Implications of Biblical Faith

Reflections on God’s Faithfulness In My Life Q&A

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Philosophy

Lesson: 4-4

Genre: Lecture

Track: 04

Dictation Name: RR250B4

Location/Venue:

Year:

I was asked to talk about my work, about my calling, my view of things from a perspective of 80 years. Well the first thing I think I must say is what Tevye said in Fiddler on the Roof, how many of you have seen that? Yes. Do you remember when he and his wife looked at each other, at their daughter’s wedding, and he said: “I don’t remember growing older.” Well, that’s how I feel, I don’t remember growing older, but I’m over 80 now. Inside I don’t feel much different then at 18, but I know I am different. For one thing I move a lot more slowly, for another if I sit still very long, no matter what I do to prevent it, I fall asleep!

Well, life for me has been, not easy, but very good. I’ve had my share of problems but I’ve truly had my share of blessings. One of the things that marked me very, very definitely was my family and my background. My parents escaped from the massacre of Armenians by the Turks. They were in the great Death March, from Armenia into the Russian held territories. The Russian general who was a friend of my father’s gave my father two horses that were slightly lame, and which he could legitimately write off, this was in the days when there still was a cavalry, and my grandmother, my mother, my aunt, and my young aunt and uncle who were about 4 and 6 at the time, were alternately placed on the horse. The Turkish cavalry was striking constantly, a great many dying, the rivers and streams clogged with human bodies. By the time they crossed the last river into Russian territory, the souls were gone from their shoes. They were walking on their bare feet which were bloody and sore. My parents had left within hours after they buried their first born son, whose name was Rousas George. I was conceived in that long trek which began in Armenia and ended not long after they ended in New York City where I was born.

Before I was born they had dedicated me to the Lord’s service, so from my earliest days I knew that this was why I was alive. They had prayed that I live and serve God. This has an effect on a child, to know that he is alive for a particular purpose. As soon as I learned how to read I began reading, in fact, I became an omnivorous reader. If I got a reader in school I went home and didn’t put it down until I had read it from one end to the other. Before long my parents would keep a watch on me, because, well, in the early days on the farm it was horse and buggy days and Kerosene lamp days, but after we moved into the city I would open my door; well first I would shut the door and turn on the lights and read, and when they would catch me reading late at night they’d finally resorted to taking out the light bulb, and then I would open the hall door a crack and hold the book like that, to go on reading.

The thing that I found the most exciting to read was the Bible, I never wearied of it. It is the most exciting book in the world. I don’t think there is a story for example, as moving and as powerful as the story of Joseph. I still shed tears when I re-read it, as I did just the other day for the umpteenth time. I don’t see how people can forget to read their Bible, there isn’t a more interesting book that you can read, and I read a lot of books. I read, mark and index approximately 250, 270 books a year, then I read in another 4-500. That’s what I am doing, that’s my calling. I am serving God by studying and writing and applying the word of God to every area of life and thought. So reading the Bible has been very important to me, and a very great privilege.

I am not up to my father there, he had an old country education, which meant that it was highly disciplined. It used to amaze me how his classmates from the old country, men who were farmers, had not gone beyond grade school, had so much knowledge and such remarkable memories. And when my Father in his 70’s realized that he was going blind, he memorized all the Gospels and most of the Pauline epistles. He also memorized the Psalms and a great many passages from the Prophets. It was no problem for him to do that, in fact his memory was so good that when my two oldest girls Rebecca and Joanna spent one winter with their grandfather and grandmother back on the farm and one of the girls was Rachel’s mother, their grandfather could help them with their algebra. I’d forgotten my algebra and geometry two years out of high school, but his type of old fashioned strict education had given him a phenomenal memory; he could tell you the name of every text book and author all the way through grade school and high school and college into graduate school, no problem.

I might if I worked at it remember 2-3 from my college and graduate school years, but that is about the limit. I think, step by step Christian schools will put us back into that type of schooling, as a matter of fact when I was young a high school, well not a high school, a grade school education, grammar school as they used to call it, grade k-8, was almost equivalent to a bachelor’s degree at a good old fashioned college today. You’re learning was that solid. That is why someone like Abraham Lincoln who went to school only three years, and the school terms were about 6 weeks each, was so literate.

