Lecture
Science the New Source of Truth
#5Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject:
Genre: Speech
Track: 08
Dictation Name: RR325D8
Location/Venue: ________
Year: _______
&
#xa0;In this second hour I speak on the relationship of postmillennialism to education. As a result shall plan for a somewhat briefer period of time to deal with the subject. It is, of course, related to what we have been talking about. The meaning of negation in the modern world.
The sad fact is, that in the modern age the church and Christians by and large have been to an increasing extent less and less active and less and less capable of taking a leading role in society. This has become so extensive that today the most impotent sector of the American population is your Christian Bible believing acceptive. It’s the conservative {?}, there are fifty to fifty-five million professing evangelicals in the United States. This would mean that approximately one out of four, and this is not counting their children! Yes, they are the most impotent segment of the American population. Why?
It’s very easy to discern the reason when we talk to such people. One of our group from Westwood who moved to another state to complete his schooling, joined a Baptist church; the pastor was a very fine man, but he said, the pastor was having a very uphill struggle. Why? Well because it was so difficult for him to get the members interested in doing anything other than coming to church and having their fellowship times and the like. He said that he himself spoke to some of these members about the necessity for Christian reconstruction, and about it being the moral imperative of our faith to apply it to every area of life and thought. He tried to go into Christian schools in particular, because they have a young boy of about a year and a half.
And he said the stark answer he got was, ‘What do you mean the moral imperative? We don’t drink or smoke!’ Now, you see what Christianity has identified with... In essence, a few negative virtues. Nothing in the way of positive actions. This spirit of negation is very strong - Christianity becomes ‘Thou shalt not’, rather than being more than conquerors and going out and conquering the world.
As a result the question of eschatology is a very real one. As some of you know, I have put out a little booklet on the subject God’s Plan for Victory which deals with the question of eschatology, and it sold in a very short time quite a phenomenal number of copies. It has also produced some very interesting mail, one that arrived a couple of days ago told me that I was an absolute heretic, and not a Christian, a phony, and so on. ‘Sincerely In Christ--’ it was signed. [audience chuckles]
The question of eschatology does arouse strong emotions, and of course I criticize all three divisions there even though I am a postmillennialist. I criticize the postmillennialist position because in most cases it too is imbued with a spirit of negation, it has no program. postmillennialism has had no connection with Biblical law for untold generations and as a result it has withered on the vine. How is God’s rule going to be extended from pole to pole? By negation? By doing nothing?
This is an absurd kind of position no matter who holds it.
The premil position of course looks to God’s miraculous deliverance of his saints from this world. The rapture means that our problems are solved. Now what this faith tends to produce is a waiting on the rapture; it becomes the goal in the Christian life, to wait for that glorious event. As a result it produces a quietism of ethical action. It means, by and large, that the goal is an any moment return - which therefore means that long range Christian action and planning is out of the question. Now, many Christian schools are premil in their orientation, but I know that as I first began to travel twenty years ago and speak about the Christian school movement, one of the things that many premils who did start Christians schools faced was the challenge by people that they were wasting their time because the rapture was due at any moment because the rapture was due at any moment. And it was difficult for the premils.
As one of them said, and I asked of these people, the Lord still says “Occupy till I come.” Which was, of course, the proper answer. But you can see the problem. It does create a quietism, so that it leads to a criticism of those who take an activist position - who feel that they must under God go out and occupy until he comes.
On the other hand, amillennialism is even worse. The premils can speak of their present hope, the rapture, but what do amils have to look forward to? The world is only going to get worse and worse until the second coming. So it creates a ‘grin and bear it’ philosophy because there is no hope, really, except the second coming. It is interesting that the amil philosophy really began out of this pair. You did have the postmil and the premil thinking in the early church, but amillennialism was really born with saint Augustine and it’s saint Augustine is one of the great fathers of the church! And we owe a great deal to him, including the Reformation, because it was out of one strand of Augustine's thinking - his emphasis on the sovereignty of God and predestination - that Luther and Calvin got their impotence. It was Augustine who drove them back to the word of God and led thereby to the reformation. So that Augustinianism is the foundation of the reformation. But Augustinianism is also, because of another strand of his thinking, the foundation of the church of Rome and the Middle Ages. Why?
