Christian Resistance and Tools of Dominion

The Atonement

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Christian Reconstruction

Lesson: 3-7

Genre: Lecture

Track: 59

Dictation Name: RR145B3

Location/Venue: Parkview Baptist Church

Year: 1960’s - 1970’s

In the first of a series of studies in systematic theology that I’ve written, I’ve titled it ‘Infallibility, An Inescapable Concept’, by denying the infallibility of Scripture, you don’t eliminate the doctrine, you simply transfer it to the State or to the autonomous mind of man, or to something else. You cannot do away with it. You can deny the God of Scripture, but you don’t deny the concept of God, you simply make something else god. And the same is true of the doctrine of atonement. It is an inescapable doctrine. It’s not just the Church doctrine, not just the theological doctrine, it is one of the key doctrines in all of life, and you cannot escape it. Atonement is a fact that stares every man in the face, wherever he is. And if he will not have atonement in Jesus Christ, he will have it through some other means, a false means. Man being a sinner, needs atonement.

For all we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth, he is brought out as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him, He hath put him to grief. And thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, ye shall see his seed. Ye shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Christ is our atonement. While we were yet sinners Christ died for us. We had strayed, we had sinned against God’s covenant, His grace, His law. And God, in faithfulness to His covenant with us, rescued us from death. He provided His only begotten Son, very man of very man, as well as very God of very God, to be the spotless sacrifice for us, one of us, our Adam.

And we are recreated in Him. Our sins are forgiven, because He makes atonement for us. But every sinner needs atonement. He has been created by God, created in God’s image. Having sinned, he does not lose that image, it is defaced, it is marred with sin, but he is still God’s creature and he needs atonement. God tells us in Romans 1, that everything in the being of ungodly man witnesses to the things of God, visible and invisible. But they hold, that is they keep back, they suppress, the truth in unrighteousness. It’s crying out in them, everything in them is witnessing to God, witnessing to the fact that they are sinners. That they need atonement, but they will not admit it. I mentioned earlier today, that Freud had said that the only way to eliminate religion was not to try to disprove that God exists, he said it won’t make any difference to man, as long he feels that he is guilty before God, he will seek God. He will want something to take away that guilt, and he will go to some kind of religious practitioners then. So to eliminate religion, he said, we’ve got to convert guilt from a religious problem to a medical problem, to be dealt with by scientific practitioners. But of course it won’t work, for all their efforts. Sin and guilt require atonement because man is God’s creature, and not Freud’s. Now, how is man the sinner to make atonement for sin? He is going to make atonement for sin. Every man has to have atonement. He has feel justified. Everything in man’s being cries out for justification. We want to be justified. If we go somewhere, and we make a blunder, don’t we, in our bed, rehearse that incident and think of what we ought to have said, and how we wish we could relive that episode, and justify ourselves.

How much more so the sinner? Not too long ago, a young man came, I had vaguely met him once before, and he had come to the faith through our ministry, although I did not know it, and he came and spent two or three days up there. He had come from a very wealthy family, by the way, and he had been in the International Polo playing set. He had been disowned, totally disinherited when he became a Christian. The family could tolerate anything in him, and they did, because he was profligate and immoral. They could not tolerate his profession of faith in Jesus Christ. And he said, you know, when I was at the University, I used to make fun of the Christians who’d talk to me every now and then, and try to witness to me, and I would get very contemptuous and laugh in their faces, and he said, inside I was always crying out, convince me, convince me. Give me some peace.

Sin and guilt require atonement. And because of that, sadomasochism is basic to every man outside of Jesus Christ. And too often evident in poorly taught and weak beliefs. What is sadism? In sadism, what a man does is to lay his guilt on others, and to punish them. In sadistic sexuality, for example, the sadist will beat the man or the woman, with whom they are about to commit adultery or fornication, saying, it’s your fault that I’m sinning. And having beaten them, will go ahead with the act. Or in masochism, the reverse is true. A masochist puts himself in a position to suffer, or he will be beaten first, before committing fornication and adultery, or whatever the sin is, in effect to say, you see, I’ve paid the penalty, now I’ve paid the price for sin.

