Law and Life

Occultism and Charismatics

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 29 of 39

Track: 140

Dictation Name: RR156Q29

Date: 1960s-1970s

[Rushdoony] Our Scripture is from Deuteronomy 18, verses 9 through 14. Deuteronomy 18, verses 9 through 14. And our subject Occultism and Charismatics, Occultism and Charismatics. Deuteronomy 18, 9 through 14. “When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee. Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord thy God. For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times, and unto diviners: but as for thee, the Lord thy God hath not suffered thee so to do.”

In this statement, Moses uses every word in Hebrew to describe any and every form of occultism and declares that they are all forbidden by God’s law. He declares moreover, that the nations of his day were dedicated to an occultic quest for power; that is for power apart from God. These things, he said, represented a hostility to God and were gaining the judgment of God, for all these things, he says, are an abomination unto the Lord. And because of these abominations, the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee. Thus emphatically, what the law here declares here is that God’s judgment will strike any people that dedicate themselves to occultism in any and every form. Moreover, there is a statement often cited by enemies of the faith, Exodus 22:18, which is closely related to this, which declare, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch or sorceress to live.”

Now as I indicated very briefly last time, the word for witch or sorceress in the Hebrew is a very interesting one. We know what it means because we have the Septuagint, that is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, made in Old Testament times. We also have the same word in New Testament Greek, and in both cases the word is pharmacos. Now we have that word in English today as pharmacy; a place where drugs are sold. The witch or sorceress, of whom it is said thou shalt not suffer a witch or a sorceress to live, was a dealer in drugs, dangerous drugs, and also a poisoner. Now as a matter of historical record which is been demonstrated by University of California scholar Jeffrey Burtram Russell in his recent study Witchcraft in the Middle Ages that there is a close link between witchcraft and poisoning, witchcraft and drugs. The two were very closely related, and it is not an accident that the drug movement of our time has been very closely linked also with occultism. They belong together. Sorcery or witchcraft believes in controlling people through the use of drugs and eliminating people through the use of drugs; poisons.

Now it is interesting that {?}, who is the justice of the Supreme Court of Israel and a professor of law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has said of the Biblical law against sorcery and related practices that according to the law, and I quote, “It was to be the characteristic of Judaism that nothing would be achieved by magic, but everything by the will and spirit of God. Hence the confrontation of Joseph and the magicians of Egypt. Of Moses and Aaron and Egyptian sorcerers. Of Daniel and the Babylonian astrologers, etc. And hence also the classification of crimes of sorcery as tantamount to idolatrous crimes of human sacrifice. (Which Burton found to be associated also with witchcraft.) And to idolatrous sacrifices in general and its visitation, just as idolatry itself was death by stoning, in a God-fearing Israel there is no room for {?} sorcery. In the presence of astrologers and fortune tellers is an indication of godlessness.” Unquote.

Now, divination is also condemned in this text, and divination has reference to various practices to foretell the future. We meet with divination in the New Testament in Acts 16, verses 16 through 19, where we see that divination and soothsaying are associated very clearly with demonic possession. Now it is important to understand these facts because for a long time it has been ridiculed as a harmless superstition, that all these occultist practices were of no consequence. Now, as people have been studying them of late, like Dr. Russell, who began with cynicism on the subject and ended up frightened, men are beginning to realize these are profoundly dangerous anti-social forces. In the modern age, unfortunately, occultism began a revival ostensibly as Christianity. In the Middle Ages, there was an all-out warfare between the witchcraft movement and the church, and the church was ill prepared, being itself heretical, to cope with it. The witchcraft groups began to forbid tithing, to hit at the pocketbook of Christianity. They began to preach anti-nomianism. They began to proclaim a sexual revolution. They began to proclaim virtually everything that you see today proclaimed on all sides by the same kind of movement.

