Profound Questions and Answers

History on Nicene & Arianism

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 13-24

Genre: Talk

Track: 13

Dictation Name: RR208J18

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, a good question. Now the environmentalist believes that man is a product of his environment, so that he is created by the environment, the environment is properly his god. So that he is passive in relationship to the environment. For the Christian, man is a creature of God; having been created by God he is passive in his relationship towards God, but active in his relationship to the environment; whereas for the environmentalist man is active in his relationship to God, because God didn’t make him, he can be very high and mighty if there is any trace of environmentalism in him, he can demand that God stay out of his way if he believes in God, and he isn’t going to accept predestination, and he is not going to believe a lot of these things that are in the Bible because: “Well, they make for difficulties.” He wants his independence.

So environmentalism means passivity to the environment, towards nature, activity towards God. But Christian faith means passivity toward God since He made us, and activity in relationship toward the environment. So that indeed the environment sometimes has an effect on us, but basically we are here to exercise dominion over that environment, it is sin when we do not. It is an aspect of the fall. So that man’s calling is to bring that environment under the dominion of God, and it is only when he is in sin that he cannot do it. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, and he is basically an environmentalist, but he uses the Christian terminology to take you away from this (tithe?) of God, and, well he is blasphemous to the extreme. But he is brilliant, there is no getting around that, he has a knack for getting the point across, so that some people are almost impossible to persuade of the blasphemous nature of the man.

[Audience Member] He is speaking of renewal, spiritual renewal, and I have got to reread the thing to see that’s how he (?). But he doesn’t really speak of the regeneration, he uses that term ‘spiritual renewal.’

[Rushdoony] Yes. They use language that is either the language of the Bible or resembles it, but they empty it of its content to give it an entirely new meaning. This is of course the strategy of Neo Orthodoxy. Well, one more…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, because he is active in relationship to God if he believes in God. His passivity is in relationship to nature. Yes?

[Audience Member] In connection, there is a program in the Methodist church, and I really believe that it is a national council program, called (?), and this is to be a program (study?) …?... They are using the book of James: “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers…” …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, right. Well, of course they reinterpret it entirely; faith without works is dead, James said, but it’s not the faith in Christ whose works they are calling for, it is faith in socialism and the works of socialism that they are basically calling for. It is a radical misuse of scripture again.

[New Question and Answer Period] …Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, a very great difference, because first of all Reformation churches do not accept purgatory, and second, Hades refers to the place of the dead, and generally to heave and to hell, both. In other words, the other world. So Hades is a radically different concept.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, Purgatory you find the first evidences of belief in it in Judaism under the Pharisees. In the Second book of Maccabees you find hints of the doctrine of purgatory, and also the works of supererogation. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, the quick, quick is an old word for living, and we find it often used in the Bible: “Him hath He quickened” that is, made alive. This is a case of a word changing somewhat in meaning, for example another Biblical word in the King James Version that has changed its meaning: “Quit ye like men” in other words, acquit yourselves, behave, act, stand like men. There was a little rumpus during WW2 when one little manual for soldiers with prayers and various verses of scripture, I think it was put out by the episcopal church, was passed out to men and a commanding officer saw the verse that was written on the cover: “Quit ye like men.” He didn’t understand the meaning, and for a while he was quite upset and angry. But the quick and the dead, the living and the dead.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. Be lively, living. Yes?

[Audience Member] Where can we find a copy of the apostles creed? Is it in the Bible somewhere?

[Rushdoony] No, it is not in the Bible, it is in many churches in the hymnal or in the Book of Common Prayer or the book of (?) worship.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, in some cases some churches have changed a word or two, some instead of ‘holy catholic church’ read ‘holy universal church’ which is the same word, to avoid misunderstanding; others read: ‘He descended into Hades’ others ‘he descended into the place of the dead.’ I believe the Lutherans have the place of the dead. But minor variations, mostly those two, in order to avoid misunderstanding. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, they don’t even attempt it. Comparative religions, of course, is an area of study. The very idea of comparative religions was established by people who were trying to make all religions one. Now, religion apart from Christianity has never tried to govern morality. All it has talked about is the other world and the powers there and your relationship to them, and what you are going to be like in the other world. And even there its ideas were governed to a great extent by the state, because the state was the means of getting to the other world. The state controlled heaven, as it were. So that your real religion was to believe in the state, you believed in the emperor or in Pharaoh.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Right, yes. Of course…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, you read in all of them that these religions supposedly established a morality and so on. Instead, what they should tell you is that here was a move to establish an empire, a state, and at the same time a religion of that state and a morality of that state. For example, Mohammedanism is not so much a religion, as Islam, as a rule. It is a political order. This is its basic purpose. Now it is a political order which says it represents the divine order on earth, and therefore it has the power to determine morality.

