Salvation and Godly Rule
Regeneration
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Works
Lesson: Regeneration
Genre: Speech
Track: 41
Dictation Name: RR136W41
Location/Venue:
Year: 1960’s-1970’s
Let us pray. Almighty God, our heavenly Father, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. We thank thee that, through Jesus Christ, thou hast made us thy people. We thank thee that, in him, we have newness of life and that all thy promises to him are Yea and Amen, and so our Father, we come in this blessed season to praise thee, to rejoice in the abundance of thy grace and the certainty of thy government, and to give thanks unto thee that thou art our God. In Jesus name. Amen.
Our scripture lesson is from the Gospel According to St. John 3:1-8, and our subject: Regeneration. “There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: the same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born? Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”
The problem of personal and social renewal, or regeneration, is the most persistent problem of civilization. One civilization after another has arisen high in hopes, convinced that it has the key to making the world what it should be, and then it has spawned into pessimism and despair as it has found itself beset with all the problems that have haunted man through the centuries. Then, when this despair sets in, men begin to arise to condemn everything this civilization hopes for. These men have had various names through the centuries, Non-Conformists, Bohemian, Cynics, Stoics, Nihists, Beatniks, Hippies, Revolutionists. Some hope that society and men will be regenerated by revolution. This problem I have dealt with in my study of the religion of revolution, the cults of chaos which, because they believe not that God is ultimate but that chaos is ultimate, look to chaos for revolution, for regeneration. They therefore, indulge in acts of chaos, of revolution, hoping that thereby, they and society will find regeneration. The result, however, is always bitter dissolution.
It is interesting that a man who is definitely in the existentialist tradition, Jacques Ellul, in a recently published book, Autopsy of Revolution, gives a sad commentary to the hope of modern man in revolution. Ellul says that the revolutions have all round us being reactionary, that instead of furthering the hopes of the revolutionists, they have confounded them, so that whenever men have sought to attain something through revolution, they most definitely brought precisely their hope.
This is an interesting commentary coming from a man of that tradition. It does indicate increasingly what besets men without Christ; a despair of history, a feeling of hopelessness. What the use of it all? When men lose faith in the future of man, when they despair of any hope in history or any meaning of life and history, then their hope becomes severely localized and it becomes trivialized. If men cannot set their sights on something in the future, a great and a wonderful goal, and work towards that with a feeling of realization, when their future is wiped out, they think of only the day and their life becomes progressively trivialized in terms of what they hoped for in today. Civilization then gives way to trivialization. Their concern then becomes with very immediate things; social status and taste, and that sort of thing. It’s very interesting that when you study the history of civilization, these things which are the moment become important in certain areas, very dominant, and it is precisely when the end of a civilization is near. Taste then becomes a religion.
It’s very significant that, for example, throughout civilization, men have been concerned with good food and good things to drink, but this becomes virtually a religion, extremely important just before the breakdown and collapse of a civilization, so that in the last day of Rome, taste became a religion. At the end of the Middle Ages, before the collapse of the various monarchies, and again now. It becomes the substitute for reality, a means of discrimination other than character and faith, and the interesting thing is that when you come to the end of a civilization, nothing more irritates man than other people. He both finds it difficult to live apart from man and to live with man. A very prominent European dramatist, one of the most highly regarded avant gard dramatists, Eugene Ionesco has written as follows, “My contemporaries irritate me. I detest the neighbor to my right. I detest the neighbor to my left. Above all, I detest the one of the floor above me, just as much anyway as the one of the ground floor. I live on the ground floor myself. Everyone is wrong. I envy people whose contemporaries were alive two centuries ago. No, they were still too close to us. I can be indulgent only to those who lived well before Christ, and yet, in my contemporaries, my friends now, I feel terribly distressed. Distressed? Afraid, rather tremendously frightened. That is understandable. I feel more and more alone. How can I manage without them? What am I going to do, living on with all the others? Why is it the others did not die instead of them? I wish I could make the decision myself and choose those who would remain.” It’s an honest statement, and it is one that is all too prevalent in our time. Such an attitude leads, very logically, to self-hate, but {?} trivial form.
