Profound Questions and Answers

Early methods of teaching at home. Downgrade after 1900. Statistic of man, woman ratio in the church & downgrade.

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 19-24

Genre: Talk

Track: 19

Dictation Name: RR200A1

Location/Venue:

Year:

Oh, this is the question with respect to free will as against predestination.

[Audience Member] Yes.

[Rushdoony] At a later date we will go into that subject, but briefly this is the answer: it involves some very complicated philosophy to understand it, we are asked to believe it by faith, but it is briefly this: If we deny predestination you deny free will. Because it is only in the world of the total determination of God that secondary causes can be valid; in other words, the freedom of second causes, (and man is a second cause we are not a first cause, we are not God) the freedom of second causes is only possible as there is the total determination of primary causes, only if you have a world of law and order.

And this was the thing that destroyed the ancient world, they affirmed total freedom without any divine predestination. But the minute they affirmed freedom without God and without His total predestination, they ended up immediately in the destruction of man’s freedom, because then man was totally subject to natural forces, environment, heredity, everything. So that, first of all we are asked by faith to believe both that we are free and we are responsible, that when we choose we choose between good and evil, validly; and second that God from the beginning ordained all things, and as scripture says: “Known unto God from the beginning of the world are all His works,” and it is not merely foreknowledge: “Whom He did foreknow he did predestinate.”

So both our responsibility and free will of the secondary sort, and Gods total predestination are affirmed by scripture.

[New Question and Answer Period]

No, a very good question. Many people have said that the concluding portions in Matthew 5 require passivism of us, that: ‘If a man compel thee to go one mile, go with him twain; if he smite thee on the one cheek turn the other cheek’ and so on. So that we are told by many that pacifism is obligatory upon Christians. Now this is not the meaning of this famous passage in Matthew 5; what does it say? Well, the word that is used there in Matthew 5 in each instance is a situation of compulsion, and the word translated ‘if they compel thee to go one mile’ is the word for the required and obligatory draft which the Roman government could place upon anyone, it could draft you at a moment’s notice, all it needed was a legionnaire or some other official of like status in any emergency to put his hand upon you and say: “We are drafting you for this particular job, immediately.” This is not entirely gone in our culture by the way, I have lived in the inner mountain area where they had under federal law similar requirements in case of a forest fire, and I have on occasion been told, immediately, that anyone passing through an area where there is a fire; the car is stopped, you are told there is a forest fire, grab a shovel and get going. And you are liable to prison, and a very severe sentence if you continue.

Now this was required in the Roman Empire, and the Judeans were fighting this tooth and nail. Well, the obvious reaction of the Romans was, when they put their hand on a Jews shoulder and said: “Alright, do this.” And he resisted, was to compel him not to go the one mile, but to go ten. And so Jesus was counseling realism there, and He said you are far better off if you go the second mile readily. Don’t be a fool in this situation. If he is going to slap you on the one cheek, then turn the other; there is no point in resisting, if you are cooperative you will get further. If he is going to take your coat, give him your cloak also. He can take everything, and if you are cooperative with these people you can do better.

Now this was social realism, and our Lord went on to say: “Be ye wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” And He also said “the children of darkness are wiser than the children of light,” in other words they are practical. So be practical without sacrificing your principles.

But there are people who try to make our faith into something as unpractical and unrealistic as they can, and they feel the more impractical you get the holier you are. That is nonsense.

Now, what are we to do in the way of resistance? What kind of resistance is Godly? We are told we cannot resist evil in any ungodly way. First of all, this matter was gone over by the way at great length during the period of the Reformation as well as before, and the classic book on it is Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos and although this book is practically unheard of, it was the most read book at the time of the American War of Independence, John Adams said it was the book that had brought about the War of Independence. And yet you never hear about it, you hear about Tom Paine’s Common Sense and we are told that that caused the War of Independence, and nobody tells you the obvious fact that when Tom Paine came to this country the first Continental Congress had been sitting for four months and the break was already underway, so that he got here after everything was underway; he had nothing to do with starting it, and he left in disgust before it was over. Now, what did Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos declare? That obedience to tyrants could be disobedience to God, that to obey that which was contrary to God could be disobedience to God, and therefore it was more important to obey God than to obey men.

