Christian Reconstruction vs. Humanism

The Death of the Old Humanist Order

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Christian Reconstruction vs. Humanism

Lesson: 7-12

Genre: Lecture

Track: The Death of the Old Humanist Order

Dictation Name: RR177A2

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Introductory Speaker] Okay, our first speaker will be introduced by Mr. Victor (Porlierre?) of Port Angeles, Victor?

[Victor] I trust that you will accept what will probably be somewhat of a heterodox introduction to a man who means very very much to me, and if you’ll excuse a few snapshots out of my life as to why I am here, I hope that it will be some parallel reasons as to why many of you are here. Finishing graduate school in 1960 at the University of California, I came out a free thinker, an atheist and a socialist, and (?) with the Kennedy administration in 1961, and spent the 60’s with the state department, but in which time it became very clear to me that the ideas which I had learned in university were bankrupt not only in the united states but in the countries around the globe, then with a great deal of disillusionment, left Washington DC and returned to the west coast. A few years later the Holy Spirit that had been brooding over my life said let there be light, and at the age of 38 I came to know Christ Jesus. Well the very saying that forced you to begin to find an abundance of literature on a number of personal aspects of one growth and life, but having spent more than a decade concerned with the problems that are facing humanity around the globe, it was rather a difficulty for me to find very little literature of any. There were a couple of writers that I eventually ran into that I still have a great deal of respect for, that did a diagnosis of problems, but I kept asking, where’s the prescription? I kept praying for that prescription, and of all the most obscure titles that should come into my life, a little book entitled: The Myth of Overpopulation came into my life, and as a person who had worked in the foreign aid program I knew that there obviously had to be bounds, but I would read it anyway. (Laughter) And it wasn’t. And I got to be a very thirsty man, particularly if you have as a humanist, seen the exciting bubbly white froth that actually turns out to be the lip of a whirlpool of destruction, to finally find a place where God is using a man as an instrument to articulate a vision of victory. A vision of victory that is comprehensive, and so with some boldness I actually called man a (unintelligible) to call because some of his books seemed to be very serious and almost prophetic and somber, to find on the other end of the line one of the most gracious men I had ever spoken with, and began to understand what full grace meant, began to prepare to go down for about 5 days to Chalcedon. I probably have not done more reading in my entire life in those few months beforehand because I didn’t feel it was fair to go down and asking questions about things he’d already written in his books.

I went down and found that Rousas Rushdoony and his wife Dorothy were two of the finest Christians that God has walking on the earth today, not because of them but because of Him. And as I have spent these last 5 years getting to know more and more people whom God is drawing to an understanding to an understanding of a vision of victory that is saturated, with which holy writ is saturated, (unintelligible) increasingly exciting. Times may be dark around to the new light glowing, and it’s largely due to the fact that God almighty has been using Rousas Rushdoony, and I introduce him to you now. (Applause)

[Rushdoony] Our subject this morning is the death of the old humanist order. This afternoon I shall deal with the forces of reconstruction that are very much at work. The forces of destruction were born with the humanistic order; it had within it the seeds of decay. And it is a curious fact of history that there is a general ignorance of two wars at the beginning of this century that revealed the bankruptcy of humanism. These two wars were first, the first Balkan war of 1912, and then the second Balkan war of 1913. They were the prelude to WWI, and they were not insignificant wars. Within one month of the declaration of the first Balkan war, 1,200,000 soldiers were in the war zone. This was the first war in which the modern invention, the airplane played a role. The Bulgarians used aerial warfare against their enemies, bombing troops and installations. It was the first war in which barbed wire surrounded troops and trenches. In many ways it was the prelude of WWI in its use of modern technology.

Several nations were involved, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro. Balkan states were lined up against the Ottoman Empire. A great deal was at stake, Turkey was known as the sick man of Europe, behind the scenes all the nations conspired to direct the course of the war; they wanted it to be a stalemate. In effect they wanted no winners, but the Bulgarian army surprised them. Within a year the war was over and it was a smashing victory for the Balkan forces, the Bulgarian in particular. Then with diplomacy the victory was snatched from Bulgaria, Bulgarian Macedonia wanted freedom to unite with Bulgaria, this was prevented. Everything was done by all the powers to prevent the victory. Why? Russia was afraid that if Bulgaria continued they would capture the Dardanelles. And the Dardanelles has always been the key area in the world for power; control of the Dardanelles means control of more trades then Suez and Panama Canal have. It controls all of central Europe. And Russia’s position was if we cannot have it, the Turks must. This was the position of Austria, the position of Germany, and the position of Great Britain. Everything was being done by the great powers to keep Turkey alive, this in spite of the continuing anti-Christian atrocities and massacres perpetrated by Turkey. Why? A very simple reason: Turkey was a totally unprincipled nation, all the great powers knew they could buy Turkey and it would stay bought, but they did not trust any other power to be totally unscrupulous. The result was a second Balkan war which precipitated the following year in 1913 to undo the damage done by the first Balkan war, the victory of Bulgaria.

