Education and Christian Faith

History as a Theological Science

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Education

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 2

Track: ?

Dictation Name: RR306A2 – History as a Theological Science

Date:

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee that our times are in Thy hands, who doeth all things well. Give us grace day by day to take hands off our lives and to commit them into Thy keeping, knowing that we are Thine. Thou hast saved us. Thou will do yet more and care for us. Make us strong in Thy word and zealous in instructing Thy children, in Jesus’ name, amen.

Faith is a total thing. A man’s faith, if it is real, will alter the totality of his life. It will alter everything that he is and does. Out of the heart, scripture tells us, are the issues of life. And so it is that as men come to a faith, they begin, if they truly hold to the faith they profess, to reorder every area of life and thought in terms of that faith. As a result, education in the hands of the Humanists becomes a radically different thing than it is in the hands of Christians. Faith makes a total requirement of man. No more than it is possible to be half-way pregnant is it possible to be half-way a Christian. It’s an all-or-nothing commitment. As a result, it is necessary for us as Christians to marshal every fact, every area of life into conformity with our faith and to view it in terms of that word.

Now history in our time has disappeared really, as a subject. Some years ago at one university, I was told of a younger historian who was teaching (I believe) the required Western Civilization course who began the session by declaring to the class, there is no such thing as history. To say that one believes that there is, is to have a theological premise, to believe there is an order and a direction and a meaning and a purpose in events. History, he said, is a myth. Those events that we call history are without direction, purpose, or any kind of pre-established purpose or meaning. However, he said, the Board of Regents of this university pay me a tolerable salary to teach history so let us begin.

Now in one respect, he was right; there is no such thing as history if you are a Humanist. Instead, you have the social sciences. Why is there no such thing as history except on a Christian premise? Because history means an ordered sequence of events moving in terms of a purpose beginning with an act of God (Creation), having its focus in another act of God (the Incarnation), concluding in still another act of God (the Second Coming). Now that’s history. It means there is a movement through all of that, that in spite of everything man does, God’s purpose prevails. “Even the wrath of man shall praise Him.” Paul says, “For we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” That means that there is a tremendous power and purpose and design using even our worst errors and our sins to make them work together for good.

Now there are various names given to that. I like the biblical term, predestination, which means that God is in control. That’s what it means, that it’s God’s Law, God’s government that governs all things. If you deny that, as the Humanists do, what do you have? Social science. What is social science? It is control, predestination and planning (not by God’s plan, but) by man’s plan. So what do you have? The alternative to the government of God is the Socialism of man: social science. Social science is about the planning and control of man by man, so it is directly and totally against what we believe, because all of us believe, no matter what variations of theology we may have, we believe I trust that it is planning, government and control by God. So the two perspectives are totally hostile.

History is an area of accident. Because it is an area of accident, it means that man (accident in the old-fashioned philosophical sense of meaningless events; chance occurrences), it means that man must force his will upon those events. This is why we have had books such as one which said that man must take control of evolution (biological, cultural evolution) so that man now controlling will guide his social evolution ( his history we would say) and his biology and reshape himself. You have tremendous experimentation today with not only society but with the idea of clonal man. What is clonal man? Supposedly you can take a few cells out of the human body and out of that, recreate your total twin. They’re working in it.

Why is it so important? It is important because they are rejecting history and therefore the God of history and they want to be creators totally of man. Think of the beauty of it from the Humanistic point of view. No longer are you people out there who were born in God’s way going to be born out of the test tube. You’re going to be born as man’s creature, and history is going to be man’s creation. This is the goal.

There’s a story I like to tell because I think it sums up so powerfully the difference between our perspective and that of the social scientists. About ten years or so ago I was on a forum in Northern California. It was a forum on education and I was representing the Christian perspective, Christian schools and freedom in education. The other participants were Mr. Paulson and Dr. Drakovich of the Hoover Institution. The moderator was the state senator, Clark Bradley. It was a huge auditorium, packed. And the questions were hot and furious during the question and answer period, and there was one young woman in the back who I learned when she came up was a schoolteacher who kept waving her hand to be recognized and was not. There was just too many and the hour was getting late. So as soon as the meeting was adjourned by Mr. Bradley, she came charging up at me to accuse me of being a quack and teaching all kinds of superstitious nonsense, and I was double a quack for talking about freedom in education. Why? These were her exact words. “In the modern world freedom is obsolete.” In the modern world, freedom is obsolete.

