Profound Questions and Answers

Explain the first pop. of the Earth.

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 18-24

Genre: Talk

Track: 18

Dictation Name: RR203D8

Location/Venue:

Year:

Any questions now?

[Audience Member] What is the meaning of the word repent: “And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” Does that mean the same as our repent?

[Rushdoony] Not exactly, we are dealing with idioms here, and idioms are very difficult to translate. The significance of this is that God was revolted at what He saw, even though He had created it and ordained it, the whole thing was revolting to Him, and so He was determined to pursue the appointed judgement. Yes?

[Audience Member] A few days ago I happened to get the two way radios (?) and apparently a religious leader …?... was discussing the fact that God was omnipotent, …?... why did He create people, …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, I indicated at the beginning that this table has no possibility of good and evil, but when God created man he created the possibility of evil, because you cannot have moral choice, you cannot have man as man, without the possibility of a world of good and evil. And when these Socialists dream of a world beyond good and evil, they dream of a man dehumanized, totally. So that he will be like the ant heap, or even more like pegs that can be moved around and put in their place, and they are no longer human; because to be a man involves this element of having the capacity to obey God or disobey Him, of accepting His word or rejecting it. Now evil is not a thing so that it can be created as a thing, evil is a possibility in terms of moral choice, and you cannot create man as man, human, capable of being obedient or disobedient, a covenant keeper or a covenant breaker, without evil.

Now, what these people do is to pursue a very silly error, and to speak of evil as a thing instead of a condition. Now God did not create you hungry, nor did He create you full to the point that you are sick because you have overeaten; He created you with the capacity to eat and with the possibility of being hungry or too full. These are conditions that are brought about by our conduct.

Now God of course in His eternal predestination knew that these things would develop, but these aspects of the possibilities of life, rather than things that are created.

[Audience Member] Well in relation to that same question, man people are born incomplete in some manner, or deformed, and …?...

[Rushdoony] Why are they so born?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Right, sin is in the world, and so there is evil in the world, and there is material damage in the world as a result of man’s fall. And this is a consequence of our activity and our action, and these things come about because people have as a result of their own way of living, created these conditions, and these children are the innocent victims of it. This is as a result of wrong standards concerning marriage for example. Now, I am told that a certain breed of dogs throughout Southern California is no longer fit to have because it has been overbred in terms of certain show standards, to the point that the dogs are defective and not worth having, except as showpieces.

Now this is a product of man’s sin, rather than Gods creation. There are some peoples, who with old world standards concerning marriage, such as that you should not marry unless you know something about the ancestry of the prospective girl or boy, the bride or the groom, for so many generations back; where any such thing, any deformity is almost unheard of, and some kinds are never heard of. But in our culture you see, we have for some time been marrying in terms of romantic rather than Godly and sensible ideas.

At the end of the Middle ages, at the time when Luther began his work, you had a tremendous birth throughout Europe, and had had for some generations, of human monsters. Why? Because you’d had a couple centuries without any strong Christian faith, a gradual drifting into the kind of thing we have today, romanticism. And you had all kinds of cults; you had your Beatniks then, you had your Goliards, the wandering student subversives who would go from one university to another across Europe to do nothing but to subvert it. You had your nudist cults all over the place, and some of them parading openly; in fact they had parades in Amsterdam in the late Middle Ages, and the community had a lot of trouble with these people. You had your Communist movements and Communist groups; and for a time they took over certain parts of Western Europe. And you had as a result of this total breakdown in Luther’s day a fantastic amount of fearful births.

But little by little these things began to disappear as we had Godly standards. Now because our standards are breaking down, we are having more and more of a problem, because marriage is not something you enter into in terms of obedience to God in establishing a Godly household, of rearing good, health, Godly children unto the honor and glory of God, but in terms of physical appetites. “He or she looks good to me, and I don’t care what his past or background is, I am going to marry you.” And the consequences are devastating.

Now, what about the children who are born of these? We have indications, hints from scripture, that these people because they do not have the capacity, are like children who die in infancy with the Lord; beyond that we cannot go. We have hints in that direction.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes there is. Now, the Mosaic law specified that there was a right of divorce for uncleanness. Now what constituted uncleanness, that is the point of debate. And in the New Testament the same word appears as fornication. Now in Matthew 19, I believe verse 9, our Lord says that divorce is forbidden except for cause of fornication, which is the same as the Old Testament word for uncleanness. What does this mean? Some people say this is adultery, but if it had been adultery, you see, our Lord would have specified adultery, which has a very open, obvious, restricted meaning.

Now, there are a number of possible translations for fornication; one means sexual relations, another can refer to homosexuality; others, other meanings refer to lasciviousness, to a flagrant and anti-Christian disobedience and contempt of authority, to desertion. Now on these grounds from the Biblical perspective, I believe divorce is justified. It is not in terms of: “Well, I don’t love him or her any more.” or: “I would like a change of partners.” But it has to be this serious ground which is specified in scripture.