Now, we are under covenant to God through the church, which means we must keep His commandments with respect to worship; we are under covenant to God in the civil order, the state, whose purpose is to establish law and order, and we are to obey as far as it is humanly possible, unless it is against the laws of God. Now we are in covenant with God in marriage also. Marriage is a covenant and most of the marriage forms that exist today involve in the vow taken by bride and groom: “That I do vow and covenant before God and these witnesses, to take thee;” and so on. What did the word covenant mean? Well, here was an order under God and under His law. Now, supposing the point comes in your life where there is a conflict between which set of laws or which covenant you are going to obey? You have a covenant with God, the church; you have a covenant with the state, God’s order for law; you have a covenant with your family. But supposing the state requires something of you that is going to be the destruction of your family? Which covenant are you going to obey? Well that which requires of you that which is faithful to God. So that if the state comes in and wants to take away your children, it would be a sin to obey the state, because you would be disobeying God, you would be faithless to your covenant vows; and you have then a Godly requirement to resist.

So that the trouble with some of these people who are pacifists is that they say there is only one law you should keep, the law of the state; your obligation to state. And they forget about your obligation to the church and to your family, and to every other sphere of life, and they make that the only law that exists. Any other questions?

[New Question and Answer Period]

A very good point. I have been asked to relate just what it takes to be a Communist today. To join the Communist party is a very serious matter, not lightly to be done; you don’t simply go up and sign a card and say you want to be a Communist. To be a member of the party you pledge first of all a percentage of your income, and you are subject to special assessments as occasion and need require; so that you give and you give heavily, very heavily. It has not been unusual for some Communists to find that it is necessary for their wives to go to work in order to support them in their membership; these people are dedicated.

Second, you must study. This means that you are given certain books of Marx and Lenin to read, and you go through a class and you are drilled on these things, and you take examinations on them, and you have got to know the answers, you have got to know them so thoroughly that they come out just like that, you don’t have to think about it. Those answers are a part of your being. And I have seen books of Marx and Lenin that were owned by ex-members of the party; it is very interesting, some of these owned by simple working men who have very, very limited intelligence. And yet those writings were very involved ones that graduate students read in universities. But those men, whether they were Negro longshoremen, or whatever they were, (?) had to sit down and spend hours and hours, night after night, studying those books; getting the answers down pat. And if they didn’t have them, they weren’t told: “Well, we’ll let you by because you’ve been active for quite a few months now night after night.’ No, they had to go home and be drilled on it further, until they got the answers. That is why it is so exceedingly difficult for a communist to leave the party. He has been drilled in these answers until they are a part of his being, they are second nature to him. And he has been drilled in giving sacrificially, in putting his whole life into this, so that it is a deep wrench for him to break away with it, it is almost like dying, some of them have said.

Now contrast that with what it takes to be a church member these days. All you have to do is to indicate you are interested, and they are begging you to come in, and in fact if you are not interested they are begging you to come in in many instances, and you don’t have to believe anything, in fact I know one pastor of whom I have a very low opinion, who preached a sermon, and it was on the Tower of Babel, and he said the Tower of Babel stood for confusion, but he also said it stood for the unity of everyone, and unity was a good thing. So even though they were confused and it meant confusion, still this unity was a marvelous thing, and he said: “Now in this church, we have a lot of confused people, and most of us don’t know what to believe, and a good deal of the time I don’t know what I believe.” So he said; “Those of you out there who aren’t members yet and are very confused and don’t know what to believe, this is the church for you.”

Well, I think that’s describes most churches today. And if anyone is miffed with something in the woman’s association, and they feel they have to lay the law down to the pastor, they are going to leave the church, and they leave for trifling reasons continually. But, it is a sin in the sight of God, to join a church apart from the faith, or to leave it for any other reason than it is faithless to the word of God. And when it begins to be faithless, and to tolerate anything else, then we have an obligation to leave. We cannot be a party to something that is anti Christian. So, this is the difference.

Now, this is why the communists are so effective. They can be a fraction of one percent, but because they have the dedication, they can accomplish a great deal. But we have in this country at least 30 million, and it could be 40 million people who are members of churches that claim to believe the Bible from cover to cover, and what have they accomplished/ Nothing. And we are losing the country, because theirs is a faith without works, which means that it is dead.

