Profound Questions and Answers

01 Question on William Buckley conservative

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject:

Genre: Speech

Track: 01

Dictation Name: RR210L22

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1960’s-1970’s.

[speaker] Rushdoony, what do you think of Buckley and his {?} Christianity {?}.

[Rushdoony] Buckley is a very talented and able man, and there are good things in his publication, but basically, he is not a conservative he is a conservative liberal. Now the basic difference between conservatism and liberalism is that the liberal believes in intervention. He believes that the government should intervene to save the man from poverty. He should intervene in foreign affairs. He should ‘intervene’ here there and everywhere.

Now, when you hold to interventionism you can be a conservative interventionist or a radical interventionist. The radical interventionist says we should not only intervene but take over. The conservative interventionist says we should intervene only to give a hand.

The historic Christian position in America, going back to John Cox, which is from the early 1600s, is anti interventionist. The state has no right to play the role of a savior and to intervene here there and everywhere, in the affairs of men or in foreign affairs. It’s function is the ministry of justice.

Now we have been interventionists as a country since World War I, as far as foreign affairs are concerned. We intervened in the European War of 1917, 1943, and again in--or 1942 in Korea--, and now Viet Nam. This is interventionism. We are intervening in every area of private and industrial life.

Now Buckley is a very mild interventionist, but he is an interventionist. He does believe in a certain amount of intervention in foreign affairs, he does believe in a certain amount of intervening domestically, but he’s very conservative about it. So that he is very different from historic American conservatives. Yes?

[speaker] [poor recording, transcription is not reliable] I was wondering if I nullified their own {?} into Europe. Plenty of the house citizenships in the infiltration--1845-- [speaker becomes unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Mhm. Yes. Some of the earlier presidents had very serious doubts about the use of that section. They felt it was being misconstrued that the reference was to the frontier areas; so they were very reluctant to make use of that. Very reluctant. Yes?

[speaker] Can I ask a question?

[Rushdoony] Sure.

[speaker] Regarding salvation preached, which comes first: the chronological (order?) of the faith or knowledge?

[Rushdoony] Well what comes first is native, it is prevenient grace. Which goes before and leads us to here so that we might understand and believe. So that prevenient grace moves our hearts to faith and to understanding.

[speaker] Well then would you say that faith and understanding happen simultaneously? I was thinking of the 1 Corinthians 2:14.

{Rushdoony] Yes. Well, faith goes before knowledge because knowledge rest on a presupposition and once the faith appears and behind the faith IS the prevenient grace, then knowledge opens up in terms of the presuppositions of that faith.

[speaker] Now it is the Holy Spirit who compels on a broader length, you have faith because {?}. Therefore we don’t need to have knowledge, really, just to obey. You don’t have to have knowledge in order to obey the state. The Holy Spirit leads us to the realization of our sinful nature and our need for a Savior.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[speaker] In other words we don’t need to find {?}.

[Rushdoony] However, the Holy Spirit can work through knowledge which brings us to that point of grace, you see. It’s prevenient grace that is prior and you have to insist on that. Now that prevenient grace can use a number of things to precipitate the moment of faith. It can be admitted knowledge or something else, but it’s prevenient, and then in the (state?) opens up and enlightens all knowledge. But it is the prevenient grace of God that is prior to all else.

Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] No, I am against it. Because first, it does not--it is not specifically Christian. It opens up the way for any kind of religion in the schools basically. And second, what it will do is to lead people to a complacency about what the reality of our statist education is. It will not make the schools Christian, it will give up the sod so that the schools can more readily subvert the country and people will sit back and say “Well, why worry about anything, we’ve got the Bible in schools!”

I’ve written a long analyses of the congressional hearings and of the bill which may be published sometime in the next few months, by a particular magazine. I’ve paid for it already so I think they’ll publish it... [audience chuckles]

[speaker is unintelligible]

Yes. I would be afraid to have religion taught in the schools today by the teachers who teach it. Now, we’re just about up but I thought I’d pass on a little item which has no religious significance whatsoever. Some of you will remember the way travel was and cars were before World War I and after World War I also, I was a very small boy then but I remember some of those things, and this was exactly the kind of thing you did get from car dealers. Just a little poster.

