World History

Ancient History and Christianity_b

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: History

Lesson: 5-23

Genre: Talk

Track: 5

Dictation Name: RR160B3b

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Picks up from previous lecture]

…And Oedipus starts on a journey, and he runs across his father who sees he is a stranger and challenges him, feeling that there is something suspicious about him, and forces a fight on the young man and is killed by Oedipus. Well, as the story continues, Oedipus who is a tremendous young warrior is made a king by the people of that country, and they married him off to his own mother, and he has two daughters. And then of course comes the time when the thing comes out, he is married to his own mother. And of course what is happening is, the Fury’s are taking out on him. Now he is innocent you see, he never willfully did any wrong. You see how the story stacks the deck. Here is the greatest tragedy of Greece which reveals their religious outlook.

Poor Oedipus has never done anything wrong, he has been a very good king. He didn’t willfully kill the old king, the old king attacked him. He tried to avoid it. But no, the Fury’s are now taking it out on his kingdom, that is how he starts the quest, you see. Why are these terrible things happening to his realm? He is trying to rule wisely and all kinds of horrible things are happening, there must be some evil somewhere. (?) But he didn’t do anything wrong.

So to quiet the Fury’s and to relieve his country he blinds himself and begins to wander everywhere, hoping that finally the Fury’s will leave him in peace. His two daughters leading him, now blind beggar as he goes place to place. At the moment he finds out what has happened, Oedipus says: “Oh, oh! All brought to pass--- all true! Thou light, may I look my last on thee, I who have been found accursed in birth, accursed in wedlock, accursed in the shedding of blood!”

And the chorus, the Greek chorus, comments as he rushes into the palace to blind himself, so that the Fury’s will stop destroying his life, and then goes no more king, just a homeless beggar: “Alas ye generations of men, how mere a shadow do I count your life! Where, where is the mortal who wins more of happiness than just the seeming, and after the semblance, a falling away? Thine is a fate that warns me,--- thine, thine, unhappy Oedipus--- to call no earthly creature blest.”

Now there you have the Greek system. All this business about them being happy pagans, and how happy the Greek outlook was is nonsense. There you have the Greek outlook. “Call no creature blest.” No one is happy. Live it up, you are going to be dead soon. Whether you do right or wrong, life stacked against you.

The last words of Oedipus: “Therefore while our eyes wait to see the final day, we must call no one happy who is of mortal race, until he hath crossed life’s border, free from pain.” And so it goes, the poor man until he finds deliverance in death, and then his poor girls carry on. Two innocent girls. This is tragedy. This is why tragedy is not Christian, it is anti christen, because it says that the universe is stacked against man, that whatever god may exist is radically perverse, so he picks of Oedipus who is especially innocent, and brings him about to a position where he is involved in all kinds of horrible things through no fault of his, and then enjoys blinding him, driving him as a suffering beggar all over the face of the earth until he dies.

Tragedy implies a hostile universe that is against man. It does not see man as sinner, but as victim. The universe is neither God created or God ruled. Significantly, in the modern world, tragedy is regarded, beginning with Shakespeare, as a great art form. And today 90% of what you get on television, and in the movies, and in novels, is tragedy. And if you think it is not religious, you are kidding yourself. It is the most poisonous, the most venomous kind of anti-Christian religion. It is giving us something that is radically, totally stacked against any view of God behind the universe, that says man is not a sinner, man is a victim. And therefore what’s the use of it all? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

Thus the Greek picture is something that no Christian can accept, but it is the picture with which we are surrounded day and night. Virtually every program represents a militant anti-Christian religion, crusading (?)

Our time is limited, but I want to continue now with the next chapter, chapter 7 on our board, Jesus Christ and the beginning of Christianity. Again, contrasting the basic religious premise behind the history so that we can see first the movement of the events in the text as we read week by week, and then something of the meaning, the religious meaning of these movements. Now, as against all these pagan views, and especially as against the Greek view, we see in scripture God as the creator, and as against the ultimate perversity of the universe, we have our Lord declaring very early in his ministry, in Matthew 10:25-34, the total government of God.