I have in my library a reader from the fourth grade in the 1840’s, and the reading is more advanced than in College texts today. Our education has just gone downhill.

Well, the Christian schools are going to bring it back uphill. This is why by the way in the old days, first half of the last century, you went from grade school to Harvard or Yale or whatever school you chose, because you were ready for it. At best you would take a summer session before going in which you mastered Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Then you were ready for the University. You had mastered those before you went.

Well, I knew what my calling was. I also came to realize as a result of my studies that the world was moving away from a Christian faith. I never dreamt that it was going to be as bad as things are now, but back in the 20’s and 30’s, murders were rare. You hear about the Capone day’s in Chicago, the lawless era, supposedly. Do you know that there are far, far more murders in Chicago in a month, sometimes in a week, than in a year under the Capone era. That’s how bad it is. In those days you didn’t bother to lock your door, theft was uncommon, if there was a rape in one end of the country you read about it at the other end of the country, it was sensational and horrible news. It was still a somewhat Christian culture and law abiding. Well, that was because people still saw themselves whether they were believers or not as somehow God’s creation. That made a difference. Can you look at a film or something on television today, and tell yourself: “These people are made in the image of God?” No. The author doesn’t even remotely have that in mind as he writes the story. They’re Darwin’s higher apes.

So there is a different view of people. There was a great deal more respect. I know that we were better behaved because if we didn’t we got smacked, and no ifs and buts about it. I recall once that we had some guests, I think they were with us for the summer, it was this widow and her son, Willy. I detested Willy. And willy once got into my stamp collection and took some that he wanted, I found out about it just as I was about to go to the dinner table, so I confronted him with it when I went to the table and I said: “Willy you stole my stamps.” And my father immediately had me out of the dining room, and into the barn, where he said: “You stay here with the cows until you are ready to behave like a civilized person.” And I said: “But he stole my stamps.” And he said: “That was not the way to go about correcting the situation.” So he said: “Stay out here until you are ready to behave like a man instead of an animal.” Well, after a while I thought better and went in and told Willy I was sorry I had spoken to him like that in front of everyone.

That was not unusual. You were required to treat everybody with respect. And if they did something wrong you did not do anything to upset anyone else, in this case his widowed mother, and of course any time we were in a room and an elderly person came in, we kids all had to stand up and we were not to be seated until he or she sat down. How many of you have had that kind of training? Yes! Yes, Good. Wonderful. It was a different kind of world and it is one we are going to have to get back to, and I believe the Christian and homeschool movements are moving us back to that kind of a Christian and civilized culture.

It was easy to see that the world was moving in the wrong direction, especially when I went to the university, and there the faculty since the students were a long way from home, was much more open about its anti Christian character. But the Christian ethos still governed. Now we were much more relaxed in California in many ways including our dress code, and most of the people in the United States are now Californians in that respect. But I recall when a new student, a graduate student, came from Harvard and we were taking a walk and discussing some things, and there was a man washing his car with a hose and he had on shorts but no T-shirt. And this graduate student from Harvard, who was not a Christian, was a thoroughly modern pagan person , still stopped in shock. And I said: “Let’s go.” And he said: “No, I want to wait and see the police arrive and arrest the man.” and I said: “For what?” and he said: “Why back at Cambridge, Harvard, anyone there or anyone in Massachusetts who was so casual would be arrested.” And I said: “Well, this is California.” But that tells you what things were like.

Those were the days of all the demonstrations, the huge Marxist campus movement, and yet event he Marxists on campus were behaving like good Sunday school kids, because that was the background.