And so, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia and Turkey were manipulated and sent against Bulgaria, and Bulgaria was not only defeated, stripped of what it had gained, but stripped of its own territory. And with that, the European powers felt satisfied. As King George the fifth of England said: I have 18 million Muslim subjects, and he did not want their feelings hurt by having Turkey crushed. The war showed only one principle at work, the balance of power politics. No nation in Europe wanted too much power to accrue to any other nation, there was no other principle at stake. This was the same thing that led to WWI, and WWII; no principles. In WWII we had a prelude when the powers built up Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, then the Soviet Union united with Nazi Germany against the west; all of them playing the balance of power game, none with any principles. Two Balkan wars, two world wars, the Korean War, the war on Vietnam and many another a conflict in every continent, all fought to the death of any principle that anyone went into the battle with. The total bankruptcy of our humanistic world order was increasingly apparent. Not justice, but advantage, not truth, but propaganda prevailed. All Europe had long professed to be Christian, but one thing that has been apparent in this century is that all the powers worked to help turkey in the two Balkan wars, an anti-Christian massacring power. The greatest recipient of American foreign aid in this century has been the Soviet Union; more has been done by Washington to help the Soviet Union than the people of the United States. I mentioned that Bulgaria came out the winner in the first Balkan war, Bulgaria itself has a very interesting story, it Czar for some years had been Ferdinand II, known as foxy Ferdinand. He was a prince of Sax Cobourg Gotha, a German Prince, a descendant of Louie the 14th, a relative of Queen Victoria, related to the Czar and to the Kaiser, and to the Emperor of Austria, Hungary. They were all his cousins, and they were all engaged in total warfare behind the scenes against one another. No one gave Ferdinand a chance of lasting more than a few months when he was made ruler of Bulgaria.

But he survived, gained the name foxy Ferdinand, not because he intelligent, but because he was even more unprincipled than all the rest. One of the things he said not too long before he assumed power, speaking to Princess Louise of Belgium he declared: “the Devil exists, I call on him and he comes.” Ferdinand was a homosexual. What Paul said about homosexuals in Romans 1 fitted him perfectly: “without natural affection.” And because Ferdinand, a man of ordinary intelligence, very ordinary intelligence was a bit more unprincipled than all the other rulers he usually came out ahead, until the whole concert of powers, as it were, ganged up on him. After WWI he abdicated in favor of his son Boris who was later executed by the Nazi’s, then his other son who succeeded Boris, Cyril, was murdered by the Communists. And the old Ferdinand not long before his death, surveying the ruins of Europe at the end of WWII, of the ruins of his own life and work said: “everything is collapsing around me.” And it was. The whole world order was crumbling because there were no moral foundations.

Early in the last century Hagel had taught that the state represents the principle of absolute reason and spiritual power, that the state is God walking on earth bestowing on man all the values he possesses. Horace Van Kalen, an American educator writing in Saturday Review in 1951 spoke of the world religion as the democratic faith, by which he meant faith in the democratic state, which he saw as the one true catholic church but that church was failing man. It was unable to give man anything to live for, and what was in evidence then is increasingly in evidence today; despair and the sense of impotence, of hopelessness, because what humanistic statism has done is to eliminate any transcendence to the state. There is no law, no god above the state for humanism, therefor whatever the state says is the absolute truth about anything. The state is man’s imminent god, and there is no god or truth beyond it according to humanism. And when man denies himself transcendence with his faith, there is no law of God, and no supreme court of God to which he can make supplication, to which he can pray, and the result has been cynicism.

A few years ago, an attorney general of the state of California, (unintelligible) Younger, when well documented charges were made that he was friendly to mob interests said: “I never said I was tough on crime” nobody paid much attention. The cynicism was that great. In one area after another, men began to turn away from the present world, nostalgia has never before in history began to grip people as they look to the good old days, no matter how bad they may have been materially, they were the good old days because there was some kind of standard then, Paul Johnson, in the Enemies of Society wrote with regard to the world of art and I quote: “in the 18th century, the vast majority of musical works performed at concerts and in churches were contemporary. In 1776 for instance, the organizers of the London concerts of ancient music explained that ancient referred to pieces more than twenty years old. The proportion of modern music performed remained high throughout the 19th century, but a statistical summary quoted by Roy McMullen in Art of Affluence and Alienation, the Fine Arts Today, suggested over 90% of the music performed in the third quarter of the 20th century was composed before 1900. Welford Mallers the leading critic and composer who takes a pessimistic view of the musical future, observes that “the desire to listen exclusively to the music of the past rather than to that of one’s own time is a phenomenon that has never happened before.” This is true in all the arts, and it is true because establishment art, establishment music is so radically bankrupt of meaning.

