event to the very hairs of our head, that there is total meaning in the universe. Because there is total meaning, therefore, there is total progress. Total providence means total progress, inescapable progress. This is why St. Paul, in terms of this, could have the utter and absolute confidence that he has in this passage. He was living at the dawn of persecution of Christians. He himself gives us a chronicle of what he himself has suffered. Beatings, shipwreck, imprisonment, thrown to wild animals, and yet, though he can say, “For thy sake we are killed all the day long, we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter,” we experience distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and the sword. What shall we than say to these things then if God can be for us, who can be against us? Because everything adds up to good, the worst thing the world brings to us, “there is nothing neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things to come, nor things present, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature which is able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.” The absolute providence of God makes sure that the worst thing that the world throws out way brings us closer to the glory of God, and to his glorious purpose for us.

Progress is providence. J.B. Bury who wrote the classic study of progress, defined the non-Christian view of progress thus: “This idea means that civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction. But in order to judge that we are moving in a desirable direction, we should have to know precisely what the destination is. To the minds of those people, the desirable outcome of human development would be a condition of society in which all the inhabitants of the planet would enjoy a perfectly happy existence, but it is impossible to be sure that civilization is moving in the right direction to realize this {?}.” And so Bury, the great scholar of the subject of progress from a secular perspective, recognized that without the doctrine of predestination, without a sovereign God and a sovereign purpose governing all history, it is impossible to define progress. If there is no God-given direction and meaning to history, who is to judge what is progress? Progress can be your death. Progress can be your suffering. Progress can mean being in a communist prison and being tortured. Who are you to say what is better and what is worse if there is no standard?

Khrushchev, Stalin, Kosygin, Hitler; men like that have just as much right to say what constitutes progress as you have. There is no standard, no norm whereby anything can be judged, and so even as Bury wrote the great book on secular ideas of progress, he wrote also his epithet.

They can see no hope. The Westminster Confession of Faith gives us a summary statement of the doctrine of progress which sets forth precisely the necessary ingredients and declares God, the great creator of all things, doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most wise and holy providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge and pre- and immutable counsel of His own will, to the praise of the glory of His wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy. Although in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God the first cause, all things come to pass immutably and infallibly, yet by the same providence, He ordereth them to {?} out according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently. God, in His ordinary providence, maketh use of means yet is free to work without, above, and against them at His pleasure.”

The Shorter Catechism gives it to us even more succinctly. “What are God’s works of providence? God’s works of providence are his most holy, wise and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all their actions.” Thus, because God is God, because He rules absolutely, there is providence. There is progress. There is the assurance of victory.

Two or three years ago when I was lecturing in one community, the thing that interested me as I was talking to a group on campus, it was, of students and some adults from the community, that some of those who gathered around afterwards were particularly hostile, both conservatives and radicals, to my confidence concerning the future, and so they charged me with having a false optimism, and I said, “No, it isn’t false because I believe God is sovereign, and I do not believe that man shall prevail against God and His purposes,” and they both, immediately, from both sides, started {?} that faith and the sovereignty of God, and it became apparent as the discussion continued, that both the right-wingers and the left-wingers resented it because it said The matter depended on God, not rather than man, and they wanted to say if the world was going to be saved, they were going to do it. Man was going to do it, and that’s why the world is in a mess. Men have dreamed of progress without God. Men have dreamed that, by their own will, they are going to create an eternal decree which shall give direction and meaning to history and instead, they have robbed it of meaning.

Progress without God becomes nothing. The cyclical view of history returns. The world becomes an irrational universe, life becomes meaningless, reason then becomes empty, but not us remember this very crucial fact: history is documented endlessly. This is not the first time in history that men have lost faith, that there is any meaning to life. This has happened over and over again. Men have denied God and they have denied providence, and they have said Life is meaningless and empty, that man never has been able to live in a vacuum. He has never been able to accept the idea, emotionally, however he affirms it, intellectually, that the world is meaningless. Whatever philosophy has concluded that the world is empty of God, and empty of providence, empty of meaning, men have insisted on seeing the meaning, but the meaning they then read into the universe is demonic. Whenever history has seen a collapse of a faith that life has meaning, men have snatched at some kind of meaning, and they have turned to the occult, to the demonic. If men deny God, they soon affirm the Devil.

They have an evil purpose, then begins the reign of the psychopath, the reign of the Satanists, the reign of the man who believes there is meaning, but it is demonic meaning, and today, precisely as we have again denied God, denied predestination and providence, and therefore denied progress. Today when our schools from the lower grades to the universities have declared that the world is empty of God and meaning, men have begun to people it{?} with demonic forces, and opportism{?} which not too many years ago people regarded as an ancient superstition, is again a ruling force in our time. Without God, then {?} live, and without God and meaning, men seek the Devil, and death.

As our Lord speaking His wisdom centuries ago, “All they that hate me, love death.” Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of thy grace and mercy hast redeemed us through Jesus Christ, and by thy providence dost surround us day by day with thy mercies, to rule and overrule in all things. We thank thee for the glorious victory and destiny which is ours in Jesus Christ, and we pray that thou wouldst make us mighty and effectual, under the tearing down of the things which are, that thy kingdom may be built, thy name magnified, thy glory manifested in all the earth. Bless us to this purpose, we beseech thee, in Jesus name. Amen.