Not a sparrow falls, but your Father in heaven knows it. If a house be divided against itself, it cannot stand. (?) Fear not therefore (?) the absolute government of God.

And in that passage what our Lord is saying is that the house, the universe, is under God, not under Satan. The universe is not ultimately perverse as tragedy would have it, but it is under God. Now, remember when he was writing, Greek was the second language which every Hebrew, every Jew spoke. Greek culture was very powerful in the land, Greek (gymnasiums?) were all over Jerusalem. And the Sadducees were extensively influenced by Greek thinking.

Every person in the land had a second name which was Greek. So when you read the New Testament, when you read the words of our Lord, remember, this was the environment, this was the kind of thing He was talking against. The intellectuals around Him, the educated people had read Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, they had grown up in that world. And He declared: “The house, the universe is under God and not under an abusive hand. Fear them not, therefore. All things shall be revealed,” he said. “All shall be judged, all shall be punished or rewarded. There is nothing hidden that shall not be marked down.”

The universe, absolutely governed by God, from the very hairs of our head to the fall of every sparrow. God’s government and care are total. “He who confesses me before men, him will I confess before my Father in heaven. Confess me therefore and battle against the enemy, and I will confess you before God. Think not that I am come to bring peace, I am come not to bring peace, but the sword.”

‘I am come, not to unite Good and Evil in Persian fashion, or in pagan Greek fashion, but to divide and to destroy evil. To bring about a separation. To summon men to regeneration, and to build afresh all things in terms of my word.’

Now, looking back on what we see in the pagan civilizations we have studied last week and tonight, then study just these words of our Lord in Matthew 10:25-34, and you see the direction of His ministry, the direction of His words, His teaching. Do you see why a knowledge of history is important? So that we can see the issues as our Lord presented them against the whole backboard of history, and you can see the (?) as it is again lining up. Because again we have the tragic view of life, as the Greeks. Again we have the Persian view, “tolerate both Good and Evil”. Again we have the Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian view of Chaos as the source of regeneration. And we must therefore again find our personal and societal regeneration in Jesus Christ. All things must be made new, in terms of His word. So that on this battlefield of history, we hope we shall see in the weeks ahead, progressively more and more clearly and sharply the nature of the battle, the work for us, and the direction of the future.

Let us bow our heads in prayer before we have the questions.

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee that all things begin and end in Thee. That thou art He would di make all things, and did ordain and determine therein. We thank Thee therefore that in this confidence we can face the battle of the ages. Knowing that we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us, even Jesus Christ our Lord. in His name we pray, amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, in my book, Politics of Guilt and Pity I have a chapter on the U.N., a religious dream, in which I speak of their ideas of mass movements of peoples in Babylonian fashion, and Assyrian fashion. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] He is financing this kind of migration?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, I would say (?) has disappeared from (?) role and gone into the (?) tent. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, Belshazzar was Nebuchadnezzar’s Grandfather. But, since--- Grandson, yes. Nebuchadnezzar was the grandfather of Belshazzar. Now, Belshazzar was made the son of Nebuchadnezzar, and vice king under Nabonidus, you see. Because he was quite young when his father… well, when his grandfather died, Belshazzar was too young, so they made his father, even though he was not the son of Nebuchadnezzar the king. And then they made the young king the second king, vice king, or vice president in our terms. So Nabonidus was also made an adopted son as it were of Nebuchadnezzar. So, strictly he was both grandson and legal son.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, of course, Sophocles thought he was being realistic you see. What is realism? Realism is determined by your faith. You can go back through the centuries, and you can find writers were always claiming to be realistic, in terms of their faith. So the realism that you find in the modern novel, and the modern movie, and the modern television series, is always a realism in terms of their religious faith, which is a belief in tragedy. The deck is stacked against man. This is their faith. It is a bitterness against the universe; things weren’t made right, and the only hope is that man can re-make everything. But you get a steady diet of tragedy to tell you what a mess God has made of the universe. “It is an ugly world, there is no meaning, no purpose, no God behind it.”

