Implications of Biblical Faith

Implications of Biblical Faith Q&A I

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Philosophy

Lesson: 2-4

Genre: Lecture

Track: 02

Dictation Name: RR250A2

Location/Venue:

Year:

In our first session we discussed the meaning of the fact that God is the creator, let us go on now a little further in the same subject to discuss the purpose of creation. There was no need in God. You and I have needs because we are creatures, we need certain things, and our goal is to get those thing that we need so that we live constantly with expectations, with plans, with hopes, and with desires. But there is no need in God. Revelation 4:11 says: “All things were created for His pleasure.” Not because He needed anything but because it please Him to do so. Psalm 11:7 says: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork.” All things are manifestations of the glory of God, and of his creative power. God created things in the space of 6 days, there is no getting around the plain language of Genesis 1.People have tried it from the early days of the church.

You must remember that evolution is an ancient myth. The Greeks believed it, and therefore they found that the Bible was an embarrassing book. When they were converted they tried to get around Genesis 1, to spiritualize the days, to make them long ages and eons upon eons, and it embarrassed them as they went through the Bible that God spoke in His word about such things as diet, and rules regulating how you live. Some of the early church fathers who were more Greek than Christian like Gregory of Nyssa, who actually spiritualized everything from Genesis through Deuteronomy. When he got through with it, there was no history only a great many allegories that meant strange and fanciful things. They were embarrassed by Genesis 1.

They were given to a belief in process. We will come to that tomorrow, but for the present just to say, they could not believe in a creative act, God said and it was done. God declared: “Let there be light and there was light.” All these things were impossible to the Greeks, for them man was essentially the creator, man was the governor. Now the previous hour I began by saying that every school of thought has a place where things begin, where the order of necessity originates. So, If you believe that all things came out of a mythical entity, a collective noun called nature, then nature is going to govern everything, and this created major problem in human thought. Because with the enlightenment somewhere around 1660, when civilization in the west shifted from the primacy of God to the primacy of nature. They did not like the idea of God, why? Because God was the creator and the Predestinator, because if God is literally the creator, if he made all things in heaven and on earth, all things operate in terms of His word and His purpose. That makes predestination inescapable.

The Bible tells us, and the Westminster confession insists that God predestinated all things, yet without violence to secondary causes. So that, we are responsible creatures, and yet God has numbered the very hairs on our head. I don’t know how many hairs you have on your head, neither do you, nor do I know how many I have on my head, although they are a lot fewer than they were 60 and 70 years ago.

Well, God knows. He has numbered all the hairs of our head, He has determined everything we do, and yet I am a responsible creature, I am responsible for what I do, I am guilty if I do wrong. That’s a mystery to us, we can’t understand it. But philosophically you cannot escape from the fact of the primary determination of all things by God, and the contingency or freedom of secondary causes, and the Westminster Confession very, very strongly affirms that. Well, there is a realm of necessity. The enlightenment did not like the idea of being necessitated, predestined to use the theological term, by God. So they rebelled against the concept of God and said: “We will be under nature, not under God. We are creatures of nature.”

But what happened? They could not escape from necessity. So what did they have? Determinism, naturalistic determinism, and it culminated in a book which perhaps is no longer taught because it’s a problem, La Mettrie, a French Philosophe, who wrote Man a Machine have any of you ever heard of it or read it? Yes a few of you, alright. La Mettrie in that book has a person totally committed to a materialistic and naturalistic philosophy of life wound up with a more rigid predestination by nature than the Bible has by God. At least in the Bible we are still responsible creatures even if predestinated, a mystery we don’t understand, but which we have to except. But in La Mettrie’s world you are totally determined by nature, so that you are a machine. This ended up with so ridged a naturalism, that when I studied in the mid 30’s psychology at Berkley at the University of California, a required course, the textbook I had in those days spoke of consciousness only in one sentence where it dismissed it as an epiphenomenon, nothing real.