The insistence of past art and music is therefore understandable because of this alienation from reality and from people. Modern art in every department has become esoteric, and good art cannot find an audience, it is cut off from an audience. Because of the dislike of the present, much of the world today is trying to make itself into a museum or a museum piece, consider for example, and the instances abound, New England and England. The emphasis there is on their past glory, on what they once were, on preserving the past. Well then good, but what about living in terms of the present and the realities of the present? The south was trying hard to do the same, but it has been flooded with a lot of people and the old order in spite of its efforts is collapsing. Australia has problems, but at least it has a little more orientation to the present and future that England, and is thus a more hopeful area unless Christians in England and New England and every area of the world that seeks to make itself into a museum begins to say that under God we will be oriented to the future, and not to the past. The dying order lives in the past, and in that respect the whole world is a dying order. A dying order cannot transmit its culture, and it becomes hostile to aliens, does that sound like your community and mine? It’s because it fits. And what happens in a dying order is that only the aliens appreciate what was good in the past and are able to transmit it to the future, and so the aliens who come in become the defenders.

When Rome fell the only ones who fought for it were the Goths who had moved in and become a part of Rome and had some appreciation of its past and possibilities for the future. The only ones who tried to resurrect Rome after its fall were Barbarians who had picked up some appreciation. The Romans themselves were only living in terms of the past and could never live in terms of the future. A dying order by default gives its realm to those who will take it by their vitality. The life and death of a culture is a religious fact, a cultures dies when it becomes religiously bankrupt. Today first of all, humanism by denying the fall of man has an unrealistic view about man and history, it has built its house upon sand, it believes that man can remake himself in this world without Christ, and for this reason it is perishing. Second, man, humanistic man, has sought to be his own savior, state school psychotherapy and so on. All these have become instruments of humanistic salvation and have become instruments of destruction. Art has become messianic instead of remaining art, science seeks to save man and society by knowledge, others tell us that humanistic love is the means of saving the world, and so on and on, all ideas thoroughly bankrupt. And third, humanistic statism has denied to the church a necessary public function, the state says we are the necessary, the public institution, the church is merely a private concern, it’s optional, you can take it or leave it. A man doesn’t need a faith to make society work, but of course they have been hypocrites there because they have been offering an established religion, humanism, through the schools, they are humanistic churches. The most public thing of all is religion, it is the foundation of society, the heart of culture, and if we fail to see that faith, religion, is the one necessary public aspect of life, then we contribute to the breakdown of a culture.

The fitting symbol of the modern humanistic state is the gulag, the slave labor camp. The whole world is moving into a gulag state, step by step attempts are being made to control churches, Christian schools, private associations, families, the individual, in every area of his life, the arts by subsidies, and so on. The end of this kind of control is full scale coercion, the gulag state so that every modern state is on the road to the gulag. When the state denies that there is a truth above and beyond man, above and beyond the state, it lays the foundation for the gulag. When it sees itself as the only source of truth and law it declares in effect that whatever the state does is of necessity, of right. This was the foundation of Nazi-ism; its foundations were laid as Hallowell showed in The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology. And the fact that the philosophers of law step by step denied that there was a God, and a law beyond man’s law, beyond the state, and so they came to a legal positivism whereby whatever the state decree was ipso facto right, because it was legal, and there is no truth beyond the state and its will. But for us the truth is Jesus Christ, and for us all who deny that Jesus Christ is the way the truth and the life become a part of the lie. And they do not live in a vacuum, that lie becomes progressively demonic, it creates the gulag state, it creates increasing coercion.

Hitler came to power with the approval if the German intellectuals in the universities, he was their child. He represented the legal positivism they had been proclaiming for a few generations, and Hitler’s dream was after the war to create a totally modern city as a scientific world center, dedicated to scientific research, to science as truth, and of this, the universities approved. To silence the word of God is to silence man’s only hope, and a modern state is bent on silencing the word of God, and we are in the first stages of that today with controls upon the church and its school. And we have seen in the past two years more than one minister go to jail, the late Lester Roloff, Levi Wisner, Everett Sullivan who is in jail again, and others as well. The proclamation of the word of God is the proclamation of the truth that governs man in every area of life and thought, and to silence that word is to silence finally freedom itself, man’s independence of the gulag state. But the word of God cannot be silenced, it is written in the being of every man, and Paul tells us in Romans 1:19-20: “The ungodly hold down the truth in unrighteousness or injustice, because that which may be known of God is manifest in them. For God has shown it unto them, for the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”

