Salvation and Godly Rule

Hell

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Works

Lesson: Hell

Genre: Speech

Track: 33

Dictation Name: RR136S33

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Mark 9:42-44, and our subject: Hell. “And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea. And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.”

Recently, in reading the comments of a very capable Marxist scholar, I was very interested to note that he commented in passing that the absence of a belief in Hell, in any society, created serious social problems. I was reminded of the words of Emery Store{?} which I have quoted before, when he said, “When Hell drops out of religion, justice drops out of politics.” We can add that justice also drops out of religion when Hell is denied.

A very interesting work by an English scholar who is, by no means a Christian, deals with the subject of Hell. He studies it historically, the belief in particular in the 17th century and thereafter, as belief in Hell began to decline. This scholar, D.P. Walker, commented, “There is only a limited number of possible ways of eliminating eternal torment. The simplest is to deny personal immortality. All the other ways involve universal salvation.” This is a very astute observation, and particularly telling in that it comes from someone who rejects the doctrine.

Now, let’s look at the subject very carefully in terms of what Walker, as someone who has no believe in the doctrine, says the only possibilities are. They can be reduced, he said, to three things. First of all, you can simply hold that death ends all. Then there is no problem about Heaven and Hell. There is no life beyond the grave. The possibility of Hell then is exchanged for the certainty of death. It means the reduction of life to meaninglessness, but many men prefer this. They prefer an eternal meaninglessness to an eternal God and a universe of meaning. To accept eternal death and universal death as ultimate is a form of suicidism, but many prefer it to life of God’s terms. For such people, salvation means salvation from God. After all, for a runaway murderer, the sight of a policeman is hell, but for someone who is being attacked, to see a police car come around the corner is salvation, and so it is that unregenerate, reprobate men have seen salvation as escape from God. They are ready to pay the price of eternal death.

I recall some years ago, a man who was a militant atheist, a thoroughly reprobate character, and when someone commented to him in my presence that when there was a discussion of, “Is there life after death?” and he insisted that death ended everything, and someone reminded him that that meant, of course, that there was no meaning in the world. It was the finish for any idea that there could be any meaning, or purpose, or direction, or sense in life, and his triumphant answer was, “It’s the finish for God also.” For him it was worthwhile to eliminate all purpose and meaning in life if he could eliminate God. Of course, long before Dostoevsky pictured such a character in his The Possessed Kirinov, who said by his suicide that he would kill God, and psychologically, there was a profound truth to that. The death of man to affect the death of God. This then, is one way of looking at the situation. You eliminate the problem of Heaven and Hell by saying death ends all.

The second alternative, as Walker pointed out, is that Hell can be dropped, or it can be turned into a probationary place, a kind of prolonged purgatory, or you can have reincarnation, or any other variety of things, spiritualism, but the ultimate meaning of this is eternal and total salvation for everyone, universalism. A justice and law begin to depart from a man’s moral universe when the doctrine of eternal punishment is surrendered, and it is very interesting what happened when men began to drop the idea of Hell.

The English situation is very interesting because some of the earliest skeptics arose in the 17th and 18th century in England, and with them, antinomianism was born. The minute they dropped that idea, which meant, as Emery Store{?} said, justice went out of their philosophy, their religion, their faith, antinomianism took over. The results were very interesting. It was precisely among those who abandoned the idea that you got, on the one hand, a belief in reason as God, the autonomous mind of man as its own God, or the belief in experientialism, or new revelations with those who retained the idea in God, and so it was that those who first denied the doctrine and formed separate meeting groups, very quickly began to divide one from the other. Each one felt that now that God’s word had been set aside, they had some kind of ultimate word, the ultimate truth. Whether it was a product of their reason or some fancied revelation, each of them felt, “Now I know the truth.” You see, an ultimate law, an ultimate standard, an ultimate accounting had been denied, and since there was no final irrevocable accounting, they began to play fast and loose with the truth.

