Profound Questions and Answers

Charity Help to Vietnam

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 12-24

Genre: Talk

Track: 12

Dictation Name: RR201B3

Location/Venue:

Year:

Any questions? Yes?

[Audience Member] What were the (?) of the Revised Standard Version (?) I think in Isaiah…?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the Hebrew word ‘Alma’ or ‘Almah’ is translated by the Revised Standard Version as a young maiden. This has always been translated until the RSV came along, as a virgin. Whence this new reading or new translation? The whole point of course of Isaiah’s statement is that this miracle will take place, and there is no miracle in the fact that a young woman is going to have a baby, and through the centuries this was always interpreted as virgin. The meaning of Alma is Virgin. But after the first century, as controversy between church and synagogue arose, the Jewish scholars anxious to take away the force of that text as proof of Christ’s coming, insisted that it did not speak of a virgin. So they began to insist that ‘Alma’ meant a young maiden, any young unmarried woman, rather than a virgin.

Now the evidence clearly is against this. No scholar ever took that statement, which was pure propaganda, and anti-Christian propaganda, no one took it seriously until recently when the translators of the RSV who were uniformly modernists, who did not believe in the virgin birth, went to the Hebrew and insisted on reading it in terms of this old propaganda reading. The weight of the evidence is clearly against that. Dr. Edward J. Young of Westminster seminary has written extensively on the history of the word ‘Alma’ and made it clear that it is impossible to give it any other reading than virgin. But this is one instance of many where the RSV has given at the very least a very debatable reading which is based on anti Christian premises.

[Audience Member] I’d like to ask a very basic question, and perhaps you might answer this at another time, but there is some confusion in my mind based on what I have been taught about salvation in the Old Testament and now in the New Testament. And I’ve come to the understanding that it has always been the same, that it has never any change, Old Covenant, New Covenant, it has always been based on Christ, would you talk about that?

[Rushdoony] A very good question. the plan of salvation from the Old to the New Testament from the beginning to the end of scripture has always been the same. Salvation was never by the law in the Old Testament. Because even before the law was given beyond the 10 commandments and a few other statements, the sacrificial system was set up. Because it was apparent that they could not be saved by the keeping of the law, therefore the sacrificial system was set up and the tabernacle, and the pattern of the tabernacle given in great detail, immediately after the first giving of the 10 commandments. Thus the whole of the latter part of Exodus deals with the tabernacle. Then Leviticus gives immediately the sacrificial system, then you begin to get law. and laws are given again further in Deuteronomy.

Now, in the sacrificial system, as it was set up, it was as apparent as could be from the beginning, that their salvation was by the grace of God through an appointed sin bearer. What was the sacrificial system? There could be no approach to God except through the blood of an innocent one. They had to come to the sanctuary with the blood of a lamb without blemish. This lamb was to be taken and slain upon the altar and the blood shed; the bones were not to be broken, it’s wholeness was to be maintained. The believer who came forward put his hands upon that sacrificial animal to identify himself with it first of all, to indicate that ‘it is I who deserve to die, and the death of this innocent one is my death. I accept the sentence of death upon myself, and this lamb is my sin bearer.’ So that he laid his sins as it were upon that lamb, he identified himself with it and said he was one with it, and it was he who died in the person of this lamb, and he who now lived because this lamb had died in his stead.

Now, this was the essence of the Old Testament plan of salvation. They knew of course that that lamb was a type, a symbol. Now the one difference between the Old and the New Testament is that the typology, the symbolism, gives way to the reality; Christ now appears, He is the sin bearer. He is the innocent one. When He dies and we accept His death, He takes our sins upon Him, and He becomes us, He dies for us, and we are alive because He destroys the power of death through His resurrection.

Now there is thus no difference from one end of the Bible to the other in the meaning of salvation. Thus those who have tried to say that the Hebrews were saved by the law are completely misreading the Bible; moreover they have fallen victim to the Pharisaic faith because the Pharisees in the inter-testamental period between the Old and New Testaments, developed this plan of salvation by works, by law. But it was not the Biblical law, but a substitute for it, a reading of it, and of course the Talmud as we have it today is simply the interpretation, century after century, of the law, whereby the meaning of the law is completely destroyed and the interpretation takes its place; and it is made possible to keep.