After the war things began to change very rapidly, and by the 1960’s they began to gallop. Most people living in the world today have been born since 1950. If you go back to 1940, the overwhelming majority of the world was not born. So most people who are alive today don’t know what it was like in those days. They don’t know how much freedom there was, or the fact that only Millionaires paid an income tax before World War 2, only millionaires. And the property tax was so low, that it was practically nothing, in California farmers paid $5-10 in property tax for a family sized farm. After the war it started to skyrocket, no it is in the thousands, so that if they have a bad year they have to turn to their savings to pay their property tax. I can remember too when a great deal of charity was still Christian, not as much so as it was say, in the early years of the last century, but there were a lot of institutions, services, run by Christians.

One of the most remarkable in California was Captain Dollar’s home for boys, which was an orphanage. They quietly passed laws which ended all such institutions during World War 2. But Captain Dollar’s homes for boys had Dormitories, 60 to a dormitory with one Christian couple as mom and pop to all the boys in their dormitory. There was never a one of Captain Dollars boys who went wrong. Captain Dollar himself was an old steamship captain who built up a major line, which has since been sold out, but it used to be the major steamship line in the pacific. He was an old, white haired, white bearded man, when the boy’s finished the 8th grade they were put on a bus with their bags, taken over to San Francisco from San Anselmo, they would line up to shake hands with old Captain Dollar, who handed each of them a silver dollar, then he prayed over all the boys and sent them out into the world, telling them to be good, God fearing men and women who would serve the Lord in one way or another. There was never a boy out of Captain Dollars homes who ever went astray, not a one, and they were all proud to be called one of Captain Dollars boys.

On one occasion there was a little accident or something I don’t remember the details and a police officer arrived and I was a witness, I put down my name and address for him, and he said: “Oh you’re a minister aren’t you?” and I said: “Yes.” And he said: “Well I am one of Captain Dollar’s boys.” because it was a Presbyterian ministry, that is, Captain Dollar was a Presbyterian, and he conducted it on good, Reformed lines. He was proud to declare that he was, and he told me how it was the lasting influence in his life.

So it is a different world today. You see, every generation you have to convert people, all over again. Because none of us are born and are naturally good. We are born sinners, we need salvation, and if the church falls down on its task of bringing Christ to the younger generation, then you have a world of barbarians. And when you strip education of Christ, what are the schools but schools for barbarians? And we live in a barbarian society.

Well, this concerned me very much because I could see the direction we were taking as a people as a society. I felt it was only going back to what we once affirmed, namely the whole word of God, the law as the way of sanctification, Christ as our salvation. But the church was turning its back on that sort of thing; I was really rebuked more than once by prominent pastors for talking about Gods law. That was somehow a forbidden subject, which baffled me, it was a part of the Bible, I didn’t see anything in the Bible that told me that the law is dead, it did say that we are dead to the law in Christ as the handwriting of ordinances against us; in other words as a bill of indictment sentencing us to death. We are dead to it because we have died in Christ, we are alive to it now as our Lords way of life for us.

Well I waited until I was 50 before I began to write about the law, and the hostility to it had not lessened. So, the hostility has been there right along. But friendship with the world is enmity with God. I learned this very early, that if my intentions were to please the world I had better stop calling myself a Christian, but there were too many who were doing that, and they would receive the greater judgement; after all we are told very plainly: “Judgement begins at the house of God.” That’s a scary statement. Think of it, God says: “You are doing what you are doing in my name and you are doing wrong. Therefore my judgement will strike you first and then the world. So it is important that we be unequivocal, faithful, hardworking, in what we do. We are not here to please ourselves. That was one of the first things my father taught me, and coming as he did from a long, long line of pastors, and with a tremendous love of the church, he still told me: “You will find nothing in this world more deserving of your love than the church of Jesus Christ, and more horrible because of what it does in the name of Christ, than the church.’ And he has been right on both counts. The most beautiful experiences in my life are connected with the church and the most horrible ones as well, because when the church goes astray it is a very, very tragic and ugly fact.