One man, for example, who founded such a group, was the Reverend Richard Roach{?}, and he was sure that he knew what was right and what was just, and he began to preach about a God of love, who would never condemn anyone. Very quickly, there was a woman in his group, Mary Kimer, who was spouting new revelations from this God of love, and so she was standing up at meetings and saying things like, “This is and this is a verbatim account,” from one of her admiring contemporaries, who included her brother. “Consider thou, O man, I will confound thee, yea, and bring thy lofty thoughts down. I will lay thee even with the dust. Who art thou, O man, that exaltest thouself? Who art thou? I am. I am. How dost thou presume to speak unto me? I can this moment strike thee dead. I am. I am. I am. I am, and ye shall know that I have spoken for quickly judgment shall be ushered in. Thou wilt know who hast spoken and who dost now speak. Tis the God of love.” Not very loving, but she said it was the god of love talking through her, and she ordered the group to provide her with money to go to France to tell Louis XIV to listen to her immediately or be struck dead by the word of her mouth.

Now, you know something very interesting. These people were denying Hell but they certainly were ready to pass around judgments on one another. As a matter of fact, her brother Samuel Kimer wrote, “I have seen my sister, who is a lusty, young woman, fling another prophetess on the floor, and under agitations, tread upon her breasts, belly, legs, etc., walking several times backwards and forwards over her, and standing upon her with violence. This was adjudged to be a sign of the fall of the Whore of Babylon.”

Now, this is a very significant aspect of antinomianism. When the God of justice is denied in the name of the God of love, the people of love immediately become champions of judgment and violence. It’s not surprising that the peaceniks of our time have been the most violent people in our streets, and there is a connection. When you eliminate the justice of God, and when you eliminate the doctrine of Hell, then you must take it upon yourself to play God and mete our justice. In other words, final justice is transferred from the world to come to this world, and it’s placed in your hands and in the hands of the state. So, very significantly, as Hell has departed from men’s beliefs concerning the world to come, it has become a reality of modern politics. It’s very significant that in the latter part of the medieval era and the Renaissance when men had very little faith in the church and out of the church. In fact, there were popes who denied the idea of Heaven and Hell. It was then that the most fearful kind of tortures came in, things that had been unknown before, and it’s significant that again, this kind of brutality towards man, unequalled any time in past history, is routine, especially in the Iron Curtain countries. You see, when men try to play God, they create a Hell beyond the imagination of men previously. So that as Hell has departed from men’s beliefs concerning the world to come, it has become a reality of every day life.

In fact, Marx called for this. Marx was not a fool, although he was a very unbalanced and unprincipled man, and Marx specifically, very early in his writings, in fact, you’ll find this not in his Kapital, but in his early writings, specified that, having abandoned the whole idea of Heaven and Hell for the world to come, it had to be made a part of every day life. So that, he said, we must speak of the proletariat as the saints, as the elect people, and the devils must be all the bourgeois, the capitalists, and we must have a Hell for them, here, and we must offer our people a paradise when communism is ushered in.

Marx did not deny the doctrine of Heaven and Hell. He simply said we’re going to make it the realities of this life. You see, the idea of Hell is an inescapable category of life. If you deny it in one area, you transfer it to another area. All those who denied the doctrine became antinomians. Markedly so.

For example, one of those in the early 1700’s, John Lacy, was prominent in the denial of it, very quickly felt that he could also deny monogamy, and get rid of his wife because she felt that his ideas were rather ungodly. So he dropped her and picked up with any number of women and felt that he was thoroughly justified in it, because he felt that there was no accountability, no law to require of him, and his ideas were, in essence, what we today call the new morality. When Hell disappears from religion, it reappears in politics and social morality, and the ultimate judgments are mad eon this earth, and man becomes the judge and the state becomes the judge. Now, tyranny is bad enough when man presumes to become a tyrant in the name of God, which has happened. It’s far more terrifying when it is done in the name of man.

Many of you have heard and have read of the writings of Reverend Richard Wurmbrand, and it is a fearful account that he gives, that it has been confirmed by so many others who have been released from communist cells. Wurmbrand writes, and I’m just quoting a little bit because there is so much more that could be said of a fearful sort. “For fourteen years of prison, our food was horribly bad. Prisoners were forced to eat their own excrements and to drink urine. For much of the time, we ate cabbage and unwashed intestines. In our cells, Christians were tied to crosses. Every day crosses were put on the floor. Then dozens of other prisoners were brought in and obliged to fulfill their bodily necessities upon the faces and on the bodies of the crucified ones. Then the crosses were erected for the amusement of the communists who stood around jeering, “Look at your Christ. How beautiful he is.”