Now the great conflict in the church today is that some prefer to say no ground whatsoever. Now this is being holier than God, which I think is Phariseeism compounded. Others would restrict it only to adultery because it is simpler to deal with it on that basis. But the point is our Lord did not say adultery, He said fornication, which in the Greek is ‘Pornea’ and we have to go in terms of what that word means.

[Audience Member] What would the word be in Hebrew?

[Rushdoony] I don’t recall now, but it is uncleanness as it is translated into the English. But ‘pornea’ is used in the Septuagint, so you know it was regarded as identical. Any other questions?

[Audience Member] Could you expound politely on the flood concept you hold with …?...

[Rushdoony] No I don’t believe there is any ground in scripture for the limited flood, there are many many people today, Bernard Ram for example is one of them, who try to get around your unbelieving scientists to the flood by saying: “Well, there was just a flood in that area, so there was a valley or two flooded, and Noah got into his boat instead of heading for the mountains or the next valley.” This is nonsense, it is reducing scripture to child’s play. The scripture I think speaks very clearly that it was a universal flood, that it covered the entire face of the earth.

This has been dealt with by several writers, I think perhaps the best single work is Whitcomb and Morris The Genesis Flood. In the first part of it, Whitcomb dealing with the Biblical evidence in the first 90 or so pages, demonstrates conclusively that the Biblical data clearly speaks of a universal flood. Then in the second part of the book, some three hundred or so pages, Dr. Morris from the scientific perspective points out that the flood best accounts for the facts of geology. It is an excellent book and I commend it to your reading.

But Dr. (Lamberts?) formerly was professor of Genetics as UCLA, then went on to become chief of research for Germaine Laboratories, and is the head of the Creation Research Society, a group of scientists, mostly research men, who subscribe to Creationism, the six day concept of Creationism, and are top-notch scholars; and their journal by the way is very interesting reading.

They have in the current issue several interesting articles, one of them deals with Carbon 14 dating, and heretofore of course a number of people have pointed out, how if you get back more than just a few thousand years, 2-3 thousand years, it isn’t very accurate.

Now one of the men in the society has reported on the fact that young trees about 5-6 years old near airports in big cities, have through the carbon 14 dating method been established to be 2-3 thousand years old; and this is because of the jet blasts on takeoff; these trees absorb a tremendous amount of carbon, and trees near a freeway apparently will come out to be quite old too. So you can see how this doesn’t take into consideration all kinds of factors. Yes?

[Audience Member] I don’t know if you recall an article from the …?...

[Rushdoony] As I recall his statement, his idea was accommodationism, in other words God accommodated His thinking to the age, so because they were ignorant and childish He spoke to them as though they were children, but if God were talking to us very wise people nowadays, He would speak on a higher level. Well, I think this is ridiculous. I don’t believe that people in Abrahams day were any less intelligent than we are, and one of the silliest mistakes that we can make, and which people very often make, is to assume that children don’t have an IQ equal to that of adults. A child’s mind is just as intelligent, just as capable as an adults; the only difference is he hasn’t had as much material accumulating in his memory to work with. But it has been demonstrated, the Puritans demonstrated very clearly that a child of 6-7 could learn Greek and Hebrew and Trigonometry and everything else. If you told him he was expected to learn it he did, because he looked to the world around him and he figured these were the standards he had to meet, and he met them. But you couldn’t today because they are convinced that all they can do at that age is read: “Jump Spot Jump”.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, there is no accomadationism in the Bible, it speaks with maturity to mature people. Now the only problem we face is that the idioms sometimes are foreign to us, because idioms sometimes when you translate them from one language to another sound outlandish or they sound peculiar, and this is a rather ridiculous instance, but I recall some years ago when I was in college, I went to an opera in San Francisco with some friends and they had this other guest, a rather charming woman, and I was introduced to her and my name sounded very foreign to her, and she assumed that I might be a foreign student or something. She was sitting next to me and she got very restless, and she leaned over and whispered: “You’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got ants in my pants tonight.” And then she started to blush, because she thought: “Well, here’s a foreigner, a foreign student perhaps, and he is wondering literally what that means!” So she started to explain herself and the more she explained herself the worse it got. Now, you can see how if you said something like that to someone in France in French, the misunderstanding it would create.

Now there are idioms in the Bible which we need to understand, and sometimes we fail to understand them; but this isn’t a major problem, it is a very minor and incidental one, and many of the idioms of the Bible have now become idioms in English as a result of centuries of reading the Bible. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] It was spoken by our Lord at the Sermon on the Mount, and repeated by Him later on elsewhere, except for the closing phrase. So that it is definitely a part of the inspired word of God, going back to the early days of His ministry. It is the only prayer we as Christians pray without saying: “In Jesus name.” because there we pray in His words. We are summoned to pray in Jesus name, because it is in Him that we have access to God the Father, He is the mediator. But in this prayer we do not pray in His name because we pray in His words. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, there is no real difference, you see, what they used liturgically and some of the Book of Common Prayer also, some portions of it use it this way, instead of saying: “For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever amen” they just stop: “But deliver us from evil.” Because our Lord used it once in that sense when He was also talking on prayer, He just gave the beginning to that point, and both forms appear, both in the Catholic liturgy and the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Now this sometimes disconcerts people who aren’t used to it, but it is Biblical in both cases.

