A Christian Survey of World History

Twentieth Century, II

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*This is an unedited and unoffical print version of R.J. Rushdoony’s lecture.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:01 Between July 1970 and April 1971, three fourths of the year. It went through fifteen major printings, tremendous additions. Some of them as much as 100,000 copies. It also had a Literary Guild addition, a Psychology Today Edition, as well as other printings. It has been enormously popular.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:45 Modern man with his unbelief likes the vision here, because basically hating God, he hates himself and hates life. This is the kind of world we face, a world which most men around us want. They are suicidal. They hate God and therefore themselves. I recall some years ago, and I’ve referred to this a time or two, reading with a sense of shock an account by a psychiatrist of patients in institutions, mental institutions, whose hatred of God is so great, but the only way they can strike at God is to strike at themselves because they bear the image of God and so they deliberately defile themselves. These are mature men and women, highly intelligent, who will deliberately eat their own urine and feces and do it with pleasure because, “See what I’m doing to your image, God.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:17 This is the hatred of God that is in the heart of man. As our Lord said, speaking his wisdom ages ago, ” He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul. All they that hate me, love death.” Proverbs 8:36. And the love of death governs our politics, our education, our amusement, our films, television, novels, our life today. We thus live in difficult and challenging times, but God is still on the throne. Our future comes from him and not this scientific elite.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:15 So, while these are perhaps very difficult times, they are also tremendously exciting and challenging times because we are at the crossroads of history. We have a great and a tremendous opportunity. We must remember that in every age, one with God is a majority. We have a responsibility to remake all things in terms of Christ and his Word and to recognize that we can not give our loyal to anything short of God and his word.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:59 Anything that falls short of that belongs to the enemy. We had an opportunity, and a tremendous one. Men have been fakers. The modern age, from kings down to commoners, has shown their depravity. Now, let us set forth the glory and the righteousness of God and of his kingdom. Let us pray.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:37 Almighty God, our heavenly father, who with thy sovereign grace has called us to be thy people and have given us so glorious an opportunity in this day to set forth thy word in the face of the powers of darkness. We thank thee that thy word shall not return unto thee void, but shall accomplish that whereunto thou doest send it. Empower us therefore by thy grace to stand in thee and by thy word and to be more than conquerors through him that’s loved us. Even Jesus Christ our Lord. In his name we pray, amen.

R.J. Rushdoony: 05:28 Let me remind you before we begin our questions that we shall, next week, have a two or three week series on the effect of Platonism on Christianity and we’ll see forms of Platonism around us in the modern political scene. So, I think it is an extremely important subject because I think it will help us to sort out the various Christian and semi-Christian movements around us, as well as to understand the secular movements. It’ll be just as the previous sessions will be, $1 per session and I’ll try to get it in two but it may take three. I’ll know more about that next week.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:26 Now, are there any questions on our lesson? Yes.

Speaker 2: 06:32 Could it be the popularity of those books is [inaudible 00:06:33]. When I was in college, everybody [inaudible 00:06:37] for curiosity.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:46 No. They have been very popular and very well received. Brave New World and 1984 were satires on what was coming. These are very sober presentations. Their popularity has been because there are a great many people who like it and who feel they’re going to be on the top of the pile or who feel, “Well, there will be no problems in that kind of a world and I’m fed up with problems.” Many people want to be zombies. This is the whole point, for example, in drugs and the drug culture is now down to the junior high level and seeping down into the grade school level.

Speaker 3: 07:37 [inaudible 00:07:37] the government [inaudible 00:07:45]

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:48 Well, sometimes.

Speaker 3: 07:48 So, you really don’t, in most positions, the average level you don’t take a risk position responsibility. You work hard for six months till you get past the probation period and then you just show up [inaudible 00:08:03].

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:06 Of course, one of the attractions of jobs with big corporations is precisely that you don’t do any work as a free agent. This is the big appeal to big corporations. They go to the campuses and the prize recruits are many, very often the young radicals that have been demonstrating against them because it’s a sure thing and they like a sure thing. The company isn’t likely to go under and if you go through the motions, you’re there and you get ahead. You move in the right circles, it has a big appeal.

Speaker 3: 08:45 A limited risk situation.

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:49 A limited risk situation, precisely.

Speaker 3: 08:50 What about the executives though who do go higher? They really have to pay the price to get there.

R.J. Rushdoony: 09:03 Well, it’s an interesting thing. There was a study recently, I was someplace and I saw this journal and read it on the top executives in major corporations today. This is what happens. When men graduate, say from the Harvard School of Business or the Stanford School of Business and any other major school for business management, many of the top students, of course, land the choice jobs, say with General Electric, General Dynamics, Ford, and so on, with the big corporations in the country. So, right off the bat they’re making from $15,000 to $20,000 as junior executives. But, they never go more than so far. They reach a secondary level and never go further than that.

R.J. Rushdoony: 10:09 And what they found in the study was that the men who leave these schools and don’t take these jobs with the big corporations, but get a job with a small company that hires from between 20 and 200 men. And very often will go to work with one of five or six men where they have to hustle. And they make that company grow so that from nothing it begins to mushroom. These are the ones who are chosen for the top offices of the major corporations in the country. In other words, these boards, when they look around find where is there someone who’s been an old fashioned entrepreneur? We’ll have to get him. They always pass over the bright, young executives that they chose for their company.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:12 So, they come from the outside, always now. They’re looking for the person who can take chances and put a company ahead. But the sad fact is that the company they left, now that it’s gotten up there, will start looking around for the sure thing type of management. And then it begins to level off in its growth.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:40 Yes.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:48 No, it’s another one of these groups of thinkers and planners. And today, since what you have is government by experts, basically, the politicians rely on them. In fact, they feel as if they are naked if they’re not. And the press, the people, the politicians, they all turn on someone who doesn’t rely on them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:19 Now, this was Lyndon Johnson’s big mistake. After a certain point, he did not rely too much on these people partly because they were so much associated with Kennedy that he felt that he didn’t want a part, any part of that. And, of course, Johnson, who was the best democratic president this country has had in this century and that he did more to accomplish the goals of his party than any democratic president. He did far more to further the platform of his party than FDR ever did. And yet, his party turned against him. Everyone did. He couldn’t have run again for office, and there are some who claim that Humphrey lost because Humphrey did not disavow Johnson. And his big offense was, of course, he broke with all these experts. And they really turned on him.

R.J. Rushdoony: 13:28 And, of course, this is one thing that Nixon is fast trying to catch up on. And this is why he has men like Kissinger and others around him. He has a scientific elite around him, because this what the modern man likes. He definitely does. Again and again this has been demonstrated. This is the appeal. We are living in a scientific age and people love a scientifically governed thing. It means a sure thing to them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:06 And, of course, they distrust politicians, so if the politician wants to improve his image, he gets the scientist because there he is relying on really superior people.

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:23 Yes?

Speaker 5: 14:24 It’s interesting to note that many issues of the Scientific American magazine has more articles on social issues than medical articles.

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:33 Very true. A very good point. And this true now of Natural History, which I’ve delighted in for years, but it’s getting to be more and more political. And this is because when you are talking about science today, you’re talking about politics. So that the scientists today are about as political as the republican and democratic parties, and maybe more so because a lot of the republican women’s activities and the democratic women’s activities are more social than political. So, the parties today are not too politically oriented.

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:14 Yes.

Speaker 6: 15:14 Is witchcraft and spiritualism a part of [inaudible 00:15:21]

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:23 It’s a part of the scientific world because the essence magic and witchcraft is total control by man over man, nature, and anything beyond nature. And this is exactly what these books are talking about, you see. So, science today has become magic. And so it’s ready to talk about magic. It’s ready to have magical goals. It’s ready to explore any subject as an open question, except God.

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:59 Yes.

Speaker 6: 16:00 Are the [inaudible 00:16:00] the magicians then?

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:02 Yes. They’re the new magicians. After all, when they talk about the kind of thing that these books do about making men and abolishing death and reversing the first and second law of thermodynamics, you know, just changing the whole nature of the creation. They are talking, well, they are putting the old magicians to shame. They were pikers by comparison.

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:42 Yes.

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:42 Well, the purpose is basically this, first of all he is a politician. Every president is a politician first. Now, what he wants to do is to stimulate the economy, our balance of payment situation is very bad, so here is the biggest market in the world. If he can open it up for selling, think how he can help the whole balance of payment situation. So, that’s the whole purpose, to open it up.

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:35 Now, of course, the kind of trade we will get is very deadly one. They are telling us the Chinese are very good at payment, very prompt. Well, how do they pay? They pay off and anything that they have that they want to send to you on their terms, they’ll put a price, say, on the hog bristles they are going to give you. So, if you are selling them airplanes or trucks, you’ll wind up with more hog bristles than you know what to do with. And you’re not merchandising hog bristles. But what do you do? Well, Jack Bizard was telling me what happened to his company recently because they were dealing with … may I tell this story?

Speaker 7: 18:17 Sure.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:18 With Douglas, and Douglas had sold planes to Yugoslavia. And Yugoslavia paid them off with hams. So, Douglas paid off their suppliers with hams. Tell them you are going to take hams instead of money. Period. Now, this is the way they are going to solve the balance of payment deficit, you see. The big corporations won’t be hurt, they’ll just pass it on to their suppliers, you see. And this is the way they are going to make business, you see. So, that’s it, basically.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:53 Now, they are hoping by the first quarter of ’72 they will have a very favorable balance of payment picture. Yes.

Speaker 8: 19:03 Senator Smith’s had a good comment on that. He said he had no quarrel with Nixon going to China, but he did have a quarrel with him coming back.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:09 Yes.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:09 Yes.

Speaker 9: 19:10 [inaudible 00:19:10] talking about these contests that specify [inaudible 00:19:10] dollars. Is there any way for these various companies, even smaller companies, making them stick to the agreement, the dollars involved.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:33 Oh, of course. Of course, they can get the dollars but they won’t get any more business. And they’ll be wiped out. If you cannot sell to the big companies, you are a small supplier, they’re your market. You’re at their mercy and if they are going to pay you off with hams and hog bristles, you’re going to take hams and hog bristles.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:57 Yeah.

Speaker 10: 19:58 All these things, it’s pretty hard for me to see the Christian world that’s supposed to be ahead of us.

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:05 Yes, but remember it was much harder for the Christians in the arena to see any possibility of victory when every Christian was doomed, was going to be exterminated. It must have been very hard for them, but they did have that faith. And they were right. And, you see, it isn’t by sight that we walk, but by faith. So, we have to say it is true.

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:40 Now, the big argument, for example, that Hal Lindsey uses against post-millennialism and that Jay Adams uses against post-millennialism is that, look at the papers, how can it be true. Well, if you look at the papers, there’s no God either. But we’re not to look at the papers but to God and his word. And in terms of that, why, if the ungodly flourish, the psalmist says, it is that they be destroyed. So, they’re going to be destroyed and that’s our confidence.

Speaker 10: 21:27 They always are.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:27 Yes.

Speaker 10: 21:27 That book of Mary Bunyan, Bunyan’s daughter?

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:27 Yes.

Speaker 10: 21:27 Did you read that?

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:35 Yes. It’s a beautiful story.

Speaker 10: 21:39 There will be so much privacy with all the [inaudible 00:21:43] Be nice. (laughter)

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:03 That’s Hal Lindsey, that’s who I just referred to, stay away from it.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:05 Yes.

Speaker 11: 22:07 [inaudible 00:22:07] I was struck by the parallels of the things that would be indicative of another tribe or another people, the beliefs and things that they do to sustain the things, are parallel between those things and things that they do in the modern world and feel like they are so awesome and necessary. And you’re bringing up this delusion of science and the betrayal of science, it just shows us again so clear. One of my disappointments is people argue against scientific things, [inaudible 00:22:51] and the welfare state and realize [inaudible 00:22:54] and people earned it are really paying for it. And this is what’s going down, but I think what’s really amazing is how little [inaudible 00:23:10] in this scientific vision that they dangle in front of you. I mean, there’s nothing, the scientific theories that seem so fabulous really are as absurd of a dream as a mumbo jumbo back jungle, any kind of dream.

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:31 Yes. You mentioned Mexico and that’s a very good point. When the Spaniards went into Mexico, the Aztecs, Montezuma had total power. And the Spanish were just a handful. And what very few people realize is the only way the handful of Spaniards overthrew the Aztec Empire was because the people had reached the limit. They were filled up to here with horror with the totalitarian regime of the Aztec power and of Montezuma. Human sacrifice was a routine thing. The common people were like animals to be slaughtered. There was an elite class that fed on human meat and it was openly sold in markets. And they felt that they would grow stronger on it.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:26 And it had reached the point where anything was better. And the Spaniards were cruel, but that cruelty was preferable. And so, the empire collapsed. This is why today the Soviet Union, while it is so tremendously powerful, far more powerful than we are militarily, is afraid of its own people because they’ve pushed them, they’ve murdered them to a point where they don’t care anymore. And you have some of the prominent scientists and writers there smuggle out their books, which are protests against what’s going on there and they are being published in this country. They are ready to take what may be dished out to them for the simple reason they feel, what’s the use any longer?

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:13 Now, that’s what’s ahead of us. Disillusionment to the point where the thing crumbles. Assyria was the most powerful empire in all history. Terrorizing everyone, but suddenly it crumbled, almost overnight. Well, to change the subject from things rather grim to something much lighter veins, some months ago I read to you from the California Farmer, the editor, Jack Pickett’s account of his prize bull, Charlie. And people have written to him, “Is Charlie real?” Or “Isn’t this true?” And in fact, at Kelseyville, they decided they wanted to put it to the test, is there a real Charlie? If so, bring him up and let’s have him in the parade.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:04 I won’t read you the whole thing, but just portions of it. So, I’ll skip around a bit until I get to the latter part. “Many people ask me about my prize bull, Charlie 007, who lives on my one acre ranch in Lafayette with ten cowboys. Many ask me if Charlie really exists.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:28 Then he goes on to say he took him to Nevada recently for a breeding, then took him to another ranch. And he said, “It was lunchtime and the cowboys were gathered down near the corral. Charlie was going through all his idiot tricks trying to snaggle a beer from one of the boys. He’s gotten to be very fond of beer. He was single footing it back and forth. Then he would try a fancy step, but the boys were not buying that day.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:03 Suddenly they saw Charlie’s tail go straight up in the air. There on the other side of the corral was a big feral doe. This doe was getting fat off of Charlie’s feed. We had seen her crawl under the corral, it is amazing how small a place deer can get through by getting down on their bellies and crawling. Charlie’s eyesight isn’t so great anymore. He used to know enough not to chase deer, but to him this looked like a Jersey heifer with his eyesight being what it was.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:33 Showing frightful manners and with no attempt to get acquainted, that bull just took off like Geronimo and charged. That doe looked up to see this frightful thing hurtling at her. She turned, and tucking her feet under her, sailed over the corral like a thing of beauty. Charlie had a quick decision to make, either hit the brakes or try for the top pole of the corral. He chose the latter, imitating the doe. Tucking his feet under him, he sailed into the corral. His head hit. Then his body rolled up against the rails and he finally sank head first down to the ground. Did a momentary head stand, then crashed over on his side.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:19 Well, Charlie got his beer. That’s what it took to bring him out of dreamland. The boys supported him back to his bachelor quarters where they made him comfortable. Shorty came and got me and we decided that outside of a terribly sore everything, he was going to live.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:37 A few days later, Shorty came to me with a suggestion that we take Charlie up to our ranch in Lake County because his spirits seem to be broken. I told Shorty he would have to go along. He said, “Boss, is that dumb bull going to ride in the front seat like he always does?”

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:55 I said, “There is no other way.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:57 Shorty said, “I ain’t gonna ride up there with him. He’s got bad breath.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:03 I said, “No, Shorty, you’re going to ride up there with us.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:06 Shorty said, “Is he housebroke?”

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:09 I said, “Pretty well.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:12 Meanwhile, Charlie’s fame had preceded him. A guy with a beautiful herd right out of Middletown had asked for Charlie’s services. I told him I was bringing Charlie up to Lake County and right past his door. But I told him that Charlie was too racked up from a broad jumping experience to be of any good.

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:31 Well, this guy leaked the news that Charlie was coming and we got another letter from Kelseyville asking if Charlie were real and could he lead their big annual Tourist Plucking and Muskrat Skinning Day parade? We knew Charlie would be in his ham bone glory, so we said okay.

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:48 We made it to Kelseyville just in time. The parade was just forming. They had a lot of effort put into colorful clothes. The natives gasped when they saw Charlie get out of the front seat. And Shorty had a short scuffle getting a lead halter on him.

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:05 Well, all was ready and everybody in the place for the long hike through greater downtown Kelseyville, when a guy from the excellent little local paper called, The Clear Lake Observer, stepped right up in front of Charlie and took a flash picture. Charlie thought the world had fallen down. Instead of leading the parade, that dumb bull disemboweled it. People were scattering. Floats were exploding in magnificent bursts of colors. He wiped out the entire parade.

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:39 One guy standing next to me said, “If that bull with that rack of horns had been 30 feet to the left, he would have wiped out the left hand side of Kelseyville.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:51 To avoid a lynching, we jammed our festooned bull into the truck and took off for the lake. We are strictly in hiding. Charlie is on nerve pills. Kelseyville hasn’t been that upset since the Indians ran old man Kelsey down and parted his hair with a skinning knife.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 31:11 And with that, we are adjourned.

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965.  His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.”  He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder

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A Christian Survey of World History

Twentieth Century, I

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Transcript:

*This is an unedited and unoffical print version of R.J. Rushdoony’s lecture.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:00 Tonight, as we conclude our series in world history, our purpose will be to discuss something of the movement of history in the 20th century. The basic events of the 20th century, the two World Wars, and other major developments are familiar to all of us. It will be our purpose, therefore, to look behind them and see what has been a motive force. A week ago, we dealt with Britain from the 18th century through the 19th. I commented on the loss of the will to live as the Enlightenment and its skepticism with regard to God, brought to men everywhere.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:56 Let me cite a further example of that from Edmund Gosse’s study of Thomas Gray, the poet who wrote the Elegy in a Country Churchyard. It says of Gray, “He never, henceforward, habitually rose above this deadly dullness of the spirits. His melancholy was passive and under control, not acute and rebellious like that of Cowper, but it was almost more enduring. It is probable that with judicious medical treatment, it might have been removed or so far relieved as to be harmless, but it was not the habit of men in the first half of the 18th century to take any rational care of their health.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:39 “Men who lived in the country, and did not hunt, took no exercise at all. The constitution of the generation was suffering from the mad frolics of the preceding age and almost everybody had a touch of a gout or scurvy. Nothing was more frequent than for men, in apparently robust health, to break down suddenly at all points in early middle life. People were not in the least surprised when men like Garth and Fenton died of mere indolence because they had become prematurely corpulent and could not be persuaded to get out of bed. Swift, Thompson, and Gray are illustrious examples of the neglect of all hygienic precaution among quiet, middle class people in the early decades of that century.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:34 People had no will to live. They ate in a frenzied way, as though there was nothing else to life except eating. Pictures of the period indicate the incredible obesity of people. The fact that men, including men of prominence, would simply go to bed and stay there and wait to die, is indicative of the loss of the will to live.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:07 It was also an era of man centered morality. To cite an example from France, from a classic of the day, the sageist Gil Blas, and a very revealing passage about how people were governed. Gil Blas has just met this very young widow, and within four or five minutes of their meeting, he is trying seduce her. And I quote, “‘Hold,’ said she. ‘You are too importunate. This is like a rake. I fear you are but a loose young fellow.'”

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:49 “‘For shame, Madame,’ explained I. ‘Can you set your face against what woman of the first taste and condition encourage? A prejudice against what is vulgarly called vice may be all very well for citizens’ wives.'” That is, for the middle class, the puritan element, the Huguenots. “‘That is decisive,” replied she. ‘There is no resisting so forceable a plea.'”

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:21 Now, that’s the mentality that prevailed int he 18th century. It was barely pushed back by the evangelical reawakening. It began to return full force for the 20th century. With the 20th century, there began something that was unique in history, except in the latter days of Rome. A strong tendency towards suicide. Early in the years of this century, Masaryk, the great Czech scholar, called attention to the face that suicide was something new in Christendom. A high rate of suicide and suicide as a major cause of death. It still is.

R.J. Rushdoony: 05:27 Far more so than it was before World War I. The difference is that now, of course, the statistics on suicide are almost impossible to get because too many doctors will cooperate with the family to cover the cause of death and it will not be properly reported in the press and in death notices. In the 18th century, taste was what reasonable, cultured people could enjoy and the world was to conform to their taste. Joseph Addison said, and I quote, “The taste is not to conform to the art, but the art to the taste.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:19 In other words, what an elite group of people said is good taste determined what constituted are, what constituted proper attire, everything. Of course, with taste changing, in terms of the fad created by the elite, what was good art and good music also, therefore, was a changing concept. Last week, we saw how the aristocracy took over and became a governing elite. The 20th century saw this aristocracy progressively replaced by an equally anti-Christian group.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:12 The 18th century had seen these people quite powerful in France, the Philosophes of the enlightenment. In the 20th century, the modern philosophes, the intellectuals, came to the fore, so that the old aristocracy that was anti-Christian was replaced by an even more vicious element and even more anti-Christian. When we speak of them as intellectuals, this is a technical term. It doesn’t mean they are more intelligent or that they are more scholarly than others.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:51 By soft definition, the intellectuals are anti-Christian. Thus, recently, in another part of the country, a professor, an associate professor, at a major university, lost his position and one of the central charges against him … He was a very popular, a very successful professor. One of the central charges against him in the hearing that ensued, and it was in the press, was that he had assigned, to his classes a book, by a man name R.J. Rushdoony, entitled The Messianic Character of American Education, which was actually against the public schools and how could such a man, be a scholar, assign such a book.

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:46 In the hearing, the professors, who engineered the firing of this associate professor, admitted on the stand that they had not read this book by Rushdoony, but it was obviously unscholarly in view of its thesis because it was Christian and it was anti public schools. So, you define an intellectual as one who takes a particular line of necessity anti Christian, of necessity socialist status in orientation. We saw how, in France, Louis XIV introduced the pentagon concept, the use of experts, government by experts, so you had the rise of expert to power, of intellectuals and scientists. Increasingly, as the 20th century moved ahead, the great expert came to be the scientist. Louis Mumford, who definitely is not a Christian nor conservative, has commented on the role of such people in his book The Pentagon of Power. He says, among other things, concerning the goal of these scientific experts, and the goal, he says, is to create life.

R.J. Rushdoony: 10:35 They are governed, he says, and I quote, “By a more insidiously flattering idea, who he creates life is a God. Hence, the very idea of a creative deity who science, from the sixteenth century on, has regarded as a superfluous hypothesis in analyzing matter and motion, came back with redoubled force in the collective persona of organized science. All those who serve this God participated in its power and glory and for them was the ultimate kingdom too.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:12 “Even a few years ago, this interpretation might have been seen unacceptable except in an avowed science fiction track, but in 1965 the President of the American Chemical Society, a Nobel Prize laureate in a parting address, put this ambition into so many words, ‘Let us martial all our scientific forces together.’ He urged his colleagues, ‘in order to create life’.” Unquote.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:46 So, the God concept, he says, is fact, full force, except, now, the desire is for a new god, the scientific expert. Man has made the machine and now, scientists are seeking, he says, to remake man in the image of the machine, to program man. And, he goes on to say and I quote, “The final consequences of such submission might well be what Roderick Seidenberg has anticipated. A falling back of man into a primordial state of unconsciousness, forfeiting eating, even the limited awareness other animals must maintain in order to survive.” In other words, to be like Zombies.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:37 “With the aid of hallucinatory drugs, this state may even be described by, the official manipulators and conditioners, as an expansion of consciousness or some equivalent tranquilizing phrase that would be provided by public relation experts. If proof were needed of the real nature of electronic control, no less a promulguer of the system than McLuhan has, had supplied it. Electromagnetic technology, he observes, in understanding media requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation, such as befits an organism which, now, wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 13:26 “Man must serve his electric technology with the same cerebral mechanistic fidelity with which he served his corporal, his canoeist typography and all other extensions of his physical organs. To make his point, McLuhan is driven brazenly to deny the original office of tools and utensils as direct servants of human purpose. By the same kind of slippery falsification, McLuhan would reinstate the compulsions of the pyramid age as desirable features of the totalitarian electronic complex.” Unquote.

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:05 Now, some of this seemed like peculiar language. What he is saying is that McLuhan and others require utter human docility and quiescence of mediation as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside of its skull. What does that mean? Wearing our brain outside of our skull? Why. the idea there is that we are creating giant computers and all, so those are now the real brains of humanity, they and an elite group that will run them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:43 So, our brains are outside of our skull and therefore, what’s left inside of our skull must be utterly docile and totally quiet and with drugs it will be made quiet. This, then, is the vision of the future that the new governing elite of the twentieth century has. World War I and II were preceded by a great deal of thinking and planning by these people, whereby, the world was to be now an area of utter safety. A world of peace and unlimited progress. It became, instead, an age of total war.

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:33 With the peace treaties, after both wars, the dream of creating world peace was revived. After all, was not World War I fought, according to Woodrow Wilson, to make the world safe for democracy, a war to end war? And, the same was ostensibly the purpose of World War II. The peace treaties, however, reflected Comte, August Comte, C-O-M-T-E, the founder of sociology and sociology with the results of the League of Nations and the United Nations.

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:14 Now, according to Comte, mankind has three stages in its history. The first was the stage of religion and of myth, in which man was trying to find the meaning of things. The second was the stage of reason and philosophy, when man was still trying to find the meaning of things. The third is the stage or the age of science, when man has advanced to the point where he realizes there is no meaning to anything and it is only the religious idiot who is interested in meaning, and in purpose, and morality, as though these things were real and important when they are just myths.

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:05 The age of science is the age of technology, of technique, where you try to solve all problems by scientific technique and technology. Now, of course, this is exactly what was attempted after both wars. The League of Nations, United Nations, techniques for differences together and resolving them scientifically, rationally. No consideration given to the fact of sin as important, no. Technique is everything and thus, the twentieth century is the century of technique. The problem therefore must never be seen as sin, but simply inadequate technology.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:07 One of the most important statements of this was in 1962, by John F. Kennedy, at Yale University, at the commencement exercise. When he said, we have now passed the age of ideology, the age of religious conflict and the conflict of ideas. We, now, understood that all problems were technological problems, and we now had the experts who could cope with them. This is why, of course, all the intellectuals dream of the days of Kennedy as the days of Camelot.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:48 He was their shining King Arthur because for him, all answers were answers that the experts were going to solve, and he was gathering the experts into Washington to settle all the problems of the world. Thus, any concern with truth, any concern with meaning, with purpose, was an indication that you really belonged to the realm of the idiots, the religious people. You were a fool. It is interesting that Will Durant, not a Christian by any stretch of the imagination nor conservative by any stretch of the imagination, still had enough in him of the old fashioned world to be concerned about truth. Some few years ago he wrote, June 8, 1931, a letter to Lord Bertrand Russell, and sent it to Presidents Hoover and Masaryk, Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Philip Snowden, Briand de France, Benito Mussolini, Marconi, D’Annunzio, Madame Curie, Mary Garden, Jane Addams, Dean Inge, Joseph Stalin, Igor Stravinsky, Leon Trotsky, Gandhi, Tagore, Paderewski,, Ricard Strauss, Albert Einstein, Gerhardt Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Eugene O’Neill.

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:40 Now, that, certainly, was a letter that went to some of the most important people in the world. Of course, the letter was regarded, by most of them, as a joke, but why? “ I am attempting,” I’ll just read a few passages, “to face,” in my next book, “a question that our generation, perhaps more than most, seems always ready to ask and never able to answer. What is the meaning or worth of human life?” “The Industrial Revolution has destroyed the home, and the discovery of contraceptives is destroying the family, the old morality, and perhaps, through the sterility of the intelligent, the race.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:25 Love is analyzed into a physical congestion and marriage becomes a temporary physiological convenience, slightly superior to promiscuity. Democracy is degenerated into such corruption as only Milo’s Rome knew, and our youthful dreams of a socialist utopia disappear, as we see, day after day, the inexhaustible inquisitiveness of men. Every invention strengthens the strong and weakens the weak. Every new mechanism displaces men and multiplies the horrors of war. God, who was once the consolation of our brief plight and our refuge in bereavement and suffering, has apparently vanished from the scene, no telescope, no microscope discovers Him.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:09 Life has become in that total perspective, which is philosophy, a fitful pullulation of human insects on the earth, a planetary eczema that may soon be cured. Nothing is certain in it except defeat and death, a sleep from which it seems there is no awakening. We are driven to conclude that the greatest mistake in human history was the discovery of truth.” That is, the truth that there is no God, supposedly.It has not made us free except from delusions that comforted us and restraints that preserved us. It has not made us happy. For truth is not beautiful and did not deserve to be so passionately chased.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:59 Spare me a moment to tell me what meaning life has for you? What help, if any, religion gives you? What keeps you going? What are the sources of your inspiration and your energy? What is the goal or motive force of your toil? Where you find your consolations and your happiness? Where, in the last resort, your treasure lies. Sincerely, Will Durant.” Well, you can see why it was a joke because even though he was an atheist like the rest of them, he was still concerned about truth, about meaning, when all there is supposedly is technology and sensation or pleasure. You see, Will Durant didn’t get the message that your grade school children have gotten today and this is why they are the way they are. This is why you have books like E.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, and people act surprised about it. But, as Mumford makes clear, when you have to eliminate man as a factor you have to teach him that his brain is over there in the computers and the governing elite. Why shouldn’t you openly propose that he have electrodes put in his brain so that he can be controlled better?

