Profound Questions and Answers

Origin of Baptist Doctrine on Baptism.

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject:

Genre: Speech

Track: 03

Dictation Name: RR211M23

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1960’s-1970’s.

[0:00:00]

Yes?

[audience member speaks unintelligibly]

[Rushdoony] Both the mechanism and the spiritual meaning are necessary. In other words, we must truly yield ourselves unto God and we must be baptized because this is the commandment of God, and the great commission was to go ye unto all nations baptizing in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Ghost. So that both are necessary! Now, why this is necessary you can see perhaps concretely through a simple illustration: it is not enough to say to a woman ‘I love you spiritually with all my heart, mind, and meaning.’ The feeling is there, but there must also be the external act of a wedding or else she’s going to be dubious. You see? The two go together, you cannot separate the physical and the spiritual because both are inseparably linked. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

Not two persons but two natures. He is one person with two natures: the divine and the human, and they are in perfect union without any mingling of the two and without any division. Now the second person of the Trinity was present in heaven even when he was incarnate on earth in the person of Jesus Christ. But this incarnate person was in a very real sense isolated from God, and experienced the pangs of isolation. This is a mystery; we cannot understand it because it is beyond us, but nonetheless the scripture is emphatic that at this point this was a total isolation, because, he became the sin bearer for man even though he was without sin. He felt the full weight of total isolation from God.

Now, no man will ever experience this isolation - but becoming the sin bearer for all the elect he was therefor feeling the full weight of their gift. But after this cry there was also the note of victory: this is not the last word on the cross, and the last word was: ‘For Father, into thy hand I commit my spirit.’ From Psalm 31. And that was the word of perfect peace and triumph because it came from a Psalm which was the evening pray

er of Israel which every child learned at his mother’s knee and said as his bedtime prayer. So there was both the total isolation and victory.

The best exposition of the entire of the Passion Week is Doctor K. Schilder in three volumes. There are very few works ever written to equal that. There’s only one thing wrong with Doctor Schilders work and that is that you finish reading it. It’s so memorable, it’s an experience to read it that you feel sorry when you come to the last page. But I recommend that for a very detailed analyses of this aspect, as well as every other aspect of Passion Week. It’s Doctor K. Schilder. S-C-H-I-L-D-E-R. Three volumes on the passion of Christ. I believe Christ in His Suffering, Christ on Trial, and Christ Crucified are the titles of the three volumes. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

No, the origin of the Baptist doctrine is that you only baptize when a person is mature. Come in basically a rejection of the Old Testament. The Old Testament on the part of some people is seen as a book that they accept only because it’s in the Bible, but you pay no attention to it and you regard the law and everything in it as essentially Jewish. And also you don’t like anything that’s connected with the Hebrews so therefore you simply disregard it. You say, oh yeah, it’s a part of the Bible but it’s not a part we pay attention to. With some, as the disciples of the Christian Church or Church of Christ, they are almost savagely hostile, some of them, to the Old Testament! They speak of New Testament Christianity, and this is really all believe.

So believing just that they don’t know the rest. They don’t realize what the law requires and that baptism was simply the rite which replaced circumcision and it was required of children and therefore instead of seeing the doctrine of the covenant they put it on an entirely individualistic basis. They make salvation dependent upon your personal act of faith, and they do not see what Saint Augustine taught: the doctrine of prevenient faith. So that since you do it you wait until you’re old enough to do it, and you don’t see God’s requirement of it. You don’t see it’s relationship to the doctrine of the first group.

Because you refuse to accept a good deal of the scriptures. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

He was circumcised. He was circumcised on the eighth day. Now, when he was baptized it was by John the Baptist and when John the Baptist began to baptize, since this was given as a sign of the new covenant by Ezekiel, everyone was excited! And John was out on the wilderness, he had gone out into the desert and was preaching there because he was in a sense saying: ‘Your cities, your country sides, every in the country is finished. It’s under God’s judgement. The axe, he said, is laid at the root of the tree, it’s going to be cut off from the root up so it’s dead. Therefore, you must leave.’ So he was pronouncing the death sentence on the old Israel of God, then he was saying the age had come and therefore the new sign of the covenant which was to replace circumcision had now taken its place.

