Knowing the Triune God

Systematic Theology

Lesson #3

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject:

Genre: Speech

Track: 3

Dictation Name: RR10??

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1960’s-1970’s.

All fools are in their essence theological and religious. Whether you’re talking about politics, education, or economics, whatever you’re talking about will have its foundation in religious roots. Now modern man is trying to conceal that fact, because he’s trying to rob you of the foundation of your freedom. Those foundations are theological, they are Biblical. As a result, when you disguise the issue and when you have indifferent Christians who are {?} Christians, then it becomes a very simple matter to steal and bribe. Because, after all, they do not care about what they have.

A few years ago I spoke to a very large church which raises over half a million dollars a year for various missionary causes, and one of the things I told them was that while the half a million dollars was very good, it really meant something when they began to minister to people in their own circle. How about the elderly members who are shut in? Those who cannot any longer, because they’re old and infirm, take care of their own housekeeping or drive a car to go shopping. Who’s looking out for them? You should start doing something about it.

Of course that brings us down to the home level, it means you are someone in your family has a responsibility to your family members. That’s where Christians now fail. You have to pay a pastor to do the job, or a missionary. This is why we are so easily undercut. You want religions to talk about, to affirm in abstraction, rather than to apply. But the doctrine of God is a total thing, it has implications for every area of life and thought.

Now modern philosophy says some very strange things which superficially seem to be insane, but you need to pay attention to what insane people say, after all, we’re dominated by them today. Why? Because every man is insane if he thinks he can live in God’s world apart from God’s law. And because men are possessed by that kind of insanity they’re wide open to the rule of the insane.

Comte is the father of sociology; when you read the life of (Comke?) you wonder, how could such a fruitcake ever have had the influence that he did? He actually founded a church for the worship of his dead mistress, who was not much to begin with! Or Karl Marx, think of how much he has done with his influence. If you had met him, you would have said, “What a nut.” Which he was! He was not only a nut but he was a man with such a guilt ridden life because of the many may things he did that he was continually literally, physically ill. One of his problems was that he was continually breaking out with boils from head to foot. He couldn’t sit or lie down, his face and body was covered with boils, as very few men have been effected. He talked about capitalists and exploiting their workers, a maid, that his wife brought into the marriage, he raped. He had an illegitimate child by her. Everything he ever accused the capitalists of he was himself. He was also a man with a tremendous income - that may surprise you, but several times the annual income of a gentleman in England. But he was always hard up because he was spending that money on get rich quick schemes. [chuckling] He was one of the great suckers of all time for fly by night scots! If somebody was peddling some kind get rich quick scheme shares, Karl Marx was number one on their sucker list.

I could go on and sight the men, like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and others. Men who, some of them, spent a part or a good deal of their life in mental institutions. Yet the twenty-first century is marching to their music! And this should not surprise us, because when man lives apart from God, he lives out of his mind. And when man goes to church but says, ‘I’ll pay no attention to God’s law’ he is out of his mind. If you think that the Lord of the universe would set down his will for us very clearly and bluntly in His book, the Bible, He’s going to take very calmly violations of that?

Now at the dinner table, since my daughter is here with us over Thanksgiving, she was recalling how if any of them pushed me too far by violating my requirements, I would reach for that red paddle of the top of the refrigerator and paddle their behinds. Why? Because they were not obeying. Now do you think God could take kindly to our disobedience? It’s insanity on the part of man. A wild kind of mindlessness to expect that God will not. And God tells us though the prophets that when men will not obey Him he will give them over to tyrants, and as a supreme insult, women and children will rule over you!

And we see that today. A generation where kids to sometimes an incredible extent dominate their parents. Sometimes you wonder how anyone in their right mind can see a little kid do what they do, defy their parents, and not get whacked. Sometimes it takes a lot of patience not to reach out with a helping hand...

Now what does this lead to? Well lets look at modern philosophy, talking about the insanity of our age. What does modern philosophy tell us? It tells us very literally that there is no law, nor any order to the universe. When I went to the university at Berkeley in my mid-thirties they still said there was a probability because as far as we always knew the sun always rose in the east and set in the west it would do that tomorrow morning. They talked about no natural law, the probability concept. Now they’re abolished the probability concept because it still points to God and his order. So that at Berkeley now, you can no longer talk about the sun rising in the East tomorrow morning. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Well it should. But until you realize that practically all our modern thinking is based on that kind of insanity, you miss the point.

