Systematic Theology

Lesson #7

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject:

Genre: Speech

Track: 7

Dictation Name: RR10??

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1960’s-1970’s.

Continuing our studies on the doctrine of God, and in this first period our subject will be God and Creation. God and Creation. The Bible makes it clear that God created all things not out of any necessity, but out of sovereign grace by the Word of his mouth. Not only in Genesis 1, but in John 1:1-14, Ephesians 3:9, Colossians 1:16, Hebrews 1, Revelation 4:11, Hebrews 11, 13 Psalm 33:6, we are told emphatically that God is the Creator and that he created all things by his sovereign and gracious word. Psalm 33:6 is very emphatic. In Psalm 33:6 we read:

“By the word of the LORD were the heavens made;

and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.”

Moreover in verses 4-9 we read:

“4 For the word of the Lord is right; and all his works are done in truth.

5 He loveth righteousness and judgment: the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.

6 By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.

7 He gathereth the waters of the sea together as an heap: he layeth up the depth in storehouses.

8 Let all the earth fear the Lord: let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.

9 For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.”

Now, what these verses emphatically teach us is fiat creation. God said, and it was so. Moreover, very literally the Hebrew of Psalm 33:9 “he commanded, and it stood fast” is “he commanded and there it was”, so that when God declares something by his fiat word and says, ‘let there be light’ or ‘let there be this and that’, at that instant, all of it is there. This is the doctrine of fiat creation. The breath of his mouth creates instantly.

Thus the Psalmist says in verses 8-9, “Let all the earth fear the Lord: let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.”

Calvin was sometimes impatient with wayward theologians and unbelieving philosophers, whom he called “that sty of swine”, and he spoke to the necessity of believing the Bible and beginning with the fact that God is the creator. This establishes the Lordship of God; if God is the creator in the literal sense, who by his fiat word made all things...He commanded, and there it stood; then man has no claim on God. Nor is there anything in the creation that is a product of the creation, it did not evolve, it did not develop, it was created a mature creation. Creation therefore the Bible declares was in six days. Genesis 1 is literal history. Creation is not a process, but an act.

Now what this means is that there is a total dependance of the creation on the Creator. There is no inherent power in the creation whereby it developed itself and came to the point that it is at today. What the creation has done, rather, is not to evolve, but to devolve! It is going downhill as a result of the fall, as a result of sin. There is no inherent power in matter or in the universe. Thus, the doctrine of fiat creation spoke the word and there it stood, stresses the gap between God and man. God is God and man is a creator; it is the mark of paganism always to deny that gap, or to blur it, or to try falsely - apart from Christ - to bridge it.

Thus we can say that the goal of all efforts to eliminate the strict doctrine of fiat creation is to eliminate God. Whenever you tamper with the doctrine of fiat creation you begin to eliminate God from your thinking. God becomes an idea, he becomes remote, he no longer is the living God...the source of all power and authority. You see, the problem for unbelievers, for atheists, for unbelievers, for evolutionists, is not creation out of nothing. Because every evolutionist believes in creation out of nothing, that’s how the universe appeared! ‘Once there was nothing, and out of that nothing came the first atom, or molecule, and now that it evolved, all things’. It isn’t the doctrine of creation out of nothing that they object to, but creation by God out of nothing. It is God that they will not tolerate.

What they believe in is the greatest of miracles because all this universe came out of absolute nothingness, according to them...

Now as we shall see in our next period, the necessary concomitant to the doctrine of fiat creation is predestination. Because, if creation is the absolute work of the sovereign God then it is his plan and his decree that governs it, this is why when you tamper with the one doctrine you tamper with the other. If you tamper with absolute fiat creation you tamper with predestination, if you tamper with predestination you very quickly begin to alter the doctrine of fiat creation. If the universe, moreover, is self generated - if it has evolved - then so has history. Then history is not a part of God’s plan, but it manifests in mans plan. Van Til has pointed out that this is what (Collingswood?), one of the most popular philosophers of history, has done.

Van Til writes and I quote, “Collingwood thinks that the modern historian should follow Viko, the Italian philosopher of history. ‘The fabric of human society’, he says, ‘is created by man out of nothing, and every detail of this fabric is therefore a human factom eminently knowable to the human mind as such.’ Unquote. Nothing short of this will do for Collingwood if we are to be rid of what he thinks of as the dualism between God and man.” Unquote.

You see? Deny God as the creator and predestinator, and you make man the creator and the predestinator. We’ll go into that more in our next period. You affirm creation out of nothing, then, and you transfer it to man and to the universe, which are then self generated...and everything then in the universe is self generated. Ancient Greek philosophy held that the mind of man participates in the mind of God, so that God’s truth and being are not really beyond man but are a part of the life of man. As a result, they transferred all power, all determination from any God that might exist into the hands of man. And modern philosophy has done this to the enth degree.

But you also transfer infinity! One of the things I was taught when I was quite young, in junior high, in fact, was that the universe is infinite. Well how do they know? How do they know that the universe is infinite? Infinity is an attribute of God, if you deny the living God then you are going to say that whatever is your ultimate - if it is the universe - is infinite. And so it’s a matter of necessity for modern thought to affirm the infinity of the universe, which they do on a matter of principle, as a matter of faith. Therefor, time has no beginning. There are millions and billions of years, stretching out to all infinity, and just as God eternally was so something eternally was. It had a beginning, but there always was a something, a potentiality, an infinite possibility.

Because once you deny God, all the attributes of God are transferred to the universe, or to something in the universe like man! Or some institution of man, like the state or the church or the university, whatever you choose to make the local of all your divine attributes. Moreover if the universe is self existent and self generating, then the law of God irrelevant to such a world.