It is interesting that one of the problems of our day is that people do not like themselves. This is why the commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” is a very difficult one for man to obey in our day. To love your neighbor you have to love yourself also, “as thyself,” and if you have no respect for yourself, how can you respect your neighbor? If you do not love yourself, you cannot love your neighbor. Men today hate themselves, and therefore, they hate one another, but they hate themselves for the wrong reason. They look in the mirror and they do not say “I am a sinner, and my life is without meaning and purpose, and I need to submit to Almighty God, and to relate my life daily to his ultimate meaning and purpose.” Rather, they look in the mirror and say, “My hair isn’t right. I don’t look right. My age lines are beginning to show, or my hair is thinning,” and so on. They despise themselves because age and maturity is coming, and they reject it, and this is a significant fact again that happens certain times in civilizations.
Very, very often, in civilization, particularly when it’s healthy, in fact always when it’s healthy, both age and youth are respected. The very interesting thing that in the early Medieval period, as in Old Testament times, the aged were greatly respected, and yet you find men who were young, reaching positions of great power very early. So many of the great Medieval figures were great and prominent in their very early twenties, so it was an age in which both youth and maturity predominated, and had a meaningful role, but when a civilization is dying, when men begin to feel their culture and their world is growing old and is becoming meaningless, when they see no point in things, what happens over and over again is that men rebel at the idea of maturity and age, in the world around them, and in themselves, and they seek to destroy the forms of age, the old dress young and seek childish {?} and opportunity of youth. Culturally, men turn away from the established and mature norms to worship primitivism, and you have the primitive in art made again the science. Virtually all the art from Nero’s day is gone, but we are told it was very much like the movement in art that began around World War 1. There was a worship of primitivism in art.
One scholar, Bared{?}, has written, “cultural failure accelerates primitivism whenever {?},” and he is right. The myth of the noble savage predominates whenever a culture is dying, and there is nothing that you can tell men about the so-called primitive people to disillusion them. When you consider the number of anthropologists from the various universities, who have, in the past thirty, forty, fifty years, studied various tribes where the most unspeakable practices prevail, where cannibalism is the nicest kind of practice going, and yet comes back and rhapsodize over them, it’s staggering.
I recall some years ago, sitting at a table with an anthropologist at the University of California who was describing something some people he had been working with were doing. Barely printable and certainly not repeatable here, and I laughed and said, “Well, their culture certainly would not be to my taste,” which was a very mild remark in view of the practices being described, and he was almost beside himself in fury. To think that anyone could look down on such people, and he went into a long tirade declaiming about the nobility of these people who were about as degraded as you could get, and dirtier, and about how terrible our civilization was. He had been touched at a point that was critical, of religious faith. He was a man without hope, without faith, and his only hope was in the primitive and therefore, you could not challenge him at the point, even with the most casual remark.
When primitivism prevails, men’s tastes are shaped by it. Very interesting to look at the paintings of Paul Gauguin. His paintings before he went to Tahiti are remarkably beautiful, but it’s the paintings he did when he went to Tahiti where he was trying to recapture the primitivism of the people on canvas, paintings which he himself felt were something of a failure, just skyrocketed in value, and the only reason the earlier paintings have any value today is because Gauguin’s name is on them, but there is no question which are the superior, but today we worship primitivism, and therefore, Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings are the ones that are idolized.
Pablo Picasso has an article which has been widely reprinted and meant nothing, admitted that he is something of a faker, but a lot of his painting represents a pose. He was trying to recapture the primitive, but it makes no difference. Whatever he says about himself, he has caught the mood of modern man, his lust for things that are primitive, and as a result, he is the most financially successful and the most highly regarded painter of this century, and the fact that Picasso himself has strong veins of primitivism only helps him in the eyes of the people.