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

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Pessimism is a form of existentialism. That is, pragmatic philosophy is the American version of existentialism. Now, existentialism does create a vacuum, and in existentialist circles all over the world, the influence of occultism is very strong. Now, this is not at the intention of the existentialist philosophers, but it is an inescapable result, of their destruction of meaning. They have reduced meaning to the existential moment, to man and his biology, man as God creates his own world of meaning. Well, the only meaning man in this condition is able to create is evil. He is a sinner. The only power he believes in is in the power of evil, and he peoples his universe with his evil. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, and this is the point on which they can very easily be ridiculed, because strictly speaking, if their philosophy is true, the way to develop hate is to love, in terms of their Rubinoff philosophy. You exercise what you project onto the world, and in a sense in terms of their thinking, this has been true, because the kind of love the Love Generation has shown has never been described as hatred. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, very commonly it does. In fact, you will now find that the word “love” among certain of the existentialists is no longer is favor. They prefer to use the word sex. They feel love gives a false glow{?} of bourgeois sentimentality to the picture. So they want to strip man from the relics of Victorianism, as they put it. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] The cultural mandate is to all men. Now, men rejected this in Adam and all sinners reject it, and pervert it. That is, because they are created in the image of God, they cannot escape the cultural mandate, but they try to make it the kingdom of man instead, and to build man’s world, so that the sinner is trying to develop the cultural mandate on his terms. He is trying to establish a world order apart from God and in terms of man’s own self-righteousness. Thus, everything you see in the world today of the U.N., is a good example, the attempts of man to create a better world, these are all examples of the cultural mandate in the sinner. Now, in the redeemed man, the cultural mandate in its purity is restored. Christ redeemed man so that man could now again be reestablished in that task which was given to him in the Garden of Eden, to subdue the earth and to exercise dominion over it as priest, prophet, and king under God, to rule it as God’s kingdom, to interpret it as God’s prophet and to present it to God as God’s priest. Only as men are redeemed can they discharge the cultural mandate in God’s terms and by His law. Apart from that, it will be the perverted manifestation of the cultural mandate.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. This has been a long-standing debate in some circles, and certainly man was created in the image of God. Now, the question is, was the image of God destroyed or was it marred, or what was the function of the fall with regard to the image of God in man? The position of the Scholastic philosophers was the image was destroyed and/or marred, depending on the thinkers, except with regard to man’s reason. Man’s reason, they felt, was not affected by the Fall, and therefore, Scholastic philosophy assumed that reason in every age was able to function autonomously and arrive at godly conclusions. This is why Aquinas had the confidence in Aristotle, and used Aristotle, but of course, our position is that the autonomous mind of man is, first of all, a myth. It’s a would-be autonomy, and second, that man’s mind, his reason, every aspect of him is infected by the Fall. Now, the question therefore, is, to what extent or entirely was the Fall operative against the image of God in man. The Reformation doctrine was total depravity. Now, some have misunderstood that doctrine, including some outstanding Reformed thinkers to mean the total destruction of the image of God in man. This is not tenable. Then man would cease to be man. What total depravity means is that depravity is total in its extent, every aspect of man’s being is depraved. Now, as Calvin said, this does not mean that man is incapable of doing good, but that his good, like every aspect of his being is governed by his sin. In other words, the extent of depravity is effemiated{?} one. It colors, it alters everything in man. It does not destroy. Some might say that Calvin gave too much credit to the image of God in man and its ability to be good, but we always preserve the situation by recognizing the permeation, by his sin, and he’s called attention to the fact, he has a famous passage in which he said sometimes the good civic works of the ungodly will put some of the righteous to shame. So, the image of God is depraved, it is marred, it is permeated by man’s sin, which is to be as God, but it is not gone. It hasn’t disappeared. Man is spiritually dead. There is a deadness, you see, but it hasn’t disappeared. Now granted, this is a controversial point, but I believe you get into trouble if you think of the image as gone. It is fallen. It is depraved. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] The cultural mandate and the idea of culture covers the whole of life. Now, the modern definition of culture is a very, very faulty one, and the Marxist definition is also very faulty. The Marxists tend in the Soviet Union and Red China, to answer critics who infer that their Barbarians, that “We’re cultured. We have a ballet, we have opera, we have a symphony.” That’s culture, the arts. But culture, strictly speaking, is anything to which man puts his hand. There you have culture in the most primitive sense of the term. Well, the cultural mandate means the working of the earth and of all things therein, of all the arts and sciences, by man in terms of God’s calling and purpose, and God’s law. So, it covers everything. There is no area of life that the cultural mandate does not cover. That’s a field that is, say as God created it, while is cultured, but the minute man fences it and begins to improve it, it is cultivated or cultured. Man’s hand is there. Now, culture can be good and bad, and the cultural mandate is let all things be done in terms of God’s calling and purpose.

End of tape