And now things are even worse than they were when he was there, and in China, they are going to extremes that seem unbelievable, but they are attested to by people who are, by no stretch of the imagination, conservative or Christian. Hell is not evaded by being denied.

Thus, when men choose either to deny that there is any life beyond the grave, or they take the second alternative that Walker cited, to hold out a hope for the universal salvation of everyone, Hell moves into every day life in a way that men have never imagined was possible.

There remains, then, the biblical alternative. Now, it is significant that Walker, as he deals with the biblical doctrine of Hell, is very fair-minded. For a man who is not a Christian, he very candidly admits that, through the centuries, Christians have recognized that the language is symbolic, that it does not refer to a literal fire, or to a literal worm, or to a literal gnawing, that these things are symbolic of the self-torment of the reprobate, of their conscious, of their inner torment.

The biblical doctrine of Hell says that Hell is the place of the wicked. This is stated in the Psalms, in Proverbs, and in many other places. Our Lord also described it as the habitation of the Devil and his angels. The word for Hell is very revealing. It is Gehenna, or Hinnon, depending on whether you use the Hebrew or the Greek derivation, and it took its name from the Valley of Gehenna, or Hinnon, which was the city dump of Jerusalem, and we can understand what the Bible teaches about the doctrine of Hell from realizing where it got its name. Now, in a dump, there is no meaningful relationship between objects. If we look at this room, we see that everything is placed in a meaningful relationship toe everything else. The windows are so designed to give light and air. The seating is so arranged so that everyone can look forward. Everything is done in terms of a purpose, a meaning. Everything in your home has a place in terms of a relationship to everything else so that there is a meaning in all your furnishings. Every little knick-knack you have has a meaning to you, so that it has a memory attached to it and association, and so on. Now, in a dump, nothing has any relationship to anything else. It’s just a miscellaneous junking of useless items. There is no meaningful relationship between one thing and another, although they may be jammed together.

This tells us then something about Heaven and Hell. Heaven is that realm where all people and all things have a meaningful, loving fulfillment, one in another. There is a totality of meaning, a totality of purpose, a totality of fulfillment; whereas in Hell, there is a totality of isolation. There is no community between one person and another. There is a total isolation, so that everyone is his own world, his own universe, his own god.

Now, this is significant because it does indicate that one the one hand, the kingdom of God and Heaven and the new creation are the realm of total meaning, purpose and plan; whereas Hell is that realm where everyone lives as his own universe. C.S. Lewis commented on the doctrine of Hell, “Milton was right. The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words, ‘Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.’ There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy, that is, to reality. You see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends. You call it the selfs, but in adult life it has a hundred fine names. Achilles' wrath and Coriolanus' grandeur, Revenge and Injured Merit and Self-Respect and Tragic Greatness and Proper Pride.” And as Lewis goes on to say, those are all words for Hell.

Now, the significant fact is that this is what existentialism is talking about. We’ve discussed existentialism a number of times. It is the belief that man should be his own god, totally uninfluenced by anything in his past, or in his environment, or in the world around him, that he should be governed only by the biology of his own being. This is why Sartre has said, as the great existentialist philosophy, that first, he has said, other people are the problem for him because if he’s God, how can he admit the divinity of other men, or other people, and second, his neighbor is the Devil, and if he’s God, he will not recognize any other person as God. So that, in existentialism, every man is his own universe, living in total isolation. This is why the problem of communication is such a big one in the modern world. How can you communicate when you will not recognize anyone else except as your creature? But they claim to be their own God.

As a result, the doctrine of Hell is simply what existentialism sees as its goal and its Heaven. Everything that the existentialist philosophers are describing as being their goal, that which man should attain. To be his own god in his own world, totally unrelated and independent of all things else, God or man, or the world around him. This is what Hell is, and this is what the imagery that our Lord uses means, and it is significant that Sartre himself practically uses our Lord’s language when he describes what existentialism leads to, and he concludes his massive work On Being and Nothingness, with these words in the concluding major section: “Man is a futile passion. All there is to man is this futile self-torment, this inner gnawing, this burning, and yet he will not surrender this. It’s his idea of Heaven, because it means to him independence from God, or so he thinks.” The only reason, you see, the doctrine of Hell is offensive to the existentialist mind is because God thought of it first.