“Travel hints for motorists:

Use chewing gum to mend a leaky gas line.

Carry a can of ether for winter starting.

Test for an overheated engine: If there’s a sizzle, all is well; if steam arises, check your radiator.

Strain all gas through a shammy skin to remove water and dirt.

If the spark plugger splits while you are cranking, tie it in position with a piece of string.

A box of oatmeal flakes is handy when the radiator springs a leak--pour flakes into the water, as they swell they fill the hole. Dried horse manure is also good, and of course always available.

To rejuvenate a worn tire pump in a cup full of chopped up feathers and hot molasses, spin tire to distribute the mixture easily and seal tears and holes. Watch out, though, there’s a blow out. [everybody laughing]

A gun is no longer needed when you visit the Western states.

To clean the celluloid windows and your side curtains--” Remember those?”--use vinegar.

To keep windshield clean on rainy days, rub sliced onion over it.” [audio cuts and switches]

[different speaker] The following is an extract from Doctor Rushdoony’s book The Foundations of Social Order, and he covers this material in the last chapter. I have added it because questions that are to follow this extract probably will questions that will be relative to this issue. This book is back in print, Foundations of Social Order and is available through the Mount Olive Tape Library, and is incorporated in Mount Olive, Mississippi.

[Rushdoony] In a Christian social order the state has one area: the ministry of justice. It has no jurisdiction over economics, which is similarly under God and governed by his law and not the state’s law. It has no jurisdiction over education--which is similarly under God--, or over the church, or over the family, or over any of the other spheres of human activity. Each of these is governed by God, not by the state; because God is the sovereign, not the state. But when the state claims sovereignty the state then says “It is our word, our law, our plan or predestination which must over arch the whole universe, the whole world that we cover.”

So that church, family, economics, art, education, every area of man’s life is subject to our government, to our plan, to our word. We are sovereign....but two sovereigns cannot coexist in the same point in time and space without conflict because they have mutually exclusive claims. So that, when the state claims sovereignty, the state is thereby saying that God cannot be sovereign because sovereignty precludes any other law then the law of that sovereign.

So that, whenever you have a contest of the sovereignty of the state coming into the social order you have therefore a war against God. The state versus God; Caesar against Christ. So that the persecution of Christianity becomes inescapable. It becomes a war to the death. Til finally the order goes out, as it did from Caesar: “Line them all up. By the tens and hundreds, the thousands and the millions, every last one of them, and behead them. They must be eliminated.” The only way that order was withdrawn was when, finally, Rome surrendered. It was a war to the death!

It was a war to the death, and it is precisely that today.

The fourth foundation of social order is the doctrine of grace. Man’s problem in any system is evil. In every religion, in every philosophy, in every social order, man has a problem with evil. He may handle it in different ways, he may, like the Christian scientist, say it is illusion and deny it. But every religious system has requisite itself to the problem of evil and how man might be saved from it. For humanism, the great antagonist of Christianity, evil is in the environment. The states power to change the environment is its saving grace. The physical and the spiritual environment for humanism must be changed to save man. And social change is statist grace in operation.

When the state operates today, its poverty programs in {?} and in parliament, it is according to its religious conviction extending grace to Bulgaria. Ministering to them with the true salvation. The evil environment must be destroyed to free man. Now evil environment often involved institutions as well as prisons. Therefore, if you are to save man with the statist doctrine of grace you must destroy or liquidate those things which are irredeemably evil in the environment. This may involve free enterprise, the churches, the clergy, Biblical Christians, the middle classes, Catholics, any and all who are deemed to be irredeemably evil must be liquidated. The others then must be reeducated in terms of the saving grace of the faith.

