Implications of Biblical Faith

Implications of Biblical Faith

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Philosophy

Lesson: 1-4

Genre: Lecture

Track: 01

Dictation Name: RR250A1

Location/Venue:

Year:

Just yesterday I read an account of two twins who had not been together for years who met again. As one flew from Europe to the United States and they greeted one another at an airport. They had not seen each other for years. When they saw one another they broke out into laughter; they were identical twins. They were used to thinking and doing things alike when they were growing up, but now after some years when they saw each other the startling fact was that they had on identical clothing.

Now, there was something in their background that necessitated them, that governed them, that led them to do the identical thing. Well, in a sense that’s what we are going to talk about, what necessitates us.

If I climb on this table and jump, I will only jump down; I will not be able to jump up to the ceiling. Gravity necessitates that I go down. Well, ultimately what necessitates all of us? This is an all important question, because it tells us what we really believe in. Is it God or nature? What necessitates us ultimately, God or nature? What is behind gravity, that I go down instead of up?

First of all we have to examine what we mean by the word nature. We are so used to thinking of nature as though it were something; we’ve been schooled into this, and it is nonsense. Nature is a collective noun, a collective noun. For example, furniture is a collective noun, it refers to this podium, to this table, to the chairs here and so on. So we can say, pointing to that chair there: “that is a piece of furniture.” But furniture itself is a collective noun for all the different pieces of furniture.

Now the same is true of the word nature. Nature is a collective noun, there is no such thing as nature, per se. You cannot say: “If I go to Hoboken I will find nature there, and I will see nature in all its fullness.” Nature is a collective noun for the sum total of all the things in the universe, it is not a being, it is not a person, it is not a thing, it is a collective noun.

Well, God is not a collective noun, he is a person. And there is a world of difference between a collective noun and a person. God is the supreme being, what kind of being is He? Well the Bible defines Him for us and yet it does not. When God met Moses at the burning bush Moses was very upset, he in effect said: “God, who are you? For a long time, generation after generation my people have been in slavery in Egypt, and you are supposed to be our covenant God, I don’t understand you. What is your name?” That was Moses question, “What is your name?” Well, we today don’t understand that question because when we talk about names we talk about a meaningless word that we bear, Tom, Dick, Harry, John, Jane, Jill and so on, without meaning. But in Bible times names were definitions. Your name changed if you changed. This is why we don’t know Abrams original name. We know that when God called him out of Ur He named him Abram, and much later he renamed him Abraham, father of a great multitude. Names therefore changed in Bible times if your character changed.

So when Moses says: “God, what is your name?” God answered: “I am that I am.” Or ‘I am he who is, I am the ultimate being,’ in other words. ‘I am the source of all definition’, all things are defined by God, but he is so great he is behind all definition. But then He went on to say: “Moses, I am the God of your Fathers, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I am known by my revelation to your forefathers. You can know me truly by studying my dealings with them.” And to us He would say: “You will know me truly if you study my revelation in my enscriptured word. But, you can never know me exhaustively.” Because God is infinite, he is eternal, he defines everything that he creates, but He is beyond definition, He is the ultimate being who created all the things in this world.

Now when we speak of God as the ultimate being, we must then stop and consider what being is. For us as Christians in terms of the Bible, there are two kinds of being; the uncreated being of God, and all created being. The whole of the universe is God’s creation, it is created being.

Now, there is therefore a discontinuity between the uncreated being of God and the whole universe of created being. But we are the only religion in the world that believes that. We believe it because the Bible tells us so, “All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.” Therefore the whole of the universe is a product of God’s created word. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” This means where you take the Bible seriously, where you believe that God is uncreated being, the creator by whom all things were made, there is a gap between God and us, between uncreated being and created being.

