The Future and Wisdom

Wisdom: It’s Implication for Society

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Millennial Studies

Lesson: Wisdom : Its Implication for Society

Genre:

Track: 02

Dictation Name: RR184A2

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Rushdoony] This session is Wisdom. Wisdom literature, Proverbs, and the implication of these things for Christian Society. Dr. Raju Abraham is an M.D., a neurologist, and as he can tell you, he has found that a great many of the problems people have is due to the fact that they have no structure in their life, no background of wisdom. I have an advantage here in that I am probably the oldest person in the room by some years. I am going on seventy-five. Before World War 2, in the rural parts of the United States, people still lived in terms of proverbial wisdom, biblical and non-biblical. So that, from a child’s earliest years, he was surrounded by the wisdom of his particular culture as well as biblical proverbs, so that there was always a guide, a structure, something about the limitations of human life, that these proverbs stated. That was one advantage I had.

The second I’ve always thought was a very real advantage, too, and I’ve referred to it: being in a rural area. So that the older Christian culture still prevailed to a great extent, and the third was a foreign background. I am Armenian, and as a result of that foreign background, I also had the advantage, not only of biblical proverbs, rural American proverbs, but also Armenian proverbial wisdom.

There is a story, an Armenian story, that I think is very fitting in this context. One of the characters in Turkish literature who is a hero to the Turks as a wise man, is Nasreddin. The Armenians also have their stories about Nasreddin in which he is the fool. In the Armenian Nasreddin stories, to cite one, Nasreddin has a huge branch of a tree that is growing the wrong way and is a possible source of trouble. So he climbs the tree, sits on the branch, and then saws near the trunk, and a passerby, not a Turk, looks up to him and says, “Nasreddin, if you cut that branch you are going to fall,” and sure enough, as he cut through the branch on which he was seated, he fell. So, he was unhurt and he promptly ran after the ran and said, “Sir, you are a prophet, can you tell me more about the future?” Now, I cite that because what that story tells you was there was an elementary lack of any sense of law, of boundaries, and that failure to live in terms of boundaries, what is possible and what is not possible marks our age. Children grow up without knowing what the limits are. They have not been slapped down verbally by proverbs every time they turned around, and this gives the children of our time a serious handicap, because a great deal of instruction over the centuries, has been proverbial, proverbial wisdom.

When I was a boy, there were two pocketbooks, little paperback books of the Bible that were routinely given to boys and girls, and which many businessmen carried around with them, a little paperback copy of Psalms and another one of Proverbs, and the amount of memorization that everyone did in these two books was very considerable. So that people routinely cited scripture, proverbial scripture because it was the word that spoke to their condition. I rarely hear anyone say, when they are fretful and upset, and distressed what I used to hear very commonly. “I will both lay me down in peace and sleep for thou Lord, only makest me to dwell in safety.” Words like that, the scripture from beginning to end, is full of them, and in terms of these men, have lived, but now a days, modern man is often rich in information, but commonly low in wisdom, and there is a difference. The very fact of his modernity predisposes him to folly. Because modernism depreciates the past, it tends, like Job’s friends, to believe that wisdom began with modern man and may well die with him.

As a result, the wisdom of the past is neglected or rejected, and in particular, biblical wisdom. We have, therefore, something unusual in history. A generation which rejects the wisdom of the past. Older theologians would speak of the distinction between common grace and special grace, revealed, supernatural grace, and the Bible gives us God’s manifestation of his grace. It’s a gracious word from beginning to end, but common grace is all around us in his blessings. “The sun shines on the just and the unjust.” Common grace, and the wisdom that once marked peoples before they became fully apostate as modernity has made them, reflected a kind of common grace. So, until recently, in every culture, a body of proverbs gave all the people a summation of the experience of past generations. Mothers and fathers answered their children with proverbs, which gave a perspective on the current theme, and the children grew up with an education in proverbial wisdom.

The proverb expressed a shared wisdom, a shared knowledge, a shared experience. For example, one non-biblical proverbs declares, “He who lies down with dogs will rise up with fleas.” That is, the company we keep will affect us. I cited that once a few years ago to a grown man who needed it, and it shocked him, and he wanted to know how I came up with that. I said, “It was born centuries before me, and it was a tested product of human experience.” Because such proverbs were regularly used to sum up counsel, they became second nature to each new generation. They had an important part in man’s self-government. If you were born into a family where such proverbs as, “He who lies down with dogs will rise up with fleas,” was tossed at you every time you were keeping company with some boy or girl your parents did not approve of, it would quickly register in your mind. By means of proverbs, which from very early childhood, were commonly repeated to children and to adults, the members of a culture had a shared, moral self-government. The wisdom of proverbs was a shared and controlling moral standard and it is that which we have lost in our time.

