The Future and Wisdom

Socialism as Predestination

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Millennial Studies

Lesson: Socialism as Predestination

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Track: 01

Dictation Name: RR184A1

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Rushdoony] Our subject in this hour is Socialism and Predestination. When we examine the universe around us, there are only two possible views which can logically, rationally, or intelligently be affirmed. The alternatives are chance or necessity. There have been many who have attempted to affirm chance, but it is a difficult position to maintain. If chance is ultimate in the universe, then all around us and in us there exists only an ocean of brute or meaningless factuality. Brute facts are not only uninterpreted facts, meaningless facts, but they are beyond meaning, because they are absurd, something irrational, and incapable of being expressed. Language has reference to meaning. All words are propositional truths, each in its limited way. Each word, such as the word “noun” and “pronoun” represent something and is limited in meaning. Brute facts are beyond interpretation and description. If chance is ultimate, then all factuality is made up of brute, or meaningless facts, and nothing in all the universe is then definable or meaningful.

As against brute factuality, there is the realm of necessary meaning. The epitome of this, of course, is the biblical perspective. Given the fact of God’s creative act, all facts are created factuality, and all facts have a God-created, God-given meaning and purpose. While this does not mean that all factuality is comprehensible by the mind of man, it does mean that all things are potentially knowable within creation. Because man is created in the image of God, in knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion, the quest for meaning is basic to the mind and life of man. God’s purpose is not only inclusive of all his creation, but of every possible event in that creation. Scripture throughout expresses and cites this total purpose.

“The Lord hath made all things for himself. Yea, even the wicked for the day of evil.”

“Are not two sparrow sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your father, but the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are more value than many sparrows.”

Meaning is inescapable for man. Marcel du Champ attempted to create a new language, a language that would be totally non-Christian, without meaning, and he failed, of course. Meaning is the language of life.

As a result, even those who deny God tacitly assume its existence in order to have a possibility of meaning, for the {?} idea of God was a limiting concept in their philosophy. It was there to make thought and order possible. It was not that they had an active belief in a living God, but he was a limiting concept, a necessary thing for thinking to be tenable. Paganism thus borrowed meaning from theism while denying God’s necessary order.

Another name for God’s necessary order is predestination. Wilhem Pauck{?}, by no stretch of the imagination, an orthodox Christian, nonetheless wrote of this subject, being sufficiently removed from a belief in it, to be fair-minded about it. He said, “The doctrine of predestination is implied in the doctrine of salvation by divine grace alone. If it is affirmed that man cannot save himself by reliance upon powers, also religious potentialities, inherent in him, but that he is redeemed only by the initiative of a gracious, merciful God. It must also be said that his eternal destiny is determined by God. The doctrine of predestination therefore, stands in an immediate context with that of grace and with that of original sin.”

In Acts 15:18, St. Peter declares, “Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world.” The impact of this doctrine on the Greco/Roman world has been powerfully described by the classical scholar, C. M. Cochran, in Christianity and Classical Culture. Pagan thinkers had freed man from God’s necessity only to make him the unfree reflex of a determining natural world, a blind and meaningless necessity in the form of nature and the environment determined man, in Greco/Roman thought. Christian thinkers freed man from environmental determinism of a blind sort, to make man lord over the world around him under God’s providential determination. This ancient pagan perspective, never entirely dead, revived with the Enlightenment. Nature replaced God as the source of determination, and both naturalistic and mechanistic determinism began to govern philosophy and science. Of course, La Matrice{?} Man and Machine is a classic in that field. Such thinking often had, as its presupposition, that form of deism which reduced God to the role of an absentee landlord, or the great watchmaker, a limiting concept who, having made the universe to provide a beginning, allowed it to govern itself by immutable laws. In other words, God was posited in order to provide a beginning, but he was irrelevant otherwise, he was a limiting concept.

This view, wherein nature replaced God as the source of necessity, as the source of law and order, collapsed with Darwin. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, with its struggle for survival, demolished the idea of necessity in the natural order. The natural world was, for him, the only world, and it was a realm of brute, or meaningless, factuality.

While Darwin assumed evolution, de-evolution was an equal possibility. The ideas of meaning, order, and law were dropped as theological and hence, not applicable. At one point in a private letter, Darwin cast doubt on all man’s thinking, including his own. He said, “When I try to conceive of how an ape will view the world, and how irrelevant it will be to the reality of the world, it makes me wonder at whatever the human mind conceives.”

