Easy Chair Series

Trip to Australia and Mew Zealand; Loo; Existence of Napoleon Bonaparte; Puritans; Biblical Scholarship and Progress; Soviet Leaders; Mainline Denominations; Secularism and Religion; Depreciation of History; Gentlemen; Louis Francois Armand Marcel Due Richelieu; Reason and Lust; White Slavery; Sexual Revolution; Revival of Family Life; Canada and Reconstruction

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 7-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC133

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 133, October 30th, 1986.

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of spending some time both in Australia and New Zealand. In 1983 I was in Australia twice in May and August of that year. This time I was there about eight days. The conferences went very well, precisely because the people who came were not hearers, but doers. Australia is an exciting place for me because I do believe that the Reconstruction movement there is going to make a major impact on that country. In fact, under the leadership of Howard Carter it already is making dramatic progress.

I do want all of you to be in prayer for the work of Howard Carter and his associates and the work of reconstruction there. I wish I could take time to go into some of the things that are being undertaken there, but I am short of time. I have so many things that are lined up for me to consider.

One little by the way point, any time you go overseas, though it be to an English speaking country, you do find that there are differences in the kind of words used and in the meaning of some words. One of the things that struck me as curious and I wondered as to the origin of it was the word used for restroom in Australia and New Zealand. The word is “loo,” L O O. So on returning home I turned to John Train’s book on Remarkable Words and looked up loo and I found out the origin of that term.

The English apparently, like the French, feel that certain things are better named with a foreign word. Now the flush toilet was an English invention and was, in fact, perfected by Thomas Crapper. Some of the lower classes use his name to designate the flush toilet, but most people in England felt that a more genteel word should be used and so they went to the French and took loo, which was regarded as much more genteel. However, the actual French expression which they have shortened to loo is lieu en Anglais meaning the English place which indicates that the English use a French term and the French throw it right back across the channel at the English.

That reminds me of the fact that when syphilis first appeared in Europe it was called not just the pox, but it depended on which country you liked the least. It could be the Italian or the English or the French or the Spanish or the German pox. So language sometimes is very revealing of people’s likes and dislikes and there genteelism.

Well, now to another book, a very remarkable book and I am grateful to one of you, to Phil Spielman for a copy of Richard Whately, W H A T E L Y, Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte. I already had a copy of this, but this is a complete edition prepared by professor Ralph S. Pomeroy, published, I believe, at 18.50 by Scolar, S C O L A R Press in Berkeley in 1985.

Whately’s book, Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte is a classic. It was first published in 1819, went through numerous printings and when first printed was actually taken seriously by some people. What Archbishop Whately did was simply this. He believed that the so-called good, scientific and philosophical arguments for the proof or disproof of things constituted a hoax, a pretention, a rationalistic imposition upon reality. What these methods, as first developed by Hume were doing, was to undercut, ostensibly, the authority of the Bible. By using Hume’s methodology, scholars were supposedly proving that the Bible was made up of myths, that unless you had good trustworthy evidence, evidence that met the criteria set up by these Rationalists, you had no proof of anything. Whately took these arguments, the methodology as developed by Hume and others which had been applied to the Bible to render it unbelievable and applied them to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Now 1819 is Napoleon’s day, the end of it. So what Whately did was to go to the evidence. Well, the evidence for Napoleon’s existence was not very trustworthy. It came from newspapers that had a bad record as far as telling the truth was concerned. It came from a variety of suspicious sources. So given the suspicious sources, Whately concluded no such person has Napoleon ever existed. All the evidence for Napoleon’s existence was untrustworthy. He proved his point so much so that some people at that time who read Whately’s book were sure that Napoleon was an invention of the British foreign office to get them into war. And as a result, there were some people who were quite indignant.

Whately made his point superbly. He demonstrated that the usual methodology used to supposedly invalidate Scripture could be used to demonstrate that people of our own time do not exist, so much so that people were very upset by Whately’s book. They evaded the seriousness of his book even though it was written as a spoof by treating it only as humor, whereas Whately, a superb logician, demonstrated the invalidity of the higher criticism.

This is a book that should be read in all seminaries. It is a delightful book.

