Profound Questions and Answers

Judgment begins at the House of God

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 10-24

Genre: Talk

Track: 10

Dictation Name: RR206G14

Location/Venue:

Year:

Are there any questions now? Yes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] We do see them, because first of all we are defaulting on our power. In other words, a child can run headlong all over the house and tear the house apart because the parent is not keeping the child in line; any time the parent gets up and gives the child a good firm whack in the proper place, order is very quickly restored. Thus we who have the power are not exercising the power.

Second, in the providence of God these things are taking place. The issues are being brought to a focus. Evil is being allowed to develop by God, in order that it become fully manifest, so that the tares become openly tares, and men see them in their fullness for what they are, and then the tares shall be rooted out. Yes?

[Audience Member] I read somewhere sometime back that the nail holes perhaps were not in the hands of Christ, but in His wrists, that they would not hold the weight of a body if they were in His hands. Have you ever read that?

[Rushdoony] Yes, there is a great deal of debate about that and of course there is some evidence too concerning the various ways that executions were committed; the word here is hands, and it is a problem of Greek language, the word could possibly cover the wrists, so I think a good case could be made either way.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] To be king over the earth, and told to exercise dominion. Now, Adam quite obviously became weary of responsibility, and we find there was a double situation there: first, Adam was weary of responsibility, and ready to let his wife take over the leadership in the situation and carry the ball, and second she was weary of being subordinate. In other words, Adam was called to be under God but over the earth, Eve was called to be under Adam and serve God thereby. He rebelled against responsibility, and she rebelled against her position of subordination. So what happened? She exercises the leadership, and Satan goes directly to her and she as now the leader leads both of them into sin. So that before he came them they were already in a position of departure.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] A good question. The mechanism of judgement. I think we have the Bible as the best evidence of the mechanism of judgement. How did God judge Israel and Judea? He brought upon them the consequences of their sins. The world is under God’s law. So He destroyed them in various ways, economically, through plague and drought, through captivity, a number of ways. So that they were natural means, and yet God not only told them these things were going to come to pass through His prophets, but He indicated the very instruments and the time, and the length of their captivity and so on. It was fully natural, and yet it was fully supernatural. So it is in our day, the judgement I think is very clearly coming, and we are seeing it all around us. A few weeks ago we went into the fact that we see now as in other periods of crisis, a stepped up incidence of natural disasters, of floods and of droughts, of catastrophes such as hurricanes and tornados; far, far more just since WW2 almost twice as much of these things as from 1900-1947, which is a very interesting fact, and I think these are things that point to judgement. We have a drought year the world around, and yet look at the destructive floods we have had just this weekend in Nebraska and Texas, unheard of at this time of the year. They haven’t done the countryside any good, they were purely local; they did get water to relieve their drought but of such a nature that only disaster resulted.

Now, what is the answer to this? How are you going to account for this sudden marked rise in all these disasters since WW2? There are people trying to explain them away naturalistically, and there may be reasons behind it that are right as far as they go, but behind these reasons, I still say is the supernatural, which is the ultimate cause of all things.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the state is the substitute over and over again in history for the family and for the church, and during most of history the state has been the bigger family and the church of man, so that apart from Christianity you have never had a real church, that is apart from Biblical religion. What you have had is a department of state to hand religious affairs, and of course we have established such a department now, and the United Nations has such a department under UNESCO. Because worship is essentially a worship of the state and of man, and the state handles and controls it from start to finish in anti Biblical religions. Similarly the family has no right, and the family must be steadily destroyed, so that you have had a destruction of the family over and over again in history; you had it in ancient Greece, for example. And you had it for example in Plato’s Republic. Very, definitely a planned destruction of the state (family?) a planned control of all birth, and they didn’t have the excuse of the so-called population explosion then. The idea was to destroy everything in man’s life except the state. This was to be man’s means of defying God and also to establish a world state. Ultimately.

As you recall, when we studied the Tower of Babel, the significance of it was that this was to be the world administrative center, and man was going to be saved by this world state. Yes?

[Audience Member] I have heard you mention the British Israelite movement from time to time, and I think I understand what it is but I’m not quite sure, I wondered if you would explain that a bit.