So, it isn’t realism. How much of the kind of thing that you see on these tragic television programs have you ever seen in real life? You see, everything is bleak and black, and poor innocent man is always the victim, never the sinner. So it is realism in terms of their religion.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] The tongues movement? Well, of course there is no such thing as the tongues movement today, because first of all, the tongues movement in the Bible we are told is something whereby they spoke a specific language, and people who were foreigners understood them. This was a gift in the apostolic age, whereby they communicated with people and carried the gospel to them. There is no record today of any speaking in tongues. Again and again these tongue meetings have been taped. No one has ever spoken in tongues. What they do is to get hysterical, and they repeat one or two syllables over, and over, and over again hysterically.

And in fact it has been taped, and they put it down in black and white what they repeated, two or three syllables over again. It may be: “duh duh duh duh duhh” or: ‘Abadabbah, abadabbah, abbadabbaabah” something like that, nonsense. Now, that is not speaking in tongues. Moreover, in ancient times, you had that kind of thing, which is (Lasalia?) this hysterical babbling of syllables in pagan religion. You had it in the jungles of Africa. The first time tongues came in, about the 3rd and 4th century, it came in to Christianity from Frigia, from a pagan group. The modern tongue movement or Pentecostalism began with Negro’s, I believe it was in (?) this is where it began, among Negro’s. And it is basically a pagan thing, you can find this tongues movement among as I say the tribes, you can find it among the Hindu’s, you could find it among the American Indians in the old days, you could find it among the Buddhists, it is pagan. It is not speaking in a language. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] You may be right, I know it was here in Southern California in a Negro group.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony]Well, I think there was a group that brought it to them, I will have to check, but it was originally an all-negro group, and then an integrated group caught on to it and became the center of its propagation. So probably this upper room group was the group that became the propagating group. But the first manifestation was among Negro’s, and all Negro group. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, They claim this, but again and again people have gone and taped these meetings, when they have claimed they were speaking different languages, and it has never been anything other than these babble syllables.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, right. So here is a case where it has been extensively subjected to investigation and taping, a great deal of taping. All across country you had scholars taping. Now, one particular man, not that I particularly care for the man, but he had some real research here, is Dr. Welmers, who is an OBD minister, and also a professor at UCLA. And he had done extensive taping here. And there have never been even a hint of anything of a word in any of it, just repetition of some syllables.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, of course they don’t speak in tongues, that is my point, it has never been proven and it has been subjected to intense investigation. And second, instead of having the holy Spirit, most Pentecostal groups have a very low moral caliber. A very low moral caliber.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes. And this is notorious. Now anyone who has a very close contact with those groups, and I know that (Drewby Wacker?) has vouched for their very low moral character which appears even in the clergy. Some of their shenanigans…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well some of them do, and some don’t. It depends on the group.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] That is the way some feel, but not all. But there are many who do feel that way, yes.

[Audience Member] What about these people who speak in tongues believing they have been given a special gift to interrupt them …?...

[Rushdoony] And they claim that they can interpret and they get up and give something that is essentially the message. But all of this as I say has been taped, so that we do have a great deal of documentation at this point concerning the tongue movement, and they have not been able to verify a single claim concerning the tongues movement. And their only answer is that they that feel either they don’t have the Holy Spirit, or you refuse to submit to it yourself. In other words, it isn’t the objective evidence, you have to experience it yourself and then you’ll know. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, exactly.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, emphatically so. Emphatically so, it is a dangerous thing to get into the tongues movement, because you will be milked of your money. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] To change the subject now, a question was raised last time about an Atlas. Now I don’t have all my books unpacked, so I can’t recommend some of the Bible atlas’s. but if you go to a Bible bookstore, you can probably find 2-3 fairly good Bible Atlas’s. But this, as a historical atlas is a gem, it is a paperback for $2.95 Historical Atlas of the World and it is punished by Barnes and Noble in New York, and you can get it if there is a college book store near you, or you can order it. Historical Atlas of the World and the number in their paperback list is number 249. Barnes and Noble are the publishers.