Because Augustine was intensely and emotionally involved in Rome - he was a Roman to the core - and he was filled with grief at the fall of Rome. When you read the City of God you find that this man was torn apart by what is happening...it was something that was killing him, and by faith he was trying to provide an answer for it. In this respect, he was a world apart from Salvian the Presbyter. Salvian wrote that because God is, therefore Rome must fall. He looked to the fall of Rome as a vindication of God, and a vindication of the scriptures. He knew the havoc it would create, he saw it before Augustine ever did because he was on the (prayer?), right on the border of Germany.
When the barbarians came {?} was one of the first to be burned to the ground. Salvian saw all the horrors that went with it, but Salvian said emphatically as he wrote after (kreer?) had burned, ‘It is the judgement of God.’ This was the righteous judgement of God and had to be welcomed by the believers, and it had to be seen as something that was necessary.
But Augustine did not. Although Augustine in many respects was a far greater thinker than Salvian, at this point he was weak and Salvian was great. As a result, out of despair, Saint Augustine formulated his amillennial philosophy. The world was going to get worse and worse, the forces of antiChrist were going to get more and more powerful and rule the world. How is the church to survive? By creating a fortress, a convent or a monastery, and withdrawing from the world into the protected boundaries of that world.
As a result the entire of the middle ages seized this effort to draw the people in...come out from the world into the monastery, into the convent, the truly saintly person is the one who withdraws from the world into the convent or the monastery.
Now it is interesting that (Cuno Faldeen?), a Catholic political scientist, has said in his book Leftism that the problem in the church today is more medieval than the church of Rome’s. That it has created out of the church a convent or a monastery; withdraw from the world. So you see the monastic spirit of the modern world is best exemplified in the Protestant church, and he said, this is why the Protestant church has retained {?} scripture and will not. It has that spirit of withdrawal - withdrawing from the law; but in the Bible of course, we know that we should withdraw from sin! And that’s a very different thing.
As a result, amillennialism because it creates this spirit of withdrawal has spelled retreat for churches that adopt it. Premil churches will have an aggressive evangelism because they’ve got save souls before the end! Amil churches tend to go downhill. When the Netherlands became amil there began a decline. When in the colonial period this type of thinking began to creep in together with some premillennialism into the Puritans there was a decline, until the great awakening and the revival of postmillennialism. And again, after the Civil War when amillennialism began to take over in church circles there was again a decay and a decline. Because it is a philosophy of retreat. It’s a monastic faith in essence - it calls for a retreat from the world and was born out of despair.
The postmil position holds that man has a duty to make disciples of our own nation and to bring every area of life and thought into captivity for Jesus Christ. As a result, every area and every race is to be brought into the knowledge of the Lord. The means whereby every area is to be made captive is first of all by evangelism and second by means of the law of God. The redeemed man applying the law of God will bring all things into subjection to God and to his word.
As a result, this means world evangelism. It is interesting that the reformation was preceded, in fact the reformation coincided with another movement. Exploration, the discovery of the America’s... the age of exploration. And both the age of exploration and the age of reformation were born out of a revival of postmillennialism. If you read the journals of Columbus and (Haklars?) voyages of all the explorers you find that - with a few exceptions - these men went out with a faith that it was their duty to go to the far corners of the world and share the gospel and bring every area into captivity for Jesus Christ.
Columbus, in his journal, as he was sailing to America, speaks of the new worlds he’s going to explore. He thought he would hit India, but he thought he would encounter new worlds along the way - that, while China and India would be there somewhere, there would be many new worlds in between- and he would be the instrument, he said, whereby the prophecies of Isaiah would be fulfilled. That the islands afar would hear the word of God.
Not only so, but he also thought that perhaps some of the lost tribes would be in some of those islands. He took along with him, I believe, five interpreters who spoke Hebrew. Now that’s an aspect of Columbus that we are not often taught...but it’s basic to an understanding of the man. If we go through (Hakfars?) voyages and read them, page after page you find this kind of thinking! So that, the reformation and exploration sprang out of this! “Go ye therefore into all the world, make disciples of all nations.”
Columbus, coming to Isaiah over and over again; the isles afar off had to hear the word of the Lord, and he was going to be the instrument to carry that word to them.
World evangelism and education. Education cannot be left to the enemies of God. We cannot turn over children, who are the future, to the enemies of God and have the blessing of God! Any control of children is a control of the future, and therefore it is imperative that children be (reaped?) for Christ. And hence, basic to our eschatology, there must be a concern with education. What more? It is not only the church and the school which must be Christian - every area of life and thought must obey God in his word. It’s a very serious mistake to think of the Bible as a church book. The Bible is more than a church book. It’s a book for the totality of life, and as a result, this book is for every man in every area of life and every institution. It’s a Bible for church and state, for school and laboratory.
