Rev. Rousas John Rushdoony

[MJ]

Thanks to our new member, who on his way to Hye Forum has visited Mekka, today I discovered Rev. Rousas John Rushdoony. I am going to study him and his work at my spare time. I strongly recommend you to do so, too. For now, I will only post the words of his son at Reverend’s funeral from http://www.chalcedon.edu/report/2001apr/0401CR_articles.html#RJR%20Founder's%20Foreword ://http://www.chalcedon.edu/report/200...r's%20Foreword ://http://www.chalcedon.edu/report/200...r's%20Foreword ://http://www.chalcedon.edu/report/200...r's%20Foreword ://http://www.chalcedon.edu/report/200...r's%20Foreword ://http://www.chalcedon.edu/report/200...r's%20Foreword ://http://www.chalcedon.edu/report/200...r's%20Foreword .

 

From the President's Desk:

Rousas John Rushdoony, April 25, 1916 February 8, 2001

Funeral Eulogy by his son, Rev. Mark Rousas Rushdoony

February 16, 2001

 

http://www.chalcedon.edu/report/2001apr/R_J_Rus0.jpg

 

Thank you for coming today and showing your love and respect for my father, Rousas John Rushdoony, and for celebrating his entrance into eternal reward.

He was a man with a great command of words. As such, he deserves a more eloquent eulogy than I can provide. My father was a remarkable man, a man of firm faith, and a man who was certain to act on his convictions about what that faith required of him. We knew him in different capacities. It would be too difficult for me to speak about him as a father and I would like to keep those memories forever my own. I would rather like to say a little about Dad's life as it relates to his labors as a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

My father was born on April 16, 1916 in New York City of Armenian immigrants to the U. S. He was conceived in the Old World and born in the New. His parents waited until he was a few weeks old before they traveled to Kingsburg, California where his father was the founding pastor of the Armenian Martyrs' Presbyterian Church. This was an Armenian-speaking church made up of recent immigrants who, like his parents, had fled the twentieth century's first genocide. My father spoke limited English before he started school.

The beginnings of my father's world and life view took shape in that setting of extended family and friends who all shared a horrific past. My father was aware that these people, his people, had lost all because they were Christians unwanted in a non-Christian culture. My father had a phenomenal memory. He remembered the stories told by those of the Armenian Diaspora who came by the farm seeking information about loved ones lost in the massacres or to reminisce about the Old Country. His father also spoke with him at great length of life in the Old Country and imbued Dad with a love for a land he never saw. Despite the tragic experiences of that generation, my father always remembered them as a happy group that loved to laugh and sing. My father could see their character, their strength, and even their greatness as coming from their Christian faith.

My father loved to laugh and enjoy life. He believed the Christian life was one of joy and fulfillment. He did not believe in "sourpuss" piety. The ability to see the Christian faith as one of joy and victory despite temporal difficulties became part of who he was.

His family lived in Detroit, Michigan for a time before returning to Kingsburg. By the time he finished high school, he had lived on a farm and in an industrial city, and had seen roaring prosperity and depression in both urban and rural settings. He was already a voracious reader.

When he attended the University of California, he saw a secular, cynical, humanistic worldview. Marxism was in vogue and the Soviet Union was hailed as a model of progressive reform. He ended up taking much of the teaching selectively. He often took a class for its stimulation and then dropped it.

Seminary was a like challenge. But by that time he knew enough to attend a seminary that was openly modernistic. He said he preferred that to modernism under the pretense of orthodoxy.

My father knew quite early that he wanted to write. But after his graduation and ordination in 1944 he did something that was a bit unusual. Instead of seeking an urban church pastorate that would provide him exposure and access, he became a missionary for 8 1/2 years on a remote Indian reservation in northeastern Nevada, where he would sometimes be snowbound for months. He did this out of a real, though not sentimental, regard for the Indians, a belief that they had been treated badly. But he also felt that he needed to learn how to make the Faith relevant. He was already a well-educated young man, but he wanted to learn how to make the Faith meaningful to others. The isolation also enabled him to study and begin writing articles. He loved his years on the reservation, and always spoke of them in the fondest terms. He so frequently said "during my years on the reservation" that more than a few people thought he was a Native American.

Family constraints made him leave the Indian reservation and he then moved to Santa Cruz, California where he pastored two churches. Santa Cruz was then a retirement community, and he once estimated that he had performed over 500 funerals, the majority of them during these years. It was in Santa Cruz that he began to write his books.

After nine years in Santa Cruz, he retired from the full-time pastorate to devote himself to writing and in 1965 moved to Los Angeles and founded Chalcedon, a foundation devoted to the application of the Christian faith to all of life and thought. People told him an organization dedicated to ideas could never succeed, but he was undeterred. Devoted to writing, study, and teaching full time, my father began to produce manuscript after manuscript. When people think of my father, they think of him as a teacher, a theologian, a historian, or a philosopher. Many have come to respect him for his brilliance, but my father's emphasis was never himself, but about the message. These were all areas in which his knowledge could point people to God and His righteousness.

Most people know my father wrote books and that he loved to read and collect them. My sisters and I all learned that tearing or scribbling in a book was a sin you did not repeat. Few people, however, knew my father wrote poetry. One such poem is about his love of the written word. He wrote it in 1970. I would like to read it. It is entitled "The Luxury of Words."1

The luxury of words, beyond all

Empires, makes me lord

And King. No beggar here,

In majesty, I can afford

The treasured wealth of ages.

Come, gather round and never fear

A drought of gold and silver.

This is the sphere

Of endless plenty, a dower

Of wealth and hammered power.

All words when servant to the Word

Are potentates whose laws are heard.

At the time my father founded Chalcedon and began intensive study and writing, some Christian ministers were making names for themselves and bringing in a lot of money promoting conservative politics, denouncing communism, or fighting one straw man after another. But my father knew this was not what his ministry was about. My father saw the big picture.

My father saw time itself as a creation of God. Human history lies within this boundary of God's plan. Human history has a beginning in Creation and an end in the final judgment. The focal point of this span of human existence is the incarnation of Jesus Christ and His death on the cross which paid our deserved death penalty for rebellion against God. At the end of time, my father would say, all men will know Jesus Christ. Some will know Him as their Savior and Lord Who restored them to fellowship with God. And some will know Him as their Judge. The minister's role is to point men toward Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, and pray that God's Spirit turn them to repentance and faith in His saving work on the cross.

My father always considered himself a minister first, because that was to him his highest calling. Sadly, many saw him as a threat to the gospel itself. He upset a great many people. My father once wrote that he believed in a maximal, not a minimal, Christianity. He did not believe the ultimate goal of the church was to see sinners saved. He believed that was where the church's work began. He believed that the church, the family, the school, and all individuals and institutions should be taught how to serve God in word, thought, and deed. My father believed God to be infinite, and so he urged Christians to see their faith in terms of the implications of the immense grandeur of what they confessed.

My father denounced the tendency to restrict the Faith to one part of our life. To my father, the Faith was more than a personal spiritual matter, though it is that. He saw the Faith as being as big as time and eternity. He saw no limits in God and no limits to His claims. He called men to not only believe in God and His Son Jesus Christ, but to obey in all areas of life. When he spoke of the power and majesty of God, he spoke more than theological lessons; he spoke with a certain faith and practicing confidence. My father believed that the future is as bright as the promises of God, and he urged others to so believe. But he never saw this as great faith; he saw it as the minimal essence of faith.

I remember when my father was not held in high esteem. Some thought he was a rogue who confused a simplistic spiritual message with this big picture and the responsibility it placed on men. But in the 1970s when Christians were being imprisoned and children were being removed from homes and churches were being padlocked for educating children in Christian and home schools, many across the country saw a distinguished, white-haired man they had never met appear in courtrooms to act as an expert witness in their defense. My father testified in dozens of these cases, and slowly the tide turned as victory after victory was won for religious liberty. People then saw my father in a new light. He helped them, yet made them re-examine their own beliefs. He expressed a faith that helped them take a stand based on the Word of God. Once my father was ridiculed on the witness stand by a prosecutor who sought to discredit his testimony. The prosecutor wanted my father to appear ignorant and prejudiced by saying he did not believe in evolution just because the Bible taught creation in six days. When the prosecutor cynically asked him why he did not believe in the theory of evolution, my father incredulously replied that he did not have that much faith. Many began to see that my father was a man who could teach them something about taking a stand for the Faith.

My father loved his work, because it was for the kingdom of God. His illnesses in recent years made his work difficult, and his only regret was that he had more work he would like to do, but he was ready to die. He believed in God and in the reality of Christ's substitutionary death for our sins. He believed that by God's mercy and grace Christ's work was put to his account. He knew that he would reign with Christ.

