Christian Resistance and Tools of Dominion

Lordship

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Christian Reconstruction

Lesson: 7-7

Genre: Lecture

Track: 63

Dictation Name: RR145D7

Location/Venue: Parkview Baptist Church

Year: 1960’s - 1970’s

….It is His word that must prevail. Remember the incident of Moses on his way to Egypt, to assume his calling under God and to go to Pharaoh and to say, thus says the Lord God, let my people go, and God met him by the way to kill him. Moses had not given his children to Baal or to Pharaoh, but to avoid a fight with his wife he had decided to be neutral with his children. They had not been circumcised. They had not been given to God, the Lord God of Hosts. And God said, there can be no neutrality and He met him by the way to kill him. And Moses made his stand there. He immediately circumcised his sons and sent his wife back to be with her father until he was ready to call her, because he was not going to have an impediment to his calling. And his children were going to be, by their circumcision, marked as God’s property. That everything that Moses had, his possessions and his children, had to be the Lord’s. No neutrality with God. Moloch worship thus is severely condemned by God. And He will not allow the State to intervene, even when it is a Godly state. Remember what happened to a godly king, Uzziah, when he felt, I’m a good king, I’m a very godly king, what’s wrong with me participating in the sacrifices? I’d like to be a part of the service of the sanctuary, and he entered in and God struck him down with leprosy. Why? It was not Uzziah’s good intentions, because there are no such things as good intentions apart from the Word of God. Good intentions mean: good obedience. And God struck him down. All things must be in submission to Him and His word. And even a godly king must find his place and it can only be the God ordained one, or else it becomes Moloch worship.

Now this was the issue again in the New Testament. Turn to Philippians the second chapter verses nine through eleven.

Now that is a very important verse, to an understanding of the Early Church. It was because of those words, and it’s not the only place where that statement that Jesus Christ is Lord appears. In fact, Lord, Kurios, is the most common single title for Jesus Christ in the New Testament, even as Lord is the most common title for God in the Old Testament. The most common designation: Lord. Kurios. Which means God. It also means slave owner. Absolute possessor. So that when we confess Jesus Christ is Lord, we are saying He is our God and He owns us, lock stock and barrel. There’s not an atom of our being that we can lay claim to, not a corner of our lives where we can go in and shut the door of the closet and say, well, the rest of the house is yours, Lord, but this closet, well, here I’m on my own. No. to say He is Lord is to say that He is the absolute owner. Now we know, from the researches of an English Church historian named Kelly, and the Creeds of the Early Church, that this was the first in the basic creed. That upon baptism, every new convert had to stand before the congregation and say publicly, in three or four words, Jesus is Lord, or, Jesus Christ is Lord.

When he said that, he put his life on the line. Because what was the confession that Rome required? The same that every pagan state requires, a confession that the State is sovereign, Caesar is lord.

The United States is sovereign, although, you know, the Constitution never once uses the word sovereignty. That what the War of Independence represented in part was a war against the doctrine of sovereignty, that Washington made it very clear, before they sat down to work on the Constitution that there would be no doctrine of sovereignty. None. And on the fiftieth anniversary of the Constitution, when John Quincy Adams, who was a liberal for his day, something of a Unitarian, also, got up to give the address in the great celebration, in New York City, very emotionally he spoke out against the growing doctrine of state sovereignty and federal sovereignty, and he said, if the men who framed the Constitution were here, they would witness against this generation, that sovereignty is not in man nor in the federal nor in the state government, but it belongs only to the Lord God of Hosts. So spake John Quincy Adams, very emotionally. That speech was once a part, by the way, of school readings in this country, in the days before the second American Revolution of eighteen sixty.

But Rome required a confession. Caesar is lord. And Rome told Christians, we believe in religions, we think they’re all good for the people, they improve the moral. So we’re very happy to welcome new religions. All that we require is that you come down to a government center and come up to an image of the Emperor, or a battle standard, or government seal, whatever it is there, and make your confession, Caesar is lord. And then we’ll give you a certificate to put on the wall of your meeting place, which will say you’re a legally licensed religion. A legally licensed meeting group. And the Christians refused.