Turning now to another work, this by Philip E. or Philip F. Gura, G U R A, a professor who has written A Glimpse of Zion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660, published in Middletown, Connecticut by the Wesleyan University Press for 29.95, published in 1984 and still available.

There is a great deal in this book that is very important, but I am concerning myself with just two aspects. First, one of the things that we often see people doing today which is all together wrong—and Dr. Gura has done a superb job in this respect—is to see the faults of the Puritans and, therefore, in terms of those faults to discount everything they were doing. However, as Dr. Gura points out, the various dissident groups like the Seekers and the Baptists rejected the intimate connection which the Puritans held existed between personal sainthood and social progress. To them Christ’s kingdom was of another world, never to be realized here. And so they were bitterly anti Puritan on this point as well as on others. Their perspective was other worldly, whereas the Puritans were intensely concerned with establishing the kingdom of God here on earth.

Together with this emphasis, these people had another very, very dangerous belief, one that at times affected also many of the Puritans and it was this. The test of salvation was experiential rather than Scriptural, emotional rather than logical, using Dr. Gura’s words.

Well, the implications of this also were far, far reaching because the impact of it was to say that it wasn’t knowing Scripture. It wasn’t the doctrines of Scripture. It wasn’t knowing the meaning of the atonement and what Christ’s atoning death has done for you, but it was: Did you have an emotional experience? It was this that constituted the fact that you were saved.

In fact, this was one of the things which infiltrated Puritanism and helped destroy it. You were not saved unless you had had some kind of emotional experience according to these people and you could date the day and the hour when you had this emotional experience.

Your knowledge of Scripture, your trust in the Word of God, your belief in that it was the atoning blood of Jesus Christ that had saved you, all of this was nothing unless you could say you had some kind of emotional experience.

Well, these two aspects separating the salvation of the individual from the redemption of society and giving priority to the emotional aspect over the biblical have continued to work their harm in American Christianity from the Colonial era to the present.

Turning now to another work, an older book published in 1964, first of all, and again in 1978 by the University of Notre Dame Press. Beryl Smalley, S M A L L E Y, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages.

This is a careful and conscientious study of the various scholars who gave careful attention to the study of Scripture throughout the Middle Ages. As such it is primarily of value to historians in the field. However, in her conclusions Miss Smalley makes a very important point. She says, and I quote, “Biblical scholarship in the strict sense has depended on institutions which imply a certain level of material prosperity and security,” unquote.

The point that comes through clearly is this. You have progress in the history of the faith. You have great advances in the application of Christianity to the world, to the problems of the Church and to the problems of the individual when you have people who can be set free from other responsibilities to give themselves to the task of studying Scripture and applying it. Then they can nourish people in the pulpit and in the pew, in the school and out of the school the world over.

Of course, this has a special meaning for me because I believe that this is Chalcedon’s task. This is our function. And as a result we believe that every such effort needs to be financed and subsidized because progress depends upon the kind of study that develops the implications of the faith.

Turning now to a book of a very different sort, Arkady Shevchenko, S H E V C H E N K O, Breaking With Moscow, published at 18.95 by Alfred A Knopf in New York, a book that is quite different from other books by defectors.

Shevchenko to date is the highest ranking Soviet official ever to defect. At the time of his defection he was under secretary general of the United Nations. Thus, the perspective he gives us is unlike that of other defectors, some of whom have come out of the bureaucracies, some out of the general public, some out of the military and so on. Shevchenko comes from the top. The result is a very different vision of what constitutes life in the Soviet Union.

There is so much in this book that is important that it would be a temptation to spend all evening with it. However, I want to concentrate on one point in particular. What comes through most clearly and what struck me most forcibly was the isolation of the leadership from the facts of soviet life. This isolation is so great that the leadership is isolated from the reality by the KGB which does the dirty work and the leaders at the top are more ignorant than you and I of the realities of life.

For example, Shevchenko writes that, “One of Brezhnev’s assistants told me his boss had not quite realized how wide spread the practice was of incarcerating political dissidents in mental institutions.”

