Miscellaneous

Rushdoony Whitehead 01B

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 1-1

Genre: Talk

Track: 1

Dictation Name: Rushdoony Whitehead 01B

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Audience Member] Let me ask you right now if you were in here. Alright, so we are boned up on history, how do we know if what we read is true, or at least not to be suspect?

[Rushdoony] Yes, a lot of history is very partial, and I will get books on the Medieval Era that don’t even touch on the church and what Christianity did; you would think it did not exist. In fact, if you didn’t have the cathedrals and other great buildings of the Middle Ages which make everything modern man has done look like child’s play, you would not know how capable they were, or what remarkable engineering went into the construction of the Cathedrals. We don’t have the best picture of the past, but there is enough material out there, and what we need to do is to develop scholarship that will deal with this, Christian historians who will go to the basic source materials and will re-write the history of the church and the history of Christendom.

But the sad fact is that Christians find scholarship the last thing they want to support. Now we are having a world wide influence, some unbelievers who don’t like us or agree with us said that we are the number one influence, we are the most powerful force going, when they don’t like our influence. Everyone who is there today is a witness to it, and this group is one of numerous groups like this. But Christians don’t feel compelled to support a group like ours. You see, we have abstracted ourselves so from the world that any attempt to relate the faith to the world doesn’t interest the majority of believers.

How much support is there for your periodicals? How many subscribers do you have? If it is a Presbyterian Periodical you should have a few hundred thousand subscribers, and that would be a modest circulation given the audience out there. But most of them don’t bother to read, they are content to go to church to punch in on a time clock as it were, to keep their fire and life insurance policy going, and that is the extent of their involvement.

Such a magazine should be powerful. When you go back to the early years of this country, the colonial and early American era after the Constitution, the circulation of Christian periodicals was startling. The very (poor?) were reading, now they don’t read. They can’t be bothered. In fact with the growing illiteracy created by the public schools, 27% of the population functionally illiterate in terms of Federal statistics, even the daily papers are declining in their overall circulation, whereas in the twenties almost every family had the Daily Paper coming to its door. Vast numbers now never bother with a daily paper. They will listen for a few minutes to the evening news- if they do that. Now the Christian school is restoring literacy to the United States, and I believe that that is going to be very important; I cannot forget the statement by a very godless professor of a major Western university, when he said there were not more than a handful of students worth teaching on the entire campus of thousands. Their brains were all blown, he said, by the drug culture, by rock, by anything except intelligent concerns. And he added bitterly that the only intelligent ones were those Christians, and he used an expletive in describing them.

You see, we are producing the only ones who can command the future.

[Audience Member] Would you speak for a moment about the judgement that you see coming on the church?

[Rushdoony] Well, we are going to see prosecutions for any excuse; any church member who files a suit against the church, you’ll see all kinds of help to enable him to prosecute the church. You are going to see attempts to strike at the church by demanding the ordination of women, and of homosexuals, a letting down of the bars where homosexuals are concerned.

[Audience Member] This is coming from the government?

[Rushdoony] Yes. It will be to extend the Civil Rights act in its application to the church, in other words no discrimination in terms of race, color, or creed; or sexual preference or anything else. At present the West German Parliament… [phone rings] excuse me…

Now, let’s see, I was dealing with the West German situation. It is an effort to get the Saxon Lutheran church, the very conservative body there that refuses to ordain women, on grounds that this is illegal, and after they are able to get that legislation through, they will use it on this Lutheran church and then on the Catholic church. Now the same effort is going to be made here.

In one way or another, the church is to be brought under control. It is the one uncontrolled area of American life today, the family and the church. The family is extensively being controlled, the church is still largely without any controls, and as statism grows it will demand more and more conformity, and more and more controls here.

[Audience Member] Since so many denominations do ordain women in America, it is very common, then this assault will be, this judgement will be on the most conservative of God’s people?

[Rushdoony] Exactly.

[Audience Member] Those who truly do believe in scripture.

[Rushdoony] Yes, the modernist churches are humanistic. They are not going to oppose this, they are the amen chorus, the hallelujah chorus for statism. But it is going to strike the Reformed and Evangelical churches, and the Catholic churches.

[Audience Member] Do you believe that the attack on (Dan War?) is one such attempt by the government?

[Rushdoony] I think it is precipitated primarily because of the tax revolt angle. Secondarily, I think there are those who would welcome any opportunity to intervene in the life of the church. Yes? But that would be secondary in this case.

[Audience Member] Back to basics, I guess. Could you tell me what is the kingdom, when did it begin, and what implications does that have for the Christian today?

[Rushdoony] The Kingdom of God? The Kingdom of God began with the day of creation, when God created Adam He told him in Genesis 1:26-28 to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth. The Garden of Eden was a pilot project, it was an area where a certain piece of land was set aside, even when the whole earth, we are told, was made very good, but it was set aside as a pilot project for Adam, to learn how to till the ground and to exercise dominion, to learn how to name the animals- and name in the Bible means to classify, to identify. So it was a scientific task. He didn’t have a single tool, he had to learn how to fence the fruit trees off from the other areas, and the vegetable areas from the others, so that the animals wouldn’t destroy it. He had a big job, it was a world without sin, but it was a world without any tools or technology. So Adam had to develop things, and to learn what dominion meant, what God required of him.

Now, when man fell, he was expelled of course from the Garden. Now he could not gain godly dominion without turning to the Lord, and apart from the Lord he sought ungodly dominion. God called a people unto Himself, preserved a line, then created a nation. He gave them an area in which to exercise dominion, the Promised Land. In the first chapter of Joshua we have the commission, that in abridged form we have in Matthew 28:18-20, it is the same commission, only now the whole world is involved.