And Rome said, we’re not against you, you understand, we simply say that because to have a good orderly society somebody’s got to regulate things and it has to be Caesar, he is the lord, after all. And we, this gives us the right, of course, to control and to tax and to govern, but we’re not going to be oppressive, in fact all you have to do is take this license, we won’t bother you. We know you’re good people. This is what the State of Kentucky told the Christian schools. Of course our regulation requires you to use the state textbooks and to meet this and that regulation, but as long as you buy those books and put them on the shelf, we won’t mind if you accept accreditation and certification. We won’t bother you. Just accept the principle. And the Christians responded saying, Caesar is not lord over Jesus Christ. But Jesus Christ is Lord over Caesar. And any church that accepted a certificate was regarded no longer as Christian. In fact, the first great split in the Church came after the persecutions ended. And the question was, can we receive back on repentance anyone who in fear of death, said Caesar is lord. And countless numbers died because of that confession. That was the issue. That is why they were thrown to the lions, that is why, in the great persecution of Diocletian, day after day after day, they lined them up by the thousands to put their head on the chopping block for the swordsman sword or the executioners axe. And we have eye-witness accounts that when the day was over, or lunchtime came, those executioners would have to have someone pry their fingers off the sword or the axe-handle, because they’d come to freeze there from continually wielding the sword or the axe. They would not take a certificate, they would not allow Caesar to tax or to control them. This was the issue.

(Leggie?), an English scholar, not a Christian, wrote about the fact. He said it’s a myth that Rome was interested in persecuting Christianity. It’s a myth. He said the only issue was licensure. And he was right. That was the issue. The Church refused to be licensed, or to be accredited by Rome. After all, what does it mean to be accredited?

Accredited, accreditation comes from the word credo, creed. Credo, I believe. And so you have yourself stamped as true in terms of Caesar. Certified to declare to be true, you say that Caesar has the right to declare whether you are true or not. But the Early Church made a stand; it made it very soon after Pentecost. When Augustus Caesar, about the time of our Lord’s birth, ascended to the throne, the heralds were sent out throughout the empire with the gospel. Remember, I said this morning gospel was a legal, technical term meaning good news; the king has ascended to the throne, and reigns with power. Rome had had a civil war, so it was good news, you see. Particularly good news, it’s all over, Augustus Caesar is in charge and now everything is going to flourish. And so the heralds went out from Rome, and the term was heralds, to carry the news to every government base from there to be proclaimed, and what was the proclamation, there is none other name under heaven were by men may be saved then the name of Augustus Caesar. Now do you know what Peter was saying? On that day when he stood up and said, men and brethren, there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby men may be saved than the name of Jesus Christ. Why there was a war immediately declared, a war between Jesus Christ and Caesar, between Jesus Christ and Moloch, between Jesus Christ and the state of California and Virginia and the Federal Government, and the Soviet Union and every state that says it is lord, it is sovereign. The war was an inescapable one that the Early Church faced.

One emperor actually went so far as to have an image made of Jesus and placed in his private chapel. And he had the fact advertised among the Christians. What are you Christians worried about? Don’t you know that the emperor loves your Jesus? He thinks he is one of the greatest men of all history and somehow a god. And he actually prays to Him every now and then, when he goes into his chapel. Why do you distrust such an emperor? They didn’t say He was born again, but they use language like that to make people accept the emperor. But they refused. They refused. They would not bow the knee to Baal. Now, as the struggle continued, Christians paid a price. Then along came Constantine, far from being a godly man, but very much an abused man. Constantine saw these Christians are good people; it is a fearful thing for the empire to persecute them. The empire is dying of rot and the only element that can save it is the Christian element. And he was right. So he set about to favor the Christians, to end the persecutions, which he did. And he summoned the Christians to come together, to unite, and the counsel in Nicaea was called. There’re many faults that can be ascribed to Constantine, and many sins. But one thing is clear; there was a humility about the man. He was moved to tears as he saw these veterans of the persecution come in, some of them blinded, others with their hands cut off, others bearing the marks of torture on their body. And instead of sitting on the throne at the assembly, he sat on a stool as it were to sit at their feet, very deeply moved. And even though he did not understand the doctrine and he actually favored, with his limited understanding, a rather heretical position, he recognized the superiority of the orthodox men there, and he allowed their view to prevail. So with all his faults, Constantine was trying to do the right thing, but his successors were pagan at heart, except for Julian the Apostate, who openly became a pagan, they professed some semblance of Christianity, while being pagan. They did something to further the triumph of Caesar and the lordship of the state. They thought, ah-ha, these Christians have disagreements, let us get them to fighting each other, and they will be too busy to fight us.