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels welcomed Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1958, because they recognized that it made socialism inevitable. In fact, they wrote joyfully to Darwin and were ready to dedicate one of their works to him, but Darwin was afraid that it would create too much unfavorable comment and declined. If God does not exist, and if nature, instead of being a rational order, is rather meaningless, a conflicting, struggling, brute factuality, then the only possible source of necessity, order, and meaning is man, most logically through the state, having dropped God and then nature as a determining order, the only alternative is man and the state.

A professor at a distinguished graduate school in the United States, some years ago insisted, at a forum where we were both speakers, as against my position, that the universe has only a thin edge of rationality, and man’s mind and its created order, such as the state, provides that thin edge of rationality in the universe. All the rest is meaningless, brute factuality. He insisted to the people in the conference audience, students in the main, that this was the critical difference between us, and he was right. Man must having meaning and order. He must have law, and if neither God nor nature can provide it, man must, and the most logical form is then by the state, through socialism. If you will not have God, you end up with socialism.

Thus, your only alternative to socialism is Christian faith, a thoroughly biblical faith, the Reformed faith. Socialism is necessity, or predestination, total law, total planning by the state. Assuming the death of God, the state takes over the functions of God. The older Whig liberalism held to a deistic view of nature. Nature was its limiting concept. Socialism assumes a Darwinian view, and given the teaching and the belief in the mythology of evolution, socialism becomes a logical necessity.

Quite logically, therefore, as the world has moved into a belief in the mythology of evolution, it has become progressively more socialistic. The premise of socialism is thus religious. It is salvation by means of socialism, by the state, as against salvation by God. The state, as the order of law, as against God. The older belief in salvation by nature has deep roots in the Romantic Movement, and it is still with us, in the Environmental Movement, with its worship of Mother Earth. Despite its current power, its romantic separation from the real world makes it essentially negative in its approach, capable of much destruction, but of no construction.

Socialism fills a religious need by providing necessity, meaning, and order, or law, but it cannot provide morality. At best, the morality provided by socialist states is ad hoc. Because of this lack of any vital or compelling moral law other than a vague affirmation of the people or the public interest, it has little to offer.

As a result, socialist states become power states and are marked by power struggles. Robert Conquest{?}, Solzhenitsyn, and other writers have shown that power is used brutally, simply to manifest power and terrorize the people. George Orwell, in 1984, described the goal of socialism as a boot stamping on a human face forever. Because for socialism there is no power above or beyond the state, the state and its power become ultimate. The purpose of the state becomes the power of the state. The goal of the bureaucracy becomes the growth of the bureaucracy. As a result, under socialism, the major enemy is the people, the citizenry. A foreign power may be an occasional, or a potential enemy, but the people are the constant enemy or threat. The more socialism grows in power, the more bitterly it oppresses its peoples. The slave labor camps of Lenin and Stalin, and others were not an accident. They were inherent to the system. The slave labor camps have not been dismantled by Gorbachev. The major threat to any socialist state is always the people.

As a result, the people are given false securities. Medical care, housing, and so on, all faulty, but all designed to reduce a free people to a position of dependency. Talk of power to the people is a façade for slavery. The fact that the very hairs of our head are all numbered means first, that predestination is not merely concerned with our salvation, and second, that it is total. It is inclusive of all things without exception.

Cornelius Van Til observed that if man could press one button in the universe and thereby, step outside of God’s total government, he would always have that finger on the button.

Socialist planning and government aims at the same kind of total control. Up to the early 1960’s, some scholars believed that this was an impossible dream. Such a total government would require total statistics in order to govern all persons totally. Shortly after World War 2, the Western nations began to gather statistics on all their peoples, on industry and business, on employment and unemployment, and much, much more. As Murray M. Rothbard pointed out in 1961, “As new statistical techniques are developed, new divisions of government, or departments, are created to refine and use them.” Even in 1960, the estimate of U.S. federal spending alone, or on statistics, was over $43 million, and that was before our inflation, and over ten thousand full time civilian employees were used in this enterprise. Coercion was used to gather the statistics, penalties for failure to comply. These statistics, and the forms which had to be filed, imposed a very considerable cost on businesses, small and great. At that time, the estimates were that, to achieve the goal of total statistics on every area of society would require as many people as the population of the Soviet Union, or the United Kingdom, or the United States. So, it was held to be an impossibility, because each person is involved in so many operations every day, so many sales and purchases, that he accumulates in every single day a vast realm of statistics, but something happened about that time.