We must believe the word of God, and live it. And then we will begin to see things happen. And that is why I believe, what we do as we gather together in groups such as this, and there are such groups across the country, because we take Gods word seriously, and we know it is the foundation of liberty, it is more important than what is going on in all the big churches and among the millions. I think we in the sight of God, shall be blessed, and shall be the nucleus in terms of which He instructs this country. I think we have…

[New Question and Answer Period]

Before we have our first question in terms of our subject today, I thought two articles in the Oakland Tribune of last Sunday were of particular interest. The first by the science editor: “Two top ranking scientists have warned that the coming age of supersonic jets could bring with it an unexpected phenomena which could imperil the earth.” And it says, I am just reading a portions of a long article: “According to these two men, the giant supersonic planes now on the drawing boards could coat the stratosphere with immovable silvery contrails. If this happens the contrails eventually become a solid mass. Such a mirror says (?) would prevent heat from radiating away from the earth, and cause the climate of the whole planet to warm up. The warmer climate would vastly increase the rate of melting of the artic and Antarctic polar ice caps; the sea level around the world would rise, flooding coastal cities, drowning vast areas of low lands, and changing the geography of the whole earth; the water level would rise about 250 feet.”

Now, there some dispute between scientists about whether this is possible, and some say only low flying jets at supersonic speeds create contrails, and others maintain this is not so. The other article, even more fantastic: “In the language of the water engineers the word forest is defined as an evaporating machine; a tree sucks water out of the ground and (transforates?), breathes out, moisture into the air. The engineers say that a small forest annually wastes enough water to supply a large city. So the water engineers have declared war against the green evaporating machines of the Sierra Nevada, Southern California, and other parts of the west. The U.S. Bureau of land management has announced plans to chop down trees on 856,000 acres of Federal forest lands, converting the woods into grass lands. A bill now pending in Congress will authorize eradication of 500,000 trees and plants around the low lands of the Colorado river, and nearby reservoirs, mainly in Southern California and Arizona.” This second is another item apart from the plans to chop down the 856,000 acres.

“The same bill authorizes the U.S. Bureau of reclamation to destroy huge areas of desert plants, creating a barren wasteland into which every drop of rainfall would seep into underground water table reservoirs from which it would later be pumped to nearby cities, near Donner Summit in the Sierra Nevada. Engineers have removed trees, brush and grass, and spread polyethylene sheets over mountain sides; rain and melting snow pour water into canals, instead of seeping into the ground to nourish trees. In the Sacramento Valley engineers jubilantly report that burning out all the trees and shrubs in a small valley greatly increased the water yield.” And so on.

Now, if this isn’t playing God and destroying the earth in the name of creating some kind of future, I have never heard anything like it. This is insanity, this is a violation of everything that they themselves know about ecology; but they are out to destroy because they believe they are Gods who can create any kind of world they desire at will.

[New Question and Answer Period]

Replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth, so that the dominion of man seems to be geared to the earth …?... possible, but the realistic fact is first of all in Ancient times they knew more about the world than we realize. There is good evidence that they- well, we do know that America was not just discovered in 1492, it was known and exploited extensively centuries before. There is evidence indicating that Solomon was getting his silver from Mexico, Central America, and South America. The shifts, we are told in Chronicles, took three years going and three years coming, and everything we have from ancient documents indicates it was to America, and books have been written listing by the hundreds the trading ships that came to the Americas, the Arabs traded with the Americas.

We are too prone, first of all, to believe the myths that our history books give us, to give us the idea that man was stupid then and look how smart he is now, all of a sudden. And so we don’t realize much ancient man knew about his world. It was only a few superstitious people who may have believed, and I am not sure that is true, that if you sailed so far you would fall off of the edge of the earth; that sort of thing is nonsense.

So first of all our picture of ancient man is not correct, second what we are prone to do today is to overestimate the potentialities with respect to space, rather than the difficulties. Now I am not ruling it out, it is possible, I am not a Hebrew expert, that there could be verses which would indicate man’s dominion extends much further than I have indicated. But we do know this: the problems are very great. One of the articles I read recently in this connection was quite interesting, the experiments that have been conducted recently indicate that if you create a vacuum; remove all air, all oxygen from any kind of vessel, anything touching anything else will adhere to it absolutely, so that if a piece of paper touches metal or anything, any two objects touch, you cannot remove the two of them, one from the other. So that after you put oxygen back into that test area, that paper and that piece of metal or whatever two objects you have used, are welded together; absolutely welded.

Now this is posing a problem for them, and they are working on it night and day and they don’t know an answer, they are sure they are going to come up with one. But what will happen to the first man who sets foot on the moon? Well he’ll stick to it; he’ll be welded to it. Dust, in other words, has an important part in our existence; there would be no movement possible, this was the conclusion of this experiment, if there were not dust in the atmosphere. But go into an area where there is no atmosphere and you have total welding on contact.

