The Religion of Humanism

Humanism and Morality

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Humanism

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 3

Track: 256

Dictation Name: RR137B3

Date: 1960s-1970s

Hear now the Word of God as it is given to us in the Gospel According to St. Matthew [Chapter 4] verses 1-4. Matthew 4:1-4 and our subject, “Humanism and Morality.”

[Matthew 4:]

“1Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.

2 And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungered.

3 And when the tempter came to him, he said, if thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.

4 But he answered and said, it is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”

Less than a year ago, I listened as a pastor who was facing the threat of prison for his stand described his fears. He was in a small city where he had distinguished himself for his stand for the faith and against iniquity in the community. And he said I know that there are homosexual hoodlums in that prison who are looking forward with delight to seeing this preacher in prison with them so that they can perpetrate a gang rape. He was afraid, but he was more afraid of God. And he went to court and battled and finally at the State Supreme Court level, he won.

But there are many who tell me, was that battle necessary? After all, say a great many—and I see a parade of them in court—Reformed pastors, Arminian pastors, Lutherans, a Catholic nun recently, saying very piously, we cooperate with the State and we have no problems. We are allowed to go on teaching the Gospel. One of them said in one state, we were required to be accredited and our teachers certified, but they told us if we just bought the textbooks, they’d wink and not require us to use them. So he said, we have them on the shelves in each room and we’ve never opened them. So what’s the fighting about, he said? What he had done was to surrender to the principle of the lordship of the State, to give to them the recognition that they had the right to control him. Is this battle a new one? No, it’s the old one that the Early Church faced with Rome. Was Rome out to abolish Christianity? Oh, no. Rome was far milder than the Federal and the State governments of our day. Rome said that it wanted all religions to flourish within the empire, that it wanted social order. It wanted them all to be legally recognized religions. All they had to do was to go down, apply for a permit, submit to the possibility of regulations and controls, but Rome said we’ll be very easy about that, but you must do one thing: go before the image of Caesar and offer incense and say Caesar is lord! And the Early Church said Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord. And for that confession of faith, they put their heads (literally) on the block and died by the tens and even hundreds of thousands. And they regarded all those who compromised as apostate. They refused to call them churches. They were synagogues of Satan.

Rome tried to win them over to a position of compromise. One emperor actually had a statue made of Jesus and put it in his private chapel and let it be known very often when he went into that private chapel he prayed to Jesus. Now, you poor benighted Christians, don’t you realize how appreciative Rome is of the religious values of Christianity? That particular emperor didn’t use the phrase that he was a born-again Christian to win them over; he wasn’t that advanced. But it was the same principle. The Christians resisted.

We have far more reason for resistance today than they did because today we face an open and a militant Humanism. And what does it have to say? When John Dewey began preaching his Humanism very few people paid attention until now we are reaping the fruits of it in the schools. And a great many people are unhappy. And what are the new leaders of Humanism preaching? Well, go to the library, and if they have the book (perhaps they may but it will be in the university libraries), by the Ivy League philosopher Walter Kaufmann, Beyond Guilt and Justice. What does he mean? Why, he says, our problem today is that in this country, we call ourselves Humanists but we have a Christian hang-over. We still talk about justice and we still talk about guilt and both are myths because if there is no God, then there is no good nor evil, no right nor wrong, no principle whereby you can say any man is a criminal or any man has done wrong because there is no God, in other words, everything in permitted.

Now that’s the philosophy that is going to start seeping through the schools, and has. Where do you think the hippies of the last day picked up that philosophy? Where do you think they got their ideas? They were the better pupils at our college campuses. They were often the most intelligent students. They learned the lesson they were being taught in class better than other students. They got the point, in other words. Or, in a sociology class, they will study as one of the great works of Sociology, Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method with a chapter which speaks of the criminal as an evolutionary pioneer—an evolutionary pioneer no less, as the wave of the future! The criminal is the man who’s breaking the old forms and paving the way for the society of tomorrow. Now, some of the things he does may be false starts but he’s the pioneer. Do you understand why when Attica and the riot there broke out and whenever there is anything with regard to criminals, your student generation and your intellectuals are on the side of the criminals?

What we believe represents for them the wave of the past. As good Humanists, they want a world beyond good and evil, beyond God. This is the Humanism that confronts us at every turn, and which is seeping into Church, State, the arts, the sciences, it’s on television. Flip that switch and you get it (in a watered-down form so you won’t detect it readily, but it’s there!). And it’s on the march to destroy biblical faith.