Now, what this does is to begin very early in history and give you a series of maps. The first one is the spread of civilization to maybe 200, but after that it goes back to the Pyramids and ancient Egypt, and the near East, 1400 B.C. and it gives you pictures of kingdoms, their extent like (?) which was a pretty powerful realm, a very powerful one, and also of Canaan, the entire near East, and coming up through history, Rome, Europe, early Europe in 1100 and so on, right down to the present. So that it is quite a useful Atlas, it is not as big in its maps as perhaps one would like, and they are not detailed maps, but it does give you an idea of the extent of realms. For example I mentioned that there was a time when Lithuania extended over a tremendous area, from the Baltic to the black sea. Well, you see that as you go through here, how powerful and wide a realm it was. And it will give you a picture of how many little states there were in Germany for example, for a long, long time as you look at these maps. So If you are interested in maps, this historical atlas of the world put out by Barnes and Noble is really a little gem. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, it is an amazing thing, a great deal of knowledge was lost when the printing press was invented. When the printing press was invented it was at the time of the Renaissance, the contempt of Christianity, the contempt of the middle ages, and a contempt therefore of the past; and so anything therefore that wasn’t printed was obviously old and worthless. So it was amazing how much knowledge about the past was lost when the printing press was invented. It was a great step backwards, because it came precisely at a time when men were looking down their noses at the past, therefore it was the new, the modern, the printed book. And the number of volumes with rare and important data that were destroyed, because: “Well, they are old hand-written things.”

(?) you remember I discussed once in a book Sunday morning the Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings? And how he found the extensive knowledge of the entire world in maps long before Columbus. Long before Columbus, and maps from very early ages that indicated that shortly after the flood the whole world had been mapped, even the Artic areas before the ice set in. And they had at that time a knowledge of longitude and latitude both, which they couldn’t compute again until the 18th century. It is Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. Hapgood is not a fly-by-night, he was coauthor of an important work with Einstein. And he began this study of a particular map at the request of the Pentagon, when they found maps before Columbus’s day, which clearly showed south and north America very accurately drawn, and the Artic areas, with a lake (at all?) which are now under water in the artic areas. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Right, exactly. Yes. They went back to them because they were non Christian, they were humanists, and as humanists they saw to them, and they called the intervening period the dark ages. Later they called only a short part of it the dark ages, and the rest the medieval period, the middle part, the kind that you kind of jump over. So they forgot everything that was learned at that time. They actually had anesthetic during the medieval period, which was forgotten until it was rediscovered in later centuries. We really don’t know a great deal of our history. Of course, we don’t have time to go into all of that, but a great deal of man’s knowledge was lost because he turned his back on the Christian era and said: “Nothing connected with that can be any good.” His medical practice went downhill, his knowledge of the world went downhill, because he wasn’t going to learn anything from a Christian. Yes?

[Audience Member] Which you explain the dates of the birth of our Lord being fixed in 4 B.C.?

[Rushdoony] Well, I don’t have the confidence to do it, because I don’t think anyone really knows, but there are some scholars, a great many, who believe that when, oh, a few centuries alter when the Christians triumphed they began to create a Christian calendar, but they miscalculated by 4-6 years in setting the beginning of the Christian era, because what they did was to date everything after Christ and before Christ from the year of His birth. So they began this after Rome fell, and well, perhaps a little before that they had begun to move in that direction of a Christian calendar.

Now, our time is up, and we shall continue next week with our study of the Rise and Fall of Rome, the Republic and the Empire, chapters 8-9, and chapter 10, the early church confronts the world, we may get started on Byzantium, although I am not sure. But try to get started on chapter 11 if you can. But certainly through chapter 10. Now with that we are adjourned.

Now let me see, is it two weeks from tonight that it is thanksgiving week? And we are not meeting that week. So we will not be meeting the week of thanksgiving.

[Tape goes quiet, ends]