However, modern man has a very narrow view of proverbs if he has any view of them. He is addicted to labels, not proverbs. A proverbs must be labeled such to be recognizable, so if you ask people about biblical proverbs, they says, “Oh yes, the book of Proverbs.” True, but this is a very narrow view. From beginning to end, the Bible is full of proverbs. These are summations of faith and wisdom and the major source of proverbs is not necessarily Solomon. What our Lord had to say what commonly said in proverbial form, and there are proverbs throughout the prophets and the Apostles.

One example of our Lord’s proverbial wisdom is Matthew 6:24, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Now, it is well known that psychiatric and psychological counseling does have a poor record. People who do not seek such help commonly have a better recovery rate than do patients who seek such counseling. A Dutch scholar produced a book on that a few years back. He himself was a {?}.

Now, our Lord’s statement, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” tells us why. It’s a proverb. To illustrate. A woman of some note, the wife of a major American writer, is a very serious problem to her family and to her friends. The wives avoid her entirely. Unlike her husband, who comes from an old New York family, she is a Southerner, and she is also a flaming liberal. Her forbearers made money by using slaves and while she herself had the best kind of schooling, travel, social setting, because of this past, feels a deep sense of guilt because of what her forbearers were. She nurses thus, a major sense of guilt. She is always trying to absolve herself of her past by haranguing everybody around her on the evils of racism. She grills people whom she meets to try to detect some element of racism in them, and then she proceeds to tear into them to the profound embarrassment of her husband. She is a plague. She is a walking nightmare, because she turns everyone she meets into a racist, and she is the all-righteous one who is absolving herself of her masochistic guilt. It would be difficult to imagine a more past-bound person then this woman. She fails to see that “sufficient until the day is the evil thereof.”

Another example, two sisters, daughters of a prominent public officer, were sexually molested before reaching twelve years of age by their father’s chauffeur. Their chauffeur was also their mother’s lover. Because of the father’s power, the police at first did nothing. Only much later, when the offenses continued, was pressure brought to bear on this highly placed public official to have his chauffeur discharged. One girl became a Christian. She married. She became a mother, and she is a woman now of grace and charm, and a radiant happiness, a joy to meet. The other became a permanent mental patient, often hospitalized, because she refused to accept the fact that evils do occur in a fallen world. She wants the impossible, an altered past, and failing this, she refuses to be healed. As a result, she lives in the past and she is as freshly bitter today as she was when it happened in the fifties. She refuses to accept the fact that “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

But modern counseling is too often past-bound. Whether it is by medically-trained psychotherapists or the clergy, the emphasis is too often on past events rather than the present problem. Not only individuals, but nations and races have this past-bound focus, this endless recycle of guilt for sins committed by unknown ancestors.

It was in 1987 when Otto Scott and I spoke in a number of places, including a group of outstanding graduate students at a major university, one of the two most important ones here, and the one thing that startled us was that all of them were carrying a cross, so to speak, because of Britain’s past Colonialism. We are profoundly disgusted, and Otto Scott’s attitude was a very brief one. The scripture says, “Honor thy father and thy mother,” and I said, “No one asked you to bury your parents’ sins or to seek to make atonement for them. You are responsible for your own sins and Christ alone makes atonement.” It did not satisfy them. They wanted to be guilty of their Colonial past. It made them feel noble that they were carrying such a burden, and we all know people like that.

I know there was one family I knew years ago when I was a young pastor, and when I first called the woman whom I had known in my childhood, was living with her daughter, and he daughter said to me, “Please, whatever you do, don’t tell Mother she’s looking fine. She’ll be in a rage the rest of the day.” She had spent her lifetime bedeviling her husband who dropped dead of a heart attack mercifully when he was far from retirement, with all her ailments, she was a masochist, and a sadist with regard to anyone around her, so the only way to please her was to say, “How are you doing? Are you feeling too poorly to talk?” Then she was in her glory.

Well, nations have the same habit. They recite all their past evils, and to hear people of almost any race or nation speak, all they’ve experienced is suffering. All they’ve experienced is troubles, and I think it’s a sad fact when powerful nations and peoples, such as Britain and the United States, feel as if they’re put upon, and if they have a terrible guilt from the past. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Whatever evils may have existed in the past, they are not the present evils which confront us, unless we choose falsely to make them so.