Do I sound a little strong on the subject? Well listen to what Senator Jesse Helms said recently. “Within my own lifetime, I have seen the most ferocious assaults on Christian faith and morals. First on the part of the intellectual community, then on the part of the government, especially in the last 25 years the Federal government has not even tried to conceal its hostility to religion. Now with many of our churches in disarray, the attack is being prepared against the family as the last bastion opposing the Totalitarian State.” Now Senator Jesse Helms sounded the alarm early this year and did anybody pay any attention? Did he get a flood of mail telling him we Christians want to know what’s happening when you say that there is organized anti-Christianity and anti-family attitudes on the part of the government? How can we fight this? No, I don’t think he even got one letter. What’s the matter with us? do they have to put the gun to our head before we realize there’s a war on?

Now for tactical purposes, this Humanism will often say we’re only interested in human values. We’re not trying to defeat you, because they’re interested in disarming us. Marx was more honest. The Communists are more honest by far in their approach. They say very openly Humanism means revolution. Humanism requires the radical destruction of Christianity in order to insure the triumph of man as his own god. Which, would you believe it, we have churchmen in high places in the pulpits, in the seminaries, in the Christian colleges, advocating dialogue with the Marxists, finding some common meeting ground, talking about Liberation Theology, which is another way of saying Marxism under a Christian label.

But Marx only calls for an honest Humanism. Humanism, you see, cannot tolerate Christianity, nor visa-versa. If man is his own god, if the tempter is right and we can determine for ourselves what constitutes good and evil, then man will always be moral by definition. [Dr.] {?}, a Humanist, gives us such a definition of morality. And of course, singles out Calvin as the enemy because, he says, it is clear that we accept God’s commands in Calvin because they proceed from him and for no other cause, man as the measure, man as god, man’s will as the moral law; exactly what scripture calls sin. To this, Adam and Eve succumbed. And with this, our Lord was confronted in the First Temptation in another fashion. “If Thou be the Son of God,” in other words, you cannot be unless you prove it. How? To man. It isn’t that you are by the fact of being God the Son, very God of very God, but only if you meet the approval of humanity. If thou be a son of god, “…command that these stones be made bread.”

Even more then than now, the economic problem was a very real one. There were many hungry people. There was a very real demand both in the Holy Land and throughout the Roman Empire on the part of the people that their needs be met. The middle classes of the day, too, were groaning under the burdens that taxation was placing upon them. And the rich were finding that they could only be rich by compromising with the government and being under its subjection because it was only government-created wealth that was allowed to exist. An independently-wealthy man was distrusted. It was a grievous situation. Many Romans were already submitting, turning over their lands to the emperor and becoming serfs and regarding it as salvation to be given cradle-to-grave security.

And so the tempter says here’s a world with pressing economic problems. Now how can you talk to them about God unless you first of all minister to this economic need? How can a man hear about salvation when he’s hungry, when he has all kinds of problems with regard to economics? Deal first with this social problem and of course with all other human problems, and then they can consider the question of salvation, and then of course, and only then will you be qualified to be their savior. “If thou be a son of god, turn these stones into bread.” How dare you go out with a message of salvation? How dare you present yourself as one who’s going to affect atonement for men’s sins through His blood? All this abstract, theological nonsense, when you’ve got a practical problem here crying out for a solution. Does that sound familiar?

The devil has many advocates today in the Church and out of it. Satan’s program today is the program of the politicians whereby they increase their power. It is the program of many missionary agencies. It is behind all this talk of relevance to human need at the price of relevance to God’s Word, as though man and society could be morally regenerated through bread, through economic and political solutions, rather than by the regenerating power of God through Jesus Christ.

What does this indictment say? What does Satan’s charge against Christ declare? Why, that God is to blame for man’s condition and therefore there can be no gospel presented unless that problem is first of all met. Right the wrong you’ve done, then present yourself as the Son of God. Why was the world made thus? Paul summed it up very clearly. Nay, but oh man, who art thou who repliest, why hast thou made me thus or why hast thou made the world thus, or why do we have these problems? It’s your fault, God, the woman thou gavest to be with me, she did give me and I did eat. This is the way you made the world, Lord. It’s the same satanic indictment, the death of all morality.

But you see, when you follow the course of Walter Kaufmann and you insist that man is beyond guilt and beyond good and evil, beyond justice, you do not abolish guilt and justice. By the way, Walter Kaufmann ends his book with his own commentary on a verse or two of scripture, Genesis 3:1-5, the temptation to Eve. And what is his conclusion? The tempter was right. So where is good and evil? Man is beyond it. He is like unto a god, not to be judged. Beyond guilt, beyond good and evil, so if you’re going to find evil in the universe, look to the throne of God.

