Salvation and Godly Rule

The Antithesis

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Works

Lesson: The Antithesis

Genre: Speech

Track: 29

Dictation Name: RR136Q29

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Blessed is the man whom thou chooses and causes to approach unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts. We shall be satisfied with the goodness of thy house, even of thy holy temple. O come, let us sing unto the Lord, let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving and make a joyful noise unto him with song. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto thee that thou art none{?} unto all them that call upon thee, to all that call upon thee in truth. We thank thee that, according to thy word, thou wilt fulfill the desire of them that fear thee, and that thou wilt hear our cry and deliver us. We thank thee, our Father, that all thy promises to us in Jesus Christ are yea and amen, that thou art he who dost make all things work together for good to them that love thee, them who are the called according to thy purpose. So our God, according to thy word, we come. We come to rejoice in thee and thy so great salvation, in the majesty of thy word, and the certainty of thy victory, in the protecting care which is ours in Jesus Christ. Our God, we praise thee. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Our scripture is from Genesis 2:16-17, and our subject: The Antithesis. “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

Our subject today is The Antithesis. The subject is as old as scripture, as old as Genesis. The term is a relatively new one, originating in the past two centuries. Basically, it means division, and this is a basic aspect of the Christian faith, that there is a division in the world which man must recognize and reckon with, but here is a line of division between good and evil. We see this throughout scripture. God requires man to choose between good and evil in the very Garden of Eden. One thing forbidden to him, when he separates himself from God and says, “I will determine what is best for myself, and I will eat of the fruit thereof, the process of death, the Hebrew text makes clear, “Dying, thou shalt die,” that is, the process of death will begin to work in him. He has divided himself, separated himself from God.

Then, in Genesis 6, we are told that humanity very quickly divided itself between those of the godly line of Seth, the Sons of God they are called, and those of the line of Cain, the daughters and the sons of men. Thus, the term antithesis is a new word for an old doctrine.

The source of it is in the philosophy of Frederick Hegel, and Hegel is the father of a great many things, almost everything in the modern world. He is the father of the theology that prevails in virtually every existing church. He is the father of Marxism, of existentialism, of Kierkegaard and others, of pragmatism and progressivism, and John Dewey and others, so that there is scarcely a movement in the religious, the political, the philosophical, the educational horizons which is not a product of Hegel.

Now one of the aspects of Hegel’s thoughts for which he is best known is his idea of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The words are philosophical terms, they are artificial, and those people can go through the university and graduate school today and never have these terms explained to them, but in virtually every field today, these terms undergird the existing philosophy. Whether you study biology, or law, or philosophy, or economics, or religion, Hegel’s idea of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis govern. What is it? What does it mean?

The background of it is very definitely ancient pagan, Greek dialectical philosophy. It is evolutionary. It holds that originally, there was one being, developing, evolving, a primordial being. This is called the thesis. Then, as it evolved, it divided into seeming opposites, and the world was beset by contraries which seemed to involve irreconcilable differences; right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark, God and Satan, and a great man other things. This second stage, according to Hegel, and the development of being and of mankind, and the thought is the antithesis stage. First thesis, then antithesis.

Now, Hegel held the third stage and the stage of the world state, the stage of synthesis is what all these seeming differences, these apparently irreconcilable conflicts are synthesized, and you are then beyond good and evil, beyond right and wrong, in which you recognize that all these seeming antitheses really not antithetical.

Of course, this philosophy is very old. It goes back in Medieval period to the Abbot Joaquin of Floras, who propounded the theory of the three ages of history; the age of the father and law, the age of the son, and the age of grace, and the third age for the third world, the death of God age, and the death of the son age, the age of the Holy Spirit, or the age of love when all men have one common spirit and love one another. You also find this thinking in Tergo{?}, the French thinker, and the father of sociology, Pompey, the Greek stages. It has, in various forms, been influential in history, but now it’s dying. Now, in every area, the third world thinking is prevalent. The far left, the student revolutionaries, are dedicated to it, but really, most of those who oppose them are also still thoroughly infected by this that they really are working for the same end with more conservative methods. We must transcend the stage of antithesis, for synthesis. This is the belief.