And I thought to myself: “They’ve got themselves into a fine pickle.” They cannot even admit that we have consciousness any more, because of their naturalistic philosophy. Well, This has become a problem to the naturalists. What can they do if they begin with God, they end up in determinism and heaven or hell. If they start with nature they end up with the most rigid determinism imaginable, but they are a machine, they don’t even have consciousness, how is man going to be free of God whom they hate and nature which they thought was freedom from God but puts them under a worse kind of bondage. Does anyone know what the answer is? It is one which has come about just in the last quarter century. The artificial life.

The Artificial life. The life that is against nature. What does that involve? It begins with abortion, you deny life, but it requires a lifestyle that is unnatural to use the term in its older sense, homosexuality. Let me read to you from the November 18 1995 Spectator an English weekly, and the author is David Starkey, a homosexual. He denies God of course, and he denies nature; we don’t want a natural world, we are against nature. What are we for? The artificial life. This is how he concludes: “But the fact that our sexual orientation is artificial does not separate us from modern society, on the contrary modern society in the most artificial thing there is. That is what distinguishes its comforts from the state of nature which as Hobbs pointed out: “Life was nasty, brutish and short.” We homosexuals should rejoice in modernity, we should be proud that modernity has been created by Homosexuals!”

Do you understand where it is leading them to? They have to have a life against life, against God, against nature, against everything that is natural and they feel that as gays their lifestyle is the epitome of that, and it is geared to death. So they begin by rebelling against God, then they rebel against nature, and now they are in rebellion against life. They act as though it is a matter of pride to have aids, but at the same time somehow it is the fault of the Christian community.

Now as we go through Genesis 1, as God creates on the conclusion of each day He says that it is good. And then when all things are finished, He pronounces everything very good. God blessed all 6 days, because all creation as He made it was made in relationship to himself, to serve Him, to fulfill His will and to glorify Him. A creation that God Himself said is very good.

This led Calvin to say in his commentary on Genesis 1: “Man was rich before he was born.” Man was rich before he was born. And man is still rich, he only has the task of reclaiming the wealth that is his in Christ. But man has renounced his wealth because he has renounced God. He seeks to replace God with chance, but that’s an impossibility. You know, Doctor Van Til, the greatest thinker of this century observed once that man has only two choices, God or chance. It’s really no choice at all, because if all things are chance, then there is no possibility of anything having any coherence. If things are chance, time could stop, it could go backwards, we could grow younger, the whole idea is ridiculous, it is impossible, and chance if you are logical adds up to nothing.

When I was young Bertram Russell a British philosopher who was very, very anti Christian, a terrible thing happened to him by the way, one of his children, a daughter grew up and became a missionary. That was a fate worse than death for Bertram Russell, he never talked about it. At any rate she wasn’t a very good missionary but she was a missionary.

But at one time Bertram Russell said, this was back in the late 20’s when I was young, he said: “If you had a given number of monkey’s and a given number of type writers, in time by chance those monkey’s would reproduce every work of William Shakespeare.” Just by chance. Oh? Well where would the monkey’s come from? And where would the typewriters come from? And what would make the typewriters work more than two minutes for the monkey’s, who wouldn’t know how to put paper in them? The whole idea was ridiculous. Chance produces nothing, but those as Van Til said, are your only logical alternatives, the God of the Bible or chance, and chance is ridiculous.

But evolution seeks also to replace order and design in the universe with mindless coincidence, and that is nonsense. Order and design clearly indicate the creator, and mindless coincidence? That is impossible. It would mean the whole universe is one vast coincidence with a remarkable design that is a product of nothing.

In one homeschool trial in the state of Texas the deputy attorney general wanted to prove that I was not a good witness after my testimony had really upset him, and he wanted to classify me as one of those silly people who takes the first chapter of Genesis literally. And so he asked me: “Do you believe in a literal 6 day creation?” and I said: “Yes I do. I don’t have enough faith to believe in all the miracles of evolution, trillions and trillions of miracles, everything out of nothing, design out of chaos, life out of non life.” And I went on to cite all the things that contradict scientific belief. I said “I don’t have a mind capable of believing in so many miracles, it staggers me. It is much simpler to believe what God says.” He didn’t like it, and the judge whatever he believed held up his hand over his face because he started to laugh at the discomfort of the deputy Attorney General.