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:49 The twentieth century however saw something else, the Russian Revolution of 1917, which wound up in a Bolshevik victory. In the old Russia, the nobility had been working with the revolutionists, subsidizing them, because they wanted to overthrow the Czar. It ended up, of course, with their overthrow. The Bolsheviks, who were a small handful, not enough to overthrow a village really, were able to overthrow the entire country by turning loose the mob, promising the mob everything. So, what you had for a while was anarchy and destruction in Russia. The anarchists were fully encouraged, and the mob, the peasants, the working men were turned loose with the promise of everything. Take it, its all yours.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:07 It was a period of wild looting as the mobs poured, without any interference, into good homes and into the best homes, into the palaces, everywhere, to loot, to kill, to take. This was going to be their enrichment. The Bolsheviks could never have done it without the mob. The mob, because the loss of faith was filtering down to them, was ready to do what they were asked to do.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:49 Thus, the modern age sees, first a dissolute degenerate monarchy, then a dissolute and degenerate aristocracy, a degenerate class of intellectuals and scientists, and a degenerate people turned loose to destroy. So, it was a very easy matter, after they had destroyed the old order, for the Bolsheviks to take over and to organize it. Lenin held that the end justified the means. He was a totally merciless man.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:39 For him, the goal was a scientific socialist order. He had an utter contempt for truth and the idea of truth or honoring his word. When his fellow Bolsheviks brought him the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty in 1917, early 1918, to be signed with Germany, the treaty was surrendering great portions of Russian territory to the Axis powers, and he was asked to read it before he signed it.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:22 His remark, in indignation was, “What? Not only do you want me to sign this impudent peace treaty, but also to read it? No, no, never. I shall neither read it nor carry out its terms whenever there is a chance not to do so.” Unquote. Lenin made it clear. You sign whatever is necessary, that’s our policy. You keep your word about nothing unless it is necessary or convenient to do so. Mass executions were ordered, Zinoviev said that the bourgeois kills separate individuals, but we kill whole classes.

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:10 A Czech official wrote, “We are exterminating the bourgeois as a class, don’t look for evidence of proof showing that this or that person, either by word or deed, acted against the interests of the Soviet Power. The first questions you should put to the arrested person is ‘To what class does he belong,’ ‘What is his origin,’ ‘What was his education,’ and ‘What is his profession?’ These should determine the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the red terror.” Unquote.

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:48 So, it was the mass execution of all officers in the army, of all the middle class, of all the upper class, of everyone in certain professions, of all the clergy and so on. Moreover, Lenin said in 1920, “All phrases about equal rights are nonsense. They were a fine language when they were getting the mob on their side.” He also said, “We repudiate all morality, which proceeds from supernatural ideas or ideas, which are outside class conceptions. In our opinion morality is entirely subordinate to the ideas of class war. Everything is moral, which is necessary for the annihilation for the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:43 “Our morality, then, consists solely in close discipline and in conscious war against the exploiters. We do not believe in external principles of morality, and we will expose this deception. Communist morality is identical with the plight for strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat. There are no morals in politics. There is only expediency.” Unquote.

R.J. Rushdoony: 31:20 Psalm 64 tells us that our trust is not to be in the upper, or the lower classes or in man. Weigh them in the balances, and they are less than nothing. Our trust is to be in the Lord and modern history has amply demonstrated that as one group after another has gained power. The scientific socialist state was what triumphed in the Soviet Union. The people, the common people, had power for a while during the overthrow and the anarchy and they demonstrated what they were made of. The scientific socialist state now governs in, virtually, every country of the world in varying degrees. Its concept of society is that it is a scientific experiment.

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:23 Now, in an experiment, there can be no freedom, so you must progressively eliminate freedom as a factor. In an experiment, you can make mistakes, but you do not sin and even a mistake, in an experiment, is not really bad because you need a variety of experiments to determine what will not work, and you keep performing experiments until you come to a solution that works. Man, thus, is the test tube animal in the scientific socialist state.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:07 The scientific society is with us everywhere on both sides of the Iron Curtain. We have a scientific society in this country, and it is, of course, exactly what people want. At the beginning of the modern age, Bacon and Descartes said and held that the accumulation of scientific knowledge would automatically bring more human welfare. In recent years, some have said, “We must put the emphasis more on social sciences.” This means a political problem and humanistic politics as the answer.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:51 Now, like it, or not the answer of the over whelming majority of people in every part of the world is that a scientific state will provide the answer, that the problems of man will be solved by the sciences. Those who believe in God are few and far between. If you do not believe in God, the logic of the situation is that humanism has the answer, and the most logical forms of humanism are Marxism and existentialism. The new view of reality as men see it today is that man is the measure.

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:47 Men are humanistic today. This goes not only for the ones on the left but those on the right and where men are humanistic, the logic of humanism will carry them into either existentialism or anarchism or into communism. Moreover, the new view of reality is that realism means dirt. One of the pioneers in, so called, realistic writing was [inaudible 00:35:24] and J.B. Priestley, himself a humanist, Therefore, ineffectual in protesting against realism as said of [inaudible 00:35:35], and very validly.

R.J. Rushdoony: 35:40 What he says applies to writers today, and I quote, “In spite of their objective naturalistic manner, which so easily deceives the young and the innocent, when that manner is in fashion, they are no closer to the facts of our common existence than the tales of the earlier romancers.” They, monstrously, over simplify life, rob it of most of its potentialities of change and growth, deny it any power of compensation to make their one cruel point as if they were matadors and life, a dying bull. There is so much falsification in the cool neat cynical [inaudible 00:36:27] type of short story as there is the sentimental and rosy fiction of the popular magazine.

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:34 There are as many tricks in this business of leaving characters desolate forever after three incidents in thirty pages as there are in leaving them in a permanent glow of happiness. Thus, what you have today in novels and in fiction, in television and in movies, the so called realism, is something as unrealistic as the old fairy tales because it is no more a faithful picture of life, but it is their concept of what reality is, a myth.

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:24 Moreover, as we saw last time, appearance has become reality. The essence of life is to put a good front, to make an impression, to be seen and heard, to make an impact on the public. This is why, even men like McIntyre, essentially a humanist, want parades down the streets of Washington. This supposedly is going to change men. This, of course, is precisely humanism. It is Comte psychology and sociology. What is Comte’s essence of what constitutes the third age, the scientific age: technology.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:14 You don’t work in terms of meaning but to make an impact with technology and so you are going to manipulate people by making an impression on them. Appearance, a show, a parade, in place of reality, in place of moral principles, and in place of changing the hearts of men. Moreover, the new temple has become the humanistic state school, the true temple of the modern age, its religious institution.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:54 Charles Francis Potter, in Humanism, a New Religion, 1930, himself a leading humanist, wrote, “Education is, thus, a most powerful ally of humanism and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five day program of humanistic teaching.” Unquote.

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:34 Moreover, as men dream of the future, their vision of that future is totally in terms of this scientific society. Two of the most popular books, best sellers of recent years, which deal with this subject are John McCall’s The Future Of the Future and Alvin Tippler, Future Shock. Now, Tippler was associate editor of Fortune and a professor at Cornell and elsewhere, and McCall is also a very outstanding writer and scholar.

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:22 Their vision of the future is, of course, precisely the kind of thing that Mumford was describing. It is a world in which artificial men are created, in which man himself becomes obsolete and makes way for clonal man, in which the least of things done to men is to put electrodes in their brain. It is a world ruled by the scientific elite in which there is no room for God and really no room for men in any sense that we can recognize them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:05 Very definitely, the death of God means also the death of men. For when God goes, man is expendable in the minds of these men. He’s poorly made, he doesn’t meet their specifications, and since they cannot remake him, they will invent something to take his place. Niche claimed to be the great humanist and lover of life and of man, but he ended up with the slobbering hatred of man and demand that superman be created. Now, the scientific elite tells us that they will make superman artificially.

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:53 They actually claim that the time will come when you will go to an air terminal to the counter to get your ticket, and you’ll not be able to tell whether the very beautiful girl waiting on you is an artificial girl or a human being and of course, ultimately, the artificial girl will be much more reliable than any real girl and so, you can guess who will be dispensable. This is the mad, the truly, insane dream of the new scientific elite. It’s a dangerous dream. It’s a dream that spells murder, the murder of man. The millions upon millions that were murdered by Stalin, and the millions upon millions who were murdered by Mau in Red China, are just a drop in the bucket. To what men, in the universities very close to us, all across the country, in England, in France, Germany, all over the world, are contemplating when they discuss, plan, make a scientific goal to do the things these writers describe.

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:28 It is the planned murder of man, of mankind. Moreover, they are doing this with the hearty approval of most men. The overwhelming popularity of these books can scarcely be believed. The average man is ready to accept these because he hates life. This book was published in July of 1970, it appeared, condensations of it, in Horizon, Red Book and Playboy.

Speaker 2: 44:16 Please, turn over the cassette and continue the message.

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965.  His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.”  He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder

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A Christian Survey of World History

England 18th & 19th Century, II

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Transcript:

*This is an unedited and unoffical print version of R.J. Rushdoony’s lecture.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:02 As a result, the 19th century was the age of the greatest expansion of Christianity since the days of the early church. More over, the colonialism of Britain introduced an internationalism of ideas and men. It was a tremendous accomplishment. One of the most remarkable things if not perhaps the most remarkable thing in all of human history. However there were counter forces against this. In Britain, before the century was over, the old opposition never died out. One of the most effective persons in undercutting all this work that the middle classes were doing and that Prince Albert had been able to further was Charles Dickens.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:09 Charles Dickens was a snob. He was also a dandy. I don’t know how to describe a dandy. Beau Brummell was perhaps about a century earlier, the prince of dandies. Not a century earlier, at the beginning of the century. We had a brief flash of the dandy during World War II in the zoot suiter’s on the Negro and some white [inaudible 00:01:43]. And that legitimately was a last flash of the dandy mentality. Dickens was a dandy. Oscar Wilde by the way was another. Dickens hated the middle class and his perspective was that of the leisure class. The people who are above work. And as a result, through his novels, he popularized the idea of the oppressive middle classes. And Oliver Twist and many of his other works, the business man usually comes out as the monster. And the [inaudible 00:02:34] very kindly people and the lower class is the poor abused people who are kicked in the teeth as it were by the middle classes. On top of that the Fabian Society was organized towards the end of the century, systematically propagating socialism.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:02 But earlier there had even a more deadly enemy, Charles Darwin. 1859, The Origin Of Species. The book as I point out in my Mythology of Science, sold out the first edition on the day of publication. People were waiting for the book. Here was armor against Christianity, a weapon to use against these hated Evangelicals and middle class people with all their [inaudible 00:03:36]. So they bought it up the first day. It was an enormously popular book. The myth is propagated about how poor Darwin suffered and was persecuted. This is anything but the truth, it was an immensely popular work. Except for one Bishop, there was no real opposition to the idea of evolution until about the 1890’s when various people organized to combat the rising tide of unbelief that was sweeping the churches.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:22 But there are other factors that began to contribute to the decline that was setting in. The secularization of education. Education was becoming a state affair and humanism was in command. More over the merchants and business man who were not all Christians by any mean at any time were beginning now to desert the faith. They began to imitate the leisure classes. They sought prestige. The idea was to marry their daughter off to someone in the leisure class and using as a bait a great deal of money will give so many hundred thousand pounds if Lord so and so’s son will marry our daughter. And then he’ll have money enough so that he doesn’t have a problem any more financially, and he won’t be a deadbeat with his tailor and so on. And we will be related to the Lord’s. And of course, about the same time the second half of the last century, especially in the latter part of the 80’s, you saw the same movement here in this country. As the wealthy American families began to seek alliances with the nobility of Europe. Let us marry our daughter off to the leisure classes of Europe. And many a noble family of Europe, of Italy, of Spain and France, Germany, Austria, England and elsewhere, was recharged financially with an American marriage. It is really incredible how many such marriages were contracted.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:27 Thus the middle classes began to imitate the ways and the values of the upper classes. It became more important to be a gourmet and a connoisseur than to be Godly and productive. Good taste was no longer associated with what is in balance, but what is precious and extreme, far out. As a result, when the 20th century dawned, there was a new kind of man on the scene. A man who increasingly was aping the leisure class. The 20th century was seen as the age of coming world peace, brotherhood and prosperity. They were sure that man was going to solve all his problems in this century and it was going to be a time of unequaled bliss and peace. But the collapse of the middle classes and their desertion of Christianity turned the tide in the other direction.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:52 Sometime after World War I, a very interesting comic strip was produced by a man named Briggs to satirize this change. We still have it with us, but the point has been forgotten. It’s Maggie and Jiggs. What was it about in origin? It was about an Irish couple who had come to this country and had been on the lower level, had worked hard, and she had worked as a washer women, she had worked in factories, she had worked here, there, and everywhere at every kind of job. And he had gone into some kind of production work and little by little, succeeded and then gradually become a very wealthy and a powerful man. And what happened? From being production oriented, they became consumption oriented. And Maggie decided she wanted to forget everything about their past, so Jiggs could no longer go anywhere near dinty moore on his hangout and see his old friends who are common people and who had not risen as they had. She wanted to be associated with the upper classes. And Lord’s and Ladies to be invited to her home. And of course to go to the opera where she dragged her poor husband Jiggs who hated it. She was a social climber.

R.J. Rushdoony: 09:40 And the whole point of the comic strip was, Jiggs, a man who had forged his way to the top as a very productive, capable, competent man, was now a joke, why? Because his whole perspective was being shifted by his wife’s social ambition. And from being a producer he was being made a fool who was financing his wife’s ambitions to be a connoisseur, a gourmet, a society hanger on. What did the comic strip mean as it originally came out? That the entrepreneur, the man who was the backbone of the western world, was now becoming a joke. A world of the non-working elite was returning with everyone imitating them and what was happening.

R.J. Rushdoony: 10:49 Now the elite have always despised the mob. There was a time when castoff clothing was given to servants. Now the standard became to give them their castoff back. That is to create new styles, new patterns of behavior. And to drop them the minute they became popular with ordinary people. And thereby to prove their superiority because they were setting the [inaudible 00:11:23] which everybody down to the lowest level would follow. So you would adopt a particular type of dress or a conduct. And the minute it caught on, you moved on to something else and always proved you are the elite. That you are still getting castoff things as it were, to the mob. The goal was to be demonstrably useless.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:55 A book was written at the beginning of the century about this by a socialist who was a very discerning man, [inaudible 00:12:02] of the leisure class. And he pointed out how this had been a pattern throughout history. How for example in Mandarin China the standard of being a gentleman and a lady … well to be a lady you had to have your feet bound so that you couldn’t really walk very much. You were helpless. And you had long finger nails that proved you could not work. So long that you couldn’t possibly do any work. And you thereby demonstrated that you were useless. And of course, this is the essence of the whole idea of the leisure class. To prove that you are useless, that you create things and cast them off for the mob. That you treat everything as a joke and [inaudible 00:13:03] standards. You express your contempt for the practical or the moral world. That you’re pleasure is to be seen in the best company and the best restaurants and the best home. On the best tours, the grand tour that began in the 18th century as one of the idle rich, to make an impression. Appearance instead of reality. But when men live in terms of appearance, reality does not go away. It has a habit of returning with a vengeance. Next week as we conclude our studies, we will see something of the return of reality. The Sleep Walkers, one of the great books written in Germany after World War I, was titled The Sleep Walkers. It was [inaudible 00:14:18] book. A very long, unpleasant book whose basic thesis was … and as a German who had seen defeat, he was one of the few who woke up to what the world was becoming. And his basic thesis is men are sleep walkers who are going around seeking their own advantage, their own pleasure, trying to get ahead and to make a bigger impression on other people. To experience the best pleasures, to have the best men or women to make love with. But by sleep walkers, unaware of the reality that is bearing down on them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:19 It was a fitting subject and a very timely thesis. We are in the age of the sleep walkers, who have forgotten reality for appearances. And we will next week, analyze precisely what the situation is and it’s meaning for us. Let us bow our heads in prayer. All mighty God, our heavenly father, we thank the that thou has called us out of the dream of sin, of the nightmare, the sleep walk of sin, into the reality of Jesus Christ. And we pray that thou would use us to walk up man, woman, and children to the reality of Christ. To the reality of a world lost in sin, to the reality of thy purposes for us and thy so great promises in Jesus Christ that we may be able in the days ahead to [inaudible 00:16:38] man, woman, and nations to the saving power of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. In his name we pray, Amen.

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:50 Now before I show you these two pictures, I’d like to comment briefly, next week is our last session and a few of you have expressed the desire for some other sessions perhaps a little later. And we can discuss next week what you’re interested in. So if you are interested in them, next week, we’ll have an opportunity to go into that and what you are interested in. But I’d like to say this, now, I am working on a very small paperback on the effect of neoplasticism on Christianity and this gets to the heart of many of these things that we’ve been discussing. What are the ideas that came in, what have they done to the faith. Now in two possibly three weeks I can sum up the essence of that, if you’re interested in continuing these sessions for two or three weeks. How many of you would be interested in that. Oh, very good we’ll continue with neoplasticism in Christianity after we finish our world history next week. So two weeks from now we will go into that.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:11 Now this is a picture of Jim Alley, and this is no exaggeration, in fact it is perhaps the … not realistic enough because you don’t get the smell and the sound of it in a picture. And that basement bar will say drunk for one pence, dead drunk for two pence, [crosstalk 00:18:39]. Now as I indicated because England was in a sense a center of the world stage for two or three hundred years, in a sense it became the center for every kind of [crosstalk 00:19:07]. And I just barely touched on the tremendous forces of good that came out of that era.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:40 Oh, very good question. In a much earlier era, these Lords were futile Lords who really rule each particular area as a kingdom. They had a working relationship between themselves and the people, they were the protector and they were the Lord of a particular area, they ruled, say a county or something. And as time passed of course, they no longer had that function, the crown was providing the law and order for the commonwealth. And as a result, their role was basically parasitic. And so they worked to seize power and maintain it after the glorious revolution of 1688 and to prevent the middle classes whom they regarded as a threat from running the country. The real issue of course in the Puritan regime under Cromwell was that this is where the Lord’s [inaudible 00:20:54], some of the Lords were very perturbed and with reason at what Charles I was doing. But after a certain point they wanted no more of Cromwell because they were afraid the wrong people were going to run things.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:16 How many of you saw the picture, Cromwell? Just a few of you, that’s too bad, it was a very powerful and a moving picture. But in it, it very clearly shows how Lord Essex was very much against the king up to a point. But then changed sides the minute it became apparent what the direction of the whole thing was. He and others who are associated with him could not bear the thought of triumph for these Puritan merchants. And it was to a great extent the triumph of the merchant classes and the middle class people of England.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:06 Yes. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that’s Thomas. That’s a different Cromwell. Yes, several generations before. Now at that point, their following incidentally that series while it’s possible at different points, is the most accurate I’ve ever seen in movie or television on anything. However, Thomas Cromwell according to one of the finest English historians whose just written a book Henry the eighth, is one of the most maligned men of history. And he makes a good case for the fact that he was the most dedicated servant England had at the time. A man of tremendous insight and practical wisdom. A man who did much of permanent work for England. As a matter of fact, after his execution, Henry the eighth realized that the … some of the men around him had deliberately lied to him and misrepresented things. And so he accused them once of being liars who had destroyed Cromwell, who had been a good and faithful servant to him.

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:40 Yes. The book of Jasher, there is no such existing book although there are people who claim they have it. These are all [inaudible 00:23:56]. The book of Jasher and other such books that are referred to in the Bible were not books of the Bible, they were simply chronicles of military affairs, you see. So they’re referred to a time, but they had no status as scripture. They were military chronicles.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:26 Yes. Well the things that divides men is not the class structure of society. But rather a lack of a unifying faith. Adam Smith who wrote The Wealth of Nations, was not Christian in his perspective. But he does bring out some very interesting things. How in bygone years, the Lord and the lowliest man on his estate were very close together. They had a great deal in common. First, they both shared the same faith. Second, they did many things together. It was a working relationship. You’re always going to have people who are so to speak Lords and people who are lackeys. You’re never going to escape that situation in the world. There are some people who are naturally superior and are going to go to the top. But without faith, they fall apart and they become in conflict. With faith, they become a working, cooperating, agency.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:36 Now it’s very interesting that I’ve referred to the fact that Japan is still semi-futile. America is too. But in Japan the futile relationship is a little closer in some respects, in other respects here, in the personal area, it’s a little closer. The last US News and World report had a very interesting account of Japanese labor and it pointed out they’re not under paid the way some people think. All the fringe benefits they have and so on, so that they are really very well paid. Why? Because among other things, executives feel personal concern for them and take care of them. Now Peter Drucker’s written in great length on this in Men, Ideas, and Politics. And he’s pointed out how in Japan, when anyone goes to work for a company, he can figure that if he’s there after the probation period, he’s there for life. He will be expected continually to improve himself. He gets all kinds of security provisions. When he is 55, he is retired, but he will probably be retained at better pay. Only now he can be dropped at any time. So he’s very much on his toes after 55, and instead of becoming stagnant he’s a much better employee because now he can be dropped with two years severance pay at any time.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:17 On top of that, any young executive who goes to work for a company is assigned a Godfather. This Godfather as it were has to meet with him regularly. Now who is this Godfather? Well, he is somebody who has become an outstanding executive. He’s in his 40’s. However, he is not going to be a member of the board of directors on one of the top echelons. So he knows when he’s reached that point and he’s given people who are going to be his boys [inaudible 00:28:59], his son’s in the organization … that he’s not going to be the top drawer executive in the company. What he will be given after 55 is an executive position in a subsidiary, a department that he’s familiar with so that a smaller company here, he’ll run, but he’ll meet with these young executives who’ve just been taken out of college into the company or who have come up through the ranks regularly. And he’ll discuss their problems with him. They’ll come to him with their problems and their complaints and he’ll work them out. And then he’ll go to them with things that he’s heard, what they need to work out.

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:51 And after a while, he’ll make a recommendation. And since he’s not going to be competing with these boys he’s going to be in a subsidiary company at 55, as the top man there, he’ll say, well, [inaudible 00:30:06] here is a good man for the elite leadership in our company or I don’t think he is and so on. And Drucker said that one of his pupils when he flew to Japan a few years ago, came to him and he said “I’m new here, and they think very highly of me but they don’t have any foster father, or God father in the organization whose known me long enough to be able to recommend me, and there’s a position coming up in South America that I very much want. So would you put in a good word for me in terms of your evaluation of me from seeing me at work in the states?” And Drucker said “Would they accept it?” And he said “Oh, they would welcome it.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:59 So he said he was conferring with the President of the corporation and he said would you mind if I say something about so and so, my former pupil. And the President’s face lit up and he said “Oh, I was hoping you’d be ready to say something. Tell us just what you think of him, candidly.” And he said, on his word, the fellow got the job. And he said this kind of thing makes everyone feel there’s a personal relationship you see. Now this had gone around the barn quite a bit but to give you an idea of what once existed, between Lords and commoners. And there was a working relationship them. When that ended, that was never ideal because there were many ugly periods in history then. But this was the kind of thing … there was this closeness. Now their wasn’t the corporate structure so you were working your way up, but there was closeness. Today there is no longer that closeness. Whether it’s in a small company of 50 people or a big corporation of thousands, they’re aliens to one another. In fact if there are five people working in some enterprises they can be strangers in a way that they are not in Japan and in a way that they were not in earlier centuries throughout the Western world.

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:25 And it’s this deep personalization that has created many tensions and resentments against upper class people, against middle class people, against workers because they’re at war with one another. This is why in the south, where there was this kind of personal relationship between black and white, there was possible a peaceful relationship that was not possible the minute the negro went north. The relationship was impersonal. No.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:11 Yes, one more question.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:12 What?

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:24 Well, of course this is a worldwide problem today. This is a worldwide problem and of course it isn’t that there aren’t good men, it’s when you don’t have the right kind of faith in the people. You cannot have them choose the right kind of leaders. This is the problem.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:49 Well I think that’s about all except that there is an announcement. The Calcetan prayer meeting will be meeting on January 22, at the home of Ken and Helen Thurston at 7:30 pm. And it will include a discussion on the five point of Calvinism. The address is 4837 [inaudible 00:34:13]. And contact Ken Thurston for directions.

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965.  His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.”  He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder

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A Christian Survey of World History

England 18th & 19th Century, I

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Transcript:

*This is an unedited and unoffical print version of R.J. Rushdoony’s lecture.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:00 Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that thou hath called us to be thy servant in thy world. The age-old struggle between God’s people, the army of thine son, and the [inaudible 00:00:18] of governments. [inaudible 00:00:20] by thee, our Father, to be better soldiers in thy service, and grant us the joy of seeing thy victory [inaudible 00:00:32], thy standard advanced, thine cause, [inaudible 00:00:37] of the generations to come. Thus [inaudible 00:00:41] us, we study the things in this world in the perspective of thy word. Grant that we be drawn closer to thee, and become more faithful servants of thee by means of this message, in Jesus’ name, amen. Last week, we analyzed the centrality in the 17th century and in the 18th century, France, especially the greatness of France under Louis XIV and his successors. We saw, also, something of the significance of the enlightenment and its thinking, as it laid the groundwork for a new world perspective. Reviving the motifs that had been so powerful in the renaissance, carrying them forward and making them more vocal.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:45 We saw, for example, that the man of the enlightenment was an urban man, divorced from the soil seeing things without the fullness of context that a rural perspective would have given him. We saw, also, that the total hatred of Christianity was openly stated by these men. Moreover, they were militantly humanist. They were bent on tolerating any human practice, other than the worship of God in Christ. They felt that the new priests of civilization should be the humanists, the [inaudible 00:02:30]. They took over the churches and began their dismantling and destruction. Moreover, homosexuality was a mark of being a member of the “in” group with these people. They had made, we saw furthermore, as their great cultural hero, Cicero. As I pointed out, Cicero is again a hero in many quarters. They despised science and business as puritan and [inaudible 00:03:05] characteristics, and they felt that they had been given by destiny, the duty to rule over the common people who were too stupid to be able to rule themselves and needed an elite group like themselves.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:27 Now, this movement, of course, was common to all of Europe. In some respects, it originated, as I indicated, in Britain; England, in particular. It would be easy in dealing with the history of England from the early part of the 16th century into the 20th century to make England the villain of the peace. It would be just as easy and, in fact, easier, to make England the center of the stage, for the whole period.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:09 And I think this tells us why, in some respects, some of the most incredible aspects of western history in that era took place in England. After all, that was where the action was. And where the center of the stage is, you’ll see there are also the greatest concentration of evil. Hence, where the action is. That’s where the issues are going to be threshed out.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:42 And so, in England, you had some tremendous forces at work. The puritan regime was put down when in 1660, Charles II came to the throne, not too long after the death of Cromwell. With Charles II, the emphasis was on anything and everything goes, except the old faith and morality. One of his own friends remarked of him that he had never said a foolish thing, nor never done a wise one.

R.J. Rushdoony: 05:35 He prided himself on being a wit. He was, during the whole time of his rule, and this is a matter of record now, in the pay of Louis XIV. He was a secret Catholic. He worked against the interests of his own kingdom to further the cause of Louis XIV. And it was only that parliament again and again overruled him, that England was not made a virtual tool of Louis XIV.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:16 Charles II at least, had the common sense not to go too far. This was not true of his brother and successor, James II, who lacked common sense, who began the bloody persecution of the Protestants in Scotland, in particular, and then also, in England. And therefore, lost his kingdom in the glorious revolution of 1688.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:46 William and Mary were called to the throne. After William and Mary, there was a long era of weak monarchs. And this, of course, was made to order, for the aristocracy. They took over the kingdom and from 1688 on, they wanted neither the people, nor the church to be a problem to them. Some years ago, I made a lengthy study of the Church of England, from its very beginning through the ’30s. Some day I want to do some revision on the work and publish it.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:42 There was a period there when, for 70 years, no convocation of the Church of England was called. They did not want a church coming together to decide anything. They had only political bishops. Men who rarely even saw their seize. The aristocracy wanted to rule, and rule they did, under Queen Anne, and then she, dying childless, it went to the House of Hanover of Germany. And the Hanoverian monarchs took the throne of England, but they spent as much of their time in Germany, at Hanover, as possible.

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:29 George I didn’t even bother to speak English, to learn it. George II knew it, but not any too well. Their contempt for England was very open. They were not interested in it. They allowed the aristocracy to rule, and it was not until the grandson until George II, George III came to the throne, that you had for a long, long period of almost 75 years or so, a truly popular monarch.

