Aspects of Systematic Theology

The Presence of the Spirit

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 29-29

Genre: Talk

Track: 29

Dictation Name: Tape 83

Location/Venue:

Year: 1980

Our scripture this morning is from John 14:15-21. John 14:15-21, and our subject is: The Presence of the Spirit.

“15 If ye love me, keep my commandments.

16 And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever;

17 Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.

18 I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.

19 Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also.

20 At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.

21 He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.”

When the council of Trent finished its work, it had a sentence engraved in the church of Santa Maria (Majior?) in Trent, reading in Latin: “Here the Holy Spirit spoke for the last time.” Here the Holy Spirit spoke for the last time.

This is quite a shocking sentence, but it openly affirmed what the church has all too often implicitly held. Throughout the history of the Christian church we do see periodic extravagances as certain groups make claims concerning the manifestations of the Holy Spirit; but the reaction of the church too often has been equally bad. It severely limits the work of the Holy Spirit. It virtually silences the Spirit, outside a few established church channels.

One result of al lthis is the modern doctrine of man. If we deny the work of the Holy Spirit in man, man becomes a passive creature. The animals respond to purely natural impulses, but man has been created in the image of God; it is the image of God which determines his being. Now fallen man perverts the implications of that image, and he seeks not the kingdom of God but the kingdom of man, and he seeks to apply knowledge and his idea of righteousness, and his idea of holiness and dominion, to establishing the kingdom of man.

But as we saw in our previous meeting, the Holy Spirit works in the hearts of the unbelieving and the believing alike; in the hearts of the unbelieving the Holy Spirit convicts them of sin, He brings home to their hearts the righteousness or justice of God, and He makes them aware at all times that Gods judgement is upon them. So they are always aware of their guilt before God. At the same time the believer sees the work of the Holy Spirit in his heart; the Spirit guides us, our Lord declares, into all truth. But if we deny that, if we say: “Here the Holy Spirit spoke for the last time” or: “The Holy Spirit is present in an ordination service, or in the sacraments, but don’t talk about the Holy Spirit outside of our appointed channels.” Then man is left exposed to only natural impulses, natural influences. It is the universe, the natural world, which becomes the active agent in his life.

As the philosopher Ramus observed, and I quote: “In such a view man is no longer called upon to act. He has only to let himself be acted on. Meanwhile however, he feels himself becoming smaller and smaller, precisely because of his own passivity.”

That is exactly the point. When you leave man bereft of the Holy Spirit, whether he be unregenerate man or regenerate man, when you remove the Holy Spirit from the world at large, you say: “It is only nature that works on man” If such a thing as nature exists. But what you mean is: “Naturalistic forces.” Man then lives in a world that has been emptied of God, and he suffers from emptiness because God no longer fills the world. As Ramus said further and I quote: “Man never has what he wants, and what he wants is everything. It was only in God that he could have everything.”

When the world is emptied of God, then nothing has any meaning; and man can accumulate and pile up possessions, but a great emptiness fills him, haunts his days. To quote Ramus further: “Man no longer knows what he is, so he seeks to possess.” He replaces meaning with possessions, but they will not satisfy. And so Ramus said, writing a generation ago, “The result is communism.” Which he described as the logic of atheism. In such a faith, Ramus said: “Society replaces God. You must have faith in society, as you had faith in God.”

Ramus was right. To empty the world of God is deadly and dangerous.