But the key to understanding its role in the modern age, and we see it outside the church as well, is to understand something we referred to last week in the question and answer period, the Salem Village outbreak. It was not in Salem proper, but in a nearby community which was still under Salem at that time, and is modern {?} Salem Village. It began there among a circle of girls. Three of them were associated with Reverend Samuel {?}, who had tried early as a younger son of the gentry of England to be a plantation owner in the West Indies and had failed and then gone into the ministry. He came there to New England with his family and took this church. He brought with him a slave from the West Indies who was deeply into voodoo and other practices. Very soon, some of the well-to-do girls in the community, including the Reverend Samuel {?} two daughters and niece as well as other girls who had time on their hands, began to explore being instructed by this slave, voodoo practices and various related magical and sorcery activity. At first it was great fun. Then it began to have very dramatic consequences; convulsions, wild nightmares, fits. The girls became progressively frightened at what was happening but were unable to control themselves. Reverend Samuel {?} called in the local doctor, Doctor William Grace, who declared it was possession. It is interesting that two modern scholars, {?} and {?} who do not share our faith even remotely, have said of the girls, and I quote, “The magic they had tried to harness was beginning to ride them visibly, dramatically, and ominously.” Unquote.

Now, unfortunately, what happened was even worse. The girls were from good families, from prominent families. Instead of the girls being blamed and being accused of being witches, of having dabbled in these things, they were allowed to blame others for bewitching them, and nothing said of what they had been doing regularly in their meetings together. Worse than that, their testimony was believed by the ruling element in the village. Now, as the girls began to accuse others (and it led to the death of about fifteen people) their affliction became a delight. Instead of being tormented with nightmares and having convulsions and fits, they began to blossom, and as they did they then began to claim it was heavenly and angelic visitations they were having. And some of the meetings, as they recounted things they had supposedly heard and seen, virtually became prayer meetings, although by and large there was still cynicism with regard to them. But meanwhile, spectral evidences, rather than godly evidence, was used in the trials, the girls accused others of the practices they had indulged in, and they began increasingly to manifest charismatic behavior. This died down, there was a great deal of horror at the consequences. A number of ministers in New England turned against the trials and compelled it to be brought to a halt. And the Reverend Samuel {?} never got another pulpit again.

However, in the Great Awakening the same thing happened among the youth again, this time these manifestations were seen as signs of conversion, of being possessed with the Spirit. And the consequence was that from there on revivalism meant precisely convulsions of a sign that the Spirit was working. For example, in the Great Revival of the last century, especially the first half of the century of the camp meetings, a person wasn’t really saved unless he went through wild convulsions. Grover C. {?} describes the kind of thing that was commonplace, and he was not exaggerating, and I quote, “Involuntary twitching, known as the jerks, would {?} the body, the head would twist from side to side, faster and faster till it spun the rest of the {?} brain. Rending cries burst from the lips of the jerkers, screams of anguish, shrieks of terror. Some howled and some down on all fours even barked like dogs, they leaped as if jabbed, they whirled like dervishes, rolled, wormed, hopped like frogs, and finally they flung headlong, groveling on the ground till they collapsed in catalytic rigidity.”

Why was this seen as the working of the Spirit? Because in the meantime there had arisen the modern scientific movement with its emphasis on experimentalism. If a thing is it can be seen. And the feeling therefore that if the Holy Spirit were working there had to be a dramatic evidence, and so the willingness to see these things as workings of the Spirit. Now with the Great Awakening there was also the beginnings in this country, full-fledged, of a variety of things antinomianism. One of the preachers during the Great Awakening was actually preaching free love, that men should leave their wives because wives represented the law, and now that they were Christians they had to turn away from the law and cast it out as an abomination. And of course a great deal of preaching about the imminent second return. There was a great deal of perfectionism of an ungodly sort preached. In the 19th century, this led to the perfectionism of such groups like John Humphrey {?}, who was one of the revivalists, the product of them, and his sexual communism of the Oneida colony.

Now this does not deny that there were many godly men who were part of the Great Awakening, such as Jonathan Edwards and others, and right on through, who were trying to use this new movement for godly purposes, just as Thomas Aquinas, father of Scholasticism, tried to use Thomism for the Lord. And there’s no question in my mind about the character and faith of Aquinas, who had doubts towards the end about everything he had ever done, and in the last work he wrote on Romans which is just coming into knowledge and recognition, he came to virtually the same conclusions as Calvin and Luther. In fact, either other one of them could have virtually written the same commentary that he wrote. But Aquinas tried to use Aristotelianism, which was humanism to the core for Christian ends. But the result was that Scholasticism destroyed the church. It led to a radical antinomianism, it led to mysticism, it led to pantheism, it led to every kind of anti-Christian movement; occultism, magic, witchcraft, all of these took over the Middle Ages. And now again you had great men, godly men, trying to use this new movement and direct it into godly channels and to keep it within lawful bounds. But the longer the movement continued, the more emphatically it became hostile to Biblical faith, hostile to the sovereignty of God, hostile to the law, hostile to Christian reconstruction in any and every area as was once the basic faith of this country, and more and more openly humanism.