R.J. Rushdoony: 09:13 George III was a very simple family man. He tried very earnestly to cultivate the middle class virtues. In that respect, he did recognize the old puritan backbone of the country. The common people loved him. The aristocracy despised him. They thought he was a staid, prosaic fool, and his wife a frump. The tragedy, of course, of King George III was that the family did have a great deal if in-breeding, and as a result of this in-breeding, a particular ailment, [inaudible 00:10:00], worked quite a havoc on him.

R.J. Rushdoony: 10:06 Very few people realize that he was not only a monarch for 60 years, that’s a long reign, but off and on and increasingly towards the last, totally insane. Later on, I’ll show you a picture of him. Quite tragic. You would think to see the picture that it was one of the old King Lear in his grief.

R.J. Rushdoony: 10:34 But, Napoleon rose to power, and the Napoleonic Wars took place and Napoleon disappeared, and the King of England never knew what was going on. He was out of his mind. The aristocracy ruled. And the general position of the aristocracy was an elitism, of course. But moreover, deism, a white term, really, for unbelief. The deists, technically, had a god. Somebody had to start the whole thing. And then, he was absentee god who had nothing more to do with the universe.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:18 And therefore, there was nothing that mattered. No law, no morality. Man was making his own way in the world. The deists were very cynical about the Bible and Christianity. And as a result, their contempt began to filter down. They wrote their books, the expressed their opinions, but they vowed that this is for the elite. For example, Anthony Collins, who wrote Priestcraft in Perfection, and another book, Discourses on Free Thinking, was once asked why, in view of his contempt for Christianity, he would insist on sending his servants to church.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:59 And his answer was, “That they may neither rob nor murder me.” Voltaire gave a similar answer. But, when you have the thinking people holding such opinions, and when they have captured the church and virtually gutted it, what are the people going to get when they go to church? The consequence was that within a generation, the people were like the leaders; Without faith, without morality. The figures on the consumption of liquor in the early part of the 18th century and the early 1700s in England are staggering. They are really, almost beyond belief.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:59 In some streets of London, every fourth of fifth house was a bar. I’ll show you later on, a picture Hogarth painted from life, and over one basement barroom, the sign reads, “Drunk for one penny, dead drunk for two pennies, free straw. Free straw to sleep it off on.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 13:28 We do have evidence from various writers of the day that other places, which were of a little better quality, would advertise “clean straw.” We know for example, from Robert [Woelful’s 00:13:45] own account, and he thought nothing of it. This was routine, that when he was a small boy, he was regularly made drunk by his father. And he, himself, reports that his father would say, “Come Robert, you shall drink twice while I drink once. For I will not permit the son and his sober senses to be a witness of the intoxication of his father.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:17 Now, the consequence of all of this was a decline of the will to live. A decline of the will to live. The mortality of people was frightening. People died like flies. You can say it was poor medicine, but it was poor medicine 50 and 100 years later. Not any different, no improvement, and people did not die the same way. And at the same time in America, the mortality rate was nowhere near the same.

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:55 The mortality rate, also, was very high for children. Somehow, this loss of the will to live communicated itself almost, you might think, with the mother’s milk to the children. And there wasn’t a sane care. I’m going to read some of the London Bill of Mortality figures for the era, because they’re so startling. In 1730 to 1749, these are 20-year periods, 74.5 percent of all children died. That’s three out of four.

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:38 Then, at the end of that period, the evangelical revival began, Witfield and Wesley, and the various evangelicals within the Church of England. In 1750 to 69, the next 20 years when this movement was beginning, the mortality was 63 percent. It dropped 11 and a half points. In the next 20 years, 1170 to ’89, 51.5 percent. Then, 1790 to 1809, 41.3, and 1810 to ’29, 31.8 percent mortality.

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:26 Of course, from our modern point of view, that’s a high rate. But the significant fact is, without any real medical progress in those years, the evangelical re-awakening and its growing impact on the population made for this much difference in the mortality. It was a time of considerable brutality in sports. And morality, in fact, is called a sport of the period.

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:02 I’d like to read something from the work of Dr. Brady. Just a page or two; I could select much more frightful passages, but just to give you something of the picture.

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:17 I quote, “Even in morality under the cloak of the nature worship and natural expression, propounded by deism, was during most decades of the century, largely winked at as sport. George II, Woelful, and the Prince of Wales were but representatives of a large section of high society who lived in flagrant, shameless. William Montagu in October, 1723, writing to the Countess of Mar, declared that in society, the Appalachian of rake is as genteel in a woman as in a man of quality. The Drury Lane District of West London was an extensive [inaudible 00:17:56] in such terms as Drury Lane vestals, Covent Garden, Virgin and Newgate Saint, were ironical designations of different classes of prostitutes. The court masquerades, moreover, which continued till the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, when the moral and religious feelings of the country procured their suppression, were scandalously central. While the popular subscription receptions and masquerades were copiously tarred with the same brush. Champaign, dice, music, or your neighbor’s spouse, were among the contending attractions …” That’s a literal quote, that expression.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:36 “… of the midnight orgy and the [inaudible 00:18:38] dance. Horace Woelful writing to man, May 3rd, 1749, concerning a subscription masquerade at which George II was present, said that Miss Chudley, a popular maid of honor, masquerading as if [inaudible 00:18:52] was so naked that she would have taken her for Andromeda, who rose naked out of the sea. And they sought one thing together, the masquerades of the time describes them as scenes of dissipation.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:04 “The [inaudible 00:19:04] discovery, 1770, the House of Commons adjourned to attend the subscription masquerade held in Soho. Among the illiterate and outcast multitude to such a pitch of barbarity did sensuality rise. But frequently, it was seen on parade. Every new parliament, for example, the [inaudible 00:19:24] of Garrett, the settlement of straggling cottages near Wandsworth, held a mock election. And the qualification of a voter was that he had enjoyed a woman in the open air in that district. The occasion with all its obscene humor and tawdry horseplay drew swarming crowds of debutees from London. And so much custom resulted that the local publicans, they found it in their interest to contribute largely to the expense of the ceremony. So utterly depraved, too, were some rural areas that laborers actually sold their wives by auction in the cattle market. And baptism registers show how rampant was immorality in the villages.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:10 Moreover, because the lords were ruling with a radical hatred of the middle class, the productive, the merchant class, they were, of course, not contributing anything to the development of society and to the progress of that particular element that could create work; The producing element, the middle class merchants. The result was that their answer to the situation where so many of the lower classes were desperately poor, had to rob to eat, was to pass more, more severe laws. This is in a fact that is familiar to most people, how people were hung for next to nothing in those days.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:01 There were 160 offenses for which you could be hung. They were things like, to pick a pocket for more than a shilling. To grab food and run. To grab goods and run. Shoplifting, five shillings value. To steal fruit. To snare a rabbit as a poacher on a man’s estate, and so on. Charles Wesley, on one occasion, preached in a jail to 52 persons waiting hanging. One of them was a child of 10.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:38 The ruling class at this time was made up of men of the worst caliber. Lords and aristocrats who organized an organization of secret society and club called the Hellfire Club. It was an organization given to the systematic destruction of every kind of moral standard, practiced deliberately, including incest. The Hellfire Club was bitterly hostile to the colonies, to America, and to William Pitt, the great English statesmen who was the champion of America.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:20 One of the members of the Hellfire Club, John Wilkes, supported American and many American communities, and a county or two was named after him. But, we have the right to question his integrity in this support, because he was urging them not to fight. And he was telling the American colonies, “I’m with you. Just leave it to me, and I can handle the King and the King’s friends.” And I’ll spell King’s friends with capital letters. Who were the King’s friends? They were the ruling cliché, the Hellfire Club. Thus, this Hellfire Club and their associates were very much like the philosophs of France. But, all the while that this was going on, there was another force building up from the ground up. The evangelical movement. Both in and out of the Church of England. Under Whitfield, under Wesley, under Barrage, and Fletcher in the Church of England, and many, many others. It’s impact was tremendous. It began to revive a great deal of the old puritan spirit. There are many who criticize it savagely, many historians. They point out how, what killjoys they were, and how much against many things that the people loved, who they were, and what strict Sabbatarians they were.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:05 Well, they were all those things, perhaps. And yet, one of the things that led to trouble very early was their insistence on closing everything down on the Sabbath. And you can go to some of these historians and find perfectly horrible accounts of how repressive these evangelicals were. But, they do not give you the other side of it. It was the practice of people in those days to pay off workers and servants on Sunday when the only things that were open were the bars.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:52 Moreover, they would make an appointment in a bar to pay them off. You can imagine the consequences of that, especially if the lord or gentleman paying them off set up a drink to start things off for everybody. They were gonna spend all the money there, which is what most of them did. And this is why the evangelicals both struck hard at Sabbath laws and anti-liquor legislation. This led, ultimately, to the prohibition movement throughout the world, which was a misguided movement. But very few people now realize that the prohibition movement was also a movement very closely connected with Marxism and with the various socialist movements.

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:54 Right through the ’20s, the Soviet Union was very strongly prohibitionist. Why? Because for a couple of centuries, liquor and bars have meant the deliberate exploitation of the workers, very often by people who owned the bars and made sure the worker spent his money there, and remained forever in debt to them, borrowing money from them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:23 So, you can understand something of the picture that faced the evangelicals. So they hit at these two points. They may have been misguided in their extremes sometimes, but basically, they were dealing with a very real problem. The evangelical movement, thus, began to work from the ground up. And it began to make a tremendous impact on the country as it progressively reached more and more of the people.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:58 Meanwhile, a book had been written in 1776 that also had an impact. Adam Smith’s, The Wealth of Nations. A classic statement of free enterprise economics. As a result, by 1838 to ’41, a free trade movement was under way in England in strength. Sir Robert Peel, when he became prime minister in 1841 through 1846, favored it. And he reduced the tariffs drastically in 1842, with an immediate increase of prosperity. Peel was very savagely attacked for this, again and again in Parliament by the lords.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:56 He was also attacked by one of the most brilliant men who ever was in Parliament in England, Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli was very much a champion of the lords and of the aristocrats. Disraeli was a man who was to the core, a champion of the empire of tradition, of the high church establishment, not necessarily because of any faith, and of the crown. And he was militantly against Sir Robert Peel.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:36 Peel, however, was able to prove that every time the tariffs were decreased, there was an increase of business and employment. He went to Parliament with the cold, hard facts, and he said, “True enough, when we lower the tariff, it’s going to hurt someone in a particular industry. In a particular line of work for our agriculture. But, it is going to help the consumers, who are everybody. And it will ultimately help the nation as a whole. It will eliminate the business that need to be illuminated, and it will give new opportunity as foreigners selling their goods to us have pounds, sterling, to buy our goods.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:32 He made his case. He was in spite of the fact that Disraeli could make him look like a monkey, because Disraeli was one of the most brilliant debaters Parliament has ever known. A man of tremendous wit and intelligence, who could have your own friends laughing at you. In spite of that, Sir Robert Peel went there repeatedly, with the hard, cold facts. Employment increased, and business increased. Every time the tariffs were lowered. And to the degree they were lowered, to that degree, there was an improvement.

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:20 The lords, however, fought back bitterly, the aristocracy. And one of the things they did was to launch a series of investigations of conditions in industry. Now, you hear a great deal of horrible accounts of how terrible things were in the minds and in the factories in England with the industrial revolution. These reports are in a sense true, but in a much more important sense, they are a fraud. A total fraud. The lords produced them, and the man who was the greatest in his use of them was Carl Marx. And it’s interesting that the lords and Marx and the socialists, together, united against the manufacturers. The merchants.

R.J. Rushdoony: 31:24 Now, let me illustrate why these accounts were a fraud. First of all, let us assume that we are an investigating committee, investigating aerospace in Los Angeles. Now, we are out to do them in. We hate them with a passion. So, what do we do? We go into a plant and we look for every instance of dirt. Here is a supervisor in a department who is seducing as many of the girls as he can and in fact, telling them, “If you want this job or if you want a promotion, you come across.” You get the picture. There isn’t any kind of sizable industry or business operating where you cannot go in and find enough dirt, if that’s what you’re interested in. In fact, if you want to find fault with any one of us in this room, you can. Because none of us are perfect. But that isn’t a true picture, you see. Now, there were instances of minds that were terrible. Some frightening reports of girls of nine and 10, crawling through a shaft on hands and knees, the shaft no more than this, dragging a cart of coal. True. There were mines like that. But that isn’t the whole picture, you see.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:03 If you’re looking for the worst examples, you can always find them. If you want to prove that every mechanic is a bum, a cheat, you can go through Los Angeles and find enough mechanics who, to change a spark plug, will bill you for anything they figure that they can make you a sucker for, to say that mechanics are a fraud. You can prove that the clergy are all fraud, which may not be too far off. You can make a case for almost anything, you see. And this is exactly what those investigations were intended to do. A few years ago, a group of scholars from America, from South Africa, and from England, did a re-examination of these reports that were issued at that time. And they conclusively demonstrated that they were not representative of the reality.

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:17 Now, every textbook was carrying those horror stories before that book came out in the ’50s. They’re still carrying the horror stories. Because they’re not interested in a good case for capitalism. However, as a result of this type of thing, the free trade movement plus the evangelical impulse, within 10 years after they cut the tariffs, they had abolished welfare. That’s the impact. Now, a lot of people lost money in the process. But the country, as a whole, gained. And it embarked England on its greatest period of power and prosperity, the Victorian Era.

R.J. Rushdoony: 35:25 The Victorian Era was an evangelical triumph. Ironically, Victoria, herself, belonged to the opposition. She was not a religious woman. She was very happy when Darwin’s book came out, because now she wouldn’t have to believe a lot of those things in the Old Testament. She thought very highly of Disraeli. And basically, her entire sympathy was with the aristocracy and the lords.

R.J. Rushdoony: 35:57 The important person in the palace then, was the Prince Consort, Albert. A very brilliant man. Something of a genius, who organized the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was a pure and simple, a kind of a World’s Fair to demonstrate the importance of British industry. It was a tremendous success. Prince Albert saw where the leadership was, the leadership of the future. It was in the merchants and the businessmen, in the manufacturers. And he strongly favored them. The work of Prince Albert in the history of Britain is a very, very important one.

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:48 He was a great man, and he accomplished a great work. I indicated how unhappy the work of the lords was, but I should make an exemption or two, because there were some lords who were very great evangelicals. Lord Shaftesbury, for example, this book Lord Shaftesbury and Social Industrial Progress, tells us how much Lord Shaftesbury accomplished in a number of areas. For example, the treatment of lunatics, the lodging house scandal. The health, sanitation and recreation efforts. Popular education, the ragged schools. The ten-hour bill. Anti-slavery, and a great many other things, including the opium traffic.

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:43 Lord Shaftesbury is an evangelical among the lords, together with a handful of others in the House of Lords, who were very influential in further the evangelical revival and getting through a different perspective, a free enterprise perspective through Parliament.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:08 The industrial revolution, of course, took place in Britain. It was the center of it. It was the center because it was the country with the puritan background. It had also gained because of the Revocation of Nantes, the Edict of Nantes, many Huguenots, as did America and the Netherlands. These men were the middle classes, the entrepreneurs of France. So, it had the cream of two countries. These were the men of science, these were the inventors. These were the manufacturers.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:52 The inventions that the industrial revolution produced were many. The flying shovel, the spinning jenny, the water loom, the pottery and iron industries. Canals were built and canal transportation. James Watt and the steam engine. The factory system. Then the railroads, the growth of the merchant marine because of free trade. And England became the civilizer of the western world and of the far colonies throughout all of the world.

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:28 The lords were hostile to all of this. There was a long tradition, by the way, the kind of thing I’m describing began before the renaissance and the years before. Do you know that when movable type was first invented and the printing press appeared, it was fought by the lords of the day? And they considered it a mark of being lower class to own a printed book. So it was many, many years before a lord would consider a printed book as worth buying, and wouldn’t sneer and deride anyone who owned a printed book. The people who put over printing were the students. This was a chance to get books cheaply.

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:25 Britain, through free trade, became a great exporter to all the world. But she was an exporter of more than goods. When you consider the empire that Britain had, up until World War II, an empire going back to the 18th century, what you must realize is that Britain exported throughout all the world into its empire, education. Stack up the colonies of any other countries against those of Britain, and you find that the British colonies had an amazingly high number of university graduates. And these men got their education at the expense of the British people.

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:23 Britain was an exporter of science. Science was introduced into one country after another, and financed so that scientific institutes and agencies were established throughout Asia and Africa and the Pacific. Everywhere. She was a great exporter of health, of medicine, of hospitals, of roads, highways, everything. When people talk about colonialism as though the colonies were milked, they’re talking nonsense. Especially in the case of Britain, because Britain paid for it, and the returns were meager by comparison.

R.J. Rushdoony: 42:19 The horrors of colonialism apply to one situation in particular, the Congo, when it was under Leopold of Belgium. Not under Belgium, but Leopold owned it outright for a time, and it was an era of tremendous and brutal treatment of the natives. Incidentally, up until Congo received its freedom, it had almost no university graduates. Whereas other parts of Africa did have many, and the British so many, that the figures are really staggering. Also, Britain was an exporter of law and order. The only law that vast portions of Africa and Asia had came with the advent of the British Colonial Government. Consider, for a moment, do you realize there were only about 6,000 Englishmen in all of India before they left? Before they turned it over to the Indians and the Pakistans? Only 6,000, and they were running that country very efficiently, better than it’s been run since. That’s good administration. And it certainly is not exploitation.

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:54 Six thousand Englishmen, that was the colonial administration. The rest of the administration, the Army officers and all, were the people of India. And this was the way it was throughout the empire. A handful of men, then utilizing native resources and developing them, systematically, conscientiously with the utmost concern for the welfare of the people they were ruling. It was one of the great achievements of civilization. On top of that, it made possible the extensive propagation of Christianity, because you had an orderly situation throughout the empire, whereby it was possible for missions to function.

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965.  His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.”  He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder

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A Christian Survey of World History

Louis XIV, Revolution, Napoleon, II

Listen to Lecture

Transcript:

*This is an unedited and unoffical print version of R.J. Rushdoony’s lecture.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:01 We will decide [inaudible 00:00:03]. This is why when the revolution began and these philosophes took over, they had no compunctions about eliminating people, executing them for their own good. Like George Bernard Shaw, a modern philosophe, who said that in a Fabian socialist state when people disagreed you tried to persuade them, but if they continued to disagree for their own good you would execute them in a kindly manner.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:38 This is why with the French Revolution these philosophes could sit down and debate for the good of the people, for the good of France, should we eliminate with The Terror 25%, 50%, or 75% of the people? Eliminate them. Wipe them out. Execute them. Of course, they proceeded to eliminate everyone they felt was an impediment to the will of the people.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:06 The French Revolution, therefore, represented the ideas of the Enlightenment of the philosophes on the march to remake the world. The man who stopped it was Napoleon.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:26 Now, Napoleon is a hard man to get the facts about, because Napoleon against his own wishes had to have England as his enemy, and most of our books about Napoleon are written by Englishmen. One of the best is written by an Englishman who appreciates Napoleon NcNair Wilson.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:51 For a long time, the American sources were excellent until the British view after the Civil War especially began to prevail. Perhaps the best single, most readable, most exciting book on Napoleon is by Abbott, a four-volume work. It’s exciting reading.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:11 But most of what you get in English today about Napoleon pictures him as nothing much more than a ladies’ man who spent his life going from one bedroom to the other. As the men of the day go, Napoleon was quite moral. His affairs were very, very few, very rare.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:38 It is interesting that during his lifetime a book from England was brought in which pictured him as this terrible lecher, seducing girls all the time. He read it, and he said, “How would I ever get any of my work done if I spent as much time chasing girls as this book says I do?”

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:05 Napoleon began as a typical liberal. A believer in the ideas of the revolution. But he very quickly realized the fearful evil that was there. Especially when he went to Egypt on the Egyptian campaign and saw the depravity of people there. Every last illusion he had about the natural goodness of man disappeared. He knew that man was depraved, fearfully depraved. No one had proven the depravity of man more than these people who talked about the natural goodness of man. He recognized that there was no substitute for the legitimate power of the monarchy except fear. The revolution had to rule by fear, by terror, because it had no legitimate ground for authority.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:07 Napoleon concluded that power without moral foundations is violence and tyranny. But how to provide the moral foundations? He was not himself a Christian. He was close to it in many of his ideas, but the Christianity he saw in France then both Catholic and Protestant was quite decadent. He wanted the Christians to provide the moral foundations, but they were not really able to do it.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:43 He could not call the descendants of Louis XVI back to rule as he would have liked to, because Louis XVI’s family did not have the common sense that Louis XVI did. Louis XVI went to the guillotine rather than call in the British against his people. He knew the minute he did that he was finished as the King of France. You cannot call in the enemies of your country to be your allies and expect your people to have any part of you, and so he refused.

R.J. Rushdoony: 05:29 But the heirs of Louis XVI made the colossal mistake of seeking English help which meant that no Frenchman would want any part of them after that. Which meant then that Napoleon when he seized power, however willing he was to have a continuation of the monarchy and the Bourbon’s rule, there wasn’t a Bourbon who had the common sense to be used, because they were all working with the English.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:08 If they had gone to the Spanish or to the Austrians, it would have been different, but they went to the English. The English who had taken away Canada and India from France, and no Frenchman could forgive that. This is an important fact to remember. It required foreign guns and foreign bayonets to drive out Napoleon and Napoleon III. But, Charles IX, the Bourbon who succeeded Napoleon, and Louis Philippe who later succeeded him, both were driven out by Frenchmen.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:52 To this day the French government prohibits certain celebrations commemorating Napoleon. They’re afraid of his memory. They’re afraid of the heirs of the Napoleonic line, because they recognize this that both Napoleons thought of France first, and they created a national loyalty that no one before it created, and no one since has been able to command.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:35 Now, Napoleon’s desire was to reestablish the power of France to prevent it from more revolution by regaining India and by reestablishing the Mediterranean as the French sphere of influence. He was not going to try to retake Canada. He’d given up on that. This is why he made his Eastern campaign. His position was a logical one. But, his downfall again was the historic downfall of the French, the lack of naval power. This was what doomed him, the lack of naval power. Had he had the naval power, he could have invaded England easily at one point. He could have prevented any English invasion of his country. He would have triumphed. But it took a coalition of all the powers of Europe to defeat Napoleon.

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:56 Now, Napoleon is important, very important to us, very important to the British, very important to the whole world. Because what Napoleon did was this. He checked for a full century the forces of the Enlightenment, of the philosophes of revolution. All those basic ideas that I outlined to you of the philosophes are ideas you recognize. But for a century they were held back because of Napoleon’s work and, only again, with the Russian Revolution did they begin to march. We have the same ideas on all sides of us today.

R.J. Rushdoony: 09:44 Now, Napoleon’s answer was an inadequate one, ultimately. Napoleon saw that ultimately, it had to be a religious answer. He himself was not able to provide it. The Napoleonic Law Code which he provided was a terrible one, because it did not have a Christian foundation. The basic premise that his lawyers worked out is that you’re guilty until proven innocent which subverts the whole of our Christian tradition.

R.J. Rushdoony: 10:21 Napoleon while he delayed the day of reckoning did not have the answer. The thing that prevented the same thing from happening in Britain was the Evangelical Revival in the Church of England and the Wesleyan Revival of Whitfield and Wesley. This is what gave England the tremendous position in the 19th century to make it the most influential power in the modern era.

R.J. Rushdoony: 10:59 Since World War I, with the same ideas once again on the march, there is not going to be another Napoleon now to postpone the day of reckoning. The issue this time is inescapably religious. Either there will be a return to a thoroughly biblical Christianity, or we shall see once again these ideas of the philosophes, not only on the march, but reordering all society, killing off people at will, treating people as nothing but building blocks to be used or not used and to be ordered about totally in terms of their preconceived anti-Christian concepts. We have two more meetings left, and we shall in these meetings deal with what happened in the 19th and 20th centuries, but you already see from what we have dealt with tonight how the issue of history is coming to a focus. It was delayed once by the Reformation. Then as the Reformation receded, Napoleon was able by his work to postpone the day of reckoning. But now in the 20th century, the issues are coming to a focus. What we do as Christians, therefore, is all important in terms of the future. Let us pray.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:55 Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we thank thee that thou has placed us in so great a time where every decision we make for Thee is so important for our time to come. Oh, Lord our God by Thy grace enable us so to serve Thee. That every little thing we do may add up to great things for Thy name’s sake. The end of the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and to this Christ. In Jesus name, Amen.

R.J. Rushdoony: 13:35 Now, I’m going to show you first a couple of pictures. One, a statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy and the other of his palace. Upper Belvedere was the name of it and Franz Ferdinand lived in the palace just before World War I. This is Prince Eugene in his old age. In fact, this was done after his death.

Audience: 14:11 Who did this?

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:14 [Bernini 00:14:14].

Audience: 14:14 (silence).

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:43 We don’t know much about that. We do know that they took over the czarist bureaucracy of civil service to a great extent, never changed it, because they had no way of running the country, so the czarist bureaucracy just stayed on and began to work for the Soviets. Bureaucracies stay when governments come and go.

Audience: 15:12 [inaudible 00:15:12].

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:11 Yes. Well, we do know that the Soviets train homosexuals for espionage work, so that they can contact homosexuals in foreign governments. This is a very definite part of their training. Yes?

Audience: 15:45 You mentioned the ancestry of Thomas Aquinas.

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:51 Yes.

Audience: 15:58 Have you heard, is that any connection [inaudible 00:15:58]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:58 Yes, right. Named after the same-

Audience: 16:02 Is that a saint?

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:04 Yes. He was one of the Medieval philosophers whose philosophy was made the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, and he was declared a doctor of the church and a saint. Now, of course, Aquinas had no children, but the family of Aquinas was an ancestor of Prince Eugene of Savoy.

Audience: 16:35 Is that liberal type of [inaudible 00:16:35]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:40 Aquinas College? Well, it is a conservative Catholic school, but we would not consider it too conservative from our perspective.

Audience: 16:54 That’s not the [inaudible 00:16:54] of Aquinas. That’s the modern influence [inaudible 00:16:54].

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:59 Well, yes, in my book, The One and the Many, I deal with the latent and implicit radicalism of Aquinas’s ideas. Yes?

Audience: 17:08 Well, she’s first.

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:09 Yes. [Fil 00:17:09]?

Audience: 17:09 This word philosophe is unfamiliar to me, and how do you spell it [inaudible 00:17:21]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:24 Philosophes. It’s a French word, P-H-I-L-O-S-O-P-H-E-S. It referred to these thinkers who regarded themselves as a kind of true philosophy. They were the thinkers. Wisdom was born with them. Their ideas were just what I described.

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:47 They have been very ably described by an American scholar of Dutch ancestry, Peter Gay, in two volumes on the Enlightenment. Peter Gay himself is not a Christian, and he’s one of the few who’s been honest about telling the truth about their anti-Christianity. Most writers cover this up. But Peter Gay very plainly admits how they were, first and foremost, anti-Christian.

Audience: 18:24 [inaudible 00:18:24].

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:33 Yes. Diderot and all the others.

Audience: 18:34 Unless, of course, the [inaudible 00:18:34].

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:34 Oh, yes. In part, some of them, but, basically, they were anti-Christian. That was the essence of their position. Yes?

Audience: 18:46 I have two questions. I want to know, are there any redeeming qualities about Voltaire? Two, what was the base of operations of the philosophes before they began their march into revolution? I’m sure you covered that as you introduced them, but I missed that. What was their base of operations? Were they influential in the court or with middle-class bureaucrats, or what-

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:11 Oh, yes. First of all, Voltaire was a thorough scoundrel. I don’t see anything redeeming about him. The so-called famous saying, “I disagree with everything you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire never said. That’s a modern invention to give him some respectability. He was a scoundrel. He was a cheat. He was a liar. Frederick the Great who invited him to his court finally had to chase him out, because he was so shameless and so contemptible.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:44 He was probably himself also a homosexual. He certainly had strong tendencies in that part. He did everything to rob and to cheat his host. He had a lifetime berth there and the cushiest kind of conditions. But he did everything to aggravate Frederick the Great who leaned over backwards to try to be tolerant.

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:10 Now, these philosophes, of course, these Enlightenment thinkers had taken over very steadily. The court had been tolerant of them, because what you have to realize is that while there was some semblance of faith there, Louis XV was a profligate monarch who as long as the money was coming, and he could afford his mistresses and his gay court was content to let things go.

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:40 Having no great faith, he bought the ideas of these men. He subsidized them. If they got too far out of line, he cracked their knuckles a bit. But basically, he favored them and subsidized them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:57 Louis XVI was a very earnest, well-meaning man, very devout man. But, all the same, Louis XVI had imbibed so many of their ideas that he had no way of successfully resisting them. If you already have bought nine-tenths of your opponent’s ideas, or, even 50%, how are you going to resist him? Because the enemy is then in you.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:27 While there was a tremendous conspiracy at work in the French Revolution, there is no question about that, and I think the best account of it is Nesta Webster’s book on the French Revolution, a very important work, very important. But still, what you have to say is it wasn’t the conspiracy that did it, but the fact that everybody in the church, in the state, among the common people, high and low had imbibed these ideas.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:56 On the Huguenot side, there were practically none who resisted the ideas.

Audience: 22:08 But there [crosstalk 00:22:08]-

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:08 What?