On principle, the existentialist is at war with God, because he is God himself, and of course, this was the temptation of Satan; to be as God, to be your own world, to be your own realm, and therefore, he must wage war on principle, because if he didn’t not say on principle, “I must resist,” he would have to say, “The truth of the matter is I’m a sinner.” So, he’d rather wage the flag of principle than raise the petition of confession of sins, and of course, this is the characteristic of the sinner.

I recall some years ago a situation where a man was guilty of adultery and he felt very guilty around his wife, and so his attitude was on principal to pick a fight, to find occasion to put himself in the right. So he’s always finding fault, and on this one occasion, he came in and started to complain, no doubt they’d had hamburger or something cheap again, no thought of the fact that he worked so hard, and deserved something better, and he was halfway through his second sentence complaining, when his wife told him, no, she managed to say enough out of the budget to provide him with steak, so he immediately jumped her for being a spendthrift, and of course, she immediately recognized, “There’s something wrong here. I’ve been doing everything to please him,” and of course, when she asked herself that question, it lead to a discovery before too long of the situation, and of course, this is the essence of Hell. To wage war on principle rather than to confess that one is a sinner.

You see, Heaven and Hell simply represent two rival plans of salvation, two differing concepts of paradise, and God has given to Satan and his angels, and to all the reprobate, their idea of paradise. It’s Hell. The doctrine of Hell thus, simply gives the reprobate their dream of paradise as their most fitting punishment. It is their paradise and dream, and it is their damnation. It is described as comparable to a dump. Everything in total isolation from everything else, having no meaningful relationship to anything; whereas Heaven and the new creation are portrayed both as the area of work without curse, and the totality of rest, of joy and fulfillment, and the New Jerusalem is portrayed for us in Revelation symbolically as a city, a city of unequalled magnificence, and yet as a garden, another Garden of Eden, having all the perfection of every aspect of life, and of total meaning, everything finding its fulfillment, the potentiality of everyone of us finding its full expression so that all our aptitudes and our abilities are most fully expressed in the new creation. Here, in part, and fragmentarily, we realize the gifts that we have, there in glorious and in eternal fulfillment.

It is very significant that as our civilization is collapsing round about us, and at a time when most Christians have swept the doctrine of Hell under the carpet, as it were, it should gain attention in passing, from Marxist scholars, and at great length from an atheistic scholar, and yet it should not surprise us. It does represent an inescapable factor, a God-given element in human thinking, and men cannot escape the idea. They will recreate it in one way or another, whether we like it or not, life is on God’s terms, and if we like it on God’s terms, it means a growing meaning, and ultimately, in the new creation, totality of meaning, totality of peace and joy. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that thou hast called us to be thy people, that thou hast given us the assurance of the totality of meaning, and purpose, and fulfillment. We thank thee, our Father, that those things in us that strive for expression now, shall find fullness of expression in thee, that we shall be that which thou hast called us to be throughout all eternity. O Lord, our God, how great thou art and how glorious thy purpose, and we praise thee. In Jesus name. Amen.

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

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, and it always has been. It’s only in recent times as people have attacked the doctrine that they’ve tried to interpret it that way, but you can go back to the church fathers, to the rabbis, and it was always recognized to be symbolic of the inner torment of conscience. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now, that’s in the preceding verse and at another time we may consider that. “For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward.” That’s an affirmation of total meaning. There is no meaningless act in the universe, so that even a cup of cold water given to someone in the name of Christ, our Lord says, has its rewards, has its meaning. The very hairs of our head, he also declared, are all numbered. Total meaning. This is our privilege as we move in Christ. Everything has meaning. Everything has reward. But, when you deny Him, nothing has meaning, nothing has a reward. It’s the negation of all meaning and purpose, but of course, this is exactly what existentialism was. There can be no meaning, the existentialist said, except myself. I must provide meaning or there can be none. It’s life on my terms. It’s like a remark, maybe you’ve used it at one time or another, humorously, because it used to be a very common one, of some people when they just will not be comforted. “If I want to be miserable, I’m going to be miserable, so don’t try to talk me out of it.” Well, you’ve encountered that frame, and we all are guilty of it at one time of another, but you see, that’s symptomatic, and that’s the psychology of existentialism and of Hell. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, let me explain it by going back, say 150 years to early America. Now, some of you may have studied Snowbound when you were in school. What Snowbound describes is very routine, and characteristic of life in those days. The doctor comes through the snow to visit the sick woman, and then he goes over to the neighbor’s and tells them precisely what they’re to do to take care of her, and that was routine in those days. People knew each other. They took care of one another. The idea we have today of say, lonely settlers pushing out to the West is ridicules. There never was any such thing. It was groups that moved out, that helped one another. One person may know nothing, you see, about how to build a house, but he may know a great deal about handling livestock. So they’d come together and put up their houses, do this and that, as a community, and this has extensive attestation from contemporary documents that this was the way they worked.