Confucianism, it was pure and simple political science, political theory; and therefore because Confucianism was political theory by a philosopher in politics, it dealt with morality, it didn’t touch on religion. It has become a religion, a religion of the Chinese state is what it did become.

Now, Buddhism said there was an ultimate nothingness; therefore there is no good or evil, no right and wrong. Thus it had no morality. But, it did affirm certain things as to a state, a world order and so on, and the various Buddhist states altered Buddhism in terms of their particular tastes, so you have some Buddhists who say there is a heaven and others who say there is nothing, just Nirvana, an utter blank.

So, Buddhism is primarily what the state makes it; and when Islam broke up into various states, Islam increasingly became what the state made it. In every non-Christian religion, this is it. For example, in Ancient Greece, where did you get your morality? Well, not from the Greek God’s. You can read all the stories of the Greek Gods and you can’t find any trace of morality there, you can find quite a bit of immorality, but no morality. And this is true if you read the stories of any of the Gods, I am using the Greek Gods and the Roman Gods as illustrative of this, in that morality was not connected with their Gods and with their religion.

Where did you get it? From the state. First you had your politics as in Aristotle, and having determined politics, then you determined your ethics or your morality. As a result one of the first battle grounds in the church was over abortion. This is where it came to head-on conflict with the world, because the thesis of every state was simply this: the right to life and death is the right of the state, because the state is god on earth in effect. Therefore if the state decrees that you can kill babies you can, if the state decrees that you must, you must.

As a result, the slaughter of the innocents for example by Herod was nothing to report in history, he had that right. The slaughter of all Hebrew children by Pharaoh was nothing to report in history from the standpoint of all paganism, Pharaoh had that right. And of course you find Socrates and Plato saying that there must be no unlicensed births, that the only births permitted are those licensed by the state, if any children are born, not out of wedlock but out of license, the child is to be killed and the parents are to be punished because the right to life and death, religious power, belongs to the state. And as we are now having a return to this pagan moralism, morality from politics, one of the things right now under all out attack is our Christian laws on abortion.

What does this do? It means that the right to life becomes the right of the state. It is not God’s power that governs life, it is the states power, and similarly with capital punishment, and then with euthanasia; mercy killings. You have a three pronged attack here, all of which will do one thing, to say that the state can determine who is to live and who is not to live, because the state is the source of morality. And of course today the state is the source of morality, in that it is saying: “You must integrate and you must love where you feel that you cannot love, morally.

So the Encyclopedias, the comparative religion textbooks, are lies. They are full of lies. They are bent upon confusing the issue so that they can push us into a common front with the enemy and destroy us; and the sad fact is that there are very few who realize this, not one in ten thousand in a pulpit today who realize it, that in all non Christian religions, and you can get this from the old religious books of these faiths, the state is the source of law and of morality. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, Christian Canons.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, you’ve touched on something that is so tremendously important, I wish I was up to answering it. But very few have gone into this. One sociologist who began as a radical and studied it became quite conservative, was at Dartmouth until his retirement, Eugen Rosenstock Huessy, has pointed out that our common law tradition is old Christian law; based on Christian canons. And it is a survival in our culture today that gradually is being warred on, to have it replaced by statist law; and of course by Federal regulations, executive orders. But the old common law still survives, but very few lawyers are aware of much about common law, very few study it.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, right.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] And this is why the Supreme Court has done so much to undercut case law.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, very good. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, we are turning the thing upside down, the Supreme Court is deliberately destroying case law, precedent law, which rests on a canon of truth, a basic principle; and enunciating new principles of law which are entirely hostile to our common law tradition. Yes?

[Audience Member] It seems to me that the Supreme Court has violated Constitutional law …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes and no, it is setting up precedents, but what it is actually doing is to replace both precedent and constitution with fiat law, simply proclamation. Just as in ancient times the state had divine rights, and if the state said it, it was the truth, it was the law, it was morality. This is the way it is now, so that it is replacing both precedent and constitution in effect. Yes?

[Mount Olive Tape Library] To precede the questions that are to come up, we have extracted from the end of a sermon that preceded these questions, which is of importance more than just for the questions that are to be asked, but because it is a foundational issue in the theology of this country today as it was the foundational philosophy preceding the war between the states, or what we commonly call the Second War of Independence in the United States.