I spent eight and a half years on a very isolated Indian reservation, forty to fifty years ago. It was 100 miles from any bus or train line, accessible by dirt roads in those days, and I recall one day an Indian, a younger Indian standing in front of the reservation trading point, talking with blazing eyes of how the White Man had stolen the land from the poor Indians. An older Indian began to laugh as did older men, and this man pointed to the snow everywhere around us as we were standing there, and he said, “I knew your grandfather and your father when I was young. They went around hungry.” He went on to say what they had to eat at times, but since we’ve just eaten recently, I won’t spoil your dinner, and he said, “In weather like this with snow on the ground, they had no more than a loin cloth and moccasins. If you think the White Man did us so much evil, take off your clothes and let’s see you run around like your grandfather and father did,” and they told him he was a fool. The old man saw the wholeness of life in history. He was not past-bound because he was a Christian.

Those who are past-bound are selectively so. They nurse an aspect of personal, national, or racial history to the exclusion of all else. What we are told in Matthew 6:34 is that we are to be neither past-bound nor future-bound. We are not to anticipate evils to come and to paralyze ourselves with fear. The requirement of life is that it be lived today, “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” The requirement is that we be responsible each day, and that only if we fail to meet our responsibilities should we be troubled. Every page of scripture is full of proverbs. Proverbs are rich, just sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I think you see now the counseling potentiality of those few words. You can say to people, “This is our Lord’s word. Why be burdened with past evils? Have you failed to understand the meaning of the atonement, or don’t you believe in it? Because if you believe in the atonement, you’re not going to be carrying a burden for past sins and offenses. If there were time, I would read Matthew 6:24-34, to show how every sentence if full of proverbs. “No man can serve two masters.” “Take no thought for your life what ye shall eat, what ye shall put on, drink,” and so on. “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature,” and so on and on. There is nothing you will get out of any psychologist to equal just these ten verses, Matthew 6:24-34, and the potentiality for counseling. You will either enable the person to find his healing in Christ, or he will run away from you, because he doesn’t want healing. He wants to nurse his sickness, his spiritual sickness.

And our Lord’s meaning is clear. Whose thinking and government is the most powerful and efficacious, ours or God’s? If God’s, then we need to recognize that our worrying and our mental turmoil cannot help us. We cannot assume the role of God over our lives without forfeiting the strength and the assurance of his care. Either God takes over or we do, and we are already guilty of such serious mismanagement. It’s absurd to think that we can handle the rest of our lives.

There was a young man in the United States, a young Borden of Yale, those of you with any American background know that Borden’s milk is one of the great corporations of America, and young Borden went to Yale and was converted, and one night after much praying, he came to a conclusion, and he wrote the words down in his Bible, and his words were these.

“O Lord, give me grace to take hands off my life then to commit it into your care.”

He died on the mission field in Africa, but he lived for the few years he had remaining between his student days and his death, marvelously, in terms of those words. Proverbs sums up a theological and moral perspective. Therefore, the memorization and repetition constitutes in itself a form of therapy.

Some of you are no doubt familiar with the name of the philosopher William James, one of the great founders of pragmatism. Not a good philosophy, but he was a remarkable man, sometimes capable of amazing honesty, and James, on one occasion, he was a man who lost his faith, he never came back to the faith, although he did manifest a respect thereafter, was at the point of committing suicide, but at precisely that moment, a Bible verse that had been drilled into him in which he had been compelled to memorize as a child came flooding all through his being. “The eternal God is thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms.” Now, James was not converted then or after, but at that moment, when he was ready to kill himself, he suddenly felt sustained like a baby being cradled, and he promptly went to bed and slept blissfully. That’s why memorization of scripture, of proverbial wisdom, is so important, and over the generations, countless people have found a great deal of help in such memorization.

One verse which has, I know, in the experience of deeply distressed people whom I compelled to memorize the verse and to repeat it over and over and over again to themselves, is Romans 8:28, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to his purpose.” No greater mental and moral strength is possible than the full acceptance of these words.