Dorothy and I were very thrilled some years ago, and I may have told some of you this story, to hear a geneticist who had won eleven international prizes in genetics tell us why it was easy for him to win over his competitors. Because he believed the Bible and the fact that God says that he created heaven and earth in six days, and created each thing after it’s own kind. And, he said, those who believe in evolution believe in total possibility, and they are always wasting their time in research - genetic research - trying to do the impossible. But as a Christian he knew what could not be done and he never tried to do it! As a result, he said, I was never wasting time and when we had something to do I did it! While they were wasting their time on dead ends.
It’s a book for the laboratory, it’s a book for the school, it’s a book for every area of life and this book is seriously maligned and damaged if it is treated as a book for the church only. It is to dishonor this book to limit its scope; it’s a book for the courtroom, it’s a book for the state.
Every area of life is under God, it must hear his word and it must obey him. This does not mean the union of church and state, it means that religion is as basic to the state and it is to the church. It means moreover, the restructuring of other areas as well. The restructuring of money and economics. Today, our economic policies and our monetary policies are fiat. They move in terms of fiat, which means that man plays God and says fiat dos, “let there be light”, man says let there be fiat law, fiat money; fiat economics shall prevail. When I say let it be; it shall be.
And this is one of the problems of our time, our money is fiat money and it is corrupting our economic life; it is like polluted blood in the lifestream of our economics. As a result we need to eliminate fiat in law, economics, money,...every area of life and thought. It means, moreover, resting in the Lord. You see, when man tries to play God we cannot rest. It produces a sabbath less world, a world where men take time off and thus have more time off than men used to have a generation or two ago.
But they have no rest. They cannot rest. If man is God, everything depends on him! The essence of the Sabbath principle is we take hands off our lives because we know that it is God who saves us, it is God who sustains us, it is God’s providence that rules and overrules in all the land...so we can rest in the Lord. And we know that it is the application of the word of God that provides the answer, not our word.
As a result, postmillennialism does stress as an eschatology this responsibility to apply the word of God across the board in every area, and to recognize that we have a duty. God says his word shall not return unto him void. Deuteronomy 28 declares in the second and the fifteenth verses that if man would apply the word of God, if they would obey his law, all these blessings and all these curses shall come upon them and over teak them. So that, there’s a certainty - God’s certainty - and we can depend on the results. Are there any questions, now?
Yes?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly] [audio skips] [same audience member speaking] And maybe in some ways I was copping out because I thought I’d be a (pan?)millennialist, you know, I’ll be neutral in this area; you know, I won’t get dogmatic. You know I’ve upset a lot of my friends and relatives that I’m postmillennial, but I really think the reason I take an advantage because of that pessimism that they have. Do you think that [unintelligible] in understanding by faith we understanding why by faith we understand, that that is part of the faith comes to [unintelligible] that they don’t understand, or was it faith wants to [unintelligible] sanctifies through something that they don’t understand, how they’re going to arrive. I see it in buildings, even in reconstructionism is, we’re not building. What are we going to have some years for now for our children? You know, we can have children [unintelligible] change places like Sacramento.
Well of course we have to recognize that if we take God at his word we are more than conquerors. MORE than conquerors! What a tremendous statement. But know also that the gates of hell cannot prevail, that is, cannot stand up against us. We’re going to run right over them. That’s the meaning of it.
Now, how are we going to run over the very gates of hell and all the opposition? God spells it out - I have the verse - Deuteronomy 28. If you do these things you cannot lose. ‘All these blessings shall come upon thee and overtake thee, you cannot get away from them.’ Impossible! What does this faith create, then? A tremendous certainty. More than optimism, a certainty that God’s word will not turn out to be void. That if we do things in God’s way we can expect God’s results. If we don’t God has told us what the results are going to be.
So we figure there are two ways. We’re either going to run right over them, in due time, or they’re going to run over us. That’s what God says! They’ll run over us and it’ll be the judgement of God because God says ‘judgement begins with my house’. I find offencive a false or a lukewarm faith, and I will destroy it. I will have your enemies to run over you. But if you obey me, if you believe and obey, you will run over them.