[New Question and Answer Period]

I was reading the other day, to change the subject now, in the Diary of Harold L. Ickes if you remember who the man was, this in volume 1, and I thought this passage was very interesting, to indicate how well they knew then what they were doing. The date for this entry is Thursday October 5, 1933. “I took occasion to tell the President that if he only had a bare break of luck so that we didn’t hit any more economic bumps and were able to hold our own and perhaps pull out gradually, his administration would go down in history as one of the profound and far reaching social changes. I told him there wasn’t another man in the United States who could lead the country at this time along the paths that it ought to tread. Of course he demurred to this, but I profoundly believe it to be true. He said that what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia, and even some things that were being done under Hitler in Germany, but we were doing them in an orderly way. I said to him that I didn’t know whether as a candidate he realized that he had the capacity to give the kind of leadership that he is giving, or that possessing the ability he would give it; but I was sure that the country didn’t elect him for any such reason, but for entirely different ones. He said that of course he had been thinking along these lines for a good many years, but it was evident that he himself had not anticipated the problems that have arisen, nor am I sure that he was certain in his own mind when he came into office how he would meet those problems if they did arise.”

I thought it was interesting that that early in the New Deal before a year was up, they were openly discussing the fact that they were imitating the Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany, and the only difference: “We are doing it in an orderly way.”

Yes?

[Audience Member] Along the same line, President Woodrow Wilson wrote a letter, and I don’t remember the recipient of the letter, but the paraphrasing part of the context, he was making an exposition on the fact that he had picked (landromart?) that that had to be a representative to (Bolshev edie?) in Russia immediately after the takeover, was a system and a noble experiment, checked very closely into (?) background, and made sure he was in very great alliance with their prospectives in Russia. (?).

[Rushdoony] That is why we need judgement.

[New Question and Answer Period]

When God speaks of Canaan as the land flowing with milk and honey which is the glory of all lands, this sounds strange to us because we have all seen pictures of Palestine, and it doesn’t look like that kind of a glorious land; dry, barren hills, an eroded country, it doesn’t look too good and it isn’t, because it isn’t the land that God gave to Israel. Because God declared through the prophets, including Ezekiel, that the land would be cursed if they continued in their faithlessness, as they did after the captivity. And so that land which was once a particularly rich land, wooded with a tremendous amount of wildlife, lush vegetation and wildflowers, streams that flowed continually, is now an almost treeless, dry, barren area. It is hard for us indeed to realize that once all of Arabia was forest land, and today there isn’t even sand there, it is eroded down to the bare rock, much of it.

And it is because it has experienced the curse of God, and Babylon of course is the same; Babylon was the city set in many waters; today it is a dry, barren, desert area. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, in England there is quite openly an association of witches, they have written about their faith, and it is definitely a worship of evil. There is a great deal of that, there are black masses performed regularly and churches desecrated to that purpose, and this is spreading very rapidly in this country. The church life in England of course is virtually dead; the church of England today has very few people attending; ten-fifteen years ago most of them came to have their children baptized, but even that is dropping off. I was interested recently to read, I believe it was in Harpers for- a couple of months ago, an article on the church at Woolwich written by an episcopal rector who was the rector of that church. Now the Bishop of Woolwich is John Robinson, who wrote Honest to God who believes in the death of God type of theology and the new morality, and it is significant that this church was virtually deserted, quite a sizeable building, they put in quite a few thousand into renovating it, they made one part of it an espresso bar and so on, in order to make it into a community center; and they gathered together a sizeable team of rectors to cover the entire area, a sizeable community. Now they have just barely 50 who come to that huge sanctuary, and it is because there is nothing there; and this is true throughout England, and these Satanist groups actually have a far greater hold on the people than the Christian faith does. It is only in background a Christian country, it isn’t in reality; and this is happening throughout western Europe. It is going to happen here very rapidly, because as this new theology is taking over in the churches in this country, there is a very rapid drop in the attendance at your mainline churches; since 1960 the drop has been increasing at a marked degree, it will continue to accelerate because they have nothing to offer and it is coming home to people, and they are beginning to realize too that they have nothing as a result of all their years of church going, and they are not sure they want anything. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, all kinds of research are being conducted now, supposedly to apprehend the hidden powers in nature, and to develop your hidden secret powers; and they bring people closer and closer to outright Satanism in this sort of thing.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, now we can explain it by using an analogy; when we speak of grace we are speaking of power from above, but the conclusion that these people are coming to is: “Yes, but why not power from below? This is where real power is.” And so they are denying the word of God, the source of power from above, God the Triune God, and they are going to explore the sources of power from below. And they are restoring magic, they are restoring every kind of occultist and demonic cult. They are actually talking in terms of cannibalism.