For Biblical Christianity the answer to the problem of evil is God’s grace. Not the so called grace of the state. Man’s problem is not environment but sin. Man’s desire is to be his own God and to become his own principle of ultimacy, and his own law...but man cannot save himself by politics, or by works of law, or by morality, or by any other means. Jesus Christ is man’s only savior.

Now these are the four foundations of every social order. And every social order is going to change if these foundations are altered, if the basic faith with regard to these four things is humanist the society will be in revolution against anything that is Christian. If men’s convictions become Christian then they will be in revolution against a humanistic social order. Today we witness through better than a hundred years of statist education the conversion of the masses of America to the new religion: Humanism.

Today’s Examiner had a very interesting article Death on Wednesday. A thirty-seven year old Negro convict, Aaron Charles Mitchell, is to die on Wednesday. He has been a criminal since his first arrest at seventeen and only in five of those twenty years has he not been in prison. He murdered a police officer while he was committing a felony. A (clemency?) hearing was held before Governor Brown last May. His attorney pleaded, and I quote: “Had this man been fortunate enough to have been given white skin he undoubtedly could have wound up in the seat now occupied by your Honor.” Unquote.

This was pure environmentalism. Mitchell himself has said, quote: “What people ought to be trying to find out about me is what it was in my environment that caused me to go bad.” Unquote. In other words, I am not responsible but my environment is.

This then means that we have had a revelation. The foundations of our social order has moved from Christianity to Humanism so that what we represent today is not Americanism as it exists today but we are relics of an old office or else revolutionary’s bent on creating a new order, which we are dependant upon us. Every social order has, as we have pointed out, an inflicted creed. This creed defines the order and informs it, and when a social order begins to crumble the greatest mistake that any people can make in defending it is to make political defense the first line of defense. Political defence IS necessary, but the modern conservative position has been to either make a political defense or an economic defense, and to say we are conservative, we are the correct position on economics or on politics, and therefore we are going to save the social order.

As a result they become fact finders. They document endlessly the corruption of the opposition. And what does this do? It does not change the opposition’s basic humanism--the most it ever does is to lead them to choose another Humanism or Humanist for the corrupt one they have at present. So they change from a Truman to an Eisenhower and from an Eisenhower to a Kennedy. Any defence that is not a {?} defence is a superficial one because it does not address itself to the basic foundation.

One of the most pathetic defences of the social order in all history was that made by Cicero. Interestingly enough, Cicero is now held out as the ideal for conservatives. What is Cicero advancing? The Roman Republic. The Roman Republic was established on the religious foundation of the old Gods and the fact that the old Roman Aristocracy represented a divinely established order. That they were the chosen bearers of authority. The ones who were destined in the Senate and in other offices to wield authority and to establish and govern a Republic.

Now Cicero was trying to defend his old order against the masses when he no longer believed in the gods nor in the philosophy that undergirded the republic. He wanted to retain the form without the meaning of the form. He was a radical unbeliever in everything that he upheld! He defended it because it was what he loved, it was his tradition. CIcero, therefore, was a relic of the past. And Judios Caesar who belonged to the same class as Cicero saw that there was no future, there was no faith left behind what he represented so he went over to a mob and joined it and made himself its head. Because, he said, this is where the future is. And even though they killed him, he would run it. The aristocrats killed him.

Because the future was with the revolution! It alone had a religion that the people believed in. The religion of the masses today IS Humanism, and Western civilization today is dying because its defenders will not defend the foundation. When the creed is accepted the social order is determined. If the creed you accept is Humanism then you have determined that you are going to have at a minimum democracy at the beginning and Communism as the ultimate of Humanism. It is inescapable.

You have the presuppositions that require it. If the creed which you accept is Biblical Christianity, the creed that the early church, then the social order is again determined and you will have a Christian social order. A constitution which denies the doctrine of sovereignty as far as man is concerned it never uses the (works?). Which believes that because mans problem is sin you have checks and balances, and a fundamental distrust of power, and you establish a social order on the foundation of limited power and limited liberty. There can therefore be no reconstruction of Christian civilization except on Christian creedal foundations.

Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. Most conservatives today therefore are relics of the past. We, because we are dressing ourselves with the creedal foundations represent not the past but the true future. [audio cuts and restarts] Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. In other words he (Ronald Reagan?) is offering a reforming Humanism for a corrupt Humanism for a corrupt Humanism and there is no hope in that. Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

I myself see no point in having young men killed needlessly in a war is a {?}. In which victory cannot be won.

First of all, I’m quite certain this is planned. There will be more violence because, after all, the more violent they are the less guilty they are deemed by our powers that be. It is us who represent the evil environment, and why shouldn’t they be turned loose to play on us or to kill us? But there will be violence. We have to take practical steps of course and many of us are taking practical steps towards protecting ourselves against that, but the basic practical step that must be taken is to revive Christian faith and to reestablish it as the foundation of social order. We are going to see Humanism go down in its own blood, and we better be ready to recognize that it IS going to go down in its own blood.

They’re going to change their faith only when their false god absolutely and utterly fails them. Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] No they could not, because what conservatives today are not anything more than Humanists who, aah... [audience member speaks] [speaker is unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes, because they have power. Power is a very wonderful blinder. Wherever you have power you have people coming together, and the power acts like a magnet; they hang to the center of power. But when people are not in power and they have no faith that holds them together they fragment. So that when you see the collapse in any block you see also a fragmentation. So if tomorrow they lose power, they will fragment.

[speaker is unintelligible]

Yes. There is fragmentation. But the fragmentation will not take practical effect until they lose, you see. The elements are there but they are cohesive enough at election time; it will be with defeat that the fragmentation will truly set in and rend the party.

Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

Mhm. They’re very straight fast lines in Mexico. The old Spanish will not mix with the Mexicans, the Mexicans will not mix with those who are part Indian, and those who are part Indian look down on those who are all Indian, and all of them keep the Chinese and Negroes and other racial groups outside the general scheme of things. Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

Yes. Well the word for repent there is different in connotation than the word we have. It means literally he reversed direction as far as what he had said he was going to do. It doesn’t mean there was repentance in the modern sense of the word.

[speaker is unintelligible]

Yes, no...this was in large measure the trial of Moses, and later on he makes it clear that this was the trial of Moses because he tells Moses “I will make you a great people rather than {?}. You will be the source of the new Israel.” And this was very exalting of Moses, but Moses was not thinking of himself but of God’s covenant. And so Moses has to test. But the word repent there --and some modern versions will have another word, but none of them have quite the connotation that we give the word today.

One thing more. Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

Well, very often of course when we’re voting we have a choice where we have no Christian to vote for, that is a real Christian who knows what Christianity means, we have rarely had such a man. For a generation or two. So sometimes I feel I cannot vote for either, other times I vote for the lesser of two evils. And this we must do when we feel that one of them will improve the situation. And so we must vote to the best of our abilities. We have to be practical in terms of the situation; but meanwhile, work through education to reestablish a knowledge of the foundation and make the foundation Christian. Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

Until they fall flat on their faces very thoroughly. It will have to be something drastic and probably economic. Now when I was very small we lived in a home where the heater was an old fashioned pot belly stove, and it was quite a problem--I was crawling around then--to keep me from that stove. I wanted to go and touch it. So my father finally said to my mother one day “Let him touch it. Let him touch it.” So, I went up to it, and it wasn’t at that time red hot as it sometimes gets, but hot enough to burn, and I touched it and they never had a problem again. I toddled around the room day after day and I never touched the stove again, I had learned.

Very often that’s the only way how the children of a civilization will learn. They have to get burnt. And we’re asking for it now.

[speaker is unintelligible]

No, that’s right. They never did because they didn’t have anything good to begin with. But Christian civilization has recuperated a number of times. It would take a long time to go through the medieval period and appraise the rise and decline and then to recover it. The most dramatic, of course, a third in the latter part of the middle ages when you had everything you had now--the pornography, you had the (beat neck?), you had the hippies, you had actually things that went further, far further, than now, you had some of them staging nude parades in the big cities in Europe in defence of their free love ideas and far out ideas--and Europe was dying on the vine, it was rotting through moral corruption. And then the reformation came along and you had the revival of Christian civilization, in the United States the colonies were established and became a means of revitalizing the world again.