My father often spoke with delight of the Old Testament references to being gathered unto one's fathers. Many have commented that because my father was a minister, theologian, and scholar, he was already speaking with Moses, Paul, Calvin, Luther, Van Til, or other great men of the Faith. But several times over the last few years he spoke of going to heaven and his first thoughts were of seeing his "Mother and Papa." And then he would choke up and say "and so many godly ones." I knew his thoughts were going back to his Armenian heritage and his home and church life in Kingsburg. My father kept a framed picture of the old Armenian Martyrs' Presbyterian Church near his desk where he wrote. He also kept a copy in one of his Bibles with the inscription "my home church" on the back.

Dad revered his Armenian forebears. Some thought it to be part of a nationalistic pride. There was pride, but he saw in their witness the essence of what it meant to stand for the Faith. In a different time and in a different way, he made a stand for the Faith, and many will look back to his life and work and derive a similar strength and courage. My father's faith strengthened many of us and will continue to do so for years to come.

My father believed the Christian life was one of joy because our victory was certain in time and eternity, our victory having been achieved two thousand years ago by Jesus Christ. Our task is to believe and to stay faithful in dutiful obedience as long as God gives us breath. But even a guaranteed victory necessitates our entrance into the battle. And he constantly encouraged Christians to do battle against evil in service to Jesus Christ.

My father stayed faithful. His final words to his family were to fight the battle unto our certain victory. He said, "We are ordained to victory." He could say, as did Paul when he said goodbye to the Ephesians elders:

I know that ye all, among whom I have gone preaching the kingdom of God, shall see my face no more. Wherefore I take you to record this day, that I am pure from the blood of all men. For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God.

Last year I suggested to Dad that he was pushing himself too hard trying to preach, even on an occasional basis. His response was, "If I can't preach, there is no reason to go on." Though very ill, my father preached just a month before his death. The Sunday before he died, he apologized that he couldn't preach. It was that evening he asked me to gather my sisters. I would like to read the last paragraph of his last, undelivered sermon on 1 John 5:10-12:

"He that hath not the Son of God hath not life" (vs.12). Life is not a property of flesh but of God, Who by His grace gives us life. It is He Who made us and can alone give eternal life. Life must be lived on God's terms, according to His law, and in His grace. Thus, life is a gift, not an attribute.

Paul said, "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." My father lived for Christ and His kingdom. For the family, his friends, and the church of our day his passing is a great loss. For Dad this is gain. He has gained his certain victory in Christ.

But the battle goes on. And we honor my father and his life's ministry by continuing our labors in the kingdom as he urged us. They will continue at Chalcedon and Ross House Books and they will continue in his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and in their children. And many of you have come from great distances today because those labors of which he spoke continue in you. Our labor for Christ and the great moral battle of which they are a part continue. And as he urged his family, we must fight on because we are "ordained to victory."

Many people were impressed by my father's command of words. But even his greatest gift he saw as nothing before the God he served. I would like to conclude with another of my father's poems, this one written in 1952 when he was on the Indian reservation.

When the Silence Comes2

What shall I say when the silence comes?

The words, which like lush grass,

Grow rapidly on Babel's soil, will wither. The scums

Of speech, which with unhallowed brass,

Trumpet the emptiness, shall turn to shame.

Silence, that borderland of all our speech,

Sends lengthening shadows on our name,

Lays hands upon us. It is a death we never reach

But daily live in. It comes most surely.

The last is the essence of the first

And the certain guardian of the purely

Providential silence, hunger, thirst.

Lord God, when the time of silence comes,

When my sustenance is less than crumbs,

When I stand without a plea,

Let Jesus Christ then speak for me.

____________________

1 "The Luxury of Words" Copyright 2001 by Dorothy Rushdoony and the Rushdoony Irrevocable Trust.

2 "When the Silence Comes" Copyright 2001 by Dorothy Rushdoony and the Rushdoony Irrevocable Trust.

 

In general, visit http://www.chalcedon.edu .

 

[ September 03, 2001: Message edited by: MJ ]

[gamavor]

Unfortunately, he was not quite popular in the Armenian circles due to his rigid political and theological views. For quite some time, I was secret admirer of his philosophical concepts, although he is toooo conservative. To me, he was one of the greatest theologians in the 20 century, but again I do not agree with many of his concepts.

[MJ]

Perhaps he is.

 

But the circumstances I learned about him (just today) remind me one of the first allegoric lessons from my Elementary School "Aibbenaran" titled I think "The Elephant and the Dog." It is about an elephant walking through the street, and a dog barking at him.

[MJ]

Rushdoony's Work and Legacy

by Rev. Brian Abshire

On Thursday, February 8th, 2001, R. J. Rushdoony, potent Christian scholar and prolific author, president and founder of the Chalcedon Foundation, passed from this life to the next. Unknown by most evangelical Christians outside of the academic elite, "Rush's" influence on shaping the nature of theological discussion regarding social issues may well be seen in later generations as a pivotal point in laying the foundation for a future reformation.

"Rush" was from an ancient Armenian family who fled from the Turkish genocide in the early decades of this century (though born in America, Rushdoony's mother was actually pregnant with him during their escape). As a result of growing up in the Armenian sub-culture, rich in Christian history and tradition, and living in the last days of American Christian culture, Rush had a remarkable perspective from which to see our social problems. One the one hand, Rush never got over his family's love affair with the United States. America, in the early part of this century was less consistently humanistic than today, and evidenced more vestiges of our own Christian past. Christian America had given the persecuted Armenians freedom, and security and prosperity.

Yet at the same time, by end of the 1920's the theological rot of American Christianity and the sociological implications that decay had on the nation could be clearly seen. Liberalism had conquered the mainline churches, Princeton had fallen, Machen was excommunicated, Tennessee was humiliated before the world by enforcing the Genesis account of creation all while broad evangelicalism was sliding into revivalistic irrelevancy by retreating from American life into a pietistic infatuation with the "rapture."

Rushdoony knew that America had been great, because she had been godly, and it was perhaps his most enduring contribution that his life was spent understanding where we went wrong as a culture, and what we had to do to get back on track. Rushdoony believed deeply that the Bible was God's infallible Word, and that it had answers for every area of life. A strict Van Tillian, Rush approached every issue from the perspective of "What does God say about this issue?"

After serving as a missionary to Native Americans, and working in suburban churches, he began his serious scholarly work in the 1950's as he analyzed American culture from a Reformed and presuppositional perspective. Rush authored a number of books that revolutionized the Christian concepts of education and public policy. The Messianic Character of American Education was a devastating critique of the bankruptcy of the philosophical foundations of the public school system. He accurately saw back in the days when the biggest social problem facing teachers was chewing gum and talking in class where those presuppositions would ultimately lead, forty years later. Rush thus is known in some circles as the "father" of the Christian school movement, and much of his time in the seventies and eighties was spend as an expert witness securing the right of Christians to educate their own children, in their own way.

In books such as The Nature of the American System and This Independent Republic Rush demonstrated the Christian principles behind the formation of our country, and again, he predicted accurately the growing tyranny of the civil magistrate as it escaped the bonds of Christian presuppositions. In all these books, Rush was able to succinctly and powerfully delineate the essence of the problems facing us, from a thoroughly Christian world and life-view. As a result, he provided the intellectual foundation for a Christian resurgence in the public areas of life.

But Rushdoony was not just an expert in critiquing the problem. He was an avid postmillennialist, firmly believing that God had called his people to victory, and in 1973, provided the means, through his magnum opus, The Institutes of Biblical Law (self-consciously named after Calvin's Institutes of Christian Religion). In the Institutes, Rushdoony provided the first major work of Reformed casuistry in more than three hundred years. The book was so important, that at one point, even Dallas Theological Seminary carried it in their bookstore. Basically, and essentially, the Institutes was a Van Tilian demonstration of the antithesis between the Bible and modern humanistic assumptions; assumptions which far too many Christian scholars had unwittingly accepted. It also demanded that Christians work to rebuild every area of life according to God's Word. But Rushdoony was never a revolutionary nor did he depend upon politics, as his critics so often erroneously charged. Rush explicitly taught that culture would be changed from the ground up, as Christian men first learned to be self-governed in their own lives, their families, their callings and in their churches. This kind of revitalized Christianity would then spread to affect every area of life, art, science, culture and politics.

Rushdoony's analysis was not of course without controversy. He dealt seriously with the penal sanctions of the Law, and it is probably that aspect that earned him the undying enmity of so many. Yet he never backed down from Van Til's assessment that there were only two options, "autonomy or theonomy" and if God had said it, he took it seriously. It is perhaps the saddest commentary on modern Evangelical Christianity that those who knew of but rejected his scholarly work were not able (or willing) to face the logical implications of their own presuppositions.