Now this was in something one of you handed me recently from the L.A. Times about a group of researchers here in Southern California, I don’t remember at which University, Cal Tech or UCLA or USC, who were conducting experiments with worms, and they were training worms to go through certain problems, and then they were taking the worms that had learned these lessons and grinding them up and feeding to the other worms, and they claimed that they learned something, in other words they absorbed the memory of these worms they ate; and of course they were jumping to conclusions, because their evidence I am told actually didn’t prove anything, so what they expressed was wishful thinking. But you realize what that means, that the cannibals are right, if you want to get power, eat someone who is a powerful man and you get his strength as well as yours. But the fact that a group of scientists would seriously spend thousands of dollars in such research indicates the demonic aspect of their thinking.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Thank you, then it was not Southern California that was responsible this time.

[Audience Member] One brief comment on the witches, they invaded Los Angeles, (?) with a bookkeeper a couple weeks ago, and he was telling me that there are 250 witches in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, and they have divided themselves up into 7 coves, he called them coves.

[Rushdoony] Yes, coves or covens.

[Audience Member] Yeah well coves were organized in Los Angeles, and they performed their sorceries up in Santa Monica mountain, (?).

[Rushdoony] Well, perhaps the Encyclopedia Britannica has in mind with this experiment that the Britannica would be good eating. Yes?

[Audience Member] Talking about the Sabbath …?... didn’t call it the Sabbath …?...

[Rushdoony] It was the creation Sabbath, you are right, but as far as men were concerned a Sabbath was not instituted until the Passover, so there is no mention until you come to the Passover…

[Audience Member] But the word Sabbath gets …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, just this one in Genesis 1 you have the seventh day when creation was ended and God rested. But as far as being instituted as a separate day of worship for men you do not get it, and it doesn’t appear in the Bible until the first Passover in Egypt, and God says in this passage through Ezekiel that He gave them His Sabbaths at that time. But the institution of the Sabbath was with the first Passover. This was their day of salvation, and that is why our Sabbath is not Saturday because our day of redemption is not the Passover in Egypt as it was in Israel, our day of salvation is the day of resurrection, so that the first day of the week is our Sabbath.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the world before the flood of course was a world of far superior conditions materially and physically, when men lived to be 8-900, almost a thousand years old; and having this longevity they were taking advantage of the fact that the day of reckoning, of death was a long ways off, and they were living in utter heedlessness of God. And so God destroyed that world and we have the more limited lifespan.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, and of course evil, all the same reasserted itself because man was fallen and is fallen. But God began His plan of salvation, and through His chosen line, the line of Abraham, instituted this program. Yes?

[Audience Member] We had a discussion the other evening in Genesis, about the creation of Adam and Eve, and they had two sons, and then the world was populated, this leaves a lot to your imagination or your credibility whichever way you want to put it; could you explain that?

[Rushdoony] Yes, because the scripture only mentions those who are of significance to the narrative rather than all births. You have to realize that they had many, many children; after all living as they did for 900 or more years as Adam and Eve did, and having a different type of life condition, the number of children they had was quite numerous. As a result, when Cain and Abel were well along in years and were farming and so on, and running their stock, there were other children; a great many of them in the area, children of Adam and Eve. But they are not of any significance to the narrative so they are not mentioned; except for Seth who is mentioned, because the line of the faithful, from Seth to Christ is his line, and therefore he is important.

[Audience Member] Was that where they got their wives, then, from their sisters?

[Rushdoony] Yes, from their sisters. At the beginning yes. These were other daughters of Adam and Eve that these men took as wives, and genetically it was alright at that time because there was no problem of inbreeding genetically; because you see since all the potentialities of the human race were present in Adam and Eve, the gene potential of each of them was such that their children were scarcely related. You see, our gene potential, our heredity, is a more concentrated one; but theirs had all the potentialities of all races, and so for a time there was no law against such marriages, and then of course it was instituted.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, Seth and Shem are related names, and this was the line of promise, and the Egyptians made it to stand for the devil because they rejected the faith that was involved in the line of Seth and Shem. Yes?

[Audience Member] Would you comment on giving up the ghost, such as Christ on the cross, and Luke’s account of the death of Judas Iscariot …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, that was an expression, an idiom in the Greek for dying and the separation of body and soul. So that according to Biblical faith, when we die there is a separation of body and soul, and the soul goes to heaven or to hell as the case may be; and this is what is referred to as giving up the ghost. Then of course at the end of the world we put on a resurrection body.

Now in the interim between the time of death and the new creation, we are spoken of as resting in the Lord; in other words it is not a time of action. But with the new creation and the resurrection body the scripture says: “And His servants shall serve Him” but in a glorious universe in which there is no curse. So that we resume activity, but activity without any curse or any burden to it.

[Audience Member] I was under the impression that the soul could actually die and the body be restored …?...

[Rushdoony] I don’t quite get the point, could you repeat that?

[Audience Member] In other words it refers to (?) soul as still alive.