Now they were baptizing, in the Old Testament, Gentiles. Gentiles were baptized and circumcised both because this indicated that they were to come in as it were by Christ’s work, even as the Jew’s through sacrifice represented it, but the great ingathering of the Gentiles was to be with the coming of the Messiah. So when John began to baptize Jews and Hebrews alike it created a sensation, because they said, ‘Well either the Messiah has come or this is the great prophet who is to be the forerunner of the Messiah.’ But after that baptism was of children, and of course, we are told in the book of Acts that the whole household -over and over again- was baptized. Both the old and the young.

Now the Baptist churches you said, most Baptist churches not all, many of the Baptist churches began to realize that their doctrine of Baptism was not altogether correct; so about a generation ago some of the churches began to take a step towards infant baptism with the dedication service of children - which is a kind of a forerunner of Baptism in their thinking, and is connected with it. So it was a halfway acceptance of this.

[audience member is unintelligible]

Yes. So in the dedication service, you see, they do through everything that infant baptism calls for except that they won’t call it baptism and they won’t baptize. So they’ve taken a halfway step towards it. Now the kind of thing I described does not characterize such Baptists. Those who believe in what I described as the historic Baptist position will have no dedication, they are the ones who reject the Old Testament thoroughly. Now, not all Baptists and apparently those who grew among them reject the Old Testament, but he Disciples group, for example, are most emphatic about it.

And some are extreme at this point. I have talked in the past couple months to some whose attitude is that if you quote from the Old Testament you aren’t a Christian! How dare you use that book! It’s just retained because it was inspired by God but it’s totally without any significance for us now because it belongs to the Hebrews. Therefore no Christian can use it.

Now this is the historic position, but most Baptists have outgrown it very markedly in recent years, so that which I described and that which you experience are different. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

The sacrifices were declared ended at the crucifixion of Christ, because He was the great and true sacrifice and all these were typical or symbolic of His sacrifice. Therefore there could be no more sacrifice of bullocks, or lambs, or kids, or anything else. Now the temple continued its sacrifices until it fell into its Roman war of 66 to 70 AD, but when Christ died on the cross you remember the Baal of the temple was rented twain. The temple was declared desecrated by an act of God, so that’s it’s worth was thereby finished. Ended. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

No they were not put to death. There were a few accusations of Judaizing but then that charge was leveled by heresies against the church throughout the centuries, it was leveled against the church in the Early period, in the Medieval period, in the Reformation period. It isn’t Judaizing to accept the Word of God.

One thing more just a minute or two, and then we will be dismissed: I picked up recently the National Fourth reader, I had previously the Fifth reader. This was the series used before the Civil War in this country, this particular one was a revised one just after the Civil War, and the kind of reading that characterized the Fourth grade Reader was really quite surprising because the selections are from Washington Irving, from Charles Dickens (who was then just a young writer), from Longfellow of course, from Samuel Johnson, from Thomas D. Quincy, from James {?} Cooper, Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, and - this is unfortunate - Channing the Unitarian, from Joseph Addison one of the great English writers, from quite a number of prominent writers of the day and earlier, William Cullen Bryant, Foster, Reed, and also from Whittier, Panamore, William Cooper, James Montgomery, Thomas Moore, and also from Shakespeare.

They read in the Fourth Grade reader three parts of Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King John. They also have a poem here by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, also some by Tennyson, on the Charge of the Light Brigade. That was in the Fourth Grade reader a century ago.

[audience member speaks unintelligibly]

Public. Oh yes. Public and private, you see, in those days almost all your schools in the country were private or Christian schools. The public school movement when these readers first came out was not more than about ten or fifteen years old, and these were used in all schools alike. But as the public school movement took over education after the civil war these national readers were corrupted and you developed another series, and of course, by the end of the series you had the McGuffey readers which was a further drop. But compared to what we have now the McGuffey reader, of course, is quite advanced.

This is why in those days when you graduated from the eighth grade you had a good liberal arts education. You were better educated very often than your college graduates today are; you had a better command of the English language, you had a better knowledge of the great classics.

[audience member speaks unintelligibly]

I’m quite sure.