Sadly, in this author's opinion, Rushdoony's intellectual and theological legacy will likely not be appreciated in this generation, partially due to theological inertia, partially due to the personal quirks of some of his disciples. Rush was a tremendously gracious man, kind and charitable. But some, who attached themselves to his theology have not been able to model this aspect of his character. Rushdoony used to be a popular speaker at Reformed Seminaries in the 70's, until certain followers poisoned the well with their acerbic attacks, and caustic comments, thus giving the entire movement he founded a bad name.

I knew Rush personally only for the last decade of his life. He served as one of the readers for my Ph.D. in sociology of religion, a job he did not have to do, but graciously did anyway, reading and critiquing my dissertation. I had the privilege of working with him and for him for several years at his think-tank in California, and I treasure every memory of the time I spent with him. I would not call him a "friend" for that would imply an unwarranted personal intimacy. He was not my "friend," but rather my "father" in the faith. Rush's books, bought in bulk in 1983 on my way back to England to begin my doctoral studies, changed my entire concept of Christianity. The days spent with him in his living room, surrounded by immense stacks of other books (Rush read and digested, one book a day throughout his life) was a more profound education than any course I had taken in college or seminary (and I quickly got into the habit of bringing a notebook and pen when visiting Rush, because everything he said was worth remembering). And though I did not always agree with his conclusions, I deeply appreciated his brilliance, profoundly respected him as a Christian man, and yes, I loved him as Timothy might have loved Paul.

It is a great injustice that the millions of covenant children who are being blessed by a Christian education may never know that he was the man God used to secure that right for them. It is a great injustice that though Rush provided the theological and intellectual foundation for the resurgence of the Christian Right in the 1980's, he is seldom given credit for initiating Christian activism. It is a great injustice that millions of Americans read Francis Schaeffer and never know that his most profound ideas were directly taken from Rushdoony. But Rush doesn't care, his work is done, he fought the good fight, he kept the faith and now he is at rest with his fathers. His work will live on, and perhaps a new generation, not yet born, will one day give him the honor that is his due. We will not see his like for a long time to come; God never seems to give us many Calvins, or Knoxs or Gillespies. Rush was a mighty man of valor, and the world is a poorer place without him. But there are men he taught who will continue his work, and like leaven, they will slowly and inevitably spread his ideas until that great day when every knee will bow, and every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Thank you, Rush, for your legacy. May we who are left behind remain faithful to it, and extend it, and so honor you, by honoring and obeying the gracious God you served. Rest now, in peace, until we see you again on that great day.

 

R. J. Rushdoony, R.I.P.

(appeared originally on www.lewrockwell.com)

by Gary North

The death of Rousas John Rushdoony on February 8 at the age of 84 will not be perceived as newsworthy by the American media, any more than Ludwig von Mises's death in 1973 and Murray Rothbard's death in 1995 were regarded as newsworthy. But being a newsworthy event is rarely the same as being a significant event.

Rushdoony's writings are the source of many of the core ideas of the New Christian Right, a voting bloc whose unforeseen arrival in American politics in 1980 caught the media by surprise. This bloc voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan. Two weeks after Reagan was inaugurated, Newsweek (Feb. 2, 1981) accurately but very briefly identified Rushdoony's Chalcedon Foundation as the think tank of the Religious Right. But the mainstream media did not take the hint. They never did figure out where these ideas were coming from. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were on television, and the media's intellectuals, such as they are, believe that television is the source of world transformation. Rushdoony in 1981 was almost unknown outside of the leadership of New Right/New Christian Right circles. So he remained at his death.

He was born in 1916 in New York City. His parents were newly arrived refugees. They had fled from the northern Armenian city of Van during the century's first genocide, the Turks' slaughter of an estimated million and a half Armenians, an event still ignored by most modern history textbooks and officially ignored by the British government in its United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Day, held last month. Rushdoony's older brother, a toddler, had died during the family's escape across the border into Russia.

His father had been educated at the University of Edinburgh. As a farewell gift from Scottish friends, he had been given English pounds sterling, which he had kept in cash. With this universally recognized currency, along with money he had saved from his job as a teacher after his return to Armenia, he was able to buy train tickets across Russia for himself, his pregnant wife, and her sister's family. They reached Archangel and then booked passage to the United States.

Rushdoony senior became a Presbyterian minister in America. His forebears had been priests for at least six generations, son by son. He ministered to Armenians for the remainder of his life. (With a photographic memory, he contributed two detailed eyewitness accounts for Viscount Bryce's official government volume, edited by a young Arnold Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916. His name is spelled Rushdouni in the book.)

R. J. Rushdoony learned to speak English in public school. He wound up majoring in English at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1930s. He attended graduate school there, receiving a master's degree in education, and then attended the liberal Pacific School of Religion, graduating in 1944. He entered the Presbyterian ministry in the mid-1940s, where he had a mission to the Chinese in San Francisco and later to the Western Shoshone tribe in Idaho.

Writing Career.

It was on the reservation that he began to write. He wrote for the Sunday School Times. He also wrote an essay for the Foundation for Economic Education on the erosion of the Indians' voluntary charity traditions under the collectivism of the U.S. government's reservation system. This essay was included in one of FEE's Ideas on Liberty volumes, back before FEE changed the name of The Freeman to Ideas on Liberty.

In 1959, his first book appeared, By What Standard? It was an introduction to the philosophy of Cornelius Van Til of Westminster Seminary. A shortened paperback version was published in 1960, Van Til. Then he began writing applied theology. Intellectual Schizophrenia (1961) was a short but trenchant critique of tax-funded, "neutral" public education. FEE's senior staff member, Rev. Ed Opitz, wrote the Introduction. Two years later, his masterpiece on public education appeared, The Messianic Character of American Education, a highly condensed, thoroughly documented, and theologically astute critique of the educational philosophies of over two dozen of the major founders and philosophers of American progressive education, from Horace Mann to John Dewey. Nothing like it had ever been published before, and nothing equal to it has been published since.

This book became the academic touchstone for leaders of the independent (non-parochial) Christian school movement, which was just beginning to accelerate in 1963. It provided them with both the theological foundation and the historical ammunition for making their case against compulsory, tax-funded education.

Then, in rapid succession, came This Independent Republic: Studies in the Nature and Meaning of American History (1964), essays on the conservative Christian roots of colonial America, and The Nature of the American System (1965), on the Unitarian takeover of the culture in the nineteenth century, culminating with the United Nations. Also in 1965, his remarkable and still little known essay/book appeared, Freud, which I contend is the most devastating short piece ever written on that charlatan's system.

He moved to the Los Angeles area in 1965 and founded the Chalcedon Foundation in that year. He began writing the monthly Chalcedon Report newsletter in October, 1965, which was mimeographed in the early years. (These newsletters are collected in one large volume, The Roots of Reconstruction.) In quick succession came a string of books: The Mythology of Science (1967), Foundations of Social Order: A Study in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church (1968), The Biblical Philosophy of History (1969), Myth of Over-Population (1969), Politics of Guilt and Pity (1970), Thy Kingdom Come: Studies in Daniel and Revelation (1970), Law and Liberty (1971) and The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (1971).

These books were the products of his disciplined reading habits: a book a day underlined, with a personal index in the back cover six days a week for 25 years. He then followed suit with another 25 years of the same schedule. It added up. So did the books he wrote. In the December issue of the older Chalcedon Report, Rushdoony would publish his reading and speaking totals for the year. The volume of work was beyond most scholars' capacities.

Rushdoony's great gift was his ability to pack many ideas and a mass of footnotes into a short, tightly written essay. He was primarily an essayist. His books were often subtitled, "Studies." They were collections of related essays.

The Institutes of Biblical Law.

The seemingly great exception to this related-essays approach was in fact not an exception: The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973). This was his magnum opus, a book of over 800 pages. It was the footnoted version of five years of sermons, 1968-72. This collection of sermons is like no other in modern publishing history. He will be remembered most of all because of this book. Harold O. J. Brown named it the most important Christian book of 1973 in his 1974 Christianity Today column an opinion that I suspect was not shared by the editors.

The Institutes revived a long-dead discipline among Protestants, casuistry: the application of Biblical legal principles to real-world situations. The book appeared on the 300th anniversary of the publication of Richard Baxter's even longer book, A Christian Directory. Only the late-seventeenth-century Anglican moral philosopher, Jeremy Taylor, produced anything of consequence in the field after Baxter. After 1700, the Protestant tradition of casuistry disappeared, succumbing first to Unitarian social philosophy under the banner of Isaac Newton, and later to social evolutionism after Darwin.