Now the law as it is no man can keep perfectly, save Jesus Christ, who kept it. But if I am allowed to build a church to my scale, I can jump over the steeple, I can reduce it to that size. And this is of course what Phariseeism did, it said we shall be saved by works, and so we will take the law and reword it, rewrite it in effect, so that it will become what we want it to be and we can keep it.

Now, many Christians have fallen under the very, very deadly assumption that the Old Testament and Phariseeism are one and the same. Now they wouldn’t put it in that kind of language, but when they say people in the Old Testament were saved by the law, they are looking at it through the eyes of Phariseeism. But salvation in the Old and the New Testament is identical. There is no difference except the type now gives way to the open reality.

Is that clear? Yes?

[Audience Member] Wasn’t Christ speaking …?... Pharisees were clean on the outside but on the inside they were all filthiness, and they were white as sepulchers, and they covered themselves with the law on the outside, but on the inside (?).

[Rushdoony] Exactly. They used the façade of being champions of the law while destroying it. And we must remember that here again there is a parallel error that goes with this, the assumption that because we are saved by grace we are dead to the law. Now this is true, but it is true only with respect to salvation. In other words, the law is a handwriting of ordinances against us, a bill of indictment. Now, when a man is killed the indictment is null and void, it has been fulfilled. When we accept Christ, the law, as an indictment against us is dead. But now the law is written on the tables of our hearts, so that the Christian is not saved to be lawless, but to fulfill, to keep the law. He is not saved so that he might kill, steal, commit adultery; but now given power by the grace of God to live in the law, because the law is now his new nature, the righteousness of God is no longer something outside of him as an indictment pursuing him with a charge of death, of treason against God, but now his very being because Christ is the new man in him; and Christ, the righteousness of God, very God, cannot do other than fulfill Himself in and through us, so that we are saved not to break the law but to keep the law of God. And hence the bypassing of God’s law in preaching today is really antinomianism and apostasy, and it is because we have so much lawless preaching that we have so lawless a country, because the law of God is basic to all law.

Yes, did you have a question?

[Audience Member] I had a question, probably somewhat naïve, but sometimes I’ve heard discussions that Jesus was not a Jew, it says here in the next chapter, where is he (that is one named a Jew?) Does this mean that Jesus was a Jew?

[Rushdoony] A very good question, and I am glad you brought it up to clarify the confusion there. There are some people who do say indeed that Jesus was not a Jew. When they say that they are thinking of the modern Jews, most of whom are not of Hebraic or Judean blood, so that he was of a different people than most modern Jews are, because most of them are converts. (costar?) and other groups, Asian or Europeans, Central European groups, who became converted to Judaism in the early centuries in the Medieval period. So that most modern Jews have no Judean or Hebraic blood. But in terms of the Biblical Jew, our Lord definitely was of the tribe of Judah, and therefore a Jew. It is simply a question of what do they mean by the term. Yes?

[Audience Member] Well, following along that same line then, isn’t there something wrong with the expression that is used commonly today, the Judeo Christian heritage?

[Rushdoony] Very good, that phrase should be anathema to any conservative Christian, because Judeo Christian heritage involves a contradiction in terms, the Judaic heritage is Phariseeism, and this we have no part of, nor can we ever subscribe to it. Whenever you have such a phrase, you have modernism or else ignorance. You have the social gospel, which is a form of Phariseeism. And no Christian should use this phrase, the phrase ‘Hebrew Christian Heritage’ is acceptable, but when you say Christian you are talking about the Old and New Testament, so you don’t need to have a prefix. The Christian heritage or the Biblical heritage is sufficient. But Judeo Christian is nonsense, it is comparable to the expression ‘Christian Atheism’ which is beginning to pop up. I was using that term a year ago to express the idea of contradiction, but I find now articles written about Christian Atheism. There is nothing impossible with some people nowadays.

[Audience Member] Where does this theory, that has rather grown among the Jews, I heard someone else say that he believed salvation was through the Jewish race rather than a messiah, and I think there is in the RSV two people who translated that (?) which referred to them instead of to Christ.

[Rushdoony] Yes, you mean the idea that the messiah refers to the Jewish people as a whole. Yes, this idea was one of many that was propounded after the coming of Christ to do away with the force of the Old Testament, as it clearly pointed to Christ.