Why? For her there was no God. Now that young woman was brilliant—superb thinking, and I wish our Christian school teachers would learn to think as sharply on our side because there is no God, no government in the universe, but we have to have government—total government—such as people once believed God provided. How are you going to have that total government? You’re only going to have it in the scientific socialist state. Society is therefore a scientific experiment and you can have no freedom in an experiment. All factors have to be controlled. Therefore in the modern world, freedom is obsolete.

Now remember that little episode. And remember that girl. Because her perspective is the perspective of the educators you are working with when you deal with the State. They believe that you are trying to hold on in your teaching to this myth. How are your children going to understand the problems of our time? How are they going to be prepared to cope with our world if they still go on and believe in this myth of God as the government of the universe? They’re not being taught social science, they’re being taught history—history that comes right straight out of that hopeless book, the Bible. But if they had a public education and studied social science they would know the only government that exists is by the State and therefore the state must govern everywhere or you will have anarchy. And this is what your social science textbooks are teaching.

At the beginning of the 60s I attended a Christian school conference of some 1,100 Christian school teachers, although perhaps I shouldn’t call them Christian school teachers; they were denominational parochial school teachers of a Protestant denomination. Didn’t have a very good reception there; they didn’t like what I had to say. But I picked up a world history textbook that was being used in most of the schools and was regarded as a very conservative one. And as a humanist book, it was, so that most people who are non-Christian conservatives would be satisfied with it. But I read through that book carefully and made many notes and what it taught and however conservative its political position was on the whole, essentially that perspective, the social science perspective, because it didn’t believe in God. Therefore instead of having God and His government and history as the handiwork of God, you had scientific socialist state, well no, let’s say a conservative state that where necessary gets involved in welfare policies, but basically follows a conservative policy. But it’s the only government there is—God is left out. And the logical conclusion from that is precisely scientific socialism, so they might as well have taught it from the beginning because that’s where their pupils would end up.

When you teach history as a social science, it’s a story of man’s struggle to liberate himself from God and from superstition and to take charge of his own destiny. But history is not a social science, it is a theological science. It is a theological science. It means that God, having created all things, has ordained what history is. He is the focal point of it: creation, incarnation, second coming. Those are the three main events of history: the beginning, and the end, “The Alpha and the Omega,” our Lord said. That’s how He identified Himself and when you say alpha and omega, you’re saying the a to the z. So our Lord said I am the a to the z. I am the Alpha and the Omega—I am the everything, the beginning and the end, the controller, the determiner, the Lord! I am He who was and is and is to come.

Very interesting that our Lord said that. Do you know there was an inscription on an Egyptian temple in almost those words? The Temple of Isis at Sais. Plutarch records it. And it said, “I am the one who was and is and is coming and no man has lifted my veil.” There’s a little difference there, isn’t there? And is to come, is coming, and no man has lifted my veil? In other words, the future is unknown. What was the theology of Isis? An evolutionary philosophy. So the future is unknown. It doesn’t really exist yet. It’s a mere potentiality. What may evolve tomorrow, who knows. No man has lifted my veil.

But we know the beginning, the middle and the end. And He was and is and is to come, the Lord Almighty! The Lord Almighty! History is a theological science. And we must teach it as such, in terms of God and His purpose. Our basic textbook in history therefore is the Bible because it gives us the framework of history.

It also gives us the only valid chronology for antiquity. I take biblical chronology very, very seriously. There is a good older book on biblical chronology by Phillip Mauro which is again available, I believe, in paperback. It’s well worth reading. There are others which unfortunately are out of print. Phillip Mauro. But if we did not have biblical chronology, no one would be able accurately to date Babylonian, Assyrian, or any other ancient history. It’s all dependent on scripture.

It’s ironic that they try to persuade us in universities that it’s such a hopeless mess in its chronology.

Yes….

[Audience] Are these talking about order of events or like {?} dating?