For example, the father, according to many, many fundamentalists, of the modern fundamentalist movement and of revivalism was Charles {?} Finney, and Finney makes awful reading for any Christian; horrifying reading. In many of the revivals of the day, the Bible was put aside, you didn’t read it. Why? It was like cold water on people that you were working up emotionally. And so the Bible was put aside. Bible study meetings were dropped. You didn’t want the cold water of the Bible dashed on people you were working up for this supposedly Spirit-filled movement. Now in his lectures on theology, Finney said that perfection; Christian perfection, was to do all that one was capable was doing. And if you’re not capable of doing much, much was not expected of you. Therefore, since an idiot was capable of nothing, an idiot was perfect. In fact, Finney went on to say, and let me read the condensation of it by {?}, because Finney goes on lengths and he feels he’s really come up with something marvelous, “The moral idiot, Finney does not hesitate to say it, is as perfect as God is. Being a moral idiot he has no moral obligation. When he has done nothing at all, he has done all that he ought to do; he is perfect. God Himself cannot do more than all He ought do, and when He has done all He ought to do He is more perfect than the moral idiot is, although what He has done is to fulfill all that is ideally righteous and the moral idiot has done nothing.”

Now basic to this was a rampant humanism; a demonic humanism. Finney actually asserted that to gratify yourself was a virtue, which was natural for him to say because his orientation was man-centered. The culmination of all this was of course the charismatic movement. Now, the so-called speaking in tongues is something that is very ancient, it is pagan in origin. You had it in the Frisian cults and in various African cults, cults of Asia and of Europe, long before Christ; this babble of meaningless syllables. In the modern age, it has sprung primarily from influence of non-Christian groups. Negroes have been prominent in the revival charismatics. The origin in this century was in {?} in a negro church incidentally.

Now one of the things that marks the charismatic movement is, by and large, the people in the charismatic movement have a very low moral character. I’ve talked to Pentecostal pastors about this, and I’ve got a few of them to admit that the people of good character in their church are people who grew up under a Baptist or Methodist or Presbyterian or some other church discipline. Those who came from a pagan background or those who have only a Pentecostal background have a low moral character. Moreover, I found this to be true in several cases, and I think there could be testimony in this room of it, when I’ve asked people about problems they’ve had with deadbeats in Christian schools. Who are the deadbeats? Oh, it’s a Pentecostal family. Now, by their fruits shall ye know them, our Lord says. And the fruits of the charismatic movement are emphatically not good. Now it is interesting to read the accounts by these charismatics. They virtually have their own canon; not the Word of God, they’ll use it as far as it suits them. But their canon is their own experience. It’s their own private revelation.

One man, a formal Baptist, a very able scholar incidentally who teaches for Oral Roberts at his university and believes one hundred percent in the charismatic movement, in his book on the subject says he has actually heard contrary to what other people say, real languages spoken at charismatic meetings, and he says of course the heart is speaking in tongues. But what about all the men who have gone, including the scholar from UCLA who has taped untold numbers of charismatic meetings and never once had an actual language spoken. Dr. Urban says, and I quote (This is the Oral Roberts professor), “Linguistics sample tape recordings next {?} utterances assured all in sundry that glossilalia is not actually language.” And he treats this recorded fact with contempt. He dismisses it. They’re unbelievers so their tape recordings didn’t pick up anything. Now either he is saying that by some miracle these people speak languages that a tape recorder somehow cannot record, or else he has to say that all these meetings that have been tape recorded were fraudulent and only the few instances that he knows was there an actual language spoken, in which case you have to say that most charismatic meetings are fraudulent, which is not a pleasant conclusion for them to come to. But they will not come to the logic of their conclusion. If it is not of the Lord, and if is not what it claims to be, and if they are not actual languages and all many recordings of them across country have never yet come up with a real language, you have to say it is not of God; it is not what it claims to be. But anything that claims to be of God and is not of God is obviously opposed to God and from the enemy of God.