Now that is a big problem, and that is one of many. So they may take care of some of these problems, they may, but every one they take care of turns up several newer ones, so I think they are talking through their hat. An interesting thing along this line, I may have told some of you this little incident, early this year I spent a couple of days with Dr. Walther Lammerts, Dr. Lammerts was formerly geneticist on the UCLA faculty, and then chief of research for Germain. And he told me about these so called experiments which are practically creating life in the test tube, and he said he has read every one of them, they are fantastically exaggerated, he said they are nowhere near it; nowhere near it. And he said: “I believe they may do it however, someday,” because he said: “I believe a lot of scientists today, and” he said: “you may feel this is strange language coming from me, are demonically inspired.” And he said: “When they do however, the most they will be able to create is some kind of virus,” and he said: “I believe it will be a monstrosity which will unleash a plague upon the earth.” But he said we are not remotely near it yet.

We have been conditioned to expecting miracles every day from science, and we should realize that most of these achievements of science have not come from the scientists but from technicians, and there is a difference between the two. The technicians are the ones who have done the inventing, the scientists the theorizing; and there is a world of difference there. We don’t have time to go into that.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the New Jerusalem is the name given to the New Creation, in the book of Revelation; and it is the kingdom of God, it is the whole of this new, glorified creation. Certain dimensions are given to it, but the dimensions that are given are symbolic of course, they are typical. Now, we can understand then, if we look at the dimensions, because they are the same dimensions of the holy of holies magnified; the holy of holies in the tabernacle, and then in the temple, was a perfect cube in dimensions, and the cube in the ancient world was the symbol of perfection. And so the dimensions of the New Jerusalem are that of a perfect cube, reproducing the dimensions, magnified, of the most holy place; to indicate that now it is not simply the holy of holies, that is the dwelling place of God, but the whole heaven and earth, which is the chosen community or chosen city, and also the most holy place, where God totally dwells, where He is totally present at all times. So that you can trace the dimensions of the most holy place in scripture, and see how it steadily points up to the New Jerusalem, in other words the holy of holies is now the whole of creation, the whole of the new heaven and earth. Does that explain it, or does it confuse the issue?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] It will be the whole of creation, apart from hell.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, you are right, they are being contradictory, but there is a common purpose; first in exalting themselves, making Gods of themselves they are striking at God, and then by positing life throughout the universe although there isn’t any evidence for it, for or con, there is nothing you can say on the subject because you have no information; they are trying again to strike at Christian faith. So in both instances they have, while very real contradictions, a common hostility to Christianity.

[New Question and Answer Period]

I would like to call this item to your attention from a recent article, to me this expresses better than anything else why there is no future for the so-called young nations of Africa, because of the total disintegration of the family there. In 1939, less than 10% of the people in Africa lived in cities. Today approximately 30% are urban dwellers; more than 70% of the rural men have left for urban areas. (Tomographers?) predict that at least 75% of the population will soon be urbanized. Do you get the significance of that? 1/3 of the people are already in the cities, just camping there living on U.N. or U.S. handouts. In the countryside, in the rural areas, 70% of the men are gone, which means that except for the small boys and the old men, the men are virtually all gone; and this is a product of the religion of evolution, of this total irresponsibility which these men have been taught by our modern prophets of revolution. The end result will only be the total destruction of everything in Africa, there is no future in Africa; there is only ever-increasing ruin ahead, so that you can write Africa off, it is going to be a desert before too many decades as a result of this drift.

Any questions then?

[Audience Member] …?... how can they defend against the attacks of the non-Christian religion …?...

[Rushdoony] Good question. One of the most important steps is to begin teaching our faith, and this means teaching it first of all to the young. The Christian school movement to me is therefore central to withstand these revolutionary forces, because the basic socialism as I pointed out in my book The Messianic Character of American Education which socialists a 150 years or more ago set forth (?) the socialism at the time, “Put them in a state controlled school and the future is ours.” That was their principle.

Now we need to continue to develop these independent Christian schools, whether parochial, whether independent Christian based schools, or whether independent private schools. And as I pointed out and some of you have heard me say, today 25% of all grade school children are outside the state controlled schools. They are in parochial, private, or Christian based schools. That is one out of four, and those figures are two years old, and the percentage is growing annually. The percentage in high school is not as great, but it is increasing every year. This is important, and as we strengthen such schools we will recapture a tremendous amount of ground. We don’t need to worry about going out and bringing adults to our position and converting them to Christ, we’ve got them from childhood.