Up until that time, the Christians had taken on the pagan philosophers and beat them at every turn. The best book on that is written by a man who’s not a Christian, Charles Norris Cochrane, a historian. ‘Christianity and Classical Culture’. And what Cochrane demonstrates there very clearly is that the Christians won the debate. They beat the pagan philosophers at every turn. But the Christians lost their muscles, as the emperors began to turn them to fighting against each other. So that they had more energy wasted in their battles with each other, than against the paganism around them, and we are still cursed with that fact. Still cursed with that fact.

We’ve had a battle in California, with a form one ninety-nine B which began very innocently, you know, every government regulation, virtually, is started innocently. This was the form that was sent out to the churches every year, just give us your most recent mailing address and your trustees, because, after all, we know that churches relocate and they change their officers and we want to know what your current address is and if we need to contact you about anything, why, we know how to reach you. That sounds innocent enough, then they began to ask a few more questions to be filled out, little by little, the form grew. And people did not really realize what was happening, it became common for, in many churches, for a church secretary to fill it out and take it in to the pastor to be signed. But suddenly, in seventy-eight, some churches found that it did mean something. One of the things they were signing to, and the Bible believing churches had no trouble signing, because they said, well, we’re not political, that you could not be involved in politics or take a stand on any legislative, or ballot, measure or proposal.

Well, then Don Niemeyer at the Bible Baptist church in Marysville California, he’s now at Dublin, in the spring of seventy-eight, when the gay rights issue was very much a matter of debate, took an ad in the local daily paper, what the Bible teaches about homosexuality. Well they were putting up a new sanctuary, they had built a Christian school first and were meeting in the school auditorium, and now they were putting up a new sanctuary and suddenly a State inspector, not a local city inspector, a State inspector was there, the afternoon after the ad appeared. Came from the state capital. Fire inspector. Now fire inspectors from the state don’t normally go around in the cities, this inspector was there and he looked over their construction work and he said, you’re not meeting the code. This and that and the other thing is required, and they, very innocently, said, oh, we thought we were meeting the code, and they spent thousands of dollars meeting it. The local inspector came by and he said, why did you spend all that extra money, it’s not in the code. When Don was telling me this story, Bill Whittaker was standing by and he said, they did the same thing to us and it cost us sixteen thousand dollars. Well, they did not let them alone, to make a long story short, if they had signed form one ninety-nine B they would be guilty of perjury. They could not sign it. They had taken a stand on homosexuality. A number of other churches had too, publicly. They were taxed as a result. If you take a stand on abortion or homosexuality or anything else that is being discussed politically, prostitution, you’re political. Your tax exemption is revoked. They refused to pay the taxes. The counties then, under law, sold church properties to the state, to be auctioned off in due time for back taxes. So we have a number of churches facing sale, about seventy-five. In fact, some of those will be sold ahead of time, because if you are five minutes delinquent with your taxes, anyone who holds a note against your property, can demand payment in full. So several of these churches that owed some money to a bank, or a private party, where it demands for payment in full within so many months, I believe it’s three to four months.