Well, I’ve been working at this all my adult life, to serve the Lord. I felt that if what I had to say was going to be worthwhile it had to be understood by the scholars and by the ordinary person, or the person with limitations on his abilities to understand what you are saying. I began my work in the 30’s in San Francisco’s china Town as a youth worker; that by itself was quite an experience and I don’t have time to go into it, but it was good training, let me make this one observation, because the Chinese have the most ancient, pragmatic culture in all the world. The idea of an absolute and universally true thing is unknown to them. For them it is the yang and yin, propriety, what fits at this time, what is practical and expedient, and so for them it was easy to become in China, rice Christians, and the equivalent here in this country.

To give you a moments illustration, I was once able to interest a very brilliant young man, he was my age, he was a UC graduate in one of the Sciences, I forget which, he had a responsible job as well as an advanced degree, and he started coming to the services. Morning and even worship, helping out at the midweek worship, helping out with the youth work, he was as eager and helpful as anyone could be, it was like having a second youth pastor there. Then one Sunday, Raymond, which was his American name was not there. I was able in about a week and a half to locate him, and I said: ‘Raymond we’ve missed you, why aren’t you there?” and he was happy to see me, and he said: ‘Well, I no longer have a need. Christ met a need in my life for a while and now I’ve grown beyond that need.” But he said: “You will see,” and he rattled off a number of names, so and so, and so and so, college age or post college age persons, “at your meetings very soon, because I told them how much Christianity meant to me, at a bad phase in my life and that it could be a great help for them.” In other words it was like a medicine or a drug that you need for a while and then you don’t need it any longer. That was the problem with Chinese civilization, and that is perhaps why God has put it through the horrors of Marxism, to shatter that pragmatic and relativistic view.

From there I went to an isolated Indian reservation in North Eastern Nevada, a hundred miles from any bus or train line or any town, well there was a little mining camp up on the edge of the reservation, and I spent 8 ½ years there, because I felt it was important to learn how to make the faith relevant to people who were at the very very bottom of the scale in American Society.

It was again a valuable education, a hard one, but a valuable one. I was involved in all kinds of activities apart from the work of the mission, the nearby mining camp was full of people exploiting the Indians, I did my best to uncover some of that, it did lead to a grand jury investigation an indictment against the constable there in the mining camp, but nothing came of it. No people can be helped if they don’t have the capacity to grow spiritually. And you get that only through Christ. Outside of that you go downhill. And I have seen peoples go downhill. When I was growing up there was a great deal of prejudice and bigotry against blacks, but they were also a very different people. In fact in those days if I walked into a post office and there were 5 clerks, I would get in line for the one black clerk, and others would too, because we knew he would be the best man there, and the most efficient. Why? Because it was harder for him to get that job than anyone else, and you knew that he was going to perform a lot better and with pride.

There were handicaps for many peoples then, in fact I was among one of the people’s handicapped, we were immigrants, we’d come into an area and we were resented. So I can remember stones coming through a window, things like that. The world has always had that sort of thing. The real problem is how do you take it, what do you do about it. If you feel sorry for yourself, you are finished. But if you say that you are a child of God, a child of the king, and you bear that in mind, it makes all the difference in the world. On more than one occasion, including in the past 2-3 years, when I’ve had to deal with someone who has been going through hell on earth to the point of where they are near collapse, mentally and physically, I sit them down and say: “Now, whose opinion do you value most? That of these people who are working to destroy you for their own purposes? Are you going to see yourself as they see you or as the Lord does? Are you a son or are you a daughter of the king? Now you make up your mind, because it is going to determine how you are going to come through this. If you start feeling sorry for yourself because of what is happening, don’t waste my time. You are finished. But if you see yourself as a son or daughter of the king, then you are going to come out ahead.”