Some years ago, in the 1950’s, I encountered a physician who had an excellent awareness of his patients’ problems and needs. He regularly prescribed not only medication, but would give them a second prescription, which was only a Bible verse, and sometimes, when no medication would avail, he would simply give them a Bible verse on a prescription tablet. One of his favorites was, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit dryeth up the bones.” Well, the purpose of proverbs, we are told in Proverbs, is to know wisdom and instruction, to give prudence to the simple. To the young men knowledge and discretion, that the wise man may hear and increase in learning, and that the man of understanding may attain sound counsels.” If we deny the relevance of Proverbs, we are like Job’s friends and his biting sarcasm applies to us, no doubt but ye are the people and wisdom shall die with you. Obviously, of course, wisdom was not born with us, and we would do well to pay attention to the wisdom of human experience and supremely to the wisdom of God in his word.

Now, we’re going to hear from Dr. Raju Abraham {?} who will give us something of the philosophical and the medical premises of the need for proverbs.

[Dr. Abraham] Move around a bit and perhaps by moving it will keep you awake.

The original incidency{?} before I go, one of the things, before I talk{?} off, is one of the book I would recommend, a little known work of Dr. Rushdoony’s, not as well known as his other books, is Flight From Maturity, which is available downstairs. In fact, I got it a couple years ago. That’s the first time we discussed this, and because when Dr. Rushdoony was here in Oxford, I heard {?} and said, “Look, this is great.” I’ve been thinking about it since, it would be fantastic and I’m just so grateful that you’re also thinking along these lines.

I’ll say something about my background, and I also come from a wisdom type background. We have a thing in Tamul{?}, in India, about India called the syracruk{?}, and these are wisdom {?} that come down, and the yoga sugras{?}, you know where yoga {?} from, they are also aphorisms, they’re {?}, and so I have always wondered in India how this sort of didactic teaching of the non-illustrative, logical teaching didn’t go down all that well. While in India, a thing called {?} is very attractive, and usually in the {?}, a Hindu teacher will just sit down with his pupils and they’ll ask a question and he’ll just {?} off into a story or into an aphorism, or a proverb, and from that a discussion goes on, and I’ve sort of {?} over the years about this, and my background is that I’m in medical school in India. Through a long two-year period of depression, as I was struggling through trying to be a consistent atheist, that I came across the writings of Francis Schaefer, and over a period of time of going through this, I came to the Lord because the only kind of apologetics that really appeal and seem to answer the question, were presuppositional apologetics. I didn’t know they were presuppositional apologetics. I had read so many apologetic works and none of them really came to grips with the answers that I was facing, because I was discussing things with Hindus and Muslims, and the traditional answers just didn’t work, and when I suddenly realized that here is, and I went and studied at L’Abri in Switzerland in the early seventies, and then from there I went to the Middle East and studied Islam in Judezun{?} in Israel, when I was working among Arabs there, in the hospital, and that too, also founded a lot of my understanding and firmed up my understanding of the Christian faith.

But when I came here, I trained in neurology, and in Europe as well. Again, I did three years of training psychiatry, and in trying to help troubled people, I found myself wearing two hats, you know. Inside, the psychiatrist, surgery as it were, I was seeing one thing and outside I was doing something else. I was holding onto the inerrancy of scripture at one point, but was filled with psychological theory on the other, and I was challenged, and the challenge was very brief and simple, is that if I really believed in the inerrant scripture, would I not also try and bring in a biblical understanding in this whole are of psychiatry and counseling, and we started a group called the Association of Biblical Counselors, and it’s along these lines that the whole wisdom issue has come on, and what I’m going to do is, say something about a wisdom issue and also suggest some books at the end of the time during our discussion, and also illustrate this by showing how our understanding of what I teach in {?} is how I use the {?} as a paradigm, as it were, for teaching in terms of counseling and wisdom.

One of the things that I noticed in my whole investigation of psychology, and I’m going to abbreviate my thing, and talk about abbreviate a lot of what I’m going to say, but talk about the history of things, as it comes up in questions, but I found that there was a real problem of definition is psychology and psychotherapy, and I’ve produced my own definitions of psychology which you might find interesting. The first type of psychology is scientific psychology, and this is the psychology that says how we see and how we hear, and how we understand. For example, the image that I see in front of me is upside down on my retina, and then it goes down to my brain upside down, and the back of my brain reinterprets it right side up again, and you can actually produce glasses that will do a double switch, that will get your image right side up on the retina, and then if I wear those glasses, then everybody seems to be sitting on the ceiling, but the brain then readjusts {?}, because you take your glasses off. And so, there is this real type of scientific psychology that we, as Christians, have no problems with. That type of psychology can be extended into clinical psychology.