Audience: 22:08 In all honesty, there weren’t many Huguenots there anymore.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:08 No, but they did not resist it, and on the Catholic side, there were very few also. In fact, many of the bishops were prominent among those calling for everything revolutionary. Yes?

Audience: 22:33 I thought that they [inaudible 00:22:34] in the name of science. There was all this monarchal science. Yet you mentioned, they were anti-scientific. Then what were they pushing? Just humanitarianism or [crosstalk 00:22:37]-

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:38 Pushing knowledge, learning.

Audience: 22:39 That’s science, isn’t it?

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:41 No, no. There’s a difference.

Audience: 22:42 [crosstalk 00:22:42] wouldn’t that be what the [inaudible 00:22:47] we’re going to make gold out of stones, or we’re going to-

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:50 No. That-

Audience: 22:50 … [crosstalk 00:22:50] or something.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:53 No. That kind of thing, alchemy it passed out long before.

Audience: 22:56 [crosstalk 00:22:56] [inaudible 00:22:58].

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:00 No. By and large, these philosophes were not only not interested in science but hostile to it. It was learning. It was art. It was the arty emphasis that they were selling, and this was popular with the courts, to be a patron of learning.

Audience: 23:17 Well, that would be Kissinger and his crew [inaudible 00:23:19].

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:22 No, you had that more in Kennedy and his crew. Kennedy and his crew basically had the entertainers, the dramatists, the musicians around the court. It was Camelot, another King Arthur and all these gay troubadours and so on. Kennedy’s concept was-

Audience: 23:47 But even Kissinger-

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:48 … in essence-

Audience: 23:49 … brags about his art of politics-

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:51 Well, he’s a politician primarily. That’s a minor note.

Audience: 23:58 [crosstalk 00:23:58]-

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:57 It was the Kennedy regime that was trying to create, as it were, a royal court. You had a last hangover of the Kennedy regime in the Bernstein Mass not too long ago.

Audience: 24:10 Yeah. Yeah.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:12 Yes?

Audience: 24:17 Kissinger [inaudible 00:24:17] unimportance. He got appointed to such an important job in the new administration.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:26 No, he was not of relative unimportance. Kissinger was a big wheel at Harvard. If you trace the history of Harvard in recent years, you find that since FDR and his Brain Trust calling in experts a la Louis XIV, Harvard has had a high place in this. Kissinger as a man in political science naturally was high up in the running. I’d say Kissinger was a natural for the job. What they wanted was someone who was more or less liberal who was in the Harvard tradition. Who could command the intellectual community and had prestige and respectability and give Nixon that prestige, and-

Audience: 25:09 He has no respectability or [inaudible 00:25:11] to the intellectual community.

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:13 Oh yes, he does. He does very definitely.

Audience: 25:16 [crosstalk 00:25:16] everybody laughs at him, even the people on his side.

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:20 I beg to differ with you. Kissinger commands a great deal of respect in the intellectual community, a great deal.

Audience: 25:29 Among the philosophes.

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:30 Among the philosophes very definitely.

Audience: 25:33 Because he’s doing a good job basically for the [inaudible 00:25:33] of the administration, but is he doing a good job for the American people? Oh, no.

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:39 Oh, no. We wouldn’t agree with that. But the point is-

Audience: 25:42 [crosstalk 00:25:42]-

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:45 As far as the American people are concerned, he’s doing a good job, because I would say he’s been a very major, political asset for Nixon. Because you may not like him, and I may not like him, but you’ve got to realize that most of the people are very happy about the kind of thing he has done.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:04 The Democrats are themselves complaining that a lot of their campaign promises and hopes have been stolen by Nixon a la Kissinger. He’s been a major asset. Now, they don’t figure your vote and mine is anything. They’ve written that off, so they don’t care about us.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:25 But with most of the American people, he’s been a major asset. He’s been a major asset in dealing with foreign governments. Nixon is a politician first and last. He has Kissinger there, because Kissinger is an asset to him, and he’d drop him tomorrow if he weren’t.

Audience: 26:45 Even [inaudible 00:26:45] Kissinger up as a sex symbol [inaudible 00:26:56].

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:05 See our point of view is a very, definitely a minority point of view. A man may look bad or ridiculous to us, but that doesn’t mean he is that to the country as a whole. What we thought was the most horrible thing in American history, his August 15th speech, Nixon’s, gained him more popularity than he’d had since he took office.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:28 You have to look at the reality of the situation. I think this is one reason why conservatives have generally been impotent, because they’re sure that the people really don’t want what they’re asking for.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:41 But they do, you see. When we take that position, we’re taking the position of the philosophes who said, “We know what the will of the people is.” We know what they really want, rather than what they say they do. But when the people vote for something, when the people approve of something, you have to say, “That’s what they want.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:01 This is why I don’t put any stock in what people say, “Well, most of the people in the Presbyterian or Episcopal or Methodist Church are really good Christians at heart.” If they were they wouldn’t be there. They are there, because they like what they’re getting.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:18 What you’re saying is you know better than they do what they are, and you don’t, and I don’t. People find their kind. They seek their own level. Water always seeks its own level. These people are in those churches, because that is where they are at home. People vote for what they do, because they like it.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:47 Yes?

Audience: 28:49 Except that I still think people who voted for Nixon [inaudible 00:29:03] supported him, I still think there’s an element of people who are more conservatively leaning and don’t really know what he stands for. He’s not really been and not really looked at [inaudible 00:29:05] and even some of the things, he’s done, they still try to say, “Oh, well, he has [inaudible 00:29:10] conservative at heart.” Just because they have not really been and have not really looked behind. They seem to not realize that he’s been a liberal since the day he first ran for Congress in California. Then supported by-

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:25 They don’t want to know, because basically, they don’t have any principles. You see? You cannot give people principles they don’t have. You can’t say, “Well, if they knew better, they would feel that way.” They don’t know better, because they don’t care.

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:40 They really don’t have principles. There are very, very few people in the country today who have any real religious principles, any real political principles. It’s basically, “What’s in it for me?”

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:55 Now, this is our problem today. I had a very interesting conversation a couple of days ago with Bill Richardson, our state senator. Bill was telling me about a radio address he had just made. It was about crime in the state of California.

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:16 The gist of it is this, now, I may not have the figures quite accurately, but I think I do. His secretary called me today, she’s going to send me the text of it.

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:25 There were over 640,000 crimes of violence against persons and property, serious crimes of violence against persons and property committed in the state of California in 1970. Now, that’s quite a few when you consider there are 20 million people, and those are families divide them say by five, the average family and then 640,000 serious crimes, you realize how many people are hit. Of those, in those cases, only 200,000 arrests were made about, less than one third. Of these 200,000 only a little better than 50,000 were taken to court by the district attorneys. 34% of those that were taken to court were already out on parole or were awaiting trial for some other offense.

R.J. Rushdoony: 31:41 Of those 50,000 that were taken to court, these were the ones where the DAs felt, “We’ve got to win. We can’t lose on this.” 5,000 served any time at all. The others were turned out on probation or something like that.

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:03 Now, what Bill pointed out, he said, “Study it carefully. Trace this out.” He’s been working on this for about eight, 10 months. Our prisons are empty now. They’re empty. We’re not sending anyone.

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:21 Now, some of the courts are real problems, but even more than the courts are the juries. The average person on the jury wants to turn them loose. Bill said, “Do you know why?” Because they figure, “Well, the next time, it could be my boy or my girl, or it could be some relative or maybe even me.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:45 Because they all have larceny in their hearts. There’s not enough faith in them, not enough righteousness in them to make them ready to stand up and mete out any serious sentence. The percentage of convictions are dropping all the time.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:04 What does this mean? Well, and this is the picture across country. The percentage just varies from state to state. It means that the average American, and Bill drew this conclusion, today is on the side of the criminal, and he proves it. When he goes to court whether as a witness, in that he doesn’t want to be a witness, or whether as a member of a jury, he’s on the side of the criminal.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:37 He proves it too in his taste in movies and his taste in television programs, a hoodlum as a hero. There’s a number of them who are unwilling to give a firm sentence, because they figure, “Well, the next person up might be my kid, and I don’t like things this strict, because I think my kid’s all right even though he does get into this and that trouble.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:07 It wasn’t too long ago in this area where … not too far from here, just about three, four miles. Police had to shoot a teenager who after a hold-up savagely assaulted and crippled a man, and was suspected of having done this in a couple of other cases, shot and wounded a police officer. They finally killed him.

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:42 The mother was vicious and savage in her attack on the police. Her boy was a good boy. What did they think going around killing good boys like her son?

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:56 Now, that’s the reality of our situation today. Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. Today, there is no righteousness in the American people.

R.J. Rushdoony: 35:08 We cannot give them a righteousness by saying, “Well, they’re good Americans,” and so on. They’re ungodly, and in the sight of God, they’re bound for hell. They’re going to show their hellish character, and they’re doing it.

R.J. Rushdoony: 35:24 Bill says the police are ready to quit. What’s the point in going on under the circumstances? Now imagine, 200,000 arrests where they figured they had the person. 50,000 only go to court. 5,000 convictions, and that might be a very short thing in jail, less than 1% conviction. Why it pays to be a criminal now. Crime definitely pays.

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:07 This is exactly what we were talking about this evening. The ideas of the philosophes, this anti-Christianity is revealing itself in the breakdown of law and order. We’ll never, never in all our days be able to cope with it unless we say, “We are in an ungodly generation in the midst of an ungodly people.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:26 Nothing short of a Christian reawakening, Christian institutions like Christian schools will turn the tide. Short of it, what happened at the French Revolution with the Reign of Terror and the Russian Revolution will take over the whole of the Western World. Now, that’s the logic of the situation. We cannot do anything until we face exactly what we have.

Audience: 36:54 [inaudible 00:36:54] a long period of time, as you know, I can imagine that at any age there’s always been an element of dissension [inaudible 00:37:18]. But as this thing grows and develops, isn’t it always somebody or some people in the background just [inaudible 00:37:24] on its destruction?

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:30 Oh, of course. There always is. You never, never, never in all history had a period when you didn’t have organized conspiratorial people in the background. But the question is, what determines things ultimately?

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:44 Now, you never had an era in American history, as I told our Sunday group some months ago, never an era in American history with more subversives than in the days of Washington and John Adams. There were so many subversives sent over here, paid revolutionaries, paid agents by the French government, the French revolutionary government, that the United States was honeycombed with them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:20 They had paid agents right up into the cabinet of George Washington. We had a standing army then of a hundred men. They were so powerful in this country that they thought they could take it over almost any day. You never in all of American history have had more organized, more powerful subversion than then.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:44 But why couldn’t they do it? Because you had a strong godly element. That’s what you don’t have today. That’s the difference.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:57 That we can never say, “It’s this subversive group that’s responsible,” or “That subversive group.” You always have to say as God requires in His Word, I, even I have done that which is evil in Thy sight.

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:11 The sin of Adam and Eve was ultimately this failure of responsibility. “The serpent did give me, and I did eat. The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she did give me, and I did eat.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:26 You see, as long as we take that attitude as a people and say, “It’s the Communists who are doing this to us. It’s this and that subversive group,” or “It’s the Illuminati,” or “It’s the Fabian socialists,” or somebody else. We are sinners in the sight of God. We’re not saying, “I, even I have done that which is evil in Thy sight.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:52 Because when men stand with God, God stands with them, and they’re going to triumph. But today, we have this mentality too often among conservatives, and it’s unbiblical. It’s anti-Christian, because in terms of Christianity, no one can plead that.

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:11 Then they’re putting themselves in the enemy’s camp. Then they are conceding to the basic environmentalism. If you become an environmentalist, then there’s no difference between you and the Marxist except one of degree. Because this is their premise, environmentalism.

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:29 Ultimately, we have to say it is the responsibility of the people. Every man has to meet his own guilt before God and come to terms with God and Christ, or there is no hope for us in the future.

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:45 This is why the conservative movement has taken millions of dollars, and it has wound up really helping us further down the road. Because it’s deflected the attention of people from the real issue, the spiritual issue.

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:59 It has accomplished nothing except to blind people to the real issue, to find excuses to say, “Really, we’re a fine people.” To pat America on the back, as it were, and say, “It’s just these handful of subversives that have done all this to us. Oh, we’re such wonderful people.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:20 It’s not true. We were a godly people. We are now a very ungodly people. This is our problem today.

Audience: 41:33 Well, it’s basically the people [inaudible 00:41:33].

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:49 It isn’t that it-

Audience: 41:49 … leadership that we need [inaudible 00:41:50] people.

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:52 Yes. The leadership is going to come not from any one source but from many. It’s going to come as people do things which are being done right now. The Christian school movement is a big forward step. It’s going to take thousands upon thousands of individuals, each in their calling, standing in terms of God and His Word. Each of them building godly homes, rebuilding churches, rebuilding one area of life after another. This is what’s going to do it.

R.J. Rushdoony: 42:26 I see it already being done. The real action today, I believe is precisely in that area, not in the area of politics. There is no hope in the political sphere.

R.J. Rushdoony: 42:38 Dorothy and I recently had a friend come and stay with us, I must finish with this, for three days on her way home to Northern California from Washington, DC. This friend who is a professional politician, whose work is promoting campaigns and so on, is a very competent professional politician said, “There was no hope politically. Anyone who expected anything to come out of politics and out of Washington was a fool.” That the hope had to be elsewhere. That the people were rotten to the core, and they were getting exactly what they had coming to them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:22 She painted a bleak picture in Washington, DC. Contrary to her previous visit, there’s not much crime at night. Nobody goes out. Everybody is behind locked doors with a gun.

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:34 She said, as of recent months, crime is a daylight affair. Because that’s when people are on the streets. You’ll be robbed when you stop for a signal at an intersection. They’ll walk into stores and rob you.

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:52 If you want further details on what goes on, Dick [Deamer 00:43:57] here can tell you what happens to cars in the Pentagon parking lot, because he was there. It’s a bleak picture. It’s one of radical, moral collapse, a very radical, moral collapse.

R.J. Rushdoony: 44:12 The only answer is the one that the Word of God provides, the saving power of Jesus Christ. Anything short of that is to delude the people and to join forces with the enemy. We can never allow anyone to think that anything short of Christ offers any hope for our future.

R.J. Rushdoony: 44:35 Well, we’ve run over time, so we will have to end it now.

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965.  His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.”  He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder

The post Louis XIV, Revolution, Napoleon, II appeared first on Rushdoony Radio.

A Christian Survey of World History

Louis XiV, Revolution, Napoleon, I

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Transcript:

*This is an unedited and unoffical print version of R.J. Rushdoony’s lecture.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:01 Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we thank thee that we can begin and end our days with thee. We thank thee at the beginning of a new year that our times are in thy hands who doeth all things well. We pray, our Father, for all those who suffer behind the iron curtain for their faith, that thou wouldst be with them to strengthen them and to deliver them. We thank thee, our Father, that we have the assurance in this grim struggle against the powers of darkness that thou art he who shall prevail, that greater is he that is within us then he that is in the world. Our God, in this confidence we study thy workings in the past and face all our tomorrows in the confidence of thy grace. In Jesus’ name, amen. Since our study of world history is a survey, inevitably we must skip over a great deal that is very pertinent and very interesting. It would be worthwhile, for example, to take time to deal with the continuing force of feudalism far beyond the Middle Ages into the modern era. As a matter of fact, the world of feudalism is today the most virile part of the modern world.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:41 The two countries that are the most feudalistic in the modern world are the United States and Japan. Japan got a heavy dose of feudalism from the Portuguese missionaries, the samurai. The business world of Japan gains its vitality from a feudalistic structure. The whole nature of the American system is feudalistic. The county comes from the word count, the realm of a count, only without a count. It’s a law area. The United States and Japan are the two most feudalistic areas in the world today, and they have the greatest freedom and also the greatest ability to function. Local authority and civil government prevails, and local loyalties in feudalism were very powerful, and people do develop local loyalties in this country. They will be from a particular part of the South, a particular county. They will be people from a particular part of the West, a particular county or community. This was characteristic of feudalism. There was no such thing as a national feeling in the time of feudalism. As a result, the world of feudalism was not conscious of national or racial lines but of religious lines and local loyalties.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:21 The world of feudalism thus is a very different world from ours. For one thing, people traveled around a great deal in the feudalistic world, far, far more than we today realize. When we look for example at the life of the man who in the era we shall be studying tonight, the late 17th and early part of the 18th century, was the most powerful figure of his day, regarded by many to this day as the greatest man of his century, we find a very surprising thing. The man in question was a Frenchman, Duke Francois-Eugene of Savoy, Prince of Piedmont, Margrave of Saluzzo.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:17 Incidentally, he never fought for France in his life. He was rejected by Louis XIV when he applied for generalship of the armies as too presumptuous. For one thing, he was too powerful in his background for Louis XIV to want to give an important figure so much power. Eugene, Prince Eugene was related to every royal family of Europe. On top of that, to give you an idea of the feudal world which he was a part of and how in the feudal world you could just pick up and go anywhere, and serve any monarch you felt, and then after you finished serving him you could go over to the person on the opposite side of the fence and you were not a traitor. You were just a feudal lord serving whoever bought your services. Of course, there was no feeling about intermarriage between peoples, and so people like Prince Eugene represented a very varied kind of background, as did almost every royal family of the day.

R.J. Rushdoony: 05:25 To give you an idea of the ancestry of Prince Eugene, he was predominantly French but also German, Roman, Byzantine and Armenian. He also had Spanish, Portuguese, Scandinavian, English, Czech, Hungarian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Russian, and Mongol bloods. He could trace his ancestry back to Thomas Aquinas. He could also trace it back to the Bourges family. His mother was the niece of Cardinal Mazarin. There was nobody of any consequence throughout Europe, the Middle East, and way back almost to China that he was not related to. He was a league of nations in one man, and that was routine for the day. It was very commonplace.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:25 Today that would be unheard of, but Louis XIV himself had quite a few strains of blood in him. Louis XIV was French, he was Spanish, he was English, he was German. He was quite a few other things including Jewish and Moorish. As a matter of fact, there is some belief that they had a Moorish girl who was put into a convent. We do know definitely there was a Moorish girl who was in a convent who was regularly visited by the Queen, Maria Theresa, together with the ladies of the court, and her background and everything was kept very much a mystery. This thus was routine in that day.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:18 It was nationalism that limited this kind of thing. It limited the boundaries and because of mercantilist policies by British, by French, by German, or by Austrian, or whatever the case might be, it restricted internationalism and confined people to their frontiers.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:44 There was another aspect of the world of this era that we touched on last time when we dealt with the Spanish and their contempt of work. It was carried perhaps the greatest extreme in Spain, but it characterized every country of Europe. The nobility and the royalty had a contempt for work ethics. Work was seen as the lot of peasants. Well, the middle classes of course who combined work with foresight, thrift and planning, and grew rich and powerful were therefore hated and despised everywhere. They were especially despised because by and large the people who did this were of two classes: Protestants, Huguenots and Puritans, and Jews. So much so that it was a common belief in Europe that if you were a Protestant you were really a secret Jew. You had to be. To this day, for example, in France the banking is in the hands of Jews and Protestants, and they’re regarded really as foreigners. The French finance minister today is a protestant banker, Giscard d’Estaing. Now, as a protestant he’s the last man normally that a French government and someone like Pompidou would call to be finance minister, but he was finance minister earlier under de Gaulle as well. Perhaps the most influential financial thinker is Jacques Rueff, who is of a Jewish background in part. Here you have Rueff and Giscard d’Estaing, a French protestant. The reason of course is that this is the kind of ground where you don’t find good French Catholics, you see. Now, the work ethics was associated therefore with Protestants and Jews, in particular Calvinistic Protestants. This is why, incidentally, and there’s been a study made of this very recently, Jamestown was such a failure. The men who went to Jamestown were all of the gentry. They were anti-Puritan and they didn’t believe in work. Their idea was that they were going to go out there and round up the Indians and tell them, “All right, boys, you do the work,” and the Indians had other ideas, and the colony failed.

R.J. Rushdoony: 10:35 It was only as settlement was made by those who had the Puritan work ethics that America began to prosper. This of course was the reason for the eminence of England and America, the Puritan element there. France, when it kicked out the Huguenots, the French Calvinists, began thereafter to face economic problems, because the work ethics had been in effect abolished.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:10 This period to the 17th and 18th centuries was the period of the Enlightenment, the triumph of humanism. Now, the birth of the Enlightenment was in England, but France then carried it to its logical conclusion. In a sense, the era we are going to be considering tonight requires us to concentrate on France because France was the world leader in the latter part from the 17th century up until almost the French Revolution and again for a while through Napoleon.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:53 France was, as it were, the center of the world. Therefore, France pioneered in so many things, and to this day France is in a sense a step ahead of the world in carrying the logic of the modern era to its conclusion. Some of the things many people dislike in France are precisely the kind of thing that you find in every other country of the western world, only the French have logically gone a little ahead, a little further down the road with regard to it. During this era and far earlier, well before the Reformation, French had Gallicanism. Now, Gallicanism in a sense was the same thing as Anglicanism. It was the French church separated to a very large degree from Rome, still nominally Catholic but really virtually independent of the Pope. This ended with Napoleon. Work, as I indicated, was despised. Jews and Protestants were the working rich and therefore aliens. They were so much despised that on one occasion when the Duke of Saint-Simon, who was not a fool but a very intelligent man, saw Louis XIV chatting in a friendly way with a wealthy French banker, Samuel Bernard, he was very shocked and thought it was disgraceful that the king of France should talk to a banker, a working man. This was a shameful thing in his eyes.

R.J. Rushdoony: 13:49 You can see how this perspective, which was characteristic of all of Europe and England, apart from the Puritan Huguenot tradition and the Reform tradition also in Switzerland and the Netherlands but not quite to the same degree, why it created problems in these societies and why inescapably it led to the development of revolutionary trends against the aristocracy.

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:27 Now, Louis XIV, whose dates are 1638 to 1715, had a long reign as a king. He was a small boy when he succeeded his father, Louis XIII. He was a king therefore for well over 65 years. That’s a long reign, from the time he was a boy well into his 70s. He was a very intelligent monarch. He was a very physically strong and virile man, a man of tremendous abilities. It’s very, very easy with Louis XIV, as many such strong people do, to detest him thoroughly and also to have a tremendous admiration for him. It’s very nigh impossible to know much about Louis XIV without reacting very strongly one way or another to Louis XIV.

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:49 He was very much a calculating person. He was in his own way the leader of a new secularism and a departure from Christianity, and yet with all of that he was personally very devout. He was a man who placed a great deal of emphasis on proper form. Thus, he had for many years a series of mistresses until the Queen died, and he married one of his mistresses, Madame de Maintenon, who was a very devout woman of a Protestant background who had turned Catholic, and then he was very faithful to her thereafter. He was a very virile man as I indicated because when he was more than 70 Madame de Maintenon went to the bishop and asked if it were still necessary to give in to Louis’s sexual demands, which were at least once a night.

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:56 Now, as he came to rule, he had a number of ideas in mind that governed him absolutely. One was a dread of the feudal nobility. All his life, he was working against them but never openly at war with them. Acting as their friend, as their companion, but doing everything to undercut them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:25 I pointed out last time that France was a series of kingdoms, a collection of kingdoms, rather than one unified people. Some of those kingdoms had been very great realms, very wealthy realms, of unbelievable wealth during the Middle Ages. Now they had been brought together. Louis the XI had been one of the prime movers of bringing them together and Henry IV, his grandfather. Louis XIII had furthered that under Richelieu. But when Louis XIV was a small boy, this whole settlement was almost destroyed by a revolt of the nobility trying to reestablish their independent realms, their separate kingdoms, so that for a while as a boy he lived in great fear that any time he might be taken captive or even killed by these warring lords and the whole realm destroyed. He never outgrew the fear of that, the fear of the power of the nobility.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:40 As a result, he worked to nullify it. He brought the nobility to the court to prevent them from building up their power base in their particular realms. If a lord was from Burgundy, which had been an independent kingdom, or Aquitaine, which had been a powerful kingdom, or Normandy, a powerful kingdom, and so on, they came to the court. They stayed there unless the king gave them permission to leave.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:17 He gave them all kinds of ritual offices, and he made everything in the court an elaborate semi-religious state ritual with himself the king as it were God on earth and these as the high priests so that he in no time at all had the nobility fighting with each other to try to get important positions that would put them close to the king, to be lord of the Chamber pot, for example, which meant that first thing in the morning you were there by the king’s bed with a chamber pot. Or lord of the wardrobe so that you handed him his bathrobe when he got up and so on. You were there to say something to the king and to put into a word on this and that, you see.

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:13 Everything was made into an elaborate ritual. It seems ridiculous to us that men who had ruled realms, had been powerful, had armies would be quarreling and struggling to get the honor from somebody else of handling a chamber pot or a bathrobe. But Louis very shrewdly made this everything, made everything a ritual. Then every night, gambling so that the lords were hooked on this. They became gamblers who enjoyed doing nothing but sitting around, and going through the ritual during the day, and dreaming of getting some little job whereby they handed something to the king, and then at night gambling.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:11 They had no desire for work to begin with. Now they were tied to the court ritual and separated from their realms. This had great consequences for the future of France, because they were now separated from the common people on whom they depended for their income. They were courtiers whose life was governed by the court, who regarded it as the worst of punishment after a while to be abolished from the court for a while and sent back to their own estates.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:53 Now, as I said, France was a collection of kingdoms with very different peoples. The Bretons, for example, were Celts, related to the Welsh. The Burgundians were a separate people, Germanic. In the south of France, you had people of a very different character where Syrian influence in the early part of the Middle Ages and the so-called Dark Ages had been very strong, very powerful, so you had a different kind of person there.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:29 Now, while these lords were apart of these realms and spoke the local language, they had a closeness with these people, they understood their problems, they could rule them wisely. But once they became courtiers and spoke the language of the court, they were strangers to these people. This paved the way for their ultimate downfall, because they had nothing in common any longer with the people on whom they depended. But Louis XIV broke the back of feudalism in France by tying the people to the court and to a court ritual.

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:18 Then next, Louis XIV had a middle class cabinet. He went to these working people of the middle class and made them the real powers in the government. Now, these were people who however wealthy, however successful, were not important enough to take over the government. They were experts. They were a bureaucracy. The state was run by them, but none of them were able to dominate it because none of them were powerful enough individually or national figures.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:08 It has been said that the first pentagon was Versailles and the court of Louis XIV, and very rightly so. It was even to the military extent, because he established there the first department of war in any modern sense. He had a corps of engineers to do the military planning. From a few thousand peace time army he raised the army to 100,000 in peace time and 400,000 in war. In peace time, they were busy planning.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:47 The first Inspector General of his army was General Martinet, from whence we get the word martinet. That is somebody who’s a drill master and makes you toe the mark, do everything with precision. That is why the armies of Louis XIV triumphed for a long time all over the face of Europe until they were defeated by the man that Louis XIV had turned down, Prince Eugene of Savoy. Prince Eugene of Savoy not only defeated Louis XIV, the Duke of Marlborough was in association with Savoy, but he also drove the Turks back, and had he lived he intended to take Constantinople.

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:47 What Louis XIV did with his pentagon concept was to turn government from a one man thing as it had been into a bureaucracy so that after Louis XIV you have the development of the modern idea of the state, a group of bureaucrats and experts, a group of planners doing everything and one man at the top just saying, “Go ahead with this or with that,” simply administrating the bureaucracy.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:28 Then another aspect of Louis XIV’s work, he built Versailles. Now, a little later I’ll show you some pictures of Versailles as well as Prince Eugene of Savoy, but Versailles was a very interesting concept. First, it was built out in the country outside of Paris some miles. Now, this was a very shrewd move on the part of Louis XIV. Louis recognized the power of a big city to dominate a government and to color its outlook. Any big city is likely to develop a large number of people, poor people, a rabble that can be a mob, that can dominate a government. He recognized also that a big city can color the outlook of a government, and so he felt never in Paris. The government must not be there. It must be at Versailles.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:34 He rarely ever in his life set foot in Paris, which is a very interesting fact. The King of France who rarely went into Paris and then got out as quickly as he could, hated to stay overnight. If Paris wanted to see the king, they had to go to Versailles. Thus Paris, a very powerful city, was never able to exercise any influence on his government. Moreover, he built Versailles without any walls or without a moat to indicate his sense of security and power, to say, “I have a realm so powerful, so strong, and my peace time is army is such that nobody, neither the lords nor any foreign power can trouble me. Therefore, I will make my capitol, Versailles, out in the country like a garden, like a park.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:45 He had a zoo there with animals from all lands, statues everywhere, fountains, gardens, making it look like a new Garden of Eden, a new paradise. It was both his residence and the seat of his government. Versailles was copied by virtually every other country. We have an imitation of Versailles that Jefferson copied in Washington D.C.

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:22 Moreover, the architecture was humanistic. I pointed out last time how Philip II of Spain when he built the Escorial, his palace, again out in the country, made it with a chapel at the center and a monastery, also a mausoleum, so that the Catholic faith was at the center of his concept of rule. For Louis XIV, the chapel was at one side. The center of the building was his bedroom, and he ruled from his bedroom. He’d get up in the morning and after having eaten and bathed, he bathed daily, he would then receive a procession of his ministers, these middle class experts, make his decisions. This was the center.