Now, when you read through the book of Acts and the epistles, the thing that comes out most clearly is this, that as the apostles went into any synagogue, all they had to do was to preach from the Old Testament, and all the preaching was from the Old Testament, and they simply said: “This is what our scriptures say, and this is how it has been fulfilled in Christ” because the accepted meaning then so clearly pointed to Christ. In fact at that time, the faith of Israel was also, this is rarely noted, but it was clearly Trinitarian. They believed in God the Father, God the Holy Spirit, and they believed in God the Word, or Wisdom. They were Trinitarian. But faced with the fact that all of their interpretation pointed to Christ, and the whole of their faith clearly was Trinitarian, within a generation after our Lords death, in fact by the time the Jewish Roman war had ended, their interpretation was denying everything they had once affirmed, they had become Unitarian, and they were taking the prophecy of the messiah, of the suffering servant, and saying that all the old meanings were no longer valid; indeed, they said it means Hezekiah, this was one interpretation they gave. Or it meant someone else, or someone who was yet to come, and some of them said it meant Israel. In recent years this interpretation has again been revived very extensively, although you find it far back in the Christian era in one Rabbinic writing which was written to the (Pizzari?) or (Costaar?) peoples for instruction. Their again this is propounded, Israel as the messiah.

But this was simply an attempt to evade the plain meaning of scripture, and of course it has no textual warrant whatsoever. However it is very prevalent now.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, it is actually creeping into Church circles, and I believe the next step will be to say that the church too is itself a part of this messiah, this collective messiah. The reason why I say this is because you are beginning to find in the council of churches member body, the definition of the church as a ‘redeeming body’. Redeeming body. It is the body of the redeemed, but they are not the ones who do the redeeming; but now it is the church, not Christ, who is redeeming. The church has become the messiah. Only they have not gone as far as the Jewish scholars to identify it openly with the church, and to say the church is the messiah, but that is the next step very obviously. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] A very good question. I think we need to go back and restudy those laws, and to take them more seriously. Now there are very few people who pay attention to them, I do, and I am trying to understand their meaning. In many of them there is a principle set forth, but there is also a practice required, and I think we need to pay attention to those laws very definitely, God had a purpose in giving them. The ceremonial laws which dealt with the tabernacle, with the sanctuary, with the priesthood and with Christ, were clearly fulfilled. But I do not believe that we have any warrant to set aside any law unless it is clearly fulfilled in Christ, or that some time Christ or the apostles said that some aspect of it was to be changed, for example the death penalty for adultery was set aside, and divorce became its substitute. That we know from our Lord and from the epistles, so there we feel that the law has been altered, and we have a legitimate ground. But unless the New Testament clearly gives us grounds, I think we need to respect the Old Testament law.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, we have become completely lawless. Now there are very few penalties that would invoke on us in our every day living, and we all come from a background where these things were respected; we don’t realize it, but in America these things were respected until fairly recent times, so that there are not too many respects in which we bypass the Mosaic law. But I do believe God honors obedience, and we don’t always understand the reason for these things.

There is a book that has been written, I hesitate to recommend it because it is so stupid in some respects, but it is a book by a doctor in which he points out how some of the apparently inconsequential regulations of the Mosaic law has such very important results health wise, and they are just beginning to realize this. I believe you had a question?

[Audience Member] …?... Is the day of miracles over, number one, …?...

[Rushdoony] Israel, to answer that first, means a prince with God. A prince with God. So that when Jacob became a prince with God, that is God honored him, he assumed that name. And we are the true Israel of God, that name belongs to the church, to the chosen people of God who are believers in Jesus Christ. We are in the sight of God Israel, that is, princes with God.

[Audience Member] The chosen people are believers?

[Rushdoony] Yes. The chosen people are believers, it is not a matter of blood. And this is very, very clear, over and over again in scripture.

And then, let me see, the other question… Miracles. The age of miracles in a sense is ended, it ended with apostolic era, in that these clearly supernatural miracles, the raising of the dead and so on, speaking in tongues and so on, ended then. But this does not mean there are not many, many things which are to a very real degree miraculous; but not of the same, totally supernatural character. There are healings in answer to prayer, there are events and things very often in our own lives, which clearly point to God’s intervention, God’s miraculous working. But in the same sense as in the days of Elijah and in the days of Moses and the days of Christ; no. There there was an amazing and miraculous demonstration of things such as we do not have in our day.