Now, we’re going down. Well where you have the element of Christian faith you have the possibility of recovery because you have something you can recall people do that does offer hope. But in all these other cases the basic foundation was a form of Humanism, and it was just a case of their humanism going to seed. So what could you recall them to? There was nothing.

[speaker is unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Very true. Our time is almost up, but I’d like to call your attention to something in the Open Tribune, Sunday, April 2. The title: Hungry Hindu’s Eat Cattle. This is very significant, other times they have starved to death rather than to eat their sacred cows; but this associated press release from Calcutta says: “Indians facing starvation in drought stricken areas of the (Harpeth?) are slaughtering cows and eating the meat even though the animals are sacred in the Hindu religion, a government official disclosed today.” And so on.

And this I think is good news. They are getting burned and their beginning to wake up, so that there is some hope in the future if more of this continues in India. It’s time they started slaughtering the cows, and they will be reduced to slaughtering cows and everything else before it’s all over, and they’ll be through with their Hinduism then. Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

Yes. The word communication is a very important one in the modern idiom, because the goal is to have this total communication in order to have total community. Therefore you must be able to communicate, you see, with men like Mitchell. You must be able to communicate with the prostitute, with the pervert. And hence it is, for example, in the San Francisco church concerning which I read some data a few weeks ago, Liot Memorial, there was a session with the hippies, the homosexuals, and various other groups that are regularly brought in order to establish communication.

Now of course what we must say in terms of scripture: First, there can be no communion with those who are evil. Our communion is with the people of God. Second, yes in a sense there can be communication with these people, and the communication that you and I have by the grace of God been able to convey to Mitchell is the death penalty. In other words, those who will not communicate in terms of the grace of God to them the law of God must be communicated.

But of course, those who today are trying to establish this world community want this false communication. Total communication in which there is no good and evil, in which the world is beyond good and evil. Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

The arts can be used to serve a variety of purposes. Today they are serving a Humanistic purpose, they have in other times served a very very Godly purpose. The greatest of all musicians is also the greatest Christians among musicians, Johann Sebastian Bach, a very very great Christian and clearly the greatest of musicians. I was interested yesterday in carrying Carl {?} and introducing a Bach number. People thought the tremendous fault of Bach’s writing, all of it great, he said that if a copyist sat down today and worked six days a week it would take him seventy years just to recopy by hand all of Bach’s compositions that we have.

And when you realize that much of it has been lost you realize the staggering genius of that man, and the productivity; and when you realize that his counterpoint style has a mathematical precision about it that is so amazing that people spend a great deal of time studying mathematically the intricacies of a single composition, you have an insight of the genius of Bach. Truly a great musician.

[speaker is unintelligible]

It’s tremendously moving and beautiful but we need to study it and understand it sometimes to appreciate it. Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

Yes. There has to be a communication with them, to them, but not as one people. In other words Saint Paul says if we are to separate ourselves from the ungodly we’ll have to go out of this world. That’s not practical. We must live in their midst, work with them, but we cannot become one community with them. There is a strict line of division.

[speaker is unintelligible]

No. We cannot. We have to deal with them intellectually but we can never accord to them the idea that theirs is one idea among others, it’s a smorgasbord and you pick what you like. Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

Our answer is the society has succeeded in relationship to Mitchell because it gave exactly what asked for, because when breaking the law he asked for debt. There was an excellent editorial some time ago by a man who was neither a Christian or a conservative but a kind of hard headed scientist, John Campbell. He dealt with the race (rack?), and he said that the question all of us are debating, liberal and conservative alike, is this, and he said: “What we face in civilization today, and where we become too nice to face up to it, is that there are some who are by choice and by character and by nature totally barbaric. They have no desire to do anything but destroy, and what we are doing is to subsidize them more and more so that what we are doing is to subsidize, as it were, an army dedicated to our destruction.”