Of course it is a mindless idea. It is a silly belief, evolution is. There is nothing scientific about it, it requires trillions of miracles. Somebody asked Darwin once how he accounted for the eye, how did it evolve? What was it before it could see? After all, at every stage it was supposed to be something. And he admitted that the evolution of the eye seemed to be an impossible problem for evolution, but that didn’t stop him from believing in it. You see it does not make sense. The reason why people believe in such nonsense is because of their hatred of God. “We will not have this man to rule over us.”

Do you know that Darwin’s Origin of Species--- have any of you ever tried to read it? It is a dull book, it is a stupid, illogical book, it is punishment to read it. I was a teenager when I read it, and in those days I believed that if you were a serious person you knew what the opposition was writing about, so I stuck with it and got through it, and it was terrible, and his second book was even worse, which by the way is one of the most racist books ever written, that is why you don’t hear much about Darwin’s thinking. Because in it he developed with the evolution of the various races, and his racism really came out.

Evolution assumes a vast potentiality out there, that existed when there was nothing, and out of this vast potentiality which had within it the potentiality of all the universe as we know it, everything emerged. That vast, nameless potentiality that was behind the very first Adam or sub Adam that suddenly appeared out of nothing was somehow equal to God. Strange isn’t it? He did not want God, but he wanted everything God had for this nameless vague potentiality.

We live in a world where the only possibilities are those the Bible speaks of. And only the God of Scripture is real. The God of the modernist is an idea, not a reality. He offers ideals that men have summed up and say: “These are the things that are wonderful and good and true and so on.” He can inspire, but he cannot govern because he did not create, he is an outsider if he exists at all to the universe. Only the God who is the creator can govern or necessitate or predestine, and if this vague collective noun nature is the source of everything, nature is going to determine. And because we are supposedly products of nature according to modern thinking we are a bundle of impulses and of ideas and of drives. In my day, we didn’t have minds when we took psychology we just studied the human drives. Well if you are only a driven creature driven by your drives, hunger sex and what not, they used to list the drives, then you are a product of some drives. There is nothing more to you than that, but if you are creature made in the image of God then mankind has a future and glorious one. But a present we are going downhill at an accelerating pace because the direction of modern thinking to use Van Til’s very, very important phrase, is “Integration downward into the void.” Integration downward into the void.

That’s our direction. Every year we see things moving further and further in the wrong direction, simply because our statist education is evolutionary, our statist education reduces man to a bundle of drives impulses and so on, and people go through school seeing that they are no more than an advanced ape. A few years ago about ten years ago or so one public school superintendent who didn’t have the answer, he apparently was not a Christian, but he spoke very strongly against a book that about a quarter of a century ago was put into use in high schools from coast to coast. It was the book The Naked Ape, have any of you read that? Yes a few of you. The Naked Ape. That’s man. and he said: “From the day it was introduced into the schools he saw in the school where he was superintendent or in the city where he was superintendent over the schools, a rapid deterioration in the character and conduct of the students. After all, if you are a naked ape, an ape doesn’t have any morality, why should you? Why not express your nature? And so we have today the naked ape all around us, or the clothed ape.

Well, the Bible tells us we are made in the image of God, and that Jesus Christ regenerates us in that image, so that in the place of a fallen image we have a renewed one so that we can serve and glorify God. It tells us that creation is an act not a process. Modern theology is process theology, it has reduced all things in the world to process. Creation is replaced with process, a slow gradual development. But life is not like that. We grow, by leaps and bounds at times, other times slowly. Sometimes the light suddenly dawns, we are born again, we grow, we rejoice in growth when before we didn’t.

[Tape skips]…Changed, it is not process but it is growth. It is growth by the grace of God, it is change by his miraculous power.