[Rushdoony] Arianism was humanism and statism, therefore it was intensely popular with rulers, and for several centuries, every country in Europe virtually chose because they felt the force of Christianity to declare themselves Christian states, but actually to deny and persecute Christianity by adopting Arianism as their established religion, in other words humanism. So that their old paganism, whether Anglo Saxon, or whether Roman, was continued in the form of Arianism. It was therefore the doctrine of collectivism, statism, and the Arian bishops were without exception statists, collectivists. For them the real savior was the emperor, the state, not Jesus Christ.

Now because these Arians were taking the apostles creed and misusing it, reinterpreting it to mean what they said it meant, the council of Nicaea was called in 325 A.D., the first ecumenical council of the church. The council was called to deal with Arianism, with the extensive disunity and heresy in the church. But as the council met, only a minority of the bishops were orthodox. There was a militant minority that were all out Arians, then the majority were Semi-Arian or moderates who didn’t want to take a stand. Only the tenacity and the strong faith of the (Arians?) (I think he meant Orthodox here) who stood their ground, refused to compromise, won the day.

At every point they exposed the implications of what the Arians and semi Arians stood for, so that they left them without excuse, in that they pushed them to the point where they either had to admit to what they were or give in to the Orthodox.

And so it was they expanded the Apostles Creed into what we know as the Nicene Creed. Now the Nicene Creed as we have it today in church use is an expansion of the Apostles Creed by the council of Nicaea, of Constantinople, and of Chalcedon as well as other councils; that is, each of the councils developed this creed in terms of the reigning heresy of the day, adding clauses to develop the implications of the Biblical faith and to do away with heresies. The creed as we now have it, coming through the several councils, reads:

“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds: God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made; being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made: Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried; and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end. And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord, and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father, and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spake by the prophets. And I believe in one catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. And I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.”

Now, in this creed the battle ground in particular was a sentence concerning Christ: “Being of one substance with the Father.” ‘Of one substance’ in Greek, which was the language in use at the council, is the word “Homoousian,” one essence. In other words, Jesus Christ was very God. He was of one essence with the Father.

The Arians attempted, and the semi Arians, to institute a minor change, seemingly. They wanted the word “Homoiousian” of like essence, inserted in its stead. The difference is simply the letter ‘i’.

Now Edward Gibbon in his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire makes quite a point of this letter ‘i’. Gibbon as an enlightenment figure and a rationalist hated Christianity, and so he ridiculed these Orthodox saints because they stood their ground on this letter ‘i’, and he said: “Consider all the dissention and quarrel that was unleashed upon Europe by this quibbling over a single letter.” Now Gibbon was an intelligent man, and from his own book it is obvious that he as well as the subsequent historians to this day knew what was at issue. The issue was simply this, the liberty which Christianity stood for or the statism, the collectivism of Arianism, of Humanism. This was at stake in that letter ‘i’.

The Council of Nicaea saw the triumph of the Orthodox party. The great Orthodox saints who battled for the faith there stood their ground. The Creed was adopted. But what their enemies could not accomplish in open debate because there they would have been forced to admit what their faith was in, in the state not in Christ, they tried to do after the council vote by politics. And so it was by political influence they very soon succeeded in undoing the work of Niceaea, and the Arian bishops, humanists to the core, were advanced to positions of power by the Emperor, and Arius the leader was recalled.

Arrangements were made for a huge parade to lead him to the great central church in Alexandria. The night before the triumphant parade was to take place, Alexander the primate of Alexandria in tears, prostrated himself in the sanctuary praying, and we have the record of part of his prayer: “If Arius comes tomorrow to the church, take me away, O Lord, and let me not perish with the guilty. But if thou pitiest thy church as thou dost pity it, take Arius away, lest when he enters, heresy enter with him.”

This was a prayer, a passionate prayer that God take Arius. The next day the parade began, a triumphal procession, they were in power, and they were going to take the stronghold of the orthodox party from them and drive them out. But halfway to the church, Arius was suddenly seized with a severe gastric pain. He asked that the parade be stopped and he went to a nearby open latrine near a construction job. The parade waited, they waited, waited and waited. Finally they went to investigate. Arius had suddenly had a severe hemorrhage and had fallen headlong covered in his own blood, into the latrine. The parade was over.