Well, since the doctrine of evolution began to dominate the modern world, beginning with Hagel (who is the real father of it in modern thought), what it has done is to undermine the doctrine of Biblical law. Because if God rules all things, then God is the source of all law for the state, the church, the schools, the family, for everything. But, if the universe has evolved and is self generating then law is also self generated. It is also something that comes from within the universe. Then if God gives the word, like the Bible, well, you can say ‘it’s an interesting word, very interesting, it can even be inspiring...but it’s not a commanded word.’

You see, we need to attack the idea of the Bible as an inspiring word. It’s an inspired Word! But inspiring? It’s a command word. God didn’t give it to us to read and say, ‘Oh this is beautiful, it fills my soul with all kinds of lovely thoughts...’ No. God gave it so that we would read it, obey it, and put it into practice. It is the command word and it is the command word because God is the creator. He commanded it, and there it stood. All things.

For humanism, however, man develops all things out of nothing, and all things are self generated.

We have two doctrines in scripture that confirm a radical discontinuity between God and man. There are many other, but two stand out. The doctrine of creation; fiat creation by God, all things out of nothing. And what is the other doctrine that confirms a radical discontinuity? Can anyone think of it? It’s a very practical doctrine... The Sabbath. What’s the meaning of the Sabbath? It says that our lives don’t depend upon us, our salvation is not our doing, so we regularly take hands off our lives and we rejoice that it is God who saves us. It is God’s work that is determinant in the life of men and of nations, and so we affirm a radical discontinuity.

The Sabbath, thus, and Creation are tied together. The seventh day of creation, that is the pattern, and it celebrates the day of redemption - the passover - in the old testament, and the resurrection in the new testament. When God works, when God offers a completed thing, and all man has to do is relax and enjoy it, and rejoice in it! Then he goes out and he obeys God the rest of the week, in the confidence that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. That all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. That not one word spoken in His name will return unto the Lord void, because He is God. God is not tangled in creation, he rests, and he is separate from it.

So man is to detach himself from creation and his work, and to celebrate God’s works of creation and redemption. The world is created by God, finite and good. Evil is a moral, not a metaphysical fact. Sin and death are unnatural, they are not normal, they are like a cancer on the universe. Health and life are normal, they are not ideals. Moreover, once we believe in God as absolute Lord and creator, we see our creatureliness not as something to be overcome, but as something to rejoice in.

Consider the fact that in so many religions, men hate creatureliness. They try to overcome it. They are opposed to marriage, because, well, marriage means dependance on another person, you see? Interdependence. They become ascetics. Alexander the Great did not like to associate with women too much because to be dependant on them revealed his mortality. He disliked having to eat because it reminded him he was a creature! He wanted to be a godhead, and there are many today who have that kind of sentiment.

In fact, in our day, for many the appeal of NASA and of the so called space age is that supposedly it helps us overcome creatureliness. About eighteen years ago when our space exploration was first beginning to appear on the horizon, one major corporation involved in aerospace had a full page ad showing the scientist holding a baby, ostensibly, except it was not a baby - it was a man in a space suit by the feet, as though it were a newborn baby, and saying ‘the cord’s been cut’. The cord to what? To the earth, to creatureliness! Man now was going to transcend this world and creatureliness.

And this is the insanity of the goal that marks so much of what NASA does (with our tax money, of course.) But it is our glory to be human, to be creatures, to be male and female. It is sin to deny this and to seek to be as God. From Babel, the tower of Babel, to the modern state... man is bent on playing God and transcending creatureliness, and saying, I do not need to function as a creature; I will create fiat laws, fiat economics; I will be as God.

Man was created to be God’s creature, and this is our joy. It is our calling, our knowledge, our righteousness, our holiness, and our dominion, which we realize by being creatures under God. Thus the doctrine of creation is not only important theologically, but practically. How we live, and whether we enjoy life, will be determined by this doctrine. And today there are people all around us who are incapable of enjoying life because they are determined to play God, and to be something more than a creature. Thus means no interdependence, and it means living apart from any dependance on anything.

Did you know there are actually people today who are not only concerned with the avoiding of eating meat, but who are wondering about the legitimacy of vegetables? ‘We’re killing something, we’re dependant on something’, and as a spoof not to long ago, someone wrote on the right to life of germs, presented it as a serious argument and demanded that the government take an interest in the civil rights of germs, and there were actually people who bought that argument! Why should anyone have to live in a world that they were so interdependent on things that their life depended on the lives of other things and other people dependant on them.

They want to be as God. Above and beyond all that. But it is our joy to be creatures. Are there any questions now? Yes?

[audience member speaks] Is it wrong to want to go to the moon?

[speaker becomes unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] I would say it is very wrong to explore space and to want to go to the moon, if you’re going to do it with tax money.

[audience member speaks unintelligibly]

[Rushdoony] Yes. No, no. If, IF it were a private enterprise activity, then it would be done in terms of a practical motive. A practical motive. I believe in my Mythology of Science I pointed out a statement by NASA that they were trying to explore space in order to find life somewhere; in other words, in order to disprove the Bible. They’re doing this with our money! It has no practical consequences. But if you ask for some tax money for any Godly purpose, you’d be clobbered. You see? Not that we would want to ask for it. Now, if it were done by industry it would be done for very practical motives with practical results; but it wouldn’t be done under the present circumstances, that’s for sure.

People talk a great deal about how much we’re spending for national defense, and for this and that, and the other thing, we’re not spending on the war, or on poverty, and so on. But they pay no attention to what we’re spending for the exploration of space. One economist, Doctor {?} has called it the modern counterpart of the pyramid building of the ancient Pharaohs. I think that’s a good analogy - it’s about as useful. Any other questions?

Well, if not, we’ll take about a five to ten minute break. [audio ends]