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, the sense in which that is said, and you are right, is spiritual. In other words, he can be spiritually dead, spiritually lost as far as God is concerned, but as far as the physical death is concerned, it doesn’t refer to that. In other words the termination of existence is not what is meant by it. But the termination of any relationship to God, or being dead in relationship to God, is the better way of putting it. Does that clarify it, or does it make it more confused?

[Audience Member] Well the only part that confuses me is if you have a dead soul (?) does it still remain latent until the physical death at which time you give up the ghost? Or does that precede the physical death?

[Rushdoony] He is alive as a soul, but he is dead in relationship to God; so it is not a literal death but a figurative death. In other words, let’s put it this way: You are dead to Johnson. He can’t talk to you. There is no meaningful relationship between you and Johnson, so you can say in a sense you are dead to him. Certainly I am dead to Johnson. He was in the same hotel with me this week in Houston Texas, and he was a little too close. (laughter)

Now, in this sense we speak of dead souls, we are speaking of them being dead to God, and every sinner is in some sense spiritually dead, he is a dead soul, and he is brought to life by Jesus Christ. But he is very much alive as he deals with the world of sin and as he deals with Satan, he is alive in that area. Does that help? Yes?

[Audience Member] Did you read the article …?...

[Rushdoony] No I didn’t, I didn’t.

I was very much dismayed, since you mentioned Billy Graham, to talk to one man who went to the presidential breakfast where Billy Graham spoke, to Johnson and the assembled Congressmen and Senators; and he had two verses as his texts: “I come not to bring peace but a sword” and “I am come to cast fire upon the earth, would that it be kindled.” And this minister said he had still not gotten over the shock of that meeting, because this fire which Jesus came to cast upon the earth and this sword to divide men was ‘the Civil Rights movement.’ If that isn’t a perversion of scripture I have never heard of one. Any other questions?

[Audience Member] Along the line of the Arab terrain in Canaan, Goshen has more or less kept its soil (?)

[Rushdoony] I couldn’t say, although I would say this; I don’t know to what extent it is still fertile, it has undoubtedly gone downhill, however the whole Nile valley and adjacent areas are one of the two most fertile areas of the world, the San Joaquin Valley and the Nile Valley. These are the prize areas, agriculturally in the world. And it is significant, the difference in the life around the two, and the wealth that this produces and the poverty you see there. However Egypt as a whole has gone downhill from ancient times, it no longer is the land it once was. In fact, the whole of North Africa has; we do know definitely that North Africa at the time of Abraham was a very heavily populated area, the Sahara I mean, not just the coastal places, and the mountains were well-forested, and it was an area of orchards and vineyards, and there are a few books you can get in Libraries that have explored some of these areas and called attention to traces of the civilizations that once existed there. But they destroyed the area, they stripped mountains of trees, overgrazed the country side, eroded the land and it turned into drifting sand and bare rock.

It is a staggering thing, but even as late as the Roman era, we know of course that Carthage was a powerful empire based in that area, and there were areas that were still very rich and fertile; it was still fairly rich in some limited areas at the time of the movement of the Scandinavians and Germanic tribes in North Africa, and they moved there because it was so desirable, and they helped further the trends because they just took over the grazing habits and ways, and abuse of the land that the people they conquered had; and some of them are squatting there now, much poorer than their ancestors who conquered the land, and far more stupid. Their ancestors at least were able people. The Ber Ber tribes, are descendants, among others, of some of these Northern European peoples. That whole area is just devastated now, and the interesting thing is that there are many, many parts of Western USA that don’t get any more rainfall than the Sahara does; some parts of the Sahara will get up to ten inches of rain, and look at its condition, it has been destroyed.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, they did deliberately, this was a Roman policy, they did it to Jerusalem too. But there were other policies that led to the destruction. One of the things that destroys land is the destruction of private property, the private property of a small family size basis, where people use the soil with respect; and they have gained the soil through hard work, not because it has been handed to them. Because Mexico has destroyed vast areas of agricultural land by giving the land to the peasants that broke up the rich estates in the twenties; 500 families of the old Spaniards owned a good deal of the farm land in Mexico, and it was beautiful farm land then. Now it has been divided, and 500 acres is the largest holding, and most of them are of a very few acres. They have increased their production, they have done it be steadily destroying the soil, they have stripped the mountain sides in many areas, and in not too many years they are going to face a tremendous crisis because of the devastation their policy has wrought. They gave the land to small owners who had never earned it, didn’t have the capacity to maintain it. And this is the kind of thing that has destroyed the earth over and over again, where you have a destruction of the family owned, religiously oriented private property. Over and over again this has been the case, and it is certainly true now.