It is interesting that people who say well I know someone who heard an actual language at a meeting, attempts to trace this always say well he got it from somebody else, he didn’t really hear it, and it peters out to nothing. Now, it is important for us to know that this text which speaks about these occultist practices is at the heart of a chapter that speaks about the Levites and the prophets. And it says that these people who are the custodians of the Word of God are to be tested in terms of the Word of God, and if they speak a thing from the Lord and it does not come to pass and it is not true in terms of the Word of God, then they are to be condemned; they are not of God. Deuteronomy 4:2 speaks of Scripture as one word, a unity without contradiction. It is important for us to recognize that Scripture in this passage condemns the trust in any special revelations, in any attempts to look into the future apart from the Word of God, in any and every form of divination, in any and every form of witchcraft and magic. It is not surprising that it was precisely in the areas in the last century where revivalism was taking place that spiritualism was also born, nor should we be surprised that some of the most recent groups of the Jesus freaks are radically antinomian to the point of denying the Biblical law with regard to sex and marriage, nor that this kind of thing is creeping in very rapidly into these circles.

Historically, there is a very close relationship between occultism and charismatics. Throughout history, in all non-Christian circles the relationship has been very obvious and open. In paganism, it was routine for the occultist groups to have charismatic manifestations. It is time therefore for Christians to say openly and clearly, this is not of the Lord. By their fruits shall ye know them. Moreover, that our Lord says emphatically that these things are an abomination unto the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive out these nations from before thee. Let us therefore put our whole trust in the Word of God, in Jesus Christ as our savior, and in His atoning blood. It is significant that Finney, the father of this type of revivalism spoke with disrespect of the doctrine of atonement. For him, it was not the blood of Christ that saved us but the imitation of Christ, each man becoming another Christ. This is not of God. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto Thee that Thy Word is truth, and by thy Word we have a sure and certain and infallible guide to lighten the way before us. We thank Thee our salvation stands not in our experiences and gifts, but in the blood of Jesus Christ. We therefore come to Thee, O Lord, confident in Thy atoning grace in Thy mercy and in Thy blessing. Nothing in our hands, we pray, simply to Christ’s cross we cling. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

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

[Audience member] What is to be our attitude towards charismatic people? Do we treat them as Christians?

[Rushdoony] Unless they give specific evidence of being Christian our first attitude towards charismatics should be that it is paganism. Now there are charismatics who in spite of that are Christians, but we should make it clear that the charismatic movement is pagan. It is occultist. Yes?

[Audience member] Is the devil always a part of witchcraft?

[Rushdoony] Is the devil always a part of witchcraft?

[Audience member] Right.

[Rushdoony] Yes, he is basic to it and throughout the years witchcraft has very closely aligned itself with Satanism because the thesis of Satan is that every man shall be his own god, and this is the heart of witchcraft; be your own god, do your own thing. Yes?

[Audience member] I hear the British Israelite movement is charismatic, is that right? Armstrong and {?}.

[Rushdoony] Well, yes. I would say that would be qualified. The question was is the British Israelite movement and Armstrong charismatic. We would have to say that many British Israelites, while they are wrong in their thesis, are genuinely Christian. However, Armstrong does claim (the senior Armstrong) inspiration. He has a private pipeline to God. And this has been documented in several works so that in his case, very definitely he belongs in the circle of the charismatics but of those who say the pipeline is restricted, the charismatic manifestation is confined to one person or one family. And of course, very definitely, there has been the antinominanism there in the Armstrong family. This has led to a serious break within their church and they are feeling the pinch financially now because of the disillusionment of vast groups within the church. Yes?

[Audience member] What about the Mormans?

[Rushdoony] What about the Mormans? Very good question. The charismatic aspects there are limited to the twelve apostles, but its connection to this sort of thing is very real because Joseph Smith was deeply into the spiritualist movements of the day, into Free Masonry, into occultism, and was making his living dabbling in this sort of thing, telling fortunes virtually. So what he did was to institutionalize it into a religion and a church. But he limited the revelation and the charismatics to himself and then to the circle of the twelve apostles. Today, technically, the council of apostles can give forth a new inspiration, a new revelation at any time. Yes?

[Audience member] How about the instances that charismatic groups put on to bless via the Holy Spirit to keep from people making adverse comments and they say well you’d better be careful. You know you’re going to {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, the emphasis on blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Well, the charismatics really detach the Spirit from the Word and from the Father and the Son so that the Spirit becomes a kind of a freewheeling thing who’s not connected integrally and essentially with the Word. Now there are Christian elements within them that want to restrain, you see, the anti-Christian aspects and they recognize there are blasphemous utterances that come out in these charismatic meetings, so that they do issue warnings against them. I’ve talked to people who are into the charismatic movements and they say well people who get too deeply involved very often get demon possessed. Well that’s peculiar that if you get too deeply involved in the Holy Spirit you get demon possessed. They refuse to see the contradiction there. Yes?