And clinical psychology then applies it, to say, memory disorders. So you have short-term memory, medium-term memory, and long-term memory. So, you know, when people have dementia, they lost their short-term memory first, their medium-term memory rather than their long-term memory. For example, we know that the most number of numbers we can remember are between seven to nine for an immediate recall. I won’t test you, but if I asked you for a telephone number, if I gave you, if you wanted to do this test, {?} and I said “Could you repeat the following number back to me, and say 4, 5, 3, 2, 2, 4, 7, can you repeat that back?”

[Audience] 4, 5, 3, 2, 2, 4, 7.

[Dr.] Right, and I can remember it because it’s the number to my hospital. That immediate recall says that you can actually remember seven numbers, and any person will be between seven to nine, and that’s pretty fairly definite, and that’s why telephone numbers are usually six, seven, eight. But once you start going to ten or eleven, it starts becoming a bit too much for an immediate recall, and that can be applied in a clinical situation when people lose their short-term memory. We can actually detect that and so the {?} IQ charts, and {?} but there’s also another type of psychology which I have labeled observational psychology, and this is a sort of psychology that we are going to deal with, which I am going to talk about a little bit.

But observational psychology is a sort of psychology that we all use, you know. For instance, among patients we know that there is an Italian temperament, you know. Now, the Italians probably won’t like what we think about an Italian temperament, but if you watch that famous movie about plains, I forget what movie was that, but you can talk about a Germanic temperament. Do you remember the time when he read out the rule book, and sat down, and said sit down, you know. I forget what the movie was, but {?} on airplane.

So, you can talk about an Indian temperament, you know. Indians are like this, and French are like this, and Paul said this in Titus. He says one of his own prophets, he said that all Cretans are liars. He didn’t mean that if you, you know, put all Cretans, line them up, and said, “Liar, liar, liar, liar, 99.9 liars,” neither did he mean the Cretans today are liars, even with right now all Cretans are liars. It’s an observational psychology. A guy who is very good at this at the moment who’s a secular humanist is Desmond Morris, you know The Naked Ape, and so on, man watching, and so on. So, you have this observational that is common to all of us which can be true or not true, and as Dr. Rushdoony said, that is it’s part of our commonality, made in the image of God as we observe creation, and there’s also another kind of psychology which we in England call psychotherapy.

Now, this is the application of scientific, or clinical psychology, or observational psychology, and I’m now using a research definition, which is changing the attitude, the behavior, and the thinking of people. Now, that is an attitudinal, behavioral, thinking commitive change that occurs, which has got to do with religion, and there we take issue with people, because there is only one guide and that is the scripture, that we have.

Now, having set that base, what I’ve tried to do is develop an apologetic into psychology, or into psychotherapy, or into counseling, because there is a general lack of an apologetic in counseling, in the Christian world, that will actually talk with psychologists, which will talk with psychotherapists, {?} not talking across purposes{?}, and I’ve used a pneumonic there called CLA {?} and I’ll deal with each one in turn. Make sure that {?} discussion.

Now, if you look at a human psyche, in terms of observational psychology or psychotherapy, you’ll find that life has got to do with cause and effect. There is some retribution about life, you know. If you kick me in the shins, it hurts, and I might kick you back, or may not. There is a cause and effect, you know. If you treat your wife in a particular way, that is a sort of reaction you can expect. There is a cause and effect about life. Now, both Christian and non-Christian counselors believe in cause and effect. They may not know how to articulate this, but they all believe in cause and effect, and this is a good point of discussion with psychotherapists. “You believe in cause and effect and I believe in cause and effect, now let’s see where we come from in terms of cause and effect.” You look at cause and effect when you {?} cause and effect, but the non-Christian doesn’t have the position. The secular humanist can only say that {?} come to the {?} produce order, and cause and effect, so in fact, we have a much firmer base for cause and effect. Now, this is, you find this in proverbs all the time, this cause and effect. Usually cause and effect is put in juxtaposition. Your soft answer turns away wrath, or you have this sort of juxtaposition going on in Proverbs which is, it explains the cause and effect.