[Rushdoony] Yes, very briefly, British Israelism does have some well-meaning, good people in it. But basically it is not Christian, in spite of the presence of some real Christians in it. Because British Israelism says that salvation is not of grace, basically, but of race. That God’s promises are literally only for the seed of Abraham, and that the Anglo Saxon peoples are the seed of Abraham, that they are the lost tribes, and therefore all the prophecies of scripture are going to be fulfilled in the Anglo Saxon peoples, and in the literal line of King David, which we are told is the British Royal family- God have mercy on us. And therefore this world messianic order that the Bible is talking about, and the millennium and everything else that you may find any group of Christians talking about, is all to be realized in this world order under the British Royal family.

Now there are lots of things a person could believe in if he is looking around for a substitute for Biblical religion, but to have that kind of faith in the British Royal house, it is a little staggering. That is a great faith. But this is the essence of it. Now as I remarked before, the absurdity of this is simply this: they turn up occasionally incidences of supposedly the wanderings into other parts of the world of some of these supposedly lost Jews. They were spiritually lost, not physically, although there is no question that some of these Jews did wander into various parts of the world, including the Anglo Saxon areas. But, they have turned up evidence that some of them wandered as far as Japan, and the (?) group in the Japanese had certain Hebrew prayers, so Japan is in the messianic group. But you know there are some that definitely went into Africa, so maybe the black brothers are part of this great kingdom too.

Now it begins to get a little ridiculous, and maybe that is why of course some of these people are for their brother Mr. M. L. King. Apparently… maybe he can trace some Hebrew ancestors. But you see the ridiculousness of this.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Very definitely, in that you have two aspects of this faith. One, you have a purely political, non-religious movement which says there must be union now of various nations under the leadership of Britain, a new world order under Britain. And there are several very powerful organizations united to that end, or working independently more or less to that end. Their religious arm apparently connected with them. This has not been demonstrated, but it has had suggestive evidence, is British Israelism. So you can take it either way, you can take it purely politically, and you can take it religiously, but the goal is union now, and world rule under the British Royal family.

As a result you find in the British royal family which apparently has leanings in this direction, the persistent use of the name David for the male heirs. You will find that of course the British heir to the throne has about 14-15 names, and one of them is almost invariably David, to indicate that he is of the Royal house of David. And the Duke of Windsor of course, his family name was David, and to his brothers and sisters and parents he was always David. A good deal of the fuss about the Stone of Scone, your remember it was stolen a few years ago, from Westminster Abbey, was precisely at this point, because there are a group of Scottish Nationalists who believe that this stone must be restored to Scotland because Scotland has this true ancestry.

Now, this is a minority opinion over there, but unfortunately this minority opinion is very powerful among some people very highly placed in Britain, and very very highly placed in the United States, it is very strong here. You can get it on the radio on the West coast from Los Angeles, San Diego, and (Spokan?). One of the centers of British Israelism is Merrimack Massachusetts, and they publish a periodical, Destiny. But there are a number of publications in this country representing this perspective.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] What the image of God is, is that? Yes. The image of God is defined for us in various passages of scripture, very specifically, and I think I can give you a hasty run down of some of the main ones because I have jotted them down near Genesis 1. But the basic aspects of the image of God are knowledge, Colossians 3:10, righteousness and holiness, Ephesians 4:24, and dominion, Genesis 1:28. Knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion. So that image does not mean the imprint of a face, although this is one of the meanings of image, but the likeness, the likeness of God is knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion. These are the aspects of God’s image which make up man’s nature in the image of God.

So that in the fallen man the image is a broken, shattered one, because he lacks true knowledge, having denied God; he lacks righteousness and holiness, and he doesn’t have dominion over himself. So you see, you have two humanities according to the Bible, the one humanity is the fallen humanity of Adam, and the other is the redeemed humanity, and we are born again in Christ, which means we are recreated in the image of God. We have been remade. It is like a piece of material that didn’t come out and is marred, and is thrown into the junk heap, but then this twisted, worthless material is taken and remade into something new. So that we now are in the image of God, not in perfection because we are being remade continually; that is our growth in sanctification.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Actually the sense in which the Bible uses it, it includes all these things. And the answer immediately then is: “Well how can these ungodly men have so much knowledge about say, science and technology?” and the answer is they can only have it on the basis of a Christian background or borrowed knowledge. In other words, if you believe the world is ultimately without God, without meaning, in a world of chance, you can have no science. And every culture that forsakes this stops. It has no knowledge. For example, when in India men came to the belief that there was no meaning, all was illusion, and when in China they came to this idea that all is illusion, the only goal is death because the ultimate truth is nothingness, what happened to civilization? It just stopped and went backward, in fact. But there was no further progress.