Since 1960, the situation has altered dramatically. The invention and development of computers has made possible data gathering on an unprecedented scale. Some dream, for example, of the abolition of all cash, and the use of credit cards to enable total data gathering on all transactions. Other schemes have been proposed for non-monetary surveillance. Such dreams, however, while realizable, have a nemesis. Now, with computers, the modern state has the power of total control, the ability with computers which can do the work of thousands of bureaucrats, to gather all statistics on every single person, automatically, through the day, but something has happened. While the invention and development of computers has made possible data-gathering on an unprecedented scale, and while some dream of the abolition of all cash and the use, instead, of state-issued credit cards to enable total data gathering on all transactions, so that every time you make a purchase, it is immediately recorded in a master computer. All such dreams are now vulnerable to the hands of hackers, and hackers have demonstrated their ability to penetrate computer systems. I am told that only the tip of the surface of such penetration is known by the public at large. Some have planted viruses in computers to destroy data banks. This is a problem far greater than usually imagined. The Soviet Union, while desperately in need of computers, has, up to 1990, tended largely to avoid their use in fearfulness of penetration.

Thus, even as computers provided an instrument for total control, they also introduced a radical vulnerability to subversion. The result is a serious problem for the socialist state. Liberal democracy arose in the 19th century as a religious alternative in the Western world, to Christianity. Harold J. Berman, in a master work which you all should read; Law and Revolution, The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, called liberal democracy, “The first great secular religion in Western history,” and incidentally, Berman feels that either by the end of this decade, the Western world will return to Christian faith and a biblical concept of law, or it is finished.

The rival of liberal democracy has been revolutionary socialism. But, without a Christian faith to undergird it, democracy has increasingly developed its own version of this socialism in the name of human and environmental welfare. This should not surprise us. Statism is the manmade substitute for God. While writing from an emphatically non-Christian perspective, the political economist Pierre Dockes has shown the rise of statist power in history has meant the resurgence of slavery under some name or form. He points out in his study of Medieval Slavery and Liberation, “The word service, slave, in Roman law, originally referred to a person whose life had been spared by grace.” The slave was legally dead, because he had been cut off from the cult of family worship and was a stranger. The power of God is inherent to his being. God is, by nature, omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise, and totally self-sufficient in all his being. There is nothing before, now beside, nor other than God except that which he creates by his fiat will.

Therefore, the Almighty can demand of man, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

God’s omnipotence robs no man. He is man’s creator and man’s only valid source of meaning, grace, and power. The state, and in particular, the socialist state, can only empower itself at the expense of man, the church, family, man’s economic endeavors, and man’s various institutions. Only by playing the thief, the great thief, in society, can the socialist state gain power, and it is not productive.

Socialism has deep roots, however, in the fallen nature of man. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, pointed out that slave labor is the most expensive form of labor. After all, if you own a slave, you are paying for his non-working time, for his children, and for him in his old age. “A person who can acquire no property can have no other interest but to eat as much and to labor as little as possible.” Such is the slave.

Twentieth century socialism has clearly underscored the truth of Smith’s observation. The slave consumes as much as he can, which is not much usually that is provided, and works as little as possible. Smith said further, “The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend, to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of free men.” These passages from Adam Smith you do not normally hear quoted or referred to.

The continuing popularity of Plato’s Republic is clear evidence that would-be philosopher kings love the notion of enslaving the masses to the will of the elite. As against this, our Lord declares, “Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ. But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.”

“Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant: even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

This is a religious mandate and goal, but so, too, is the socialist’s dream. It represents the purpose set forth in Genesis 3:5, man’s original sin, “to be as God,” man determining for himself what is good and evil, and what is law. Man’s goal, according to Sartre, is to be God, which meant for him that his neighbor, having a similar goal, is therefore, a devil, which creates a society of perpetual conflict, of continual civil war. The socialist goal is thus, self-destructive. With every man playing God, power is gained at the expense and enslavement of others. Socialism gives particularly vivid meaning to our Lord’s statement, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, then ye shall be free indeed.”