The second issue of the day is language, cause and effect and language. Now, you cannot help people without talking. Now, if you’re an Indian or an Italian, you can do it with you hands {?} it’s not quite enough. You know, language is very essential for counseling. You have to use words, and words are very powerful. Words are able to change people, and this use of language is common to both non-Christian and Christian counselors, but where did language come from? A secular humanist would say you had a few grunts, and you had a few groans, and then you had “o’s” and “ah’s” and {?} and all that sort of thing, and finally you had language, but we have a better basis for language. Language comes from God. {?} words, God said, and finally you have in the eschatological view, the end of all time, with Christ and everything, the word became flesh. We have a far better basis for language than the non-Christian, and you can have a very good discussion. You don’t have to be in a “you and us” sort of position, but you can have a very good discussion of where language comes from.

The third area is authority. Everybody must have authority for counseling. {?} Roger Abraham says that, therefore, do it. I have {?} Freud, Jung, Rogers, some {?} you know, or demonstrate all the books that I have in my counseling are very impressive. You have to have authority. Why do you say that? I always remember the {?} movie. The Irish and then the English, though the Englishman was in Ireland, he had his {?}, and the Irish {?} and he says, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s my {?}” and the guy looked at him and he said, the Irishman said, “Well, bet you got your field, did ya?”

He said, “I own it.”

“Yeah, yeah, but who gave it to you?”

He said, “Oh, my father gave it to me.”

He said, “Who gave it to your father?”

He says, “Oh, my grandfather gave it to him.”

“Who gave it to your grandfather?”

“Great grandfather.”

He said, “Who gave it to your great grandfather?”

He said, “He {?} for it.”

The Irishman {?}. Where does authority come from? Where is {?}. for it, you know. {?} scripture, from God’s word, and so we have a far better basis for authority than the non-Christian.

The third {?} discipline is a crucial area of counseling. You can {?} but you have to have {?}. I have to control my temper. If I don’t control my temper, you know, my wife’s {?}. I can’t do what I like. I can sleep as long as I like, I can get up when I like. I can eat when I like {?}, and modern counseling methods don’t teach it, though they {?} . I always remember, we’re very close to the Mecca of neurology here, The Institute of Neurology {?} marvelous lecture by Professor Robin Murray. He’s the professor of psychiatry. He’s {?} asked to be one of the {?}, and you know he {?} you know, we’re really got a problem here, because we have medicalized everything (his expertise is alcoholism). He says, you know a couple months ago I had this alcoholic. He came and he had all these problems, and I told him what he must do. He must go home and do this, this, this, and this, and in a month’s time he can come back and I’ll see how you’re getting on. He came back in a month, nothing had changed. And I said, “Why didn’t you do all the things I asked you to do?” And he said, “You tell me.” {?} He had medicalized alcoholism in such a way that this guy had, you know, he thought, “Well, you know, the doctor will tell me. The doctor will wave some magic wand and I’ll be alright.” But it has to do with self-discipline, and by medicalizing problems, we have taken away self-discipline, but there must be some form of self-discipline.

Now, incidentally, all this, intrinsically, I don’t have the time to go through the problems, but intrinsically, proverbs has all these principles, these four principles, and I hope you recognize.

The {?} and these five issue you’ll find repeatedly {?} we need to teach counselees about social skills, and {?} teaching, keeping the {?} father comes to the situation telling him how he can get on in life, what he must do to be a wise person, and so on, and fundamental to all that happens in the book of Proverbs is the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the knowledge of the {?} understanding, and as the writers of the proverbs meditate on God’s word, and on God’s law, because that’s all that had, the {?}, from that comes of wisdom, from which they can advise their children, or their {?} and so on. So that, in fact, we have, I find this a very good apologetic framework, to {?} questions with non-Christians about why biblical counseling and Christian counseling is superior to non-Christian counseling.

The other thing about proverbs here is that it’s very memorable, and what I am going to do is to say something about psalms and how we use psalms in counseling, again to illustrate how one can help counselees as well as build on what has already done.

First, I’ll start with proverbs. You have, and this is using Romans 1:18-21, about all that can be known about God is clearly seen in what he has made. Two aspects about God, his eternal power and his divine attributes. So we, as Christians, have two bases on which to build our foundation for problems. One is the world and the other is God’s world, or if you look at creation and God’s work. Okay, and revelation. Creation and revelation, and on these two {?}, as you meditate on God’s word, and you meditate on God’s world, you find wisdom that allows us to interact with other people and to build on all these areas that we’re talking about.

Now, several years ago, Rushdoony’s Institutes of Law showed me a way of demonstrating this, particularly how negative {?} is very useful, and {?} Genesis 2:26, {?} basis for sex and marriage. That is, “For this reason shall a man leave his father and mother and cling to his wife and they shall become one flesh.” Now, in God’s law, we find several negations. Now, negations are very important because usually the created order of the world tell us what we can do, what we are capable of. It doesn’t tell us what we should be doing.