[Rushdoony] I’m talking about the actual dating of the Bible. There is a very interesting book (I can’t find a piece of chalk but I’ll spell it out for you) by Thiele; Thiele. It’s a rather technical book but it’s one you ought to be familiar with or at least look into it, The Mysterious Numbers of the Books of Kings. The Mysterious Numbers of the Books of Kings (Books of Kings, of course, the biblical books). For years scholars had said, oh the chronology of kings is a hopeless mess. It’s absurd. Well this scholar went to work and tried to decode the chronology. And he said obviously (it was a very good assumption), obviously they were not counting reigns and dating the same way we think. But they must have had some organized structure for dating and if we know what that structure was, why we will have a perfect chronology for that period. Well, once he began to approach it from that perspective, he very quickly came to an understanding of it and he’s developed a chronology that is now the masterpiece for that era and is used by secular historians. As a matter of fact, his book was first published (it’s now in a reprint) by the University of Chicago Press. I do not know who has published the reprint but it is again available.

Moreover, there’s a term used in the Early Church with regard to history that we need to adopt again: the Dark Age, or the Dark Ages. Now Plutarch and the renaissance men said that everything back of them to the Fall of Rom was the Dark Age. Then they pushed it back a couple of centuries. But those centuries were not a dark age. They were times of political upheaval, but they are ages of tremendous light. Why? Because the great early Christian thinkers were laying down foundations for western freedom, because in that time, the missionaries were fanning out and converting all of Europe, because in that time, you were having as much inventiveness and technological development as in any age until the Industrial Revolution. If you want a good book on that, written by someone who is not a Christian, White (I’ve forgotten his first name. His middle name is Townsend). Medieval Science and Technology. [Elspeth Whitney or maybe Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn Townsend White?] It’s one of a number, but that’s available in one of those university paperback series.

Think of one invention that was applied to everyday life at that time: the horse collar. How could a horse pull much freight or a wagon prior to that with no horse collar? It was pulling against its windpipe and choking itself. So horses had very slight utility. But when the horse collar was developed, you could move freight, you could break ground and plow in a way you never could before. Tremendous invention came in the so-called Dark Ages.

What constitutes light, moreover, and what constitutes darkness? Plumbing? Well, you had hot and cold running water and flush toilets in ancient Crete in the Minoan Era. The Early Church fathers said that any age outside of Christ or any people outside of Christ were living in the dark ages. They coined the term. You have people living in the Dark Ages all over Akron and Dayton and Cleveland and Cincinnati. They’re in the dark ages. Now that’s the biblical point of view. And the schools you’re fighting, the government schools, are in the dark ages. They’re teaching dark ages studies.

History, you see, is a theological science because God, not man, is sovereign, Lord of all creation. And anything outside of Him is in darkness. And we are called to go out as missionaries in that darkness, not to carry it to our pupils.

Moreover, Christian historiography rests on an idea, a concept of absolute truth. There is an absolute right and wrong. Now there are absolutes in every faith including Humanism. But in Humanism, man is absolute. Therefore, nothing outside of man can be used to judge man, nor nothing outside of man can be used to judge what he does. So you cannot have a history because how are you going to discern what is right and wrong, what happened that was of value, if nothing outside of man can judge him? Man is the absolute.

You see, God is our absolute. He is absolute truth for us. Our Lord said, “I am the truth!” You cannot take something outside of God and judge God or something outside of scripture and use it to judge scripture. You can’t go to the Bible as some people do and say well, now the New Testament gives us a God of grace and love but the Old Testament gives us the God of Law and judgment and wrath who’s not on the same level as the Lord we meet in the New Testament. No. Then you’re abstracting an idea and using it to judge the Word of God which must be the means of judgment for all things. God and His Word are the standard. They’re the yardstick. They’re not to be judged. They’re not to be measured. We do not pass judgment upon it, we use God and His Word to pass judgment on all things else. So God cannot be judged, nor His Word be judged. They must be obeyed.

Now when you abandon God, you abandon history for social science and you say the absolute is in man. You cannot judge man. Man judges all things. Man is the lord. Man is the standard.