I’d like perhaps to dwell on that point a little longer in case there are any of you who have a terrible problem or maybe in the next few years you will encounter such a situation. Back in the 1950’s I knew two sisters, very attractive teenagers, their father was a very important man, at least at that time very important, his wife was about 15 years younger than he and a very attractive woman, and his Chauffeur and his wife were having an affair, and he didn’t have the nerve to fire the Chauffeur, because his wife said: “I’ll leave you if you do.” And he was a proud man and proud to have that very beautiful younger woman on his arm. Well the Chauffeur was emboldened by that and sexually molested both the girls. Nothing happened until the girls in desperation themselves went to the police, and then both their parents were furious, because it had exposed the situation. The last I heard about 20 years after that, the one girl was in a mental institution, because she absolutely would not give up feeling sorry for herself. But the other girl, when I met her about 20 years later, was one of the most happy, the most radiant young mothers I had ever encountered. She showed me her two children, one in arms and one by her side, beautiful children, and she was radiantly happy. Why? Because she never forgot that God governs, not people; and if you are a daughter of the king, you will come out ahead. God will take care of you. So, that’s a little bit of pastoral counseling. We have to recognize that we live and move and have our being in the Lord, and our God knows us, the very hairs of our head; that we are not here for what we can do and enjoy in this world, but for all eternity, and this life is a school for eternity, and therefore we live in terms of that world.

It is a very real world, a very wonderful world, a perfect world. It’s God’s place for us. In our Fathers house are many mansions, “If it were not so I would have told you, I go to prepare a place for you.” our Lord says. So we have a glorious destiny in Christ. It’s a marvelous one, and it should make us joyful.

This tempts me, I’m giving in to the temptation, to tell you another story out of my pastoral experience. On the reservation this one cold night, these two Indian girls walked in. The one in particular whose name was Elizabeth was the most unlikely person ever to see in church, so I figured it must be awfully cold out there, and that was why they walked into the church. Well, Elizabeth was as wild and heedless as they come, she was one wild girl. It was hard to be angry with Elizabeth because there was so much joy and bounce in her. She came in, with her friend, sat in the second row, the service was already underway I had just started to preach, and she listened quite intently. When the service was over and I went to the door she hung back, and asked me a question. I don’t remember what the question was, and I answered it, and she thought for a moment and said: “Yes, you are right. That has to be true.” And then she said: “I’ll be back next Sunday.” Well, Elizabeth was a very flighty and thoughtless kind of person, and I thought: “She means it now, but will she a week from now?” but to my amazement she was there. And she was there faithfully week after week. Very eager to hear, asking questions afterwards, and then one Sunday, no Elizabeth. And I thought: ‘Uh oh, she’s slipped back to her old ways.” So I tried looking her up and I learned that she was in the Indian Hospital, and I went there to see her. She greeted me very matter of factly, and she said: “Rush, the Doctor tells me that I’ve had Syphilis for some time and it has turned into Paresis. It’s settled in my brain. I’m going to die, and I’m going to be out of my mind before this is over.” But she said: “I want you to know that I know that Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior and I’ll never forget it. But the time is coming before very, very long the doctor says, before I won’t even be able to talk, and then I will be unconscious. Could you find and give me a little cross, so that I can always look at it and think and remember what Jesus did for me?” So we had some little crosses that glowed in the dark that we were using at Daily Vacation Bible School that last summer, and I gave her one. Visited her every day, and then I was gone on a trip, came back, she was no longer at the hospital, she was dying and would be dead within a day or two the doctor said. So I went out, saw her at her home, and she had been in a coma for some time. So I know that people even in Coma’s can hear and recognize your voice, so I repeated one verse for her, and prayed, and when I was through praying because she had recognized my voice her eyes were open and she was smiling at me, and with her head she motioned to the corner of the bed to her mother, and that was where the cross was hanging. And the mother held it in front of her, and she reached up with her head and kissed the cross, and then because she could not sleep, she turned and smiled at me to let me know that she was still strong in the faith. And she slipped back into her coma, and was dead a little later.

She knew she was a daughter of the king, and she knew that she had a better life, and everything in this world, even her own sins had helped prepare her for the Lord, because we know that all things work together for good, to them that are of Christ. And they do. Thank you.

[Audience Leader] Doctor Rushdoony, what should make up a seminary education, and how can it be obtained?