But I do not believe we can deny that there are very definitely supernatural healings and other things of a very real sort. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, a very good question, but the difference is this, when God intervenes it is not to take us out of a situation, but to give us power and strength to overcome in the face of it. And this is a very different thing, very often we find that people have clearly unforeseen, unforgettable things happen in their lives, where through the most amazing things something turns up which delivers them, and it is a clear-cut answer to prayer. There is no accounting for it. But it didn’t take them out of the situation, it gave them strength to go on, strength to overcome in the situation. This is a different thing. The salvation of God is not Deus Ex Machina. God does intervene in history, but not to take us out of it, He intervenes to give us strength to overcome in and through it. Is that point clear?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, the reference there is quite specific in the Mosaic law, it was an animal that had been strangled rather than bled. It did not have reference to rare meat. That is a good question…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Very good, because there is an important point there, and it was a good health law as well as a good religious law. Its purpose was this, that in the Old Testament all blood that was shed in slaughter was a type of the blood of Christ that was to be shed, so that the blood had to be poured out, and every time they sacrificed they had to remember someone was to be sacrificed for them. Every time they killed they had to remember someone was to be killed for them in time to come.

Now, once the New Testament age was ended, there was no strict requirement of this ruling for the Gentiles, in Acts 15, however they do require this lest it be an offense to the Jewish believers, they require it of the Gentiles, and the church as a whole has continued that requirement. And there is a good basis of health in it, I am told.

[Audience Member] …?... should limit the gift giving to our children now …?...

[Rushdoony] Doctor Spock has made certain statements recently, and I am asked to comment on them, during this past week, in fact when I was flying up to (Redding?) I read an address by Doctor Spock at the Vietnam day, and I would say that Doctor Spock is scarcely an authority in any field. Doctor Spock clearly is a left winger, and this business of not giving children gifts, or limiting our gift giving and so on- basic to his perspective is a desire to center the minds of children and youth as well in giving to a one world order, thinking about others and world brotherhood, and so on.

Now, he is trying to inculcate an unselfishness of a kind among the humanistic followers that he has, and I frankly think this business of trying to make children be unselfish in these humanistic terms is a self-defeating matter, and I think it is carried to absurdity. First of all, children are children, and we don’t make them unselfish by depriving them of gifts. We make them thoughtful of others by giving them a Christian faith and through the daily discipline of the home, by teaching them to be thoughtful of other members of the family. This business therefore of coming to Christmas and saying: “Now, we are not going to give kids any presents, because they should learn to be thoughtful of others.” Instead of being nobility, to my mind is just sick. I think it is abusing the kids. Children universally expect this to be a season of gifts, and I think they can best learn to be thoughtful, to be mindful of the needs of others, not through being deprived, this is going to make them resentful, but through a Christian faith. So that I am very hostile to this idea of giving the kids a lesson on Christmas day, or just one or two things, and telling them: “Now, remember the poor Hottentots and the Vietcong,” and a few other things like that, which apparently is what Doctor Spock has in mind.

Then with respect to Santa Claus, I think we would do best to forget him altogether. We don’t need him, the Santa Claus story we are told is ages old, but actually the Santa Claus story is fairly new, and it was in the last century that so many of these customs came into practice, primarily from Unitarian sources, as some of you know. And the whole purpose was to supplant the Christmas story with a lot of mythology. And I think it is unhealthy to give the children what is nonsense and expect them to believe it, and there will be repercussions. As I told some of you, I have seen this sort of thing, I never have believed in it, I have always regarded the Santa Claus story and a lot things like that as utter nonsense, and distasteful nonsense. My sister, whose perspective is rather different from mine, taught her children the Santa Claus story, and at a certain point when they found it wasn’t true, they made a logical conclusion, they said: “Well, the story about Jesus and the Bible is a fairy tale too, isn’t it?”