Now why does it have that fact? Why is it so important to say that there is nothing but brute factuality, blind chance out there, that no man can creditate any natural law as applying to that universe. Why is it important for them to say that we can never know the truth about anything. That any theory that we have scientifically in every hypothesis is just a kind of paradigm to use the term. You have Kuhn, one of the most influential thinkers in science today. It’s a myth, you don’t have to believe it, evolution is not necessarily true, nothing is true...we knew it was a theory. Fifty or a hundred years from now we may drop it for another kind of theory.

None of them have any truth. Why? Because there is no truth, no meaning in the universe. None. Absolutely none.

Now this summer when I was dealing with math in one of our meetings, I pointed out how important it was for the new man to say that man is the creator in math. That there is no necessity for any statement in math. Two plus two could equal whatever you want it to be equal, you are God. That’s the point of the new man. You begin to see the purpose in all this insanity? Man cannot play God unless he denies that there is any meaning apart from himself. Any meaning apart from what he creates. In essence, what it is to say is that if I say this is a table then it is a table, not a chair. And if I say this is a tent and not a house, then it is a tent. Why? Because man being ultimate means man is the definer, man is the creator, and everything is exactly as man says it is.

This is why when man denies God, it becomes all important that man - having denied God and denied his words - establish another word. Another math. Another English, another politics, another economics. Now one of the most obvious things today is of course that the change in economics has failed. Even some of the liberals are recognizing this. But what is their answer? We’ve got to create a new economics. Still another one. Why? Because nowhere can they say, whether it is with regard to economics or politics or anything else, that it is an established order that exists apart from man. The new education has failed, has it not? Were the educators showing humility? On the contrary, they were going to create something else. Sometimes they mislabel it to fool the people.

We supposedly have phonics in some of the public schools, but it is not phonics at all, it is another new innovation. Why is that important? Because somehow man’s word must be made to succeed, and man’s word leads to anarchy every time. You have anarchy in the schools, in economics... Just this evening at six O'clock when I was listening to the news the point was made that the dollar had done very badly this year abroad, and as a result anything ordered from Germany was five percent higher, and from Japan ten percent higher. The price of the Toyota is now a little better than five hundred dollars more than it was a year ago, and this also means that many American goods are going to be more expensive because many American manufacturers use parts that come from abroad. And the dollar is continuing to fall.

But what is their answer? Another word of man. Another word of man. Because they will not acknowledge God to be God. And what is keeping the economy afloat? Faith in man. The economy should have collapsed at the beginning of the ‘70s; the dollar was in disarray, foreign trade, everything - every country in the world was in trouble, but what was the attitude of people when time and again at the beginning of the ‘60s they were at the brink of disaster? “Well, the government can’t let it happen.” Faith in man’s word. And so it’s that confidence that’s keeping it going a little longer, and a little longer, because man wants mans words to work.

So it has to be a man made order, not the law of God, not the word of God. So this is the issue of the doctrine of God. All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made, as a result you cannot have education, politics, art, the sciences, anything apart from that. Now then recently the concern from the federal government over the fact that scientific research is decreasing and innovation is declining, and they feel this will have a major impact. Well of course! But how are they going to remedy it when they have said everything is meaningless? If everything is meaningless in terms of the modern faith except the meaning man creates, then man himself is meaningless. Then we come back to the same philosophy that the world has had: “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

It’s that kind of philosophy that preceded the Russian revolution. If you want to know why the revolution succeeded all over a handful of men, go and read some of the Russian novels that were written just before the revolution. They are very much like the ones that are being written now. The same kind of sexual revolution, the same kind of moral anarchism, the same exaltation of degenerated purpose. You had the same thing before Hitler! One of the common sayings in Germany before Hitler when you had that same sexual revolution, when you met someone “Let’s go to bed together and see if we like each other.” There was no God, there were no standards, there was anarchy. The government to replace that anarchy with a national {?} order, but it then had anarchy within its own ranks.