Then the next step, and this is what interests me as many of you know, and is my private hope and project, to establish a Christian college, where they can be trained in terms of these mature Christian beliefs.

Now this is the way. It is not something that is going to be done overnight, and people who want an easy victory over subversion don’t realize that these things are thousands of years old. You can trace the hammer and sickle identified with revolution back to pre-Christian times. There have been communist revolutions centuries and centuries ago, and someday and I intend in this area to speak about the religion of Mazdak, a high priest in Persia, and the total communism he instituted, a communism of money, property, and women. That was what destroyed that great country, which was a great Arian and outstanding nation. It was forever destroyed after about 50-75 years of that. The Muslims took it over, and they have been living in poverty since that they never would have dreamt of in those days. This is an ancient movement, it can only over thrown by the power of God and by faith and by (?); but it will be because God is on the throne. I believe you had a question?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Their basic premises are wrong, thoroughly wrong, and as Christians we cannot believe that they are good. Now they are often law abiding people in terms of their country, but this doesn’t make them good in the sight of God, because basic to their premise is that they are going to transcend humanity and creaturliness and become God’s themselves, and this is the process of being saved for them. So…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, there is a tremendous and a demonic pride in this idea of aspiring to be your own God, and this is the basic sin as we shall see in a couple of weeks, man tries to be his own God. and one of the best illustrations, by the way, of man aspiring to play God you can find in the last four issues of Life, where man is described, man the scientist today, as planning to create life, to give birth to children in test tubes, totally to control man. Now all of this is inescapable, I will be speaking on this in the Creationist conference, because my subject there will be Man in 1984. And they make no bones about what they are trying to do.

Now, very briefly, this is thing about it; I am giving you just the starting premise of what I will be saying there: To be God means to be in control. A true God is the one who has created and controlled and destined all things. There is no real argument among any philosopher or scientist about predestination, people who argue against it are just ignorant of the basic issues. The real issue in predestination is: Predestination by whom? God or the state? Who is going to control it? Is the government going to be upon God’s shoulders or upon the scientists? And the scientists today and these sociologists and planners are talking about predestination by man, by the elite. Now the predestination of God, according to scripture, is the very ground of our freedom. Freedom is not alien to predestination, but basic to it, from the Biblical perspective.

But scientific socialism means total control, because scientific socialism means an experiment, scientifically, in a sociological type of planning called socialism. Now in an experiment, the basic factor; and it isn’t an experiment and it isn’t scientific, if you don’t have total control of all factors. Scientific socialism is therefore the socialism of total control; and Marx was delighted when the Origin of Species was published by Darwin, and he said: “This book has saved Scientific Socialism, we have got the ground for it now, because we can say science is with us, and total planning by man is necessary. Therefore you have to have the anthill society.” And this is what modern men today are demanding, increasingly.

You recall I cited to you last time the statement of Lawrence Durrell one of these writers, in which he said that his goal, his desire was- well, I believe I have it here and can give it to you again, because I think it is so telling, that the goal of man is the ant hill. “Why are we afraid of becoming insects? I can imagine no lovelier goal. The streets of paradise are not more lovely than the highways of the ant heap; let the hive take my responsibilities, I am weary of them.”

Now this is the goal of modern man, and this is the goal of scientific socialism, to remake man so that he will desire this, so that there will be no longer, and this is a common term, it comes from Karl Marx and is common to virtually every form of psychiatry now: “to overcome alienation.” And what is alienation? Well, that means self consciousness. We are alienated from the commonality, the oneness of being, by self consciousness, by reason, by individualism. And we are to overcome this alienation through this scientific socialism, until we are no longer aware of ourselves as individuals, until we have a society- and very few people who talk about Marx are aware of this- in which there will no longer be any wages, because wages, pay, personalize man; they individualize man, and this must be overcome.

So, the goal is no wages, ultimately; the ant heap society, and hence, one book titled Post Historic Man has been written by Roderick Seidenberg, in other words, in this future man will no longer have a history, because he will no longer have self consciousness, he will be like the ant in the ant heap, whose life is a perpetual cycle without variation, and man when alienation is overcome will live in that kind of scientific socialism.