I think that is a logical conclusion, and I think that has been reached by millions of children, because I have heard it from parent after parent, that their children have asked that question. So I am against Santa Claus. He is red. (laughter)

[Audience Member] I am of the same thinking, would you care to comment on some of so called charity that we are all asked contribute to like the Christmas meal and so forth, giving gifts, is collective charity a wrong approach?

[Rushdoony] Yes, I refuse to give anything to the Christmas (seal of fun?). First of all, these are humanists, and they are full of brotherhood and love; but very little of that money over the years has gone to minority groups. The fund has been very discriminatory, although they don’t talk about it. And tuberculosis, which is their purpose, is most common in this country among Indians, and the Indians have not gotten their proportionate share over the years. Second, very little of the Christmas seal money gets to the people involved, most of it goes for administration and other funds. Now I understand Los Angeles is one of the few areas in the country where there is some kind of county committee that gives approval of various groups, however this approval that they have to have a limit to what their administrative costs are, I believe applies to the funds that are collected within this area for use in this are, doesn’t apply to the national organization, necessarily. Most of these groups that collect money use the major share of it for administrative cost, very little of it gets into the research purposes or the charitable purposes to which it is ostensibly donated. As a result, as a matter of policy I give to nothing except through my church, or as I know a particular group and have seen their reports. I have with some of these groups asked them if they will give me an auditors report of their use of funds. I have written to some of them, and I have always gotten a long letter stating why this is not practical, and with good reason. They prey on your kindness and on the worthiness of the cause, cancer, or T.B. or whatever it may be, crippled children and so on, and you give because you are moved by the cause, and they refuse to give an accounting of what they do. I think this is very wrong, and I think we need to maintain a similar supervision over church funds.

Now I have gone over the reports of many, many churches as to how, that is denominations, how they use missionary money; and it is appalling, because when you check out the statements in their yearbooks, you find that a very sizeable percentage for example of missionary funds, actually goes for various promotional and administrative costs, so that a very small percentage of it actually fulfills its destined purpose. So I think we need to be very careful when we give.

[Audience Member] Along the same line Doctor, would you comment on perhaps some specific instance of charity on an international scale that seemed to work within Korea, by a group which would be let’s say against these groups that hide these funds, but on the connotation of giving outside the country as opposed to let’s say a worthy cause within the country?

[Rushdoony] Yes, there are many appeals, you mentioned orphanages in Korea. Now, it so happens that the church of which I am a minister, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, has quite an extensive work in Korea. Korea is perhaps right now about the poorest country in the far east, because South Korea has gone through a fearful war, it has had a tremendous migration of peoples from the North before the Communists took over and when they first took over, and South Korea was the rural area, and North Korea was the industrial. So it had this tremendous influx, with no way for these people to make a living; they have faced a fearful problem.

Now, the church that our missionaries is associated with, which is a thoroughly orthodox group over there, is quite a large church, well over 2,000 congregations. They maintain a college and a seminary, and 18 orphanages, and I believe two homes for veterans, disabled veterans. These are men who are armless or legless, or blind. They maintain their own farms and it is an amazing thing, but these people help each other, feed each other, do the work on the farm, and support themselves, after a manner.

Now, we are sending over three missionaries and are cutting back steadily. We had four, it is down to three, and we will drop down to two because the church there is self-supporting. The Korean church has sent a missionary to Formosa. For 18 orphanages, they receive I believe a total of $36,000 from this country, and these are crowded orphanages. A doctor friend of mine who visited over there said he didn’t know what poverty really could be like until he was in Korea, and he said the tremendous amount of theft there is simply based on the fact that so many face the situation: steal or die. And he visited one of the orphanages, and he said that while he was there a young mother came in with her baby. The family was already on the verge of starvation, there were several children; and it was either a question of leave this baby there or it was going to starve to death, they couldn’t feed another mouth. And he said it was a very moving and heartbreaking sight to see that mother put that baby down as she walked into the orphanage, and turn around to the door, and then start back to pick of the baby, and then start crying and put it down because she knew to take it would be to condemn it to death, go through the door, and then he watched her through the window as she would walk down the street and start back, and it took her about half an hour to go to the corner and around the corner and go. That’s the kind of situation they have there.