Now traditional orthodoxy, Protestant and Catholic, would deny that it has emptied the world of God, or that it has limited the Spirit. Technically they are correct. They can point to their theology text books and say: “You see, this is what we say.” Practically however, traditional orthodoxy has so limited the Spirit, so circumscribed it to the official church channels, that to the people it is remote. A remote doctrine, and the Spirit Himself too often a stranger. Let me illustrate. Prior to the enlightenment, Christians saw God at work in storms, in droughts, in everything that occurred. They saw God in everything because they recognized God not as remote, but closer to us than we are to ourselves. I have a few times cited some of the old Colonial Puritan prayers to you with a great deal of delight, because there is humor in them; but there is a great deal of theology also. You may recall one that I cited about the congregation in New England, that during a drought met to pray for rain. They got rain, and from the prayer meeting to Sunday it poured- it was a devastating downpour, creating floods and problems. And so the following Sunday morning the pastor said: “Lord, when we prayed for rain we asked for a gentle sizzle sozzle. Not a gullywasher that would wash us out!” Now there is a lot of delight in hearing of prayers like that, and they were numerous- but a lot of theology.

God was very real to them. They could talk with Him. They could argue with Him, because they believed He heard and He acted. And hence for them the Spirit was very real, and they often spoke of the work of the Spirit in their midst and in the events of their time. But with the Enlightenment, first in Europe and then here, and then Deism, God became remote. Because Deism said: “God started the works, and now He is off like an absentee land lord, and the universe is like a watch, ticking away until it runs down. It is a unified body of laws and inner mechanisms, as it were, which is on its own.” Two churchmen naturalized that concept into theology, Butler and Paley. Both ostensibly Orthodox, both very deadly in what they did to the Christian church. Their influence is with us still. They maintained the form of Christianity, but they diminished and negated its power because they removed God and the Holy Spirit from the world, they left it a mechanism, a barren, empty world.

This past week I was very interested in a work by a doctor that I read, a doctor who is very much at sea. He had an excellent and very lucrative practice in one of the best residential areas of suburban New York. An incident triggered a series of things in his life, he wound up in (Hate?) Ashbury ministering to the hippies. Then that dissatisfied him and he went into Mexico to work for a medical group that was going to try to work among the very primitive Indians and Mexicans. When he got there he found there was a government clinic there with a fine young doctor, as fine facilities in that clinic as you would find anywhere here, and even better at some points, all sitting there rusting. The Federal doctor said: “No one comes to me. They go to their medicine men.” And he laughed, and he said: “His rate of healing is better than I would have anyway, because they believe in him.” And he said: “My only success has been to be friendly with the medicine man, and to persuade him to improve his rate of healing by mixing some penicillin powder with the potions he gives.” So he came back to this country. And then he encountered a young woman in her twenties who was faced with a hysterectomy. He uterus was cancerous, and it was the passion of her life to marry and have children, and she refused to undergo the operation, making it clear she would rather die. But what she did, not a believer, was simply to sit and meditate every day, and concentrate on a healthy, cancer-free uterus. And she healed herself.

The doctor doesn’t know where he is going to wind up, everything in his book tells us that he should be a Christian. But one thing he did recognize- the modern world is over. The world that Descartes began is over. The division of mind and body is over, we are one unified being; and we know that from scripture. So the old materialistic, mechanistic approach is ended.

Well, if a doctor without faith who doesn’t know where he stands and whose book recounts his experiences and lets us know frankly he is on a pilgrimage and he doesn’t know where it is going to take him- if he can come to this conclusion that it is not a barren, empty world of matter, and you are not dealing with the human body as a mechanism, as a purely material thing- isn’t it time we Christians recognize what scripture teaches us? Recognize that the Holy Spirit is at work in this world, and that its power is present in all of us, to indict us or to guide us into all truth? How dare we be blind to Him?

Without agreeing with the Charismatic movement at all, we need to welcome it with certain dissents. The Holy Spirit has not spoken for the last time. Its work is not limited to ordination services or to the sacraments- He is at work among the Godly and the ungodly, at every moment of our lives it is God the Spirit with whom we have to do. We are closer to Him and He closer to us than we are to ourselves, or to our families, and our friends; it is a total relationship. And this is true of all, our Lord makes clear; of the saved and the unsaved.