[New Question and Answer Period]

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Largely the Bible. In fact almost exclusively. And one reason why mothers were taught for so many, many years; and no doubt all of you felt that this was good sense because you were told it was, even as I did once; is because the state did not want the parent to interfere with education. And so to keep the parent completely out of what was once entirely the parents domain, they told the parents that it was not good and it would hurt the child and his ability to read later on, if he were taught at home because he would learn the wrong methods and so on. But this was a program whereby the parent was gradually ousted from this area; I have located in books as late as 1859 the advice, as a regular part of counseling to parents, that they should teach their children to read before they went to school; and I have found this in Presbyterian church literature that was given to parents, and you found this in all kinds of places; this was standard. But especially after 1900, it was drilled into people that this was dangerous to the educational future of the child to get this training, it would warp him, it would start him on the wrong reading habits. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, there of course is growing irresponsibility in America on the part of men, and of course with that you have irresponsibility on the part of women, one follows the other. And this goes hand in hand with the- well, first of all, as you have a decline of a real Biblical faith, you have a decline of interest by men in the church. The more modernistic a church becomes, significantly, the higher the ration of women and the lower the ratio of men. This is not my statement, this is from statistics that some very, very left wing sociologists have dug up; they don’t know what to ascribe this to, but I think we do. The male membership declines as the faith of the church declines.

Now, as the faith of the church gets off base, the men having departed from the church or lost interest in this wishy washy kind of theology which talks about loving everybody stupidly and subsidizing evil as it were, and gets off into the most silly and sentimental type of political application of this business of promiscuous love; the men, first drawing out in protest gradually lose all of this, and as they lose their basic orientation which must be in terms of God, then they are no longer able to give guidance to the family and the younger generation of men are reared in terms of this; even though they are in rebellion, they have nothing to criticize it. Well, as you have this false theology, followed by a decline in male responsibility, you then have a growth of state responsibility, because the minute the men begin to go down in their faith and responsibility, the state takes the role of the father, and the more the state takes over, the more it pushes down the man, because statism is warring against the authority of the man, against the capacity of the man to govern himself and his family and his business, and his whole life. And the state is in effect saying to the man: “Well if you can’t handle this without our care, we will be big brother to you; we will be the grandfather, so to speak in the situation, who can bail you out of everything; we will underwrite you.” So as the state enters in, the responsibility of the man is accelerated in its decline until you have a collapse, or unless you have a revival.

Now at the end of the Middle Ages you had such a situation. The Middle Ages had ended in a collapse of the Christian culture, and you had statism everywhere, the whole period of the Renaissance was nothing but statism, total statism; and the beautiful art of the Renaissance was so to speak frosting. Behind these subsidized artists were the subsidized men who were promoting total statism, who were promoting pornography; and for example one of the greatest pornographers of all history, (Arantino?) was subsidized by virtually every monarch of his day; he lived in the north of Italy but he was getting subsidies from England, Germany, France, everywhere; because having put men on the run it was an excellent means of further destroying men by subsidizing someone to produce as he did with tremendous ability, mass pornography to be spread across Europe to destroy men.

When Luther came on the scene, Europe was so far gone that medical historians such as Jeffrey (May?) and others have estimated that one third to one half of all of Europe was venereally diseased. So that, had not the Reformation come about, Europe would have gone down the drain with total physical deterioration, and if you look at some of the renaissance art, the number of monsters, human monsters that are portrayed, is startling. This physical deterioration came about; what reversed the trend? The Reformation, and then in the Catholic countries, the Counter Reformation; both of which were directed primarily against the Renaissance and the statism, and then against each other. So that what we need no is another Reformation; and men again made responsible, and that will settle the situation, nothing else.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, no man stands still, he either goes forward or he goes backward; it is impossible, totally impossible to stand still. And people are either growing in terms of their faith or they are rebelling against God and accentuating their rebellion.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, that thesis to which you referred of two stories of creation which are ostensibly contradictory is the Graf-Wellhausen theory, and it divides the whole of the books of Moses into four documents, JEDP, which supposedly were written by different men, and then they took them and put them together. And I had to for example in seminary, go through and mark each of these so called strands with a different color, so supposedly you could go through and read a J document and the E document and the D document and the P document; J Yahswistic, E for the Elohim document, D for the Deuteronomy, and P for Priestly. And sometimes they take a single verse and have supposedly all four strands there and the words woven together.