Now his question is, what must be done with them? And he said in this editorial: “Bear in mind, it could be that one of these barbarians might turn out to be your child. So you have to look at it personally as well as generally. Most of these barbarians come out of certain classes of people, but they also spring up out of our midst. He said, put yourself down a position of total power, as a dictator, what is your answer for the problem of the barbaric?” Well, I think the Bible gives us the answer and the Bible says very plainly, and I mentioned this before, that if any juvenile who could be incorrigible that juvenile was to be brought up before the council for examination, and if he indeed proves to be incorrigible he was to be executed.

So much wickedness be put out of the land. And believe me, this has been applied in this country--in the colonial period. When that law was passed, juvenile delinquency ended overnight. There is no point in subsidizing evil, and God has said this is what you communicate to such people, death. We succeeded in Mitchell’s case, but the sad fact is the number of people who are executed are decreasing each year, the number is decreasing markedly, there were very few executions last year. We have approximately sixty in death row now. Everything will be done to prevent them from going to the gas chamber. Fortunately the public sentiment was so strongly in favor of Mitchell’s execution that the Senate committee dropped consideration of the bill to repeal capital punishment. Politically, it’s dynamite. The people right now do want to see just punishment being done.

Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

Yes, yes, yes. You’ve always had in the past a vast number of people at the bottom who are, by nature, lawbreakers. Society has kept these people in line by force, by the fear of punishment, and today it is this that is gone. The number of people who go to prison for their due crimes, the fact that they get out so easily has only encouraged crime. The handcuffing of the police, the handcuffing of police, the handcuffing of district attorneys, all this is an inducement to crime. So we have seen in recent years a very direct correlation between the handcuffing of law enforcement agencies and the increase of criminology.

[audio cuts briefly]

I think it is his opinion, and it’s nonsense. The fact is, people don’t suddenly change. If you begin by being totally irresponsible, short of a religious conversion you’re going to go on being totally irresponsible. One of our problems today is that so many of these people have matured, and they are a strong force for general irresponsibility in our society. One of our problems today too is that we have so many non persons in society, and and they’re (precisely the gravity?) from the older generation hippies. These non-generation persons are people who very early just left to organized society, they do not pay income tax, they are not registered to social security, they are not registered in a census, they are not registered for the draft, they just drift in a world of non persons. They are completely unrelated to society at large, except that they prey off of it. They make up your hoodlums, they make up your drifters who live by their wits who, when they work occasionally, will work for, says, cash only, a day or two a week and then drift the rest of the time. And you have perhaps, in the city like Los Angeles, a quarter of a million such non persons. These are the becoming a growing a menace throughout the country.

And above them you have those who would leech our persons legally but are still on the fringes of this kind of world. So that, you have a vast segment of these older hippies who are constantly creating a barbaric session in society. Now I went to Cal at a time when you had people who were drifters who were going to live by their wits, and did, and those who were communists, and so on, and I would say that I’ve contacted over the years, bumped into them up and down the states, or read about them in the papers, a sizable number of those {?}. Except for very few I would say virtually all of them are almost exactly what they were when they were in school, as far as their opinions, their conduct and everything else. And some of them looked about twenty to twenty-five years older than I do because of the way they’ve lived, and a fair percentage are dead.

The only thing I could say that has involved any real change is this: Some of this outlaw fringe today, a fair percentage, is in some form of federal service. They are somewhere on the poverty program or something else. This is drew them in, those who hadn’t really done anything. Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

Yes. I basically agree with you, although I would say as far as the statistics about these states that have abolished the death penalty, law enforcement men have gone through the same statistics and proved that there has been a change for the worse where the death penalty has been abolished. So that it doesn’t hold up their statistical arguments. And another thing, when you have the death penalty removed, supposedly for life imprisonment, you not only have the abolition of the death penalty but the abolition of enforcement generally. So that there are also fewer convictions on the record. It isn’t that fewer murders are committed, but they’re not only unwilling to sentence them to death but they’re also unready to send them to prison. You have sentimentality coming in.