I mentioned a couple years ago the fact that in a book on Picasso, it was pointed out that he was feeling the clothing of his small son, because of his primitive belief in magic, that thereby wearing the child’s clothing, he could feel the child’s youth. When this was published, it did not hurt {?}. It only made him more efficacious an artist in the eyes of the people because he was a true primitive, and that made his art all the more authentic.
When a culture becomes pessimistic, when it loses any hope in it regeneration, it has more faith in primitivism than in law. It wants primitive vigor, which is something before and beyond the law, and one of the things, together with revolution, which arises in every age at the end of its culture, at the end of its cycle, when it turns to primitivism, is pornography, which is the worship of chaos, which is the belief that chaos, more chaos, is invigorating, and for the people who go for it, it has a religious appeal.
Now, all of this is important for us to understand. What these people are seeking for is regeneration, but without God, without Christ, and over and over again, the world has repeated itself at this point. It has a longed-for, it is hungered-for regeneration, but not on God’s terms. On its own terms. Now when Nicodemus came to our Lord, he was in the midst of such a crisis. In just a generation before Nicodemus, when the Roman Empire under Augustus had its very remarkable beginning, the Roman poet, Virgil, had hailed the rise of Augustus as the birth of the world’s regeneration, its renewal, and in his fourth Eclogue, he wrote in part,
“Now is come, the last age of the Cumaen prophesy,
The great cycle of {?} is born anew.
Now, from high heaven a new generation comes down
Yet do thou, at the boy's birth in whom
The iron age shall begin to cease, and the golden to arise all over the world,
Holy Lucina; be gracious.
Now thine Apollo reigns. And in thy consulate,
In thine O Pollio, shall this glorious age begin,
And the great months begin their mighty march.
Under thy rule, what traces of thy guilt yet remaining
Vanishing shall free earth forever from {?}
He shall receive grow in the life of the gods, and shall see
Gods and heroes mingled, and himself
Be seen by them, and shall rule the world that his father's virtues
Have set at peace. But on thee, O boy,
Childish gifts, wandering ivy tendrils and
Foxglove, and {?} mingled with the laughing acanthus.
Untended shall the she-goats bring home
Thou shall huge lions alarm the herds,
Unbidden thy cradle shall break into
{?} blossoms. The snake, too shall die, and
The treacherous poison-plant, Assyrian spices
Shall grow all up and down.”
Men felt that, with Augustus, the world was going to be regenerated. It was remarkably prosperous, it had remarkable feats. Augustus himself saw himself as the fulfillment of all the prophesies of all peoples concerning world renewal. As the historian, Stauffer{?}, has said, “Augustus took his prophet at his word. He gave official sanction and fulfillment to the politicizing of the ancient hope of a savior. In the year 17 B.C., when a strange star shown in the heavens, he saw that the cosmic hour had come, and inaugurated a twelve-day advent celebration, which was a plain proclamation of Virgil’s message of joy, the turning point of the ages has come. From documents known of old, as well as from some which have recently been discovered, from historians, poets, inscriptions, monuments and coins, we have more reliable information about these days and their official significance than of almost any other happening of ancient history.”
Now, let me stop for a moment there. This is a very significant fact. We know more about the expectation that this was going to be the messianic age under Augustus, and the whole world was going to be regenerated than any other period of ancient history, but we’re not told about this hope they had in most books, nor a savior. To continue,
“Heralds traversed Italy with their star-studded shields and the blessed wand of Hermes, and announced the invitation to the ceremonies. The Roman college of priests, with Augustus himself at their head, distributed holy incense to the masses for purification from past guilt. The people brought the fruits of the land for sacrifices to the chief gods of the festival, Apollo and Diana. The emperor inaugurated the ceremonies in the night preceding June 1, a night of full moon. As the divine and human mediator between heaven and earth, and the high priest of the Roman people, the emperor approached the altar in order to make a blood-offering to the goddesses of fate, with the prayer, 'I beseech you to grant the Roman people perpetual invulnerability, victory and prosperity and be ever gracious to me and my house.'”