In the Institutes self-consciously named after John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) Rushdoony took the Ten Commandments as the ordering principle for the whole of Biblical law, Old Testament and New. He analyzed each of the case laws in terms of the Decalogue. He considered which principles carried over into the New Testament era and how they should be applied to modern life. He concluded that civil government must be shrunk drastically to meet Biblical standards, so that the free market and voluntary social action will flourish. He was an Austrian School proponent in most of his economic views, as his footnotes to Mises revealed throughout his career.

The Institutes launched the Christian Reconstruction movement. It represented a major transition in his writing career from detailed negative critical analyses to a detailed positive alternative. It filled a crucial gap in his previous strategy: "You can't beat something with nothing."

Transmission Belts.

Lenin believed that revolutionary social transformation comes through disciplined organizational transmission belts of power and subversion. He thought that permanent social change must be secretly planned at the top and implemented hierarchically by means of a cause-and-effect system of institutional commands and responses. His ideal was a statist command structure with absolute obedience and predictable, measurable results.

This is not the way the world works. The world is far too complex for any mastermind's transmission belt to deliver predictable results on command. The public failure of the Soviet Union in 1991 interred Lenin's theory of social causation in his Red Square casket, although, like Dracula, the monster occasionally climbs out of its casket and wanders through American college campuses, seeking whom it may devour.

Historically, almost every founder of the major religions began to preach his message on the periphery of society. But the best refutation of Lenin's transmission belt theory in modern history is Karl Marx. Marx was an obscure, unemployed, German-speaking academic in exile during his adult lifetime, but his ideas spread quietly through the revolutionary underground. Lenin put flesh on the ideological skeleton and successfully captured the Russian State in an improbable coup.

Marxism seemed to be the wave of the future over the next seven decades. Marxism was hot stuff. But then, in 1991 and early 1992, the fat, unreadable tomes on "what Marx really meant" were consigned unceremoniously to the dustbin of history, or its academic equivalent, the "books for a buck" tables in college-town bookstores.

The careers of men who pioneer fringe ideas are testimonies to hope that flies in the face of politically correct reality. Consider Rushdoony, Mises, and Rothbard. In terms of the number of books per title sold, the size of the mailing lists compiled, the votes in Congress recorded, and similar documentable artifacts suitable for inclusion in a Ph.D. dissertation on social history, all three were on the sidelines of history. But, in the long run, when bad ideas are implemented by civil governments in terms of the statist casuistry of the Powers That Be, societies begin to shift off-center in reaction, and move in new directions toward the periphery. Men who spent their careers marshaling logic and footnotes on the sidelines of respectable culture are seen in retrospect as the pioneers.

We can only guess in advance about who these retroactively successful pioneers will turn out to be, but we do know this: their intellectual opponents are strategically short-sighted in ignoring them during their lifetimes, and their followers are not content to roll over and play dead at the suggestion of a self-tenured establishment. The center does not hold. Those who stake their reputations and their careers on the preservation of the center eventually get left behind.

 

February 10, 2001

[MJ]

Isn't everything else that you have said in this forum one sided, too? Whether his views are extreme or not I don't know - that would be in the eyes of the beholder.

 

As far as the Mecca statement is concerned, isn't it exactly what Khoja means? And why are you insulted by "Mustafa?" It is a man's name. Would you be insulted if I call you Jacob, per se?

 

Finally, since your arrival to this forum, have you done anything other than insulting and demonizing others, totally out of the context, while they are not even represented in this forum?

[khodja]

MJ,

 

Numerous prominent and Armewnian community leaders in Ottoman Turkey and in Persia were given the title "Khodja." You should read about the Khodjas of Nor Julfa.

 

For years the conservative Armenians controlled thought in the American community. I am just trying to present a balanced viewpoint. You claim that all I do is denigrate those who don't agree with me. You seem to ignore the fact that I have had somewhat positive comments about Deukmejian, Poochigian and McCain, all three of who belong to the opposite party from myself, but who are reasonable men and distinguished public servants.

[MJ]

Too bad... However, I have just defined for you the meaning of the title "Khodja."




I think you are grossly misrepresenting the picture, however, I have no interest in engaging on that subject.

[khodja]

MJ,

 

All this is one sided, from those who revered him. His views were extreme for a free, democratic nation. Also, as an Armenian, I am insulted by your Mustafa or Mecca remarks.

[MJ]

I post the following material from the Chalcedon Foundation so that to give the readers a better idea on the ideology of Rushdoony.

 

 

Jerry Falwell's eschatological schizophrenia

 

By P. Andrew Sandlin

© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com

In his recent WorldNetDaily column, Jerry Falwell furnished an update on his fledgling Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy at Liberty University, "a comprehensive school that delves into the mysteries of the Bible as they relate to world events leading to Christ's imminent return." I find this announcement staggering, in light of Falwell's tireless efforts to turn our depraved, decadent nation back to God and to revive a truly Christian culture.

Let me first gratefully acknowledge that Jerry is one of the most courageous, outspoken Christians of our time. On almost all of the great, controversial issues confronting our modern culture, he is clearly on the biblical side: abortion, homosexuality, communism, ****ography, state education, free markets, missile defense and so on. In the '70s, he helped start Moral Majority, a group dedicated to taking America back from the liberalism and secularism that had captured it by the late '60s. His perspective on major TV talk shows (both network and cable) is almost unfailingly right down the line with the Bible. He presses diligently for a recovery of biblical truth and morality in our society; he is the Christian that the liberals most love to hate.

The defeatism of dispensationalism

The thing that has puzzled me about Jerry's unflagging efforts to restore biblical decency in our culture is his eschatology, highlighted most recently in the imminent (!) Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy.

Theologians will tell you that "eschatology" is one's view of the future – how it all will turn out in the end. Jerry holds to the popular idea of dispensationalism. This is, not surprisingly, the eschatology undergirding Tim LaHaye's popular "Left Behind" series. It holds that the moral conditions of the world and the church are destined get increasingly worse. When they get almost unbearably bad, the Lord Jesus will return in the clouds to "rapture" the living saints up to heaven. Then, the world will face a seven-year "tribulation period," during which a shadowy political figure known as the Antichrist will take over the world; persecute Jews and (new) Christians; and set up a final, cataclysmic encounter with Jesus Christ, who will return to earth (the third time) to liquidate the Antichrist and his cohorts and set up a 1,000-year earthly reign in Jerusalem.

This is the basic scheme of Jerry's and Tim's popular eschatology, which will be taught at the new school of prophecy.

The promise of postmillennialism

Jerry's Liberty University, and the Chalcedon Foundation, of which I am executive vice president, are on an eschatological collision course. Let me explain. We both agree that Christ will return one day visibly to earth ("The Second Coming"). We disagree radically on what will precede that great event. While Liberty and LaHaye are dispensational, we at Chalcedon are postmillennial. We believe that Christ is already reigning from the heavens (Acts 2:29-36). He extends His kingdom in the earth by His Spirit, using redeemed humans, Christians (Acts 2:14-21). The Bible teaches that Christ will return after all human enemies are placed under His feet (1 Cor. 15:24-27). Jesus indicates that it will be a good, long time between His First Coming and His Second Coming (Mk. 13:32-37; Lk. 12:37-48). Between these two Comings, the kingdom of God will grow slowly, almost imperceptibly (Mt. 13:31-33). But it will one day overwhelm the earth. Then will be fulfilled the great Old Testament prophecy that "[T]he earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea" (Hab. 2:14). There will be a fully Christian culture on earth – not only after Christ's Second Coming, but also before.

Jerry's contradictions

Now, it is easy to see how this view comports with the idea of a Christian culture that both Jerry and I are working for. The problem is that Jerry doesn't hold it. In other words, his eschatology conflicts with his idea of Christians' social responsibility. After all, if we are dead certain that the world is destined to get more depraved just before Jesus returns, and if we are equally convinced that He is coming very soon, why get involved trying to oppose the nanny-state, homosexuality, ****ography, abortion and other social sins rotting our culture? In fact, if we oppose them, aren't we just getting in the way of God's work, since we know that work will be ultimately unsuccessful? Maybe Liberty University and the Chalcedon Foundation are delaying the precious Second Advent of Christ by trying to hold back the tide of evil destined to flood the world just before Christ returns!

No, this is silly. It is right to work to turn our nation around for the Lord, and it is wrong to believe that these efforts are all for nothing. The end is not in sight, but a Christian society could be.

I do not ask Jerry to relax his vital work for Christian culture. I ask him to bring his eschatology into line with his cultural mission. Not to do this is to maintain a mind-bending schizophrenia that leads to all sorts of ironies and contradictions.