I am telling you this so that you will realize that these people are nonetheless, with this abject poverty, bearing most of the support for those orphanages. And this is one reason why the church in Korea is such a powerful church. Now I am suspicious of some groups who are spending a great deal of time and money soliciting funds for Korean orphanages, and I think that there is good reason to believe that in many cases they don’t actually have any orphanages there, that they give a portion of the funds to these 18 orphanages, and so are maintaining in that sense orphanage work.

So I would say you’ve got to know the group, because con artists today have moved out of the traditional fields into the charity field, and you can buy if you want to from companies that sell names, huge mailing lists of people who are soft-hearted and will appeal to anything; a lot of charities are set up with no purpose except to solicit funds.

One reason why this problem is so complicated in our area is simply because the churches have mostly broken down, they have departed from the faith; and when you give your money may end up in Mississippi fighting against the people of Mississippi, or in Selma Alabama, so that the churches who through the centuries have handled most of the charity in the world, 99% of it, have done a tremendously responsible work, right now in most instances cannot be trusted. So we have a problem.

Any other questions? Yes.

[Audience Member] …?....

[Rushdoony] I think that is a fine thing, and whether we are for or against the war in Vietnam is beside the point, in fact the very fact that I feel we have no business in Vietnam, I don’t believe we are fighting communism there because if we were interested as I said in fight communism, we would fight it at home. And a government that won’t fight it at home is not interested in fighting it there. And I think those who know this best, many of them are service men, and they need our prayers, they need our help in any way we can give it to them, because they have a very bitter and a difficult task. A friend of mine talked not too long ago with an officer who returned from Vietnam, and he painted a very grim and bitter picture of the situation there, and they certainly need every help we can give them, materially and spiritually. We should pray for them, we should send things to them, by all means.

[New Question and Answer Period] …so that we face very clearly a systematic subversion of the meaning of Christmas. I was interested this past week to get a couple of things, one is The War Cry, the Salvation Army weekly for Saturday October 23, and the cover is very interesting. The UN and the United Nations day, and the qualm that is put here is to celebrate of course the U.N. the editorial: “Get back of the U.N.” and it begins by saying: “We have little or no patience with the many people in this land who apparently get a lot of pleasure out of panning the United Nations.” And instead of believing in the doctrine of sin, and incidentally they quote (Uthont?) at length, they believe in the goodness of man and mans desire for one world peace and so on. “We’d rather be inclined to the belief that men and women in every country under the sun are dominated by a passionate hope for peace and security. They seek a world in which men may grow in strength and in dignity, they want no world in which mars periodically tears the ribbons of bright promise of the future. Mankind if conscious as never before of common roots, common basic desires, common interests and so on.”

And the concluding paragraph: “It is to no time for Christians to fail in their support for the world organization, whoever else may lose heart. It is no time for Christians engaged in the cause of peace to waver with every variation of fortune, or like those who have no faith in God or His Son to make varying opinions and unfounded reports about the U.N. the criteria of their confidence and loyalty. We are disciples of a Lord who is crucified and triumphant, we move in the tradition of men who have stood steadfast in season and out of season, that kind of faith and courage is called for now.”

In other words, what this editorial says, you are not a believer in Jesus Christ if you don’t believe in the U.N. This is what the Salvation Army has become.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, The War Cry the weekly of the Salvation Army. Then this, through the mails from the American Bible Society, The Gospel for Ghana and it a question and answer thing about Ghana, where they are of course placing Bibles. Now, this statement appears in the course of the question and answer: “What kind of government does it, Ghana, have? It is the Independent Republic under the leadership of President Kwame Nkrumah, who has stated his belief that: man is regarded in Africa as primarily a spiritual being.”

Now, you can understand that they would want to say nothing unfavorably about Ghana lest they be barred from working there, but why make a statement like that and quote Nkrumah who has declared himself to be the messiah? And that people have to hail him as ‘the savior’. And to make that kind of a statement is uncalled for, and indicates of course a thoroughly unchristian bias on the part of the American Bible Society. And I think to their own confounding is the verse they have on the cover, Psalm 127:1 “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” and I think everything the Bible society is doing now is in vain.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, Feudalism of course has a long history, a thousand year history. And in a thousand years there are bound to be unfortunate periods, especially when you realize that feudalism incorporated within it all kinds of things, including serfdom. Feudalism was not serfdom, but serfdom was a part of the world as Feudalism found it.