I spoke earlier this morning about the idea of nature, that it is a collective noun, but that idea has been breaking down, ‘is there a nature? Is there a unity of any kind?’ Late in the 1950’s the university of California system, all the universities in the state had a new President, Clark Kerr. And Kerr in lecturing at a major British university talked about multiverses and multiversites. He rejected the idea of a universe. Why? Because the idea of a universe points to one God, one creator, one world. Uni means one. And to him that was a relic of Biblical thinking. The Bible speaks of one universe created by God, of one Lord, one faith, one Baptism, one, one, one. A unity. And he said: “We live in a world of multiverses. We have no way of knowing that in these many multiverses all out there in space, the same rules, the same laws apply as they do in our system.” This meant that everything is possible, except the Biblical God and the Biblical faith.

So one of the first degrees they granted after the conversion as it were to a multiversity where anything is possible except God because that points to a university, was a degree in magic. Everything is possible except the God of the Bible and what is in His word. Now that’s the kind of world we live. All you have to do is turn on television and you gets stuff about UFO’s, space peoples who have landed, about people who have gone out into outer space with some of these ships, it is all possible if Clark Kerr is right, and we live in a multiverse because of course there is no God and therefore there can be no universe. Every possibility except God and truth, a world in which De Sade sets the ethical tone, a world in which we can do as we please because all things are possible. This is the world we get if we reject Genesis 1.

A world of process and a multiverse. This is why you have to choose whom you will serve. You have to make up your mind that the Bible is exactly what it says it is the word of God, and that God did what He said He did, created all things in the space of 6 days, or having cut your anchor with God and His truth you are going to drift into the world of mutliverse, of any kind of truth, a world in which anything goes, and a world in which men have said we are going to escape God and we are going to escape nature by the artificial life. By the artificial life, the gay life style in which nothing is true.

Have you noticed of late that the gays who were twenty years ago angry if you called them queers now calling themselves the queer nation? It is because they have decided: “Life must be artificial, therefore to be queer is to be against God and against nature. Wonderful, we want the artificial lifestyle. Turn your back on God and that is where you have to go. You have got to give these people credit, they are seeing the issues better than a lot of our Christian schools and colleges and churches. They know what the choice is, and they have chosen it.

But God in the beginning created the heavens and the earth. Marvelous. Says it all. We can rest in the fact that our creator has established an order that man cannot overturn. We can rest in the fact that he who created all things in the beginning has all things in their conclusion in mind and our place in it. We are not left in the dark. Known unto God are all His woks from the foundation of the world. We live move and have our being in Him.

Well, the net result of all of this is that because we are Gods creatures we have to do His will. We have to recognize that we are not here to please ourselves. That may come as a shock to you because I hear so often people saying : ”Well, I want to get something out of life before it is over for me and this is what I want.” What you should want is what God wants, and our lives here are a short span compared to eternity. On my last birthday I was 80. 80 years doesn’t seem so long, it seems only yesterday that I was a high school and university student, it doesn’t seem that long ago. And it isn’t!

Eternity is forever. And what we do here and now governs our life forever and ever. We have a glorious destiny in Christ, we need to recognize that He has made us, and He has made us for His purposes. What are they? And how should we obey Him?

Are there any questions now?

[Audience Member] People may raise their hands, I’ve got some here as well, first could you say a few words a propos of Chalcedon foundation, and the Chalcedon report that is published monthly, and the cost involved in that, and the address as well?

