Systematic Theology – Creation and Providence

Providence and Historiography

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 9 of 17

Track: #9

Year:

Dictation Name: 9 Providence and Historiography

[Rushdoony] We continue our studies in the doctrine of providence, creation and providence. And tonight first of all we deal with providence and historiography. I suspect a number of you are familiar with the writings of J.H. Merle d’Aubigne, the church historian. His dates are 1794-1872. The works of d’Aubigne have, since their publication, enjoyed a very lively and steady sale among Christians. If you have not read d’Aubigne I strongly commend him to you. However the last thing you want to do is to mention d’Aubigne in the presence of a modern scholar in our colleges, universities, and seminaries including many of our supposedly evangelical schools; because they will immediately frown on your use of d’Aubigne. Why? Why their hostility to d’Aubigne? Well first of all d’Aubigne has an absence in his writing of a critical analysis in approaching history. Instead of approaching history with a skepticism, as though God doesn’t exist, as though we must approach all facts from an ostensible neutrality, which means an actual atheism, he approaches church history with a joyful faith.

Moreover d’Aubigne at all times sees God’s providence at work in history. He sees God’s providence whether it is in victories or defeats. When you read d’Aubigne sentences like these abound in his writings. Quote “The divine word had hardly lighted one torch before that kindled another.” Still another sentence “God’s action was not limited to one spot.” Men of the great movement in the 16th century at Oxford and Cambridge into the reformation and the d’Aubigne wrote, and I quote again “Now in every place, in the parsonages, the universities, in the palaces, as well as in the cottages of the husbandmen and the shops of the tradesman there was an ardent desire to posses the Holy Scriptures. The fiat lux was about to be uttered over the chaos of the church, and light to be separated from darkness by the word of God.” From the standpoint of a modern scholar d’Aubigne is all wrong. He is so obviously a Christian, and these scholars feel that even if you are you write as though you are not; and you never assume the reality of God nor of His providence in history.

Well for us this means a falsification of history. Can we ever deal with the facts of history without dealing with the providence of God? To do so is to deny the reality of history. d’Aubigne wrote as a man of faith, not as a so-called objective scholar, that is a humanist; he was very plainly a Christian. Moreover there is a great breech between d’Aubigne and modern historians over the issue of causality. The modern scholar as he approaches history is naturalistic. Hence he sifts endlessly through the data, economic data, political data, weather data, plagues, political events, military events, everything under the sun. The more voluminous the data the happier he is. Modern historiography thus loses itself in an endless search for causes; ever learning and never able to come to the truth.

Now the secondary causes in any event in human history are so numerous that millions of causes focus on every event in history. Thus if you are going to look at these endless secondary causes your historiography begins to break down. You can look at the event and say it was the economic factor that controlled it, or the political, or this or that, and so on. But d’Aubigne sees history in terms of the basic cause, God. God is the prime cause, and religion as the basic mover of man. Men, as d’Aubigne sees them are moved by their faith, good or bad. It is out of the heart that the issues of life come forth. So says scripture, and so holds d’Aubigne. Thus he sees history not only as religious, but also as providential. As a result d’Aubigne is better able to assess secondary causes.

Modern historians are destroying causality by their very denial of God they deny the validity of history, of meaning. By denying God they say the universe is meaningless, if the universe is meaningless then all cause in the universe are meaningless, all events are meaningless, and finally you wind up with history itself as totally meaningless. Hence when history leaves the faith that d’Aubigne represents, it finally leaves the writing of history behind. It cannot write history; there is no meaning, nor direction, nor purpose to it. Hence historians who are not Christian have a hatred of the cosmic meaning of the universe. That there is a grand design to all things, that God is the designer and that we understand nothing unless we first of all understand the Lord. As a result our history is very, very much dehydrated. Any events that leads us to see the hand of God or providence in events is dropped out. We are rarely told by secular historians, and then only to register their cynicism, that before the coming of the white man to New England a plague or epidemic wiped out virtually all the Indians. Scholars have tried to analyze from the descriptions what that plague might have been, and they cannot come up with any answer. But there could have been no pilgrim and puritan settlement of New England if that plague had not occurred, if that epidemic had not taken place. The first settlers immediately learned of it from the surviving Indians, they saw the hand of God in it. Were they right, or were they wrong? They made that fact very central in the accounts they wrote of their history. Today it’s bypassed by virtually all scholars.

Let me cite another particular fact. It is one I used in my book The Foundations of Social Order and I used it with considerable delight. You may recall if you read the book that Arius, the great heretic, had considerable power and pull and he was able to subvert the orthodox leaders of the faith. The emperor recalled him to the capital, and there was going to be a triumphal parade leading Arius into the capitol and to the church; and one old presbyter stretched out in the Cathedral in prayer, praying that God would prevent Arius from coming over and {?} the house of God. And he said “if Arius come then Lord take away my life.” Well they met Arius at the doors of the city and the grand parade began. Partway into the center of the town, and the church, Arius felt a sudden griping pain, there was a construction job going with a fenced area in which there was an open pit as a latrine or outhouse for the construction workers. He asked to be excused so he could go there. They waited and waited for him, he did not appear. They went and found that apparently as he entered he had a seizure and fell headlong into the latrine. Well the Christians all rejoiced in this providence of God, so may all Thine enemies perish oh Lord. Now that’s a magnificent fact; but historians will not use it today, for the obvious reasons.

Our history books are denatured. But d’Aubigne sees, as I’ve said, both the victories and defeats as coming from the hand of God; and he encourages us to see the hand of God in all events. He writes clearly as a religious writer, just as the humanists write equally clearly as religious writers teaching the religion of Humanism; teaching that God is irrelevant to all events, that history to be properly written must be stripped of everything that is indicative of the hand of God. But if God is as He describes Himself in scripture, how else can history be read?