The terms are philosophical, but they are in spite of the lack of knowledge of the meaning of the terms, the basic realities of our world today. We are, today, in the age of synthesis, the death of God movement, the new morality. In every area, not to a judge between right and wrong, but to compromise, and the essence of compromise as we see it in the modern world, is to be beyond good and evil, beyond right and wrong, beyond God, and beyond Satan.

Now, as against all this Hegelian philosophy, in the last century, some Calvinistic thinkers who awoke to its significance put their foot down and said, “No, there can be no synthesis. You cannot unite God and Satan. You cannot unite the truth and a lie.” Nietzsche said you could. He believed in synthesis. You cannot proclaim the death of God and a new morality in which right and wrong disappear, and every attempt to establish a law order, a political order, an economic order, and a moral order which is based on the principle of synthesis is anti-Christian and wrong. As a result, the battle was done between a very small minority of thinkers and the world at large.

Now, when we think about the antithesis as Christians, we have to realize that the antithesis is a grim reality and many thinkers in the church, in particular, have realized that they cannot call themselves Christians without paying lip service to the antithesis, and so, of course, a flawed antithesis has prevailed in Christian circles in the past century. A Christian socialist, the social gospel people, the liberals in the churches have said the antithesis is between capitalism and the establishment, as against the people. That’s a false antithesis, a very false antithesis, because it assumes that all the guilt is on one side, and that sin localized itself in one aspect of humanity. The Aristotelians in the medieval church, and the Tomists limited the Fall, limited sin to the emotions of man. The mind of man was not tainted, according to them, by the Fall. As a result, they had a false antithesis.

Today, of course, you have the false antithesis very widely prevalent in many circles. It is ironic that both conservatives and radicals are convinced now that there is a capitalist conspiracy against the people, and books are written on that subject, and of course, it’s quite commonplace to read, if you read some of the leftist periodicals, that it is the capitalists versus the workers. Sin has no monopoly on any class.

I was interested this week in reading something that I already knew but had a great deal more knowledge of, and that was the history of mining in Nevada. I lived in Nevada some years and so knew some of the background, and therefore, it was especially interesting to me, and of course, so many of the mines in this century in Nevada, with three major mining booms there, were financed by Wall Street, and so it was very easy for the IWW and other groups subsequently to come in with the claims that Wall Street was bleeding the poor worker, it organized the workers. The reality was Wall Street didn’t have clean motives there, but the workers didn’t have clean motives either, and high grading was the routine practice. In fact, I did lecture an hour on the high grading that was routine by the miners. High grading was just pocketing the choice nuggets and walking out with them. Death Valley Scotty made thousands and thousands of dollars marketing the high grade nuggets that the miners took out. He would sit in a bar in Gold Field and wait for the miners to come off their shift, and pay them, and then he would blow thousands of dollars every weekend on a big three. Some of you may recall a good many years ago, he hired a train to make a trip from Los Angeles to Chicago to set a new speed record, just out of the money he made high grading. In fact, the wages the miners were making was a mere pittance compared to what they made high grading, but you never heard such a rumpace as the miners made in Nevada when the regulation was instituted that they had to strip to the skin, take off their clothes, walk through a guard barrier to another locker and put on a company coverall, so they couldn’t high grade. They were so self-righteous and so indignant about that, it impugned their honor.

You see, the world is full of false antitheses, because man is a sinner, he continually wants to make the false antithesis in order to have the coloration that scripture gives, but there’s a moral issue involved, and so we are continually confronted in the newspapers and on television with false antitheses. I was amazed in today’s Times to find out that there is a movement, and let me get that name exactly, it’s a protest movement against death. That’s its actual name and it has some distinguished citizens on its roster. Of course, here again, you have a false antithesis between life and death, and so all the evil could be summed up in the fact of death. I’m sure you’d find a great deal of evil in some of the members of that movement. They have no monopoly on righteousness.