Now, if you get into a discussion of issues and of history, you can go to any history and find a great deal (?). You can discredit the United States just by going to the scandals in Washington in the last 10-20 years. But you cannot lay these things to the charge of constitutionalism, because they have been governed by completely anti constitutionalist movements. The essential element in Feudalism was local self government. Decentralization. And Feudalism and Federalism are basically one and the same thing. This is the thing they emphasize. And to concede at the very start, there is a great deal in the history of Feudalism that we cannot agree with. There is a great deal that we deplore, just as there is a great deal in American history we are not going to try to defend. But the meaning of American history and the meaning of feudalism is not to be found in these events and episodes and periods that are deplorable. The meaning is in a particular faith, a principle, and the basic principle of America is constitutionalism and decentralization, and the basic principle of Feudalism was decentralization, local self government, and Christian law as the higher law, Christianity as the higher law.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, that is a very unfortunate fact that they did associate Feudalism with Socialism, because of course one of the major targets of the Marxists was Feudalism. Marx savagely condemned feudalism and capitalism, and one of the major targets in World War 1 of all the socialists (and Free Masons, and that we must emphatically state) was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Because the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was a very important Empire, was a Feudal empire; it had a king at the top, or Emperor, Franz Joseph; but the various portions had a great deal of autonomy. The Hungarians had their own parliament. Each area had its local self government, and every part of the empire had this very large measure of autonomy, the preservation of local culture, the feudalistic local self government. It was a feudalistic empire, it was the last major relic as it were, of feudalism; and the hatred of the nations for it was intense. And hence, one of the first purposes of the Versailles conference was to destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to destroy this bit of feudalism; and the irony of it is that at the same time they were talking about creating a ‘United States of Europe’ which was nonsense. They had a United States of Central Europe in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they destroyed it.

So this business of preserving local cultures and local self government was simply so much nonsense on the part of the socialists. Yes?

[Audience Member] What is the (?) origin of the word feudalism?

[Rushdoony] It is related, my memory is a little fuzzy here, to the same word as confederation, linking together an alliance, loyalty to someone close by, a personal relationship in the local situation. As I say my memory is very fuzzy at this point, but I vaguely recall that this was something of the meaning. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] What do I think of flying saucers? There has been a great deal written about them, for I think it is over 15 years; and there was a flying saucer convention up in Northern California recently, and I have a sheaf of literature I received from it, from some people who quietly went to the meeting and sat in on them, it is about so high, and I intend after the first of the year to study them. But one thing is very clear in all that literature, and from the reports of the two women who sat through the conference; you have every left wing group involved here, and every occultist group. I am very suspicious of the whole business. There isn’t one responsible group involved in such a concern, or in the whole flying saucer movement, and all these men who have reported the sightings, sooner or later you find out- they are supposed to be very fine men, air force Colonels and so on- sooner or later you find that they are linked up with some occultist group.

Now what they have in mind in all of this I don’t know, but certainly the whole thing reeks of the left and of occultism. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the population explosion. One of these days I would like to give a talk on the subject, it is a very important one; but briefly, the whole myth of the population explosion is based on mathematics, that supposedly population will keep on doubling every so many years until people will be standing, there will be no room for people to sit down on the face of the earth.

Now, this is utter nonsense. Population does not increase mathematically. There are human and there are psychological factors in population increase. First, population as I pointed out before, does not increase in urban areas, it simply does not. So that only one city in the United States has a record, that is over a hundred thousand, of population increase. And that is Salt Lake City. And it is disappearing there. Every other city has to be replenished from the country side. Today about 20% of the population is in the country side and in small towns, but it produces over 50% of the population. When a city passes 25-50 thousand it begins to decline in its ability to reproduce itself. You do not have too many generations reproducing themselves steadily if both sides of the family are city born. In London the most they were able to find was two children who had four generations who were fourth generation Londoners, that is on both sides of the family they had three generations of Londoners. You do need the countryside for survival. Thus as you have an increasing urban population you finally reach a point where population no longer replenishes itself.