Now our science today has been on the basis of a firm belief in God, even though they don’t admit it. Their background is precisely a Biblical premise concerning reality. As we depart from this, we will depart from anything that constitutes real science, and one of the finest books written along these lines by a professor in a medical school, (dentrogo?) on mind and body, I forget the exact title, but those of you who have my book on Freud will find it in the Bibliography. Pedro (Dentrogo?). He points out how medicine is reaching a dead end and will decline unless it comes back to some kind of faith, because it is going to go down into magic, and our science will too. And of course this worm experiment with memory is nothing but a return to the basic premises of cannibalism.

Now this may seem fantastic, but over and over again, our world history, which we don’t have a true picture of in the text books, has revealed that in three generations you can descend from civilization to barbarism, and we are going to do it without a renewal, a Christian revival. But man either operates on these principles, or he departs from them. Now we are in the process of departing from them, have been for some time, and these scientists have as it were been living on the unearned capital of the past, just as say a wealthy family is set up by a fine, able father, the sons begin to lay it waste, they are not adding to it, and what happens to the wealth? The average is three generations for great wealth in American history, I have been told. There are a few exceptions, but then what happens? They destroy it, because they are not creating the capital, they are living off of it. And this is what we are doing to our Christian capital; we have been destroying it rather than living off of it.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. And you see, ultimately this leads to a pessimism about the present, so you feel: “What is the use of doing anything?” and you have the total stagnation of civilization and the decline of knowledge. And today we are beginning to see signs of this very definitely in the schools, in the fact that there is less and less interest in any kind of field of exact knowledge, and more an interest in: “What can I cash in on?” so, we are reaping the knowledge of the past and exploiting it, but we are beginning to see that there is nothing coming up to replace it unless we have a change.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, from the time the dead sea scrolls were discovered, and before most people knew what was in them you were getting such stories, which is the sort of thing that has come out over and over again with almost every decade, that supposedly this new knowledge proves the Bible to be false. Well, actually the reverse is true. The material is being translated as fast as it is essential to translate it, it is all being examined, a lot of it is of inconsequential value, except in that at some little point it gives us a little piece of knowledge as it were to put the jigsaw together, that will tell us something about Jewish life in the century and a half before our Lord. But basically what the dead sea scrolls tell us is that some of the Jewish people broke with the nation and went out to the dead sea, supposedly to live a purer and more religious life, but their basic faith was not Biblical; and they were as far astray as any of the groups which remained there, they were a cultist group. They were not at all important in the history of Israel and the history of Hebrew thought for what they were, they had a lot of peculiar beliefs, and a lot of strange practices. These are of the most trifling kind of significance, they had no connection with Christianity. Their one value was this, they preserved a lot of manuscripts of the Old Testament, so that the oldest manuscripts we have of the Old Testament, centuries older than any other we possess come from the dead sea scrolls, and what these manuscripts actually have done is to demonstrate that all of the critics have been dead wrong, because they were sure if you went back to the days before Christ, Isaiah for example, a book they attacked savagely and said: “It was not written by Isaiah” some of the most conservative of the Liberal scholars said that there were two Isaiah’s, most said that there were at least five, and all of this reflected knowledge that came after the events. But here we have a very old manuscript of Isaiah, and it is identical with what we have. This was a body blow to the opposition, a thorough body blow, as everything else we turned up.

So what do they do? One of the first books to hit the newsstands, a paper back, had a lot of fantastic nonsense about the secret life of Jesus that supposedly came out of these manuscripts, when they had nothing to do with Him, not the faintest trace of a reference to Him, came before Him, were totally unrelated to Him. Now, this is the kind of totally mendacious, which is another way of saying lying, use of the dead sea scrolls. And these scholars have no intention to the tell the true, they are liars, they hate the truth, and therefore they are going to pervert it.