[Rushdoony] Yes, the Chalcedon foundation has as its purpose to develop the implications of Biblical faith in every area of life and thought. We have published through Ross House Books, books by Christian scholars on a number of areas, education, history, philosophy, mathematics, because mathematics, the idea of numbers comes from God, if you don’t have a Christian perspective you ultimately destroy the possibility of mathematics, because what does one mean and what does many mean? Well, we put out a semiannual journal of Christian Reconstruction, we put out a monthly magazine The Chalcedon Report Which is sent to anyone that asks that their name be put on the mailing list, it is on a donation basis and gifts are tax deductible, so if you want to receive it, and we hope you will want to and enjoy reading it, we hope you will also contribute to it, just give me your name and address. We do a number of things the world over because we believe that the faith involves head and hand, ideas and action, faith and works. For example. We are supporting work in a number of places including Africa. In Africa in the Sudan hundreds of Christians are dying every day because of their faith, others, especially children and women are being sold into slavery by Muslims. The Northern half of Sudan which is the worst place for this sort of thing is Arab and Muslim and the southern half is black and increasingly Christian. The southern half is the more prosperous half, and the Arabs, the Muslims, are determined to wipe out the blacks there, enslave all the Christians, and take it over.

Our position is what is known as Christian Reconstruction. WE believe that the word of God has to be applied to every area of life and action, every area of faith and thought. We are very happy that one country in Africa now has a Christian Reconstruction president and vice president. About 3 years ago both men were prisoners in a cell about 25 by 20 feet, not very big. There were 60 some prisoners in that little hell hole, too many to lie down. No plumbing facilities. The only source of air was from an opening this big in the door, through which food was handed. Peter Hammond was tossed into that jail because he came into Zambia with Bibles, and Peter did what he does best, he preached to every one of the people in that prison cell. When the revolution occurred and then the election, two of his converts in that cell were elected president and vice president, the former Marxist head of the state is in Washington D.C. trying to get help to overthrow this fall the Christian regime there.

We have Monty Wilson, how many of you know Mont? Well, he is going over to Zambia to speak to those leaders there and to encourage them, he is going to be on his way this coming week. And you should remember Zambia, the Sudan in your prayers. We are sponsoring Aaron (Kaiyaian?) a very wonderful pastor who broadcasts in French to all of French speaking Africa, which is the center of Africa. We have other working elsewhere in a number of ways so that we are bringing together faith and works, head and hand. Does that suffice?

[Audience Leader] I’ll begin with our first question, and this is addressed to each of our speakers, Doctor Rushdoony, Doctor (Tautus?), besides the Bible what men or books have had the most impact on your thinking?

[Rushdoony] Besides the Bible, there are three persons who have had a major impact on my life and thought, first my Father; I won’t get started on that, because I will talk on at a great length. Then second, John Calvin and his thinking, and Third Doctor Cornelius Van Til, and I count it a privilege that I knew him personally and had opportunities to spend time with him. Those were the three men who had the decisive influence on me.

[Doctor (Tautas?)] Oh I am going to start with my mother, and the reason that I think of my mother is that she is the one who taught me that my Mormon heritage was untrue. She herself was a fourth generation Mormon, and I remember when I first came home after learning about Polygamy, I had a Sunday school teacher that taught me that polygamy was good because it taught women how to share, and to a 6 year old mind that didn’t sound very correct and I asked my mom what she thought about that, and she then told me about her grandmother who was one of three wives. And I’ve been appreciative of my mother because even though she didn’t teach me through Christianity because she didn’t know it, she taught me that what was being taught to me as if it were true was not true, and I look at that as very significant because it broke the bondage that had been in my family for almost 4-5 generations, that I might be free to embrace Christ.

The second person who influenced me greatly is sitting to my right, and after I became a Christian I asked my pastor: “What am I going to do? I’ve become a Christian and here I am stuck at the University of Oregon and I don’t know what to do.” And he introduced me to Doctor Rushdoony’s writings, which were, I think had such an impact on me because I didn’t know that there was anyone intelligent out there that believed the Bible, and at the same time knew how to apply it to all of life, and Rush that has been the impact that you have had on my life. And of course since he Was impacted by Van Til and Calvin before I got Van Til and Calvin in and through Rushdoony as well.

The third person that has influenced me and in a very significant way, is the writings of Blackstone. Not that Blackstone was always right, indeed anybody who has studied with me will know that there are many things that Blackstone wrote that were not right, but his introduction to law, I think is one of the most profound statements of the nature of law that has been written in history, and even though he was mistaken in so many things when he went to applying what was spoken and written, that particular passage with regard to the nature of law has had a tremendous impact on my life as a person.