For example in Nahum, one of the minor prophets of the Old Testament in the first chapter, we read in the first eight verses: “The burden of Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite.2 God is jealous, and the Lord revengeth; the Lord revengeth, and is furious; the Lord will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserveth wrath for his enemies.3 The Lord is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked: the Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet. 4 He rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry, and drieth up all the rivers: Bashan languisheth, and Carmel, and the flower of Lebanon languisheth. 5 The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at his presence, yea, the world, and all that dwell therein. 6 Who can stand before his indignation? And who can abide in the fierceness of his anger? His fury is poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by him. 7 The Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him. 8 But with an overrunning flood he will make an utter end of the place thereof, and darkness shall pursue his enemies.” Now there’s no way you can spiritualize away that passage.

Today the pulpit is very prone to spiritualizing so much in the Bible. But what Nahum tells us very plainly is that God controls all of history, he controls the storm, the whirlwind, the weather, that He takes His vengeance on His enemies, that He is the captain of the whirlwind and storm. It does not tell us these things are poetic images. You see we read the Bible under the 18th century and its deism. It was deism that began the spiritualizing of the Bible; it was deism that began to speak of God as an absentee Landlord, and providence as the naturalistic process. What happened? The reformed faith was virtually destroyed because it bought many of the ideas of deism without becoming deistic. It began to see providence as a kind of working, almost mechanical, abstract working of God’s predestination in all of history. And what it did was to turn predestination into a stiff doctrine, rather than the one could of comforted the saints, as Calvin said, and providence into a naturalistic scheme. Providence is not a stoic doctrine; the stoic doctrine was the naturalistic one. Ours is that the personal, loving, Father is in absolute control of history, and we see in all events His love as well as His judgments and wrath. That’s very different. But today the reformed faith by and large is stiff, cold, dead, the more openly reformed they are the deader they are by and large, and it’s because they’ve inherited from their 18th century theological leaders the paraphernalia of deism, a kind of a stoic and abstract version of reformation theology; and not until the reformed faith goes back to the vitality it had before the 18th century will it again be powerful.

You see men no longer feel surrounded and upheld by the living God. For them it is a lonely universe; and as a result prayer is stiff, cold, and formal, because God is afar off. The universe and providence become like the clockwork of an absentee watch maker, and absentee God. Now the puritans had their faults, but they prayed to a real providential God who was their Father and they felt He heard every word and was always very near. I’m going to read a couple of puritan prayers to you. They’re perhaps a little funny but they’re real you see. They are real because they pray to a God they believe to be very real, very personal, providential, and they prayed for real things that they needed today. And here’s a prayer from minister Miles for rain. I quote: “Oh Lord Thou knowest we do not want Thee to send rain which shall pour down in fury and swell our streams and sweep away our haycocks and fences and bridges. But Lord we want it to come down drizzle-drozzle, drizzle-drozzle for about a week.” Now see He believed in God and He believed that God wanted him to be plain spoken about his prayer. Now that man knew he was praying to a living God.

I’m going to read you another part of a prayer. Now this one the theology may have some faults because he was a man, a Calvinist, who was praying for victory, he was a chaplain in the war of Independence. It was the Reverend Israel Evans, Chaplain of general Enoch {?} and the things that concerned him as he began to pray was, well, maybe God has ordained that the British win. He didn’t like that, so he didn’t want to say: “let it be Thy will Lord; and if we be defeated we will” he wanted to win, so he said “Oh Lord of hosts lead forth Thy servants of the American army to battle, and give them the victory. Or if this be not according to Thy sovereign will, then we pray Thee stand neutral and let flesh and blood decide the issue.” [Laughter] Now as I say you can criticize the theology of that, but he was praying to a living God, a providential Father, a very personal prayer. Without a faith like that prayer is an empty exercise. This is why when you read the puritan prayers they’re often very homely, such as these. But they’re homely because they came from the heart and they were to the living God. Now that’s a belief in a living God whose providence would affect us as the hand of a loving father.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience member] Could you spell the name of that author of the book.

[Rushdoony] Yes, it is J.H. Merle d’Aubigne. He has a number of books that are still available, this one the two volumes of the reformation in England, but any of his books you will find to be delightful reading, excellent reading.

Yes?

[Audience member] Is this also where you got the puritan prayers?

[Rushdoony] No, the puritan prayers I got from a book that was published a good many years ago by Richardson Wright, grandfather was queer {?}

[Audience member] Wright?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Any other questions?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, the king in Daniel 2 had a dream which was very disturbing, it was a dream which seemed to him clearly prophetic and shook him up very badly. Then of course he could not remember the dream. Well the answer of the wise men was “oh king live forever, tell thy servants the dream and we will show the interpretation.” And the king then demanded that they make known unto him the dream and the interpretation. The dream had obviously shaken him to the core of his being. It was a dream that shattered all of his complacency, his sense of power, his religious faith, and it seemed to him an empty thing that these men who claimed to be wise men had no knowledge of the future, nor of any such thing; and so he was in a very perverse mood, he was demanding something of them that they said was impossible. And of course it’s at this point that God gives Daniel the knowledge of it so that he remembers as Daniel speaks what the dream was.

AS you know we all have dreams, nothing like Nebuchadnezzar’s, but when we awaken in two or three minutes, sometimes we remember it as we awaken, suddenly it just leaves our mind. And sometimes it may come back later, something may remind us, sometimes it never does. And on occasion we can take up the same dream at a later date, get a dream in its installments. Have you ever had that happen?

Well let’s take a break now for about five minutes.