{?} in the popular mind from a savage. That is, a man supposedly in a state of nature. Civilization is ostensibly an emancipation from a rural, religious, and superstitious mentality, into a scientific, urban, and secular perspective. The idea of civilization for many means also, equality, democracy, and secularism. Some men equate the rise of civilization with the development of secularism and science. Instead of approaching the subject from this perspective of humanism, let us view civilization as Christians.

Henry R. Van Til, in 1959, in the Calvinistic concept of culture, defined culture as religion externalized. A culture is, thus, not as some now understand it, the arts of a society, but the religious outworking of the people’s total life. The formal organization of that culture is civilization. Sociological definitions of civilization see it as an evolutionary development, as a state in the natural development of a society. Such views exclude the religious perspective, whereby a particular civilization is the development of a religious faith. However, we can speak of the varieties of Islamic civilization, of Buddhist civilization, and so on and on. The various civilizations are not the products of an evolutionary development, but of a religious faith and culture. The difference between a Shinto civilization and a Christian one is very great. These differences are not biological. They are religious. If we neglect this fact, we are in trouble.

In fact, Jose Ortega y Gasset, writing The Revolt of the Masses in 1932, spoke of the new barbarians as the scientists and specialists who believe, “That civilization is there in just the same way as the earth’s crust and the forest primeval.” This kind of thinking is endemic among the believers in evolution. They see civilization as a natural development rather than a faith product. Because civilization is an outgrowth of a faith, it will wane and decay when that faith subsides or dies. No more than a tree can outlive its roots can a civilization outlast the death of its faith.

We are, at present, in the last stages of the death of Western civilization. Western civilization, or modern civilization, became worldwide by the end of the 19th century. Its visible death throes began in 1914 with World War 1. Modern civilization, which began with the Enlightenment, has been anti-Christian, and aggressively humanistic. It began in 1660, approximately as a surface civilization. It was the property of rulers, the aristocracy, the artists, writers, and academicians, but after about 1860, it began to filter downward to the peoples of the lower and the middle class. In this century, by means of films and television, it has saturated the minds of men. By eroding the lingering Christian faith of most of the people, humanism has signed its own death warrant. The modernists, by means of what has been called an apotheosis of childhood, transformed original sin into original innocence. Men like Rousseau, Blake, and Wordsworth saw freedom from religious restraints as the liberation of man into the truest culture and civilization.

The results have been, in the words of T. J. Jackson Lears, “A non-morality deifying immediate experience and self-gratification.” George Santyana, while not a Christian, saw the decline of faith in heaven and hell as undercutting moral action. Others saw the rise of criminality as closely connected with the unwillingness of churchmen and the sociologists, to see evil as something chosen by men rather than socially determined. As Richard Weaver had written early in the years after World War 2, ideas have consequences. No where do they have more consequences than in the religious sphere, because it is faith which impels human action.

Christian faith has been more effective in moving men to action than any other faith in all of history. However, in the past two centuries, because of false eschatologies, combined with antinomianism, this motivating power has been undermined, and the clergy have become studiously irrelevant.

An instance of this was cited in 1834 by Thomas Babington Mcauley, when he encountered an English divine who, “Without any preface, accosted me thus. ‘Pray, Mr. Mcauley, do not you think that Bonaparte was a beast?’ ‘No, sir, I cannot say that I do.’ ‘Sir, he was the beast. I can prove it. I have found the number six sixty six in his name. Why sir, if he was not the beast, who was?’ This was a puzzling question, and I am not a little vain of my answer. ‘Sir, said I. The House of Commons is the beast.’ There are six hundred fifty-eight members of the House of Commons, and these were their chief officers: the three clerks; the sergeant and his deputy, the chaplain, the doorkeeper and the librarian make six sixty six.’” Mind you, Mcauley knew whereof he spoke. He had been in Parliament. “’Well, sir. That is strange, but I can assure you that if you write Napoleon Bonaparte in Arabic, leaving out only two letters, it will give six sixty six.’ ‘And pray, sir, what right have you to leave out two letters?’ and as St. John was writing Greek and to Greeks, is it not likely that he would use the Greek rather than the Arabic notation?’ ‘But, sir,’ said this learned divine, ‘everybody knows that the Greek letters were never used to mark numbers.’ I answered with the meekest look and voice possible. ‘I do not think that everybody knows that. Indeed, I have reason to believe that a different opinion, erroneous no doubt, is universally embraced by all the small minority who happen to know any Greek.’ So ended the controversy. The man looked at me as if he thought me a very wicked fellow, and I dare say has, by this time, discovered that, if you write my name, Thomas Babington Mcauley, in Talmud, leaving out the “T” in Thomas, and the “B” in Babington, and “M” in Mcauley, it will give you the number of this unfortunate beast.”