[audio ends and different recording commences]

[speaker] This reverence to the national fourth reader was made by Doctor Rushdoony on this tape in 1967. We would take what we are making now in 1992 {?} out of the question by Doctor Rushdoony. Quite a number of the books have been reprinted, and I carry them at the Mount Olive Tape Library. The book I think that Doctor Rushdoony was mentioning is now titled: Gaining Favor with God and Man. Other books that have been published for the use of training young people: ‘One Nation Under God’ and ‘The Plymouth Settlement’, ‘The Price of Liberty’, and Christopher Columbus and the New World. These books are being reprinted by Mantla Ministries at 140 Grand Oak Dr., San Antonio, Texas, 78232.

But the Mount Olive Tape Library also is carrying these books for Mantla. The Mount Olive Library also carries both the McGuffey’s readers, one written by the original McGuffey and the other by his brother, that was revised later.

[audio ends and different recording commences]

You know it’s very interesting he showed the Humanist in taking over the Presbyterian church of course were not satisfied-- [speaker becomes unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[audience member speaks unintelligibly]

[Rushdoony] Yes. They are not released because the vow is taken not to men but to God, and in the new confession of 1967 the very committee that worked it out - and it is a thoroughly {?} confession. They denied the faith by essentially this kind of Humanism that I have been describing - the total identification of Christ with Humanity, in particular the most degenerate kind of humanity. It is interesting that members of the committee that wrote that confession are now saying it’s only a stop {?} measure; in other words, they want a more Biblically socialistic Humanistic confession. So that they’ve already indicated that this was a compromise, after all, it still has the forms of Christianity. So you can assume from that that the next confession will have even less of the paraphernalia of Christian terminology, until it becomes openly the church that worships man.

[audience member speaks] They recognize though, apparently, God in the fact that they have reduced the word of a capital W to a small w. They openly say that the scripture is not the living word of God. [audience member becomes unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Their God basically is man, however, and they use the idea of God other than man as a limiting concept. In other words, they are some of them still ready to say there are limits to what man should do. There are certain things they’ll call right and wrong. So they’ll use God as a limiting concept so that they don’t say ‘anything goes’; they’re not ready to say that. So that God is not the living God, for them, but a philosophical limiting concept.

Now this is what he is for Karl Barth. The Barmen declaration which was included in this new confession is a Barmen document and I think may have been written by Carl {?}. This new confession goes a little further than the Barmen declaration, but already, as I have indicated, there are voices that say this Barthianism is too conservative. ‘Why maintain the forum, why use a limiting concept?’ So that a confession of 1990, you see, is already triumphed. A confession that will go away with the necessity of confessing anything except yourself! Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

Yes. The ‘I Thou’ conception is an existentialist one, and in terms of existentialism there is no God out there. Now, if you believe in the God of scripture then every fact in the Universe is a personal fact because it was created by a personal God. It therefore had to mean in terms of God, it isn’t brute faculty, it isn’t meaningless, unrelated babble. If you are an existentialist you deny that there is a sovereign God, there is nothing out there except brute faculty. Meaningless {?}. It is a world of ‘it’ objects, and the only personality in the world which you really know is yourself. You’re an ‘I’ and everything else out there is an ‘it’.

Now the thesis of these existentialists is that Christianity, the Bible, treats everything as an ‘it’ because, of course, they refuse to acknowledge God as Creator so they say, if you bear in terms of Law and the Bible obviously it’s untrue therefore obviously you’re treating everything in terms of something that’s non existent, so your relationship is an ‘it’ relationship. In other words, you’re not having a personal relationship with your husband or wife if you’re going in terms of God’s law. You’re saying, I have to be faithful because God requires it and this is what I believe to be true righteousness, and I want to be righteous therefore I’m doing it.

Well, that’s an ‘I’ ‘it’ relationship - that’s immoral! How do you become moral? Well, you deny that there is any law and you say the only thing that makes for any meaning in the world is myself and my love. So I will establish an ‘I’ ‘Thou’ relationship. Now when it’s an ‘I’ ‘Thou’ relationship you can have one with your husband or wife or any person in the neighborhood, or with any man or woman so it can be a homosexual relationship, but it’s a holy one because then in it personal. It’s an ‘I’ ‘Thou’ relationship. It’s you and your law, and that’s the only law that exists.