As I said, ours is the only religion, Biblical faith that believes that. If you were a Hindu for example, you would believe that all being is one, so that as you rise on the scale of being you will ultimately become a part of Brahma. You will be a part of God. Well, this poses problems. If everything is a part of God, then if you are eating any living animal you are eating a part of God, a part of yourself because you are one with them. So the Hindu’s don’t eat meat. Well, now they’ve got another problem. Some of their scientists, you may not agree that they are good scientists, but they in their research have come up with the idea, well we would agree with them up to a point, that plants, trees, shrubs, are all living things. Now, they’ve gone further and they have said: “We have studied vegetables and we find that when you pull a vegetable out of the ground or you break it off and pick say the tomato or a stalk of this or that, they feel pain.” Well, that poses a problem for a good Hindu, how can he eat something that is a living thing like himself and feels pain and is a part of God? This is a part of the doctrine of the continuity of being which we as Christians do not believe; We believe that God created all things in heaven and on earth, that He is uncreated being and we are created being, and the rules and laws for our being are given in His word, and when He says eat we eat, and when He says: “This you don’t eat.” We don’t eat. When He says “this you can do”, we can do it, when He says “Thou shalt not do this that or the other thing” we don’t do it.

Why? Because the Bible says so, and the Bible is the manufactures book. He made us, and this book gives us his instruction manual on how to live, so because we are not God, we are creatures, we go by the owners manual.

Now, if you take the view point of other philosophies or other religions, you will have to say when you look at the world that sin and death are normal, that is what you find in, quote: “Nature”. But the Bible tells us that sin and death are abnormal. They came into the world because of mans disobedience to God, so it is not normal for us to be sinners, nor is it normal for us to die. And our destiny in Christ is to be delivered from sin by His atoning work on the cross.

So it is not the principal of sin that now rules in us but the principal of righteousness or justice. So we hunger and thirst not after sin but after righteousness, and in the new creation in heaven we will know neither sin nor death, because Christ’s work will have eliminated these two great abnormalities, sin and death.

Now humanity living and dying is a burden for other religions, and they believe that as we ascend on the scale of being and become God, all will be better. But God said he made man out of the soil of the ground. The word actually s out of the top soil, so you are not out of the no good soil that is deep underneath, you are part of the top soil.

And it is not finitude, the fact that we live and die that is our problem, but sin is. And when sin is finally overcome, then Paul says: “The last enemy, death shall be destroyed.” As I said earlier, sin and death are unnatural facts for the Bible. Abnormal facts, they are not the normality.

Well, this will give you a different outlook on yourself and on healing and on medical practice, on every are of life and thought if you see yourself as someone who was made by God to live forever and serve Him, but because of sin now decays and ages and dies. What will this do to your medical practice? The idea among too many doctors is that the body needs a lot of correction. Yes ago when I was young an arrogant doctor, and I am glad there are not as many doctors like that today said that: “If he were doing it he would make a lot better body.” And medical practice tries to correct what is wrong in the body rather than to say: “What are the owners instructions? How can we know something more from the owners manual?”

Well, when I was young doctors did not believe that stress cause ulcers. Now they now better. I recall a doctor telling me, this was 40 years or more ago that when he went to medical school, and he was not a young man, if he had said stress caused ulcers He would have been kicked out of medical school, it was just a chemical reaction to be chemically corrected. But as doctors began to understand the mind body relationship, they began to see that stress does indeed cause ulcers. And since then we have come to understand much more about the mind body relationship and its effect on us. We are, Genesis tells us: “Made in the image of God.”

What is the image of God in man? We are told we are made in the image of God in Genesis 1 26:28, then in Colossians 3:10 and Ephesians 4:24 it is defined for us in those three passages. The image of God in man is knowledge, righteousness or justice, holiness, and dominion. In fallen man the knowledge becomes false knowledge, it becomes injustice that man wants, not holiness but evil, and not dominion but domination; so that man works then to do that which is ungodly. He works against God, because what is original sin? It is defined for us in Genesis 3:5, where the tempter says: “Ye shall be as God, knowing,” which means determining for yourself, “What is good and evil.” “You will make your own morality, your own laws, you will define good and evil for yourself. In the public schools that is exactly what they are doing in many instances from coast to coast in the values clarification courses. What they say is: “You will define your own values,” They don’t use the word morality any more, that’s old fashioned, it smacks of the Bible. They use the word values, “Crete your own value system, there is no universal right or wrong, no universal value, just establish your own values and live by them. If you don’t like what you’ve chosen you can switch to another value system later, you decide for yourself.”