We heard from Mr. Raminger, about the case in New England about the child suing his parents. We have a very dangerous movement now to pass some kind of bill, a Children’s Bill of Rights, children’s civil rights which would limit the power of parents, in fact destroy it, over their children. Why? Because man as god says no one could judge him. We had a chief justice a few years ago who applied this idea very rigorously, Chief Justice—not Chief Justice, but Associate Justice Douglas; William Douglas. Douglas held that you cannot judge the cannibals. That’s their practice. It’s their way of life. There’s no standard outside of man whereby you can condemn any man. The only thing you can condemn is a practice that says there is a principle of condemnation: Christianity. You either stand in terms of the Lord and His Word or you’re condemned. But there is a heaven and a hell.

John Dewey, of course, was emphatic. Christianity was anti-democratic because it insists on the difference between good and evil, the saved and the lost, the sheep and the goats, heaven and hell. And he held that education and history would not be free until you abandoned those concepts. You equalize all things. Then you could have social science, the control of man by man.

All things are relativistic in any faith, moreover, in terms of your absolute. Our faith says God is the absolute and all things are relative to Him. Humanism says that man is the absolute and so all things are relative to man. And between the two positions, there is total war.

Now as we deal with historiography, we have to recognize that the very terms (I’ve mentioned ‘dark ages’ but it’s not alone) reflect this humanistic point of view. Renaissance—that means rebirth. Rebirth from what? Why, the rebirth of man from Christianity. That term, renaissance, by the way, was not coined until 1815, after the French Revolution. And it was a part of man’s new way of looking at things and de-Christianizing the world. Before that, the renaissance was seen as a time of tyranny. Moreover, when we look at history from that perspective in terms of its own self-definition (renaissance), we begin to realize the direction of modern history; the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the U.N., it tells us a story.

There’s a very brilliant scholar whose book deals with this. He doesn’t share our point of view but he certainly documented it from his perspective. And he says that the movement of history beginning back in the medieval era has been from Christ to Adam, from the supernatural man to natural man. And he says this is the basic revolution of modern history. His book is a rather difficult one to read, but it’s a brilliant analysis of history. And if you want the title, any of you interested, I’ll give you the title—oh, very good. Eugen (the German for Eugene, no e on the end) Rosenstock-Huessy. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and the title, Out of Revolution, the Autobiography of Western Man. It’s a superb analysis. He wouldn’t agree with us but he’s told us exactly what the direction of history from the standpoint of the Humanist is. Let us get rid of supernatural man, in other words of God, of Christ, of redeemed, regenerate man. We want natural man as the foundation for society, for the future. Isn’t this what public school education is about? To recreate natural man; to encourage him, to bless him by means of the State. He’s the key to the future.

But it is also at the same time designed to destroy supernatural man. That’s what you are. I like the language that sometimes the ungodly invent concerning us. Rosenstock-Huessy didn’t use that term, supernatural man, another scholar did; but I love it. You and I are supernatural man, born again supernatural. And we’re part of a story, history, that is supernatural. So between our story and man’s the difference is between Christ and fallen man. One glorifying Christ, and one glorifying fallen man and saying the whole goal of revolution, the whole goal of our social sciences must be the glorification of this man.

Yes…

[Audience] {?} persecuted {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes…

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Beautiful. Psalm 2 is a philosophy of history in a nutshell. What is it? “Why do the heathen rage and the nations, the kings of the earth take counsel (or conspire) together?” It says we have a world conspiracy against the Lord and against His anointed. That clearly is underway.

What is the psalmist’s declaration? “He that sitteth in the circle of the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.” So God laughs at the pretentions of men. So you’re going to take over history? You’re going to convert it into a social science? No. It remains mine. So He calls His Son and commissions Him.

And then the summons to the nations, kiss the Son. Now, that’s not in modern American terminology. That meant as with an oriental potentate, you fell down at His feet and kissed His feet, acknowledging that you are under His submission. You were an enemy and now you are pleading for mercy. Kiss the Son, lest He be angry and ye perish in your way; tremendous psalm and magnificent statement of the biblical doctrine of history.