This is the gospel in the church today. It’s this ‘I’ Thou’ relationship. Well, when you’ve established that you have automatically declared that there is no God out there. There is no law out there. Everything (gropes?), you dissolve the family, you dissolve the marriage, you dissolve the state, you dissolve any kind of loyalty to anything except yourself, you dissolve the whole world of God...at least in your imagination, you have. Now it is in terms of this, the ‘I’ ‘Thou’ philosophy that almost all of your pulpits are operating, that your marchers (for example, New York and San Francisco) were operating, that your hippies, your diggers, your hoboes, your beat necks,...all of them are operating. This is the reigning philosophy of today.

So anytime you hear this ‘I’ ‘Thou’ kind of talk, beware. You’re dealing with a dangerous person. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

Yes. The scripture tells us--and I’m glad you asked that because when I’ve gone into this before I think it’s so important that it doesn’t hurt to repeat it repeatedly. Now, the scripture declares that our moral relationship with other people is on a three level basis. It is not a universal epic, a universal morality as the humanist declares.

First there is a level of law for our dealing with our family. Husbands love your wives, support them. He who does not provide for his own is worse than an infidel. Now, we cannot support the whole world, we cannot love the whole world. We’re definitely not to love our neighbors wife, nor discipline our neighbors children, but our own. This alone is moral. So there is this one kind of moral obligation, a sphere of law, the family.

Then there is another area as we deal with other men and that is the church. This is a kind of larger family and we are to love the brethren, we are to provide for their loss (with the deacon’s fund in most churches), and we are to recognize that we have a common destiny and live in terms of that.

Then there’s a third kind of relationship with the world at large. We are required to make known the Word of God to them, to try to convert them. This isn’t everybody's individual duty, although when the opportunity presents itself we certainly to have a requirement to witness. We have an obligation, Paul says, to be honest in all our dealings with them. To love our enemies, in the sense that we keep the law with regard to them. Not to kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, or covet. This is what it means to love our neighbor and our enemy. And when works of mercy are required, as, for example, with the Good Samaritan. He was an enemy to the Jews, yet he stopped and took care of this Jew who was by the wayside, made provision for him with the innkeeper and passed on. Now he did not say I’m going to associate with him for the rest of my life, it was just a work of mercy. This is to be our relationship towards the world. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

Rest. They are a prostate and in a sense they are more objectionable to God than those who have never come in the church because they are guilty of a fearful blasphemy. And certainly, we are at war with them, they are at war with us! They’re doing everything to drive the true faith out of existence and I think some of you perhaps have seen reports lately {?} has published them in the Christian Beacon how through internal revenue tax exemption is being taken away from churches that are faithful to scripture. More than one church in the past two years has had it’s tax exemption withdrawn, and in one instance the congregation was told, ‘Well, we’ll grant you your exemption if you join the National Council.’

Now what does the National Council do with internal revenue? But in other words, they will only recognize the Humanistic churches. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

Exactly what do you mean, eliminate?

[audience member is unintelligible]

Well, the warfare is to be conducted on God’s terms. The obligation we have is to create a Christian order. This means, therefore, we have an obligation to set up a society and work towards a society that will be Christian. In which the church will be Christian and the state will be Christian. Now this means we enforce God’s law: the death penalty. We do not permit abortion, because this is murder and man does not have the right to kill. We create, therefore, a society established in terms of God’s Word. In terms of that I would say I do not believe an unbeliever should have the right to vote. He has a right to exist, he has an obligation to obey God’s laws and he’ll be treated justly and fairly as long as he does, but one of the things that brought us into the past we are now was that all the laws we once had which required that a man believe in the scriptures, the infallible Word of God and in the doctrine of the Trinity before he could vote in any and every one of the states in the United States began to be treated more and more carelessly until enough people were voting, because they weren’t being strict about that regulation, that people finally did away with it.