Well, one of the consequences of such thinking is that we now have legalized abortion and homosexuality, and are in the process of legalizing right now euthanasia. In fact a book of the early 70’s translated into English representing an avant garde European opinion which has already become law in some places is every kind of perversion should be legalized. And in fact the states or federal governments should pay subsidies to the people who practice these things and have been persecuted over the generations, things like necrophilia, making love to the dead.

Things like Copraphilia which I won’t define. All these have groups calling for their legalization, because the goal is to abolish every kind of law and have only one law that make Christianity illegal. Why? Well, if you believe in God, this is your owners manual and this gives you your law. But if you believe in that mythical entity nature, you will say: “Anything that happens in nature is good because nature is good.” You actually have people who’ve affirmed, beginning with the Marquis De Sade two hundred years ago, and coming right into this century when after being forbidden for about 200 years, the works of the Marquis De Sade were published with long introductions by scholars on how great they were. And the Marquis said not only that abortion and homosexuality and euthanasia should be legalized, but rape, murder, every crime you can think of. Why? They happen in nature, nature is good, and therefore they should be legal. But if you believe God alone is good, and He sets the standards, he defines the law, then you are going to say: ”What God says is right and wrong, defines it for me.”

But nature? What does nature say? Why nature, the whole world that of all these things comprehended by the collective noun includes every crime in the book. It can’t be bad, they have to be therefore good because nature allows them. How many of you are familiar with Emile Durkheim? Well, the schools have gone beyond him, because about 20 years ago I was speaking at a southern university to about 2000 and I asked them how many of them had been assigned, I was dealing primarily with Durkheim’s thinking, the Rules of Sociological Method. About 2/3rds raised their hands. Then I asked them if part of their assignment included the chapter on the criminal as an evolutionary pioneer, and none of them had read it. They only read the chapters that had been assigned.

Well, the Criminal as an Evolutionary Pioneer, written in the 1890’s, is a key aspect of modern sociology. That chapter is very important, because what does Durkheim say there? Well, as a sociologist he says that “The criminal is of great importance to me. We need to study what the criminal does, because the crimes that he commits today that lead to his imprisonment may be the next step in evolution. So if we study the criminal as an evolutionary pioneer, then we will understand the direction that evolution is taking.” Logical isn’t it?

And once you abandon the God of the Bible and His word as your law, then what Durkheim said is altogether logical. But God says: “There is none beside me, I am God, and there is none else.” But now in modern thinking evolution and time and chance have replaced God, and the logic of it requires that we follow the Marquis de Sade and Durkheim into a destruction of all law and all morality. I hope this helps you to understand what the universities are teaching, what television and film fair is indoctrinating you with, knocking down the old standards.

There is a verse in the Bible: “Whosoever breaketh a hedge,” sometimes translated as fence, “A serpent shall smite him.” That’s a marvelous verse. What does it refer to? Well, a fence in Bible times was a hedge, a hedge fence. On the borders of your field you would plant and this used to be true in England although those hedge fences are now being destroyed. You would take a strip around the borders of your field, let us say from here to the blackboard and plant shrubs there and trees, so that you had a few feet of solid growth. Well, and interesting thing would happen with these hedge fences. They would provide a place for birds to nest, there would be all kinds of insects hovering around those shrubs and trees that the birds would feed on, and underneath there would be a good place for snakes. They would not be exposed to the open field and to the cattle and to the plow, so this hedge fence of a few feet would have all kinds of wild life in it including snakes, poisonous snakes. Well, if during the night you wanted to break an opening through that hedge fence to let your cows go into your neighbors field and graze on it, you took a very good chance of getting snake bit. “Whoso breaketh a fence a serpent shall smite him.”

Now the Bible uses that to say “When you break God’s law which is a fence between good and evil, out of it will come a judgment against you. A good verse to remember.

Now we have a few minutes, are there any questions? Yes, and speak up because I’m hard of hearing.

[Audience Member] Certainly, um, I was taking notes and I missed when you said, when you are made in the image of God, with knowledge righteousness holiness and dominion. You said when sin enters that picture we have false knowledge, I think the second one was evil, and I missed the third.

[Rushdoony] Knowledge, so we have false knowledge, Righteousness, we would have instead of righteousness or justice injustice, and then in place of holiness evil, and in place of dominion domination.