Consider that. The simple fact that political dissidents are put into medical, mental institutions and regularly, routinely mistreated, was largely unknown by Brezhnev. The interesting thing is that Shevchenko worked very closely with Gromyko. He gives us a long and very, very revealing picture of Gromyko. But, again, we have the same fact that he stresses. Gromyko knew nothing about the real life in the Soviet Union. Gromyko’s daughter told Shevchenko that she knew that for 25 years at least, if not all his life, Gromyko had never set foot on the sidewalks of Moscow. He was always isolated from the people. He was driven from home to his office by a chauffer. And this, according to Shevchenko, marks every last one of the leaders. They are isolated from the people whom they distrust. They have no recognition of what the common life of the people is like and, hence, are ignorant of the realities of every day life.

Thus, they live in a dream world and it is the ugly KGB that alone knows the grim realities and, thus, applies its horrors to the situation.

So Shevchenko’s book, unlike others, is most revealing. As a matter of fact, he points out that in may of the office buildings the ordinary workman is barred from vast areas because the leadership is afraid of even their own lower echelon people. They do know this, that life is better in the United States. When they come here they go on buying sprees. They do know that coming to this country is a plum to be prized. But in spite of this, they have no awareness of the reality of either life here or life in the Soviet Union.

Now when people are that isolated from reality, they are dangerous, because having no sense of reality is what constitutes insanity. And they have done it to themselves.

He had some grim comments to make on détente and he makes clear that détente is to the advantage of the Soviet Union.

Gromyko comments on the United States. I quote from page 279.

“One day while we were lunching I asked Gromyko what he saw as the greatest weakness of US foreign policy toward the Soviet Union. ‘They don’t comprehend our final goals,’ he responded promptly. ‘And they mistake tactics for strategy. Besides, they have too many doctrines and concepts proclaimed at different times, but the absence of a solid coherent and consistent policy is their big flaw,’” unquote.

I do commend this book to you. You will find it thoroughly worthwhile. The insights into the Soviet leadership are things we do not have from other books. There is even a little bit with regard to Stalin, although most of it comes from the post Stalinist era.

This little note on Gromyko and I quote from page 146.

“Gromyko’s devotion to the Soviet Union is complete and unreserved. He is now himself a fundamental element of the system, one of its most powerful driving forces. At once its product and one of its supreme masters. On one occasion when a journalist asked him for biographical information he remarked that, ‘My personality does not interest me.’ This was not a pose, but the plain truth. Although he is, in fact, a quite extraordinary personality. Khrushchev once said that if he were to order Gromyko to drop his trousers and sit on a block of ice for a month he would do it, the premier’s way of paying homage to the near legendary tenacity and persistence of his foreign minister,” unquote.

Well, that little paragraph, I think, is very revealing. It tells us something about the dedication of some of these leaders, how they have submerged their personality to the Soviet Union, how also at the same time they believe they are the elite rulers and the future of history depends upon them. And so they live like czars, but at the same time with a radical dedication to their beliefs.

I strongly recommend this book. I wish men in Washington would also read it.

Then, very briefly, in Insight magazine for October 20, 1986 it is a two page article entitled “Struggle for the Presbyterian Soul.” I don’t know how good the title is, because it doesn't seem like much of a struggle given the apostasy within that church. For example, we read, and I quote, “A professor at Louisville Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian institution in Kentucky was asked who was Jesus. He responded simply, ‘Jesus was a dead Jew,’ thus denying belief in Christ’s divine nature and resurrection,” unquote.

There is more of this sort, but enough to indicate that this is a church that does not even make a pretense of being Christian when it allows this kind of thing to be taught in the seminaries. It is no wonder that membership is declining every year.

Well, another major church, the Episcopal Church, John Lofton remarked in one of his “Our Man in Washington” columns that if they continued their present trend, their Radicalism and Modernism, they would continue to lose and in due time their general convention could be held inside a phone booth.

I think we have great cause for concern with the major denominations in this country almost without exception. They are far gone, are declining dramatically. And yet all too many people remain in such churches because they were born into it and they are going to fight to save their church, although what there is left to fight for, I question. And how God will deal with people who place the form and the denomination above him and his Word is frightening to contemplate.