[Audience member] So many people {?}

[Rushdoony] I can’t hear.

[Audience member] So many people give {?}.

[Rushdoony] Yes. They refuse to see that Paul insists in a real language whereby everyone can be instructed, and second that Paul also says these things shall pass away, but faith, hope, and love shall remain. Now, at these charismatic meetings there is nothing but vain babbling, which when recorded is proven to be nothing but syllables, two or three syllables repeated over and over again. Once in a while somebody will get up and profess to interpret them at some meetings where they want interpretation. But, the interpretations are ridiculous because the tapes have shown that there was no language involved there. In one instance this happened in the South, a group of college students who a number of them are on our mailing list, went to campus charismatic group and one of them who had studied Hebrew got up and in the meeting, supposedly possessed by tongues, and rattled off some Hebrew and someone got up and interpreted it as some language other than Hebrew and gave a supposed account of it which was total nonsense. Are there any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience member] Would this sudden interest in the Bermuda Triangle be related to this movement?

[Rushdoony] Would the sudden interest in the Bermuda Triangle be related to this movement? Yes, there is a desire today to explain everything in terms of occultism. This is the answer to all problems so that there is no attempt to deal with things in terms of natural phenomena or to master them. All our progress has been by saying God has created an orderly universe. Therefore, is there a problem here? Well let’s study the weather patterns, the water patterns, there are a great many very peculiar things in that area about currents, weather patterns and so on, and instead of studying these, you see, the desire is to find an occultist reason. This is why apart from the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, science cannot get very far or even exist. It has been where you have had very clearly the Biblical faith in the sovereignty of God that men have believed the universe is orderly and law abiding rather than occultist and therefore knowledge of it and control of it under God is possible. The men who led to the tremendous outburst of modern science were at the very beginning all Puritan and predestinarian. And because they were, and this has been documented by secular scholars, they believed that they could organize knowledge concerning the world of nature and have means of controlling it. So occultists, all occultist thinking, is against all real knowledge. It wants to ascribe it to things that are totally abnormal. It wants a totally capricious universe in which man can be god among the ruins. Yes?

[Audience member] Is it permissible to invoke curses like David did in the Psalms?

[Rushdoony] Yes, if we curse according to the Word of God, we can. We certainly are not to bless evil. We are to recognize, for example, that murder and adultery, for example, are always under the curse of God.

[Audience member] But people that are, who are keeping you from serving the Lord in some way, is it permissible to curse them?

[Rushdoony] Well, first we should try by prayer to convert, but there is a point where with some people, with some things as well, we need to invoke God’s curse upon them, commit them to the judgment and the wrath of God. People are unwilling to do that today and as a result they are unable to come to grips with the problem of evil. Chief Davis of the LA police force has said one of the problems of our time is men are unwilling to turn on evil and say it needs to be judged. It needs to be condemned. It needs the death penalty. That’s because we no longer have any real awareness of the wrath of God and of the hatred of God for evil. We’ve been too much brainwashed by the religion of love; sweetness and light, love things enough and love people enough and you’ll change all things, which is of course a way of saying whatever I do wrong, love me some more and that’ll make me good, you see. Yes?

[Audience member] What about {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, control by hypnotism. Now, it has been demonstrated that where people have a strong and a secure faith, they cannot be hypnotized. Man requires authority. If he is not subject to the authority of God, he will be subject to the authority of man. And the more the modern age has grown, the more people can be hypnotized, which is a very interesting fact, so that the fact of hypnotism is a willingness to surrender oneself into the hands of another. This willingness does not come about where anyone is godly, securely godly. In other words, let’s transfer it into the logic of everyday life; a godly woman can never be dominated like an ungodly woman. You see, the ungodly both are rebellious against true authority and wide open to ungodly authority, precisely because they are rebellious, because we all require authority in our lives, and we’re not subject to the unqualified authority of God and all godly authority we’re going to be wide open to all other kinds of authority and at the same time lawless.

[Audience member] The Scripture {?}to whom you give {?} to obey {?}.

[Rushdoony] Yes, and the word there is very literally slaves. Well our time is up, let us bow our heads now for the benediction. 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]