In sadomasochism, what do people do in a hundred and one ways, often non-sexual. They will put the blame on someone else for everything. And make some else the sin bearer. They’re almost repeating the ritual of the Old Testament, where by one confessed his sin, on an unblemished emblem. The woman who Thou gavest to be with me, she did give me, and I did eat. It’s your fault God, you gave her to me. It’s the environments fault, it’s societies fault, and we got to do something to society. Or we got to punish the capitalists, or we got to punish these people or this group or that group. Its whitey’s fault, or it’s the black man’s fault, or it’s somebody else’s fault, and let’s get them for it. And what happens when a nation is sadistic, because of its sin? Well, the Soviet Union is an ungodly nation, and what is its strategy, it blames the world for all the problems, and it wants to punish the world. And what the United States, is it not masochistic? Blaming itself for everything. I spoke once in, at a university, and I was to speak, it was at a graduate school, a law school. A major secular university, and I was to speak at another university, two days later, and after that talk they canceled me out. It was a talk that was intended to make a Christian witness to them, but also, I said something in the presence of it, which blew the university apart for a couple of days. I spoke about how words have changed. I was illustrating something in law. I was talking to law students, and I said, words change their meanings, and I cited several examples, I said, the word silly once meant, dear, or beloved. But, I said, you couldn’t call your wife, my silly wife, now, without getting into trouble, because it no longer means beloved. I said, the word Cannibal comes from Carrible. It had reference to the Indians of the Americas, beginning with the first that the Europeans met. The Caribbean Indians. Because they were cannibals. And the world first encountered cannibalism among the Indians of the Americas. I went on and I cited three, four more other words, including the origin of the word farmer, but they were outraged I had said the Indians were cannibals. Though they were. I don’t have anything against the Indians, I was a missionary among them for eight and a half years, and I thought the world of them, I knew their sins. But I was there because I was concerned for their salvation. I was canceled out of the other university, and what a faculty member finally said when I said: “go to this book and that book and that book in the library, you’ll see that this is the fact, Indians were cannibals. Many of them, most.” And he said: “given the record of the Christians all over the world, no Christian white man dares speak one critical word about any other religion or any other race, without being guilty of fearful crimes.”

That’s masochism. And our foreign policy is masochistic, is it not? We’re geared for defeat, because of our masochism. Because we are a people that no longer have an atonement in Jesus Christ. And even a large percentage of people in Bible believing churches, do not know what it means when they say that Christ died for my sins. And they are sadistic or masochistic. I went to school with a girl, whose mother outlasted her daughter and her husband and quite a few others. She was over ninety the last I knew her, and still going strong. Ever since I knew her daughter in, well I think in the third grade, the mother was always so ailing, so sickly, the worst thing you could say when you walked into the house at any time, was to say, hello Mrs. Blank, you’re looking very well today. She carried on then, oh how she punished her family, and you were in her bad books. She enjoyed bad health, for a long, long life. It was all she could do to eat just enough to put soul and body together, but somehow with the sparrows portion of food that she claimed she ate, she was a hefty woman. And how she punished her poor husband and her children, and then her grandchildren. That woman professed faith, but she was not saved. She was seeking false atonement.

And so often people will do things, deliberately, to bring punishment upon themselves, to bring some kind of embarrassment of problem, or will be accident-prone, because they want to pay a price. And say, in effect, to God, haven’t I suffered enough? Haven’t I suffered enough?

I’ve known men who’d endlessly put themselves in a position where they are fired, well, it’s because they can’t tolerate a real Christian in their midst. That’s not the reason why they are fired. It’s because they’ve gone out of their way to bring punishment upon themselves. They’re masochistic. This is a problem we have to deal with in the Church. We have to deal with in people who profess Christ. I met, a while back, a very rich man, he was a multi-multi-multi-multi-millionaire, who dressed poorly and drove jalopies, because of masochistic tendencies. He enjoyed the abuse he got from people. Without atonement there is no peace in a society. And unless we set forth the doctrine of the blood atonement of Jesus Christ, there is no peace. A society will be in perpetual war, people will be sado-masochistic, alternately, some of them bearing unwanted burdens and bringing punishment upon themselves, or trying to punish others, because they have not known the atonement of Jesus Christ. They do not know the release from sin and guilt that comes when Jesus Christ pays the price and sets us free. So that in Him we are a new creation, we are released from the burden of sin and death, and we look at ourselves in the mirror and we say, yes, I am a sinner, but a sinner saved by grace.

And I no longer have that burden of sin and guilt. I have freedom.

Now consider the social implications of that. You cannot have a good society, a free society, a safe society, until men are free in Christ. If the Son make you free, then are ye free indeed. And what is slavery; it is slavery to sin, and to the burden of guilt. And the Pharisees who proudly said, we are the sons of Abraham, we have never been in bondage to any man, our Lord didn’t have to remind them, because it was obvious when the words came out, they were in bondage to Rome. And it was their sin that had placed them in bondage to Rome. All one has to do is to read through the history of the Maccabean era. And to know how they did everything to destroy their own freedom. Even as we are today. We cannot blame, if we continue our present course, the Communists for coming in, we will have virtually invited them in. The Communists will have their own judgment from man to God, but I doubt that they will outlast this century. It’s a time of judgment for all the nations. Because if men will not know Christ as the Savior from sin, the consequence of sin has always been, the wages of sin have always been one and the same thing, death. Death for men, and death for nations, death for churches, death for any organization or institution or person who will not have atonement in Jesus Christ.