After all, if Jesus is coming at any moment, why start a Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy? Why all the planning and effort? If the school's stated objective is, in Jerry's words, to teach "the mysteries of the Bible as they relate to world events leading to Christ's imminent return," how can we honestly believe it is "imminent"? Jerry's school is scheduled to start in a couple of years. But won't we all be raptured by that time, and won't the Antichrist have closed and boarded up the Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy?

Moreover, why worry about abolishing abortion, exposing statism, and decreasing homosexuality if the rapture is "imminent"? If we work for a godly culture, we need to be assured that our efforts will not be in vain (1 Cor. 15:58). We need a divine guarantee that "God hath put [past tense!] all things under Christ's feet" (Eph. 1:22). We then go forward with the assurance that before Christ returns, all of His human enemies will be subjugated to Him. This is the confidence that propels us to work to bring America back to God.

Unfortunately, Jerry Falwell's sense of Christian cultural obligation conflicts sharply with his eschatology. As long as he teaches his students that "the end is near," that as we near the end, the world will become progressively more evil, and that all our efforts to clean up our culture will eventually come to nothing, then he will never convince them that they need to throw themselves into the task to which he has tirelessly committed himself – turning our nation back to God.

Jerry needs to abandon his eschatological schizophrenia and embrace biblical postmillennialism. It is this eschatology which fuels the vision of a Christian America and a Christian world.

 

Andrew Sandlin is executive vice president of the Chalcedon Foundation which since 1965 has been dedicated to applying historic, biblical Christianity in today's world. He is the author of "Christianity: Bulwark of Liberty" and several other works.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article....RTICLE_ID=23749

[gamavor]

My main objection to his ideas was introduction of the Bible Law(God's Law) as an effective Law in all matters concerning human society.

[MJ]

Maybe. But he was true to his belief, and it apears that he has lived hs life according to his doctrin, at least.

[khodja]

Gamavor,

 

You have isolated the fulcrum upon which our opposition rests. Biblical law is OK for those who choose to be members of a religious organization (church). National laws in a diverse society should not adhere to the beliefs of one religion, and especially not to the interpretation of one faction.

[MJ]

I will let Rushdoony himself reply to the previous allegations.

 

 

(Condensed from "This Independent Republic"1)

The idea of sphere law is basic to Christian orthodoxy and to an understanding of Western history. The concept is also termed sphere sovereignty, not an altogether accurate designation, since sovereignty is not ascribed to the spheres but to God and His law. Moreover, the term sphere sovereignty is a modern one, owing its central philosophical formulation to Abraham Kuyper and its great development to Herman Dooyeweerd.2 The historical and theological origins, however, are much older and are of vast significance to our history.

In ancient history, the Tower of Babel stands as the best witness to man's virtually universal faith.3 The unity of life was asserted, the unity of god or gods and man, of divine and human, so that man's total life, religious and political, was under the power of this unified divine-human order, against which there was no appeal.

The sole exception to this was ancient Israel when faithful to the Lord. The priestly and kingly offices were strictly separated, although without separating religious responsibilities from the king. In apostasy, the state sought this union of powers in pagan cults. This unity, however, was forbidden to the human order; only in the Messiah were the priestly and royal offices, common to pagan monarchs, to be united. The development of Judaism, however, represented the apotheosis of this unity, so that, as Christ, representing the incarnation and transcendental focus of this unity, came onto the scene, He clashed at once with a hierarchy which saw the challenge of His presence. The hope of the Jews had become a world order governed by themselves as God's chosen people, with the Messiah, where accepted by a particular party within the state, seen as subservient to this hope.

The coming of Christ was thus a challenge to the truly totalitarian world of antiquity. The Caesars recognized the challenge and fought it savagely and bitterly, and lost.4 With Athanasius and Augustine, the faith triumphed that there can be no confusion between the human and the divine orders.

The history of the Christian era has been largely the struggle in some sense to reestablish the divine and unitary state, the Tower of Babel bond of heaven and earth, as against the Christian sundering of that bond. In the West, the Holy Roman Empire quickly developed the same claim to represent total order, and its one-power theory led it to claim "apostolic" rights over the church. Against this, in terms of the Christian faith, there was the bulwark of Augustinian and Gelasian affirmations of the two-power theory, i.e., church and state, both under God. Later, however, Pope Innocent III abandoned this concept in favor of the one power idea, the church as the divine-human bond of heaven and earth, the kingdom of God on earth, though various factors within the church paved the way for the development of sphere law and the integrity of creaturely activity.

The Reformation, while challenging the one-power concept of Innocentine faith, and of the state, was also a continuation of the new sense of priesthood being developed by the Tertiaries. Significantly, also, Augustine was a major influence on both Luther and Calvin. With respect to sphere law, Calvin at three major points fashioned the doctrines of a new world order:

1. Calvinism denied that the kingdom of God is to be equated with the church. Instead, wherever God reigns, there is the kingdom and God should reign everywhere. Hence, man can serve God everywhere, and the kingdom of God includes every area of life, and every institution which obeys His commandments.

2. Calvinism, both in terms of this concept of the kingdom and in terms especially of justification by faith, which relates man directly to God, asserted the priesthood of all believers. Thus, man is as fully a priest of God at his business desk and cobbler's bench, when he faithfully obeys God, as is any ordained man in the pulpit. He has direct access to God, and serves God everywhere. Hence, the glory of the closed church meant for Protestantism that the institution and building were there for worship, but not needed for access constantly to God, Who heard men everywhere. Every sphere of life is an area of priesthood and a place of nearness to God. Similarly, man under God is king or vicegerent of creation, called to exercise dominion over creation by godly exploitation, exploration, knowledge, and activity. Again, he is a prophet, called upon to interpret creation in terms of the Word of God.

3. This led to a third factor, not immediately recognized but steadily asserting itself. In view of this doctrine of the spheres, and the kingdom, neither church nor state has any right to rule over the spheres, since each is directly under God and equally in the kingdom. It is Christ Who is the mediator, and the only mediator, and no institution, order, or person can interfere between God and man. Interventionism is a pretension to deity, a claim to powers of mediation and to divine government, and hence is inadmissible.

Medieval feudalism, whatever its weaknesses, still had the Christian virtue of asserting against total government the limitation of powers and the responsible, contractual or feudal nature of power. It was thus a forerunner of true federalism. To this inheritance was added the Protestant concept. The independence of the spheres was an interdependence in life and activity but an independence in terms of human authority. It meant for society a necessary division of powers in institutional and sphere activity: in civil government (as developed in the United States, executive, legislative, and judicial branches, all under a constitution which presupposes a higher law), in the church (minister, session or board, members, church synods and conferences, creeds, Bible), in education (the development in the United States of trustees, a new concept and derived from church lay rule), and in other realms a like division. Man, being a sinner, needs checks and balances. Man, being in the kingdom and a priest, serves God everywhere. Every area has its own law-sphere, and every area its own powers as well as God-imposed restraints on its powers. The unity of these activities and spheres is not in any one of them, in man, or in the whole, but is transcendental; it is in God only. Man experiences the spheres as unity, but he sins if he seeks to unify them under his government. Thus, no institution or sphere, nor man himself, individually or collectively, can claim to be the source or the mediator of unity and authority. Totalitarianism, civil or ecclesiastical, claims institutional divinity and authority.

The sources of American liberty are deeply rooted in this faith and cannot long survive apart from it. The U. S. Constitution had a severe conception of the limitation of powers, and most present federal activity is in violation of the express power doctrine of the Constitution. Instead of being rootless, American history is deeply rooted and hence hostile to the empty forms of traditionalism. Its emphasis on localism and development within context are aspects of this respect for sphere law, or, from a theological point of view, for the priesthood of all believers.

__________

1 Condensed from chapter 11, "Sphere Laws" in R. J. Rushdoony, This Independent Republic (Nutley, NJ: The Craig Press, 1964). Ross House Books will be republishing this book in 2001.

2 For this development, see Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1961); Evan Runner in Christian Perspectives 1961 (Hamilton, Ontario: Guardian Publishing Co., 1961), 188; Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 19531958), 4v.

3 See Eric Burroughs, "Some Cosmological Patterns in Babylonian Religion," in S. H. Hooke, ed., The Labyrinth, Further Studies in the Relation between Myth and Ritual in the Ancient World (London: SPCK, 1935), 4370; and Andre Parrot, The Tower of Babel (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955).

4 Ethelbert Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955).

 

http://www.chalcedonreport.com/html/0701_0...701_0801CR.html

[MJ]

An interesting one:

 

Publisher's Foreword:

Evangelicalism

 

By Rev. R. J. Rushdoony

 

Evangelicalism is a beautiful word that has come into a little disrepute because of its misuse in recent years. Early in the 20th century, a movement arose calling itself fundamentalism. Very early, the Arminian wing gained control, stressed certain views strongly, and became known as the "fighting fundamentalists." While not Reformed, they were zealous and effective, much hated for their successes. After World War II, great segments of this movement drifted into compromises, especially on inerrancy, and called themselves evangelicals. They waged war on fundamentalism, and also often on Cornelius Van Til and his presuppositionalism. The notable institution for evangelicals is Fuller Seminary, at war against Biblical inerrancy, and the Rev. Billy Graham, with his congenial spirit of compromise.