Well, in my lifetime, I have seen some who clung to the belief that Kaiser Wilhelm was the beast. Then, Mussolini became the candidate. Later, Hitler. For some, Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, for instituting social security and giving people numbers. Stalin, according to others, Kissinger, and so on. Much as I would like to see the tag pinned on some of these people, it is not scriptural. False eschatologies have repeatedly nullified Christian action.

Some years ago, J. Vernon McGee was eloquent in opposing all Christian social action as polishing brass on a sinking ship. More recently, a book by Tim Timmons sees Christian action as cultism. Added to this has been antinomianism, with its hatred of God’s law. I have known Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Baptist church which barred even the reading of the Ten Commandments, once a part of the communion service, as false and alien to an age of grace. Too many churchmen are involved in a studious irrelevance that does violence to our Lord’s teaching, and to his prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.” God’s will is done, step by step. Our Lord says, First the {?}, then the ears , after that the full corn in the ear. Things do not occur simply because we wish them to. When a seed is planted one day, the harvest cannot be reaped the second day. Just as false apocalypticism has infected too many churchmen, so, too, we have today a revolutionary apocalypticism which has seriously warped the modern outlook, humanistic and ecclesiastical. We must remember that Lenin totally expected a humanistic paradise to begin the day after the Revolution, and he was radically unprepared for practical measures. The basic policy became the eradication of real and imagined enemies as a substitute for social reconstruction. The same problem haunts virtually all civil governments today.

Woodrow James Hansen studied the issue with respect to the history of California, a very important work much neglected. In 1822, the rule of the Spanish empire over California ended. California was subject to the same modern, secular influences which were influencing Spain, a desire for state reflecting the ideas of the French Revolution and Free Masonry, secular and anti-authoritarian. The church and the military had been the governing forces in California, but now there was a search for a system of authority to replace that of the cross and the sword. This same quest marked all of Hispanic America. The failure in virtually all of Hispanic America, outside of California, has condemned a part of the work that educationally and other ways was quite advanced, to nothing but unending problems. The revolt against authority had been without a sound concept of authority to replace the old order. As Dr. Hansen wrote, “Here written in small was the tragedy of California, to be enlarged upon in the years that followed, possessed of a political idealism that sought to erase all vestiges of Spanish Colonialism in Alta California, young California liberals learned early to set aside tyrannical government and governmental authority as lightly as they discarded a soiled shirt, failing to realize that successful republican government depends upon an underpinning of social and economic relations.” And we could add, and must add, a sound basis of authority based in a faith.

What saved California was the Civil War, and that to bring California, with its still ostensibly Hispanic population, into the side of the Union instead of the Confederacy, Lincoln made a deal with the Catholics of California. The missions had been seized, religious liberty had been destroyed by both the Spanish and especially the Mexican regimes, and he promised there would be laws guaranteeing religious liberty; freedom for the institutions, the schools, the seminaries, the colleges and/or universities from secular and statist controls. To this day, we live in the bounty of that provision. The Catholic church has collapsed in California. In one year, at the beginning of the seventies alone, between $80 and $100 million in properties were sold by the Catholic church, at prices sometimes about a sixth of their value, but the law’s still on the books, and it has given us, in California, a freedom that has no existed in other parts of the country.

But the tragedy of Hispanic America has been reenacted again and again, all over the world. We must, of course, recognize that “Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” The various states of the world, of Hispanic America, of Africa, and elsewhere are constantly in trouble because of the rootless nature of their civil governments. In Europe, as Christian authority has weakened, you have had two movements, one towards internationalism, and then various smaller ethnic groups have sought independence. Whereas, once a common faith united various nations, now the loss of faith has revived ethnic particularities and divisions. Authority is a religious fact. Its absence in the modern state means both fragmentation into constituent elements and lawlessness and the rise of crime.