Second, your standard of living, your concept of life, has an effect on population. Now, in most of the world population will reach a certain point of density and then it will taper off and die down. Why? Because after a certain point congestion has an adverse effect psychologically on fertility, and there is a drop in human fertility. So that there cannot be a perpetual increase, there simply isn’t that possibility, because it is not a question of mathematics, it is a question of psychology. People are not going to have children if they don’t want them, and there can be conditions when life isn’t livable to people, and birthrates decline markedly, and population has repeatedly gone down in history as a culture reaches a dead level, as it begins to decline, people no longer find life livable, and there is a drastic drop in population. When Rome fell, its population was a fraction of what it had been 2-3 hundred years before, and this was true of every part of the empire.

Today you do not have a population explosion, for example in the United States. We have all kinds of land. We have a problem of surplus production of food. Europe has a high standard of living, and it is not complaining about a population explosion. The areas with the highest density are in the Netherlands, probably, and a few other limited areas. And those areas are not complaining unduly.

Now certainly you cannot talk about a population explosion in South America. It is about as under populated as you can get. The same is true of Africa. Africa is highly under populated. Let’s go to Asia. In Asia today we don’t know what the figures are with regard to China because we have no honest statistics. For a while after the Communist takeover they were encouraging birth control at quite a rate, but now they have abolished it, and possibly the reason is that there has been such a tremendous loss of life due to Communist conditions, Communist created conditions, that they have a problem now, even though they are talking about 600 million, we don’t know.

We have enough evidence that has come out of the U.S.S.R. to realize that the population there is very low as compared to the past. The last census that Stalin took, he killed off every census taker so that the results would never be reported.

Now you might say that there is a population explosion in India, but in India they have vast areas of land that revert to jungle every year because the monkeys and the cows and the other animals, the leopards take over, and they won’t kill them. As far as I am concerned there is no population explosion there, because all they need to do is start eating those cows and shooting some leopards and tigers and monkeys, and they have more than enough land to feed themselves. So it is their own fault, and I think we ought to stop feeding them and let them starve for a while, until they are ready to use their land properly.

Now one of the most crowded areas in the world today is Japan. But I think it is significant that the standard of living in Japan is rising very rapidly. Very rapidly. And the reason for it is that they are improving as a country in their standards, in their productivity, in their economics status. So because they are a producing nation and hard working, the fact that they have so little land is not limiting them, they are living quite a bit better than the people of India who have far, far more land than any Japanese has ever dreamed about having.

So population isn’t the problem, it is bad economics and bad civil governments.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] The reason for screaming about the population explosion is a very good one, an old, old, leftwing trick. First you persuade the people that there is a problem, second you say that you alone can answer it. So that, persuade people that there is a population explosion, and what must be done? There must be a world authority to deal with this. And of course there was a sermon preached here less than a month ago in Los Angeles by a prominent Presbyterian minister, and you may have seen notices of it in the paper, in which he said that all good Christians should stop having babies, and they should go out and adopt the children of some of these welfare people who are having babies. In other words, let the best stock in the country die out, and let us subsidize these incompetents, the degenerates of our culture to have more babies and penalize the Christians by putting them into their homes. And if that isn’t insanity in the name of Christ I have never heard it.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Exactly, and…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Within the past year, a state educational commission under the state board of education called attention in a meeting in San Francisco to the fact that we had planned by 1970 and 75, far, far more schools than there was any possibility of ever filling. In other words, it has become just an automatic matter with the state government to say: “There is going to be this mathematical increase, we have got to have more schools.” Actually the birth rate has been dropping since, I believe, 59; and there is no problem as far as taking care of children in schools, the problem is what to do with the schools that are on the drawing boards.

On top of that, we are also building not only grade schools, but planning to put up universities, state universities all over California at a fantastic rate, and the purpose of course is here and elsewhere to eliminate all kinds of private education in order to control the mind of the youth of tomorrow.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, one of the things planned of course by the U.N. is the mass transfer of populations, so that you will in the old Assyrian and Babylonian style, break down nationalities. And this would mean a mass transfer of various peoples from South East Asia, India and elsewhere, into North America and from Red China as well, so that the one world order can be brought about through this forced integration. The U.N. documents very candidly talk about the mass movements of populations from such areas as the United States into more primitive areas. So there is no doubt they are dreaming insane dreams about breaking down populations in old Assyrian and Babylonian fashion.