For example, we are capable of having homosexual relationships, but it doesn’t mean that’s what we should be doing. We are capable of shooting each other, but that doesn’t mean what we should be doing, and so the negations that we have, you know, for instance, in our {?} sex, the negations that we have allow us to draw a boundary line in conflict. So, for instance, we know that any {?} in morality, fornication is wrong, incest is wrong, homosexuality is wrong, bestiality is wrong, but within this framework we have a lot of movement, and one of the classical ones {?} on that creativity is Proverbs 5, you know. A way, he says, you know, in this whole area of, but Proverbs 5, he says about how to get joy out of the wife of your youth. You know what I mean. I’m sorry, what this? What’s the word?

[audience] {?}

[Dr.] Right. And so on. Okay, you have Proverbs 5, and you have the Song of Solomon, and within this framework, you have a larger movement. That’s what Christians have not realized. You have a lot of creativistic{?}, and I often think of it as one of these fountains. You know, one of these firecrackers that send off sparks, that allow you a lot of movement. What Christians have gotten a semantic bind, they think they can {?}, you know, but in fact, within these boundaries it a lot of creativity that you can move within, and our development is that each one of us is capable of developing our own plan{?}, because you have all of creation. You have God’s word for us to constantly meditate on with God’s word to allow you to make the right interpretations. So you can always be fresh, like the Lord says, “The kingdom of God is like a householder who goes back into his house and brings out things old and new.” You can bring all the truth in a special new way because we have the language. We have freedom. We have the ability.

Now again, I’ll demonstrate one more thing, as to how I use Psalms in counseling, and how again, this whole methodology could be used in Psalms. Here, I use some memorable things. You see, as you look at the Psalms, is the only part of God’s word where people are crying to God. You know, everything else is what God is saying or what the prophets are saying, or what is being historically recorded. The Psalms cry out to God, which is scripture, and you’ll find what I’ve developed is sort of a pneumonic-type framework. I call it the Five P’s. The word Psalm has five letters, you know the “P” is silent, {?} five “P’s.” And the key word is patterns. Patterns? Patterns of prayer and praise, but are both private and public. So you have five “P’s.”

And then I say that there are six “E’s. Psalms has six letters and you have six “E’s,” and the six “E’s” going to {?} which are your emotions are exposed. Your experience is expressed, but always Elohim is exalted. You see, and this is the struggle of the Psalms. The Psalms give, articulate my experience. It exposes my emotions, and yet, at the end of the day, it’s Elohim is exalted. So you can say, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” So what happens is when I go to the Psalms, and you go to the Psalms, you find an ability to articulate what you feel but are afraid of blaspheming. Suddenly the Psalmist finds words for you. Your emotions are exposed. You suddenly find things inside yourself you never knew before. Your experience is expressed, but always Elohim, and you know Elohim is one of the {?} words used a lot, particularly in the first part, Elohim is exalted. So, you have the five “P’s” and the six “E’s.” And I sort of put it in a {?} like that, you know. Patterns of prayer and praise, both private and personal, private and public, and you have the E’s. The emotions are exposed, the experience is expressed, and Elohim is exalted.

But there is another aspect of Psalms which, in my teaching, I do, and this is taken from Paul Ricor{?} and reinterpreted through Brugerman{?} and {?} and others, particularly {?} Allen, who was professor of Old Testament at London Bible College here some years ago, but he called the thing the Orientation Disorientation Reorientation issue. That is, you have orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. Now, what happens is that in the Psalms, and Psalms 73 exemplifies this. It says, “Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart,” and you have this orientation, and then he says, “But as for me, my feet had almost slipped,” and you have this squeezing{of the Christian, and throughout still {?} he is being squeezed, and his emotions are being exposed, and he envys the wicked, and he says, “Look, nothing ever happens to them. They’re doing fine, and what about me, and I spend my time doing this, and all his experience and emotions are going through {?} of being articulated, and you have this orientation. And then, you have a reorientation, and in {?} when my heart is {?}, but when I was sick and {?}, as I was, no, no, When I try to understand all this {?} to me, still I answered {?} of God, then I understood their final destiny. And he comes out and {?} life as a Christian, he knew everything, nice and square, you know. We know how many times we should be baptized, forwards, backwards, sideways, and at the end of the time we get rounded off, but our faith is not compromised. Our presuppositional base hasn’t. It is only that we have put down deeper and deeper theological understand of God’s {?}.