[Rushdoony] It was a mistake to ask me this question… (laughter) In the United States for generations in the colonial period and then in the Constitutional Republic, a student gained his training by going to a pastor who was known as a scholar, and a prominent scholar pastor would have a number of students who would come, stay in his community and read theology under him. For example a pastor like Nathaniel Emmons; who was one of the, we would say today, minor Reformed thinkers, oh, in the early years of the last century; would have 25-50 ministerial students under him. They would learn Greek and Hebrew on their own with a little coaching from him, they would meet a few mornings a week for his guidance in studying or as they called it then, reading theology. And he would assign them Calvin or other great thinkers of the past going to the early church Fathers. So they came out better trained than the modern seminary student. At the same time because the pastor was spending all that time on them, they would then take over the pastoral work of the parish.

So, someone like Nathaniel Emmons would have 25-50 students to go out and visit all the members, or to send them out to help some, one of the farmer members who needed help. It was a good practical education that prevailed for generations. The Seminary system has grown progressively weak as it has receded from that early system, because what has happened is that it has worked to turn the ministry into a profession, when it is rather a calling. There is a world of difference between the two. Second, it has institutionalized the church, and the ministers now trained increasingly to be a church administrator, and the church becomes more and more an institutional thing. For example, when I was young a Presbytery would meet once a year, that was it. If there were any other meetings they were just specially called meetings to install a pastor.

So, it would include only half a dozen men in that particular area and it was for that reason only. There was not much business that the church conducted. But little by little it has reached the point where Presbytery’s are meeting every other month, in some areas every month and so on. What does that do? Well, it means that the institutional side of the church becomes more important, so that the headquarters, the administrators, and the seminary are always functioning. And at the same time more and more the good pastors drop out, they cannot afford to drive all the way to this or that city to attend a Presbytery meeting every month or every other month when a lot of it is administrators or windbags holding forth by the hour. So, what happens is that the attendance decreases, and a handful of bureaucrats run the whole thing, and before the people know it the church is led astray.

Now that’s what happened with the old Presbyterian Church USA. The Presbytery meetings were so frequent, more and more pastors were not attending, and before they knew it, the Seminaries were modernist and the colleges were in the hands of liberals, and it was all over for the denomination.

[Audience Leader] Doctor Rushdoony, you mentioned Van Til in a lecture this morning, could you comment on his importance?

[Rushdoony] Van Til is important because he developed the meaning of the presuppositions of the faith. What he did was to show very, very tellingly that all thinking has undergirding it various presuppositions or axioms. Those axioms will determine the kind of thinking that will follow, just as the axioms of geometry will determine what kind of geometry you are going to have; if you change the axioms you get a different geometry. Well, Van Til demonstrated that the Axioms of theology, of our Christian thinking must be the triune God and His enscriptured word. When you begin with that, then you can think Christianly. If you begin with autonomous man and his reason, you will end up with nothing. The whole history of modern philosophy demonstrates that.

Descartes began with “Cogito Ergo Sum.” I think, therefore I am, and ultimately it lead to Descartes, (He may have meant Sartre?) who said that the only thing real in the world is myself. If you exist you are the devil. Nothing else is real or important. Now, the only way you can account for the world and the people in it is to begin with a presupposition of the triune God and His word, then you don’t have a problem of knowledge, and an epistemology or theory of knowledge has really been dropped by philosophy because they can’t solve the problem, they cannot say: ‘This is how we know.” They have no valid theory of knowledge. So historic philosophy is dead, because it has reached a dead end. Historic philosophy is gone and now you just have logical analysis analyzing the meaning of words in a philosophical context, as a kind of game, a meaningless game.

(Lichtenstein?) is the great example of that, a thoroughly degenerate man whose thinking is also a reflection of his life.

Well, Van Til makes clear that on the Presupposition of the Triune God and His word, only then can we have valid knowledge, valid science, valid anything. He is the key thinker of this century, he will be better known I believe a hundred and 200 years from now than he is today, but during his lifetime the contempt with which he was treated was incredible, because what he did exposed the shallowness of so much Christian thinking; a great number of prominent Christians went out of their way to be radically abusive of him, but he took it with unfailing grace.