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:27 Moreover, the fact that he reigned so long made his reign extremely important in that what he did could be made permanent. It could be made so much a part of the life of the nation because he ruled for so many years. It’s interesting to realize that Louis XV was not the son of Louis XIV. He was his great-grandson who succeeded as a boy of five. Louis XV, like his great-grandfather, reigned a long time, from 1715 to 1774, so that it was his grandson, Louis XVI, who succeeded him. In three monarchs, three generations are passed over because their reigns were so long.

R.J. Rushdoony: 31:35 Thus, Louis XIV made France the world power. There was a weakness in what Louis XIV did, great as it was and important as it was. He made French the language of international trade, of diplomacy, the world language, so that as a matter of fact French continued for a long time alongside of English as the international language and still does to a degree. But since the economic policy everywhere including France was mercantilist, that is buy American, buy French, buy this, just your own country, develop colonies as the source of raw materials and as your market, it put France at a disadvantage because the French simply were not navally oriented. They were a tremendous land power. Their army was always their strong point. Their navy they never did emphasize.

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:58 This meant that with a far flung empire, because India was French, Canada and much of America was French, Louisiana and adjacent areas was French, the Mediterranean was the area of French power and influence, but not being a naval power England was able to cut them back and to destroy them ultimately. They lost their colonies in America in the French and Indian War and also India, simply because of their naval inadequacy.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:55 Now because of the mercantilist policy, this created a crisis for the French. How could they import raw materials, not having the colonies now, or export to colonies when they didn’t have the colonies? It created an economic crisis which ultimately led to the collapse with the revolution. If they had not lost the empire, there would have been no revolution. This is why France was the great ally of the Americans in the War of Independence. They had lost just a few years early the French and Indian War and their empire to the British. Well, America was the choicest part of the British Empire, and they were going to do everything to help the Americans kick out the British. This is why. It wasn’t altruism. They sent over troops, Lafayette and many others. They provided all kinds of foreign aid in the hopes that this would be the beginning of toppling the American power. If you’ll recall, part of the American strategy encouraged by the French was an invasion of Canada.

Speaker 2: 35:25 You meant toppling the English power.

R.J. Rushdoony: 35:34 What? Yes, toppling the English power, yes. Excuse me. However, this did not prevent the collapse. In fact, it very nearly led to a collapse both in Britain and in France. If it had not been for the Wesleyan revival and the evangelical revival within the Church of England, when the French Revolution occurred there would have also been a revolution in Britain. It was the religious aspect in Britain that prevented it from blowing up in a revolution.

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:23 Now, the French Revolution was the great opportunity for the radical humanists, the enlightenment thinkers who called themselves philosophes. I indicated earlier their sources were the English deists and thinkers and also the Dutch thinkers. There are several things that characterized these philosophes, very important for us to understand because what we have today and have in this century, especially since World War II, is the ideas, and the faith, and the spirit of the philosophes on the march all over the world.

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:04 They were urban first of all. Therefore, they had no sense of the reality of the soil and a man being bound to the earth. They saw things from the standpoint of big city people who with a wave of a hand assume you can do this and that and as though, well, the food is always going to be supplied. Those Slavs out there and the farms, the peasants, they are always provided, you see. They just assumed these things. They assumed production. They were planners pure and simple.

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:43 Second, they were characterized by a total hatred of Christianity. Anything was tolerable, any kind of paganism, any kind of primitive religion, but not Christianity. Voltaire, for example, said, “Every sensible man, every honorable man must hold the Christian sect in horror.” The motto of these people was, “Wipe out the infamy”, the infamy being Christianity.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:19 Then they had a motto, which they derived from Terrance in Silica, the Romans, “I am a man. I think nothing human alien to me.” Of course the meaning of this is you tolerate everything except Christianity. You tolerate every crime. You tolerate every pervert, because nothing human is alien to me. Again, you recognize a familiar temper of our day. Then Diderot declared, and I quote, “The magistrate deals out justice. The philosophe teaches the magistrate what is just and unjust,” unquote.

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:08 Now, historically it has been Christianity that has established right and wrong, and the law reflects what scripture teaches. But no, they said, “We will be. We the intellectuals, the philosophes, will be the new priests of humanity, so that we will say what the law should be and what right and wrong are. We will define all these things.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:39 Now, since the churches were politically controlled, these philosophes very quickly provided for the takeover of the churches in all the countries and politically appointed bishops in England, in France, in Germany and elsewhere who were unbelievers. This is a point which very few scholars will touch on. You find it here and there in footnotes, but the great destruction of the churches, whether in England or France or elsewhere, was by these political bishops, men who hated the church. You had one, for example, Archbishop of Canterbury whose wife was very much a slut. He had an illegitimate son who he promoted to office in the church and so on, that sort of thing. These were men who hated the faith. An opportunity to pull down a church or to destroy it was all to the good for them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:57 Then another aspect of these philosophes. Again, this is something that strikes a very familiar note. Homosexuality was the mark of membership in the in group. It was virtually required. If it wasn’t to your taste, you indulged it and you indulged in it. It was the mark of membership in the in group.

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:35 Then they believed in the omnipotence of criticism. This was their phrase. “The autonomy of the human mind, so that man like a god could pass everything in review before him and judge on men, on God, on the Bible. Man’s judgment is absolute.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:57 Then there was another thing that’s very indicative, very revealing. When I say this, I want you to do a little hard thinking about it. Guess who their hero was. Cicero. Cicero. When you examine what Cicero was, and you can look up Cicero in my book The One and the Many, I have quite a bit about him, you realize why he was. It’s very interesting that Cicero is being foisted on conservatives now as though he were a great hero. It’s very interesting that the woman who claims to be a Christian and has written a gooey book on Cicero as though he were a great hero, Taylor Caldwell, was in Los Angeles just last week and on New Year’s Eve was indulging in an occultist meeting where she was being hypnotized by Jess Stearn, an occultist leader, because she believes she has been reincarnated many times, and she sat down with Cicero and conversed with him, and later on had dinner one day with Nero. Now, this is the kind of thing that is very interesting. Cicero, the hero then, and Cicero being pawned off on us again by people, knowingly or foolishly, as a hero.

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:48 Another thing, science was despised by these people. Why? They regarded it as a Puritan movement, which it was. In England, it was despised by the lords because the scientists were all Puritans, and that was true. Moreover, they saw the intellectual as being the mind of the people, so that the revolutionary belief and spirit of the French Revolution could be summed up in the expression, “The will of the people makes the laws, and we are the will of the people.” In other words, you could tell them, “You poor slobs don’t know what you really want. We know what in your heart you truly want or should want.”

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965.  His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.”  He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder

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A Christian Survey of World History

Wars of Religion (so called), II

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Transcript:

*This is an unedited and unoffical print version of R.J. Rushdoony’s lecture.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:01 -work at conning because in the process you prove yourself superior to all the poor suckers you con. This is why Latin America is not making any progress. You have in Latin America some very tremendous natural resources, but because of this Spanish tradition, which is anti- work, there’s no progress.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:34 You’ll recall Dr. [inaudible 00:00:38] commented on this aspect of Latin America. You can go to Brazil today and see the areas where there is industrial progress, and see areas of protestant growth. Those areas will be just like Los Angeles or San Francisco or any other American city. People walk faster and are more active on the streets in those cities than in the more purely Spanish tradition cities where the Catholic tradition prevails.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:24 Now, we shall deal more with France next time because we’ll be concentrating to begin with on Louis XIV, but France, very briefly now, is really several nations brought together as one to form a central state. We think of France as made up of one people. This is not true. It was once several nations. The Bergundians were a very powerful state for centuries, even more powerful than the French, and for centuries they were perhaps the wealthiest, most advanced country in Europe.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:20 Then, many of the very advanced countries of the middle ages were what is now portions of southern France. The language of Paris in that area was made the official language for other parts of the country, and the languages of the others suppressed by force to make them all Frenchmen. The Britons to this day maintain their own language, although only this last year, 1971, did they finally get permission, legally through the courts, to name their children Celtic names because the Britons are related to the Irish and to the Welsh and to the Scotch.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:19 Their names are long ones closer to the Welsh than to the Irish and Scotch, and they were illegal until recently. On top of that, the reformation added religious disunity to France. It was divided into Huguenot and Catholic. The country was brought to unity by a Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre, who ruled as Henry IV, who became one of the most popular rulers of all French history.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:10 Henry IV, however, found that he could only bring unity, finally, by himself becoming a nominal Catholic. However, he did issue the Edict of Nantes guaranteeing freedom and religious liberty to the Huguenots. Even then, however, some of the fanatical Catholics did not trust Henry IV, and in 1610, he was assassinated by one of them. His son was Louis XIII. His grandson, Louis XIV. It was under Louis XIII, whose mother was Marie de’ Medici, that [inaudible 00:05:02] became the actual ruler of France and played so powerful a part.

R.J. Rushdoony: 05:14 We will come briefly to the role of [inaudible 00:05:17] in a moment or two. To conclude, now, we will take more than a little time to analyze the 30 years’ war between 1618 and 1648, which brought about the disintegration of Germany. Germany, by 1600, in the 80 years or so after Luther, had seen a decline in the protestant faith, among Lutherans at least. There had grown to be a great deal of formalism and stagnation, as well as among the Catholics.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:06 There had been a number of gains, religiously, in Germany by the Calvinists who had not existed at the peace of Augsburg in 1555. The peace of Augsburg said that each state could prescribe its own religion, and whatever the head of state prescribed would be the religion for that particular German state. Now, at the time, the peace of Augsburg was made in 1555. There were just the Lutherans and the Catholics. However, what happened was that the Calvinists moved in and very quickly began to make converts out of a number of heirs who became rulers of very key and strategic realms.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:04 So you had a third element now in the picture, the Calvinist states, or kingdoms, or dukedoms, or principalities, depending on their size. Moreover, some of these were very important in the election of the emperor. The Habsburg power was very unhappy about this. On top of that, the Habsburgs began to feel that is was especially important for them both to keep the lid from blowing off in the Netherlands, which they were trying to make Catholic again, to have a solid land bridge from Austria clear across to Belgium and Netherlands, as we know them today, so that they would have a solid land mass across there.

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:05 To them, this was a part of their grand strategy to conquer that area. So, they began to take moves to conquer that domain. With this began the 30 years’ war. The Danes and the Swedes moved in to protect the protestant parties and others moved in until all Europe was involved in it. The French moved in also, although Catholic on the protestant side under Cardinal Richelieu, because Cardinal Richelieu did not want to see the Spanish power predominate. This is why when I spoke earlier of the so-called wars of religion in this century and a half that is was so-called because very often the line up was very peculiar, and Richelieu, a Cardinal, was working against the Catholics because he knew that a Catholic victory was really the victory of Spain, and he preferred a weak Spain and a strong France.

R.J. Rushdoony: 09:33 Now, one of the tragedies of the war, the 30 years’ war, was of course that all of Germany became the battlefield for 30 years. The armies, then, were mercenary armies. It didn’t make any difference whether they were supposed to be Catholic or protestant. They were hoodlums out of the slums. Most of their pay they figured was to be gotten by conquest, and so you had the ugly picture of both sides ravaging the country, and raping and murdering at will so that when they would go through the … whether they were supposed to be a protestant or Catholic army, they raped and killed everybody, irrespective. The nuns would be raped by Catholic troops as well as by protestant troops, and the protestant villagers, the same way. What happened to Germany in the 30 years war I think can best be described by going to a couple of books: one, the Cambridge Modern History, The 30 Years’ War, this entire volume deals with. Just to read a couple of pages of summing up some of the damages.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:12 But the political losses and gains, which the peace of Westphalia entailed upon the empire and its princes sink alike into insignificance. Even the undeniable advance towards religious freedom marked by the adoption of that peace of the principal of equality between the recognized religious confessions is obscured when we turn to consider the general effects of the war now ended upon Germany and the German nation. These effects, either material or moral, cannot be more than faintly indicated here. But together, they furnish, perhaps, the most appalling demonstrations of the consequences of war to be found in history.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:06 There have been worse wars in history, in the amount of people killed, in the total devastation. The Jewish-Roman war is the worst war of all history in its total effect, but this is unique in that here was something sustained for 30 years. The mighty impulses, which the great movements of the renaissance and the reformation had imparted to the aspirations and efforts of contemporary German life were quenched in the century of religious conflict, which ended with the exhausting struggle of the 30 years’ war.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:51 The mainspring of the national life was broken, and to all seeming, broken forever. The ruin of agriculture was inevitably the most striking, as it is the most far-reaching result of this all-destructive war. Each one of those marches, counter marches, sieges, reliefs, invasions, occupations, evacuations, and reoccupations, which we have noted, and a far larger number of military movements that we have passed by, were accompanied by devastations carried out impartially by friend or foe.

R.J. Rushdoony: 13:33 Well, the peasants who dwelled upon the land, there was no personal safety except in flight. Their harvest, their cattle, the rope over their heads were at the mercy of the soldiery. As the war went on, whole districts were converted into deserts. Bohemia, where the war broke out, had the earliest experience of its desolating effects. Above all, [inaudible 00:13:59] tribe northwest of the kingdom, but its sufferings reached their height long after the Bohemian rising had been crushed, as it seemed, forever.

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:09 Early in the last decade of the war, the destruction of villages from which most parts of the empire suffered was probably here carried to the most awful length. Of a total of 35,000 Bohemian villages, it is stated that hardly more than 6000 were left standing. Of 35,000, 6000. The sufferings of Moravia were in much the same proportion, and even more protracted. Those of Silesia only ended when it was made over by a Saxony into the emperors care at the peace of [rock 00:14:54].

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:55 Upper and lower Austria also enjoyed some relief during the last part of the war. The main anxiety of the emperor was to keep it out of its hereditary dominions. The inflictions to which Maximillions [electric 00:15:10] was subjected during the victorious campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus and a subsequent invasion of Bernard of Weimar were followed by a far more grievous treatment by the troops of Bonaire and [inaudible 00:15:25].

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:26 Then he goes on to describe how, utterly, one area after another was destroyed. The population diminished by at least 2/3 from over 16 to under 6 million. Now, part of that was by immigration. People just left. A lot of it through murder. As a result, the area was, for a long time, in ruins, but I think you still cannot get the picture, and I [sought 00:16:14] to quote now from another work by Gardiner on the 30 years’ war.

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:23 What a peace it was when it really came at last. Whatever life there was under that deadly blast of war had been attracted to the camps, the soldiers’ camps. The strong man who had lost his all turned soldier that he might be able to rob others in turn. The young girl, who in better times would have passed on to a life of honorable wedlock with some youth who had been the companion of her childhood in the sports around the village fountain, had turned aside, for a very starvation, to a life of shame in the train of one or other of the armies by which her home had been made desolate.

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:08 In the later years of the war it was known that a body of 40,000 fighting men drew along with it a loathsome following of no less than 140,000 men, women, and children, contributing nothing to the efficiency of the army, and all of them living at the expense of the miserable peasants who still contrived to hold on to their ruined fields. If these were to live, they must steal what yet remained to be stolen; they must devour, with the insatiable hunger of locusts, what yet remained to be devoured. And then, if sickness came, or wounds and sickness was no infrequent visitor of these camps, what remained but misery or death? Nor was it much better with the soldiers themselves.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:07 That’s a grim picture. 140,000 camp followers after an army of 40,000, all waiting for a chance to move into the next city so that you can imagine what it was like whenever they conquered a city. One after another, every city fell. Germany was ruined. It took a long time for it to overcome. With a generation or two, there was of course peace and order, but vast areas still depopulated, uninhabited and wild.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:56 The 30 years’ war has long been seen as a kind of model of gorilla warfare, and so it has gained a great deal of attention in modern times by people who see it as, in a sense, the kind of thing that could happen again. There are certain differences, however. One of the things that marks the most notable difference is this. In those days, armies moved on their feet. This has ceased to be true in the western world. Especially in the last 30 years, the armies of the western world have lost all ability to move on their feet. They move by truck and by jeep.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:56 The last army that could still move on its feet in the western world was the Russian, and that has been thoroughly mechanized now. The average army recruit throughout the western world no longer has the capacity to march. The majority, now city boys, were not used as far boys are to long, long marches on their feet. They can’t take it, are not drilled for it. They aren’t put on maneuvers now that take them on long marches.

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:38 This is passe. The only western army that still has a sizable element of farm boys who can move on their feet is the Russian, but even they do not march. They have trucks. There’s only one army of any consequence today that goes on its feet, and that’s the Chinese, so that the ability to march, which was once characteristic of armies, is gone, which is one of the things in thinking about military strategy that every militarist has to recon on today. The modern army, if it took a long march, would very quickly be so foot [inaudible 00:21:30] would be out of commission.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:33 It would have blistered feet, which would become quickly infected, and it would be unable to move. This is why the modern military strategy for gorilla warfare is primarily urban, where there are short distances, lots of roadways, and ready maneuverability. There, the type of strategy of the 30 years’ war and gorilla warfare can be readily applied. The 30 years’ war was thus the kind of classic in warfare. It was a classic in the kind of total destruction that can be locked.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:23 It was a classic in the senselessness of a protracted war in which motives and counter-motives get so involved that finally nobody knows how to quit until finally everyone became exhausted. The settlement, finally, did work to a degree to the same end that had been purposed at the beginning. Each area was given the right to choose its own religion. So that nothing was settled, it was back in effect to the status quo. It remains a landmark in the history of Europe of what war can do to set back a civilization.

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:23 Our time is just about up now, just briefly before we continue. It marked also the transition to a secular approach in that however much when the war began, Spain had in mind a religious conquest of those areas. It also had a powerplay in mind also. Before the war had proceeded very far, it was the political motive, which began to predominate rather than the religious concern.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:10 Europe was moving rapidly, and in this war, it came to the [fore 00:24:15] to a humanistic orientation which was going to dominate the future. That humanistic orientation appeared most openly in Louis XIV, and we shall spend a little while on Louis next time. Let us pray.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:36 All mighty God, our heavenly father, guide us, we beseech thee, in the days ahead that we may restore things to their proper place an obedience to thee, and conformity to thy word so thy praise and glory. Oh Lord, our God, use us mightily to establish thy word in the sovereignty of thy kingdom in our lives and in our times. In Jesus name, amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Speaker 2: 25:30 It’s my understanding that their [inaudible 00:25:47]. How do you answer people who say then [inaudible 00:26:03]. They’re always fighting. [inaudible 00:26:05] deny this yet it happened.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:09 Yes. Well, first the answer is, they don’t want to see that at all. It’s like these student speakers I read at the beginning. Nothing is more obvious from reading history that the renaissance saw the rise of tyranny, that they see it as the birth of a freedom. This one student said it was the birth of freedom for the individual and the growth of the power of the state, as though the two could both happen.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:39 Now, when people are blind, they will not see. All you can do is to hope that perhaps the person can see it and to say, “They were not wars of religion. They were political wars.” If they were wars of religion, why were sometimes Catholics fighting against each other and protestants fighting against each other? Was it because they were Catholics and protestants or because they were primarily statist, concerned with power politics?

Speaker 2: 27:22 [inaudible 00:27:22].

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:25 Right. They were Christians. In most cases, they were Christians in name only.

Speaker 2: 27:33 [inaudible 00:27:33].

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:35 Yes. Some of them were about as Christian as Martin Luther King. Yes.

Speaker 3: 27:42 What about the situation of Ireland today? It’s being called a religious war for Catholics and protestants. Can you say something about that?

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:54 Yes. The situation in Ireland today is called a religious war. But first of all, there is very, very little, almost no orthodoxy among the protestants, which means there’s no faith. Second, the Catholics have just about as much religion to them as the protestants, which is next to none. It’s a class warfare. It’s not a religious war.

Speaker 4: 28:26 Who’s instigating that [inaudible 00:28:28]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:28 They’re both guilty. They’re both seriously guilty. In the protestant circles, the orange men have a virtual kind of secret masonic grip on the country, and no protestant who is not a member of their society, and no Catholic is going to get anywhere without them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:54 On the other hand, the Catholic majority is by and large, you might say they’re the Negros of North Ireland. They represent an element that isn’t very ambitious, doesn’t have much drive, doesn’t work too well, but is demanding its rights. You’ve got two groups that see only the faults of the other, and none of their own faults. So, they’re going to go on destroying each other in their country.

Speaker 4: 29:30 I’m not saying [inaudible 00:29:31].

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:30 What?

Speaker 4: 29:37 Other outside influences. [inaudible 00:29:37].

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:40 Oh yes. Anytime you have people who are stupid and foolish, you’re going to have outside influences, but they don’t need those. They’ve got enough stupidity on their own to make trouble enough for a dozen countries. I think it’s a serious mistake that many Americans make. They feel they’ve got to pick sides, like India and Pakistan, and sides in North Ireland. So, one has to be right and the other wrong. A good deal of time in history, both sides are wrong, and in these two cases, they certainly are. Yes?

Speaker 5: 30:19 [inaudible 00:30:19].

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:35 Yes. The protestant leadership in the north has provided it with an industrial leadership. On the other hand, they have been faltering in recent years. In other words, the younger generation have not had the caliper of the older that made it. The south of Ireland wants that, and has for a long time. On the other hand, I think as things are now, while the indications are there’s no politician in the south of Ireland that wants to say we don’t want it because it would be political suicide, or a lot of them have nightmares at the thought of having to take it tomorrow if the British would say, “It’s yours. Take it. You try to bring peace there,” you see.

R.J. Rushdoony: 31:22 In other words, the government of Ireland must maintain a position to satisfy its people if they want a united Ireland, but they know good and well they couldn’t cope with the problem there. The second, their own industrial power has been developing very rapidly lately so that there is a growing prosperity in south Ireland. The economic drain of trying to police that portion of Ireland, if they were to get it, would really sink them. It really is a situation where there’s no answer because neither side is ready to give in a bit or to listen to reason. Their attitude is, “Kill.” That’s the answer. Each side wants to wipe out the other.

Speaker 6: 32:18 See, this … Ireland has been behind about 50 years, [inaudible 00:32:25]. Why is it taking so long for [inaudible 00:32:31] to come to a head if these people did not have outside [inaudible 00:32:36]? Is it a gradual growth [inaudible 00:32:38] and so forth, and what caused them to wait for 50 years?

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:44 A good question. Why did this take 50 years to develop? One of the reasons that has made it come to a head in recent years is that north Ireland has been faltering somewhat. It has been a tremendous area of industrial development and growth. But of late, it has had, as all the world has had, an economic crisis. Now, add to that economic crisis the fact that you had a leadership that hasn’t moved ahead with the times and has faltered somewhat, and you can see how its own leadership would … I mean, its own position in the world economy was a little harder hit.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:37 The result is, everyone felt it, and the ones on the bottom felt it the hardest. There were fewer jobs for them. The consequence is, they’re all worked up about it. Just as [inaudible 00:33:53] has pointed out, the Civil Rights Act has led to the Civil Rights Revolution. The minimum wage law, it immediately meant that a whole world of Negro youth could no longer work, so they became revolutionaries. They were not fit to make as much as the minimum wage law said they had to make, so they could not be employed. Therefore, they became idle, welfare recipients, and they began to develop a revolutionary ideology.

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:37 The economic situation in Ireland immediately meant that you had a growing element of Irish youth, unemployed, ready to listen to revolutionary talk. SO the situation was right. And of course, it keeps feeding on itself. It’s already meant that economically, the north of Ireland, which was in the doldrums, is really in trouble. You cannot have that kind of civil warfare and have real production. How can you maintain economic leadership then? Economic development goes where there’s peace, where you can depend on labor and you don’t have to worry about having your investment bombed out.

R.J. Rushdoony: 35:33 This is why economic development is going to south Ireland, because there are no problems there so people are investing money there. So the south of Ireland will take it all away from the northern part. Yes?

Speaker 7: 35:53 [inaudible 00:35:53] problem? [inaudible 00:35:55]? [inaudible 00:35:59] grown up with this. I am a conservative in New York, and [inaudible 00:36:03]. They don’t want to join with the [inaudible 00:36:07] Ireland.

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:10 I don’t think they should be because it is a different area. It isn’t a part of them culturally.

Speaker 7: 36:14 And these-

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:15 It would be tragic.

Speaker 7: 36:16 -people who are coming in, they’re invading the country and [inaudible 00:36:20], and they’re actually invading.

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:16 Right. That’s right.

Speaker 7: 36:28 [inaudible 00:36:28] one people [inaudible 00:36:31].

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:32 Well, you know, when southern Ireland got its freedom, most of southern Ireland didn’t want it. The IRA was a minority group. The overwhelming majority of the Catholic clergy was against independence. They felt it would lead to secularization. Most of the political figures preferred union, but you had a minority, the IRA creating violence, leading to bombing, to sabotage and so on until Britain said, “We can’t be bothered. Turn them loose.” That’s how they got their independence, against the wishes of the majority.

Speaker 7: 37:16 That’s what they’re wanting to do now because-

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:19 Exactly, yes.

Speaker 7: 37:20 [inaudible 00:37:20].

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:21 Yes. Now, this always happens, you see. History is rarely dominated by a majority. Only by dedicated minorities. The lack of a dedicated minority with a faith for the future means that a revolutionary element can take over and command it in terms of pure hatred, you see. What is needed in Ireland is an element to stand in terms of a Christian faith and to spell out the matter in terms of economics and religion, and to get together with people of both sides, but there’s no one with the faith to do that. 20, 30 years ago, there would have been. Today, there isn’t because-

Speaker 7: 38:14 A lot of them [inaudible 00:38:16].

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:15 That’s right. Yes. This is the problem.

Speaker 8: 38:18 What about that, I don’t know, that was [inaudible 00:38:23]-

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:18 Paisley.

Speaker 8: 38:18 Paisley.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:28 He’s a rival rouser, and in my books worthless. He’s an associate with McIntyre who’s a rival rouser. He has nothing to contribute except hated. He has to bear some of the responsibility for helping create this situation.

Speaker 8: 38:46 Isn’t he one of these dedicated Christians devout or-

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:49 As a Christian, he has one message: hatred. He has one message: hatred. He has never, never distinguished himself for preaching the gospel to the end that people may be seen. He’s never gone out to the Catholics with a message that Jesus Christ is the savior of protestant and Catholic alike, but this is what the Word of God teaches. He’s gone out to them with a message of the sheerest kind of hatred. I regard him as one of the most ugly characters in Protestantism in our time.

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:23 He was, for a long time, before the violence began, creating such an atmosphere of violence, but he was in essence saying, “I’m going to make it impossible for Catholic and protestant ever to talk together.” No, I’ll stand before God almighty and accuse that man of being one of the worst characters of our age. What he has done is fearful. He has spewed forth hatred. Put him and that Bernadette [inaudible 00:39:54] and some of those others together, and confine them to hell, which is where they belong. He’s a fearful character. I read a number of his talks that he gave when he came over here, which McIntyre published. He’s a hatemonger. He’s a hatemonger. The protestants and Catholics were living side by side there. They were living side by side in the south of Ireland. This doesn’t mean there haven’t been tensions, but to go out and whip up hatred deliberately, deliberately, the Bible says that such men are to be avoided. Solomon has a great deal to say on people of that character. Paisley is an ugly character and a rival rouser. Yes?

Speaker 9: 40:45 He’s a rival rouser, [inaudible 00:40:45].

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:48 He’s still around.

Speaker 9: 40:49 I haven’t heard of him [inaudible 00:40:51].

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:54 No, but you see … Yes?

Speaker 11: 40:57 Well, isn’t it the history … It takes a period of 50 years to secularize one generation against the other. When England gave up its colonies where they start all this revolution movement, until then we didn’t have a lot of peace going around, but we had greater control of the colonies. Is that right?

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:18 Well, to a degree, yes. Yes?

Speaker 12: 41:24 [inaudible 00:41:24].

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:28 For this reason, I have many times crossed McIntyre’s path as I’ve gone across the country. I have seen situations, I can cite one in some detail, because I know and still correspond with the people involved. There are a group of 75 professional men who had walked out of a church because it was modernist, went to him and said, “We want a church that will preach the gospel.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:58 He has not interested in doing more than when he met some kid in another city. “You want to be a pastor, Richard? Go over there and take care of those people.” He didn’t even bother to sit down and talk with the man, the young man. Now, he wasn’t interested in establishing a church of people. What he wanted to do in that city was to preach against national counsel, and to preach against this and that, and to collect funds and to pass on.

R.J. Rushdoony: 42:27 Now, he could’ve done far more good in the long run by saying, “Here is a fine group of the finest men in this community who want a church. I claim to be connected with the Bible Presbyterian Church. Let me establish a church here amongst them.” He could’ve sent somebody responsible to meet with them. Now, this has happened not once, but many times, many times. He’s not interested in building churches.