What is the issue? It is lordship. Does the State have the right to say what the Church can teach and what it must be silent on. Must it be silent on the issue of homosexuality? The IRS says yes. The IRS has a doctrine, public policy doctrine. Anything contrary to public policy has no right to tax exemption, and many of the states are adopting this by regulation. They go further now by implication and say anything contrary to public policy has no right to exist. Which means, when they decide that public, Christian schools are contrary to public policy, and churches are contrary to public policy, they have no right to exist. Do you see the implications of that? Right now, Mississippi is facing a real problem. The IRS has moved in and served notice on thirty-three churches. All of which have Christian schools. They’re mostly Baptist and Presbyterian churches. That unless they integrate in terms of the IRS’s standards, which means at a ratio the IRS determines, they will be shut down. Now, none of these schools are segregated schools, incidentally they’re not giving the white citizen council schools much trouble, it’s the Christian schools. These schools are not segregated schools. But the IRS says we will determine the proportion of blacks you will have, or Mexicans or whatever minority we say, in school. And we’re going to require the same proportion of the faculty and of the board. Oh, but our church board is the session or the board of deacons. Well, you’re going to have to integrate. And you’re going to have to turn all your books over to us, so we can exam your records. Well, all of them are refusing. And they’re facing court trial. Now, we know from within the IRS, what the goal is. To apply the civil rights act to every church and Christian school. This I cannot prove, but we’ve seen this direction and we have word that this is the goal.

What will it mean? Why first of all, integrate them all racially, second you integrate them all sexually. Equal representation in the pulpit of male and female. So that you’re going to have to have two pastors and one of them will be a woman. And your church boards will be likewise integrated. Then, next, you integrate in terms of sexual preference. You include homosexuals or lesbians. Then finally, you integrate in terms of creed. No discrimination with regard to race, sex, color or creed. Equal time from the pulpit for all faiths. So says lord Caesar. And they do mean business. This is the public policy doctrine. Moreover, they are saying, the IRS and the state of California and other agencies, and you’re going to encounter these in every state, that, the First Amendment is done away with. Doesn’t exist. I’ve encountered that in the courtrooms all over the country. Why? Well, the Sixteenth Amendment, the income tax amendment, eliminated it. Why? Well, the Sixteenth Amendment didn’t make any exemption for churches. Therefore churches are liable to an income tax, property tax, any kind of control from the IRS. That all they have is a statutory exemption, not a constitutional one. And the statutory one is revocable at will. So what is the IRS been doing since nineteen fifty-two? It has been saying, you’re not a church until we grant you tax exemption. Now that is establishment religion. It’s says, you’re not a church until the IRS says so. Congress shall make no establishment religion. But Congress is now, and the IRS.

You’re not a church until they say so. And the newest guidelines sets fourteen standards. Are you an independent church here? You don’t qualify. You have to have a long history, a seminary, various institutions, and boards, and whatnot, to be called a church. And how can you have a history like that, if you’ve just organized an independent congregation? But this is the fourteen point guideline for establishing whether a church is or is not a church. This is the kind of thing that is prevailing. The issue is sovereignty.

Now, let me cite something else, and this you have here in Virginia, whether you know it or not. California’s plan to take control of children. What is it? Well, in seventy-nine, Congress passed a child control bill, two of them, in fact. ATW was behind them. They made North Carolina the pilot project. To establish the lordship of the state over the children. It was developed in a Blue Book of sixty-eight pages. And what did the Blue Book say? Why the Blue Book said that, there must be a help home for every child. As against the family home. The family home, you see, is unhealthy.

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And this church address is Bennett, and Indiana Avenues, Southern Pines, North Carolina. Send them five dollars, and ask for a copy of the Blue Book on Child Control. And the new generation concept booklet. And he’ll be happy to send it to you. But do send them five dollars, because he’s been fighting this tooth and nail in the state, he’s a tremendous man. And he can’t afford to give these away indefinitely.

Well, as State Senator Bill Richardson, a fine Christian, says here, in the initial phase, children’s service centers would be set up to provide all services to all children, up to thirteen years of age, in each neighborhood. Then upon their thirteen birthday, youngsters would be put into the care of career preparation centers. They will stay there until seventeen. These centers would replace high schools. They would offer a combination of career education work and counseling opportunities. In other words, Soviet style, they’ll say, your testing proves you’re a ditch digger, you are going to be an engineer, go to it now, we’ve determined what you’re going to be. The final phase of this three prong puberty plan involves a universal public service program, which would be required of all youth, male and female, between seventeen and nineteen. Now the Federal Government is behind this. Our sovereign lord in Washington. And you had better take it very, very seriously.