We are not saved merely to wait for the rapture to get out of this world into heaven, we are saved to apply our faith to every area of life and thought; that is the kingdom. Our Lord uses the word ‘church’ I believe only twice. He uses the word kingdom throughout. When Paul uses the word ‘Ecclesia’ which we have translated as church, as I pointed out in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, Ecclesia is used to translate ‘assembly’, ‘kingdom’, and a number of terms. Because by the Ecclesia was meant the kingdom of God, and the church in Corinth was the kingdom there, the kingdom people organized for worship. What the worship center became was the (Kuriocan Doma?) the house of the Lord. But the ecclesia is the kingdom over all, what we call the church is really the house of the Lord, and in the New Testament sense the church is the kingdom.

[Audience Member] In case of a (?) denominational standard about the true life of the church, could you have some comments about church discipline?

[Rushdoony] There again we have a semantic problem, because the root of the word ‘discipline’ is ‘disciple’, and we have twisted the meaning to mean chastisement. Discipline comes out of discipleship; the basic discipline that the church should inculcate is through its preaching, its teaching, its strengthening of the family life, so that every member is under a discipline process. Then occasionally there are times when one or another may need chastisement- and sometimes excommunication. But we need to restore the primary aspect of discipline, which is discipleship.

There is too little systematic preaching. Visual sermons can be very good, sound expositions of a particular text, but nothing to give a detailed, a systematic teaching in what God requires of us. For example, systematic teaching on Exodus or Deuteronomy, or a systematic teaching in one of the gospels, or the epistles, from beginning to end. So that instead of having little bits and pieces we see the total meaning of life in Christ.

Then teaching and preaching must make connections. One of the books written recently, the culmination of series of pieces of research, is by Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution. His work culminates a development through various scholars, with whom I was familiar, studied under two of them, the three main ones he relies on, and I knew the third. And what Berman shows is this: that Christianity was a legal revolution in the empire, and in the western world; it created it. How? Well, in a long development that culminated in Hildebrand, and in Anselm, Saint Anselm, a concept of law was developed, came to focus in Anselm, and it stressed the atonement. The meaning of the atonement was that the law of God was violated by man, and man could not make restitution for what he did, and therefore Jesus Christ, very God of very God and very man of very man, had to make atonement, only so could the law of God be satisfied. This meant that God’s law was very important, that the atonement came to rectify the damage done by lawlessness, and to bring in a spirit of faithfulness to the Lord, obedience, to bring about the spirit of obedience.

Well, Calvin carried that a step further, in tying that doctrine of the atonement with the doctrine of God, God’s predestination, God’s purpose for man, and so on. But since we have been in rebellion against that and the doctrine of atonement, its relationship to law has receded, and so as the high doctrine of the atonement as it came to focus in Anselm and Calvin has receded, so has any healthy view of the law; we have had antinomianism arise, and we have had a progressive substitute of therapy for law, as the means of dealing with people, and other like substitutes.

So that our culture, our civilization is in its death throes, and short of a revival, Berman says, by the end of this century it will be dead. Well, you see the point that Berman has made, the church and pastors and laymen should have been making a long time ago, that take away the atonement and its centrality, and you take away the law of God; and you take away any purpose of law and society, you take away the back bone of society and you have a jellyfish culture, which is what we have today. What we have is a vague affirmation of the atonement, being saved by the blood, without any relationship to the law, before and after; without any relationship to what that means to a society. Berman has done a magnificent job there, his work rests on the work of, as I said, several men who proceeded him. It is a seminal work, and I think he is thoroughly right, that we have to restore the meaning of atonement to restore the meaning of law in our society, to save our culture from becoming a jellyfish culture, in which there are no standards, no backbone, in which everything goes.

[Audience Member] I had one more question, if you don’t mind commenting briefly on the October issue and the threats that have already come out against you as a result of it.

[Rushdoony] The October issue publishes Shelby Sharps report on the American Bar Association meeting in San Francisco, and how this one special seminar, several top attorneys spoke about a new area of law, and about the nuclear attack on Christianity. This is important, all we can say is that these people are sensible and honest given their presuppositions. If you do not believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and savior, you have got to see Him as the greatest roadblock in mans way; you have got to work logically to eliminate Christ and the church from our culture. So these people are only doing what is logical and sensible, given their presuppositions. With that I cannot quarrel; what concerns me is the indifference of Christians to this.

They do not see the importance of defending the faith, of extending the scope of Christ’s work; so as long as they have their personal plan or life insurance, they don’t care. They are going to heaven, let them destroy the church, let them destroy Christians in Africa or Asia or in the Soviet Union, it is no concern of ours. The one missionary scholar who has kept track of things says that hundreds of Christians are killed daily, somewhere in the world, and very seldom is this reported. The war is going to be brought to our doorsteps.

There is no point in raging against these people, they are doing what is sensible, logical in terms of their faith. If we did the same there would be no problems.

[Audience Member] We do have the permission to go ahead and make duplicates of that, since you are out of copies of that issue?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] And what about the threats on you, have they been basically---

[Rushdoony] You can reprint the whole thing if you want, and any publication. We like to have it known.

[Audience Member] The threats against you, are they coming from the government, or are they coming from the people you have exposed?

[Rushdoony] At this point I would rather not go into any of that.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Recording quality very poor, cannot understand]