There is another fact. A civilization without Christ is one without justice. God’s justice, or righteousness, is set forth in his law word. Without God’s justice, pseudo-justice prevails, and new sins are invented. One such offense, a new sin, is racism, or racialism, and as Otto Scott has pointed out, racism is a modern offense, a product of Darwin’s theory. Darwin plainly insisted on a disparity of ability among races. The term “primitive man” is a reflection of his theory. We need to remember that the ancient Christian liturgies referred to the Christian race, and prayers were offered for the Christian race, which embraced all peoples, whatever their background. No group in history has been more under Christian influence, or more given to intermarriage than the Europeans, or as they are contemptuously called in the United States, the WASPS (White Anglo Saxon Protestants).

Humanistic doctrines of justice also stress equalitarianism, of a Utopian variety. Again choosing to neglect the fact that Christianity has fostered more brotherly love than any other faith, the evil sense of unreality in some current doctrines of justice can be seen in the identification of justice with a denial of sexual differences, with an acceptance of homosexuality, and especially with a cultivation of envy. In fact, much legislation today is based on envy, not justice.

The need for justice, of righteousness, is imperative in our time, and no justice is possible apart from the triune God and his law. Justice, or righteousness, is a way of life, and our Lord is clear that no man can serve two masters. Either we derive our doctrine of righteousness, or justice, from the triune God, or we derive it from man or the state. The impotence of the antinomian church is due to the fact that it has an alien, a humanistic doctrine of justice. It is polytheistic. The gap between God’s righteousness and man’s is widening as the modern state strays further and further away from the Lord. Abortion, the legalization of homosexuality, the abolition of the death penalty, the replacement of restitution with imprisonment, and much, much more mark the shift to legalize injustice. The Psalmist asks, “Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee which frameth mischief by a law?” Framing mischief by a law is the usual practice of the modern state, and too often, the churchman gives assent to it.

The solution to this problem is not to be sought in revolution nor civil disobedience, nor violence, but in regeneration, and we have a largely uncontroverted church. At its best, it is a weaponless army. We need regenerate men who move in God’s spirit in full faithfulness to his law. The reconstruction of society requires the application of God’s law to every area of life and thought. In a Christian culture, God’s law word will define and limit all authority. It will set forth the requirements of justice. It will shape the lives of men and the character of society. It is worthy of note that, in some of the most ancient Christian church buildings, the center of attention is often a Mosaic of Christ’s transfiguration. The art historian Otto G. von Simpson observed this, (his most important statement,) “The transfiguration miracle, as I have tried to show, is the premise and image of man’s participation and the glory of Christ’s resurrection and as such embodies the religious vision of the ancient church. It is important that we try to understand the general impact of theological controversies. Given with satisfy to recount with sardonic amusement, what he took to be no more than the dogmatic squabbles of professional theologians, not realizing the doctrine is no more, and does not aspire to be more than an attempt to formulate rationally that which transcends reason. He never sounded the depths of religious experience which moved the age of the great councils. The inadequacies and inaccuracies of the decline and fall are largely due to the fact that Gibbon’s rationalism prevented him from understanding both the nature and the power of religious experience in the sixth century. Might he not have avoided this pitfall by looking at the transfiguration in St. Apollinaire in Classe.”

This was the vision of the early church, as Von Simpson pointed out. The transfiguration of Christ and through him, the transfiguration of man and society, of civilization beginning with us, with our regeneration and our extension of Christ’s dominion into every sphere of life and thought. This is the Christian calling and goal. It is not achieved by mysticism, but by faith and obedience, by that spirit which says after our Lord, “Lo I come in the volume of the book it is written of me to do thy will, O God. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.” This fallen world, man and nations, need to be redeemed. They need to see how all things must be subjected to the transfiguration, the transfiguration of our Lord prefigures, as the early church saw, the transfiguration of man, history, and the earth itself, a vision of the time when the lion shall lie down with the lambs, when all the earth shall be God’s holy mountain, and a sinner dying at a hundred will be accounted to have died young. Ours is a magnificent calling, with the future of civilization as our sure goal, as Isaiah 65 makes clear.

Moreover, as St. John tells us, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous. For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?” Let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee that, in Jesus Christ, thou hast called us to be members of thy kingdom, a new creation, to be members of that great company which peoples all heaven and shall people of earth{?}. We thank thee that we have been called to be the people of the transfiguration, and make our churches, O Lord, instruments of that purpose, so that we, as members of the church of the transfiguration, may further the obedience of thy people to thy word. Bless us to this purpose, in Christ’s holy name. Amen.

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