And until World War I, you know, some states still had such laws in the statute books, written in their constitution in at least one case. Now, this is the way we should operate, and of course this is the way they’re operating because ultimately they are going to deny to us any right of legal existence and private {?} fiscally as well.

[audience member speaks...fuzzy recording; transcription may be inaccurate] Do you hold therefore that it’s scripturally and a positive Christian go hand in hand in only a primary defence is measured with Christian-- [audience member becomes mostly unintelligible] infiltration...all the earth...amongst the enemy of course, not among the Christians but amongst the enemies.

[Rushdoony] In warfare, yes, but otherwise it’s futile. I think we already have wasted millions documenting what the enemy is doing, and I think most Christians today are sinning because they are spending so much time trying to document endlessly. Now this IS important in some cases, in a limited number, but in most cases what does it add up to? We’ve got libraries full of documentation as to what the enemy is doing, what we need is to have Christians who will stand in terms of the faith and apply it.

[audience member is unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Very definitely. A very definite and inescapable link. Apart from Christianity {?}ism has always been stillborn in every culture where it has developed because capitalism cannot exist without capital. Now, the accumulation of capital and its ability to become effective requires two things: hard work and thrift. The culmination of the two you do not find apart from Christianity, and of course the critics have pointed the finger at the Reformed tradition particularly and insisted that there is a link, {?} and Tony and others and their right because many people have been compelled to work hard in many a slave state, but that’s a different thing that hard work that is productive work, that is voluntary work combined with thrift... This produces capitalization, and you do not have any real development of capitalism until you have capitalization.

Now, we now are in a period of decapitalization. How are we decapitalizing? Because socialistic states everywhere in the world are destroying {?}. But the basic decapitalization before you have the destruction of wealth is the decapitalization of character. And this decapitalization has already taken place in most of the world. You have no longer the same character of work, the pride in work, the productivity; you no longer have the thrift. The readiness to forgo present pleasures in terms of a future purpose. So that the basic decapitalization is a character and the basic capitalization is character. And that’s why the critics of capitalization have put their finger on the very source of the whole thing, they’ve said that it has been Christianity and it has supremely been the Calvinists and that’s why there’s a particular hatred of that tradition. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] What’s that?

[audience member is unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] [fuzzy recording; transcription may be inaccurate] The free nations represent a law or a paternity which binds its doctrine best expressed in morals and Alfred Heist who is often spoken of as having been in his day the international hope of freemasonry. Basically freemasonry believed in what the French Revolution {?}: liberty, paternity, equality. Liberty from God, total equalitarianism, and world brotherhood. It is a radically Humanistic faith, it believes that the real gods are men and men ascend up into Godhood by degrees and the degrees of Masonry represent the steps by which a person step by step rises in degrees until he becomes a God.

I do not believe that a Christian can be a freemason. A freemason has been a powerful force in the Western world for a number of revolutionary movements and one of their strongest means of strength is that most freemasons join merely for the social angle, and are thereby valuable in that you have hundreds of thousands of people who pay a tidy sum each year and never bother to open moral development to find out what they have joined, but they feel it’s good for business to be associated with all these other businessmen and to go and have some fun regularly at the meetings. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

Well, there are all kinds of theories as to its origin. Scholars say it began in the eighteenth century; certainly it’s modern form was at that time, or reorganized Masonry began. You can find evidences of this type of {?} through the Middle Ages and earlier and there are those among the freemasons who claim in their various books that it goes back to the Tower of Babel. That they were the builders of the Tower of Babel and that when they were scattered they established these various signs and symbols so that they could recognize themselves wherever they were. Now, I think that’s a fitting place to find their origin. Certainly this much is apparent, there are signs and symbols that make them recognizable in various areas.

Certainly the origin of freemasonry can be traced back into the Muslim world into the various cults and sects there, the {?} movement, that were like our sexual freedom league and like our Communists. They were bent on a real organization of society. In the early years of this country some American sea captains were Masons and got by in the Mediterranean without any attack from the Barbary pirates by flying Masonic symbols. They were then let through without attack, and that comes from a secular scholar who has no antipathy to freemasonry. {?} Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

The Knight’s Templars apparently brought these into the Western world, and finally the King of France prosecuted the Knight’s Templars--the church did not. The church got the blame for it and the church was slow in seeing the danger there, but the Knight’s Templars had various requirements such as denying the Trinity, sitting upon the (almond?), ritual homosexuality, and so on for membership. They were an exceedingly wealthy and extremely powerful order and some have claimed that the order was suppressed because the King of France was anxious to appropriate their wealth.