But this is not all, and I could talk at great length about this, and incidentally, copies of Chalcedon’s position paper number nineteen on sovereignty are available in quantities there if you want to deal with some of the issues from a doctrinal perspective. What we are seeing is, and this is a page from Time magazine, January the twelfth, nineteen eighty-one. Suing clergymen for malpractice. This is beginning to happen all over the country. And what’s behind it? Well, we are seeing attempts to slip in, and I’m sure it has in some states, legislation with regard to psychiatric boards of accreditation and certification, requiring ministers to be certified for counseling or else be arrested for medical malpractice.

One of our friends and supporters of Chalcedon is legislator Tom Bush in Florida. And he caught such a thing before it went through, and killed it. We have reason to believe it’s being done in other states, to sit there on the books and then at the key point say, oh, well, this has been required for some time, and to get someone to arrest a pastor for malpractice. We’ve been told in California by people on the state level that they suspect it’s going to be slipped in before to long. This article has to do with John McArthur, pastor of a large church of about seven thousand members in the L.A. area, there was a young man who was deeply troubled, who came to him for counseling. John took the young man into his own home, the parents hated everything that John stood for. They took the boy, seventeen years old, away. The boy later committed suicide. Now they are suing John for malpractice. But what they did not say anything about was that for some time prior to and when he committed suicide, the boy had been in the care of psychiatrists whom the parents chose. The judge should have thrown that case out of court. He had not been under John McArthur’s care for some time. He was under the care of psychiatrists, but the judge has ordered him to stand trial. This is the kind of thing that’s taking place. Then something else that has just happened and something I had been anticipating. Because you see, sovereignty, lordship, is a total concept. You can only have a total god, not a half-god. A lord who is not lord over all of your life is not lord. If Caesar and Moloch is going to be your lord, he is going to seek total control over you. Over every aspect of your life.

Your possessions, your work, your mind. Total control. We were expecting this. We’ve had warnings that this was going to come. We’re expecting it in California. But it happened in Ohio. A lot of things have started in Ohio, because Ohio is the national center for the humanist society. A new Ohio license for churches. The Ohio department of public welfare has published a new set of proposed rules governing licensure of daycare centers. The welfare department has designed these rules so that church nurseries, during the morning worship, Sunday schools, Vacation Bible schools, church operated daycare centers and church operated preschools must all be licensed. Licensed as childcare facilities, and controlled, lock stock and barrel. Be open at all times to inspection, and to be shut down at the notice of any inspector, immediately. Here’s lordship in action. Here is Baal worship, doing its work. You’re going to get this. Unless it is totally smashed in the first few states, you’ll get it everywhere. Of course in all fifty states you have the work of Ray Marshall in the Labor department under Carter, which has not been dropped yet, they’re still pursuing cases. I question that it will be dropped. To require all Christian schools and missionary organizations and Christian agencies to have unemployment compensation insurance. Now the unemployment compensation laws specifically exempts all non-profit groups. But the law doesn’t mean anything anymore, a sovereign, you see, is above the law. You are bound by the law, but the sovereign is above the law. In a Los Angeles federal court where I was a witness this fall, attorney William Bentley Ball got two labor department officials who had flown out there from Washington, to admit on the stand that if they won the case, that they’re trying to do in every state, they would reserve the right to overrule the firing of any teacher who was fired for molesting a child sexually, or for denying the faith. Consider the implications of that. They do mean business. One of the things that they’re doing is to require it of Catholic orders. How many monks are ever unemployed? Consider the absurdity of that. Of course, they’re requiring pregnancy health insurance for nuns too, you know.