Incidentally I mentioned in the previous hour - or no, I just mentioned it in this hour - that the geneticist did not work on dead end ideas. One of the things I’ll be talking about in our next meeting will be science and the scientific method, and in the course of that I will share with you something which, if you haven’t seen it, should be worth your while. The Saturday review for July 9, 1977. And now, interesting fusion, the marriage of plants and animal. The picture shows, I guess this is a cat with a womans bust and head, a man with a carrot head, and here, a man with a bull head. And this is the kind of daydreaming they’re doing. Now, of course he says they are on a very elementary level but they’ve made some tremendous breakthroughs. You go through the article and read about the breakthrough which sounds less and less like anything but hopefulness, but it gives you an idea of what they’re working on. This is the kind of thing they’re making announcements about regularly - that “They’re on the verge of a giant breakthrough” or they’ve “made some tremendous forward steps in interkingdom fusion, the marriage of plants and animals.”
Well, we’ll go into that next time. Yes?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
Yes. Piecemeal religion is a very popular thing in our time and it’s a relatively new thing in civilization. I always encounter people who feel they can take something from Hinduism and something from Buddhism and something from a few modern cults, and mix them with Christianity, and oh it’s so beautiful. Well of course they have nothing except themselves and their foolish finds. You cannot use religions --[audio skips]
[Rushdoony] Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that thou art on the throne, that thou art our God, that thou hast established a covenant with us and are the covenant teaching God. Give us grace to walk, our Father, in gratitude for thy greatness, thy goodness, thy mercy, thy grace and salvation. Ever mindful that greater achievements is in us and with us than thee that is in the world, we have been called to be more than conquerors to him that loves us. That the ends of the world are ours in Jesus Christ, that we are called to claim all things and to present all things in his name into glory. Bless us to this purpose we beseech thee, in Jesus name, Amen.
During the first hour this evening our subject will be education as a plan of salvation. Education as a plan of salvation. We are too often so brainwashed by the world around us, by the communications media and by the fact that almost all of us have had only a state school education that we fail to realize that the greatest religious war in all of history is underway: the war between christianity and humanism. The state school is an instrument, as is modern politics, of that humanism and it is dedicated to a war to the death against Christianity.
One of our problems is that we do not read enough of what these philosophers of the opposition have to say, nor do we take them seriously. But they are concerned with our extermination. Today, cross country there is in one state after another an attempt to legislate the christian school and the christian church out of existence! At this point let me review something we said a year ago, because we began these meetings last year, September...when it was considerably cooler. In a month or two we’ll be meeting in {?} conference room in our new building.
But we cannot understand the life of the early church and it’s battle unless we see this fact: the Roman government wanted to recognize Christianity as a legal religion. All the evidence we have makes it clear! Rome wanted to save the church, and said over and over again, we want you to be a legally recognized and honored religion in the empire. One emperor went so far as to have a statue made of Jesus Christ and to put it in his private chapel, and then to have that fact publicized so that the stupid Christians would get the idea that he wasn’t against them!
But of course, we knew better. Why? Because the first premise of the Christian church was this: the word for church in the New Testament does not mean ability for worship, or an institution for worship; it is ecclesia. It is not our word church which comes from (curriatis nomos), house of the Lord. It is the same word as we have in the old Testament in two words, assembly and congregation, which can mean the army of the Lord - the actual fighting men - it can mean the place of worship, it can mean the covenant people, it can mean also all who are within the covenant nation Israel, but basically it means the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God.
So. The early church saw Christ’s kingdom as a kingdom, and as a kingdom it could not bow down to another king. Now Rome was ready to recognize Christianity at all times as a legal religion, provided that it would give Rome first the power to licence Christianity, and second to tax Christianity. To licence and to tax. But the church said no. Any church and any group of Christians that wanted to be recognized as legal only had to go, when they were arrested for practicing an unlicenced religion, and stand before the image of Caesar and offer incense and gain a licence and they could worship all they wanted and the government wouldn’t bother them. Then they were under the building codes and zoning codes and every kind of regulation.
But the Christians said anyone who does that is guilty of apostasy! They had to repent before they could be re-accepted as Christians. That was what the early Christians died for. No control by the state. And the soviet union, the constitution, guarantees religious freedom to everybody... They have so many rules and regulations that no church can exist unless it’s a front for the police. And all the rules and regulations that are being instituted in this country have as their goal the same thing, to eliminate the church. Because the state today has another plan of salvation.
Basic to this modern plan is this: first of all, all problems are social problems, not theological problems. You have problems with crime? Well, it’s a social problem. Those people come from minority groups so they’re discriminated against, and so they’re reacting. It’s not a theological problem, it’s not sin, you see.
You have problems internationally. Well, it’s the has versus the have nots. It’s not sin.
And so on and on and on.
Environmentalism in some form...not sin. The problem is not theological, but social. That’s the modern perspective.