We hear a great deal about soil conservation and reforestation, but the worst areas by and large in the country today are in the national forests. Your best forests in the west are (warehouser?) forests. They are not the national forests. And the state of Maine which is virtually all privately owned forest land, there is more acreage in forest there now than when the white man first landed, and it is in better forests, the trees are in better condition. And that is one reason why the Federal government is trying to take over a great deal of Maine and make it a national forest, because it is an offense to them that this stands there. Once it becomes a national forest, if you are a powerful politician you can run thousands of head of cattle on that land all year round without owning an acre of land of your own, if you know how to pull the right strings. You can get all kinds, not only grazing rights, but cutting rights, if you can pull the right (?), and this destroys the land. But in private ownership it is maintained.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?... India has what we consider a non-Christian attitude …?... people maintain their land by family generations.

[Rushdoony] A very good point, India is an exception to what I’ve said, but it in a sense proves the point, because here you have the reverse: because they believe in reincarnation, they believe in killing nothing because you might be killing you cousin or your mother or your grandmother, they therefore allow the wild animals to take over their farms and destroy them, and they will move out when the man eating tigers move into an area. As a result the jungle reclaims a great deal of agricultural land regularly, and this is a major problem. Some areas have been eroded in India that have been held by non-Hindu’s, that is people who are say, Muslims or held some other faith. But where you have the Hindu faith, instead of developing the land they allow nature to drive them out and they end up in the same position more or less, they starve.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, they simply tax the tenants and get their income that way. Of course they are virtually finished, now. India has taken over to all practical intent their lands, and gives them a kind of a pension, and when they die off, that’s it.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] And, then there is another point, we are shipping a fantastic amount of wheat to India to keep them alive; wheat and rice and various grains. But did you know that the rats of India are eating annually far more grain than we ship over? But they don’t kill the rats. That is the insanity of the situation. And this is what…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, they will not kill, they will not kill any living thing. In reincarnation, you see, you reincarnate upward or downward in terms of the way you live, so that you can go down, down, down if you live a bad life; and then you progress up, up, up. Then for example if you are a poor man in this reincarnation and you live very, very devoutly you will be a somewhat richer man and maybe you will get to be a Maharaja, but the way most of the Maharaja’s have behaved, they probably get reincarnated as rats! But finally you reach oblivion, and Mahatma Gandhi felt that since he had been, he believed, very, very holy, that this was going to be the last reincarnation for him and he was going to be delivered into Nirvana, total death. That was his hope. Well, I think we know where he is.

[Audience Member] (?) the Pharisees in chapter 3, (?) two groups in the Pharisees, one in the original (?) and one just Pharisee, and I was wondering if you were in agreement with this, that perhaps Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were of the true Pharisee …?...

[Rushdoony] I think that is a rather artificial distinction. The Pharisees were a part in Israel, and there were three main religious parties, the two main ones were the Sadducees and Pharisees, and the Essenes were a third and relatively minor party which we know more about nowadays through the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Now, both, well, all three of them essentially believed in salvation by works, that man was going to work out his salvation by creating the right kind of social order, and personal order; so that all three were more or less concerned with politics; the Essenes more with building their own exclusive society. There were degrees and variations in the kind of Pharisaic faith that existed. But essentially the Pharisees were united. The basic difference was that the Pharisees said that they believed the Bible with any variation, but they made it of none effect, as our Lord said, with their tradition; whereas the Sadducees did not profess to hold to the Bible, so that the Sadducees we might say were the honest modernists, and the Pharisees were the dishonest modernists.

Now, since these were the only religious perspectives that were held at that time, either people just paid no attention to these things and went their own way and became humble believers completely disregarding all of this, as you have today in many of the apostate churches; or else as scholars and no doubt Nicodemus was one such, they studied all these things but perpetually seeking, knowing that this was not the answer, but at least saying: “Well, Phariseeism is better than the Sadducees, but what is the answer? This is not it.”

So that, to find a good element in Phariseeism I doubt, and this is the kind of think that Finkelstein has extensively taught, and has become basic with many Christian pastors, in fact Finkelstein’s two volume work on the Pharisees has had more influence on theological education in the past generation than many another book. But this is essentially Finkelstein’s position that we mustn’t look at the absurdities in Phariseeism, basically the main tradition was a great and a glorious thing, and Jesus simply represented Phariseeism at its best. And of course, this I think is nonsense. Yes?

[Audience Member] I get the feeling that there really was a greater distinction or class in the Pharisees, Gamaliel and Nicodemus were actually close, the (brother?) of Pharisees in the night trial in the Sanhedrin, it was willingness on the part of Jesus to communicate for instance in this case with Nicodemus, whereas in other cases He specifically wouldn’t communicate at all to the Pharisees in favor of the (?) so it would occur to me that there must have been some return (?) of some sort.

[Rushdoony] No, and Gamaliel never did make a break, Gamaliel stayed with them; so that all you can say is that there were a few superior men among them, but the overwhelming majority, in fact virtually all, stayed with Phariseeism. And those who did become converts became a problem within the church, because they wanted to bring their Phariseeism with them, and these were the Judaizers who went around and made so much trouble for Paul, and they finally separated themselves from the church and formed a couple of separate sects, the Edomites and others, and finally disappeared from history. But Phariseeism was in essence hostile to the Biblical faith. The fact that there were some superior men among them, men who were superior to Phariseeism, shouldn’t be attributed to Phariseeism. In other words what Nicodemus was, was not because he was a Pharisee, but because he was dissatisfied with Phariseeism.