So that statistically their argument is not sound. Law enforcement men do not back it up. You are right, of course, that just having the penalty without a Christian social order will not work. What you had in 18th century England was of course virtually a total breakdown of Christian law and order; the church of England was thoroughly corrupt, there were very few services where even a service was conducted because the clergy mainly got their offices through political appointments and never visited their {?} more than once or twice in their lifetime. So services were not conducted, the people were not taught, England was for all practical intents a pagan country. There was nothing they could do to stem the tide of lawlessness until they had the Westleyan revival, and I say this reluctantly because I don’t like John Wesley's basic stance--it is very heretical at some points.

And the Anglican revival; these two things really that it must be given to, or accredited to, changed the face of England. Whitfield was the one in the Wesleyan revival who did the more solid work.

Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

The foundations of social order are first of all law, which rests on morality, which rest on religion. Second, the doctrine of the state, what is your doctrine of state. Then third, it is your doctrine of grace. What you regard as grace. The other is the doctrine of sovereignty, what you hold to be the doctrine of sovereignty, where is your sovereignty, on heaven or on earth.

[speaker is unintelligible]

Well these are all creedal aspects, in other words, you’re morality and religion is creedal, your doctrine of sovereignty is creedal, your doctrine of grace is creedal, your doctrine of the state is a creedal matter. So that all these things are aspects of creedalism and the point is that there’s a creedal foundation to social order. Yes?

[speaker is unintelligible]

Yes, I think if one does just because they pleasures. Because God wants us to enjoy life; the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. So that there is no evil in pleasure as such. We are as creatures, we were created to enjoy life, and God set man in a paradise. And, we are told, that the blessings of the Lord maketh rich, and he {?}. So that God’s purpose was for to prosper, that he be in good health, that he enjoy life! And of course, first things first, to glorify God is our first responsibility and then to enjoy all things in Him.

Now when this question was raised in our Lord’s Day we dealt with it on a number of occasions, I think we summed it up in the Sermon on the Mount. He said that all these things to the Gentile, this is what their whole life is given to, a pursuit. But, he said, seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you. So that God wants us to enjoy these things.

Now it is basically a product of the grief culture, Neo Platonism, in particular that led to this temperament. The Greeks held, you see, that there are two kinds of beings, basically. Related and intermixed, matter and spirit, and you had {?} matter for spirit in order to become truly holy. But from the perspective of the Bible, man, body and soul, is fallen from Christ and then he is regenerated, body and soul, by Jesus Christ. And the ultimate goal of body and soul is the resurrection of the dead. And you find that some of these ideas that pleasure was wrong were when they supposedly came in to the church basically pagan. For example, Simon {?} was closely connected, and that’s why the church never really recognized him.

And regarded him with suspicion as Assyrian {?} called a Baal form of worship. He is the one who is one the pillar, you know, and lived there for so many years. He actually wore his belt, his flesh began to rot and he would pick up the worms and put them back in and say: “Eat worms” and destroy this foolish flesh, and so on. He had quite a following and his following was primarily pagan. The pictures we get today in our textbooks are perverted. They speak about the glory of Greece and its emphasis on the body and material pleasures, while there was an emphasis on perverted pleasures but not healthy ones, and Greek culture turned its back basically on the body, on the material world, for the realm of ideas.

This sort of thing crept into the church for a while and then it was forsaken. You had a major conflict in this in the height of the Middle age church, ah, Mid Century. Between the regular clergy and the secular clergy, which truly represented the faith. And the regular clergy finally triumphed over the secular clergy, and the regular clergy has steadily receded because the regular clergy emphasized that the emphasis of the regular clergy was not fully and authentically Christian.. This has been a controversy for a long time and it hasn’t been entirely clarified, but we are coming closer to a clarification and the textbooks have first rate, because they give us the idea that this renouncing of the material world is Christian when it is basically pagan. [audio ends]