The heart of this new evangelicalism can be seen in the Fuller Seminary position on the Bible. Professor Donald A. Hagner, in Theology News & Notes, June, 1998, held that "it is hard to imagine anything more debilitating to the work of a Biblical scholar than a priori insistence on inerrancy" (p. 7). This new evangelicalism sees its future better based on the critical premise of modernism than on the historic foundations of the Christian Faith. It sees orthodoxy as imposing alien, non-scholarly premises on Christian scholarship whereas the premises of modernism are supposedly scientific and valid. It will not admit that all starting points are a priori acts of faith, and that no scholarship is possible without them. The question is rather this: Do we begin with God or man, with the word according to God or the word according to man? The new evangelicalism begins with man, not with God.

In so doing, it ignores man's fallen state. Certainly Dr. Hagner never mentions nor considers it. Yet the Biblical Faith requires it. Is man a fallen sinner or a capable scholar and judge over God and his word? Dr. Hagner sees no question of competency, but the Bible presupposes it.

The new evangelicalism is at odds with the Reformation and often in open sympathy with St. Thomas Aquinas and his rationalism. This should not surprise us. Rationalism is too much a part of evangelicalism. Dr. Hagner is concerned with "the credibility of the evangelical perspective in the larger intellectual world" (p. 8). But is it our calling to please that "large intellectual world" or our Almighty God and Redeemer?

As a young man, I recall being told of an aging modernist scholar who in his younger days had held he was as good a fundamentalist as any! Claims are cheap; affirmations must be yea, yea--not a vague, compromising word. In due time, these new "evangelicals" will discard the term as having served its purpose.

It is our duty to uphold the Faith, not the popular, nor the noted. The days of these compromisers are numbered because God is God. One report lists only eleven Christian colleges, universities, or seminaries as still maintaining inerrancy. So much the worse for the rest of them. Christendom has more than once seen the faithful almost disappear, but the true Faith survives and revives. Will you?

http://www.chalcedon.edu/report/98oct/Rush...gelicalism.html

[gamavor]

Matthew 22:21 - They said, "Caesar's." Then he said to them, "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."

[MJ]

You might've noticed that I like quoting the same passage in this forum, too. But I am sure that Rushdoony was also aware of it. By the way, some place I read that he is not opposed to the separation of Church and State, he opposes the separation of the government from God.

But I know too little about his doctrine and him to bring arguments in his defense. However, one thing is evident that we are "too small of puppies to bark at him." One possible explanation may be his answer in the courtroom about the creation of the earth desribed in the Eulogy by his son.

[ September 04, 2001: Message edited by: MJ ]

[gamavor]

Agree! As I said he is a great theologian and it is sad to admit that since 11-12c we hadn't have anybody close to him, ot at least I'm not aware of any (it doesn't matter that he was not affiliated with the Armenian Church).
The man is idealist to the extreme!

[MJ]

Given Armenian Church’s Ecumenical activism, that shouldn’t be a concern, am I right?

[gamavor]

MJ,

 

In democracy one can chose to be a Protestant, Buddhist, Mohamedanian and whatever he/she pleases. I’m not personally fan of Ecumenism or of any kind of Protestants, or other heresies, but I tolerate them and expect them to do the same. If they don’t tolerate me, than I will explain to them the meaning of the words of our Lord , that once you were puzzled about : “I came to you not with peace, but with sword”.

[MJ]

Please do so. As a matter of fact, I would love to see here (not in this thread, however) someone who may make the case for the Armenian Apostolic Church. Maybe then, he can return home the prodigal son.

[khodja]

The following Armenians achieved high positions in American elected office. You can see that the majority were Republicans.

 

George Deukmejian, Republican Governor of California.

 

Stephen Boghos Derounian, Republican US Congressman from Long Island.

 

Adam Benjamin, 1/2 Armenian Democratic US Congressman from Indiana.

 

Charles *****yan, Republican US Congressman from Fresno, California.

 

Anna Eshoo, 1/2 Armenian Democratic US Congresswoman from Silicon Valley, California.

 

John Sweeney, 1/4 Armenian Republican US Congressman from Upstate New York.

 

It is interesting to note that both Congressional Democrats were 1/2 Assyrian, while the others are all Republicans.

[MJ]

Setting the Record Straight:What Chalcedon Really Believes

 

by Rev. P. Andrew Sandlin

 

In a lawless, compromising, and apostate age, any Christian individual, church, or institution that stands unequivocally for the Biblical authority and the orthodox Christian Faith and, moreover, obedience to the Word of God and its application for all of life, is likely to be misunderstood, maligned, and slandered, both outside and inside the church. Often, these assaults are the result of misinformation, in that professed Christians routinely break the Ninth Commandment. Unintentionally, they just as frequently pass on to others erroneous information. The fact that their intent is often not malevolent does not absolve them from their guilt of violating God’s law. Others are truly malevolent. Their intent is malicious, and they employ their tongue to spread deceit, which they know to be deceit.

Chalcedon is often the object of these attacks, both clearly malevolent as well as simply misinformed. Christians suckled on a pietistic view of the Faith and life simply cannot conceive of a world-conquering Christianity; because they cannot grasp this premise, they dismiss its defenders and spread misinformation about its position. Some are simply too irresponsible (or lazy) to acquaint themselves with our position and, failing to understand it, impute to Chalcedon positions and statements we do not espouse, and, in some cases, just the opposite of what we espouse. The malevolent detractors, on the other hand, know fully well what we believe and teach; their objective is to erect straw men, paint Chalcedon in the poorest possible light, and assassinate our position and character. We are not interested in dialoging with or defending ourselves against the accusations and innuendo of these malicious individuals. We are, however, patient with those who have not been sufficiently exposed to or who do not adequately grasp our position, and have simply been the recipients of misinformation. For that reason, I will set forth eight particular positions, often imputed to us, which we do not believe. At least on these points, I will set the record straight as to what Chalcedon actually believes so that sincere, honest inquirers may gain an informed understanding of our position, whether they agree with us or not.

 

Justification by Law or Works

 

Because we strongly emphasize the authority of Biblical law, holding it to be a verbal description of God’s character, and because we hold that Biblical law should govern every area of man’s life and thought, it is sometimes suggested we believe that man is justified by keeping the law, or somehow by his good works. This charge is not merely seriously erroneous; it is monstrously mistaken. As Calvinists, we believe that sinners are saved solely on the ground of Christ’s substitutionary, atoning death and law-keeping life, the passive and active obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 5:21; 1 Pet. 2:24). Further, we believe that justification, man’s legal acceptance in the sight of God as "not guilty," is appropriated by faith alone (Rom. 5:1; Eph. 2:8-10). Because faith itself is a gift of God, no law-keeping or works of any kind that man can perform could in any way secure or contribute to his justification or acceptance before God. God does not cooperate with man in saving him. God saves sinners; He does not help them save themselves. Law-keeping and good works are the essential results of justification; they are not the ground or means of appropriating justification. All who are truly justified will obey God’s law, progressively, though not perfectly, in this life (1 Cor. 6:9-10; 1 Jn. 1:8). God, by His matchless grace in the atoning death of His Son, saves those whom He has chosen. He does the deep work of regeneration and conversion in their lives. This is God’s work, not man’s. But the God who justifies also sanctifies, and sanctification means progressive obedience to God’s requirements, His law of the Old and New Testaments.

 

Those who teach that man is justified by law-keeping or good works are pronounced cursed by God (Gal. 1:8-9; 2:16); just as clearly, those who as God’s covenant people do not obey His law are cursed by God (Dt. 28:15-68). Men are justified by Christ’s redemptive work alone, and appropriate this justification by faith alone; but those who are truly justified manifest that justification by their obedience to God’s law.

 

Political Dominion

 

Because we believe that the Bible should apply to all of life, including the state; and because we believe that the Christian state should enforce Biblical civil law; and finally, because we believe that the responsibility of Christians is to exercise dominion in the earth for God’s glory, it is sometimes assumed that we believe that capturing state apparatus and enforcing Biblical law on a pervasively unbelieving populace is one of our hidden objectives. Our critics sometimes imply or state outright that we are engaged in a subtle, covert attempt to capture conservative, right-wing politics in order to gain political power, which we will then use to "spring" Biblical law on our nation. This is flatly false. We do not believe that politics or the state are a chief sphere of dominion.