[Audience Leader] Doctor Rushdoony, Doctor James Skillen, a proponent of “Biblical Pluralism” in a debate with you at Dort College in 1987 challenged your reconstructionist views on a Christian political philosophy. He claimed that Romans 13 must be compared with the kingdom parable of the wheat and tares, and especially in light of the content of Romans twelve, where we are commanded on the political arena to “so bend over backwards that we ought to give the Homosexuals the same freedom to establish schools as atheists and Christians.” The answer to whom should enforce God’s law is determined by the sphere of life one is considering.”

[Rushdoony] I don’t remember debating James Skillen in 1987 at Dort College, so I am baffled by the first part of that question, where does he state that he debated me?

[Audience Leader] It’s not my question, someone here asked the question.

[Audience Member] I did, I acquired a copy of a tape and that was the label on the tape, that it was a debate.

[Rushdoony] I was just called there to lecture, the faculty there took over, it was a ministerial conference, but the faculty took over and monopolized the question and answer period. And when the conference ended there were complaints by the ministers, but I don’t know who the faculty members were, they may have called it a debate, I don’t know. But it was not supposed to be that, it was a pastoral conference.

I really don’t know what he said then, and how Romans 13 can be compared to the parable of the tares and the wheat I just don’t see that, I don’t have any problem with allowing homosexuals to establish schools in our society, in a Godly society no. In our society which stands for nothing they can do it, but the problem is, who are they going to teach? They don’t have children, by and large. They have no desire to enter into Christian Schools. I have on many an occasion when I have spoken about Christian schools, challenged the people who disagree with Christain premises in education to start their own schools, and not to use the public schools and our money to teach their philosophy. And they have no answer. They have no desire to put their money where their mouth is; they want to put our money where their mouth is, so I regard them as hypocrites. Beyond that I don’t know what to say because I don’t know how they got a debate out of the tape or what they did because I just gave lectures, a series for two days, there were question and answer periods. It’s very curious, it baffles me.

[Audience Leader] Doctor Rushdoony, how do you respond to the atheist who claims that morality is a convention that man of himself has invented, or at least has discovered and instituted?

[Rushdoony] The answer to such a person is: “Then if you really believe that, follow the logic of the Marquis De Sade, the most rigorous champion of that position. Legalize theft, murder, rape. Everything. Would you like such a society? Do you feel that it is alright for anyone who dislikes your argument to kill you? Can you be logically consistent and maintain such a position? Or is it only a way of arguing against God and the Bible? I don’t believe there are any people today who logically hold that position, the Marquis De Sade himself was illogical at that point.

[Audience Leader] Doctor Rushdoony, how do we know that an alien race does not exist somewhere in the universe?

[Rushdoony] Well first of all, how do we know that it exists? We don’t. And the fact is that something that important, the Bible would tell us about. Logic then too would require you to say: “If an alien race exists somewhere, why not everywhere? If every corner of the universe has a planet with people on it and some kind of race there, then how many times has Christ going to become incarnate in how many worlds, and die how many times? Everything in the Bible tells us about the uniqueness of this world. Now, I think it is typical of our time that there are so many people ready to argue that such a possibility exists when nothing points to it.

I was on Southern California living their at the time of the Mars shot, and the wife of one of the men in NASA kept feeding me some mimeographed papers that were going around at the time expressing the sentiment of the people at NASA. It was very intensely interesting, I hope I can find it some day, but I think I have lost in the process of 2-3 moves since then. But the gist of it was, they wanted to find any kind of life on Mars to prove that the Bible was not true, and it was really a day of mourning when the photos of that space vessel and indicated that no life could exist on Mars. I really expected to see a black border around the next mimeographed paper or two, but it was really a time of mourning for those people. That is how intensely there is a will to believe something like that. [Tape Ends]