But all confessions of the various Knight’s Templars at their arrest (and they were not all forced confessions, many were voluntary) indicate a common story. Significantly the head of the order, (Jan Guillou?) - and modern masonry made a great to-do about him and have a separate order for younger freemasons in his name. So they claim a link to the Knight’s Templar. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

Well, Washington has been made much of by the freemasons. They claim him as quite a dedicated member and you often see his picture with a Masonic apron on and so forth. Now the reality of that is simply this: Washington very early because of his prominence was made an honorary member of just about every organization in the country and Washington was made an honorary member, or taken into one {?}, he attended one meeting in his entire lifetime. Some few years later when they were criticized he admitted he didn’t know anything about them and defended them. Later when he found out more about them he wrote two letters to Reverend Jedidiah Morse denouncing them and declaring that they were infiltrated and controlled by the illuminati. So that this is Washington’s only association with freemasonry.

Earlier this year I finished reading the collected works of Washington, so his letters are fresh in my mind as a result. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

The answer to that is that we were established a Christian nation. Every country because it has a body of law has defined those laws in a moral system. In other words, laws represent a moral perspective. They say some things are legal and other things are illegal - that is, right or wrong. Our entire legal structure was established as Christian to the core, in fact, the original statutes were simply enactments of Biblical law. For a long time in this country it was not possible to vote without being a Christian, believing in the infallibility of Scripture and the doctrine of the Trinity.

During, for example, the War of Independence in Virginia you could lose your children if you were an atheist. You would be considered incompetent and dangerous for their welfare. As late as 1912 at least one state constitution said that citizens had to be Christians. Now we are in process of disestablishing Christianity to establish another kind of religious and moral law: Humanism. And we are trying to work towards that, we are still to a considerable extent a Christian nation; for example, we still have capital punishment for certain crimes in terms of the Biblical perspectives. Now the Bible says for first degree murder, for kidnapping, and for various other crimes the penalty is death. We still have laws against homosexuality, even though we are not enforcing them too well, that again is Christian and no other culture has that. We still have laws against rape, and very few cultures have that... We still have strict laws against abuse and theft of property, and that is very definitely Christian. And so on.

You can go down the line and you find that our laws are Christian, they are geared to the Ten Commandments. Now we are trying to destroy this. We are trying to abolish capital punishment, to legalize abortion (and abortion was never regarded as murder until Christianity came), we are trying to substitute mental health programs for punishment, and we are trying in various ways to overturn a Christian system of law. But we have disestablished Christianity as the religion of the state but we have not yet disestablished it as the law, as the basic framework of our legal system. We are trying to do that.

[audience member is unintelligible]

Yes. That’s right. It’s not written in the Constitution for the simple reason that a constitution has no say so. This was in every case constitutional and the constitutional was asked to stay out of it, ‘it was not a federal matter’. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This was a matter of state right. Each state had the freedom to establish it’s own religious establishment and they did, and nine of the states had an established church, or churches: all of them had Christian requirements. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

Right. And the presidential oath, as I’ve said before, is very important because we don’t realize what an oath of office means unless we realize that an oath is a Biblical concept and it meant swearing in terms of the Bible. Deuteronomy 28 in particular; that if you obeyed, all these blessings of God were to flow to you and to the people, and if you were disobedient all the curses specified were to overwhelm you. So an oath is an invoking of blessing for the truth and for fulfillment of the oath, and of all the curses of God for disobedience. So you can see what our president has been invoking in recent years.

[audience member is unintelligible]

The Bible does not speak specifically on that, but the only thing the Bible says with respect can be construed one way or another on that is that there are various cases whereby God blesses the fruitfulness of the faithful, for example Leviticus 26:9, ‘For I will have respect unto you if you walk in my statutes and make you fruitful and multiply, and establish my covenant among you’. And there are many other verses like that, for example, Psalm 128:3 and 4, ‘Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the side of thy house, thy children as olive plants round about thy house. Thus shall the man be blessed that hath fear of the Lord.’