 

It is understandable why many people assume that we do hold this position, however. We believe firmly in social change. Liberals believe firmly in social change. Liberals believe that social change is the effect almost exclusively of politics and state coercion. For example, they believe that we can change society by means of state-financed and governed "public education"; health, education, and welfare programs; and speech codes. In other words, they believe, like communists, that man is essentially a plastic being that can be fundamentally reshaped by external means -- education, wealth, health, penitentiaries, and so forth. Since no later than the French Revolution, most civil governments in the West have believed that social change occurs by revolution, not by regeneration. When, therefore, liberals (and even some alleged Christians) see us supporting and working toward social change, they presume that we are interested in political power. In simpler words, because they believe in social change exclusively by means of politics, they assume that anyone who supports social change or gets involved in politics is attempting to gain state power in order to further a social agenda.

This is a serious miscalculation. We believe in regeneration, not in revolution. Men are not changed fundamentally by politics, but by the power of God. Men’s hearts are changed by regeneration (Jn. 3:3). They are translated from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God’s dear Son (Col. 1:13). From that point, they progressively work to reorient their lives and every sphere they touch in terms of God’s holy, infallible Word. Long-term, pervasive social change is the result of extensive regeneration and obedience by the people of God. This means, of course, that there can be no Christian society of any significance or longevity unless a large number of its members are Christians.

 

We do encourage Christian political involvement, but not for the reason that many people suppose. In fact, we believe it is important for Christians to get involved in politics because we do not believe politics is too important. The great problem with modern politics is that it is used as an instrument of social change. We at Chalcedon passionately oppose this. The role of the state is in essence to defend and protect, in the words of the early American Republic, life, liberty, and property. It is to reward the externally obedient by protecting them from the externally disobedient (Rom. 13:1-7). Its role is not to make men virtuous; we have a name for civil governments that attempt to create a virtuous society: totalitarian. Biblically, the role of the state is to suppress external evil: murder, theft, rape, and so forth. Its role is not to redistribute wealth, furnish medical care, or educate its citizens’ children.

 

We do believe that the state one day will be Christian, but this no way implies that the role of the state is to Christianize its citizens. The Christian state is highly decentralized (localized). Our objective, therefore, in supporting Christian political involvement is to scale down the massive state in Western democracies, reducing it to its Biblical limits. We do not believe in political salvation of any kind.

 

A Dispensable Church

 

Because we believe that men should seek first the kingdom of God, not the church; because we believe that the kingdom of God is much wider than the church; and, consequently, because we believe that the institutional church is simply one dimension of the church, it is often charged that we believe the institutional church is a dispensable, and perhaps even unnecessary, institution. This is greatly in error. While in the Bible there is but one true church, this church can been seen from several different perspectives. The Reformers recognized, for example, the invisible dimension of the church: that group of genuine believers throughout history seen only to the eye of God. This was not, in their mind, the institutional church. They were far from dismissing the institutional church, however. The Calvinists of the British Isles, for example, went so far as to concur with the church of Rome in identifying the institutional church with the kingdom of God. To their credit, more recent Reformed theologians have recognized the mistake of this view, though this does not imply that they believe that the institutional dimension of the church is unnecessary. On this we agree fully with them.

 

The church as mentioned in the New Testament is the ecclesia. It began in the Old Testament as the visible covenant community. It is, in Rushdoony’s words, God’s government in the earth, and it is this government both within and without its institutional dimension. But its institutional dimension is one vital aspect of the church. Must the church be limited to its institutional expression? Surely not. Schools, colleges, mission agencies, evangelistic organizations, Christian foundations, and on and on may truly be considered an aspect of the church even though they are not themselves the institutional church. The kingdom of God is bigger than the church, just as the church is bigger than its institutional dimensions. However, the institutional church as the visible covenant community under the government of godly elders is a vital part of the church and the kingdom of God. Every Christian should be a member of some orthodox, institutional church. This institutional church should not monopolize or dominate the Christian life or the Faith, but it is a vital part of it. The institutional church as an agency for preaching the gospel, administering the sacraments, edifying the saints, and exercising godly dominion is an essential feature of God’s kingdom.

 

Kingdom by the Power of Man

 

Because we affirm postmillennialism, and because we believe that no church (in any of its dimensions) will ever have any qualitatively different and superior divine resources at its disposal than it now has, we are often accused of believing that man by his efforts, ingenuity, and strength is to bring in the kingdom of God on the earth. We are accused, in other words, of an implicit humanism. This is a woefully mistaken charge. In the first place, Jesus Christ already "brought in the kingdom" at His first coming. His glorious reign was formalized at His ascension (Dan. 7:13-14), after which He showered His royal gifts on His people so that they could advance His kingdom in the earth (Ac. 2:17-18, 30-33). Christ’s kingdom is something that Christ Himself brings in. Christians do not bring in the kingdom; Christ brings in the kingdom.

We do believe that God uses Christians as instruments to advance His kingdom. Thus, just as He used His covenant people in the Old Testament to advance His kingdom among the Hebrews, so He uses His people in the great multi-racial, multi-national church to advance His kingdom and His world-conquering gospel. The so-called Great Commission (Mt. 28:18-20) is the Marching Order of the King. Christians are His subjects, and they are called to obey Him in every area of their lives. Further, they are called to exercise godly dominion in every sphere with which they come into contact. Every area of the Christian¹s life is to be governed by God and His written Word, the Bible. God uses man’s obedience to advance His kingdom. Jesus Christ did not tell His disciples that it was essential for Him to remain on earth so that the kingdom would be advanced; rather, He told them it was essential for Him to leave so that they could do greater works (Jn. 14:12; 16:7). Christians can do greater kingdom-advancing works in the King’s absence, because at His ascension He was crowned with great gifts which He bestowed on His people by which His saints take dominion in the earth (Dan. 7:18, 22, 27).

But fundamentally the work is God’s, not man’s.

 

Persecution for Religious Beliefs

 

Because we believe that the state is an inherently religious institution, and because we believe that a Christian state should enforce the law of God appropriate to the civil sphere, some have accused us of endorsing state persecution for religious beliefs. This is wrong. Biblical law does require criminalization of a few sins like murder, kidnapping, theft, and child sacrifice; but these are not religious beliefs; they are violent practices that assault the fabric of society. The Bible does not permit the state to persecute or suppress any religious belief, only certain dangerous, socially destructive practices.

Further, Biblical civil law is designed for a covenanted society, just as Biblical ecclesiastical and familial law are: Paul’s epistles, for example, are written to Christian churches, not to Satanic synagogues. Biblical law governing the family is designed for Christian families. Likewise, Biblical civil law is created for a covenanted, Christian society. This is why God dictated His legislation (including civic legislation) to ancient Israel after He had entered into covenant with her (Ex. 19). Biblical civil legislation is for a covenanted nation, not for modern, secular Western democracies at war with God. Our first objective is to work to Christianize them.

 

Automatic Christian Children

 

Because we believe that the children of Christian parents are to be included in the visible covenant of the church, and because we believe that these children should be treated as though they are among God’s elect unless they give definite, objective evidence otherwise, occasionally some assume that we believe children of Christian parents are "automatically" saved because they are born into a Christian family, and that they do not need to hear the gospel. This is flagrantly untrue. The gospel is the chief component of man¹s salvation (Rom. 10:13-15). The gospel is the good news of salvation by faith in Christ alone, in His great sacrificial work of redemption on the cross. No one is saved apart from this work, or from the message of the gospel. The gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16).

Nevertheless, the Bible generally promises salvation to covenant children ‹ that is, the children of Christian parents. This is one vital provision of the Abrahamic covenant: God would be a God to the seed of Abraham in the same sense He was a God to Abraham himself (Gen. 17:7). This is the promise to which Christian parents cling (Gal. 3:29). It is the promise not merely of "common grace," or general providential provision, but of salvation. This fact is reinforced in Acts 2:38-39:

“Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.”

The promise of salvation is not just to those adults who believe, but also to their children. This is not a promise that every single covenant child will certainly be saved (Rom. 9:6-9), but we have good Biblical warrant to assume that our children are the elect of God unless they demonstrate otherwise by their faithlessness and disobedience. In the pithy Puritan quote: “God casts the lines of elections in the loins of Christian parents.”

In no way does this imply that they do not need to hear the gospel; indeed, it means that we must be more urgent in preaching to them the gospel. 2 Timothy 3:15 teaches us that the Old Testament Scriptures instructed the child Timothy in salvation, and it is most likely that his godly mother and grandmother nourished him in the gospel (2 Tim. 1:4-5). This is the calling of Christian parents: to nourish our children in the gospel and in the Faith. From infancy they must be taught that they are sinners and stand under God¹s judgment, that the only hope of salvation is Christ’s redemptive work which can be appropriated only by faith. Those who do not nourish their children in the gospel, but simply presume that their covenant inclusion guarantees regeneration, run the risk that their children will never, or only rarely, hear the gospel by which men alone are saved.