Now, you can live for years and not know the name of the people across the street from you, or next door to you, or in your apartment building, and this is becoming more and more pronounced, it’s less so in this part of the country, more so in some places like New York City. Total isolation. You can be crowded together with people, but you don’t want to know them. You don’t want to have anything to do with them. This is the difference, you see, between Heaven and Hell. Between community and isolation. Close proximity, but no desire to do anything.

Now, more than once and I’ve talked to various church groups and told them about Christian Reconstruction and what Christians should do. Well, they say, “What practically can we do?” Now, I’ve never heard of a situation yet, and I have mentioned this a number of times, where anyone’s done anything about it. Why? They’re ready to say, “I’ll dig into my pocket and send money to Africa or Asia, or somewhere else, mission church, or missionary work,” but when you mention the fact that it was once commonplace for Christians to care for their own {?}, how many people do you have in your congregation who are elderly, who need someone to come in and do their housework for them? Or someone to take them shopping? Or someone to take care of various little chores for them? Now there isn’t a church anywhere, no matter how small, that doesn’t have a few people who are in such a condition. But this means getting involved, you see, and it’s easier to do something at a distance. The last thing the modern man wants is to get involved, and that goes for Christians who are deeply infected today with this existentialist mentality. It’s better to sit back and just pick at people, which is existentialist also. No involvement. That’s the existentialist mentality, and it deeply infects us. The existentialist is a god sits back and judges{?}. He won’t touch a situation unless it’s perfect, and this is why our world is in the predicament it is, with only a fraction of the Christians today practice the type of neighborliness that was commonplace in bygone generations, it would have a major impact on our time.

Now, this is the difference, you see, between Heaven and Hell. You might speak of the modern life as being in the suburbs of Hell, because it’s moving in that direction with the increasing isolation of man from man, and we do need meaningful relationships one with another.

Now, of course, it’s more difficult, you cannot in a sense, have a relationship with the ungodly who don’t want it, but there are enough among Christians to whom we could have a meaningful relationship, and it is not {?}. Any other questions?

Our time is just about up. I’d like to comment on one thing before we adjourn. I referred awhile back to Admiral Farragut when I was dealing with the difference a century or so ago in maturity, and I pointed out that Admiral Farragut, at the age of 59, was a 50 year veteran of the U.S. Navy, but in those days, maturity came very young because there was a very different kind of education. Mothers taught their children to read an write between the ages of two and four, and then they went to school for an education, and in two or three years, they learned a great deal more than people do over a long period of time.

Well, I learned something more about Admiral Farragut. When he was nine, and was formally in the Navy, he was not new to the Navy because his father, who was a naval officer, had turned him over to Commodore Porter, who more or less adopted David Glasgow Farragut so that he could get training before he enlisted, so that when he was nine, he entered not as a cabin boy, he’d been all through that for two years and a great deal more. He entered as a midshipman. When he was twelve years old in the War of 1812, he commanded the prize ship that they took in battle, faced a mutiny from the crew, and put it down, and took the ship into port, at twelve. He was a man by that time. Now, it just shows that the difference between education then and now, and it’s a very dramatic example of it, and the interesting fact is that it was not uncommon, it was quite routine.

I’d like to remind you of the Economics seminar with Dr. Hans Sennholz. It will be this Saturday from 2:00 – 9:00 p.m. at Knott’s Berry Farm, and it will be an analysis of some important aspects of economic theory as they relate to our world today, as well as an analysis of our present economic situation. I think you will find it a very timely seminar in terms of the critical stage of our economy and of our country at this point in history, and of the entire world situation. There are blanks on the lectern in the back. 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