Occasionally I run across quotations from some book of the Bible which is simply not there, and most readers will read through these books which are far to the left and come across this supposed statement from Isaiah, and Isaiah never said any such thing. And just recently I read in a book written by the grandson of one our American presidents, not the president but the grandson, one of the filthiest characters we have in America today, one of the most unspeakable wretches, and he consistently ascribes opinions to Saint Paul that have nothing to do with what Saint Paul ever thought. This is routine. What can you expect from a liar but lies? And this is the kind of thing we get about the Dead Sea Scrolls continually, and it is utter nonsense.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] They were Hebrews, and therefore they were not going to break entirely with the Old Testament, even though like the Pharisees and the Sadducees they had departed from it. Just as most of the churches today claim to be the Christian churches, and we are a group of foolish people who fail to understand the genius of Christianity. They claim to represent Christianity, Biblical religion, but they don’t believe a word of the Bible. And I recall when I was in Seminary, hadn’t been in seminary more than 2-3 weeks when this one young man went to take his examinations, he was a senior, for the ministry of the Methodist church. He now teaches in one of the most important universities in America, a professor of religion, and he came back laughing, and he said: “I affirmed all, what is it 39 articles,” and he said: “I don’t believe a one of them.” Thought it was a big joke.

Now, these people none the less claim to represent the faith, so this is the kind of thing we are confronted with. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the first decay when a people decays spiritually, is that they move into technology. A civilization becomes heavily absorbed with technology, and it confuses technology with knowledge. Then the next step is that they become totally involved with technology, and we are at this stage of technology, is that they lose technology. For example, civilization has more than once had quite an advanced stage of technology. We know that. We know for example in ancient Crete, and we don’t know anything about them much because we can’t read their documents, but we know from our excavation for example of the royal palace, which covers as I recall it three acres and was three stories high, that it was a thoroughly modern building, it had modern plumbing and so on and so forth, and this was far, far back in antiquity, way before the Greeks were anything but barbarians. But they lost it. And other cultures gained it and lost it, for example Egypt.

We really know very little about ancient Egypt, and one of the things we don’t know is their technology. We do have a few pictures that give us their life, that indicate for example in the days of Moses that a gentleman wore a top hat and a cane when he went out for a walk. But we don’t know how they built the pyramids. We do know that the ideas we had earlier, that they had tens of thousands of slaves dragging these stones is nonsense, they didn’t; they had some kind of technological equipment to do it. What it was we don’t know, the newest guess is that it was something on the principle of a rolligon machine. But they moved these heavy stones without using millions or tens of thousands of slave hands, they were moved with some kind of technological devise that civilization lost.

Now this has happened more than once, you can go to the jungles of Thailand, some of the ancient cultures there and their cities. Mohenjo daro in India, one of the earliest, and it is interesting, it is probably the earliest evidence we have of man’s existence, and it is a full-fledged city with city planners operating and so on, it was a highly developed city, quite a modern one. We don’t know what happened. We do know that these cultures develop, technology took over, and then with the decline of any kind of character technology disappeared. Yes?

[Audience Member] I thought of this once before, why did Jesus say that He spoke in parables lest all be converted?

[Rushdoony] Yes, a good question and I think it is worth taking up again and again because it is one of the central points of the Bible. Our Lord summons men to believe by faith. It is not to be by sight, or by works. So that when it becomes a matter of sight, they are blinded; and Isaiah said in the 6th chapter than when it reaches that point: “Hearing they shall not hear and seeing they shall not see, lest their eyes be opened and they see, and understand and believe.” And so it is, our Lord says, the He spoke to them in parables, because those who would not believe were not to be warned. Those who would only wait till it was their skin, as it were, that was at stake, were not to be saved by God. They were to be saved only as they to a recognition of their sins and repented, and put their whole confidence in God, then their eyes would be opened progressively, and they would see. And so the parables were closed to the outsiders, but opened by grace to those within the faith. Because God made it clear in the parables of our Lord what He purposed to do, the judgement that was coming. So they only served to blind the blind further, but to open our eyes all the wider.

Does that help? Yes.

[Audience Member] …?... what really hit me was that they were discussing the …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, it is humanism, and as humanists their Christ has no relationship to the Jesus Christ of scripture.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Oh of course, He will. They will be judged by Him. And the Bible says that judgement begins at the house of God. In other words, the sins of those who call themselves Christians, and especially those who call themselves leaders in Christ, are the most fearful ones in the sight of God, and therefore His judgement begins upon them.