You see, the antithesis is, in a sense, necessary to life. If you’re going to say that things as they are, not as they should be, so you create false antitheses. Another false antithesis that continually besets us is the one which removes it from the sphere of morality to the sphere of metaphysics. We are told by some that it is an antithesis between spirit and matter. If we would all become more spiritual, this would solve all our problems, and that’s rubbish. Our problem is not that we are not spiritual, but that we are not godly. Satan is a pure spiritual being, purely spiritual. Doesn’t make him morally pure. You can be totally spiritual and totally Satanic, and a lot of the spirituality that many churches are proclaiming and fostering is really ungodly. It’s a holier than thou self-righteousness. The antithesis thus, is not metaphysical. It is not that we are not God. It is not that we are not pure spirit. It is a moral antithesis. It is a product of man’s refusal to obey God, his moral rebellion against God. In Paradise, God gave man a choice, a moral choice. Obey me, and life if yours. You have freedom in this world to do as you please provided you obey me, and the obedience was with regard to one thing. Man’s disobedience meant that man was in moral rebellion against God and said, “I shall be as God, knowing,” that is, determining for myself, “what constitutes good and evil. Determining it in terms of what I think is best for myself.”

Man’s moral choice was therefore, an epistemological choice. Again, we’re using a philosophical word. Epistemology has to do with the theory of knowledge. How do you know things? So that man, when he made the choice to be independent of God, said, “I can know reality better on my own terms than on God’s terms. I will establish what is right and wrong, and what is true and what is real, rather than taking God’s word for it,” so that moral choice is also an epistemological choice, as choice as to how one would seek to know reality, whether in obedience to God or as an autonomous and independent being. Sin, thus, is cutting loose from God morally, and epistemologically. Sin is a rebellion against creature-hood, but man still remains a creature. He cannot change the metaphysical fact. He seeks to know independently of God, and to decide morally in independence of God, but he still remains not a god, but a creature.

Now, of course, it is the work of Satan and of all sinners to try to destroy or to obscure the antithesis. This is done by presenting a false antithesis or by denying that it exists. But men cannot forget or overcome the antithesis, because they are God’s creatures and every fiber of man’s being, every atom, witnesses for God against man. We can never be anything except creatures, and our whole being testifies to that fact.

Then, God’s judgment compels recognition of the antithesis. When man sinned and god judged him and cast him out of the garden, he told man he was making conflict, tension, hostility, an inescapable part of his life. Man, being at was with God, could not be at peace with himself, with his loved ones, with his neighbors, with his fellow man. Division was now written into his being. He couldn’t overcome this until he overcame his moral warfare with God.

Moreover, our very calling as the sons of God places us in sharp opposition to evils. We can never obscure the reality of the division. We may like to be in peace and sometimes to forget about the fact of conflict, and we often feel that it would be easier to live and to let live. We don’t like the antithesis. It asks too much of us. It asks us continually to make a stand and continually to break with people, and I think virtually every one of us, if we look in our background and our history, we find that it’s sad story of many partings, with church groups and with individuals whom we love deeply, and yet we had to make the break. Whether we liked it or not, there were some things we could not live with in peace, and how ever much it may grieve us, we know we cannot go back on that.

A man I was more close to than I’ve ever been close to any other man in my life, the time came where there was a parting of the ways, on moral grounds, on religious grounds, we could not continue the relationship. It was painful to us both, but the antithesis is something that God writes into our nature, and however reluctant we are and however much we want to say “Live and let live,” we cannot do it. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and beyond the certain point, we cannot be peace-makers, because beyond a certain point, it becomes a surrender to evil. It becomes a moral compromise.

Moreover, the antithesis cannot be overcome. The kind of synthesis the Hegelians believe in is impossible because both the godly and the ungodly work for dominion. When God created man, he said, “Subdue the earth, then exercise dominion over it.” Now, dominion is a part of the image of God in man. Fallen man still seeks to exercise those aspects of the image which are a part of his being. Now, they are tainted by the Fall. His urge to dominion is not dominion under God, it is dominion in antagonism, in hostility to God. It is dominion trying to play God. A godly man wants to exercise dominion over the earth, dominion over various fields of knowledge, dominion over various areas of life, under God. As a result, the moral conflict is inescapable.