Speaker 12: 42:56 Was that information given [inaudible 00:42:57]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:00 No, because that’s not his main interest. He’s more interested in promoting marches. He’s an organizer. With the kind of money, with the radio stations, the talent he has, in these years he could’ve established literally thousands of churches from one end of the United States to the other. Thousands, and he’s not done it. He has established a college or two, which have been beset by problems, and I have known people who have been on the faculty members, and they say that the biggest headache is McIntyre and his unwillingness to do anything but to have them to say he has them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:42 But he can organize a big march on Washington every so often, and put a great deal of real talent to organizing that and getting people from California over there, and from Maine and Washington, all over to march on Washington, put on a big show. Now, he has demonstrated that what he wants to do, he can do. But to promote the work of Christ’s kingdom, he has not done and he’s raised millions of dollars over these years. What’s there to show for it? All he does is to preach against something or other all the time.

R.J. Rushdoony: 44:23 That’s what people apparently want, and they’re getting it and that’s why the country is going to hell, because it’s people like McIntyre and Hargis who get up who are preaching against this and that, and are not preaching the gospel, who are not going out and building things, Christian schools, Christian churches. The people are getting what they want. Yes?

Speaker 13: 44:46 I’m not particularly a McIntyre fan, but [inaudible 00:44:51] more than that because one man cannot do everything. The people of [inaudible 00:45:02] who want to serve, [inaudible 00:45:08] leader. If one man organizes the marches, why doesn’t somebody else organize churches? That’s not enough of a criticism. If we need a church-

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965.  His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.”  He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder

The post Wars of Religion (so called), II appeared first on Rushdoony Radio.

A Christian Survey of World History

Wars of Religion (so called), I

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Transcript:

*This is an unedited and unoffical print version of R.J. Rushdoony’s lecture.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:00 Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of thy grace and mercy have called us to be thy people. Has given us such glorious promises through Jesus Christ. We gather together in thanksgiving and all thy blessings from the year past. We thank thee that as we look at the year past and at the ages past, we have the blessed assurance that our times are in thy hands, and all the issues of history, and all the issues of our lives, to the very hairs of our head, are all numbered, all come from thy hand, all reflect the glory of thy governance, and the certainty of thy rule. Bless us as we give ourselves to the study of these things, that we may understand thee better, serve thee better, and rejoice ever the more in thee. In Jesus name, amen. We went through the reformation last time. Tonight we will deal with the century and a half, approximately, after Luther, in the so-called wars of religion, which took place in Europe at that time. I spoke of them as the so-called wars of religion. Actually their origin was otherwise, as we shall soon see.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:42 Before we begin, I’d like to read a few passages from freshman examination papers in the department of history at a major California University. These were copied down by someone in the department for me, as typical answers by intelligent students. They reveal the anti-Christian, humanistic bias.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:16 The first, “During the Middle Ages, men accepted the things they were told were true without investigating the ideas themselves. The Middle Ages men lacked curiosity in anything. For this reason, the Middle Ages were labeled Dark Ages.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:37 The second, “The 18th century can be seen as an age of enlightenment. If we define enlightenment as a new or sudden awareness, as a ray of light breaking through the clouds, then the 18th century surely fits the definition.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:56 Third, “Superstition died, and so did the myths of the past, as men formed a record of history and looked to the future with optimism.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:07 Then last this, “The Italian Renaissance was the beginning of freedom of the individual and power of the state. The individual became freer because he became secular. He was no longer church dominated.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:26 Now of course this last one at least has one element of truth in it. It recognizes that the time of the renaissance was also the rise of state-ism. How you could have freedom of the individual and the rise of state-ism, of course, is impossible to reconcile. The renaissance was indeed the time of state-ism, and of tyranny. A time of man’s radical loss of freedom. It was also a time of the beginnings of nationalism.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:07 Now at this point many conservatives go very, very sadly, very badly astray. As between nationalism and internationalism, they come out solidly for nationalism. Actually it’s like saying, which Cide should you have been on in World War II? National socialism or international socialism? Because it was a war between the two. Our answer should have been, “A plague on both your houses.” The same with regard to the quarrel between nationalism and internationalism. Neither represents the Christian perspective.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:47 Nationalism speaks of the priority of the nation and the national state in everything. This we cannot agree to. Internationalism holds to the priority of the world state. Both are geared to a stateist perspective. Both are untenable positions for the Christian who cannot view things from a stateist perspective. He believes that a nation has a place under God. He believes that there is a kind of Christian internationalism, but not political. Therefore, he must dissent from both.

R.J. Rushdoony: 05:31 Now there was, in the events that led to the Renaissance, a growth of centralization of power into the hands of monarchs, kings. A development of the idea of the divine right of kings. As a matter of fact, this may come as a surprise to you, first of all serfdom was not a medieval product. This is a point I have made on other occasions. Serfdom began in the Roman Imperial Estates. Where on men traded their freedom for cradle to grave security. The Middle Ages did not invent serfdom. They improved a lot of the serfs, and some of it gradually disappeared.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:24 As a matter of fact, serfdom did not come into Eastern Europe until the post-renaissance era, until modernism began. There were no serfs in Russia a few centuries ago. It was a product of the modern world, of the rise of nationalism and statism. The idea that for long centuries through the Middle Ages the peasants of Russia were enslaved as serfs, is ridiculous.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:03 In the 18th century, latter part of the 17th and in the 18th century, and into the middle of the 19th, they were serfs, and their lot was very bad. You can’t read that back through the centuries. It was a part of the rise of modernism, of the depreciation of man, and of the appreciation of the state. Throughout Europe, in other words, in the modern era there was, from the renaissance on, until the 19th century, 100 years ago, a very marked loss of freedom for the individual. The poor people of medieval Europe were freer, than the people of 17th and 18th century Europe.

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:10 statism, the contempt of the common people, the brutal suppression of the common people, these and other things flourished throughout the continent. Only in one area did you see a growth of liberty. That area was Great Britain, England and Scotland. You had in that area also a tremendous drive, as you did on the continent, towards absolutism. That is absolutizing the state and the monarch, making it God on earth. The idea of the divine right of the kings, the divine right of the state in Rousseau later on.

R.J. Rushdoony: 09:08 Now, you had this same drive in England, you definitely had it in Henry VIII. You very, very powerfully had it in Queen Elizabeth. It was the faith of James I, and Charles I, and of Charles II and James II. There was one reason alone why England, instead of going down the drain with the other countries of Europe into absolutism, one reason why it didn’t take that path, and it was the Puritans. The Puritans, and to a lesser degree the Scottish Calvinists in Scotland. Those two together, but the Puritans have to be given prior credit, were responsible for the growth of liberty.

R.J. Rushdoony: 10:13 Now Christopher Hill, a brilliant English scholar, who is not a Puritan, not a Christian, nonetheless has emphatically made it clear that the growth of constitutionalism and liberty in England must be ascribed to the Puritans and to Cromwell. He has written a book about Cromwell in which he develops this thesis.

R.J. Rushdoony: 10:48 Now it’s ironic that, first of all, so many of the English scholars treat Cromwell as though he were the villain of their history when they owe their liberties to him, and the Puritans, as though they were really foreigners and something very un-English about them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:07 As a matter of fact, I just finished reading a book by one English scholar who says, by the way, that in his circles you identify yourself by the church you do not go to. In other words, what are you? Well the religion I do not take part in is high church Anglicanism, or the church I do not have anything to do with is low church Anglicanism, or non-conformity. In other words, they don’t belong to any, but if there’s anything they could tolerate, it would be that.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:55 He says the church he does not belong to is high church Anglicanism. His thesis of course is that anything below that really is not English, and he despises it, and he says so. Well this is tragic. Actually when you go back to English history, you have to say that, well first of all Presbyterianism was a part of the Church of England. It was kicked out, against its will, by Charles II, who then kicked out all the really faithful bishops in the church as the next step, the Nonjuror bishops. You have to say then that the Puritans were really Church of England men, who were concerned with preserving the liberties of Englishmen in church and state.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:55 Now, Europe, because it did not have this Puritan element, or the Calvinistic element in Scotland, was not preserved like Great Britain was, from the blight of absolutism. It went progressively into deeper and darker absolutism, which finally culminated in the absolutism of the state. The monarch being exchanged for the divine state, with the French Revolution as the logical culmination of these ideas.

R.J. Rushdoony: 13:36 The reason why in the 19th century, the last century, there was a tremendous birth of real liberty in Europe was because, and this an Austrian scholar has pointed out, of the influence of America, and of the War of Independence. It was the American influence in Europe that led progressively in the last century, to a tremendous birth of liberty there. As our influence began to wane after the end of the century, because we were departing from our own heritage, Europe and the whole world took a turn back to the absolutism, the totalitarianism, which the renaissance had instituted. Now one of the things that greatly advanced the developing statism, which the renaissance was beginning to see, and the early stages of the renaissance was creating, was the discovery of America in 1492. We don’t think of it that way, but the discovery of America was in some respect a very disastrous thing for Europe.

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:01 Now, I want to say at this point, Europe was taking the same course anyway. If America had not been discovered, it would have taken the same course, but the discovery of America speeded up the rise of statism in Europe. Why? Well, there was a tremendous flow of wealth, of gold, into the hands of Spain, and from Spain into all of Europe.

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:33 1492, gold was discovered. By 1550, in other words 58 years later, the Spanish discovery of gold was an established fact and the gold was pouring into Europe. Spain at that time was the Holy Roman Empire. It owned all of what is now Portugal and Spain. It had all of what is now Netherlands and Belgium. It had all of what is now Austria and Hungary, and Bohemia, or Czechoslovakia, a sizable portion of Germany, and a sizeable portion of Switzerland, and a sizeable portion of Italy. All that was controlled by the Spanish monarch. In other words, it was the power in Europe. Under Philip II, its strategic power and importance, owning that much in Europe, and then most of South America, well all of South America and Central America, and some of North America, you realize their wealth.

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:03 Now, inflation is the increase of the money supply. Normally inflation takes place when a civil government begins printing more money, or in the case of coining it, uses baser metals, cheap metals, instead of gold and silver, and gives them the same value as gold and silver. You can have inflation also, and you had it once in history, with a sudden influx of a large amount of fresh money, real money, gold and silver, as happened when all the accumulated wealth of the Incas and the Aztecs flowed suddenly into Europe.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:06 Now, every now and then when I speak on the subject of gold, somebody brings up the question, where there’s not enough gold in the world to provide the necessary money. Well of course the answer in part is, there’s not enough paper in the world, if paper were the money, because you couldn’t print it fast enough, it would disappear in value so rapidly. What we must point out too is that the whole value of money is its scarcity.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:39 That’s the trouble with paper money. After all, if money is ready and cheap and easily come by, then everybody could have everything, couldn’t they? Except you could get everything, it wouldn’t be available. When you start printing a lot of money, and giving it out in the form of welfare, and subsidies, and so on, what happens? Prices start going up? Because there are more people out bidding for the same limited number of items. Thus, between 1550 and 1600, prices doubled in Europe, because there was a sudden influx of new money, but no increase in production.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:41 That was nothing compared with what happened in the next 50 years. To give an example from one record, wheat and hay sold in the Paris market in 1650 for 15 times the price of 1500. In 150 years, prices had increased 15 times what they had been. The reason of course was there was all this new money, real money, but there was no comparable increase in production. The amount of gold and silver in circulation was rising far more rapidly than any goods could be produced. If you increase money but not production, you always have a crisis. Of course, because with statism the common people were being suppressed, the farmers were being suppressed, the working men were being suppressed in their demands. Actually production in some cases was being limited, it was decreasing, so what was the answer? Well, for the next couple centuries or so it was mercantilism. A rise of mercantilism among the national states.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:24 Now this in particular is very important for us to understand, because we are now in a new mercantilist age in the 20th century. The 20th century has been called a neo-mercantilist era. The idea of mercantilism was economic self-sufficiency for every nation, so that the idea was buy British, buy French, buy German, or buy whatever you were. You did not buy imports. In fact, everything was done to keep imports out of the country. Every country was trying to export, but not to import.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:16 Well now, if the British were refusing to take French imports, but wanting to export into France, the French were going to say, and they did, “We won’t take British imports, but we’ll export into Britain.” Only they wouldn’t take it, so they closed their boundaries to each other.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:38 Well the next step then was you developed colonies, and the purpose of the colonies was to have somebody to buy from you. You got your raw materials from them, and then you insisted on selling to them, and told them they had to buy from you. Of course, this is one of the reasons why Britain had trouble with the colonies. Because we told them they had to buy British goods at British prices, and they were charging them more than in the home country, because if they couldn’t make it there in England, they were forcing Canada and America to buy at their prices so they could make a profit.

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:27 That was the whole point of colonies. In other words, in each case a country tried to establish colonies in order to be able to live off of them. If you lost your colonies, your economy collapsed.

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:43 Of course, this is why France collapsed with the French Revolution. Because in the French and Indian war, what we had done was to rob the French of their colonies, Canada and India. They had nobody to export to. French business went into a decline, they had a depression, and they had a revolution. Now this is mercantilism, it leads to disaster, it leads to revolution ultimately, as it did in Europe finally. Of course, this is precisely what we are going into now.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:32 The surcharge was a mercantilist act. We’ve pulled away from it temporarily, but we haven’t departed from the principle. Of course, with mercantilism, it meant creating industries. After all, there might be something you needed in the country that you didn’t make, and you weren’t going to go across the English Channel, or across the border into Germany to buy what they had. Oh no. Even though in your country you could not produce that as well, or as cheaply. In fact, it might be very costly to produce it. You went to work and produced it, and you had every kind of trade barrier to protect your production of it. The result was economic chaos.

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:29 It meant that the working man went deeper and deeper down economically. What was supposedly for the benefit of the masses and of the nation became their destruction.

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:48 Now to turn to the centrality of Spain in this era. Spain was the center of the counter reformation, as well as the most powerful political entity. It was the Spanish crown that was so intently concerned with reestablishing a Catholic Europe. The Council of Trent was the work of the Spanish Crown, not of the Popes. The Popes were not in favor of any kind of internal reformation, they resisted it.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:35 Philip II of Spain carried on the work of his father, Charles V. It is very easy to regard Philip II with great admiration and also with great horror. This is why some scholars see him as a perfect monster, and other scholars, especially Catholics, see him as almost a saint. He was a very intensely devout man. Extremely devout.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:12 He was an international ruler, in that he had within his empire not only the Indians of the Americas, Portuguese, and the Spanish, the Belgians, the Netherlands, various Germans, Bohemians, Slavs, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, the Swiss, every kind of people imaginable. He himself, the family, was a German family. He saw himself as the defender of the faithful.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:48 He built a palace, the Escorial, 30 miles outside of Madrid. It was built in the form of a grid, in honor of Saint Lawrence. Now by grid I mean literally that, a gridiron, because Saint Lawrence, in about the year 238, was martyred by being burned to death on a grid. The palace was intended to last forever. It’s a tremendous place. It was intended to be also not only a palace, but a monastery and a mausoleum. It was unlike other palaces, because its first and foremost thought was religious. At its center was a chapel.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:52 Next week we’ll come to Louis XIV, and the rise of the modern state. At the center of Louis XIV’s palace was his bedroom, where he could make love to a procession of women.

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:05 The monks moved in before Philip II did, and then eight coffins of the family dead. He wanted to be reminded always that he too would die. He wanted it to be a center of worship so that always he would have the faith first in prospect.

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:36 He was in some ways a very heartless man. He was responsible for the fearful persecution of the Protestants in the Netherlands, under the ugly Duke of Alba. In other respects, a very selfless man. His son, who was to have succeeded him, died mysteriously. There are many who feel that Philip had him put away, because there was something twisted in the young man’s mind, vicious and cruel, and Philip was afraid for the future of the kingdom. Whether he had him put away or not, we do not know. He died mysteriously. He did make very great use of his dashing half brother, his father’s illegitimate son, Don John of Austria. Don John of Austria was one of the more dashing figures of the day, and it was he who won the great Battle of Lepanto against the Turks, the naval battle. Philip II had no hesitancy about using him, because he felt he could do a great deal of good for the empire.

R.J. Rushdoony: 31:11 His answer, unfortunately, to almost every problem, was to use the power of the state to accomplish what really was spiritual ends. He tried to destroy the Protestants in the Netherlands by blood, and only hardened their resolution. Philip II was responsible for persuading the French monarchy to have the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, in which the Huguenot leadership was wiped out overnight.

R.J. Rushdoony: 31:48 Philip II was the one who in 1588, to destroy another Protestant country, Britain, assembled the armada. It was 130 ships weighing 58,000 tons, carrying 30,000 men, and 2400 pieces of artillery. However, the odds were in favor of the English. The English had 200 small ships, which were much more maneuverable and faster. Moreover, the commander of the armada was not even a seaman. On top of that, orders had to be issued in six languages to the crews, which made giving an order always a complex matter.

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:46 On top of that, there were several elements in the crew that didn’t even get along with each other. They hated each other about as much as they hated the English they were going to fight. For example, the Catalans, the Castilians and the Portuguese did not get along with each other. On top of that, the Irishmen, and the Emigrate Catholic Englishmen didn’t get along with each other. While the armada was quite a formidable assemblage of ships, you might say it really was doomed before it took off, because there were so many things about it that were unwieldy and unworkable. Moreover, life within Spain had left reality. People had long since ceased to think of work as the way to get ahead. The Spanish wealth from the Americas forever destroyed Spain. Now there were elements of this earlier. Spain, incidentally, was a Visigothic country. The Spaniards were a gothic people in origin. They became, over the centuries, intensely nationalistic. Nationalistic almost to the point of insanity. As a result, they became bitterly hateful of any foreigner. The word foreign came to have very detailed classification. You were a foreigner if you were not a Catholic.

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:35 The first thing they did was to eliminate the Moors and the Jews. Now the Spanish Moors and Jews were really Spaniards, Visigoths, who had been converted to those respective faiths. The total number of Arabs who had entered the country was a small handful, and by the time of … The total number of Jews a small handful. By the time of Isabella, the difference, physically, facially, in every way, between a Jew, a Moor and a Spaniard, was totally indistinguishable. As a matter of fact, Isabella’s husband Ferdinand was as much Jewish as he was Spanish, if you want to get technical. On top of that, their prejudice then extended to other groups, the Germans. The only one they didn’t dare apply that to was the emperor, who was a German. They even went so far as persecuting German Franciscans in the monasteries in California, in Mexico, in Peru and elsewhere. A very real persecution, which was tragic again, because some of the finest of the Franciscan brothers in the Californias were really of German origin. There was this fanatical nationalism.

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:15 Then there was this pride that developed in being a gentleman of the blood, of the nobility. Again, this reached the point of being almost insane. Let me read to you a passage from the poem of the Cid. You’ve heard of El Cid, because right now on KFAC there’s a commercial about the Campeador, El Cid, and there was a movie awhile back about El Cid. I don’t know anything about the movie, but El Cid, Cid means Lord, was a remarkable general of the lesser nobility gentlemen, who became in his teens a great general. He died at 56, a natural death. He was never once defeated in battle, no matter what the odds were. No one was able to stand up to him. To this day he is, with justice, one of the greatest heroes of Spain.

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:29 The poem of the Cid was written by someone who had lived during his lifetime, so it reflects the life and the times of the Cid and the episodes from the life of the Cid. Now, two of the heirs of Carrion asked for the two daughters of El Cid. He had a son and two daughters. The son died in battle, which is a great grief to El Cid. They asked for his two daughters, and of course they gained with them a very tremendous dowry. They really became quite wealthy, because El Cid had conquered such vast areas and had become Lord of Valencia through conquering it, and overthrowing the Moorish king, that he could really endower his daughters in a remarkable way.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:39 They came, they went through a battle with El Cid, and they married his daughters and off they went, on their way back to their realm. The heirs of Carrion were of semi-royal blood. They camped by the way, and celebrating things with their wives. Then in the morning they insisted on some more lovemaking while they quietly ordered everybody to decamp and move on, except a handful. Then about ten o’clock in the morning they had their own tent struck, and ordered them to carry the tents. Then they told the girls, “You’re beneath our dignity. We’ve got what we want out of you, and we’re through with you now.” They beat them savagely and left them for dead, and off they went.

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:43 Fortunately one of the men of El Cid was suspicious about the whole thing. El Cid himself had not been in favor of the marriage, but because the king had approved of it when the heirs of Carrion had asked for the hands of the two girls, he had had to go along with it. At any rate, there was a trial. Now, one of these two heirs of Carrion, Diego González, this is what he said to justify it. He didn’t deny what they had done. The girls had survived, because they had been picked up in time by this man, and nursed back to life.

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:29 This is what Diego González said, “We are by birth of the purest lineage of counts. Oh that this marriage had never been made, that made us kin of my Cid, Don Rodrigo. We still do not repent that we abandoned his daughters. Let them sigh as long as they live. And what we have done to them will be thrown in their faces always. This I will maintain against the brave Saint, for in abandoning them, we have gained in honor.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:04 Now that is a shocker, isn’t it? To think that anyone could marry two girls, and then treat them that way, and then say in a court, “We have gained in honor.” After all, we’re the bluest kind of blue blood, and what more did they expect from our hands? They were lucky they got as much as they did.

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:37 They lost the case, because it was proven against them by some of the men of El Cid, that they had been cowards in battle. That put them to shame, so that none of the royalty who were there could give them the case. Now, this kind of emphasis on blue blood, on being above work, on living off the empire, made of Spain a parasite, a parasite on Latin America. The result was that Spain did not have a real economy, nor a real agriculture, until practically this century. When Spain finally lost, in the Spanish American War, the last of her colonies of any consequence, it meant first they had to begin to develop something in the country, and that this old mercantilist exploitation was now ended.

R.J. Rushdoony: 42:59 Second, it meant trouble within the country, because it had no real economy. The result of course was a long series of troubles, culminating in the Spanish Revolution of the ’20s and the ’30s. Franco taking over, trying to resurrect an economy out of Spain, which has proceeded to a minor degree, but is not as far along as it should be. Thus Spain, a country where there is a very high order of intelligence, really intelligence of a high degree, has never gotten very far because of this cultural heritage which makes it unwilling really to study or to work. Where the ideal is to be a gentleman. You do not do anything, you are something.

R.J. Rushdoony: 44:15 Among the common people, the standard was to live by your wits, rather than to work. I wonder how many of you ever read the life of Lazarillo de Tormes. The picaresque hero, and a man who lives by his wits. It’s a delightful story, but it’s the most popular story also for centuries in Spain. It really gives something of the popular ideal. Lazarillo lives by his wits, that is by conning people continually. He does it very cleverly, very amusingly, but that’s the whole point of it, you see. This is the way to live, not by work.

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965.  His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.”  He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder

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A Christian Survey of World History

From Renaissance (Humanism) to the Reformation, II

Listen to Lecture

Transcript:

*This is an unedited and unoffical print version of R.J. Rushdoony’s lecture.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:01 … be the ruler. His interest in theology remained all his life. A very devout, Roman Catholic in his theology. As a matter of fact, he gained the title, Defender of the Faith, for his book against Luther. That title, Defender of the Faith, was given to the English Crown as a hereditary thing by the Pope. It has now been dropped by Elizabeth, which is very interesting.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:34 You used to find the Latin abbreviation for a Defender of the Faith on many of the coins, including Canadian coins, until not too many years ago. But it’s been dropped.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:53 Now, Henry’s problem was this. He was brilliant. He was intelligent. He was a humanist, a renaissance scholar. He had learned his lesson well, and what he realized was, “I have all this power. I am the philosopher King. I can do as I please, and there’s no law that can bind me.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:20 It was Henry’s very intelligence that took him the course that it did. Men of lesser intelligence would have been less ready to throw aside laws. Now, his father had been a hard money man, who made England very, very wealthy with his emphasis on gold. Henry thought, “Well, if man makes laws and I can make any law I choose, why not copper coins with a little bit of gold wash on them to get by with the people.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:59 Of course, those coins began to wear out very quickly and since, with his image on them, the nose was that which was most prominent. The gold wash would wear off on the nose first, and so they began to call him, looking at those images, old copper nose.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:20 He debauched the currency, and it wasn’t until Queen Elizabeth’s day when Gresham told Elizabeth what was wrong with the money and the economy of England, that they went back to a hard money as a result of Gresham’s advice. We know now, it’s Gresham’s law … It was not original with him … which is that bad money drives out good money.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:52 But, because Henry had this power, he utilized it in every area. He did some things that were gross, that were brutal. But it was because this superb mind believed that, “Now I can do as I please, and on the earth, there is no one who has any right to oppose me, nor can.” He did become a tyrant.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:28 The danger of Henry VIII is precisely the danger we have in our day. Men again, are without faith, in fact having far less faith than Henry. And the more intelligent the man in government who has this humanistic perspective, the more readily he will use power without any scruples.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:57 Now, Henry VIII, we are told, divorced Catherine in order to marry Anne Boleyn, with whom he was having a flaming affair, and this is why he got his divorce. This is not true. Anne Boleyn was probably only seven years old when he filed for the divorce.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:22 The action took a number of years. It was not because he didn’t love Catherine any longer. As a matter of fact, the one queen he perhaps loved right to her death was Catherine. Catherine was quite a remarkable woman. She had a neurotic streak, which ran in the family. She was a daughter of Isabella of Spain, and her sister was known as Joanna, the Mad, another queen. She was not mad. She was framed by her father, Ferdinand, who was a vicious, ugly character … That’s another story … but there definitely was a neurotic streak in the family.

R.J. Rushdoony: 05:09 She was extremely devout and she was heavily used by her father, so that through her chaplain, who was being instructed by Ferdinand, and through various counselors and advisors, she was giving pro-Spanish ideas to Henry so that more than once in foreign policy, Henry did things that were damaging to England to help out his father-in-law, who then would leave him in the lurch and betray him.

R.J. Rushdoony: 05:44 But, even then, Henry never lost his respect for Catherine, although she made a fool out him more than once, to please her father. The [inaudible 00:05:58] reason was this. Henry’s father had not been a prince. He had gained the crown as a result of a long struggle, the civil war in England. There was a danger that there would be another civil war, a bitter struggle to gain power, if there were no male heir.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:20 And so, Henry felt, “I’ve got to have a male heir. I’ve got to have one,” and this was the issue that he presented to the pope. He said, “England is faced with great dangers. One of the dangers is that the Reformation can sneak in here from Germany if I don’t have a male heir, and if a civil war develops, Catherine is past the time for child-bearing. Therefore, I need an annulment of the marriage to her, so I can have a male heir. There’s only a sickly daughter, Mary,” and she was sickly and she died after not too many years as queen.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:13 The pope was sympathetic to Henry. He agreed with him, but there was a problem. Italy was run by Spain, and was the Spanish Crown going to see one of girls of the family set aside and not take it out on the pope? So, he had a practical problem. He said, “I can’t give you an annulment. They’re right on my neck,” and of course, finally the sack of Rome did come about at a later date, worse than the one by the Barbarians when Rome fell in 410 AD.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:49 So, the pope’s suggestion was, “Don’t divorce her or have the marriage annulled. Just take a second wife. I’ll make polygamy legal in your case.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:01 Well, Henry thought it over and he didn’t like the idea. He said, “No, I don’t want a polygamous marriage. I just want one woman, but I want a younger woman by whom I can have a son.” Now, that was the real issue, and that’s what he kept hoping for, a son that he could leave the realm to.

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:24 Edward VI was born subsequently … I think of the fourth or fifth wife, who died subsequently, but Edward also was a sickly child. The only healthy child of the three that he had was Elizabeth, who was quite vigorous.

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:44 This, then, was the key to Henry’s acts. He was not a sentimental fool. He, who was going to tear the country apart because he loved a woman. This is the modern perspective, reading it back into history. He was concerned about the future of the kingdom and he wanted a male heir.

R.J. Rushdoony: 09:12 He did not want a reformation. Cranmer wanted it. This is why Henry VIII burned the Protestants during his reign, as heretics, but he hung the Catholics as traitors. It was a point he was very insistent on. He never burned the Catholics. They were not heretics. The Protestants were. So, he hung them, or beheaded the Catholics as traitors, but he burned the Protestants as heretics.

R.J. Rushdoony: 09:53 The English Reformation, thus was a very, very difficult one. The Puritan movement was a part of the movement within the English church. We don’t have time to go into that now. The English church finally was broken for some time to come under Charles II.

R.J. Rushdoony: 10:21 Under Charles I, before Cromwell, the Laudians and Charles, of course, and his queen, Henrietta, wanted to return the church to Rome. Charles II was a secret Catholic, and James II an open one, and what they did was, first to drive out the Puritans, and that led to the formation of the Presbyterian church. The Presbyterian Church of England came right out of the Episcopal, or the Church of England.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:00 And then they drove out the non-juror bishops, so that the men of faith on both sides were driven out, and only political bishops left, or created, in order to lead the church back to Rome. But of course, then you had the revolution of 1688. William and Mary came over. But the Crown control of the church remained … This has been a chronic problem in the Church of England … so that the future of the Church of England is still questionable as far as any kind of real future, in terms of its basic faith, 39 articles, and the prayer book are concerned. It will probably have to be a new movement of some sort, which will then revitalize what is existing. We’ll go into later, the similar decay in the Lutheran and Reformed Churches.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:14 Very briefly, to pass on, because our time is limited, in Scotland, the Reformation was led by John Knox, who had gone to Geneva and learned Reformation doctrine there. Scotland had long been a problem to England, and Scotland by and large was very close to France. The Scotch and the French, throughout the middle ages, were usually in alliance as against the English.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:49 Scotland represented a politically difficult kingdom. Very few kings died a natural death because the clan organization of Scotland was more basic than the Crown, and this led to a highly undisciplined situation. Very, very commonly in the history of Scotland prior to the Reformation, the Scotch, who could usually wipe out any English army, began to falter after Edward I and Edward II began to train, discipline, organized English troops.