Now, it’s important for us to understand this, because it was just a generation later, in the days of Tiberius, when the whole world was in bitter disillusionment. Prosperous? Yes. At peace? Yes, and yet with a cancer, a spiritual unrest eating away at their souls, and Tiberius, immensely successfully humanly speaking, having the world at peace, and prosperity, withdrew to the Isle of Capris and shut himself off from men in bitter despair and gave himself over to debauchery. Life was meaningless. A bitter pessimism and despair was beginning to infect the soul of all men. There was no inner peace. Their sense of guilt only increased, and so Nicodemus came to our Lord.
Feeling the hopelessness of all the failure of the centuries, feeling the hopelessness of the Pharisees who were astute men, but the only answer the Pharisees said was law and order, the yoke of the law. Men are always going to be brutes. They’re always going to be vicious depraved people. Therefore, repressive law and order, that’s our answer. Hold them in check. The yoke of the law they called it. It was in the name of the law of Moses but they had used their own regulations and rules to replace that law. Our Lord said they made it of none of that.
So, a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, “Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can do these miracles that thou doest except God be with them.” Nicodemus had two ideas in mind. What we have here, John gives us a synopsis of their meeting, the highpoints of their remarks. So, the second of the two points that Nicodemus had in mind we know from our Lord’s answer. Nicodemus said, clearly, first of all, Rabbi, there is something supernatural about you. No one can do what you do except God be with him, but second, what is the point of it all? What does it all add up to? From time to time, God has manifested himself in our history, in Israel, every few centuries once or twice, but what hope is there for the world? How can sinful man attain the kingdom? How can the hope set forth in the prophets be realized? The world just goes down the drain progressively. The more it advances, the more spectacular its sin becomes and its collapse, when all its structures begin to falter.
Jesus answered and said unto him, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” This did not help Nicodemus. How can a man be born again? This, of course, is what every country has been talking about. This is what the Romans and the Greeks have been dealing with and have failed. The whole world wants renewal. They tried everything. They cannot get it. How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born? How can a mature man change his habits, change his nature, short of being a baby and coming again from his mother’s womb? What we want is the regeneration of man and society, Nicodemus says, but how is it possible short of that? Very early in children, we see their ways set. How can man be changed?
Augustus, with all his power, could not change men. Alexander the Great could not change men. None of the good emperors of the Medo-Persian Empire, much as they tried to create the right kind of social order, could change men. It’s never been done. Is the only possibility the yoke of the law to keep men in check? Jesus answered, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”
In the eighth verse when our Lord speaks of the wind, he does not say that the wind is the spirit, or that the spirit is like the wind, but that it is man who is born of the spirit who has the wind’s mysterious character. You see the wind bending the trees. You see the effects, but you do not see the cause. In other words, our Lord told Nicodemus, There is far more to history than history, and there is far more to the regenerate man than the man himself. There is the Holy Spirit. Man’s rebirth is by water purification, and by a spirit quickening and making alive.
The reference there is very plainly water and of the spirit. Genesis 1:2, the Spirit of God {?} over the face of the deep, over the waters, and our Lord here compared rebirth to the original creation of the world. It is its recreation. Moreover, our Lord does not say unless we be born again, except ye be born again. Very clearly, although Nicodemus does not see him as more than a teacher, who separates himself, and sets himself apart. Regeneration requires the old man, the old world to perish so that a new may be born. Regeneration occurs within history, but its origin and determination is from God, and this is why when men have sought regeneration from within history, from man, the result has only been failure. This is why ancient history, history before Christ is repetition. Even the liberals who talk about progress have difficulty reading progress into the ancient world. Things rise and they fall, but since Christ, in spite of the rise and fall of nations, there has been a steady upward climb, and steady vein of progress, because there is something new in history; God working in men through Jesus Christ.
This is why our hope cannot be in politicians or in sociologists, or psychologists, but in the power of God through Christ. There is no regeneration apart from Jesus Christ. Let us pray.