These are just some of the things that are being done. Now, up until lately, they have been going primarily after independent churches. And off-beat groups. They like to go after a small Baptist church, for example, because they’re not going to rouse the whole Southern Baptist denomination, or a little independent Presbyterian church because they’re not going to get all the Presbyterians in the country riled up. And they like to go to off-beat groups, like the World Wide Church of God and Armstrong. Very serious case that should concern all Christians. Why? Because there their charitable trust doctrine was applied. But a church is not a religious trust but a charitable trust comparable to the United Way. And all its property and assets and funds are to be used for the general public. Not for the members thereof. So that with or without cause, the federal and or state governments have the right at any time to demand the books of any church. Or to move in and take over everything and appoint a court receiver, with or without cause. That’s been spelled out in the courts. There’re a few churches right now that are in such a bind. There’s one in Wisconsin. And in the World Wide Church of God case, they did what they usually do; they talked loudly to the press about all kinds of financial shenanigans. The receivership had the church for a couple of years; they didn’t have one single thing to take to court. True, the men at the top, notably Armstrong, were very well paid. But the people of that church believed that Armstrong was an inspired prophet. Now if they want to pay him well, well and good. Maybe some of our members would get the same idea. But that’s their prerogative.

And the fact is that the court appointed receiver who talked loudly about how much Armstrong was getting, was taking more every month out of the church funds as his pay. Or consider what they’ve done to the Moonies. Now I don’t like the Moonies, but you’d better be concerned about them. Why? Because of the kidnapping and deprogramming. And we’ve let them get away with that in the courts. There’ve only been four convictions against the kidnappers and deprogrammers. And now we’ve had a number of cases of young people and young men in their twenties who’re of age, being kidnapped and deprogrammed for coming to a Bible-believing faith. So you don’t sit by and let things happen which can be used against you. One of the most savagely persecuted religious groups in this country are the Scientologists. Again, viciously slandered. But if they establish the victory over them, they can move in on every minister across the country for medical malpractice, for counseling without a medical license. Because, you see, the gist of Freud’s work was to say, let us convert the problem of guilt from a religious question to a medical question. And that’s the direction of these malpractice suits. They are extremely serious. In all of this, what we are seeing is a very simple fact. You can have, and I believe, must have, a separation of Church and State. And the man to whom we owe the most in this respect, by the way, is the man who is the real father of the Baptist churches of this country, and too little recognized. Isaac Backus. Yale University press recently brought out a volume of his tracts and essays, because they’re of such great historical importance. I wish the Baptists knew as much about Isaac Backus as the scholars are beginning to know. Because they’ve come to realize his importance in American history, precisely in terms of the Church and State issue.

Now, you can, and I believe you must, have a separation of Church and State. But you cannot have a separation of religion and the state. Why? Because, what is civil government? It is a legal structure. A government of laws. And all law is morality enacted. And what is morality? It is a branch of theology, of religion. So every civil government is an establishment of religion. So what these people are talking about when they throw: “Well, all that moral majority is doing and everybody else is to violate the separation of Church and State.” no. Or that we’ve got to keep religion and the state separate, while they’re saying that, they’re establishing humanism as the religion of this country. What you have in the public schools is a religious establishment, humanism, that’s what is taught. The Ohio minimum guide for public schools specifies humanism over and over again. And in other states I’ve seen the same thing. The National Education Association has written books on moral values in the school. Humanistic values. They’re teaching religion. Our courts represent a religious establishment now, what did the Supreme Court do, in its decision of abortion? It quoted every kind of pagan precedent going back into pagan antiquity, all humanism, and avoided one book above all others, the Bible. Never quoted it. Never. Now, there was an aspect in the US Supreme Court decision on abortion and in the New York Supreme Court decision on abortion, which people missed. It was an assertion of sovereignty. What did it say? What they said, and New York spelled it out very clearly, the fetus is a human being. It is a human being, but the medical fact is irrelevant. What constitutes a person with rights under the law is purely a legal definition. And the state will define what a person is by law, and if a person is not included in that definition, they are not a person.

Now my friend Charlie Rice, one of the professors at the University of Notre Dame law school, has written a book on this subject, analyzing these decisions, and he says, before the end of this century, unless we Christians start turning the thing around, they will be defining certain groups of people as non-persons. So that it will not be murder to kill us. That’s what lordship means. Now who defines us? Congress? Or the Lord? Our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. You see, whether it’s in the courts, or in the classroom or in everyday life, the issue is one of who is the lord? Christ or Caesar? Lord God of Hosts, or Moloch. Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.