R.J. Rushdoony: 13:37 This was the failing of the Scotch throughout that entire area. The lack of discipline. They were given to wild charges, and as a result, England very frequently dominated Scotland. With the Reformation, however, the wild nature of the Scots, the most feared people of Europe because they were regarded as almost impossible with their wildness. It was the country of the real barbarians as far as the rest of Europe was concerned, because of their continual switching of sides. Became the most disciplined area of Europe. They became the empire builders for Britain. They became the backbone of the Imperial armies of the British Empire.

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:40 You’ve perhaps heard the remark of one British general when Canada was taken from the French. He put the Scotchmen up in the front lines because Her Majesty’s enemies were always expendable. However, this policy only led to victory over and over again, and the Scotch became the empire builders.

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:12 An anthropologist has said that the two people who have done more, in more parts of the world, accomplished more than all others by a considerable margin, are the Scotch and the Jews. There’s scarcely a part of the world where you can go without finding the Scotch and the Jews, and very much running things.

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:35 Moreover, another interesting fact that goes along with that, people can go to different countries and lose their accent, and learn the language, and become very much one of the people, except for the Scotch. They never lose the Scotch burr when they emigrate. Racially, anthropologists say the Scotch to this day have maintained their ancient, Celtic distinctiveness. They have never fully become integrated, as it were, with any of the other peoples.

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:23 Scottish history is a very, very remarkable, and an interesting story. It would be tempting to take time to go into it, but our time is short. Let us go on now to the Counter Reformation, and the Council of Trent. Now, the Counter Reformation within the Church of Rome, is very important for us to understand.

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:56 Why had the Reformation come about, and what was the problem? Well, as the medieval period developed, more and more within the Roman communion, alien doctrines began to creep in, against which, of course the reformers protested. But even more, that which developed was the increasing power of the Vatican, so that you had both in Church and State, the devoutment of the Doctrine of Divine Right, the Divine Right of Kings, the Divine Right of the Popes, or the Papacy, so that the folks progressively claimed to speak for God, and to speak infallibly.

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:47 Papal Infallibility was a doctrine that developed in the medieval period. This papal power prevented grassroots reform during the medieval period progressively. Earlier, there had been all kinds of false doctrines that had crept in again, and again, and again. But, repeatedly there had been grassroots reform within the medieval church.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:19 Now, it had been stifled. Let me say parenthetically, this is the problem in Protestantism today, as well, is it not? Power has gone into the hands of general assemblies, and denominational authorities, or bishops, and so on, not in the hands of the local church as it was in the early medieval period.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:48 And as a result, the possibility of reform has been stifled. It’s been choked off. And this is why, just as with the Reformation, it had to be a movement outside the old church. Again, reform will have to be outside the established structure of the church, because the control chokes off the possibility of inner Reformation. Well, this is what the Vatican had done. It had choked off any possibility of reform. Its control was so thorough.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:29 But the Reformation gave Catholics a chance, because with northern Europe and England and Scotland having gone with the Reformation, the Holy Roman Emperor could say to the Vatican, “Look, this is all because you’ve done nothing to bring about a reform. We’ve got to have a general council of the church to reform things.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:59 Now, the Vatican did not want one, but the Emperor forced the calling of the Council of Trent on the Vatican. A counter-reformation was only possible when this was done.

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:18 Now, the Council of Trent was some years in session because the pope was doing everything to frustrate it. What it did do, was to clean up a lot of the immorality of the priests and a lot of the misconduct, and the Vatican, as well. The Council of Trent did bring about a moral Reformation within the Catholic church.

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:45 However, it established those dogmas that had grown up during the medieval period, so that it was not a return to the faith of the early church, or to biblical faith. It was simply confirming the faith, but they did give priority to that faith over the pope. In other words, what Trent emphatically said is, that the faith, however wrongly they interpreted it, is prior to the pope.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:23 As a result, the Vatican and the papacy declined in power from the Council of Trent to the time of Napoleon. What happened? Well, Napoleon destroyed the Emperor of Austria, who was the Holy Roman Emperor, Francis, the son of Maria Theresa, who didn’t have the common sense that his mother did. He was a good man, but he lacked his mother’s common sense.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:57 And again, and again, when Napoleon gave them every chance to be at peace, he allowed England and others to push him into action, and he would take the first beating. So, the Holy Roman Empire collapsed.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:16 Now, the Hapsburgs had controlled the Vatican. They kept it from getting out of line. Their concern had been to keep the Catholic Church pure of moral corruption, and to keep the Vatican from trying to dominate the churches. So, the local churches all had a great deal more freedom.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:42 Then, Napoleon, as ruler, controlled the pope. He even took the pope prisoner. But, when Napoleon fell, the Vatican was free, and the pope was free. What happened?

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:57 Within a half a century, the Vatican was ready to move, and it called the first Vatican Council. And what did they do? They defined papal infallibility. In other words, they hadn’t learned a thing. They went right back to that doctrine with which they had corrupted and virtually destroyed the church.

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:23 Now what did Pope John and Pope Paul do? Vatican II. Now, the whole point had been at Trent, the priority of the faith over the pope. What did Vatican II do? Well, it subverted the Council of Trent, in other words, the Counter Reformation.

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:51 The [inaudible 00:23:53] Catechism, which is the Tridentine or Trent Confession and Catechism, is not in print since Vatican II. Father Nugent in Kentucky is going to republish it so that conservative Catholics can have it. But you see, it was war against Trent by the Vatican. It was dropped immediately.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:19 The Latin mass expressed the theology and the faith of the Council of Trent. Now, to all practical intent, that is suppressed. The few priests who perform it are usually bootlegging it, and they are being threatened by bishops.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:44 It all adds up, you see, to war against the Council of Trent. And the changes, what’s their purpose? To subvert everything that a traditional Catholic has affirmed. But out of it all, you see, what will remain is loyalty to the pope, and this is the issue that is being fought out in Catholic circles.

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:07 You have to be loyal to the pope no matter what he says. This, then, is the direction that is now being taken. And of course, loyalty to the church, the same thesis that led to the Reformation and which today Vatican II has in effect reaffirmed, and the Vatican is affirming.

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:36 The various Protestant churches, Episcopal, Lutheran, Reformed, are emphasizing loyalty to the church, not loyalty to the faith. This is why there is the systematic desecration in all these communions, Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Catholic, of that which long was regarded as essential to those particular churches. They’re going to break them of any loyalty to that and replace it with loyalty to the church. As a result, we must recognize that today we are again in the same position as the people in the years before Luther were.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:42 This time, the paganism goes deeper, the totalitarianism in our part of the world does not go as deep as it did then, but it may. And again, the hope is, first that scholars working to make again the faith relevant to all of life, may find among the people an answering response so that again there can be a true Reformation.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:17 This is why the Christian movement is important, because it can create that answering response in the hearts of the people of the years ahead.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:33 Let us bow our heads in prayer.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:37 Almighty God, our heavenly father, we give thanks unto thee that thou art on the throne, and we beseech thee that now again, as man desecrates thy church, thou wilt again revive thy people as of old. And reestablish thy church and make again the supremacy of thy word and of faith to be paramount in the hearts of people. Use us, we beseech thee to this purpose. In Jesus’ name, amen.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:17 An announcement before we have our questions. We will not have a class next week because of Christmas, but we will meet two weeks from tonight, and continue our study-

Class Member 1: 28:34 [inaudible 00:28:34] … New Years. [inaudible 00:28:38] … week before New Years.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:41 Yes. The week before New Years. It will be … Let’s see, 29th? Something like that.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:48 All right. Any questions now?

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:55 Yes.

Class Member 1: 28:56 [inaudible 00:28:56] today, where the ministers are dropping out a roll council or a national council of churches they call [inaudible 00:29:07] … again? But, actually they’re still … They can be a minister and still [crosstalk 00:29:19] fundamental [crosstalk 00:29:19]

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:18 Yes. Right. Yes. Oh, yes. Right. Right.

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:21 Yes.

Class Member 2: 29:28 Do I understand in Luther’s book on the Bondage of the Will, there’s a proper discussion of predestination of the Lutheran Church, that doesn’t follow today?

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:41 It does not follow it today. No. There are some Lutherans who will believe in predestination, but most do not. Luther’s Bondage of the Will is a great all-time classic on the doctrine of predestination. Luther formulated it, worked out the scriptural analysis of it. Calvin did not add much to it. It’s a great work. If you haven’t read it, it’s well worth reading, tremendous study.

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:18 Yes.

Class Member 3: 30:22 [inaudible 00:30:22] similar when the reform church is [inaudible 00:30:27] what had happened that the control is no longer at the parish, but in the general [inaudible 00:30:38].

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:40 Right. Right. A friend of mine, now a professor in this country, is an ordained minister of the Church of England, and he has not transferred to the Episcopal Church in this country, and he said the Orthodox churches and the Church of England today, those which are under local patronage, that is, from the early medieval period, they are controlled by a local guard, or a local township, or a local foundation, which provides the funds and has the power to call the minister.

R.J. Rushdoony: 31:27 And these are the Orthodox ones, he says. And he said the bishops are very unhappy about these, because the ministers are all Orthodox. Very few of any of the others are. They cannot touch them to this day.

R.J. Rushdoony: 31:47 And he feels that the hope for the future there is out of these particular churches.

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:08 Yes.

Class Member 4: 32:10 All I was trying to say was, that there’s always a remnant left. There always has been. Is that true? [crosstalk 00:32:10]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:09 Yes. The question is, “Isn’t there always a remnant left?” Yes, there is, but we must beware of assuming that that remnant is necessarily within, you see.

Class Member 4: 32:24 Oh, [crosstalk 00:32:24]

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:23 Very often, the remnant separates itself in order to rebuild, and then to influence again, the church.

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:35 Yes.

Class Member 5: 32:36 I’d just like to comment, [inaudible 00:32:38] thought about [inaudible 00:32:38] I was always told [inaudible 00:32:42] the Church of England [inaudible 00:32:44] The Church of Ireland was all [inaudible 00:32:55] and then [inaudible 00:32:56] in name, maybe only, but [inaudible 00:33:02].

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:01 Yes. That’s very true. Some of these churches have retained some of the more conservative aspects longer than the Church of England.

Class Member 5: 33:25 Yes. The Church of Ireland always calls [inaudible 00:33:28] never [inaudible 00:33:31] is not considered priestly. Oh, and even in Canada, which is the church I went to [inaudible 00:33:41] I believe [inaudible 00:33:51] and they always put it aside [inaudible 00:33:57] and the people had access directly [inaudible 00:34:03] In today’s practice, we [inaudible 00:34:13] open access [inaudible 00:34:13] significant.

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:14 Well, for example, it was the Church of England and the church in America that led the other Episcopal churches in dropping the Athanasian Creed, and other things from the prayer book. So, the others were far more conservative and you can see it to this day in the Canadian prayer book, which is-

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:36 Yes. Yes.

Class Member 6: 34:42 There was a picture, a Man for all Seasons, and [inaudible 00:34:58] the conflict between Sir Thomas Moore and Henry VIII, and would you comment on that?

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:58 Yes. The question is about the play, The Man for all Seasons. I saw it in stage form, rather than the movie, and it was a very beautiful, a very powerful story, except that it was not historically accurate. The moral point, of course, was sound, the point that was made there. But St. Thomas Moore, as he is now called, was not being moved primarily by Christian considerations, but rather by humanistic ones. Thomas Moore was one of Henry’s teachers, as well as advisors, and he had both advised him against being too loyal to the pope earlier, and in favor of asserting his power more independently.

R.J. Rushdoony: 35:53 Moreover, Thomas Moore was a communist to the core. He wrote Utopia and Utopia is a vision of a communist society. He was, moreover, instead of being the fine sensitive person that he’s portrayed in the play, I think a very crude and coarse man. Thus he, in his book suggests that the best way to pick a wife is to examine her in the raw, in the nude. And so when Sir Thomas Roper said he was interested in marrying one of his girls, and suggested the same policy, he took him into the bedroom where the girls were sleeping and their nighties had come up under their armpits, so Thomas Moore just flipped back the bedding and they were lying on their back, and they woke up and rolled over, so Thomas Moore had a look at both of them on both sides, and he reached over and slapped one in the fanny, and said, “I’ll take that one,” and that’s how the marriage was arranged.

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:10 Now, the only reason Thomas Moore was made a saint and is magnified by Catholics today is for political reasons. Here was someone who fought against the English Crown, you see, not for the right reasons. So, let’s make a saint of him and very early he was promoted as an anti-royal [inaudible 00:37:39].

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:38 If they really wanted someone who would qualify in terms of Catholic standards for piety, and all, Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine, would’ve far more readily qualified. She was a woman who’d spend four to six hours on her knees in prayer every morning, and for years, Henry did it with her, by the way, something very few people realize.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:04 So, it was a beautiful play, and I’m sure it was a beautiful picture, and the point was the sound one that a man should stand in terms of the faith. And it is true that Thomas Moore said a number of very moving things during the trial, and later, but he was good at that sort of thing. But, basically, in his writings you see the man he is, and he was nothing. He was a rather contemptible character.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:39 Yes.

Class Member 7: 38:41 I think that from your analysis, then, that the play and the picture were really propaganda for anti-royalty.

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:01 No, it’s a part of the myth and Catholics are convinced that if the church says a man is good and holy, he is. Now, I read one book of the works of Moore with a preface by a couple of Catholics who kept saying, “Well, don’t take him too seriously when he says this,” and “Don’t take him too seriously when he says that,” as though the man wasn’t telling us what he meant, when he was very emphatic about it. And he certainly wasn’t kidding.

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:34 He said what he meant, and he did have a vision of a communist order. He was an egghead par excellence, and like all eggheads, he felt life could be planned on paper and the trouble with kings and politicians is that they don’t follow the plans we have so wonderfully developed.

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:57 In other words, he was the kind of person I dislike. I thought I’d better add that in case you hadn’t gotten the idea.

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:06 Yes.

Class Member 8: 40:11 As I understand this, the difference between [inaudible 00:40:20]

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:26 Luther often was concerned with the law, but then he was not a systematic thinker. He often contradicted himself. He didn’t develop his position in terms of an overall theology, you see, in which things tied in together.

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:45 Thus, we often encounter people who are very good on one doctrine, and then they’ll have some weird idea, and they won’t put things together to make a unified picture. And you try to tell them, ” Well, you’re right in holding to that, but don’t you realize that this, that you just said, contradicts that?”

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:06 They won’t think systematically, consistently. Luther was a great man at fighting on an issue, rather than seeing through to the totality of the picture. So, he was a very wonderful, very lovable person, but he was also very emotional and somewhat unstable person, too.

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:34 He was the kind who would get quite intensely worked up, sometimes with very good results, but sometimes very foolish. For example, he learned very early that it was the place to learn Hebrew the best, was from some of the rabbis. So, he went to them and was taught, and he enjoyed their company very much. They were very friendly, so there was a lot of rapport.

R.J. Rushdoony: 42:04 So, he thought, “Oh, we’re getting along so beautifully. I’m going to convert them.” Well, when he couldn’t, he became so angry with them, that he denounced them in language that would have delighted Hitler, you see.

R.J. Rushdoony: 42:19 Now this is the way he was, and a great deal of some of Luther’s writings are very intemperate, because he was the kind of man who would lose his temper very readily. And when you read Luther, you’d better forget about outlining what he says, because a good deal of the time, he starts on something, and it reminds him of something else, and he goes from there to something else, and from there to something else, and from there to something else, so that he goes into every possible subject before he comes back to his original one, or he might forget his original point.

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:01 He was this way, tremendous insights, powerful, great mind. In the Bondage of the Well, there he marshalls arguments systematically and goes through he could do it. But, it wasn’t his emotional temperament.

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:17 Yes.

Class Member 9: 43:29 How has the liberal trying to see the reason for his pains and obviously [inaudible 00:43:29] instead of saying what he really feels [inaudible 00:43:32]-

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:29 Yes. That’s right.

Class Member 9: 43:29 Did you see that play on television?

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:29 No.

Class Member 9: 43:32 It was a couple of years ago. [inaudible 00:43:32].

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:31 Yes. Well, it’s easy to do that to him, but he was a very great and a very lovable man, and as I say very often, in his emotional outbursts, he would say some very stupid and very foolish things. So, it’s very easy for people who dislike Luther, to go to him and make a fool out of him.

R.J. Rushdoony: 44:01 But very often, out of the spontaneity, come some of the most charming things. I like the letter he wrote after his marriage to a friend. You know, the story of his marriage is a delightful one because after he began the Reformation, a lot of nuns left convents and it was a difficult life for them, because very often their families, still being devout Catholics, would not have anything to do with them. But they, having seen corruption in the convent, and having read Luther’s writings, would run to him.

R.J. Rushdoony: 44:40 So, he always had a lot of nuns on hand, and he had a place to house them, and he would very quickly try to find husbands for them, and so on, and to get them rehabilitated in some area. And since the nuns in those days tended to be the daughters of prominent families, these were no ordinary girls.

R.J. Rushdoony: 45:02 So, there was this one girl, Katharina von Bora-

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965.  His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.”  He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder

The post From Renaissance (Humanism) to the Reformation, II appeared first on Rushdoony Radio.

A Christian Survey of World History

From Renaissance (Humanism) to the Reformation, I

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Transcript:

*This is an unedited and unoffical print version of R.J. Rushdoony’s lecture.

Speaker 1: 00:00 Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, who has called us and consumed us in Jesus’ name. We thank Thee that Thy hands have been upon us for good all the days of our lives. We thank Thee that Thou has beset us before and behind with Thy mercy and [inaudible 00:00:18]. We thank Thee, our Father, that not only our individual lives, but our lives as a people have been blessed by Thee. We come into Thy presence to study Thy workings of this day. We rejoice in Thy providence, and to look for even greater works in the days to come. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Speaker 1: 00:50 Our subject this evening the Reformation. The Reformation is not given quite the space in the history books, nor definitely the favorable attention that the Renaissance is given. Renaissance, of course, means rebirth. It was a self-conscious rebirth of paganism and humanism. Again, man was the measure of all things, so that society, human conduct, moral and religious questions were all to be judged in terms of man. As I point out in the text of our lesson, the expression for a fool in those days was a good Christian. To call someone a good Christian was to say he was a fool.

Speaker 1: 01:58 Renaissance was a period of aestheticsm as against ethics. Aesthetics instead of ethics. That is, the form, the manner, the beauty of something as against the moral question. As a result, the Renaissance saw a number of very interesting developments. On the one hand, there was a tremendous emphasis on taste, good taste in every realm. Thus, the gourmet was associated with a gentleman. A gentleman was a man who had particularly refined taste in foods and in drinks. This was cultivated to the nth degree in those days, to the point where sitting at a table was not so much eating, but tasting endlessly from an incredible variety of foods, that were paraded before someone, so that the [inaudible 00:03:10] could dabble, and taste, and sit endlessly, and prove himself by his commentary on that which was set before him.

Speaker 1: 03:22 The same was true with respect to art. There was a heavy emphasis on the form, on manner. Earlier, art had been concerned with religious themes, and was in some respects a more developed, a more refined art, we could say. The emphasis now became of course, humanistic in content, but even more, the refinement and the subtlety of the form.

Speaker 1: 03:58 The dandy, again, came into his own. The expression “the dandy” belongs to the Enlightenment period, or more properly, to the 18th century, but there was a comparable standard at that time, and man began to dress like peacocks. A splash of color, as much ornate dress as possible, and as expensive as possible, so that a man’s wardrobe cost a fortune. This was true also of women. An incredible amount of money was spent on wardrobe to the point of virtually bankrupting oneself in order to put up the appearance. In other words, appearance was everything. Life was a performance, self-consciously so. The world a sage, but not before God, but before men.

Speaker 1: 05:05 I point out that Castiglione, in his [inaudible 00:05:08], or perhaps it wasn’t here. It was the one in the many and is the [inaudible 00:05:14] says that, “A good soldier, a gentleman soldier does not do brave and foolhardy things if there’s no one to watch, so that he does the foolhardy, the brave, the daring thing when he is sure that the prince or the general is observing him. That’s the time for brave and daring actions. It’s wasted on any other occasion.” Men, in other words, were continually putting on an act self-consciously, deliberately before other men, and this was the goal, the purpose of life. Not morals, but appearances. Similarly, there was a refinement of torture. It was crude just to kill men. You developed a highly reformed torture in order to dispose of them.

Speaker 1: 06:14 The Renaissance, thus, saw this emphasis on appearance, taste, manner, the gourmet, as against the moral and the Godly man. At the same time, because the moral issue had been subverted, the religious and the moral issue, you had a period, in fact, one of the periods of the most unbridled totalitarianism in all history. When it was considered nothing at all to eliminate thousands upon thousands of people. When it was nothing unusual to admire Pope Alexander, who was the father of Lucrezia Borgia and Cesare Borgia, as well as others, and maintained a harem in the Vatican, because he was so shrewd and astute. That was the thing men admire. There was nothing wrong with his character. After all, if you have power, you use it. He did everything with such finesse, with such taste, that it was all really excusable.

Speaker 1: 07:27 As a result, with this emphasis on appearance, rather than religious faith and character, tyranny developed to unimagined bounds. It would be tiresome to go into the depiction of it. The Renaissance tyrant was indeed a fearless, a ruthless, a vicious person, and society thought nothing of it. Whenever the emphasis is on appearance, on taste, as it is again in our time, the truly Godly values, religious and moral, disappear, and human life becomes cheap, as long as appearances are maintained.

Speaker 1: 08:20 As a result, the Reformation came none too late. One medical historian has estimated that because of the deterioration of faith and morals, one third to one half of the earth was venereally diseased when Luther began his work, so that were signs of a physical degeneration, which could’ve led to the total decline and corruption of European life. The disappearance into anarchy and deterioration of the Western world.

Speaker 1: 09:03 The Reformation was first of all, as I point out in the text, an anti-humanist movement. It was thoroughly against everything that the Renaissance represented. The Renaissance was to it, the epitome of corruption. The Reformation, thus, very definitely climaxed a century later in Puritanism, because the Puritans despised with all their heart this kind of affected prancing. Some have tried to say that the Puritans were anti-art, anti-good taste, and so on, which is false. As a matter of fact, some of the Puritans were among the outstanding men in art, in the appreciation of music, in the producing of music, and so on. They were not a crude people, but they gave moral priority its proper place. The result was a truly great art that developed. In music, Johann Sebastian Bach. In poetry, men like John Milton and so on. Certainly not people who were anti-art, and who had a tremendous audience that appreciated and loved what they had to say, so that anti-humanism did not lead to a depreciation of art and taste, but giving it its proper place.

Speaker 1: 10:46 Then second, the Reformation was a scholarly movement. It’s important to recognize this fact. It was headed by scholars. Luther, a professor, Calvin, a scholar. The Reformation leaders were very largely not only the upper echelons, but the secondary ones. Scholars, thinkers, people who are concerned with the basic issues of their day, or concerned with making the faith relevant to all of life so that it is important to recognize that it was a scholarly movement. Third, it was also a popular movement, because by the providence of God, there were people who are ready to respond to what these scholars like Luther and Calvin and others had to say.

Speaker 1: 11:44 Then fourth, it succeeded most where there had been a resistance to the papacy during the investiture struggle by the princes and monarchs. The investiture struggle was a struggle between Church and state as to who should control the Church and the bishops. The Vatican wanted to control all the churches down to the least detail. The kings and emperors wanted to control the Church themselves. They didn’t want an outsider in the Vatican running them. In a sense, neither side was right. The Church should have been free from centralized control. It should’ve been locally controlled, and it should’ve been free from imperial or royal control. However, the areas where there was resistance to papal control, or the areas where enough independence had survived so that the Reformation could there succeed.

Speaker 1: 12:48 The Reformation of course, began in Germany, with Luther and his 95 Theses in 1515. It might repay to remind you of the significance of those theses by quoting from the indulgences. The indulgences were the sale of forgiveness of sins by papal preachers. They were a good source of funds. By selling indulgences to people they had, as it were, a permit to sin, because they not only had, through purchasing a piece of paper, forgiveness for past sins they had committed, but they could also get them for sins they were planning to commit. They were supposedly forgiven from any pains or pangs in purgatory, and could jump into heaven.

Speaker 1: 13:52 In order to do some more construction of churches, Leo the 10th, Pope, in a papal of [inaudible 00:14:04] of August third, 1476, had prepared the way for Luther by trying on an all out basis to raise more money, to rebuild or to construct, rather, St. Peter’s Church. As a result, the preaching began throughout Europe to sell indulgences. As time passed, this became more and more brazen. Finally, in Luther’s day, a Dominican friar, John [inaudible 00:14:41], was sent out to raise more funds, which he did very successfully. Some rulers were able to keep them out of their realm in Germany. Since Germany was an area of small Duchies and small kingdoms, and small princedoms, and so on, very often if the ruler banned the sale of indulgences in his realm, it was just crossing over a mile or two to buy them elsewhere. After all, all the devout little people who wanted to have their relatives who were dead get out of purgatory and get into heaven, and all those sinners who wanted indulgences for sin, would walk a mile or cross the river to buy indulgences.

Speaker 1: 15:35 As I point out in the text, the preaching was plain and blunt. For example, “Lo, the heavens are open. If you enter not now, when will you enter? For 12 pence you may redeem the soul of your father out of purgatory. Are you so ungrateful that you will not rescue the soul of your parent from torment? If you had but one coat, you ought to strip yourself instantly and sell it in order to purchase such benefit,” unquote. Or this, quoting from the bottom of page 176 by [inaudible 00:16:10], “Listen now, God and St. Peter call. Listen to the voices of your dear dead relatives and friends beseeching you and saying, ‘Pity us, pity us. We are in dire torment from which you can redeem us for a pittance.’ Do you not wish to? Open your ears. Hear the father saying to his son, the mother to her daughter, ‘We bore you, nourished you, brought you up, left you our fortunes, and you are so cruel and hard that now you are not willing for so little to set us free. Will you let us lie here in flames? Will you delay our promised glory?’ Remember that you are able to release them, for as soon as the coin in the copper rings, the soul from purgatory springs,” unquote.

Speaker 1: 17:05 Then, in the next paragraph, I point out, it’s well worth repeating, it was reported that [inaudible 00:17:10] even said that, “Papal indulgences could absolve even a man who had violated the mother of God.” The answer of Professor Martin Luther was to post 95 Theses on the castle church in Wittenburg for debate. These were written in Latin. They didn’t attract much attention from the people at large, but students went there and they read them. It was a challenge to debate anybody on these propositions. They was often done in those days, on theological issues. Here was a revolutionary one. Students copied them down and sent them all over Europe. What did not, on the day it was done, October the 31st, 1517, it did not then create a stir, but in a matter of weeks, it was all over Europe, copies of it floating around, creating quite a sensation.

Speaker 1: 18:23 Let’s read just a few of these theses, which I copied down, to see how [inaudible 00:18:28] Luther was challenging Rome. On page 177, “Those who assert that a soul straightly flies out of purgatory as a coin tinkles in the collection box, are preaching an invention of man. It is sure that when a coin tinkles, greed and avarice are increased. The intercession of the church is in the will of God alone. This wanton preaching of pardons makes it hard even for a learned man to defend the honor of the Pope against calumny, or at least against the shrewd questions of the laity. They ask, ‘Why does not the Pope empty purgatory on account of most holy charity, and the graves need of souls the most righteous of causes?’ Seeing that he redeems an infinite number of souls on account of sordid money, given for the erection of a basilica, which is a most trivial cause.

Speaker 1: 19:29 “In other words, if the Pope can free them out of purgatory, why doesn’t he do it without having money paid? If he is a Christian man, he should feel sorry for those people there, so let him do it freely. What is the piety of God and the Pope in allowing the impious and hostile to secure on payment of money a pious soul? In friendship with God, while they do not redeem a free charity, a soul that is of itself pious and beloved on account of its needs. The Pope’s riches at this day far exceed the wealth of the richest millionaires. Cannot he therefore build one single basilica of St. Peter out of his own money, rather than out of the money of the faithful poor?”

Speaker 1: 20:22 You can see how radical these were. As a result, the Reformation was underway, because these propositions, these theses of Luther began to hurt income. If they had not hurt the income from the sale of indulgences, they wouldn’t have bothered with him, but the sale began to fall off. Luther’s common sense and his appeal to Scripture made people stop and think, and it began to turn in many areas the sale of indulgences into a joke.