The orthodox party of course rejoiced, and they recalled the death of Judas who falling headlong burst asunder in the midst, according to Acts 1:18 and died. And Arius's death was almost exactly the same in the manner in which he died. The incident of course covered the Arians with shame, even as it had covered Arius with dirt. And they were very very badly upset and discomfited. Naturally the orthodox rejoiced. From one end of the empire to the other, the orthodox preached this with great joy and thanksgiving: “So may all thine enemies perish, O Lord.”

It was indeed a triumphant vindication. Remember, the champions of the orthodox faith had just a couple of years ago gone to Nicaea, 325 A.D. Fresh from persecutions, some of them had been led in there blinded by their persecutors, others with their hands cut off or a leg cut off, maimed, pathetic sights, and they had gone in there to battle for the faith, and they had won a great intellectual victory at Nicaea, but now Arius had been given the church by the emperor. But God had answered the prayer of Alexander, and Arius had met a most shameful death, one that confounded him in his work, and his followers in their faith. No wonder they rejoiced. It is significant that this incident and there are many, many like it in history, has been suppressed from the history books.

Here is a major incident occurring to one of the major figures in history, but you cannot read about it in any history book written in the last couple of hundred years, or certainly the last hundred years. The historians are humanists too, and they don’t like this that befell one of the greatest humanists of all time. But we can rejoice, even as the saints of old did, this was the hand of God and God has a sense of humor; and we can say with the saints of old as we look at the enemies round about us, so may all thine enemies perish, O Lord.

Yes?

Only by going to history books form the eighteenth century earlier can you find it, and by going to the contemporary accounts, for example the writings of the church fathers and the historians of that time, so that by going to the older works you can get the story. As I say there are many such magnificent stories in church history, or in western history, but they have been dropped, they have been dropped. The humanists don’t like then, and with good reason. Yes.

[Audience Member] Is there any similarity between …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, with the civil war our politics definitely moved from Christianity to humanism.

[Audience] And that was the real breaking point.

[Rushdoony] That was the turning point, definitely. Yes. In our early American history, you can find numerous similar incidents where God providentially moved to save our people, beginning with the first landing by the pilgrims, I think perhaps some of you know that had they landed there a year or two years before, they would have been killed almost immediately? There were some very fierce and warlike tribes of Indians in New England, but before they landed, epidemics and plagues had struck down virtually all the Indians so the area was more or less uninhabited, and so it was possible to settle in New England. And from that time on, the number of providential circumstances through the War of Independence are very very many and very great.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, Curcillo. Curcillo of course is humanism, it says as Arianism did that every man can be a Christ. It destroys the doctrine of the Trinity to exalt man; it is a secret movement within the church which really is aimed at destroying the Catholic church.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well Doctor (Detar?) of Reno, a devout Catholic and a very able man who's done a great deal of work on (synonom?), has written a book on Curcillo and it's the best thing on the subject, its available in paperback. And the sad fact is that in spite of what he has written it is still defended by many many churchmen. Yes?

[Audience Member] Well, during- I can’t remember my history, what year it was, the so-called (Great Folly?) was it Arianism at that time?

[Rushdoony] Well Arianism was simply a development of what the Greek philosophers believed. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, because they were humanists to the core, and they were statists, in fact the thirty tyrants of Greece were pupils of Plato. And Aristotle’s great pupil was Alexander the great. They produced totalitarianism, this is what they believed in, the state as God on earth in effect.

So therefore those that say that our western liberty came from the Greeks are talking nonsense deliberately. Our western totalitarianism came from the Greeks.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well I recall, I’ve mentioned this before, it's worth mentioning again, I first started college studying Plato's Republic, this was the great work in ancient philosophy, and an important source of our western culture and western liberty and of course it’s a boot print for a communistic state. Yes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Oh yes.

[Audience Member] …?... some of the old saints were polygamists. Now were they disobeying God then? …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. The question is about the polygamy of the patriarchs in the Old Testament. Now first of all, let’s look at the whole subject from the biblical perspective. From the perspective of the Bible, the family is the basic institution of mankind. The family. Therefore, the Bible looks at the family as against everything that is hostile to the family, therefore any kind of promiscuity, adultery, anything that is hostile to the family is regarded with total enmity.

Now from the beginning, the Bible recognizes monogamy as the standard from the Garden of Eden. The Mosaic Law makes it clear that this is the true pattern. These other forms are regarded as inferior, defective and more or less sinful forms of the family. But, not as bad anything that is anti-family, thus in our culture today for example, we look on polygamy with horror. But we don’t feel the same horror about adultery and fornication and general sexual license, because our perspective is not familistic.