So we preach the atonement to save men from sin. And from death. And save our country and the world from the over-whelming judgment that is coming like a flood, upon the world today. This is our calling.

Are there any questions now?

Yes.

(Audience) I’d like to ask you…. What is the limit of welfare in the church?... What is the Churches responsibility?

(Dr. Rushdoony)

Yes. Now, I’m going to deal with that tomorrow, when I deal with the tithe, and what we are to do. But let me say, in a preliminary way now, our problem, when we talk about the Church is, is that we talk about it in terms of the meaning of the English word, rather than the Biblical word. The word church as we have it in English, comes from the Greek ‘kuriakon doma’, the lord’s house. It refers to the building or the institution. But the word that the Bible uses for Church, in the New Testament, and in the Greek of the Septuagint, the Old Testament in Greek, is ‘ekklesia’ as in Ecclesiastes and ecclesiastical. And what it means is the congregation or assembly, and it is also used in the Old Testament, in ways, and in the New. In the Old Testament it could mean the army of Israel, the covenant people of Israel, the kingdom of Israel. So the Church, as the New Testament uses the word, is Christ’s realm, His Kingdom, wherever it is. It can include the Christian synagogue, because that’s the New Testament term for the meeting house. It isn’t in the English, but it is in the Greek of James 2:2. There James speaks of what we call the Church, as the synagogue. The Christian synagogue. Now, it can include the Church as Paul and others in Christ our Lord speak of it, the Christian Church, the Christian school, the Christian family, and the Christian civil government. The Church is the entirety of God’s realm, Christ’s realm. Now, in terms of that, we have to say, welfare is a part of the work of the Church as the Kingdom. Not necessarily in every respect, the work of the Church as the House of the Lord, as the Christian synagogue. To a degree, in terms of the deacons, you see, the deacons have such a task, but we’ll come back to that tomorrow, but I wanted to lay that groundwork at the present. So, if you don’t mind waiting tomorrow morning, we will be going into it.

Yes.

(Audience) Something that you said just now in your answer….

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

No, no. I don’t believe that it ever does away with it. You can, and I believe, must, as I said earlier in the day, separate Church and State. You cannot separate religion and the State. The State has as much an obligation to know, to believe, and to honor Christ and His Word, as does the Church and the family, and you and I. It is not outside of God’s world.

(Audience) But shouldn’t the State and the Church be kept separate?

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

Yes. If I’m talking about the Church as an institution. Yes, the institutional Church. The institutional Church and the State must be kept separate. But, you cannot keep the Church as the Kingdom of God, so let’s use the term Kingdom of God, you cannot keep the State and the Kingdom of God separate. It is as fully obligated to be under Christ as Lord, as anything else in this world. There’s nothing that can say, well, we are outside of God’s world, and outside of Christ’s government. No one can say that. That’s why, when we established the First Amendment, that we did not say: “we cannot have chaplains, we cannot have prayer, we cannot have a day of fast and thanksgiving” and, in the early years of the Republic, one president after another in a time of crisis proclaimed a fast day. We’ve forgotten that, but fast days were not uncommon in the early days of the Republic. And the presidents felt they had a duty under God, after all they had taken an oath.

Yes.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

Yes. That’s the goal. At first it will be as the child wants to go, if the child gets angry with being disciplined, the child can appeal to the welfare worker, and he will be removed.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

And they are trying to promote the doctrine that Sweden is now affirming, of the right of children to divorce their parents.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

I don’t know.

(Audience) Rush, it was in Chicago..

(Dr. Rushdoony) Oh yes, yes. Not everything happens in California.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

Yes, there is a case, there is a case very recently that is gone to court, it’s a little different, the case I know of is suing a Catholic hospital for giving him birth rather than an abortion because he was born with a physical defect.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

Well, the logic of his situation should be, that if he wins the case, he should be ready to be put to death.

Yes.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

Yes, you had a question?

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

That has really been of the Federal level in this century. Yes. And especially since Roosevelt. That’s when it really started. That was the third American revolution.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

Yes, it goes back to Raushenbush and others, and the man who really made it a part of State philosophy, but did not succeed in applying it until one of his followers did, was Woodrow Wilson. He was the great exponent of the modern humanistic State.

Yes.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

Yes. Well, the interesting thing is that Virginia didn’t have such a requirement until recently, do you have it now?

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

Yes. There are some states where it is not the law. There’s no difference between the states that have compulsory education and the states do not, except the states do have it have a higher rate of delinquency. And there’s a good reason for that, because they compel the child to stay in school when he’s no longer interested in learning. Now, that’s, there’s a definite correlation there. In other words, even, well, let me add, even the state’s that have compulsory educational requirements, already had universal education when they passed the laws. Every parent wants the best for his children. He’s going to see to it that they’re educated. So before they ever pass those laws, parents were putting their children in schools. The idea of it, nobody is going to do it until the State requires it, is ridiculous.