God’s inescapable truth confronts this dying humanistic order, materially, technologically, industrially, the world today is very rich, but still bankrupt. It despises its wealth because life without faith is empty. The gods of humanism are very vulnerable, and they change. In the last century as Otto Scott will deal with very shortly, Greco-Roman culture was worshipped throughout the western world, and the ideals of the Greeks and romans were made paramount, and people who were evangelical Christians were busy trying to merge Christianity with Greco-Roman faith; this is syncretism. Syncretism is attempting to two things that are irreconcilable together. It’s like trying to say atheism and Christianity can be reconciled, it’s like trying to say that chastity and adultery can be brought together and made one. Syncretism means the triumph of the evil, because it is a denial of the good, and it holds to the good as a façade, so when men begin to compromise the word of God, they indulge in syncretism, and the logic of their position leads to the death of their Christian profession. Vlad Stone, one of the great figures, prime minister of England was so dedicated to Greco Roman culture that he tried to say that Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto really represented the trinity and were a memory of the trinity. Then he said Apollo represented in Greco-Roman mythology Jesus Christ, the messiah. Then he was faced with a problem, how could he call Apollo Christ when Apollo was involved in the very ugly rape of Mar Tessa? Well, he wrote a great length about it, trying to find a symbolic meaning in that rape, but finally he said: “it was rape but it wasn’t of a sexual character.” Now that’s how far syncretists will go in trying to vindicate their syncretism. And today you have syncretists in the pulpit who will become irritable if you talk about certain doctrines they don’t want to hear about, they don’t want to preach about them. They may be very likeable, even loveable people, but they are syncretists, and therefore they are without power.

Without power, they lack the power even of a militant humanism, they halt between two opinions, they are lukewarm, and God says when the chips are down, our Lord letters to the church as you remember, “Because you were lukewarm I will spew thee out of my mouth.” Humanisms gods are imminent ones, they are man-made idols and they are readily bankrupt. Some of us can recall when the idol for the humanists was the Soviet Union, the great hope of the world, where truth and the future have become incarnate, Lincoln Stephens went there and came back oblivious to all the evil that surrounded him in saying: “I have seen the future and it works.” Now of course they know a little too much about the Soviet Union, and while they are still soft on the subject, their new future that works, listen to Jane Fond any time, is red China. And in a few years it will be something else. The false gods have a short lifespan.

At the same time the contemporary enthusiasms increasingly represent moral bankruptcy. The cynical and degenerate respective, the rock stars are idolized by their followers, precisely because their drug lifestyle is suicidal, and our popular culture is increasingly governed by suicidal motives, and like Rome it says let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die, and they are right at that one point. Tomorrow they shall die, God declares: He that sinneth against Me wrongeth his own soul, all they that hate me love death. God gives top all such cultures their hearts desire. And unless they repent, they shall surely perish. We are surrounded by a dying world, the world of humanism, of humanistic statism. Our concern therefore must be Christian reconstruction, the reconstruction; the rebuilding of all things in terms of the law word of God, in terms of the savior Jesus Christ, for the only alternative is death. And as we face a dying world, we face it not alone but in the power of God.

The old saying “One with God is a majority” is always true. One of my favorite saints, and with this I shall close, is a saint whose dates are a little before the Venerable Bede, so that he was in what was known, wrongly, as the dark ages, Saint Wilfrid of Hexum, was a man who was consumed by the zeal of the Lord. He became an abbot of the monastery, and a Bishop, established several monastic houses, furthered learning, furthered, evangelistic work, it was in his own day and partly through his work that the last area of a pagan enclave, a pagan kingdom within England was converted, although most of them still were semi-pagan under the service. Whenever Wilfrid found something he did not like and he found himself helpless against kings and Bishops, he took his walking staff in his hand and started walking, walked to the coast, took a boat to France to go to Rome, and to nag the pope until the Pope issued something to vindicate Wilfred and put down evil. But he didn’t go straight for Rome, if Wilfred heard that there was trouble in a church somewhere or that they had become corrupt, or there was no good preaching of the word, he took a long detour, he went there and with the wrath of God he set them straight, and to those who did not know Christ, he made byways to preach the mercy and salvation of God. So it took him some time, a few years to get to Rome. (laughter) and after the first trip, the pope was always glad, whoever was pope, to give him what he wanted as quickly as possible, because they knew Wilfred was going to be ther3e preaching, and nagging until he got what he wanted, because he would say: “thus saith the Lord!” And that one man with his staff in his hand marched back and forth over the face of Europe, and it was never the same when he went through a place. One with God is a majority, if he is faithful to the every word of God.

We have nothing to fear concerning the future, if we are a part of it, if we are under God without reservations. Known unto God are all His works, from the foundations of the world, and His perfect plan circumscribes the very hairs of our head, and His perfect plan concludes with His glory, the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever. Will you reign with Him? Thank you. (applause)