But we, if we are faithful Christians, must equipt that all problems are at basics theological. Theological. The more you attempt to solve problems from the humanistic or social perspective, the greater the fall.
I was very interested today, we had 19--{?} periodical commentary and there’s an article by a woman, Midge Dexter, Looting and Liberal Racism. Very interesting - it’s an extremely liberal periodical. The author makes it clear, she was there and she saw the looting. And, she said, this business of the mayor, the president, everybody excusing the looters - ‘it’s their frustration of joblessness’. She quotes one of them and says, the last thing anyone of them ever wanted was a job! They were hoodlums by choice! She says it is cant that refers to the looters as animals, because in that fateful July night they were behaving in all too human a fashion. It is also cant to say as a New Yorker did in a ludicrous talk of the town piece, that peoples anger of the looting after it occurred actually caused the looting! Or in the New Yorkers own words, “The attitude toward the riot created the riot.”
Now that’s good liberal logic, isn’t it? But it is cant above all to say that the looters conduct - as Herbert {?} did in a truly disgraceful piece which also appeared in The Times (off-ed?) page on July 21, in which he compared them with a group of Jewish housewives in 1902 who organized a protest against the high cost of Kosher meat. Nor will a month of Sundays worth of sermons about poverty and alienation erase the image pastored in a special report which appeared in the July 25 issue of Newsly...a woman wandering through the second floor of a Bookland discount furniture store during the looting, looking for end tables and complaining to the others (who were busy carrying away furniture) “I just can’t use a thing up here!”
And she goes on to say, what’s the answer? What was the reason? The answer is that all those young men went on their spree of looting because they have been given permission to do so. They have been given permission to do so by all the papers and magazines, movies and documentaries; all the outlets for the purveying of enlightened liberal attitude and progressive liberal policy which had for years and years been proclaiming that race and poverty were sufficient excuses for lawlessness. And she goes on document that very clearly, and quite extensively. And, she says, we have created with our liberal faith - and it is a faith - lawlessness and looting.
And, she says, however hurtful and humiliating it must have been for a grown black man to some years ago to suffer being called a boy, surely nothing can suck the marrow from the bones faster or more thoroughly than calling a bad boy blameless. It is interesting, she says that during the looting there were two black boys who just sat on the doorsteps and took no part of the looting going on around them. And so they were interviewed by the media reporters as to why they were not doing it, and one said, “Because my momma would’ve killed me.” What do we have today? Problems with social problems, not theological. And so the problems get worse!
Ten years ago there was a bigger black out and she says, there was neighborliness and nothing happened. But in those ten years the liberal ideology has prevailed! There is no longer a theological perspective on it, it is not sin, it’s not the individual, it’s the environment. And people have bought it.
Then, second, “The modern perspective, modern humanistic religious case is that all social problems are solvable by man.” Now, using their language...the language that you find again and again in books on education. In fact, I took that sentence out of a book on education. Put into Christian language it means that all man’s problems can be solved by man as his own savior. All social problems are solvable by man.
So it’s an ironic fact that the more man puts his solutions to work, the worse the problems become. The New York riot is a case in point. The growing impudence of crime is another case in point. The recent FBI report declared that there are two million professional criminals in the United States. Two million bona fide professional criminals. But now takes on average, and this is startling, about seven years to convict a wrongdoer. Five hundred police killers were analyzed, eighty percent of them had previous arrests, sixty percent previous conviction, two-thirds of the police killers at one time or another received {?} or probation, and three out of ten were actually on parole at the time of the killing!
Are we solving the problems? All problems are solvable by man, but because man’s answer denies the truth of God it compounds the problem, and the problems will be compounded so that you can say you haven’t see anything yet.
You know, today in Africa there are countries galore...more than we can begin to count, new African nations ruled by dictators, the most vicious kind of tyranny. Idi Amin is far from the word! We only hear about Idi Amin because he broke with his neighbors, in that he was not going to allow himself to be dominated by Marxist. As a result, attention is being called to the aberration of Idi Amin, but all the other African states which are far worse in many many cases of Idi Amin and Uganda. Bad as it is, they’re not getting the same attention.
The interesting fact is, these are not jungle bunnies-cannibals who gained power... These men, who are ruling those African countries with a savagery that the cannibal era, bad as it was, never saw. [unintelligible] Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard, and maybe Berkeley has somebody over there off the top too. These are men, in many cases, (Idi Amin is an exception, he was a military man under the British) with advanced degrees! More education than most of us here have. PH Ds and the like. Barbarian? Well not the kind you think, but they are humanistic barbarians. Their savagery is born of this new religion, humanism! You can’t blame the old Africa, you have to blame the new York and the New America! You have to blame the faith which says all problems are solvable by man, man is his own savior, and that’s what you have... A number of saviors as heads of those countries.