Now, this does not mean that the bible ever gave its approval to polygamy, it did not. But it recognized it as a form of the family, a very markedly inferior form, a sinful form, but still far different from that which was anti-family.

Now the horror for adultery in the patriarchal kind to something that is hard for us to understand. But if you look back to the instant of for example both Abraham and Isaac when they denied their wives because they were afraid they would be killed, and someone would take their wives, and they pretended it was just their sisters. Why? What was the reason for that? Well it was simply this: in those days, adultery because it was destructive of the basic institution was regarded as so fearful a thing that murder was not as serious by comparison, although murder was a serious offense. So that a man would more readily commit murder than he would adultery; so that Abraham said now someone may kill me in order to take you as their wife, so just pretend you're my sister and we can get by.

Now when you understand this perspective then you begin to realize what the situation was. The polygamy there of course is on the whole rather small, you have it for example in the case of Jacob. But Jacob was in a sense tricked into it. In the case of the kings, the Deuteronomic law for kings forbade it. But it was still done because it was the basic method in those days of diplomacy.

Now we think of polygamy primarily in sexual terms, which it has been in modern times almost entirely. But in the ancient world you didn't trust the civil service; well how did you take care then of administration? You had wives. So one many many cases these wives would be older women who would be experienced administrators, perhaps their husband had been a judge in a previous marriage, the king would marry them and they would handle the administration, or as in Solomon's case, he was an important monarch, he had treaties with every kingdom around, how were these treaties settled? They would send him a wife or a concubine. What was her function? She would be in charge, usually of trade relations with that country and would be their representative in his court, she would have some ties you see with her home country, she would come from an important family. But she would also have some ties to her husband, so it would work for the welfare of both.

Now that was better they figured than a civil servant, because there was a personal loyalty. So this is the perspective with which we have to view the polygamy of the monarchs. But basically it was a familistic perspective, the family versus anything that was conducive to the breakdown of the family.

[Audience Member] Did the Mormons get their idea from the …?...

[Rushdoony] No, definitely not. The Mormon idea comes from thoroughly pagan sources, it is closer to Hinduism and Shintoism. In their perspective the man is a god, and women have no real being apart from this god whom they marry. And his purpose is to beget as many other persons, sons primarily, as possible, so that they can worship him in the world to come, because these other people, his forbears are god's over him, and he's going to have a lot of gods under him, and he wants a lot through progeny. It is a weird and thoroughly pagan system. It is totally unlike the Biblical, and it began out of the sexual desires of the founders who were men of bad reputation. When Joseph Smith was a young man in New York, there wasn’t a mother in the community who would trust Joseph around her daughters. He came from a ne'er do well family that was of the lowest of the low in the community.

The deeper you go in Mormonism the more you are taught the inner doctrine. It is an esoteric faith, in other words there are levels of knowledge you are exposed to. Yes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, of course their thesis is that the Negros represent a demonic people. It's their belief of course that the Indians too are a low people, they represent the lost tribes who became apostate and so on, so they look down on the Indians and they especially banish from the pale of hope the Negro unless he becomes a white man through some complicated religious processes. There is not much likelihood of them changing very rapidly but of course they can in that the twelve apostles can at any time have new revelations, so that a revelation is possible tomorrow which will say the Negros are angels, however I don’t think it’s very likely. One of the twelve apostles by the way is a Romney.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I could not myself vote for a Mormon because I believe it to be an anti-Christian faith. Moreover, (Ezotat?) Benson while some of his speeches and statements he has made sound fine, he is a man who was a part of the Eisenhower administration, and a very definitely socialistic program in the department of agriculture.

Now we have to judge a man not by what he says but by what he has done, and his administration did not materially differ from that of (Brenan?) who preceded him, so that while he talks conservatively, he did not change matters in the department of agriculture. Then, in the I believe December American Opinion there is a very telling article about these two brothers, farmers in the Dakota's, the (Dejevski?) brothers I believe, and how because of their criticism they were persecuted and imprisoned by the Department of Agriculture, and the imprisonment was fraudulent according to the article; they were totally innocent, and yet at the time this took place (Benson?) was secretary of agriculture. Now the article says he deplored and offered to be a witness for these people, but he was still head of the department. He didn't- he was not a witness however, he could have moved heaven and earth had he chosen and stopped that whole prosecution, but he did not. He did nothing to punish the people who were persecuting these two farmers.

I cannot believe that he is a real conservative, you have to judge a man by his works, and certainly he has not in his public life given any real evidence that he is a conservative. It's easy to talk conservatism, it's another thing to live it.