Well, it is an excellent article and it raises a very pertinent question. Some men are fighting. Some are good men, but as one man, Robert Campbell, president of the Presbyterian lay committee has said, and I quote, “If you want to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ you can’t leave out a belief in the traditional understanding of his birth, death and resurrection. To make him into some kind of merely human figure is not the good news and if you change the definition of the good news, it is not evangelism in any Christian sense of the word,” unquote.

A good statement except that instead of saying “the traditional understanding of his birth, death and resurrection,” he should have said, “the biblical.” And until he stands in terms of that, his stance will be weak.

I would like to turn briefly to a book first published in 1972 now out of print, Andrew M. Greeley, Unsecular Man, the Persistence of Religion. There is a great deal in the book that I have no use for, in particular Greeley’s rather modernistic perspective on the faith. However, the first chapter or better the introduction is excellent, because at that point Greeley does look at the modern world realistically and critiques it most ably. In fact, I think the same arguments could be applied against himself that he uses on others.

For example, he deals with the fact that many scholars write regularly about the collapse of institutional religion. Greely says, and I quote, “I think that professor Fontanel is talking about a situation which is limited to his colleagues on university faculties and their counterparts in the mass and not so mass media. The fallacy of equating what goes on in the intellectual community—and only a segment of that—with the whole of society is one that has been so long enshrined among academics that he who questions it is viewed as just a little odd. Nevertheless, I will assert here the proposition that the religious crisis of the intellectual community by no means reflects the religious situation of the mass of people. Western man, modern man, technological man, secular man are to be found, for the most part, only on university campuses and increasingly only among senior faculty members as the students engage in witchcraft, astrology and other bizarre cultic practices,” unquote.

Then as against another scholar, professor Marty who feels that Liberalism, Evolution, Socialism and so on have virtually wiped out the 20th century Church and its faith. Greeley says, and I quote, “I would argue against professor Marty that Liberalism, Evolutionism, Socialism and Historicism, if they have been pitiless and persistent rivals of religion, have also been extremely unsuccessful rivals,” unquote.

Then, as against another professor writing on the change in fundamental values and the fact that mankind is changing profoundly, Greeley comments, “I would argue, in response to professor Ed Sharon, that mankind is not changing profoundly. Some of the circumstances of human life have changed, but relying heavily on the thought of Robert Nesbitt, I would say fixity is far more characteristic of the human condition than change,” unquote.

So while Greeley says, “I am a Liberal politically and educationally and I am a Radical as a social analyst, a skeptic,” he says, “I cannot believe in these critical scholars. Most Americans are still very thoroughly Christian and have not become the kind of modern man that these scholars say they have become.”

Turning now to another older work, John Lukacs, L U K A C S, Historical Consciousness or The Remembered Past, published by Shokun Books in 1985, but this is largely a reprint of something published in the 50s.

The introduction, written in 1985 on the state of historical knowledge is excellent. The rest of the book is rather mediocre, but in the introduction he does deal with some of the fallacies of our modern society and culture very, very, tellingly. I would like to quote from a paragraph.

“Much of this (the supposed changes in our society), much of this has been due to the degeneration of civilization during the age of universal education and to the alarming shift, mostly during this century, from verbal to pictorial communications and culture, including the shift from verbal to pictorial imagination in the minds of millions. Yet we still think in words when we think, perhaps in clichés and automatic phrases, but in words, nonetheless. The connection of language of the mind is inescapable which is why the Chinese adage of a picture being worth 1000 words is largely nonsense,” unquote.

And so Dr. Lukacs attacks our depreciation of history, our failure to understand history or be concerned about it because our education has sought to shift us from the verbal to pictorial which is what the look see method is all about. Phonics, of course, reestablishes education on the [?] and this is the methodology of Christian schools.

As he continues to develop the implications of this shift, he cites George Orwell’s statement of more than 40 years ago, and I quote. “We have now sunk to a depth where the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men,” unquote.

Dr. Lukacs is concerned with the absurdities of contemporary history. In 1972 he tells us a caucus of gay historians was officially recognized by the American Historical Association. When we read about that, we must recognize that we have men in Christian colleges who insist on denying that there is no such thing as a Christian history of the past or a Christian historiography. At the same time they are ready to bow the knee to feminist historiography and homosexual historiography. These people are so eager to have professional respect from an establishment that is degenerate.