Speaker 1: 21:06 Luther could not have gotten anywhere. Many of the German princes had not rallied to his support. Some did it for nationalistic reasons, but we must recognize that many did it for Godly reasons. Luther is charged by Catholic scholars with having divided Christendom, but it was already divided, disintegrating in the abyss of the Renaissance. What Luther did instead was to bring about some reunification in terms of the faith. Moreover, he did this not in subservience to the princes, but in union with them. Then we must say further that Luther, rather than Calvin, was the great teacher of predestination. It’s the myth that Calvin was the one who taught predestination so drastically and heavily. He did teach it, but he didn’t state a new thing about it, or develop any new arguments for it. It was Luther, who in his debates with Erasmus, not a formal debate, but a written debate, set forth the greatest statement of the doctrine of predestination. Lutherans, because they by and large have forsaken the doctrine, will not mention the fact that it was Luther who taught it, and they have created the propaganda that it was Calvin who brought up this horrible doctrine. The Catholics, of course, say the same thing. It was always the faith of the church, and the great statement of it was by Luther. “On the Bondage of the Will” is the title of his study. It is one of the greatest classics of Christian history and probably one of the three great documents of the Reformation.

Speaker 1: 23:20 Moreover, Luther emphasized heavily another doctrine, justification by faith. Justification by faith. Luther was not the systematic thinker that Calvin was, and it appears at this point, because the doctrine of justification of faith, of course, is thoroughly Scriptural. When it is detached from other doctrines, it can lead to a kind of humanism. The exclusive emphasis on the salvation of souls, rather than on the whole counsel of God. Of course, fundamentalism, with its emphasis on the saving of souls almost alone, has come about from Lutheranism, a little more so than Luther, because Luther emphasized predestination as well. Lutheranism, by dropping predestination and emphasizing justification by faith exclusively, has given it a false emphasis. As though the saving of souls was the only function of the Church, and of the people of God.

Speaker 1: 24:45 Very quickly in Germany, other religious groups sprang up as a result of the Lutheran Reformation. These groups are called Anabaptists. They are not related to the Baptists of today. The Anabaptists went, supposedly, like the Reformers, to the New Testament for their model, but not for doctrine. Their basic purpose was political. They wanted to establish, supposedly, a new Christian order. What it amounted to, in so many cases, was that they went to Acts for the statement about how the disciples lived together and shared things in common, or supposedly did this, which is a mis-statement. I’ve described this on other occasions, so I won’t repeat unless some of you … Perhaps I will. I see some of you do want.

Speaker 1: 25:53 What the early church was this, only in Jerusalem and nowhere else, because our Lord had told them in Matthew 24, that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed, and not a stone left standing upon another, they knew there was no future there. They sold their property because they believed our Lord when He said Jerusalem was going to be totally destroyed. They used some of it to live on, and many of them, not all, were told it was voluntary, gave it to the Church to be used for the evangelization of their fellows Jews and Israelites in order to save them before the destruction by the Romans king. It was not Communism.

Speaker 1: 26:43 However, the Anabaptists tended to see it as their model. When they went to the New Testament, it was things like this they zeroed in on. They tried to establish a Communist order. As a matter of fact at Munster, several such groups were started, but Munster is the classic case. They did seize the area for a while, and they expected like all Communists, that once they had gained power, everything was going to be perfect. It doesn’t work that way. Of course, they then went into all kinds of sins, including polygamy, because they were beyond the law. The law was dead, as far as they were concerned. They were in the reign of grace, in other words, of Communism.

Speaker 1: 27:35 Some flagrant immoralities became commonplace. It went from bad to worse. Finally, these Communistic groups were put down in blood. The other groups tended to abandon politics and emphasize inwardness. Some of those who had been very political at first, like the Quakers, tended to abandon that for a kind of pietism, emphasis not on faith, but on the inner light. The thesis, for example, of Quakerism, is that every man, whether he’s a Christian or non-Christian, has a spark of the divine in him, and that’s heresy, and all he should do is to develop that inner light.

Speaker 1: 28:28 The Anabaptists thus, were a very revolutionary group, which subsequently became a pietistic group emphasizing the inward aspect of life. The Quakers are one such group still surviving. There are several others. The Mennonites are also an Anabaptist group, but they were more religious in their emphasis, so that while they did believe in forming communities, it was not a revolutionary community. Their community separated from the world so that they were the Christian element in the Anabaptist movement.

Speaker 1: 29:16 In Switzerland, Zwingli, a Catholic priest who had been an immoral man, became a convert and the leader of the Reformation for a time in Switzerland until he was killed in battle. The great work in Switzerland was that of Calvin, whose dates are 1509 to 1564. In other words, when Luther posted his 95 Theses on the church in Wittenburg, Calvin was a boy of six. He went to school, began his training as a very devout Catholic. It was only little by little, as a young man, that he became a convert to the faith of the Reformers. Calvin’s emphasis, unlike Luther’s, which was on justification by faith primarily, was on the sovereignty of God. You began with the sovereignty of God and the infallibility of Scripture.

Speaker 1: 30:29 Then, the sovereignty of God meant salvation by the grace of God through faith, so that Calvin firmly rooted the doctrine of justification in the fact of God’s sovereignty. Moreover, he emphasized that the kingdom of God means the universal reign of God. Catholicism had equated the kingdom of God with the Church, so that state, school, family were not a part of the kingdom of God. The Church and the clergy were the kingdom of God. This was a very important thing, and without this, you cannot have a true concept of the Reformation. This emphatically Calvin emphasized. It was one of the great advances in Christian history.

Speaker 1: 31:27 Then, he stressed also the priesthood of all believers, which was a doctrine right out of justification by faith. The priesthood of all believers means the doctrine, moreover, of calling or vocation. Every man, whether is be a minister, a banker, a carpenter, whatever he is, is in a Godly vocation and must serve where he does under God and as a service to God.

Speaker 1: 32:03 Then, Calvin also emphasized the doctrine of the covenant, and the independence of the various areas of life. The Church could not be under the state, nor the state under the Church. The school was independent, the family, every area, but interdependent as well. Alike aspects of the kingdom of God, and together serving God. In Geneva, he attempted to set these things forth. Calvin is often portrayed as the dictator of Geneva. The fact is, he couldn’t get permission to hold communion from the city council. He had to defy them. He was not even given citizenship until they knew he was dying. The supposed dictator of Geneva would often have dogs sicked on him when he walked the streets. Everything done to discourage him. It was the Reformation against tremendous opposition, and very often, he had his bags, as it were, packed, ready to leave at a moment’s notice because it seemed so impossible that he could continue much longer.

Speaker 1: 33:33 Now the Reformation in England is another aspect of the Reformation, which it is important to understand. The English church existed long before Rome had any control over it. It was a part of the great Celtic, or Irish church, an independent church. It was put under the control of Rome by the British Crown. Thus, it was for centuries thereafter a captive church, as Rome and the English kings struggled for control over it. Sometimes the various monarchs would run the church in England. What Henry VIII did was nothing new. At other times, the Vatican would run it absolutely and ruthlessly, so that the church was alternately a captive to Rome, or to the Crown.

Speaker 1: 34:46 What Henry did, thus, was to reestablish the royal power over the church, which the Church had off and on through the centuries. Nothing new was done. Contrary to the Catholic position, the Church of England was not created by the act of Henry VIII. It existed before the Church of England ever had any contact with Rome. Moreover, the Church of England, before Rome appeared on the scene, was a highly developed church with deep roots, even apart from the Irish in the Roman period. The Irish gave it definitive shape, but because England had in the earliest days of the Christian era, been a part of the Roman empire, the Christian missionaries very early had begun their work there.

Speaker 1: 36:03 What happened of course, was that the earliest converts were Roman officials. When Rome fell, and the Roman legions earlier were withdrawn from England, of course, it was just too bad for most of those Christians, but they didn’t entirely disappear. As the Danes and the Anglo-Saxons invaded the area, they were pagans, and Christianity did come close to disappearing. The Irish then converted these barbarians from the north.

Speaker 1: 36:40 The term barbarian long lingered to describe the kind of Christianity that you had in Britain and in northern Europe. Barbarian Christianity is the term used by some English historians. Barbarian Christianity, we shouldn’t misunderstand that word, because we think of barbarians as savages. It’s used by these historians to describe the northern tribes, even after they were Christians. Barbarian Christianity tended to be a kind of Christianity in which the state, or the Crown, governed the Church. This was the pattern that Henry VIII tried to reinstitute in England.

Speaker 1: 37:36 [inaudible 00:37:36], a very superior man and a very wonderful Christian, tended most of his life to be given to this barbarian Christianity, to believe in the royal preeminence. This is why very often, people fail to understand [inaudible 00:37:57] position. They feel he was a hypocrite, that was at times serving them. He was a man of very great sincerity, integrity, and very real faith. His position was more Lutheran than anything else. In fact, he had begun as a secret Lutheran. He was very genuinely convinced that the Crown, rather than the Vatican, should govern the Church. The issue finally came to a head in his thinking with Queen Mary. She was both Catholic, and both the Crown, the monarch.

Speaker 1: 38:49 Should the Church be ruled from Rome, or should it be ruled by the Crown? The two were one now, as it were. The acts of Mary were a bloody repression of many of his friends. First, he signed in obedience to the Crown, a statement affirming royal supremacy and their acts, which were uniting the Church with Rome. Then he came to the realization it cannot be Rome or the Crown. It has to be the freedom of the Church. He renounced the statement he had signed, and went to the state for it. When the flames began to leap up, he put out the hand with which he had signed the first statement, that it might burn first.

Speaker 1: 39:46 [inaudible 00:39:46] is not sufficiently appreciated in our day. He was a very great man. The Church of England took its definitive shape under Edward VI, the young son of Henry VIII, who succeeded him, and died when he was around 17 or 18. Edward VI was a very devout and a very wise young man. Under him, the Book of Common Prayer took its definitive form. The Church gained its name, which unless it’s been changed, was for along the legal name, the Reformed Church of England. You never heard of that nowadays, so that properly the Reformation had two kinds of churches. The Lutheran and the Reformed. Many people say Lutheran, Reformed, and Episcopal. This is not true. Basically, the best classification is Reformed and Lutheran. The two great documents of the Reformed churches were Calvin’s Institutes of the Book of Common Prayer. This is why there is so great a hostility to the Book of Common Prayer in the Church of England. The attempt at its radical revision in 1928 in England. Of course now, it is virtually a dead letter. The thought of identifying the established Episcopal Church of England, and the Episcopal Church of the U.S., the major group with the Book of Common Prayer, is going to be over very soon. It is by and large being supplanted. The new liturgy is definitely anti-prayer book. It deliberately sets out to violate it, and a great deal of substitutes are commonplace in the church today with Episcopal permission. Of course, the reason is obvious. The Book of Common Prayer, as well as the 39 articles, give a theology which is so alien that it is unendurable, even it to repeat it without faith.

Speaker 1: 42:29 Henry VIII, unfortunately, is remembered by most people in terms of Charles Lotton’s depiction. Henry VIII was not a stupid slob. He was perhaps, the most brilliant mind on any throne in Europe at the day. This does not mean he was a good monarch. Far from it. He was the darling of the Renaissance scholars. They were delighted. Here was the dream of Plato to be realized, the philosopher king. A man with a brilliant mind. A man with a great talent in every area. As a musician, a composer. I have somewhere at home a poem that survives of one of those that he wrote. I think it’s as good as anything Shakespeare ever wrote. He was a man of incredible talents. Just amazing. It’s rare that there’s been a king who has ascended to the throne with abilities equal to Henry VIII’s. Moreover, he was trained for the priesthood. His brother Arthur was to be the king. He was the Prince of Wales, and the older brother.

Speaker 1: 44:03 Henry VII decided that Henry would be archbishop of Canterbury. The two brothers could this way run the country very neatly. This was very shrewdly planned. Henry VII incidentally, was a very able, intelligent king. His wife, Henry’s mother, Elizabeth of York, a very remarkable, very superior woman. Arthur died, and as a result, Henry was yanked out of training for the priesthood against his wishes. He was very devout. He wanted to be a priest, and he was married to Arthur’s widow, Catherine, some years older than himself.

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965.  His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.”  He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder

The post From Renaissance (Humanism) to the Reformation, I appeared first on Rushdoony Radio.

A Christian Survey of World History

New Humanism or Medieval Period, II

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Transcript:

*This is an unedited and unoffical print version of R.J. Rushdoony’s lecture.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:00 If you want to hear more of the good simple woman of our countries say has been done onto their sons. When the lads have set their lives elsewhere and their mother cannot wean them from it. It is certain that when fathers and mothers be dead and step fathers and step mothers, argue with her stepsons and scold them and repulse them, and take no thought for their sleeping nor for other food and drink, their hose in their shirts, and all there other needs and affairs. And the same children find elsewhere a good home, and good counsel from some other woman who receives them and takes thought to warm them with [inaudible 00:00:45] with her. And to give them a bed and keep them tidy. Mending their hose glitches, shirts and other garments, then those lads cling to her and desire to be with her. And to sleep warm between her breasts, and are all together estranged from their mothers and fathers who before took no heat of them. And now want to get them back and have them again.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:08 But it may not be, for these children hold more dear that company of strangers and care for them than that other kin folk who have no care for them. Then the parents will mount and weep, and say to the same women have bewitched their children. That they are spellbound and cannot leave, but are never easy save when they are with their enchantress. But whatever maybe said of it, it is no witchcraft, but it is by reason of the love, the care, the intimacies, joys and pleasures which these women do in all ways onto the lads, and on my soul there is no other enchantment. Wherefore, dear sister, I pray you thus to bewitch and bewitch again your next husband. And beware of dripping rope and smoking fire, and scold him not, but be unto him gentle, and amiable, and peaceable.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:08 Be careful that in winter he has good fire without smoke and let him rest well, and be well covered between your breasts and thus bewitch him. And thus you shall preserve and guard him from all discomforts and give him all the ease that you can, and serve him and cause him to be well served in your house. And you shall look to him for outside things. Or if he be a good man, he will take even more care and trouble over them than you wish. And by doing all that I have said, you will make him always miss you and have his heart with you, and with your loving service and will shun all our houses, all other women, all other services and households. All will be knobs to him save you alone, if you think of him afore said. And so on the road husbands with think of their wives, and no trouble will be a burden to them for the hope and love they will have their wives.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:09 Whom they will long to see even as poor hermits penitence and fasting monks long to see the face of Jesus Christ. And husbands last served will never desire to abide elsewhere, or another company, but will withhold, withdrawn, abstain themselves therefrom. All the rest will seem to them, but I’ve bed stones paired with their homes.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:39 I think that’s very interesting and very revealing as to the practicality and the simple Christian outlook of the people of that time. There’s nothing romantic about that. It’s down to earth, preparing a wife for her second husband. He was totally delighted with her, but he wanted and it was his joy and pride in life to prepare her properly for a good young man who had married her in a few years when he died. And he didn’t want her to wait a long time as a widow. Get married as quickly as you can, but to the right man. Well, we don’t know what happened, but we have a pretty good guess, because she kept the letter is apparently, and prized, them and pass them on in her family. So obviously it all worked out and it is a very interesting aspect of the period.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:52 It makes clear the difference between their era and ours. But, within a century or two, that note disappeared. Why? Because romanticism came in, and the idea of romantic love. And this of course made the kind of common sense attitudes that this man represented hopelessly out of date. Romantic love thrives on frustration. It likes to feel sorry for itself, and the essence of romantic love is that there be insuperable problems, star-crossed lovers. And that it go from frustration to frustration, and romantic love dies when it can get the one it loves. Whereas the kind of thing this Frenchman represented thrives rather with realization.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:03 The great classic of the era that developed before too long, the great classic of romantic love was Kristen [inaudible 00:06:13]. And of course it set the tempo for romantic love, which to this day has lingered. Someone falling in love with another person’s wife, and going from complication to complication, into adultery, into frustration, tragedy and death. The whole of the romantic agony. The idea of living happily ever after is alien to romantic love. Whereas this husband and his young wife, the ideal that was represented was of living very happily together, and the wife living happily ever after when he was gone. And making provision for that, so that what he represented in his letters to his wife was a genuinely Christian perspective.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:11 In an unusual situation, one we’re not familiar with, but all the more revealing because it was such an unusual situation. A man over 60, a girl of 15 being prepared by her husband’s letters, being trained for another husband. It hardly is the normal thing today, but it certainly was a godly thing. So the medieval period, we must say, in spite of all it’s sin, had a great deal in it was remarkably Christian. And I cite in this chapter cases where well into the late Middle Ages in England, I found an instance where the congregation of a church laid down the law to the priests. That say he was going to stop quoting classical poetry and classical authors in the sermons, and give them nothing but the Bible. There was a lot of that throughout the Middle Ages. And we forget that a lot of the people did have the Bible.

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:24 In England, for example, Wycliffe had translated the Bible into English, and the laws existed right down to the reformation. Going around adding secret meetings, Bible study groups so that there was in England when the reformation came about, a tremendous body of people who just surfaced who’d right along and studying their Bible and knew it. So that by the grace of God, the word of God itself remained always before the people, even in the darkest era of people power and royal tyranny. Thus the medieval period, a very interesting, a very exciting period, a period which had a great deal of usefulness and vitality to it, a freshness about it, as well as a great deal that we must clearly regard as heretical is a period of great interest.

R.J. Rushdoony: 09:45 I think one thing sums up, and this is from a Catholic historian, what happened. As gradually the theology that came out of Rome departed more and more from the faith as well as their moral practice. The pictures that show us worshipers in the early medieval period are very revealing. They show people praying with her hands open expectantly, the attitude of receiving, and their faces turned upward joyfully towards heaven. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the prior show people with their hands like this folded, cowering in prayer, afraid, because they did not have a saving knowledge. They were overwhelmed by the burden of their sin and guilt, and they had no preaching of the word. And so an era that began with a sense of joy and of light, and when you read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, you can feel the freshness of spring throughout. It’s a joyful thing.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:04 Closed with a grim note of darkness and the reformation came to light in that darkness, let us close with prayer. Almighty God, Our heavenly father, we thank thee that throughout the ages, thy witness has always been present among me. They word, they truth [inaudible 00:11:30]. We thank thee for the saint of old, who en humble well in great ways. Set forth they truth, were faithful unto the they are calling, and rejoice in they sovereign salvation. Make us faithful in our age that we may witness and a good witness, and in they name conquer. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:05 Are there any questions now concerning our lesson? Let me say before we do that next week we will have the 15th chapter on the reformation, so please read to that for next week. And to remind you that Sunday in Westwood, before our meeting from 9:30 to 10:45, we will hear a very outstanding recording of Handel’s Messiah. Now, are there any questions?

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:55 Oh, there are a number of books. The book I was reading from this time, it’s Monks and Civilizations. I don’t recall which ones I cited. There are so many here. There are some very interesting things on the Irish monks. I don’t recall now which ones I cited, unfortunately. Yes. Any other? Yes.

Audience: 13:37 This is really taking long. I would like to know what [inaudible 00:13:45].

R.J. Rushdoony: 13:53 Right. Well, they’re basically-

Audience: 13:55 Would you repeat the question?

R.J. Rushdoony: 13:57 The question was to differentiate between the philosophy of Aristotle, Aristotelianism, Plato and Platonism and Neo-Platonism. Now they all come out of Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy held that it was dialectical. Now dialecticism says that there are two ultimate’s, which are basically opposite to one another. And it tries to affirm both of them. It’s like saying you worship both God and Satan, you see. That would be a dialectical position. You regard them both aS equally ultimate. Now for Greek dialectical thought, the two ultimate’s where spirit and matter, which they saw as two different things, totally. Both of them equally, ultimately. In other words, having a position like God, being ultimate, not created, but both always there. Now, how are you going to unite these two? How are you going to have any contact between the one world and the other? Now, Aristotle tried to bring the two together and say you had to maintain the two in a dialectical tension. You couldn’t surrender the one or the other. And he tended to emphasize the unity, bringing them together, and the state as the basic agency in society, the saving order, because man was for him essentially a political or a rational animal. The state was the idea or form, or mind, or spirit in the world, and people and the natural world were in a sense the matter of the state. So he was bringing form and matter together and the unity of the state. Now, Plato of course, also unified things in the state. Plato’s republic, a communist order. But Plato tended to emphasize ideas or the realm of the mind and the spirit somewhat more than matter.

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:21 And with the Neo-Platonist, this ended up by saying the world of matter of the world of the state, the world of the flesh was nothing. And the Neo-Platonists therefore tended to disregard anything that was of the flesh. So they became ascetics. They would go onto the desert, they would torment the body. You read about some of the early hermits in the church who went through all such things, before they came around, the pagan Neo-Platonist monks and hermits were doing this. And these were simply converted and carried over some of this Neo-Platonism into their thinking. So you have this dialecticism of form and matter, or mind and a matter in all Greek thinking. But progressively from Aristotle, to Plato, to Neo-Platonism, the emphasis is less and less on the unity, and more and more on the spirit, or on mind so that the world of matter becomes less and less important. Does that help explain it? Any other questions?

Audience: 17:43 [inaudible 00:17:43][crosstalk 00:17:43].

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:42 Oh yes, there were two kinds of university. Some were students who would get together to study and would call someone to teach them. Others were scholars who had come together and form the school and then they would in a sense advertise themselves to bring the scholars. However, they had one system which was very interesting. You could be on the faculty, but your income depended on the number of students you had. You see. So that if the students didn’t feel you had anything to teach, they wouldn’t go to you, and a very successful teacher would have quite a sizeable income. However, most of them were members of various monastic orders so they would give it to the order.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:08 But a professor had an income in terms of his popularity. And something of this, it isn’t a perfect system. Something of this wouldn’t be out of a line today, because there are many universities where they will have a man getting $20, 000 a year to teach some out of the way subject, where he may have one or two students. And this with taxpayers funds. Yes.

Audience: 19:55 Were the monasteries series part of the Catholic church [inaudible 00:19:55]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:55 Well first, the monasteries and the priests were separate. The priests were attached to churches, congregations. The monasteries are made up of people who came together to serve God in a community. And they would be scholars, they would be farmers, they would be evangelists traveling from here to there preaching. They would do a variety of things. They lived in community, whereas the priest was a married man throughout most of the middle ages serving a parish. So, there was a very real difference between the two. Yes.

Audience: 20:40 Were hospitals and charities [inaudible 00:20:44]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:46 They were all carried on either by bishops are by the monasteries, the monks. They took care of all of these things. And of course you had various lay Christian groups, Christian businessman who would establish hospitals and schools, and so on, and endow it. That was the origin of foundations. Foundations were an origin entirely Christian. They were organizations for the promotion of various Christian causes by Christian businessman.

Audience: 21:29 Where did the priests get their training in those days?

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:35 Well, sometimes at a school, and sometimes by studying under someone, it depended on the area. You see, we must disabuse ourselves that there was one united church with one common form in every country. What was happening was that gradually Rome was trying to gain control, and finally did, and then lost everything with the reformation. But it would vary, sometimes, from one community to another. It would be wildly different from one country to another, and in the same country you might have a dozen different ways of carrying on the church life, and so on. In many cases, say a feudal lord would run a church absolutely, and he would name say a younger son of his to be the priest. Because he’d give the first one the lands and estates, and he would make the other sons priests.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:42 And sometimes he’d consecrate them as priests when they were eight, 10 years old, and make them bishops by the time, or before in some cases, they were in their teens. Because he controlled those churches and he wanted to have them there so that he could feed his sons into them. Now, this was the system of patronages by local lords, and it was fought by the bishops in some cases, and by Rome throughout the middle ages. They never overcame entirely. And it is interesting that in Rome they never overcame it either, but the day, the almost only orthodox congregations in the church of England are the patronage churches. Where a township or a Lord names the rector, and the archbishop of Canterbury can’t do a thing about it, and the bishop can’t do a thing about it. Well, now those are the only conservative or orthodox churches in England. Yes.

Audience: 24:03 [inaudible 00:24:03] Roman Catholic [crosstalk 00:24:11].

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:12 Yes. Well, St. Augustine was a bishop, a bishop of Hippo in North Africa and he did not consider himself as under Rome, but as a partner with Rome. In other words, he was a bishop and the bishop of Rome was another bishop. This did not make the one lord over the other. That was the attitude.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:46 No. No. He did the live in Italy for a time, but he was from North Africa, and he served their finally, and while he was dying, the barbarians were taking the city where he had his bishopric. He was named by acclamation, which was the common way of naming a bishop in those days and many areas. This is another way. You see sometimes a lord would name them, but in many areas in the early church especially, and it gradually died out, it was by acclamation. That is, the people would simply demand that somebody be named bishop. And they would very often single out someone whom they regarded as a superior man, if the people were a superior faith. And they demanded Augustine, who didn’t want to be bishop, and he was made bishop.

Audience: 25:46 [inaudible 00:25:46]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:49 Well, now the origin of the bishop was this. In the Apostolic church, you see St. Paul and the other apostles going from place to place starting churches. Now, they will be the pastors of these churches, and they would write letters as Paul did to these churches. And they would name someone who they ordained, we would call them an elder to carry on the work there. Well, as time passed you see various men, who are successors of the apostles, would sometimes be, say, pastor in a city church, and then they would make a continual tour evangelizing in the countryside. And because they worked first in the cities in those days, the apostles went from city to city because the way the church began was to go to the Jewish synagogues and make their first conference their. And the Jews who were in the cities.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:56 In the countryside was pagan. And the word pagan means country person, a rural person. That’s its literal meaning in origin. So as they go from place to place, you see they would gradually not only have the church in town, where they were a part of the time, but they would have maybe five, 10, 20, 30, 40 little congregations meeting in homes. And they would name a layman, an elder, or a presbyter to take charge of these home study groups, these home churches. Now that’s how the bishopric developed. So you could call him a minister who had a number of elders. And in those days the elders exclusively, and this is what an elder is properly. Someone who’s carrying on work in a particular place. A meeting has been started and which the pastor visits regularly, and in between times the elder is carrying it on.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:09 So gradually as these developed into churches, the one was called bishop and the other the presbyter, or pastor. So in a sense, neither the presbyterian nor the episcopal method is entirely in terms of the original. They both are outgrowths of the early church practice and both have departed from it. Yes.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:56 Yes. Well, that’s what it meant then too. But you see, since they had conquered … were in the cities, when they would talk about working with those who had no witness to them, they are talking about the pagan. Pagans. The country people. There was no witness to them, so they were going out to the pagans. This was in the early centuries. Yes.

Audience: 29:32 [inaudible 00:29:32] were all women educated by their husbands in those days?

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:34 No. The women went to convent school very commonly. So, this girl of 15 you see could read. Her husband who was writing letters, which indicated she had education. It wasn’t education in our sense. That is education in reading, writing and arithmetic. It was education as to how to manage his estate, and how to find the right husband, and how to handle the second husband.

Audience: 30:24 [inaudible 00:30:24]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:23 No. I don’t think that’s fair to him, because he makes it clear he was delighted with her. But he’s also telling her and reviewing things over and over with her because he wants her to be able to be the perfect wife for her second husband, and to know exactly how to manage the estate and affairs, and then choose the right man. And not the feel, you see, after all he was an older man of some means and she would naturally defer to him. And she did from their wedding night as he says. Well, when she married, say in five or 10 years, some young fellow his age or her age, 20 or 25, or 30, at whatever age she remarried, just because they were of like age he didn’t want her to feel that, Well, I don’t have to do all those things that I did when I married a very wonderful older man who was very good to me, and gave me all of this. It does in a sense, you see, the shoe would be on her foot, so to speak, because she would be going to that second marriage with a great deal. Yes.

Audience: 31:40 During this long period [inaudible 00:31:49]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:08 Yes. That’s a very good question. How was property protected during the medieval period? Now, when you go over some centuries, let us say from the year 1000 to the year about 1500, 500 years of history and medieval history. It’s very easy to find eras of great unrest, of war, of looting and robbing. But what we have to say is, well, those things happened but didn’t they have also a great deal of peace in between? And we have to say yes. That’s a very interesting thing that assassinations are virtually unknown during the whole of the middle ages. A very remarkable thing, which indicates there was a fundamental sense of law. Now, this does not mean they weren’t sometimes very brutal to somebody who was a tyrant, and through legal means was being brought to justice.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:20 But the merchants did go around, sometimes they would have to travel in caravans as it were, in order to have safety. So that it was quite normal to wait in a city outside a gate, and for a whole procession to go together so that a robber wouldn’t waylay them. So taking precautions, they moved around safely. They move goods around, they move money from here to there, and they did it with fairly reasonable security. When you realized that they would move goods from China to England in those days, you realize that they had to have quite a bit of law and order. Yes.

Audience: 34:13 [inaudible 00:34:13]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:13 yes.

Audience: 34:17 Repeat the question.

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:30 The question was, since education for woman was so specialized in that day, wouldn’t it be wise if it were so today? and I think, of course, the answer is an obvious yes. Women should be educated in terms of their life as a woman. It doesn’t mean that their education is any the less capable. In fact, a woman in terms of scripture is a competent manager, and an assistant in the management of her husband’s estate. And it would be much better if women today had more training in business administration and related subjects, the kind of mathematics that are related to that management of estate. Since so much of the wealth of the country is in the hands of widows today, and less of the nonsense they get.

R.J. Rushdoony: 35:25 Because a woman doesn’t need geometry, and most men don’t either. Our Education today, a lot of it for men and woman, is nonsense. Any other questions? Well, now that our time is just about up, and there are no more chapters to give out. But if some of you did not get some of the back chapters, we have one or two available. For those of you who have paid and have failed to get them because you were not here, or absent.

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965.  His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.”  He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder

The post New Humanism or Medieval Period, II appeared first on Rushdoony Radio.