I know one young man who while a very likeable man, I think very highly of his family and I like the young man, who as long as he was employed here in this area was a fine conservative, in fact before I came down here last year he was attending some of the meetings that were held in this area coming from the Pasadena area. He is known to various members of the group. However when he moved into another position in another area where he was surrounded instead of by very strong and powerful conservatives, by very powerful liberals; his conservatism was put on check. Now is he a conservative? He's a compromiser, and we have to judge a man by his works. I cannot see (Benson?) as a candidate for president, and I don’t think a majority of the American people are going to do so. I think this candidacy of (Benson?) is a dream. Strom Thurmond on the other hand has proven himself, there is a man who has stood up again and again and again for the conservative cause; now his record, I am told by some people is not perfect, but then whose record is? Strom Thurmond has earned the respect of all conservatives because he has been under fire, and he has come through splendidly.

He has demonstrated all the characteristics of truly Christian statesmanship, we need to respect Strom Thurmond, we need to say that Benson has not proven himself, he may be a conservative, he sounds like one, but he has not done the work of one.

[New Question and Answer Period] Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the Nicene Creed in its complete form which represents the various councils including Chalcedon as they developed it. It is basically an expansion of the Apostles Creed:

“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; he suffered and was buried; and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father; and he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end. And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets; and I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church; I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, there are a number of churches which use it, quite a number. Lutherans do, some Presbyterians do, and the Catholics of course use the Nicene Creed.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] There will be minor variations in various churches, but the basic meaning is the same. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, as I indicated earlier, all the councils now are thinking in terms of the institution, not the faith; and unity, not truth. And this has been true for a long time now, so that every council today only compounds the evil. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] The Athanasian Creed I will place in your hands very soon, you can find it in various manuals of the creeds, the Lutherans I believe still use it, so that you could find it in a Lutheran service book, but we shall have when the series is concluded all of the Creeds mimeographed and given to each of you. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, that is not true, there are two versions of the Lord’s prayer given to us in the New Testament. One is in Matthew and the other in Luke; in the version in Matthew the doxology at the end is given. In a second version which our Lord gave on another occasion He did not include the doxology but went on to an exposition of its meaning without giving the doxology. Both versions are Biblical, and it is ridiculous to argue that the shorter version has to be the only version. There is not the slightest ground for any such conclusion. Our Lord gave the longer version in the Sermon on the Mount, and in a later sermon which Luke records He repeated portions of the Sermon on the Mount on another occasion, but abbreviated it and went on to deal with other material, other subjects as well. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Creedalism is… well, ‘creed’ comes from the word ‘credo,’ ‘I believe.’ Creedalism is simply the assertion or the condition of moving in terms of a specific body of belief, of doctrine.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, right. Yes, (freedoms?) comes from ‘credo’ as well, the same root. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, in just a moment, the source in Luke for the Lords prayer; yes, Chapter 11 verses 2, 3, 4. And He immediately goes on in verse 5 to deal with the meaning of prayer, so that He stops at the conclusion of the petitions in order to develop the subject of the meaning of petition. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, there is a great deal in the Bible concerning our relationship to the poor. Now, it would take quite a while to go through all the laws that deal with the subject, but first of all we are commanded to be charitable, we are commanded to be merciful, we are commanded to give justice, but we are never permitted to subsidize slothfulness or laziness. And I think the Biblical perspective is summed up very well in Paul’s statement: “He that doth not work, let him not eat.” Which means, if he will not work, let him starve. On the other hand the poor who were ready to work were to be provided for, and in the early church this was summed up by a regulation whereby any member who was unemployed was to be given charity for one day, and then the church provided work for him. One of the members or the church as a group, something was done to enable him to work, there was this obligation. But there was no obligation to keep him as a charity case.

Now this basically sums up the Biblical perspective.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, justice is a big word, and the… justice in relationship to what?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, there are a great many passages in the prophets where God condemns the unjust treatment of the poor, during the times of ungodly monarchs. And these passages are extensively used by the social gospel preachers. What these passages refer to are very real abuses of the poor by the courts. The courts were stacked against Godly men and against poor men. Therefore one of the major problems dealt with by the prophets was the ungodliness of the courts, the injustice men received from the courts. Well, I would say that if they want to do some preaching today they can, in the same direction. But their preaching is for tolerance towards the evil doer by the court, rather than a defense of the poor and the Godly by the court. So they are turning it upside down.