Here are two kinds of people, both seeking dominion, one under God, one as God, and as a result, the conflict is there. It cannot be evaded. To be redeemed, to be saved means to move from one side of the antithesis to the other. From evil to good. From disobedience and hatred of God to obedience and love of God. It means to move from one plan of conquest to another, from one kind of knowledge to a radically different kind of knowledge. When our Lord declared, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace to the sword.” This is what he was talking about; the antithesis. He also spoke of peace, world peace, and the prophets of old foretold it, but it was not in terms of synthesis but in terms of the antithesis, overcoming and eliminating evil, redeeming men from evil, bringing the world into captivity to God in Christ.

Then you have not synthesis, the uniting of good and evil and living beyond good and evil, beyond God and Satan, beyond right and right. The reestablishment of God’s righteousness, God’s law order, God’s peace.

Thus, the doctrine of the antithesis. It’s very important for us to understand, because there is not an area of life today where men are not moving, judging, thinking, and acting in terms of the belief in thesis antithesis, and a synthesis, which will obliterate the meaning of right and wrong, in which we will have schools without failure, because failure is irrelevant. The child is automatically {?}. Churches without God and without morality, because men are now beyond good and evil. Courts without law, because men are no longer to be judged. Economics in which nothing matters, and there is no law because the one purpose is to be beyond law, beyond good and evil.

Thanks be to God, thou men may dream and plan for such a world, it is impossible. It is still God’s world. The moral antithesis is inescapable. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that of thy grace and mercy, thou hast rescued us from the world of unbelief and disobedience and made us members of Jesus Christ, to show forth thy glory, thy law word, and thy majesty. We thank thee, our Father, for the assurance of victory. We thank thee that greater is He that is in us, and with us, than he that is in the world, and so, our God, we commit ourselves afresh unto thee with joy and thanksgiving that thou art on the throne. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

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

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, this philosophy is simply old paganism. Now, with modern education, it has become the thinking of the common man in the streets, of everyone, so that everyone is using this terminology. Now, it’s very interesting that an economist, Baxter, M.J. Baxter who died two or three years ago, in the early fifties predicted that there would be a move in the sixties towards, and you use the term unisex, that there would be very definitely such a movement. Now, Baxter wasn’t claiming to be a prophet, but he was simply aware of the fact that synthesis was basic to the thinking of everyone. Since it is now a part of our thinking because men, by and large, have rejected the biblical faith, they have bought the old pagan and Hegelian philosophy, and it has become so commonplace in every sphere. Why people who have never heard of the words thesis, antithesis, and synthesis are spouting this, and they think they are being original. You see, it’s become a part of the mental apparatus of modern man. The only way you’re going to change that is with a new kind of education, and a new faith, a renewed faith. Otherwise, men will think in those terms, and of course, it goes right back to the Fall of man. When man fell, he denied that there was an antithesis, and so ultimately, he developed a philosophy of synthesis.

