Miscellaneous

World Wide Reformation (part 1)

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 1-2

Genre: Talk

Track: 1

Dictation Name: World Wide Reformation A

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Unknown Speaker] …In Isaiah 58:8-12. May we seek the Lord’s blessing, and His guidance in this service. Heavenly Father, we come before you now with a repentant heart, seeking your Spirit to open our hearts and minds in the inner man, that we may know truth and that we may further have the power to begin to execute this truth in our works, that we may restore the true word of God in your remnant and in the hearts of true believers, and that we may bring about Reformation; that we may place a light on the hill, that the gospel may shine forth to the whole world. And we ask these things Father in Jesus name, and for His sake, amen.

Reading then in Isaiah 58:8.

“8 Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward.

9 Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am. If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity;

10 And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day:

11 And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.

12 And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.”

I think sometimes we over emphasize the importance of what we call the Great Reformation. We have elevated the words The Great Reformation to the status of a proper noun, and we sometimes when speaking of history and the development of the gospel in the world, we continually hearken back to what we call the Great Reformation, in particular the reformation of the gospel which came with Luther and Calvin, and Knox and Owen, in the 16th and 17th centuries.

I think, however, that there might be a certain degree of deception in looking at the Reformation in this light, and what I mean of this is that in our emphasis of this being the Great Reformation, we may often times miss those events which came before, which in their own right stand also to be thought of as Reformations. In particular if we study Genesis and the fall, we see that in the inner man, the corruptions that were manifest through the temptations of the serpent, to even also Adam. With this inner corruption of course came the fall, in which Adam rebelled against God and His sovereignty. This inner conviction of apostasy, this inner state of apostasy, later of course manifested itself in death for both Adam and his posterity. Eventually this process of inner and outer corruption reached a point at which God could tolerate it no longer, and then came the judgement of the flood. But out of the flood God saved a remnant of His people, Noah and his wife, his three sons, and their wives. And out of this remnant there came all the later races of the earth, and as the Bible tells us, the Lord established where these various races and nationalities would eventually end up when fixed the boundaries of the nations and the continents.

But later, apostasy again began to manifest itself in the body, and this corruption proceeded as focused in for example the incidence concerning the tower of Babel, the centralized idea of religion became so dominant in the thinking of people. This corrupt idea of course led to the building of the Tower of Babel, and again when this corruption had reached its fullest expression the Lord sent a judgement, confused the tongues, and scattered the people. Out of this scattering however He also preserved a remnant, which would eventually begin to manifest itself in the person of Abraham.

Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned unto him as righteousness. Abraham sought the true God, in the face of all the apostasy that surrounded him, and he sought Him fervently. And although at many times it cost him a great deal, God also prospered him in the midst of this apostasy that was going on about him. Later God began to fulfill the promise that he made to Abraham and his seed after him, in Isaac and Jacob. And after Jacob and his sons were finally secured in bondage in Egypt God raised up Moses, and Moses again sought to restore the true word of God and the true knowledge of God to the people.

Again amidst tribulations and trials God delivered the people out of the hands of the Egyptians, out of the hand of Pharaoh, and I think most of us are all too familiar with this particular story, and we do not see that out of this process of history, we do not see that there are certain patterns beginning to develop which will mark as distinctive all subsequent restorations and reformations. I think these patterns are extremely important for us to perceive, particularly in the modern day.

As the individual man is moved by the sovereign spirit of God to seek the true word, and then once sought he proceeds to manifest this word, he proceeds to preach this word, he proceeds to live this word amongst the people; and as the word is restored in purer and purer form, the minds and hearts of the people are themselves restored in the inner man, and as this restoration of the inner man begins to take place the Spirit of God begins to motivate and prompt these people to repent and take a different course of action in terms of their work.

This of course in a state of apostasy in the world brings them into conflict with the world. But with the spirit of God giving them the power to withstand the resistance they meet in the apostate people that surround them, through trials and tribulations God refines this gold in the minds and hearts of His remnant, in the minds and hearts of His true believers, and they resist that which is evil. And what comes out of this process of inner restoration, external reformation, is always a higher form of civilization.

Eventually of course, Israel once she had become established in the land through dealing with the pagans, though not completely as she was told to do by God, and allowing a remnant of paganism to exist in close proximity to Israel; but as they were established in the land they grew, as many civilizations do, very comfortable; and Judges 2:10 tells us of course that there grew up a generation after Joshua had died and been laid with the fathers, there grew up a generation after him which knew not the great works of the Lord on the part of Israel, and they fell into apostasy and followed after the Baals.

And again God brought judgement on these people who had rejected His word, and they were scattered through the agency of pagan armies; and they served for a time in bondage. Then the Lord began again to move in the minds and hearts of His remnant, and He began to restore their minds and hearts to a knowledge of the true word of God, and this restoration of the inner man through the agency of God’s sovereign Spirit began to motivate them into a course of action which would again bring them into conflict with the pagan societies around them. But God led them back to the land as (?) restored the law.

The pattern reached its fullest expression with the coming of Christ, because Christ restored the fullness of the law, for both the inner and the outer man, and of course with His restoration of the law to the inner man, put it on their minds and hearts, with this restoration of the law in the inner man, there came about a change, a reformation in their actions, which again brought them into conflict with the external world around them, and the next three centuries of the history of the church is graphic proof of that.