Now, we’ve seen this already in history, in the Bible in fact, in that in the Old Testament era it was clearly said that before the coming of Christ God would wipe away every false order that claimed to be the kingdom of God on earth, and where did He begin? He began with Israel and Judah. First them, and then the great powers and small powers of antiquity were judged. And so God begins every judgement, either with the church, or is most severe on the church. And the most fearful judgement in all history, without equal, and we are told there is never to be anything its equal in all history, was the judgement on Jerusalem which denied Christ. There has never in any warfare, ancient or modern, been a disaster comparable with that. If you don’t believe me, read Josephus sometime on it, and you will find it almost unbelievable, the kind of horror there and the total toll of life, far, far more than any other thing in history, perhaps the most fearful other disaster in history was the totally uncalled for bombing of Dresden at the end of the war, which make Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem tame by comparison. And that was nothing compared to the fall of Jerusalem, and it was fitting, they had denied Christ.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Not vows of celibacy. But of course the word ‘beat’ comes from ‘Beatitude,’ from holy, the Latin word for holy, these are the holy ones of the new faith, so they very self consciously are not emulating Christ, but are emulating holiness, they are the saint of the future and of the present. Yes?

[Audience Member] Someone told me that Josephus didn’t mention Christ, did he mention Christ? If he doesn’t why doesn’t he?

[Rushdoony] There is just a passing reference I believe to Christ and the Christians, for good reason. Josephus did not believe in Him, and the policy of the Jews was that something they could not explain they were not going to mention. In other words, here things happened, someone raising the dead, healing the blind, causing the lame to walk, being crucified and resurrected; well, how are you going to explain away things like that? Especially when there were thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, up and down the length of the country, who were witnesses of it? So you just walk around the fact. Also, Josephus had pretensions to being the messiah.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Just an oblique reference.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No.

[Audience Member] was it Barbaras or Barabas?

[Rushdoony] Barabbas.

[Audience Member] Was he the leader of a right wing patriotic group?

[Rushdoony] He was a revolutionary leader as well as a thief and a hoodlum, a gorilla type man.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, except the politics were different then, but it was salvation by politics.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, the fish as an emblem for Christ had nothing to do with this, in fact I don’t think it was a very good emblem, and it had some pagan connotations, so that the use of a fish which came in much later had nothing to do with the fact that these early Christians were fishermen. Totally different.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, this has been overdone. There are evidences of the fish being used as an emblem for the Christians, but this has been very heavily overdone by our modern writers.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, this is overdone. A lot of these symbols that are called early Christian symbols, you find that they occurred, but not in the way that our modern writers would infer, it’s just that they found occasional evidences of them. Yes?

[Audience Member] I was wondering historically how many of the teachers understood or put forth the idea that in all faith (?) should have a Christian foundation …?... How new is this idea? (?)

[Rushdoony] A good question, how well was the necessity for a thoroughly biblical foundation for every area of thought and education known. First of all, so many of the early converts came from alien backgrounds; some of the Pharisees became converts and tried to convert the whole of the faith into Phariseeism, so this was a major problem in the early church. Then you had others who were Greeks, and they tried to blend Greek philosophy and Biblical thought, so that you had Platonistic Christianity just as in the Middle Ages you had Aristotelian Christianity, or Scholasticism.

Then you had others who attempted to blend Egyptian and Syrian thought with Christianity, and the Ascetics represented strongly Egyptian and Syrian strains; the desert monks, the pillar saints so called, were more than 9/10ths pagans, Saint Simeon Stylites who sat on the pillar was closer to one of the Baal cults of Syria than to Christianity. So that you had a major struggle of these various groups to take over the faith; and for example Gnosticism, for a while almost took over the entire church, and it was comparable to modernism of today in that it was a mixture of Greek and some Jewish thought, it was trying to make Christianity scientific, and it was a mishmash of all kinds of weird ideas. A great deal of our modern subversive movements come from Gnosticism and Manichaeism, or Dualism, which also attempted to take over the faith.

Then of course you had Arianism for a while, ARIANISM, take over the church almost entirely, and the few men who were Orthodox like Athanasius being persecuted. It was the Unitarianism of its day. So, after Christianity was the recognized religion of the Roman empire, within a matter of 10-15 years, Arianism had taken over the church, so the church became the official religion, and then the state because it didn’t want orthodox Christianity, made Unitarianism official Christianity. So that Arianism was the religion within the Roman Empire, within Germany, and areas outside the Roman Empire, for about 3 centuries.