The Psalms are full of it. Psalm 149 is a magnificent one to read in the same vein, because there again, you have a hallelujah psalm about what God is accomplishing in history and how we are to rejoice and how it is our privilege to sit in judgment.

Well, I’ll take time now for some questions. I’ve tried to cover hastily some of the essentials of “History as a Theological Science.”

Yes…

[Audience] What do you think of Abraham Lincoln? Have you ever heard anything contrary to what we would have been taught about {?} president?

[Rushdoony] Abraham Lincoln was a man who was a Deist theologically. He was inclined as a Whig in politics to take a rather liberal view of things for a long, long time. He went to church dutifully, to a Presbyterian church in Springfield, because his wife was a member, and he also liked the pastor. Before he went to Washington, the pastor there gave him a massive study (I believe it’s in two volumes), Dicks’ Systematic Theology, I believe it is, from the Scottish Calvinistic perspective. Lincoln read it very conscientiously and faithfully, returned it to the pastor, but it did not convert him.

However, the peculiar thing is that it really reshaped a great deal of his thinking in spite of the lack of conversion, because he no longer saw God in a Deistic sense as an absentee landlord, he saw Him as sovereign, as in control. And in his presidential addresses, very often his wrestling with this subject comes out. His deep concern over this, he sees the hand of God there in all things, but he doesn’t have a personal relationship to that God, yet.

Now let me say on Lincoln sometimes the statement is made that he got into spiritualism in the White House. That’s not altogether true, although the facts are not too much to his credit. They lost a couple of sons, as you know, and Mrs. Lincoln, whose mind was in very sorry state, began to long for her sons and show some interest in some spiritualistic mediums and so Lincoln invited one man in the White House in order to hopefully bring some peace to his wife, which it did not. So while he himself showed no belief in it, it was not to his credit that he resorted to that step.

So Lincoln’s position during his presidency involved a great deal of change in his political attitudes. These changes were a part of his wrestling with the problems as a result of having read this book. But I don’t think there’s any real ground for saying that he ever changed his position.

Yes…

[Audience] I understand that the Renaissance is an {?} of Humanism, a turning away? I’ve always taken the Renaissance to be culturally {?} indoctrination, {?} War of Independence and I was wondering how this played, {?}

[Rushdoony] No, the Reformation was directed to great degree you might say 90-95% against the Renaissance because the Renaissance was not ruling the Church. The popes were humanists, they were openly Atheists. Several of the renaissance popes made no bones about saying they didn’t believe in Christ or in the Resurrection. They were administrators. Incidentally, did you know that for some time after the Renaissance, Alexander VI, the Borgia Pope was regarded as one of the greatest of the popes, because he was a superb administrator? To this day, the Vatican is more or less under the influence of that Borgia pope, one of the most degenerate men ever to occupy the Vatican, because of his administrative reforms. You know, I don’t like administrative reforms in the courts or in the statehouse or in Washington because all they do is to make the enemy more efficient. And Alexander made the Vatican more efficient.

So the Renaissance was in control. And what were the reformers doing? They were trying to take the Church out of the hands of these renaissance men, these humanists. They wanted to go back before the scholastics as well, to Anselm of Canterbury who made his basic premise faith, and in philosophy he said, I do not understand in order that I believe, but I believe in order that I might understand. So the reformers were moving against the entire temper of the Renaissance, and with them, the Renaissance came to a halt. Now, granted, they used some of the tools of learning acquired during the Renaissance, the revival of interest in Greek and Hebrew for example, particularly Greek. But this does not mean that they were renaissance men; they were anti-renaissance in spirit.

So the term renaissance, as I indicated, is new, meaning ‘renewal, rebirth’. And they saw it as the rebirth of what—Humanism, anti-Godism, of classical Greek paganism.

Yes…

[Audience] How much parallel is there current Humanism and Plato’s Republic?

[Rushdoony] How much parallelism is there between current Humanism and Plato’s Republic? A great deal, because Plato’s Republic says in effect just what I’ve been saying here. The men of ideas are the ones who must rule and give history direction. The common people, the common herd, can’t do it. They’re just stupid matter. They have to be molded and governed and totally controlled as does all of human institutions, persons, events, by the philosopher kings. Well, now instead of philosopher kings, we say with the scientific socialist planners, the educational planners, the government planners and so on.