Perhaps what we need to say is that the charismatics have not gone far enough. The Spirits power and work is not to be limited to certain meetings, or to certain events. What our Lord says in John 14:15-21 is very clear. First, He says: “If you love me,” As Westcott and Morris and other have correctly pointed out: “You will keep me my commandments.” “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Faith, love, and obedience are inseparable.

Then second, our Lord says that the comforter, the advocate, the Holy Spirit, is the very present life and strength of all who love and obey the Lord. The word that is used: “If you love me you will keep my commandments” moreover is a Greek word ‘Entole’. We encounter it in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and it is there used over and over again for ‘law’, for God’s law as God gave it to Moses.

Thus when our Lord says in Matthew 5:17-20 and Luke 16:17 that His law cannot be set aside, He is talking about the whole of the Bible.

Then third our Lord says concerning the Spirit that the world cannot receive Him because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him. The world has an imperical test, a materialistic test; seeing is believing. It wants the autonomous mind of man to be the judge of all things. It therefore excludes by definition any possibility of the Spirit and His work.

But fourth, our Lord says: “Ye know Him for He dwelleth with you and shall be in you.” The regenerate know and see the Spirit in His power and witness, they are never alone, and for us the world is never empty. The deadly effect of the modern view is that it empties the world of God and also all life of meaning. And the result is the terror, the dread, of existentialism. It is also drugs and the flight into fantasy, experientialism, simply to avoid emptiness. No theology can do justice to our faith, which silences the Spirit. All such theologies smell of dust and death.

Then fifth, our Lord says: “Yet a little while and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me because I live. Ye shall live also.” Our Lord also says: “I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you.” He comes to us in the Spirit, He comes to us in His resurrection, in His ascension and reign, and at His coming again He is always with us through the Spirit. We are never alone, all life comes to us from the Lord. And so we can say with scripture that in the face of all things we have this confidence, for Thou hast said: “I will never leave Thee nor forsake Thee, so that we may boldly say: The Lord is my helper, I shall not fear what man may do unto me.”

Then finally our Lord says: “He that hath my commandment, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me; and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.”

To love and obey Jesus Christ means that we are loved by the Father and the Son. We are always surrounded by their love. We live and move and have our being in God, in the Triune God. Paul tells us that we are called to live and walk in the Spirit in Galatians 5:25, and it means that all things are mediated to us by the Spirit, so that we are never alone. We cannot, in other words, define ourselves apart from God, from God the Spirit; He is always with us, to comfort and to guide us.

Thus no church can say: “Here the Holy Spirit spoke for the last time.” Or say with regard to its sacraments and ceremonies: “Here is where the Spirit speaks.” The Spirit cannot be limited. The Spirit speaks to believer and unbeliever alike, He is the Spirit of truth. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, we give thanks unto Thee for the gift of the Spirit, and we thank Thee that the world in which we live and move and have our being is Thy creation, filled with Thy presence; so that we can face the enemy, not alone; we can live in the world, not as a vast emptiness, but always in the confidence that Thou wilt never leave us nor forsake us. Oh Lord our God, how great and marvelous are Thy ways. Bless us this day and always in Thy service, in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience Member] …?... do you think that the concept of seminaries is a valid one?

[Rushdoony] The question is with regard to the concept of seminaries. So many have been started, and have fallen by the wayside- is the concept of the seminary a valid one? There is some very questionable things about the concept of a seminary; this is not to say that it is an impossible or a totally wrong concept, but there are very serious weaknesses in it. Some few years ago, Harry Blamires wrote a very interesting book in which he made a tremendous point, he said there is a very important distinction between a scholar and a thinker. A scholar is somebody who wants to know about something, but without commitment. Of course that is an impossibility, but he tries to say: “I am not going to be involved in this, I am interested in it purely as ideas, as doctrines or concepts.” And as a result, he is not concerned with action, with application- it is purely an abstraction to him. The thinker is not interested in being a scholar. He may or may not be more profound in his learning, but he is interested in action, in knowing something to apply it. Now a Christian has to be a thinker. He has to know the word of God, and then to apply it, and to pray for the guidance of the Spirit as he thinks and applies what he knows.

