Miscellaneous

Why Chalcedon - Dec 6 2000A

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 1-1

Genre: Talk

Track: 1

Dictation Name: Why Chalcedon - Dec 6 2000A

Location/Venue:

Year: 2000

This is R.J. Rushdoony. I have been asked to talk about the origins of Chalcedon and its purposes for those of you who are the faithful supporters of our work. It began of course as a one man project, and its origins were deep in my childhood. I was an Armenian, intensely conscious of the Armenian massacres, when according to Walter Marshall Lang the British historian, two out of three million inhabitants of Armenia were massacred by the Turks. The intellectual origins of the massacre were in the philosophy of Frederick Nietzsche, his idea of the ‘superman’ and life beyond good and evil.

We do not recognize how wide spread his influence and power in the twentieth century were. Nietzsche, a German, was widely read in Turkey by those who could read him, because Turkey was then a close Ally of Germany, deeply committed to working with Germany, in particular on the Berlin-Baghdad railway. Well, at any rate, the fact that although there was a great deal of public outcry among the Allied powers against the massacres, actually it was because it was war time, and it was a good point to use against the Axis powers. Well, that left a deep impression on me. So cataclysmic an event, and so quickly forgotten, a fact that Hitler remembered and made use of when he adopted his policy towards the Jews.

Then as a student in my latter days as a graduate student in particular, I became aware of more than a little thinking in Reformed and Presbyterian circles, about a Christian university. This appealed to me tremendously. There was a great need for a renewed Reformation scholarship, a rethinking of the premises of all culture, and an application of the faith across the length and breadth of life and our times. That thinking persisted in the late thirties, the forties, and died out early in the fifties. I understood why it died out, on one occasion I had a brief visit with a prominent churchman. I expressed interest in the idea of a Christian university, because I had heard he was prominent in its support. We immediately divided, and his attitude towards me was one of disgust, because what he said with regard to a Christian university was that one of the urgent and necessary requirements was that it have a football team that could beat Notre Dame. Then indeed it would be recognized as ‘The Protestant University’. Well, that was in my idea nonsense, and I said: “But one of the necessary things in starting a Christian university was that there be no football program.” Of course, we split and I had a few occasions to see him thereafter, but he avoided me and I avoided him.

But I was thinking from the late thirties on, about Christian scholarship, creating some kind of center whereby the basic problems of society could be dealt with in a Christian, in a Biblical manner.

Now one of the things I have learned as a result of my own thinking and studying, as an upper division student at Berkeley, at the University of California, was that society in the pre-Christian world apart from Israel was statist; in other words, the state was man’s true church and savior. As a result, wherever you went in the world, somehow the state had an association with divinity. It could be that the state was held to be divine; a second opinion was that particular offices in a state were divine, whoever held them; a third was that the ruling family or dynasty possessed the deity. In any case, salvation in antiquity was statist.

This opinion could survive all kinds of corruption and decay. Rome, long after people were disillusioned with it was still the ruling power, was still seen as ‘Eternal Rome’ because people could not conceive of any other form of salvation than by the state.

Well, finally Rome fell, not because the Barbarians came up with such dramatic military tactics, but because when a handful, a few thousand German tribes of this or that origin wandered through the Empire, they did so with no resistance. Nobody felt Rome was worth fighting and dying for, and so the Roman Empire really collapsed, more than it was overthrown.

It was becoming apparent to me that we were only a few generations away at the most from a like position throughout the Western world. How many people within fifty years or seventy five or a hundred, would feel their country was worth fighting and dying for? I felt that whatever the timing- and I felt it was coming soon- it was truly the fact: civilization was going to collapse, because fewer and fewer would find it worth dying for.

Well, after Rome fell, it is interesting that a tremendously urban civilization with great cities, collapsed into next to nothing in the way of cities. Rome itself at one time reached a population, I think a century or more after Rome fell, of five hundred people. Whether that is accurate or not we can’t say for sure, but we do know that the whole idea of the state as savior collapsed. Instead of cities, people were rural; a strong man might protect the rural people working in his area, these were later on knights and Lords, but originally what they afforded was protection. So life became very different.

Out of that, the church grew and became stronger, and gave to Western Civilization a new idea of social salvation by the church, so that from the state society took on a new orientation: the church. At one time the rulers of the various countries were so weak that they had truly no capital city in our sense of the word. Very often the ruler would have an entourage that moved from place to place, visiting various Lords and Knights, living off of them for a matter of days or weeks or even months, until they were virtually destroyed, bankrupted, and then move on. It was only with time that they developed centers, and in terms of Rome began to dream of a statist culture. The culture was basically church oriented.