This is why Humanism is environmental. If there is evil in the world, it’s in the environment; it’s due to Christianity or to Capitalism or to (some would say) the Communists. But it’s more than that! It’s due to the fact that man is a sinner, and you can be a sinner whatever your politics. You can be a Humanist even if you’re Conservative. Humanism says that man is his own god. And Humanism refuses to say I, even I have sinned and done that which is evil in Thy sight. Humanism refuses to stand before the Throne pleading for grace and say there is none righteous, no not one, and I know that in me there is no good thing. Humanism indicts God as one in whom there is no good thing.

This is what the war is about. And it is a war in which there can be no compromise. To say to any that, why don’t you surrender? It’s nothing significant. In one state, a member of the State Board of Education who claimed he was a born again Christian told one of the pastors, he said signing this paper doesn’t mean a thing; it’s not worth a dime. Why don’t you sign it and forget about it? And the pastor said if it’s so unimportant, why don’t you tear it up and throw it away and let us go our way in peace? And the man turned on his heel and stormed off. Oh, yes, the Humanists would have us believe indeed that the issue is not important. But our life, our church’s life, our children’s life, this country’s life hangs upon our answer. We either stand in terms of the Word of God or all these things go.

The evil around us is a product of man’s sin. And man’s solutions from Washington to Moscow only compound the evil. Death entered the world because of man’s sin and man’s answer to his sin has created even greater problems continuously. But our Lord speaks the answering word. “It is written man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Every movement which does not first of all and above all else direct itself to the fact that it is not the economic problem or the political problem or the psychological problem that is the key, but it is the sin problem, man’s relationship to God, and nothing can be righted in any realm until that is dealt with. And man must be born again, and the regenerate man is the one who lives by the every word of God.

The Bible is a command book. The Bible is not an inspiring book, it’s an inspired book. Very often it is anything but inspiring to read because it indicts us. It says thou art the man. It tells us wherein we have come short of the glory of God. It reminds us of God’s total claims upon us, and we’d like to keep God in one part of our life only, but that Word rebukes us, corrects us, commands us. It is the command Word.

The Humanism of morality thus, as it confronts us today on all sides, calls for the radical destruction of everything that makes for Christian culture and civilization. It is war against the Church, war against the family. John Dewey, in 1932 in his Yale lectures said that democracy was incapable of any compromise or being reconciled with biblical faith because biblical faith is hopelessly aristocratic, he said. It calls for a division between the saved and the lost, the sheep and the goats, the good and the bad, the passing and the failing. And that’s aristocratic. Therefore, Christianity has to go, he felt. In 1948, James Bryant Conant carried it a step further in writing for the National Educational Association and he said the family is a hopelessly aristocratic institution. Every parent wants the best for his children. And therefore the family has to go. We cannot have an inequality of the treatment of children.

That was 1948. Now in 1978 in many of the city schools, you’re beginning to see the implementation of this. You’re beginning to see the talk of campus schools whereby children from the earliest ages will be taken, and they’re proposing to go back to age 3 now, and put onto campus schools to be kept there, to be insulated from the contamination of their parents, with all their old-fashioned notions. Now it may be another 20 years or more before they can implement that type of idea, but if we do not stop them, they will.

What’s all this fighting about? Why, it’s fighting for the Word of God, for the Christian faith, for the godly family, for the life of a country that was begun in terms of the Word of God and will not survive apart from it. That battle is going to be fought. It’s going to be a grim battle flowing this way and that for the next decade at least and perhaps 20 years. I have no doubt that God and His people will triumph. The only question is, in that battle, where do we stand?

Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, we thank Thee that Thou art He who of old did deliver Thy people, led Thy covenant people out of the captivity of Egypt, parted the waters of the Red Sea, confounded and destroyed the Amorites and gave unto Thy people the Promised Land. Thou art He who didst write upon the wall of Belshazzar, His judgment and in a night brought him down in his pride. Thou art He who at the supreme moment of Satan’s confidence, when he slew Thy Son, didst fulfill Thine age-long and glorious purpose, the redemption of Thy people. Thou art He who didst raise the dead, heal the sick, cause the lame to walk and the blind to see. Thou art the same yesterday, today and forever. And oh, Lord our God, Thy power is unchanged still and Thou art able to confound the enemy and the adversary and to give Thy saints a victory in our time. Oh Lord our God, recall us to Thy Word, take from us a fearful and unbelieving heart and create a new spirit within us that we may give ourselves to Thee, hear Thy Word as a command Word, belong to Thee mind, body, soul and pocketbook, that we may be holy warriors for Thy Kingdom, living by Thine every Word. Bless us to this purpose; we beseech Thee, in Jesus’ name, amen.