Interesting, too, Lukacs comments and I quote, “Already in the United States some of the best history is being written and researched and thought by certain amateurs,” unquote.

This should not surprise us, given the absurdities of these professional historians.

A delightful book I read recently was Brian Wilkes, Jane Austen a book published by Hammond Incorporated, Maplewood, New Jersey in 1978.

I am interested at the moment in passing on one little item, a familiar item, but still each time I encounter it it amazes me, the definition of a gentleman in those days, in the early years of the last century and I quote, “All are accounted gentlemen in England who maintain themselves without manual labor,” unquote.

Well, that rules out a great many people, always has. Thank God a gentlemen for us must be defined in biblical terms.

Another interesting book that I read recently, an older work, by Hubert Cole, C O L E, published in 1965, First Gentleman of the Bedchamber: The Life of Louis-François Armand,. Maréchal Duc de Richelieu. Not the great Cardinal Richelieu, but a later Richelieu who lived in the reigns of Louis XIV most of his life under Louis XV and then, finally, under Louis XVI, dying of a very ripe of old age, vigorous to the last and a rascal to the last.

The interesting thing about this book which is a chronicle of his life, a gentleman, a cad, a fornicator, an adulterer, a man who lived for prestige and pleasure in the generation or two or three that preceded the French Revolution at a time when any husband, if he were a gentleman, would be looked upon ridiculous as laughable if he were concerned about his wife’s adultery. The only thing that would upset him would be if she had an affair with someone beneath her station.

This was the time when Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony had 354 bastards, quite a number. These were the acknowledged ones. These were days when the nobility of France and other countries as well vied with one another to have their wives become royal mistresses. It was a time of very great expenditures in gambling and very great expenditures in clothing. At one wedding, for example, the wedding dress was so heavily embroidered and so thickly encrusted with jewels that the skirt alone weighed 30 pounds more than a cavalryman’s {?}.

Well, the book is an interesting chronicle because it tells us why the French Revolution was inevitable. The ruling class had made itself irrelevant, irrelevant to God and man and, therefore, once the revolution began nothing could stop it. These people had nothing to defend, were not worth defending and their regime collapsed quickly and totally.

Another interesting book, again I am not going to deal more than very briefly with it, published in 1976 and still available John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660-1750.

This was the Age of Reason when the philosophers and pastors, clergymen, theologians all exalted reason. Reason was the great ally of man and of religion and everything was brought to the bar of reason.

Well, the man who punctured this balloon, to my satisfaction, at least, was Rochester, one of the most profligate and immoral men of his day, a thorough degenerate, but a man who recognized the fallacious nature of the thinking around him, because whereas everyone was exalting reason as the ally of religion and virtue, Rochester said, “Reason is an ally of lust,” and in his own life demonstrated that reason was a marvelous of every kind of evil. He thereby reduced to nonsense the whole position of the philosophers of his day.

Now to a rather sad book by an English scholar, Edward J. Bristow. The title, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870-1939. This was published by Chopin Books in 1983.

Bristow is an English scholar, I believe. He did receive his doctorate from Yale. At any rate, what Bristow has done in this book is to study one facet of a tremendous evil that prevailed in the last century and up to World War II. Since then there has been general unconcern with the problem. This was what the white slave trade...

It began about the time that the French Revolution began. Its origins were divers. One was the breakdown of the family, another urbanization, a third, the decline of religious faith in many urban centers. And, as a result, in one country after another men, lawless men began to exploit the women of their own country. And you had an international trade in transporting poor women, women who were sometimes forced into the trade, but usually out of poverty drifted into it, into prostitution, shipping them to the frontier places as in Latin America, to the gold fields of the American West and of Australia, to the Far East, to Turkey and so on.

The Jews exploited the Jewish women; the French, French women; the Italians, Italian women; the Japanese, Japanese women; the Chinese, Chinese women. The whole horrible history has never been fully written, but this is one of a few books written to document it.