Being an Arminian, I have no love of the Turks...but the old Turk, at least you could live with him! He was a tyrant, but what happened when the young Turks took over? Why, the young Turks were trained in Germany and in France and England and they had imbibed the totality of the new Humanism {?}. And their attitude was mass murder. Mass murder.
In the next Chalcedon Report I point out, citing Otto Scott in his book Robespierre: The Voice of Virtue, the word purged is a modern political term. The word purged first came into use in politics in the French Revolution. It was to that point and for sometime thereafter a medical term. What did it mean? It meant giving someone an enema, expelling fever. What was the idea of a purge in politics? You eliminated the human feces, the human waste from society.
So in the modern politics the purge means you regard a segment of humanity as subhuman, as comparable to waste. All problems are solvable by man, and it means, finally in the humanist framework: mass murder.
Men met with this humanistic face.(<---??) The (panathea?) for all social problems, the cure all, is to found in politics and in statist education. This is why your politicians and your statist educators act like little messiahs. They answer comes through them, and all you need to do is to vote them more and more money and they can solve all the problems.
Last week I read the statements of several men in Washington - bureaucrats and senators - on how we must deal with the undue wealth of many individuals. Now anybody over the twenty-thousand bracket has got to be hard hit with taxes, we cannot tolerate this kind of wealth in the country. And whose drawing more money than they are? A congressmen controls for himself, his office and everything, three hundred and fifty-thousand or better. His actual salary is very high, but only a fraction of what is his to any practical intent. And who spends more money than the government?
But you and I...we dare not have the (consentment?) to enjoy it. It’s a sin. All problems are solvable by man, and when they say man, they mean political man and statist educator man.
With regard to the schools we can add one point further, and this comes directly from their own statements again, “The goal of education is not knowledge nor information, but self realization.” Self realization. The self salvation of the person. And this means being free, from parents, from society, from social controls,...being yourself. Well what does it mean for us, for man to be himself? It means to be a sinner. It means to be a creature depraved. Lost in sins and trespassing. And to tell that person to be himself and to express himself is to ask for social chaos! Is it any wonder that we are getting it?
In effect, what politicians and educators are saying today is that the best way to drive a car down a winding and steep road in the mountains is to make sure you have no brakes. It will get you down in a hurry... And of course the brakes are increasingly gone in our world today. The brakes have been thrown away!
Very good friend of ours who was born and grew up not too far from here in Modesto, and every time he goes home he almost cries because in the Modesto he grew up in nobody locked doors, there was no such thing as crime and problems...and now his elderly mother and stepfather have nothing but problems! And it distresses him to see them in the same house in which he grew up, finding that the neighborhood is so different. The young and old today are heedless, contemptuous of other peoples property, no longer neighborly.
Well, we see the result of another religion. A religion taught in school, financed by our politics, and basic to our political program today. It’s a war unto death! It is two religions diametrically opposed. Because we as Christians believe that all our problems are theological - that until we begin with the theological fact, because the solution begins with regeneration and then it continues with the application of the word of God, the law of God in every area of life and thought... and apart from obedience there is no solution.
We believe also as Christians that it’s not politics nor education that solves our problems, but Jesus Christ. And any and every effort to reflect men from that fact, work to the destruction of man and his society. This is why in the name of one kind of regulation after another in some states already attempts are being made to limit, to control, to legislate out of existence one aspect of the life of the church after another, as well as the schools. Make no mistake about it, we are at war.
The sad fact is that most Christians are not even aware. Someone is gunning for their lives and they don’t know it. We as Christians have a duty. To recognize that there is a war, to make sure that we are fighting, and to make sure that we are fighting on the right side. Then we can fight no one better. We are more than conquerors through him that loves us, even Christ our Lord.
Are there any questions now?
Any questions before we take a break and then go on to our second subject?...How many of you saw the copy of the Washton that we reprinted? On the legal paper? Very good. Well, do you know that I received a long and highly critical letter about that? Very interesting. The sad fact is that it came from a Christian school principal. He was all for compromising to the state, he feels that the state is concerned for the welfare of Christian schools. The worst part of it is that he comes from Ohio! Can you imagine such blindness? [audio ends]