We may very well never know the exact moment of regeneration and conversion in Christian children; our calling as parents is not to absolute knowledge, but to faithful obedience. We nourish and bathe them in the gospel and the Faith and train them up as Christians (Eph. 6:1-4), as God¹s property (Ezek. 16:8, 20-21). Sinners are saved by the sovereign grace of God, but the preaching of the gospel is the instrument by which He accomplishes this salvation.

 

Faith is Mainly Scholarship

 

Because we stress the importance of ideas, and because we believe that sound Christian scholarship is essential to the advancement of Christ¹s kingdom, it is sometimes thought that we believe that the Christian Faith is mainly a matter of Christian scholarship, and that those who are not scholars are second-class Christians. This is severely in error. God and the Faith, not scholarship, are central. Scholarship is instrumental; it can be used for good or evil purposes. The Bible forbids and condemns godless, faithless scholarship, not godly faithful scholarship (1 Cor. 1:18-31; 1 Tim. 4:13). Moses, Paul, and Apollos all used their extensive learning for the sake of Christ and His kingdom. Festus declared of St. Paul, “Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad” (Ac. 26:24).

Critics of Christian scholarship often draw attention to 1 Corinthians 1, where Paul extols the foolish things of the world that confound the wise. What Paul is arguing against, of course, is not godly learning, but the pseudo-scholarship of the Greeks. The apostle’s methodical argument in the book of Romans is a masterpiece of scholarly theological argumentation. In today’s world, scholarship is almost exclusively on the side of God-haters, humanists, and apostates. Almost all of the leading seminaries in the country are apostate, and this is only slightly less true of colleges. Higher education is morally lower education. Many Christians, therefore, simply equate scholarship and learning with modernism, apostasy, and so forth.

 

This is not merely mistaken from a Biblical standpoint; it is historically uninformed. The highest point of scholarship in the medieval world was within the bosom of the church; and although it was defective at certain key points, it was at least an attempt at intellectual reverence for God. The scholarship of the Reformation was even more rigorously Biblical, and this was no less true of the Reformation¹s successors, the Puritans, who greatly influenced England and the formation of the United States. The earliest institutions of higher education in the Americas were distinctly Christian, and only later apostatized with the advent of Deism, Rationalism, Transcendentalism, and other heresies.

 

Scholarship should grow out of a vigorous Faith, but it is God and the Faith, not scholarship, that is central. Chalcedon agrees with Richard Weaver’s premise that ideas have consequences. Men are saved by grace, not by ideas, but ideas are the result of a work of grace ‹ this is why salvation has an inescapably intellectual component (Lk. 1:77). The Bible itself is a revelation of ideas as much as it is words; it is not a collection of isolated words, but of words that are divinely inspired and arranged to set forth ideas. Biblical revelation is propositional: it comes to us in words and sentences, conveying thought. To say that we should dismiss ideas and the work of scholarship is really to say that we should dismiss God’s written revelation. One is deeply impressed, for example, with the wide scholarship of men like the Apostle Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Kuyper, Van Til, and many others. But this scholarship, in every case, springs from a simple faith -- faith in the sovereign, Triune God and the authority of the Word of God. Scholarship is an instrument in the service of the advancement of the Faith and of Christ’s kingdom. Scholarship is not central to the Faith, but a vigorous Faith requires scholarship. It is this sort of scholarship to which Chalcedon is dedicated.

 

Racist Religion

 

Because we believe that the godly are called to exercise dominion in the earth; and because the notion of godly dominionism has been revived in the United States; and, finally, because some who claim to believe in dominion are also racists, it is occasionally presumed that we hold to a racist religion. The term “racism” itself can be and has been variously defined. One thing is for certain: We do not believe that one race is inherently superior to another, or that only one sector of the race is to take dominion as Christians, or that sinners of whatever race do not stand equally guilty in the sight of God, or that Christians of a certain race do not stand equally justified in the sight of God. Therefore, we believe that the racism of the KKK, the Arian Nation, the Identity Movement, Black Power, the Black Panthers, and the Asian, Hispanic, and Indian racist movements are anti-Christian at their very core.

 

Chalcedon supports only one form of “racism”: God blesses, nourishes, and honors the Royal Race of the Redeemed, all of those of whatever physical race that have placed their faith and trust in Jesus Christ, and God curses the race of the First Adam, all of those who live in unbelief, rebellion, and work-righteousness (Rom. 5:12-21). This is the only “racial discrimination” the Bible knows anything about. God discriminates in favor of covenant-keepers, and discriminates against covenant-breakers (Dt. 28). Some may object that He favors the race of Israel in the Old Testament era, but it must be immediately noted that His choice was not fundamentally racial, but religious. For this reason, Gentiles could become a part of the Jewish race, and thus a part of the covenant people of God (Gen. 17:12-13). The non-racial aspect of Biblical Faith is clear from Ephesians 2:11-15:

“Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace....”

All converted Jews and Gentiles stand on the same plane of blessing in God’s sight, just as all unconverted Jews and Gentiles stand on the same plane of judgment in God’s sight. The race God favors is the race of the Second Adam; the race He disfavors is the race of the First Adam. And this has nothing to do with physical race.

 

Disposable Eschatology

 

Because we believe that Christ’s first coming established His kingdom (Mt. 3:2), and His church is presently energized to advance that kingdom (Mt. 28:18-20, and because some heretics have suggested that His Second Advent, and the final resurrection and judgment of the just and unjust occurred in A. D. 70, we are sometimes criticized for diminishing the importance of the great eschatological (future) events of Christianity. This charge is quite erroneous. As we noted above, Jesus Christ bestowed His royal gifts on His people after His ascension. He does not delay His blessings for kingdom advancement until His Second Coming.

 

Nonetheless, there will be no sinlessness until the eternal state, which follows the Second Coming (1 Cor. 15:23-25). There will be a great time of future earthly peace and prosperity before the end (Is. 65:17-25), as a result of the success of the gospel; but there will still be death and sin in this era (Rev. 20:7-10). Death will not be finally overcome until Christ returns (1 Cor. 15:24-27). The millennium is a Godly Golden Age, but it is no utopia. The Second Coming definitively puts the finishing touches on God¹s plan for the earth and human history. It is the ringing culmination of His providential dealings with man.

Further, those who claim that Jesus Christ’s Second Advent, and the final resurrection and judgment of the just and unjust occurred in A. D. 70, assault the Bible and the Faith. Acts 1:11 tells us that Jesus will return just as he ascended -- bodily and visibly, with his disciples gazing at him, and we know that this has not yet happened in history. He is to come “n flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thes. 1:8). Likewise, 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 declares:

“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

 

This teaches that the final physical resurrection of the redeemed will occur when Christ returns, with great royal fanfare: “a shout…voice of the archangel, and…the trump of God.” This is the announcement of the King’s return to his earthly jurisdiction. It is a physical coming creating momentous physical consequences: resurrection of bodies, and the equipment of the redeemed for the eternal state and the unredeemed for eternal perdition. It concludes human history.

 

Thus, while we must never diminish the power granted the church because of the operation of Christ’s First Coming, we must be careful also never to diminish the finality of Christ’s work in the world which the Second Advent initiates. The Second Coming and its attending events are crucial to the Christian Faith.

 

Conclusion

 

This should set the record straight on certain key issues on which Chalcedon’s views are often misunderstood. We will continue to suffer slander at the hands of unscrupulous, devious men -- inside the church and out. But honest Christians, whether they agree with us or not, are entitled to hear a forthright declaration of our position on these misunderstood issues.

 

P. Andrew Sandlin is executive vice president of Chalcedon and editor of the Chalcedon Report and other Chalcedon publications. He has written hundreds of scholarly and popular articles and several monographs.

http://www.chalcedon.edu/faith/sandlin_wha...on_believes.htm

[khodja]

So now you will play Chalcedon's trumpet all over the internet? It would have been preferable for me had you not entered these shores. Those of us who were raised in the American traditions firmly believe, to the core of our being, in the principles upon which America was founded. Your value system is that of the East, not one of religious tolerance.

[MJ]

You don't want me to appeal to Mustafa, again, do you?

 

And don't insult the American culture, please, by claiming that you are risen in that tradition. I can also add a couple of other comments about a type of schizophrenia we have touched on earlier, but I would prefer to spare the readers.

[khodja]

I know your kind. To you there is only ONE kind of Armenian. Anything else is "psychosis." You are a Soviet to the core of your being.