Now you had a few lone voices for Orthodoxy. Then during the early part of what is called the Middle Ages you began again to develop Christian thinking; Anselm of Canterbury was a notable one. But immediately you had subversive movements again, and coming right straight out of ancient Greek thinking, the death of God school of thought began to revive again, and one of the most prominent members of the school was an abbot, Abbot (Wakim?) of Flora in Italy. And Abbot (Wakim?) said that there three ages to history, the first was the age of the Father, the Old Testament religion with its stern God and its wrath and law, the second was the age of the Son, which was the age of Christianity but it was still of an exclusive kind of religious faith, the third age was the age of the Holy Spirit when we realize that God is all of us, and that all peoples and all ideas and all religions are equally good and equally divine, and that there is no God out there, the only God is the one that is here in mankind united.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] That was the God is dead movement, it was straight ancient Hellenic or Greek thought, revived by Abbot (Wakim?) and it had a powerful influence within the church. For a time it took over the Franciscan order, and the spiritual Franciscans as they were called, the followers of Abbot (Wakim?) had to be finally excommunicated and driven out of the church. But it infected a great many people, and lingered on, and one of the people who seems to have been quite heavily influenced by this was a certain ship captain named Christopher Columbus.

But as a result you see, the Middle Ages ended up in humanism, outright humanism. And the Pope’s would ridicule the faith, they were humanistic scholars, they were patrons of the Renaissance, there was nothing more embarrassing to them than anyone who took the faith seriously. And it was, well, Boccaccio was a far superior man to most of the clergymen when he wrote his Decameron, and what is the Decameron except stories about the sexual misbehaviors of churchmen? And one of the first stories there is about the Jew whose neighbors were trying to convert him, and they told him, and he said: “Well, I’ll believe after I go to Rome.” And they thought: “Oh when he goes to Rome and sees how the churchmen behave he will never be a Christian.” And he went there and came back and became a Christian, and he said: “If God permits all these things to go on in Rome and the flagrant immorality of these men, then they must be next to God.” Now that was a cynical statement, and it came from Boccaccio, a priest.

So, humanism was in the saddle, and with Luther their began in the Augustinian order, where there was a remnant of the old Christian faith still surviving, the protest against this, and you had a major battle against humanism. And of course then the counter Reformation within the Roman Catholic church also began a battle in part against Protestantism, but also against humanism. The Enlightenment led to the defeat of this.

So you had in the early centuries just a brief time when Christian faith was vital, you had it for a brief time in the Middle Ages in various parts of Europe, you had it briefly revived with the Reformation, and now you are seeing in America, it was the one place where the Reformation did have a chance to develop before the Enlightenment captured it, so we saw a clearer development of some Christian principles, both of Medieval Feudalism, which is Federalism, and of the Protestant Puritan spirit, here in America.

But now we are seeing, and this is why we should be hopeful for the future, more real Christian thinking than has gone on for centuries, and more of it concentrated in one time than ever before. For example in Europe, the school of Philosophical Presuppositionalists were totally Christian. Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven and (Speer?) and (Vanreesen?) and others, and their writings are beginning to have some real influence, in this country Van Til is a leader of this sort of thinking, and the major outlet for this type of thinking of course is Craig Press and Presbyterian and Reformed. But it is beginning to have its influence, of all places, it appears recently at Harvard, where a student in either Economics or Political Science began spouting this in some of the articles he was writing, a graduate student. How it ever got to him I don’t know, but it is beginning to have its influence in various parts of the world.

So I think we are going to see more real Christian development in the days ahead than ever before.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] These words are spoken to the disciples specifically, and through them He performed all kinds of great miracles. The gifts of the Holy Spirit, so that they too raised the dead and healed the blind, and performed all kinds of miracles, of which only a few are reported in the book of Acts. And the book of Acts should be properly titled: “The book of the acts of Jesus Christ through His apostles.” In other words, the whole point of the book of Acts was this: The disciples were proclaiming this Jesus Christ whom you crucified is not dead but alive, and at work through us. And so they performed the miracles in the name of Jesus Christ: “I say unto thee arise and walk.” It was always in the name of Jesus Christ. So that this witness was given to Israel as a final testimony before their judgement, after the fall of Jerusalem the miracles ceased.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, she is applying to herself something that was applied specifically to the apostles, who did have these special gifts of the Spirit. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, no more chance than any unbeliever has in any age to accept Christ as an individual. But they do not as a race have any special place any longer I believe. Now some disagree, but I believe that our standing with God is by grace alone, not by race. So that neither the Jew nor any other people have any special place in God’s plan apart from Christ. But they have a place insofar as they accept Christ, but it is entirely of grace.