Now, we may later treat on the great attempt, very early in the history of man, to establish that synthesis, and that was the Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel was a philosophical construction. That is, it was architecture which embodied a philosophy. That same philosophy you have today in Freemasonry. The idea was one of degrees whereby a man ascended, step by step, higher and higher, until he became a god. A French archeologist who was not a Christian, even remotely, has written a book on the philosophy of the ziggurats, the Tower of Babel is a great ziggurat. He’s called the book The Tower of Babel, and he has pointed out that as you approached the ziggurat, and chiefly the great ziggurat, the Tower of Babel, you saw a building in which each floor was recessed a little more so that the top story was a little left inside, and it looked like a ladder, reading up into heaven, and there was a temple, build, a room on each floor, as well as office rooms. It was to be a governmental center for the empire that was being planned. Now, whenever you have a revival of humanism and a belief in synthesis, it’s interesting, there is a revival of the Tower of Babel architecture. It’s very prominent as the top part of buildings in New York, very prominent, and of course, there’s a building in downtown Los Angeles which has a ziggurat cap{?} on the top of it. The city hall. If you look some time, you’ll see that step ladder effect up on the top of it, and of course, it’s because the same philosophy of synthesis again prevails, and the architects who have gone for this have become very much believers in this concept of synthesis. So much so that some of them have tried to combine, and sometimes it’s been very attractive, but the philosophy behind it is not, outdoors and indoors, in their architecture. There are homes designed now so that the distinction between the indoor and the outdoor is gone. The swimming pool will come right into the living room, and go outside, and some rooms will not have an outer wall, and so on. All of this is premised on a synthesis idea abolishing walls, abolishing distinction. They’re playing with the idea, because the idea represents their basic faith. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] What you mean is there will be a kind of uniformity.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, first of all, there are a number of points you raised. The word “synthetic” comes from the Hegelian terms. A synthesis means to bring things together, irrespective of whether it’s good and evil, right and wrong, truth and a lie. The word synthetic materials means bringing various things together. So the very word “synthetic” comes out of the background of Hegelian philosophy. Now, the type of situation you have referenced to culturally is one in which there is no synthesis, but there is the victory of one side of the antithesis, you see, the victory of righteousness. Now, this does not mean a conformity. It leads to conformity to the word of God, but it does not mean that you are conforming to my way and I am conforming to your way. It allows for the full freedom of differences, of different languages, cultures, and so on, provided that they are God-oriented, so it is a world of very marked, variations and variety.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, you would have a universal faith, according to the prophesies of Isaiah and other portions of scripture. “The knowledge of God shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea,” so it’ll be a worldwide faith, but this does not mean that there has to be a uniformity of all the people. Now, there is a point in the Gospel of John which has been mistranslated, that supposedly, Christ’s goal is one-fold, one shepherd. Now, the translators didn’t know their sheep. It’s not one fold, but one flock. There are many folds within a flock. In other words, when we look at Christ’s words properly, it means that there is one flock under Him, but many folds, many individual groups, so our Lord never asks for a one world church, you see, or a one world organizational, institutional unity. It was one flock in Him, but that means there can be many folds. Now this is technical sheep terminology, but it’s a very important one.

Our time is just about up and there are a couple things I’d like to pass on to you. One is an item in the paper this Tuesday, which I think is extremely important, and it is on British inflation, and according to this report, since about mid summer, in a five-week period, Britain’s money supply skyrocketed at an annual rate of 40%. Prices have risen a full one-third. In some areas, prices have skyrocketed. For example, old dilapidated six-room houses in some London sections sell now for about $150,000. Food prices are at an all-time high, and so on.

In talking yesterday with a friend, he reported an associate of his who is also a friend of mine, has now moved to Munich, and he was back recently on business, and he reported that the inflation in Germany and in France, and elsewhere on the continent is very rampant. He is living very modestly in an apartment with his wife, in Munich, and he said he could only describe it as comfortable, and nothing more, and paying $800 a month for it. Now, this is very significant in that part of our economic crisis in recent years has been that, beginning with Eisenhower, our rate of inflation began to surpass the European rate. As a result, there was a drastic flow of capital out of this country, of dollars and of gold. Now, the European rate of inflation is surpassing ours dramatically. It’s too early yet to see what this will mean, or whether we will be caught up into it, and a lot of the answers will depend on the election, who wins and what the winner does about it. It does indicate that there is a very serious international situation economically, inflation is one thing that scripture does speak about, and it does tell us what the sources of it are. Dishonest money, and today, the world, because it has denied God’s law and the principle of economics which once prevailed in our monetary standards, it is paying a price for it.

Then, I’d like to announce that, on the back lectern, there are some announcements of the Institute of Applied Christianity, the meetings or seminars which will be held beginning this month, and the announcements of our Chalcedon Guild seminar on economics with Dr. Hans Sennhotz, Saturday, October 14, at Knott’s Berry Farm from 2-9 p.m. I think you’ll find this a very interesting and important seminar because Dr. Sennhotz is one of our finest economists in the country.

Then, one more announcement. The ladies of the Chalcedon Guild are planning another luncheon social to begin right after the morning meeting on Sunday, September 24. It’s two weeks from today. It will be at the home of Flowa{?} and Wes Hamilton, 2169 Mandeville Canyon Road, just a short distance away. All are invited, so please plan to come on Sunday the 24th, and I think it would be advisable to let one of the Guild officers, Mrs. Thurston or Mrs. Bizzard, know if you are planning to come. 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