Now an example is Job’s wife. What happened to Job’s wife? She’s orientated. I mean, everything’s going fine, everything’s going fine, but then suddenly everything collapses, and what does she say? “Curse God and die.” Change your presuppositional base to something else, and we know many, many who proceed to do that, and in the counseling situation, well, we know many people who do that. In that you change your presuppositional base, and you form a new base, but you {?} issue in the Psalms is you {?} disorientation, emotion exposed, {?} expressed and then finally, you go to the sanctuary of the Lord. Then you understand {?}, and then you burst out in praise, and then you {?} in worship, and you have a new understanding of the world, and you go forward with renewed faith.

Now, Dorothy Sayers, {?} once I went to see a patient, and I hadn’t read Dorothy Sayers, who till that time, {?} coming out and there was a usual bookshelf, and there {?} second hand bookshelf and I couldn’t resist the temptation. My {?} book by Dorothy Sayers called The Poetry of {?} and the Poetry of {?}, and she tackles this. Way back in the fifties, she tackles the {?} book {?} read it. {?} fascinating book. She was a real, her understanding of literary, her understanding of faith were very {?} much about her other than that book, but she says {?} not she calls it the Poetry of {?} and the Poetry of {?}, and she said modern people only like {?} , they don’t like {?}, and if you have comment {?} they get very annoyed with you. They will constantly be searching.

Now, in the Psalms, you find the search, statement, search, statement, going on. Some Psalms are just search, disorientation. Some Psalms are just orientation. Some Psalms are {?} orientation, but {?} of Psalms, and so what I often do, and I must talk, I’m going on too long, is that I often get my counselees, who are going through depression, or a marriage break up, or loneliness, and I say, “Read the Psalms, and then find a word, find a Psalm that has affected you, find a phrase, and then come back and let’s talk about it.” I usually tell them there are five books in the Psalms. You know, you start with book one on Monday, and go to book two on Tuesday, so you don’t start with one, two, three, and you never end up more than {?} Psalm, and on Wednesday you go to book three and four, five, and then take rest on Saturday and Sunday, and you have, and so they get a full feel of the whole breadth of the Psalm, and then they come back and they write {?}, they just keep going till you come {?}, now that tells me something about myself. Then come back and let’s talk about it, and it’s a little how I use some of the Psalms. I’ll stop there, except as Rush has quoted {?}, very interesting, I remember {?} but you know another quotation by a person who died very young, which is Jim Elliot, and he said, “{?} is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” So we can skate on our own problems entirely based on scripture, which has {?} insight and {?} ability to communicate {?}.

[Rushdoony] Just address it to either one of us. While you’re thinking of them, perhaps you can comment on these books.

[Dr.] Right, this contemporary wisdom thing is very contemporary today, and there’s a very good book by Nicholas Maxwell called From Knowledge to Wisdom, that is available in {?} over here. I saw it a few weeks ago so it’s still there, still copies there. Now, Jeanie{?} bemoans the fact, and what Rushdoony was saying earlier is that, all you’re left with today is facts, information. There’s no wisdom, and he bemoans the fact that secular humanism has produced it, and he tries to produce wisdom from a secular humanistic base, which is very {?} from knowledge to wisdom. But there are quite a few books over here, one I’d recommend to you. It’s called The Art of Biblical Poetry. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with it, Robert Alter, {?} University. He’s a Jewish author, but {?} understanding on the structure of the wisdom literature.

The other one I would recommend again, Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. It gives you a lot of insight into the work in linguistics that is going on {?}. One by a liberal which has a lot of good material in it. It’s called The Language and Imagery of the Bible, by G. B. Caird. Some of you might have heard, but you’ll get a lot of healthy insights. There’s one that I’ve used a lot. It’s Those Who’ve Ponder Proverbs by James Williams, {?}, and then I’ve just put out some people who use {?} aphoristic type of proverbial one, it’s called Half- Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths, by Karl Kraus, who’s a German author who is quite popular {?}, and you know something like {?} Principle, Parkinson’s Law, those are some of the books that I’d recommend.

I have a lot more books {?} names and publishers, I’d be glad {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, the Psalm singers usually have a versification Psalm. The Book of Common Prayer has a chanting of a Coverdale translation of the Psalm, and I think the chanting has been more productive, because there they have not a versified form, but the biblical statement of each of the Psalms.

End of tape.