And this was the reality of the situation. But there is no evidence of anything there in Phariseeism, that was at all of a good character, Phariseeism can best be described as Talmudism, because Talmudism is the quintessence of the Pharisaic attitude. It was humanism applied to the faith, but using the form of the faith.

[Audience Member] I still think there was a distinction because of the willingness to communicate and not communicate.

[Rushdoony] Yes, but this was not a part of Phariseeism, and this was my point, but the fact that these men were superior, and discontented with what they were getting. The Pharisees were very unpopular, even with their own people, because of this tremendous pride that characterized them. And the Galileans in particular had no use for the Pharisees, the Galileans took a very practical attitude towards religion, and that is why you find the frequent phrases of contempt for anyone who was inclined to disagree with them, and of course Nicodemus was asked: “Art thou also of Galilee?” “Are you one of these who has no use for our tradition and our beliefs?” and Phariseeism was characterized also by a tremendous pride. The Pharisee was of course a consummate scholar, and as a scholar he despised the common people because they didn’t have his learning, so that it was almost a position that: “You are cattle and we are men, and as cattle you have some status if you obey us.”

The pride that was inherent in Phariseeism was tremendous. One of my favorite stories concerns one of the Pharisees who was regarded as the closest to perfection of any, in any of the schools of rabbis; and there was one point at which they said he lacked perfection: he was not humble. He knew how learned he was, how rigidly he kept the law, and never failed to let people know it. So the one thing keeping him back from perfection was his lack of humility. So after he was criticized on this score by a number of other rabbis he began to put on a great façade of humility, and to speak of himself as ‘the most unworthy of scholars,’ ‘the least of rabbis’ and so on and so forth, and gradually had acquired quite a reputation as being humble, and now the perfect rabbi. There was no rabbi anywhere to equal him; and on one occasion when he was being introduced as ‘the greatest of rabbis, the rabbi who had come to the point of perfection in his keeping of the law’ and so on and so forth, after the long introduction was finished, but no mention made of his humility, the rabbi before the man could sit down tugged at his robe and said: “You forgot to say that I am humble, too!” (laughter) And that was Phariseeism, and it did have this tremendous pride.

It was confident it was saving itself, and that is why of course everything that Jesus said was an offense to them, and that is why Jesus singled them out over and over again as epitomizing all that was evil in Judaism. Yes?

[Audience Member] Not to harp on this subject, but I think in my parallel, (?) properly put it, but I was contending not that perhaps the end of business of Phariseeism (?) but as in our modern day pagan society and the Free Mason movement, the bulk of the people are intent on doing what has been shoved into them (?) pseudo collectivism, and they believe in this world government (?) toward that end, however there is a very small 3-4% who sit quietly in the background using these people as fronts, and who are in full knowledge of where they are going, this cult of chaos plays within, perhaps this synagogue of Satan was a very specific thing as (?) pointed out within the Pharisees themselves; but were totally aware that Phariseeism was a front, and that behind it lay those within them who were the devil themselves.

[Rushdoony] No, I don’t think we can think we can make that escape into distinction, because no one was called a Pharisee unless he went through years of intensive study in the Rabbinic method of interpretation; therefore the average person was not called a Pharisee, he could be called a follower of the Pharisees, but he was not a Pharisee unless he was a rabbi or a lawyer who had dedicated years and years to this kind of study, so that the Pharisees were an elite group who had dedicated years simply to the study of the law, in terms of their concept of interpretation.

Now, as I indicated earlier, there were earnest people in their midst, who believed this earnestly and yet were discontented. This does not absolve them of the responsibility, Paul for example said he was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and as such persecuted the church; Nicodemus was a Pharisee, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t change, and we must say that before he became a believer he did participate in the fall of man, he was a member of a fallen humanity, and although we might say he was better than most he was still a sinner, and he was party to all that was evil in Israel. This was his regeneration, and we can’t nullify the fact that there was a before and after in the life of Nicodemus, there was a point at which he became saved; before that he was a Pharisee, one of the better ones but still a Pharisee, a party to everything there. After that, a Christian. So that you cannot give credit to what he became to one group within Phariseeism, but to Jesus Christ, to His regenerating power.

[Audience Member] But I was going in the other direction, not towards Christ, but towards Satan himself, for instance in the Pharisees of today, the holiest of the holy (?) and yet most Pharisees today are not (?) they are not learning in that school, they know of it of course, but you have the Orthodox which are anti Christ certainly, but still not pro-Satanist, whereas the (?) is definitely pro Satanist.

[Rushdoony] You can’t use Satan as a test, you have to use Christ; anyone who is not for Christ is with Satan, so that anyone who is not a believer, who is not a Christian, whether he says that he is a fine man or whatever he claims to stand for, he is with Satan; and whether he is actively and consciously or just as one of the crowd drifting is irrelevant as far as the final issues are concerned. So that we cannot use the yardstick of Satan, we have to use the yardstick of Christ and say: “Where do you stand in terms of Him?” and as far as the ultimate issues are concerned, the shades of variation make no difference. You can be guilty of killing one man or guilty of killing ten, but you are still a murderer, and the penalty is death.