So the compulsory education laws are really not worth that much. Moreover, the ratio of illiteracy has shown no relationship to compulsory education. We have the highest rate of illiteracy now, in the United States, then we’ve had since this country was first settled. Thirteen percent. By the statistics compiled by Congress, there are thirty million illiterates in this country. Other statistics that the Federal Government had also compiled have said, that there’re between twenty-seven and thirty-three function illiterates, who can barely read and write, and who are dangerous on the job, because they cannot follow instructions, and regularly ruin valuable equipment. Now, that adds up to, from fifty-seven to sixty-three million illiterates in the United States who are products of the state schools. Doesn’t say much for their requirements or for their practices. Interesting thing to me in those hearings was, that one of the Senators present was McGovern. And McGovern made a very interesting comment considering his position. He said: “it would appear that our public schools are good at only one thing, extracting money from the pocket of the taxpayers.”

Yes.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

No, but it would be a considerable portion, because a great many states now do require eighteen years before they can leave. There is only one, I believe, of those who’ve compulsory education laws, there is only two or three that still don’t have them, that says fourteen, I believe that is New Mexico.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

Well, Florida had a law passed a couple of years ago, four or five years ago, to require a literacy test before they could graduate from high school. And the law was struck down by the U.S Supreme Court as discriminatory.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

Yes. That’s, they found that some teachers who had graduated from the universities and had diplomas and were teaching the lower grades, could not read nor write.

Yes.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

The question is with regard to genetic engineering, which is outside my field; I don’t know enough to tell you much about it, all I can tell you is what one Christian geneticist told me. He said to take what they report with a large grain of salt. He said, he is familiar with the field, he believes that some amazing things will be done somewhere down the road, but he said, the simple fact is, they are so anxious to play god, that they are claiming to be able to do things, that, he said, when I read the technical reports, I know they cannot do. Now, about two or three years ago Science Digest had an interesting article and there was supposed to be a second article following up that one, which was to be even more devastating. But they never published it, I guess, because a protest from the scientific community. And what they did was to analyze the reported results, in scientific journals, of experiments, scientific experiments. There were several studies like this. One study was of twenty-seven scientific experiments, as reported in major scientific periodicals. They wrote to the scientists, and asked for a copy of their findings. Almost everyone wrote back and said, that, well, inadvertently the papers had been destroyed. Of those that returned them, they found that there was no correlation between the experiment, and the reported conclusions. In all but about, three or four out of twenty-seven, where it was valid. And I believe it was the director of the U.S Bureau of Standards, said that it was his estimate that over half of the scientific experiments reported in scientific journals, were invalid. So, the amount of fraud here is enormous. Several times it had been discovered in flagrant cases, and in most occasions, nothing has been done about the fraud. So, we have men who are determined to play god, and to claim that they accomplished things which in reality they have not. So, I believe this makes them all the more dangerous. Because they are dishonest as scientists. They are straining after powers to use over us. They are therefore, deadly dangerous men.

Do we have one or two more questions?

Yes.

(Audience)

…(?)…

(Dr. Rushdoony)

Yes. Well, not all the relationships were slave and master. You have to remember that many of the cities, like Corinth, for example, were industrial centers. Now Corinthian goods, we know, were being shipped all the way to China in St. Paul’s day, and the Corinthian Chamber of Commerce was regularly doing things for business men who came as buyers from India, from Central Asia, from China. And one of the things that made Corinth the place, Paul said he went there with fear and trembling, was it was geared to selling, producing and selling with no moral scruples, and the Chamber of Commerce of Corinth, when Paul went there, maintained two thousand prostitutes to entertain visiting business men. Now, the workmen were like workmen today, and they had their guilds or their unions, so it was not unlike that which exists today. There were slaves also, but the slaves were basically household slaves. Not factory slaves. We know from studies, they found that in factories and in mines, they tried using lines, it did not work out. The only way you could get much work out of a slave was if you had a personal relationship with him. And you cared for him and had a personal concern, if he were a household slave. So we do encounter them. And in fact we have a very dramatic story in Scripture of a household slave. Let me say, most of the time, people miss the really startling aspect of the story of Philemon and Onesamis. What was the relationship of Philemon and Onesamis? Why, slave and master. But that was not all. He was a brother. His own brother. Verse sixteen. When he sends him back, he says, not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved, especially to me. But how much more unto thee both in the flesh and in the Lord?

Here is a case of a no good brother, of a good family, who’d gone astray, wound up a slave and his brother had bought him, to protect him, and then he robs his own brother. And so Paul has to write a letter and say, look, he is now a brother doubly. Because he is now born again, a member in Jesus Christ.