Now this is a marvelous thesis. They claim they can actually differentiate these strands. Well, when they are confronted with something like Shakespeare’s plays where we know that sometimes Belmont and Fletcher and other writers collaborated with him, and say: “Now, get to work and separate the words here that are Shakespeare’s, and those that are Belmont’s or Fletchers;” they can’t do it.

So that this is utter nonsense, that they can go through and do this, and again and again the theory has been demonstrated to be totally fallacious, on a hundred and one counts. But according to them the first chapter represents one strand and the second represents at least another strand; but this is an absurdity, and even some of their own men like Albright, John Hopkins, who certainly would not agree with me, has nonetheless said that the theory is un-provable and rather unlikely. The first chapter is a general statement of creation. The second chapter after this description of the whole of creation, centers attention on one aspect of it, the creation of man, and then proceeds to tell the story.

Now, there is another aspect to all of this that I think is very interesting, and a British Scholar has recorded- has done some work on this, he is with the British Museum, and (Weismann?) is his name, Dr. (Weismann?) has said that the frequent term, as for example in Genesis 5:1 “This is the book of the generations of Adam.” Now he said, indeed generation is a possible meaning here, but he said the older and original meaning is: “This is the book of the family records and the history as it is compiled by Adam.” And (Weismann?) has through extensive use of old Babylonian tablets that have been uncovered, and other records, throughout the whole of the ancient world demonstrated that this word does mean that, so if he is right and I think he is, when you read Genesis 5:1, what it is saying is: “This the book of the records kept by Adam.” So that everything up to Genesis 5:1 is Adam’s record; the inspired record as kept by Adam, and then you get a record kept by someone else, so you have through these frequent references the records of the Patriarchs, and this goes back then to the very times that these things happened, and Moses simply compiled them. Yes?

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[Rushdoony] He gave him the law, and the pattern of the tabernacle on the mount, so that Moses wrote or compiled this from the earlier inspired records and brought them together, but we are told definitely that the law was given to him on the mount.

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[Rushdoony] All of it is inspired by God, that is very clearly stated. But Moses took Genesis which was a compilation of Adam, of Noah, and of other men, and simply put it together in this one collection of the five books of Moses, so he was the compiler; but it is the law that is stated as coming directly from God on the mount, all of it as I want to reemphasize, is inspired by God, and this is emphasized repeatedly in scripture.

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[Rushdoony] No, there are those that say that the- and this is a fairly recent theory, that according to Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 there are two creations, and there was a fall in between; and this has been developed in the last hundred years by people who want to say: “Well, we have got to leave room for these vast geological ages” because they accept the words of the scientists concerning them, “Therefore God created the world and it fell, it was a habitation for angels and they fell and that is where the devils come from, and after millions of years, then He went ahead and did this new creation of the six days.” But there isn’t the faintest trace of evidence for that. There have been a number of very fine books written demonstrating that this is without any foundation.

A Dr. Morris of The Genesis Flood has a paperback on the subject that he published earlier this year in spiral bound form in which he points out that this is nonsense, there is no evidence for it from the Bible, it is an attempt simply to accommodate evolutionary thinking.

[New Question and Answer Period]

I was interested some time ago to do some reading on the Jivaro Indians of South America. It is a little safer in some circles to talk about the Jivaro’s, not because I am unwilling because I shall talk about the African peoples a little later, but it doesn’t get you on to extraneous issues. But the Jivaro’s can only count up to three, they don’t know how to count beyond three. They don’t feel any need to learn; no one else, and nothing in the outside world has that much meaning. The Jivaro’s live in the most abject kind of segregation, they are unspeakably filthy. They live on anything they can kill, and make no provision for tomorrow. A French Anthropologist who worked among them for a while said that one Jivaro had as his wife a captive woman from a much more advanced tribe. Every Jivaro woman resented her and was envious of her because she was clean, but none of them felt any desire to conform to any kind of standard, ever clean themselves, or to rid themselves of vermin. They simply resented the presence in their midst of one person who had even so primitive a standard as being, after a fashion, clean.

What happens? Does it stop there? When a people says: “I am my own God and there is no law outside of me” they live finally not only with no reference to the outside world, but in a dream world; and it is not surprising that they take to narcotics.