[Audience Member] but Biblically can’t you be guilty of murder through manslaughter and suffer a lesser penalty (?).

[Rushdoony] Yes, but I didn’t speak of manslaughter but murder. Manslaughter is different, it is accidental and not willful intent. And every man is either for or against Christ by willful intent, he has decided to neglect Him, to turn his back on Him; or he has by the Holy Spirit accepted Him. We have to make Christ the standard. He is the dividing line. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?... reference to Nicodemus …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, and the scripture says that this is the work of the Holy Spirit that brings them to Christ, that they are dead in their sins and trespasses; that that which brings them to Christ, the dissatisfaction, everything, is itself the work of the Holy Spirit. So that from the time they begin to show dissatisfaction, to the time of their regeneration, the Holy Spirit is moving within them, because a dead man cannot bring himself to life, and Paul says emphatically that men apart from Christ are spiritually dead in their sins and trespasses.

[Audience Member] I was thinking of a book I read many years ago, Christ Among Men by …?... most mundane cases men in the gutter who had no conception of …?... how do you explain those cases?

[Rushdoony] You have to explain all cases in terms of the supernatural, the Holy Spirit of God. This is the only way you can explain it. Because in every case this is it, it is by water and by the Spirit. There is the outward that we see and that we witness, and there is inward which is the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.

I could go on and delineate a good many more very dramatic cases of people who have been saved under the strength of circumstances, I saw among the Indians people who had never given any evidence of Christian faith; in one case a young woman who came to a meeting with a couple of friends, came in late so that she was there for only part of the service, I think she’d had several drinks when she came in; she asked two or three questions as she went out, and when I answered her she said: “That’s true. It has to be true and I believe it.” Which I thought was a very off handed way to deal with the whole thing; she said it rather thoughtfully, but I didn’t think I would see her again because she was a particularly wild young girl who was married to a young man from California who was part Indian, and the next Sunday to my surprise she did walk into the service, quite late, but she was there. She was there about three Sunday’s after that, very earnestly, very happily, listening to everything that was said and giving every evidence of regeneration; and I believe it was the fourth Sunday after that, she was not there; and I thought: “Well, maybe it was just a flash in the pan.” But I found she was in the hospital, she had (pleurisis?) of the brain. In other words syphilis struck her brain. She died a long, lingering, and very painful death, and yet conscious to the last, and about the most radiant death I have ever seen, so that she almost glowed. And there was only one thing you could say about her, she was a Christian, and she died most beautifully, and even those who came around her, Indians, medicine men and all, were moved by the whole thing. This was supernatural, she had never been inside of the church or inside of a Sunday School, never listened to any preaching before, but she was saved. And in that case as in every case it is the work of God, of the Holy Spirit.

Now many, many such cases could be cited; sometimes it is dramatic, sometimes it is gradual. This varies from person to person. But in every case it is the work of God, and this is the answer to (ministry?). Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Some people are definitely and genuinely saved as a result of Billy Grahams crusade, but on the whole in most cases it isn’t too lasting nor is it too real, because the weakness there is that there is a very real spirit of compromise, and Billy Graham does very definitely work with modernists, with the council of churches, and in fact the council of churches usually get a cut out of his crusades, so that they are as a result quite favorable to everything that he does; and he avoids offending any of these people. Not too long ago when he was in Washington D.C. in February for the Presidential breakfast, the essence of his message was that the fire that our Lord had come to cast upon earth that was going to divide men for and against Him was the Civil Rights movement, and that we had to be for it.

Now, I think the best answer to Billy Graham is what John said in 2nd Epistle, the 10th verse: “If there come any unto you and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed, for he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.”

Now, I think that states it plainly enough. Anyone who compromises, anyone who works with such people as Billy Graham does we cannot be party to. And yet Paul admits that by the grace of God, even some who were hostile to him and basically a self seeking people who were not true Christians, by their preaching sometimes souls were saved. This is God’s work, it is never man’s work, so God is pleased to do it sometimes through the foolishness of men. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?... a man who is still a young man, and over ten years has become very obsessed in reading the Bible and its meaning to him, and …?... what he should do, and …?... believes very strongly in his Bible but he has four versions of it which he studied thoroughly, and he tells me that …?... he tells me that for ten years he has prayed that he would receive the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost, and yet he hasn’t. Now, I think there is no question about this man’s sincerity and his diligence, and what (?) in his case now is the instruction.

[Rushdoony] He is laboring under some very false doctrines, there are some churches that believe that first you are saved, and then you have a special baptism of the Holy Spirit. Most of these churches though not all tend to be of the Pentecostal variety.

[Mount Olive Tape Library] We regret that the tape ran out at this point. [Tape Ends]