Are there any questions now?

[Audience] …{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Charles E. Rice, beyond, I believe the title is, ‘Beyond Abortion’. I’ll tell you, drop me a letter, with a postcard in it, and just, ask me to put down the correct title and the publisher and so on, and I’ll do it and drop it in the mail to you.

Yes.

[Audience] …{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Someone in HEW last year, a high ranking official, said, we need to start planning to proceed with the licensure of parents. Now that thing has been talked about for some years, but when it comes from a high official in HEW, it’s serious. Well…

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. I think it’s illegitimate, but you see, it’s a theological issue. Until we smash the theological foundations of lordship that the state claims, and say, you are a false god, we cannot deal with the situation. Once we break the theological foundations and say, Jesus Christ is Lord, make that the confession of the Church in every area of life, Jesus Christ is Lord. Then we will push the State back to what it should be under God. And it won’t be licensing everything; licensure is a means of exercising lordship and also a racket to raise money.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes, they should be. Now, we have a young man on our mailing list who is a surveyor in Alaska. He’s a graduate surveyor, he’s very good, but he said, I can’t get a job. Why? Because the state law requires, before I can be licensed to be an independent surveyor, I have to be an apprentice under a licensed surveyor for so long a period. And, he said, they are refusing to license very many, in fact, you almost have to be related to an existing surveyor, for the simple reason now every one of them has a huge backlog of work. You have to wait for a couple of years or so to get your place surveyed. Which makes for a problem if you want to develop the land, if you want build on it, if you want to establish your property lines. Which means, of course, since you have to wait indefinitely, you pay a price, and you say, well, I’m ready to pay three thousand or four thousand extra if you’ll do this surveying tomorrow. It’s a nice racket. It’s a legalized form of theft. It’s a monopoly. And he said a lot these surveyors, I know are not as good as I am. But he said, I’m independent and they know it. And they will never allow me to be licensed. So he’s trying to take it to court. And we have to encourage them, because, as he says, this is a false area for government. But the basic battle has to done on the biblical level.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Well, what we have to do is to resist the key point. In requiring the 5013C filing, they are saying, we have the right to establish religion. It’s the Lord Jesus Christ who makes a church a church. Not the IRS. And until fifty-two, a church was a church because it was a church, and it was tax exempt because it was a church. The IRS has insisted, no, you’re only a church unless we say so. And there has been, exactly as you say, a progression. You don’t have your Statists unless you keep filing more and more forms, each of which means a surrender of freedom. And what is happening is that some churches are resisting now, and are refusing to file, and they’re fighting the IRS. I know that at the IRS hearings in December of seventy-eight, in Washington D.C., when one pastor got up and he said, we are not a church because we have been cleared by the IRS, and this has been a usurpation on the part of the IRS, they were very upset. They don’t want that to be stated. Because they want people to forget that up until not to many years ago, you were a church and you were tax exempt, just because you were. But now what they have done, in addition to the things you’ve said, the State will not require as tax exempt, unless the IRS does. They’ve tied the State into themselves.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. We’ve got to oppose these forms, and we’ve got to challenge the IRS’s right to say what is a church.

Yes.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] No. First of all, what is happening in this battle is that everyone is being compelled to deepen their roots. In other words, what we are seeing, and I’ve seen this again and again, for example, because this is the laymen’s battle to a great extent, or the independent pastors battle, you see. It’s not the organized churches by and large that are involved in this battle. I mean, the large bodies. The independent pastor and the laity. Well, they’re being forced to their knees and to the Bible. The amount of Bible study by Catholics today is phenomenal. It’s because of this battle. And I’m constantly amazed at the number of Catholics today who are listening to my tapes, for example. Which are Bible study tapes. And who are wide open to the Gospel. Now, I know of one community where there’s an independent Baptist church, which is ultra-fundamental. And they had a union thanksgiving service with the one other church in the area, which was also thoroughly Bible believing. A Catholic church. The two priests, I was amazed, I met them both. They had come over to the doctrines of grace with a passion, well the Bishop landed on the main one, the older is in his seventies and semi-invalid, so he’s not very active. But it was the fundamentalists in that county who were closest to those two priests. Now I was staggered by that, until I met and visited with those men, I couldn’t believe it. But what is happening is that the battle is forcing men to their knees everywhere. And as such it is shaking them up, it is taking them to Scripture. I don’t know what’s going to come of it. But I think there is a revival underway that is totally unprecedented in history. It is a leaderless revival, it’s something that’s coming out of the needs of people.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Now I’m not saying I approved of that union service. And the pastor, the Baptist pastor, was a militant Bible school graduate, but he said…