[Audience Member] Thank you.

[Rushdoony] The Westminster standards, the Catechism and the Confession give you good definitions of all these things. Any other questions, yes?

[Audience Member] Doctor Rushdoony…

[Rushdoony] Could you speak up or come down, because I am hard of hearing.

[Audience Member] I’ll try to speak up. You may want to explain a little more about why the world continues to attack God’s standards when it is obvious that it is destroying them…

[Rushdoony] I’m sorry, I really can’t follow you I really am hard of hearing. Or perhaps you could interpret the questions after this Byron?

[Audience Member] I was just saying, you may want to explain about why the world continues to attack Gods standards when it is obvious it is destroying them, and we are told that one of the rules is self preservation?

[Rushdoony] Yes, the world continually attacks Gods standards and his word, because they believe they can establish their word, and that their word shall prevail and will create a heaven on earth. Friedrich Nietzsche was for destroying man as God made him and creating a super man, and he believed that an order beyond good and evil could be established. But when he pursued his thinking logically he found that once you abolish Gods standards you no longer have any good or evil. You have destroyed the possibility of thinking, you have no criteria for judgement, and so the consequence for him was total pessimism. There is nothing that remains when you abolish God because then you really have no valid criteria for defining anything or saying anything is good, because it is every man’s word then. Remember the theme verse for the book of Judges? “In those days there was no king in Israel” That is, God was not king any longer, they had rejected Him “and every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

Every man pursued his own standard, and that’s anarchism. The most prominent of the existentialists was John Paul Sartre who died just a few years ago. And John Paul Sartre did not believe in God, he did not believe there was any right or wrong, good or evil, he believe that you should be governed by the biology of your own nature, without regard to what any school, parents or church taught you. So you were to do what you felt impelled to do.

Well, this was a logical development of the premise of the tempter, every man his own God. The logical conclusion for Sartre then was: “For me, my neighbor is the devil.” If I am God, my neighbor who thinks he is God and disagrees with me has to be the devil, I don’t agree with him, he doesn’t agree with me, therefore he is a devil. It is interesting that Sartre also went on to say at one point in his Being and Nothingness that between two existentialists, one a prime minister and the other the village drunk, the better existentialist was the village drunk, because he didn’t care what anybody thought or said whereas the prime minister, however philosophically an existentialist, at least cared enough to try to please the voters, so he was not a good existentialist.

This means the logical atheism is a total self centered belief. That one is God, and that one can do as he pleases.

[Audience Member] Doctor Rushdoony, would you share with us, just give the current climate of the state and the church today, how you anticipate… what do we have to look forward to over the course of the next 10 years or so?

[Rushdoony] Over the next 10 years or so the outlook is very grim. Very grim. In the long term it is very good. Because sin is suicidal, sin is suicidal. The opposition will self destruct. Your mainline churches that have gone modernist are dying. I know in California some of these churches that 25 years ago would have 2-3000 every Sunday now have a good Sunday if they are 200. One about 60 miles from us down I the valley, we are up in the hill and mountain country, about 15 years ago sold their church which seated a couple thousand because they were down to a handful and they were mostly elderly people. Elderly women, in wheel chairs. And they built a church, a small one with a ramp for wheel chairs. They are dying, because God is life and if we separate ourselves from the lord Jesus Christ we separate ourselves to death, and we will be part of the dying world all around us. And it is dying, and its death is going to be a grim and a bloody one, but we are the people of life, we are the survivors and the conquerors. In fact Paul uses a remarkable image in Romans, he uses the word Conqueror, and that had a very, very technical meaning for Romans. It referred to an Emperor coming back after a victory with thousands of captives behind him brought to be sold as slaves or to be used for the games in the arena; chariots and wagons loaded with gold and silver and all kinds of wealth, and the conquering emperor riding in from of them to the cheers of the Romans. Well, Paul takes that and says we are more than conquerors through Jesus Christ, more than conquerors. Now that’s our future.

God made the world, it belongs to Him, He will not tolerate the perverse generation that abuses it, he will in due time clean house. And that is where we come in, that is our job, to do Gods work, to clean house for Him. Well, I think it is about time, isn’t it?