In all of this process we see the same pattern developing, that out of apostasy the Spirit of God moves in the minds and hearts of His remnant, and begins to restore within their inner being knowledge of His truth. This creates a Reformed course of action, bringing them into conflict with the corruption about them, and a new and higher level of civilization is born.

We see this particular series of events, this cause and effect chain of events if you will, occurring with Calvin, with Luther, with Knox, and with Owen, and we see that here these were just common men originally, you might say almost indistinguishable from the rest of the populace about them. And then the Spirit of God began to move in their inner man, and they began to see things in the word of God which had either been lost, or they began to see things which had broader implications than previous generations of expositors and seekers after the truth had been able to know. They began to see that the Bible spoke to more than just the inner man, and they began to realize the importance of knowing history, they began to realize the importance of remembering God’s acts on behalf of Israel, and on the behalf of Christian forefathers, and the inner restoration of the word began to produce external reformation of conduct and actions, and what we now call the Great Reformation was born. It brought them into conflict of course with the established powers, with the pagan forms of worship that existed, and eventually it created such a conflict that it brought down the crown heads of Europe. This was one of the motivations, or one of the intents of Wycliffe when he began to translate the scriptures into the language of the common man; because he knew that when the common man could read the scriptures for himself without coming through the Papal filter so to speak, that when the average common man could read the scriptures for himself, then he would then see that even kings are subject to the law of God.

There is no question in many circles today that the United States is seen as a further expression of the Reformation. Indeed we can say without any fear of doubt, but with a great deal of contradiction from the opposition, we can say that without the Reformation there would be no United States of America, there would be no Constitution as we know it, there would be no separation of church and state, there would be no free enterprise system as we know it, and I could go on and on and on listing all of these things which we probably would not have if it had not been for the Great Reformation. But we must see that the Reformation, the Great Reformation as we call it, was in actuality an extension, a refinement, a development of previous periods of Reformation.

There is no question that in today’s world we are living in a state of apostasy. I don’t think one has to be a graduate of the Harvard school of divinity in order to perceive that. Every man can see the state of the world about us. But there is also something else happening. For many years now there have been a small, obscure group of individuals who have begun to seek a restoration of the true word of God in the minds and hearts of believers. Reverend Rushdoony is among those people, Cornelius Van Til is another. I could name many, many more, right here in America; many of the Europeans, and in a very real sense there is an underground movement in America today for the individual man to restore a true perspective on the word of God to his inner being.

Of course, this has all been personalized, we all speak of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We all talk about things which can be summed up as subjective pietism, and many people see this as an evil and a corruption, and in a very real sense of the word it is, because it extremely limits the potential in the gospel. They have separated the inner and the outer man. The inner man can have personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and it can all be sweetness and light on the inside man, but on the outside the works of the man- “Well, I have to do things the way the world does them. I have to live in this world.” and that is used as justification for corrupt works, for doing things in the external world on the worlds terms.

Now it is very interesting, with all this emphasis on the inner man, that the underground Reformation which is beginning in America today and indeed in many areas of the world; what began as a personal, inner kind of awakening is beginning now to manifest itself in changing the world. Reverend Rushdoony has been preaching the very kind of Reformation theology we talk about for many years now; others also. But now in this last year and a half to two years in the world, we begin to see a number of historical events converge, which lead me to believe without the slightest doubt that we are on the verge of another Great Reformation. A Great Reformation which will bring about an even higher form of civilization by further expression of the gospel.

I will give you a few examples of this from my own personal experience. Last week I had a telephone call from a gentleman who woke me up at a rather strange hour in the morning; it seems he failed to reckon with the fact that he was calling from London England, and there is an 8 hour time difference. So he woke me up at a rather early hour in the morning to tell me a number of things, but one of which it seems that he heard about a particular project that we were working on, and it seems that God had been with this particular gentlemen and the group of people he is working with in England, had been for a number of years now, working on an almost identical parallel with the very things that Reverend Rushdoony and Marshall Foster, and a number of other people whom you have heard of, have been working on in the States. But we didn’t know about the existence of this other group of people.

Over the last week and a half I’ve had at least four or five transatlantic phone calls with this gentlemen and some of his associates, and I’ve come to find out that there is something similar to this also going on in Australia. I’ve come to find out from reading Newsweek May 4th this year, that there is a strange phenomena beginning to occur in Red China, which is, well, it’s puzzling a number of our leaders, particularly those in the journalistic profession, because it seems that Red China has in the last few months relaxed its constraints against the preaching of the gospel, and we’ve found out that in Red China today there are more than 50,000 home churches. That is rather startling when you think about it, because all these years we’ve been thinking that nothing has been happening with the gospel in China. Oh yes, we’ve been setting up powerful radio transmitters and dropping leaflets where we could and things of that nature to try to beam the gospel behind the bamboo curtain. But we had no concrete data, we had no concrete facts to determine whether or not this beaming of the gospel to Red China was really effective or not. And now we see that one of the reasons why Red China has relaxed its constraints against the preaching of the gospel is because- and I recommend all of you if you haven’t read this May 4th issue of Newsweek that you try to find a copy of it and read it- because it seems that one of the Chinese governments justifications for allowing freedom of religious is somehow or another tied up with the productive capacity of the Christians. [recording blank after this, continues in part 2]