Again, they preached against the exorbitant taxation whereby the poor were being steadily wiped out. And again we are seeing this same sort of thing, far, far worse than anything in the Bible, because at least in the Bible there was no property tax; and today we are seeing confiscation, but when they talk about the injustice to the poor they don’t talk about this sort of thing, you see. The injustice to the poor and to the Godly that the prophets spoke about came from the state. Now they talk as though the state were the God and the poor had to be protected from us! And what are any of us doing to the poor, except joining them?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, humanistic justice is political justice, its savior is the state. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] The heresies of that day as your question indicated, are very similar to the heresies of today, so that you can speak of a real continuity. Some scholars do maintain that there is a continuity between Gnosticism and Arianism, and the various heresies of today. Unitarianism for example is almost self consciously in its origins, Arianism. And Humanism of course is a product or close relative of Unitarianism. Moreover, the type approach is the same, you have the same approach towards God and evolutionary thinking, you have the same approach for example to the doctrine of Christ in Karl Barth as you have in Apollinarius, Karl Barth speaks about the divinity of Christ and the holiness of God, and you would think he were an orthodox believer, but the only trouble with his faith is that his God is way out there, totally unrelated to this world, so you don’t even know he exists, so He is wholly hidden, Barth says. Completely hidden. So what is he talking about? Something he knows nothing about.

Well, this you see is very similar to what we have been studying the last couple of weeks with respect to the Arians; so that there is a very, very real continuity, and a great similarity between the old heresies and the new ones.

And you have the same kind of hatred of certainty today that you had in the Roman Empire. The demand for every kind of sexual practice that is forbidden, that was characteristic of the humanism then, it was a desire to break the old certainties of the law; anything goes, you see. Again you have the (?). It’s a repetition of the continuing humanism that had beset and plagued humanity since the fall. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, I am not going to defend the Inquisition, because…

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[Rushdoony] Servetus .Well, alright, let’s take it in the case of Calvin and Servetus because I can speak more freely there. However there are some good books on the Spanish situation by Walsh, which are well worth reading. Although that is a more complicated situation. Now, Calvin was called to Geneva as a pastor. He was not a person who held any political office, so that the idea of Calvin as the dictator of Geneva who engineered the burning of Servetus is nonsense. It wasn’t until Calvin was dying that he ever received citizenship. So he didn’t even have the right of vote.

Second, Calvin was banished once from Geneva before Servetus arrived there, and when Servetus was there he had his bags packed because he expected to be abolished from the city at any time, he was that insecure even when Servetus was there.

Now what was the situation with regard to Servetus? Servetus was we would say Unitarian. Now, Geneva had picked out the old Bishop as its ruler, and become a self governing state, and it wanted to be a Christian state, one its problems had been that there was so much moral anarchy that the city was not functioning. Therefore they wanted Christian law and order primarily because it was good for business, so that the ruling element in Geneva was not too theologically minded, they were not too much interested in religion. For their time as compared to this time you would say yes, they were far more interested than people in Washington today are, but their basic concern was they wanted an orderly state, a prosperous state. So they wanted social order.

Now they recognized that some kind of religious establishment had to provide that kind of order. Today our religious establishment is humanism; it is not providing any order, and so its answer is going to be increasingly total control as the alternative to any order it can create through the people’s faith.

Calvin was therefore called in to establish a basis of operation for the churches whereby they could educate the people, create a social order out of the social anarchy and immorality that had prevailed. Now, they were not going to allow Calvin too much freedom, in fact he was never given the freedom that he wanted to operate, in order to conduct the church; so you could say that the church never really achieved freedom in Geneva in Calvin’s lifetime. But they did want him to establish order.

Now this meant therefore that they had adopted as basic to their community certain presuppositions which were Trinitarian Christian. To be a citizen of Geneva you had to hold to a certain faith, if you didn’t hold to that faith and you worked to subvert it, you were overthrowing the constitution of the state were you not? You were guilty of either treason or subversion.

Now, in Geneva there was a party, the Libertines. And the Libertines never published or freely revealed their hand but they stood for the relativistic, anarchistic type of faith, and they worked secretly and powerfully to undo everything that the city council was doing, they even had power on the counsel from time to time, although their men avoided showing their hand until crucial votes. And they wanted to get rid of Calvin.