The ugly fact is that the Jewish aspect of it attracted a great deal of attention in Austria and Hitler read many of the exposés of it and formed his opinions of the Jews, opinions that went into Mein Kampf with frightening consequences.

The Industrial Revolution rendered a great deal of the economies of central Europe and Russia obsolete. This meant tremendous poverty in the Jewish communities. Some of the girls felt it was better to become prostitutes and send money home to their parents than to stay there and starve to death. Many were deluded. One of the things that made it easy for this trade to flourish was that traditional customs were used by these procurers. In those days all that was required for a Jewish marriage to be valid was for a man and woman to take the vows in the presence of a couple of other Jews.

Now in terms of the new laws, this had no standing before the state. But for the girls, being old fashioned, this still made a binding marriage. And such girls would be routinely married, great numbers sometimes by the same man as he went from village to village and then shipped overseas into prostitution. They would send money home and it was pitifully small, but a great help all the same in that some of these girls were getting only three cents per customer and handling 50 and 60 per day.

Their death rate was such that they were dying between 19 and 25 for the most part. The result was a very ugly situation. All over the world this was taking place.

After World War I the interest in doing something about his international traffic began to wane. By 1939 it was dead. And, of course, with the sexual revolution in recent years, scarcely anyone is now interested in this kind of traffic. But it is a grim one and this book is a very moving document.

The breakdown of the family is still a problem. It still creates crises. And you must remember. The validity of this book and its thesis today is very great, because the millions of runaway girls of the past 15, 20 years have all been exploited in like ways. And it is a continuing problem. It extends down into children now, very young boys and girls. So the problem has not disappeared.

Another book which is related to this by John Costello, Virtue Under Fire: How World War II Changed our Social and Sexual Attitudes, published by Little Brown and Company in Boston, 1985, 17.95 is the price.

It tells us how World War II had a great deal to do with the breakdown of sexual inhibitions with regard to sex and did lay the foundations for the sexual revolution. This is a superficial book compared to Dr. Bristow’s work, but nonetheless it gives us a grim account of what transpired.

We have to recognize that the family is the first line of defense with regard to individuals, children, women and Christianity. As we see the family breakdown, we see the rise of the kind of thing that Bristow and Costello have written about. I believe that we are now in the greatest revival of family life in all of history. We have a polarization. On the one hand we see more and more families collapsing. On the other hand the Christian school movement and a number of other things, the home school movement witness to the greatest revival of family life for centuries, a renewed strength that I do believe is the key to the future. This is why I feel so strongly about the fact that in many, many churches there are working women who need not work, but whose husbands want them to work and demand that they go to work because they want more luxuries for the family, recreation vehicles and that sort of thing.

The implications of this are very ugly. The family needs to be strengthened. Those of you who do stress the importance of a family and are involved in strengthening the internal life of your family and home schooling and the Christian school movement and all know the dividends this is paying and will continue to pay. We are going to see these products of strong families command the future.

The papers this week tell us that over 50 percent of the high school children in this country have experimented with marijuana. We can see, therefore, the danger to the future. These children are going to be a part of the drop outs, drop outs from the future, people who are laid on the shelf, who, whether or not they turn out to be hard working citizens are not going to command the future. They are going to be drifters, because their life has no focus. There is no focus in what the public schools are teaching today except man, except man’s gratification and his needs. This constitutes social suicide. As a result, those of you who are establishing strong, godly homes have a stake in the future.

Well, it has been a pleasure, again, to be with you and to share with you some of my reading and thinking. There are some grim facts surrounding us, some ugly years ahead of us. But if God be for us, who can be against us? Ours is the victory that overcomes the world. And I do see the groundwork being laid for a magnificent victory. I do see some remarkable developments in Australia, here. And I read about them elsewhere. In not too many days I shall be in Canada where some groundwork has been laid this year for reconstruction. In Canada and elsewhere all over the world there are encouraging developments. We do need to be in prayer for the future of Christ’s work, that that kingdoms of this world might, indeed, become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. We have a calling in Christ, a calling to pray and to work and to encourage one another.

Well, thank you all. I look forward to these sessions with you and I trust they are as rewarding to you as they are to me. Thank you and God bless you all.