Almighty God our heavenly Father, who of thy grace and mercy hast made us new creatures in Jesus Christ. We thank thee, our Father, that day by day, that new world, which is thy kingdom, is being established and its authority extended in our world. We thank thee that the victory belongs not to the old man and to the old world, but to Christ, and to his kingdom, and we praise thee that thou hast called us to be a part of that victory. Our God, we thank thee in Jesus name. Amen.
We have time for one or two quick questions. Yes?
[Audience] In the example of the tares and wheat, Jesus is referring to me, however, {?}
[Rushdoony] Not entirely, no.
[Audience] {?} The wheat, because {?}
[Rushdoony] Satan cannot create. He can only infect and pollute, he cannot create. Now, the parable of the tares tells us that, as history advances, the tares will be more openly tares and the wheat more obviously wheat, and as the tares become more obviously what they are, they are easily separated and removed. Tares are darnel, false wheat. In the early stages, they are not readily distinguishable, so you don’t know you have them there. It’s in their later stages that they become discernable. They’re obviously darnel, or tares, and therefore, they’re more easily dealt with, so the parable of the tares and the wheat tells us that there is a progressive development of good and evil, that as evil becomes more obviously evil, it becomes much more easy to deal with, and much more easy to recognize, to cope with.
[Audience] {?} wheat {?}
[Rushdoony] Some men, well, you can’t press the parable too literally that some men are created by Satan, no, but what it does mean is some men become tares, and are revealed to be tares and God deals with them accordingly.
[Audience] {?}
[Rushdoony] No, God only creates. Satan cannot create. Any other questions? Yes?
[Audience] {?}
[Rushdoony] Well, I wouldn’t say there was an evolution of the doctrine. First of all, it’s very openly and obviously taught in scripture. You do find it very obviously in some of the very earliest writings of the church fathers, but until the fourth century, the opportunity for a great deal of formal theological thinking was not possible. The church was too clearly persecuted, too much an underground institution to develop the kind of extensive theology it did in the day of Athanasius and Augustine, where they could give the time to the development of the doctrines and their application to the ideas of the day, so it isn’t that they didn’t pay any attention to it until then, but it was they were a church underground and therefore, did not have the opportunity to develop formal theological treatises.
[Audience] {?} deny it
[Rushdoony] No, they would not have denied it, and they didn’t. You find it very definitely. You find it very definitely in the very earliest writings. So, it was the formal study when the church now had a limited measure of freedom and could give itself to that.
[Audience] {?}
[Rushdoony] Well, I think he is correct, but I think it gives the wrong impression the way it’s worded. That’s all. Our time is almost up, but there is something I’d like to read to you which I think is appropriate in terms of what we have lately been discussing. It’s from C.S. Lewis’s Beyond Personality. “The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing is to hand over your whole self, all your wishes and precautions, to Christ, that it’s far easier than what we’re all trying to instead, but what we’re trying to do is to remain what we call ourselves. To keep personal happiness is our great aim in life and yet, at the same time, be good. We’re all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way, centered on money or pleasure, or ambition or whatever, and hoping, in spite of this, to believe honestly and chastely{?} and humbly, and that is exactly what Christ warned us you couldn’t do. As he said, a thistle can’t produce figs. If I’m a field that contains nothing but grass seed, I can’t produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short, but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and resown.
That’s what belie{?} the real problem of the Christian life comes where people don’t usually look for it. It comes up the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and your hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals, and the first job each morning is just shoving them all back, just listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view. We can only do it for moments at first, but from those moments, the new sort of life will be spreading through our system, because now we are letting him work at the right part of us. It’s the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through. He never talked of vague, idealistic {?}. When he said, “Be perfect,” he meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It’s hard, but the sort of compromise we’re all hankering after is harder. In fact, it’s impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird. It would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. Real life{?} eggs at present, and you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary {?} and egg. We must be hatched, or go bad.” So, the obvious conclusion is get hatched.
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.