The world of the seminary works to produce the scholar. It is the scholar who is the popular student in seminary circles, they are working to produce other scholars. And as a result what the seminary does is to take dedicated young men and to take the fire out of their being and put ice-water in their veins. They are scholars. And the more scholarly they become the more they are loved by the seminary. And as a result they go out and they help freeze churches. This is why the churches by and large which do not have seminaries have greater church growth. And in the Southern Baptist church you can see, and in the Baptist church at large, wherever you have products of Baptist seminaries going into the pulpits, the growth rate slows down and dies; and where men go out who do not have the seminary education, the church begins to flourish.

Now granted, some of these without seminary training are not very well-learned or too well versed in doctrine and in scriptures, but a lot of them are more knowledgeable by far than your seminary trained men. I know because I encounter so many of them all over the country. They have taught themselves through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, far better than the seminaries.

So this is not to say that the seminary has not future; but it needs to be dramatically altered in its perspective to be worth anything. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Oh, the two men were not concerned so much with negating the Holy Spirit, but it was their theology and their acceptance of a perspective that made God kind of absentee from the world; so the Spirit became remote, God and Christ became remote. They were Butler and Paley. Both of them were from England, the 18th century. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?... think that the modern liberal clergy misinterprets Galatians 6:7, by stating that whatsoever a man sows he shall reap, meaning brute factuality rather than the active working of the Holy Spirit in our day?

[Rushdoony] I’m not sure I understand your question, but it is that these clergy are reaping what they have sown- is that the point?

[Audience Member] …?... when things happen it is not the working of the Holy Spirit, it is the working of immutable laws, sort of like Deism …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, right, most of the clergy today, whether they are Liberal or Orthodox, have a semi-deistic point of view. They don’t want to see the active, present work of the Spirit, of the Triune God in the world; they want to see a kind of naturalistic law at work, and thereby they make God very remote.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?... Westminster, Seminary at Jackson, Mississippi …?...

[Rushdoony] Those seminaries like most others have strayed, they have gone into liberation theology, they don’t see liberation in the Holy Spirit, they see it in a kind of neo-Marxism. There is scarcely a seminary in the country today where Liberation theology is not taught; very often they don’t even know what they are teaching. The classic work in Liberation theology as I have pointed out more than once is R.J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. But Liberation theology has captured the Catholic seminaries and missionaries, the Protestant Liberals, the Reformed groups, and the Arminian groups. It is very prevalent in all the colleges and seminaries. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?... how can you understand the working of the Holy Spirit and not abstract the doctrine of predestination?

[Rushdoony] A very good question, and I believe I am treating that in one of the others of this series. If you deny the doctrine of predestination, you will have a weak doctrine of the Spirit. The Spirit then becomes not the sovereign God, but a human resource, a human resource that you can tap into and establish a pipeline, and you can turn on the flow or turn off the flow at will; and that of course is incredibly wrong. It leads only to a belief in the Spirit in terms of manifestations, rather than the Spirit as the ever-present God who is with us.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Will I be dealing with the unpardonable sin in this series? I am not entirely sure, I am going to be dealing with that somewhere, I will make a note to check just where- because I have two series going all the time, one that I have just finished on the doctrine of sin, and I am starting on the doctrine of the covenant. Yes, any other questions? Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] What?

[Audience Member] Briefly, what is the unpardonable sin?

[Rushdoony] It’s the sin against the Spirit, it is declaring that good is evil and evil is good, it is overturning the whole moral order of God. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, if there are no further comments we will adjourn with prayer, and I ask that you be in prayer for the trial I shall be going to tomorrow in North Dakota, some of the trials that are coming up, this and others are especially critical because in each of them the claims of the state become a little more intense and extreme. Let us bow our heads now in prayer.

And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit; bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, amen.