Not too long ago, and anthropologist in the University of California spent some time among the Jivaro, who were best known as you perhaps recall, for their shrunken heads. And he reported that the Jivaro used drugs extensively; the children start using them at the age of six. Every day existence is merely the outward manifestation of reality, and not reality itself, according to the Jivaro’s. They believe that the great events of life are profoundly influenced by things that take place in these drug-caused visions. The Jivaro think the drugs help them acquire immunity from death in a land wrapped by disease, warfare, and deadly nature. They see apparitions such as giant boa constrictors or Jaguars, which they believe are ghostly manifestations of immunity, but occasionally even drugs aren’t enough; and the Jivaro must make use of the unreal waking world to kill someone else and shrink the victims head. This aids longevity, according to Jivaro logic.

The real world gives way to a dream world, when men forsake God’s infallible word for Satan’s temptation: “Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.” We are beginning to see the signs of the Jivaro world all around us. As men, whether in the courts of law or in the councils of state, take their leave of reality, and pass laws that have no relationship to anything around us, who dream their dreams of a paradise on earth, and work creating a hell on earth in the process. Take away the reign of God’s fundamental law, His infallible word, and substitute for it anything else, call it Democracy or what you will, any of man’s works, and ultimately you destroy everything. Because the reign of the common denominator takes over, and the lowest common denominator prevails.

Some years ago, A.A. Hodge, one of the great theologians of America, called attention to what was happening as the Public Schools came into existence, and he warned of what they were doing, that they were taking education away from parents; and while they were promising that they would keep the faith in the schools they would ultimately destroy it, and he wrote: “It is capable of an exact demonstration that if every party in the state has the right of excluding from the public school whatever he does not believe to be true, then he that believes most must give way to him that believes least, and then he that believes least must give way to him that believes absolutely nothing, no matter how small a minority the Atheists or the Agnostics may be. It is self evident that on this scheme if it consistently and persistently carried out in all parts of the country, the United States system of national popular education will be the most efficient and widespread instrument for the propagation of Atheism which the world has ever seen.”

It will be, he said, and this statement was made to some women’s groups, 80-90 years ago, the rule of the lowest common denominator. Because take away God’s infallible word, and replace it with man’s infallible word, and it becomes progressively an integration downward, and he that believes the least is the most powerful, being the lowest common denominator, and today because we do not obey God’s word, it is the lowest common denominator in our society which is increasingly the most powerful, the worst element in Los Angeles or in Washington D.C. or in New York City that carries that carries the most weight. It is either total submission to God’s word, or it is a progressive submission downward to the lowest common denominator.

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[Rushdoony] About as perfect an illustration as you could give, thank you, because that is exactly the true; the whole premise of the meaning of the International Monetary Fund is precisely this lowest common denominator, so that they are going to reduce all of us to the level of the least, and while they dream that this is somehow by this reduction going to raise us all, it doesn’t take more than the most elementary kind of logic to realize that it is going to destroy all of us; it is like pouring water through a leaky vessel, it is going to go out, you are going to have no water. So that if you have water in a canteen that is sound and then you have an empty canteen that is full of holes, you are not going to equalize things and you are not going to preserve anything by pouring all the water into the leaky vessel, you are going to lose it all. And the IMF of course is going to do precisely that with all world currencies. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, (?) visit was quite a shout to all Conservatives, and especially to Conservative Catholics, because what he did most emphatically was to put his seal of approval on the U.N. He said it was the political parallel to the Roman Catholic Church; he said that it was a thoroughly moral body, that it was the peace making body, at point after point he gave it I think the finest defense that has yet been made of the U.N., the most thorough going. I think however this was expected; certainly many Catholics who had spoken to me of their feelings about it, felt that everything that Pope Paul had said pointed to it, I think more tragic was the fact that Cardinal (Otobiani?) the leader of the conservatives in the College of Cardinals came out shortly thereafter with an equally strong statement in favor of world union. Thus there is no question that the U.N. has gained immeasurably in strength at a time when it was faltering badly. It has been propped up very, very powerfully, and I think now every attempt will be made to increase its powers and its strength with this kind of support.

[New Question and Answer Period]

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Who made the statement that if you only accepted his prayer (?)

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[Rushdoony] …?...

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[Rushdoony] Oh, I see, in the temple of understanding, yes. That would be simply because Christ’s name was not mentioned there. Now it is interesting that in some of the books that deal with the one world order that ostensibly is to come, they list three holidays that are to be observed by the one world state, as Liber holidays; the first is the feat of Wesak, a Buddhist festival, the second is Easter but not in the sense that Christ rose again from the dead, but in a humanistic sense that this is to celebrate the renewal of life, a kind of a spring festival, and the third and the great holy day will be the festival of humanity day.

Well, our time… [Tape Ends]