[Audience] Did he synthesize men or does that go beyond {?} basically?

[Rushdoony] what do you mean?

[Audience] Did, was he the, the {?} did he formulate that himself, was that part {?} He just merely {?} what somebody else {?}

[Rushdoony] No, the basic elements were there in Greek civilization, yes. But Plato took all these diverse elements and put them together. Now, it was the fulfillment of Greek religion and philosophy. All the development was leading up to that, but Plato put it together in a way that had not been done before. Now the interesting thing is that the 30 tyrants of Greece in the next generation were all Plato’s pupils. They went out to apply his ideas.

In his politics, Aristotle says man is a political animal. Now, the Bible tells us that man is a religious creature, created by God. It’s not politics that creates him or the State. It is God. If you believe that politics or the State creates you, you need public schools in order to mold the child in the image of the state. Then Aristotle derives his ethics, not from God, but from the State—from his politics. Well, he is no different than Plato in that respect, in fact he’s more rigorous to a degree.

You’re saying, in other words, that it’s not the Word of God or any god up there or out there who tells us what is good and evil. Man is his own god, deciding for himself what constitutes good and evil. The political order determines ethics, morality, and when you have that of course, you have pure Humanism.

Do we have a few minutes more, or?

[Audience] To what do you attribute {?} explanation provision of Franklin, wisdom in his adherence. He did much good in {?}

[Rushdoony] No, Benjamin Franklin is very much overrated. The Franklin stove was never invented by Benjamin Franklin. A lot of myths are taught about Franklin because he was a Deist, as was Jefferson. So the two of them were made out to be the great men of the era. Well, the fact is, and I’ll finish with this, about both these men, Franklin, according to Stewart Currie, the contemporary historian, was a British agent throughout the entire war, he was working for the British and in their pay. He was determined to be on the winning side however things came out. We know this for a fact because the British archives have been opened up and there is his name and his pay and his staff and everybody.

Moreover, he was guilty of several shady deals in which he sold rifles which he bought from Europe, which were incapable of shooting, to the American army. You don’t hear that very often. Moreover, a good many of his proverbs and so-called wisdom actually came from Cotton Mather, from Cotton Mather’s Essays to do Good. So he borrowed a lot of his proverbs. He did shorten them and make them more telling. But he picked up a lot of them and put them together, Poor Richard’s Almanac and so on. He wasn’t original in any of it. He’s a vastly overrated man.

Jefferson, well, Jefferson came close to losing this country for us during the War of Independence (and I’ll finish in just a moment), because of his blunders as governor and his maladministration. If the war had not ended, he probably would have been tried and found guilty by the Virginians. But when the war ended, they decided to forgive and forget and both he and Franklin got away.

Now, Patrick Henry was the man who exposed him. And Patrick Henry was asked to take over again as governor when they had to solve the mess that Jefferson left. Patrick Henry is responsible for the American nation or country as we have it today because before the war ended, Patrick Henry saw this fact. The British held everything on the other side of the mountains, so that the whole Midwest was in British hands. So he got the Virginia troops and he sent them over the mountains and he said clean out the British before the war ends. It’s got a short time to go, because we can’t afford to have them between us and the Pacific. And it was the Virginia troops, because of Patrick Henry’s wisdom at that point, that began the mop-up which culminated in one of the most important battles in all of history, the Battle of Vincennes, and with that, the British forces were cleaned out, and that meant that the new country now was not limited to a little strip of land along the Atlantic.

And do you know that most recent government school textbooks of American History, some of them will not even mention Patrick Henry? Patrick Henry was a very staunch Christian, a Calvinist if I may through in a little plug for my own side, but when he died, he was witnessing to his doctor who was an Agnostic, expressing his joy at going home to be with the Lord. He told his children that in his will, that besides the material things he left them, he left them faith in Jesus Christ, and he said that he could leave no greater inheritance to the people of this country than the Word of God. He carried tracts and Christian books in his saddlebags as he went court to court practicing law, and would give them out to defendants and jury members and judges and all. He was an evangelist. He was a great, great man.

Well, our time is up.