Because the principal of anarchy is atheism. So the doctrine of God is basic in every area of life. You see, if we discuss the doctrine of God and the doctrine of the incarnation and the doctrine of the atonement as though they were abstract doctrine, we’re denying the word of God. What is the atonement? God says that all sin must be paid for. Restitution must be made. What happens if you don’t seek atonement? Why, then you are either a Sadist or a masochist, you either try to punish yourself to pay for your sins - masochism - or you try to punish someone else for your sins. What’s the difference between the politics of Russia and the United States? The Russians are Sadists, and we’re masochists. And that’s it.

Recently I’ve spoken to the university law school and created a sensation and was canceled out at another law school. Why? Because in the course of my lectures I was dealing with the classical humanist view of man, I cited the fact that when these humanists, first encountered in the early days of exploration cannibalism among the American Indians, and I pointed out that the word cannibal was originally (carrabba?) from caribbean, and the carrab indians that they first encountered. They excused the cannibalism because obviously these were children of nature, entirely good, and if they practiced cannibalism it had to be good. I said, that’s the length they went to to justify their belief in man.

Well, all hell broke loose. The other law school canceled me out for what I said about the Indians. First they denied it was true, but finally some of them had to admit it was, but ‘how dare anyone criticize the Indians when we are such horrible people?! Nobody in history has been equal to the American people and the evil they’ve perpetrated.” And I said, you’re masochistic!

And that didn’t set well with them, you know.

And that’s why when we come to the subject of atonement, you’re dealing with the reality of world politics. And as we deal with the doctrine of God, we’ll be dealing with everything, because man is not what Arab {?} has said, a political animal; or what others have said, a rational animal; he is a religious creature made in the image of God, and everything in him requires a theological end. And if God is not his god, then he will make something else his god, but he will move in religious categories. In biblical categories. This is why there is no other answer except that of our faith. This is why it is so great a sin for people as Christians not to recognize the far reaching world wide implications of their faith! We’re never going to understand these problems apart from the theological premise.

I spoke of Russia as sadistic and the United States as masochistic, Sadists and masochists are all sadomasochistic, which means there can be flip-flops in their positions. This has happened in history. But they can never be free from the burden of guilt apart from Jesus Christ. And as long as men are burdened with guilt, their politics will be what I have called in my book The Politics Of Guilt and Pity. An ungodly guilt, and a godless pity. They’ll feel guilty for the wrong things and they’ll have pity on the wrong things. As the Bible says - the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.

So, systematic theology is extremely basic to an understanding of the world. But there’s very little systematic theology in our day, in fact, in almost every seminary in the country if they still have it in the curriculum they don’t teach it. Why? Because they don’t believe - they say - there is such a thing as systematic theology, which means they don’t there is a sovereign God such as the Bible talks about, whose word is law. If there’s no sovereign God, there’s no system, there’s no law order in the universe that you can systematize, that you can understand. So what we’re talking about is bad theology, the belief that although we can never know God exhaustively (we would have to have the mind of God to know him exhaustively) we can know him truly. And we can never know the universe exhaustively, but we can know it truly because I know that there is consistency between one part of the universe and another. That what is true on this planet is true on another - that God made everything, so there is a consistency, a system.

This means that if I am going to understand any area of life, any subject, I’ve got to understand God and his word, and if I don’t begin there I’ll never get anywhere. This is a fundamental principle of our faith, you see. I believe - as Anton said - in order that I may understand. When we begin with that faith, then we understand all things. Or as John says in his first letter, “We have an unction from the holy one and we know all things.” Now we don’t know all things exhaustively, but we know all things in principle, then we begin to apply that fact, then every area of life and thought.

This is why in this series, systematic theology, will be talking about the doctrines of our faith. But at the same time there is not a subject under the sun that we will not cover, because when you talk about God you are of necessity thinking about everything. Are there any questions, now? Yes?

[audience member speaks unintelligibly]

No. He needs to learn everything at once. You don’t divide it that way. To learn about the attributes of God is also learn about Jesus, because he has declared him, the bible says. He who has seen me has seen the Father. So you can’t approach God except through Christ, but you can’t stop with Christ - you see the Father and the Spirit through him. We have to {?}.

[audience member speaks unintelligibly]

Yes. When you say God and you don’t mean the Trinity, you’re guilty of incorrect theological thinking. God is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. But too often evangelicals say when you say God you mean the Father, so the Spirit and the Son are not really quite God. [audio ends]