With the Reformation and Counter Reformation, there were great changes because the Medieval dream was collapsing. What took its place in time with the Enlightenment was again a statist dream: society and social salvation being in the new terms, statist.

Well, from the Enlightenment to the present, this has been the dream of not only the Western world, but it has become the dream of the whole world; only now it is breaking down. What will be the foundations of a renewed culture? This was what concerned me from my student days, and I felt that the answer was in the Bible, and the Bible is to a large extent a law book. So that what it presents is Christ as King, and the Bible as His law book. This means a totally different culture, not church orient nor state oriented, and this I felt we had to recreate. If you believe in Biblical law and are Christian and Christ is your king, you are going to be ruled by a body of laws very different than that which governs a state, and more thorough because it will govern you from within rather than from without; and with this kind of government, you can truly create a different society.

Now, I talked quite a bit about these things before I started Chalcedon and in the early days, after a while I quit talking about them because it seemed to me that everybody was too familiar with what I was saying. However, I realized recently that probably almost all the people on our mailing list today had not heard me, had not heard me speak on this subject, this vein of thought. So I wrote an editorial recently for the Report on Our Necessary Future summarizing some of these ideas. I feel very strongly about them, they have been my whole life. I’m old now, 84 and a half, ailing, it seems to me that every time I go to the doctor I find out something else is wrong with me. Well, I am not improving, so it could be very soon or maybe a few years hence, and I shall be gone. But I want to share these thoughts with you because we are at the end of a culture.

Now, a year or so ago I read in brief the remarks of a prominent thinker who predicted that we would again have a depression somewhere in this new century, but that it would be unlike the depressions of the past, or of 1929, in that while it would be an economic collapse it would also be a cultural collapse; the purpose and meaning of life would go down the tubes, because our humanistic statist society would have no answers when its humanistic statist faith were destroyed.

Now this man had no solution, he was not a Christian, but he was right in his analysis. We are facing a time of disaster, a century of troubles perhaps. We have to work our way out to a solution, which I believe can only be in terms of Biblical faith.

Basic to the Bible is the doctrine of the Messiah, looking forward to Him, hailing His coming, the Messiah or the Christ, or we might also say in more modern terms: The King. Christ is Messiah, the King. So we can say just as readily as we say ‘Jesus Christ,’ Jesus The King. When we say that we must recognize that since He is King it is His law that must prevail, His word that must govern us. So we have a great deal to do to turn society around, because we are now humanistic; we no longer have a religious concern about events. What began, the century that began with the Arminian massacres, then the Jewish massacres, and then all over the world, the mindless killing whether in the Soviet Union or Red China, or elsewhere, of countless numbers of people.

How many now remember that when India had its civil war after WW2 and divided between Hindu India and Pakistan, Muslim India, that at that time six million people were massacred? They were not victims of civil war, they were massacred. The architect of the whole thing was Gandhi, one of the first to be massacred. We are never told now that while India was a part of the British Empire, a total of five thousand civil servants and military men who were English who governed, or British, and governed all of India. That was how well-organized and law abiding a society had been created. Five thousand governed all of India. It takes many, many more to govern it today, that is the two parts of India.

What has happened? We have gone into a culture, all over the world, that really has no faith. It has no premise in terms of which to do good and evil. We are collapsing as a world culture, and I believe it is the time for a true Reformation, a return to the totality of God’s word, with Christ as King and His word, the Bible as our law book; and this begins with you and I. It can only create a valid society when we as individuals, rather than we as states, follow Christ as King.

Today our statist cultures everywhere are in deep trouble. The whole world is seeing horrors that go unreported. Since about 1960, a once great people, the Sudanese of the Sudan have been the target of vicious massacres. Just in passing let me say the Sudanese, an African people, are one of the great peoples of history. The origin of the pyramids was in Sudan, not in Egypt. The Sudanese, about half a dozen times, have been a Christian people, and then Islam has wiped out the Christian population virtually, only to have it revive; and there is a great Christian revival in Sudan today. Very few people are aware that this was once a great Christian nation. We have held a conference in Sudan with good results.

I call attention to that because it is an aspect of our history, its contemporary murders, mass murders, that we are virtually unaware of.

Well, my time is growing short. What I have tried to convey to you is that we must abandon the renewed paganism of statism. We must become a truly Biblically governed people, we must place ourselves, our work, our churches, under God’s law. Christ as King, His word as our law. That is what Chalcedon is about, and it is that to which I have given my life.

At eighty four and a half, I know that there are not many who have come to my position, but I believe that it is the Biblical one, and we will either turn to it or collapse into mindless horrors the world over. Thank you for your support for Chalcedon. We will continue to promote this agenda; not the state as our savior, nor the church as the answer, but Christ the King, and His word as law.