Now into this situation came Servetus, the scholars deny, (who are humanistic) that Servetus was called in by the Libertines, or that there was any subversive purpose in his coming. I don’t think we will ever really know, because there is too much that’s been destroyed, but it’s curious that Servetus came into a situation where he was as it were sticking his head into the noose, because here was an explosive situation: a group of people trying to destroy and overthrow the government, and he very closely aligned this group, the Libertines, and this group looking upon him as it were as a patron saint. Now, we cannot say he came in to work with them, but we can at least say that it was peculiar and suspicious that Servetus came into Geneva when he knew that it was dangerous for him to do so, that he would very clearly be linked with every subversive force. Well he was recognized and arrested, and of course immediately the Libertines did everything to make this the test case: “If we can get Servetus acquitted, it will mean we have the power to take over Geneva.” Now this was the issue.

So, the case became a hotly contested one between the two factions, the Burghers who governed Geneva and the Libertines who wanted to overthrow the established order. Now in this situation Calvin was called in as the theological expert to deal with the ideas of Servetus, but he didn’t know whether it was going to be Servetus’ neck or his own; so as I stated, he had his bags packed during the trial, and at one point he preached what he thought might well be his farewell sermon.

Well Servetus was condemned and executed, and of course historians have made a great point of saying that Calvin was the one who had him burned at the stake and this is utter nonsense. And this however is typical of our history books, so I think we need to take our history books, whether they speak about Servetus or the Inquisition which I don’t of course approve of or agree with, with a grain of salt, because there is a vast amount of invention where anything Christian is concerned, but to say that Calvin had Servetus burned at the stake is simply not true. Now Calvin agreed with it, that’s clear cut. Calvin knew what was at stake, it was revolution versus order, the existing Christian order, and I think if we had been there, or if we had a similar situation here tomorrow, and we reached a situation where say, some communist agent who came into the country was on trial and the trial in a sense developed as a kind of a test case, and if they could get away with it, it meant they had broken the power of government, we would say: “hang him.”

Yes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Now, it depends in which form we encounter him, whosoever denies that Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh, John tells us, is an anti-Christ.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, we in dealing with such things have to assess each one realistically. Our Lord tells us that we must be wise as serpents and gentle as doves, and He never asks us to do something where there’s little chance of winning, we have to asses each situation concretely, there’s no point in forever charging into a situation when there is no possibility of accomplishing anything. I cannot speak for this situation, I think each of us have to assess a particular situation as we know it, and those who are closest to it may know it best, but we have to assess each situation realistically. We are not here to make martyrs of ourselves or to take a beating, God doesn’t ask us to do that, in fact our Lord told His disciples that if there was any opposition in one place to shake the dust off their feet and move on to the next, He wasn’t asking them to stick around just to be punished.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, Right. And you have to begin with those who are first of all involved with students. If the students whose money is being taken against their will to publish the Daily (Bruin?) will not protest, if a group of them will not head it up, then it’s going to be futile because it’s their money that’s first of all involved. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Surely.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] The reason for that is that it can also be translated as ‘trespasses,’ and some versions do translate it as trespass. It comes from a Greek word that has that complex meaning so that it can be translated either way. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, forgive us our sins, in the Luke version, for we also forgive everyone that is indebted to us, and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, so the passage is dealing with sins or with trespasses. Yes?

[Audience Member] Can you tell us when the change came, why the change came in the repetition of the Lord’s Prayer in the Bible “it says thy kingdom come thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven, yet in all the apostate churches they say thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Now, in my understanding that in earth would be in us, instead of on the earth it is in us, that were made of earth in the beginning.

[Rushdoony] I never have noticed that, no I’m glad you called it to my attention.

[Audience Member] In the National council of churches all of them, used thy will be done on earth, …?....

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s an interesting point, I’ve never noticed that before.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. They are reconstructing history in terms of their humanism rather than in terms of God’s reality.

[Audience Member] Do they know what they are doing or are they basing all their research on other liberals?

[Rushdoony] They know what they are doing, yes. They know what they are doing, they are reconstructing history. For example, I think some of you have read the book Christ and the Caesars. Now the one thing that is apparent in that book is that religion was basic to the Roman Empire, it was the religion of humanism; it was political salvation by the state, by the emperors. It’s also apparent that Julius Caesar saw himself as a messiah, a savior, but this is left out by the humanists completely; they know it’s there, but they will not include it because they want to take away the religious dimension from life, they want humanism to be adopted but without reference to the fact that it is their religion, and they want eliminate anything that refers of course to God. So their history is a reconstruction, and especially in view of the Marxist influence on historians, they see history as economic determinism, so they are going to rule out everything that is not conducive to their theory of economic determinism.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] So far, existentialism has not in its more modern forms influenced history, however Marxism is a form of existentialism, and as Marxism, existentialism has influenced history writing very heavily.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our time is…