On the other hand the Bible speaks a great deal about the fact that the fertility of the unGodly is no pleasure to him; we are increasing and multiplying but he’s going to cut them down. For example, in Ezekiel 5:7 to 8, “Thus says the Lord God, Because ye multiplied more than the nations that are round about you, and have not walked in my statutes, neither have kept my judgments, neither have done according to the judgments of the nations that are round about you; Therefore thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I, even I, am against thee, and will execute judgments in the midst of thee in the sight of the nations.”

And there are many other passages like that, Isaiah 29 and 18:20, Jeremiah 15:9, Amos 1:15, Deuteronomy 7, Isaiah 9:3, and so on. And Job 27: 13 and 14. All of which indicates that God is not interested in the fertility of the unGodly, that it is not as far as he is concerned a blessing and he is going to curse them for their fertility as well as for their wickedness. Thus we have a double attitude on the part of God, called human fertility. It’s a blessing to the Godly, but to the unGodly it will only increase their judgement. This is all scripture says on the subject. So beyond that we do not have a right to go. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

Mhm. Well I think here we get into the matter of individual conscience and Christian liberty. I would say your instinct is a good one, but this is a matter for each of us to decide in terms of our own consciences.

[audience member is unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Wee one of the interesting things is that the age of the faith are ages where the fertility of the Godly is tremendous, far oustripping that of the unGodly.

Our time is almost over and I wanted to read just a couple sentences from Triumph which is a very interesting new periodical, a Catholic monthly. This is an article by Dietrich Von Hildebrand on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, towards a new religion. Now de Chardin I think is a familiar name to some of you because he is the one who is so influential in the church today and has influenced the (bishop-tene) so very very heavily. And Doctor Von Hildebrand says concerning his meeting: ‘--in 1951 at a dinner arranged by Father Robert Gannon, then president of Ford University. He was in a discussion with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. After a lively discussion, in which I’ve entered a criticism, of these ideas I had the occasion to speak to Teilhard personally. As our talk touched on Saint Augustine he exclaimed violently, “Don’t mention this unfortunate man! He spoiled everything by introducing the super natural!” ‘

Now this is the kind of man who was now exercising so great an influence. Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

Yes. That’s right. That’s our {?} the gospel according to John, the eighth chapter, the first eleven verses. And it’s a very significant episode: There was this woman taken in adultery, and they said, ‘Master, this woman was taken in adultery in the very act. Now Moses and the law commanded us that such should be stoned. What sayest Thou?’ This they said tempting him that they might have aught to accuse him.

Now their purpose was not justice in this situation, it was simply to put Jesus in a difficult spot. The Old Testament punishment for adultery was death, in the new Testament this was changed to making it a ground for divorce. Now the Pharisees knew that at that time the whole matter was taken rather lightly in Israel, that for Him to have said that the death penalty was required would have been to make Himself immensely unpopular with the people! But if He refused to say so they could say He pretends to be for the law but actually he has no respect for the law.

So they figured either way they were going to nail Him on this situation, and Jesus said, ‘Ye that is without sin among you let him first cast the stone at her.’ Now this had reference to the law of witnesses. In the Mosaic law a witness who perjured himself or was an accessory to the fact or was involved in a similar crime or didn’t come to the situation with clean hands was liable to the same penalty as the person he was testifying against. So if you testified against a person whose sentenced was going to be death and you were found to be a perjured witness you had the death sentence. If it were a case in which the restitution were, say, $10,000.00, you paid $10,000.00!

Now, to back up your testimony if you were a faithful and honest witness you had to then assist in the execution. So our Lord said to them those of you who are not perjured or dishonest witnesses, who are without guilt, who have not committed adultery themselves, take up and cast the first stone against her. Otherwise I do not recognize you as a witness. In other words what he did was to put the finger on them; you’re accusing this woman of adultery but you yourselves are adulterers, all of you!

Therefore everyone of you are equally exposed to the death penalty.