[Audience] …{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Exactly. Exactly. Alright, I can tell you what happened in that case. The fundamentalist Baptist pastor lost his pulpit. Because they became upset over his Calvinism. That was plainly stated. And the one priest was moved elsewhere by the Bishop, and I don’t know what’s happening to him, the other priest is buying books on sovereign grace by the carton box full and passing them out to other priests and saying, here, you need this. Now, what’s happening is that the Holy Spirit is at work, you see.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Oh. Yes. Well of course what you have to recognize is this, the Roman Catholic Church is dying. The present Pope is doing his best to salvage it, but I happen to know, from contacts with a prominent layman, that in one year alone, the Catholic Church in California had on the market, close to a hundred million dollars’ worth of property. At bargain prices. One of them was a college that I wish could have been purchased. It was one of the most beautiful campuses in the Redwoods, the close circuit television into every classroom, the chapel, teakwood that had been imported from the Orient used for all the furnishings. And it could not have been duplicated for millions and millions of dollars, and it was up for six million and they would have taken three million. Now that’s what’s happening. The Mother Cabrini School in the Los Angeles area was closed down by the nuns who were running the school, because the nuns said the kind of material we are being required to use is ungodly and we will no longer teach when we are under such orders. We would be faithless to Jesus Christ. So those nuns, they had fifteen hundred pupils in the Mother Cabrini School, it’d just been built for about six million dollars, they went to every school in the area and they chose two fundamentalist schools and they sent a mimeograph notice to every parent and said, for the salvation of your children, we recommend that they go to these two schools. Seven hundred and fifty, almost exactly half of the fifteen hundred wound up in those schools. Now that’s what’s happening. And what the end result will be, I cannot say.

But the disintegration is there, and it is in the modernist churches. The losses are enormous every year, in the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Lutherans and the other groups that have gone modernist. Most of the people who are still on the books, a very large percentage, and this has been statistically shown, are older people, in other words, they’re too feeble to move, to depart. So those churches are near death. So, what we are seeing is the death of most of the churches because they have departed from the faith. Precisely because we are in a time of judgment, of crisis. You cannot give men a serpent and call it fish, or a stone and call it bread. Men are hungry now for the Word of Life. And this is spelling the death of the old line churches, they’re either going to have to have a revival in the near future, or they’re going to go out of existence. I was telling some of the men about a church where I preached recently, that’d been bought by a new congregation, it’d been a Methodist Church, a magnificent stone edifice, very much like one here in town, it reminded me of it. And a huge congregation, fifteen hundred. They’re down to about a hundred and fifty old ladies now. And they couldn’t negotiate the stairs to go in, so they sold that big beautiful church for seven dollars a square foot, and went out to build a little church on ground level so the old ladies could go in. The last gasp of fifteen hundred Methodists in that community. Now, that’s the way it is in place after place. So we’re either going to see a revival in this country or paganism is going to triumph.

Yes.

[Audience] …{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. Alright. You had a question?

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] I’m glad you asked that question. First of all, we have to make a distinction between piety, which is a good thing, and pietism, which is a movement that began in the late seventeenth century. Now, when pietism began, its fundamental premise was this. That the emphasis on doctrine was wrong. It had to be emotional, from the heart. Pietism stressed an emotional response rather than a root and branch faith. In fact, pietism very early went into all kinds of heresies. Some really incredible ones, immoralities, because it stressed experientialism. And as a result, pietism wrought a great deal of damage in the Church, because first of all, what it did was to withdraw the Church from the battle in life. Pietism said, we don’t have to worry about faith, let the….[tape cut off here]