And He didn’t deny the death penalty because He said cast the first stone but be sure you’re innocent. And so they left. They which heard Him, being convicted by their own conscience went out one by one. For all they knew, he might have some evidence on them, you see! He was reading their hearts; but whatever it was they didn’t want to stay to be exposed. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself and saw none but the woman he said unto her ‘Woman, where are those, thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?’ She said, ‘No man, Lord.’

Now she didn’t call Him master or rabbi as they had done, she called him Lord; which means God. In other words, she came there and recognized Him for what he was and believed on Him. And Jesus said unto her, ‘Neither do I condemn thee. Now that you believe on Me your sins are forgiven. Therefore go, and sin no more.’

So our Lord said ‘The death penalty stands but let there be valid accusers, valid witnesses; and every one of you are guilty. You are not qualified therefore as witnesses.’ And when she turned to Him by faith, He acquitted her.

[audience member is unintelligible]

Yes. That’s in the apocrypha and Susanna and the {?}. Yes, and this was during the period of the captivity. They perjured themselves accusing Susanna of adultery when they themselves has adulterous intentions with respect to her and were aggravated because of her chastity. So they themselves incurred the death penalty because of their perjured testimony. That’s a classic example of that, and I’m glad you brought that up because that from the apocrypha reveals very clearly how penalty for perjury was death.

[audience member is unintelligible]

Yes. And these people, who are perverters, their intent is only to destroy man’s soul. So we simply have to stay from such men as soon as we identify them, because there is no good thing in them and we have to come to Christ with childlike faith. As {?} said, ‘I believe in order that I may understand.’ That has been perverted, by the way, you’ll find it commonly said that {?} said ‘I believe because it is observed.’ He never made any such statement, never! But in almost any history book you’ll find that statement prescribed to (Tertulia?), he said ‘I believe in order that I may understand.’ This is the Christian attitude.

Yes?

[audience member is unintelligible]

I would put it this way, some people live their whole life through and do not want to know what it’s all about.

[audience member is unintelligible]

Exactly.

[audience member is unintelligible]

It is deliberate. They know what the answer is. Yes.

[audience member is unintelligible]

Deliberately...well this is a form of epistemological self consciousness. They know if they go in either direction they will be face to face with the implications of what they are, so they feel that if they blot out everything they will never have to come to grips with the issue. For example, one prominent writer of the 20s in his latter years was living in his apartment in New York with his walls lined with books which included the Bible - and people who knew him said that he was the aware of the fact that he was facing death, that the answers to the questions were in the Bible but he avoided deliberately ever coming to grips with the issue. Any reference to the fact of death, and reference to God, any discussion upon the issue because he did not want to change it. |

He was running away from the certainty of the knowledge that he was going to face judgement and he did not want to believe and he did not want to acknowledge that he did not believe.

Just this week I was reading of a very prominent artist, there was a page of color illustrations in time magazines, who after he passed youth and began to approach middle age began to be terrified by the fact that time was passing and he was ultimately going to die. Now he didn’t want any answers concerning what was to face him, and he couldn’t even bear to be alone; his mistress had to hold his hand if he went across the street. Because he couldn’t be alone to face the implications of his thoughts...and he finally committed suicide because he was so afraid, not only of death, but also of life.

[audience member is unintelligible]

Yes, on the surface they seem to be, but they die hard. I’ve been at several hundred death beds; they die hard. They’re fighting all the way because they are afraid. Go into any rest home today and do any kind of work in one, they won’t even mention the word death. When they die they simply say Mr. so and so has gone to a foster home. The insanity of their total flight from reality, from self knowledge, is staggering. So they may talk rather bravely while they’re still able but there’s no braveness as they come close to death, because they do have a bad conscious, and their hearts condemn them.

And think, as I mentioned earlier, the death bed is a very revealing place. I’ve been by death beds that are so moving...they are a thing of beauty. And some that, ah, you can only remember with joy, you can’t go out of them with grief. This is the way many many Christians die, especially those who from very early years have had a strong faith. I think they very often surprise themselves with their serenity and power, it’s really magic to be there. Some of them are breathtaking.

You don’t see that in sinners. Some of them try to be quick, but it doesn’t work. [audio ends abruptly]