3. Apologetics: Part III (Remastered)

Apologetics, III

R.J. Rushdoony

[Rushdoony] Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that thou art our God, and that thou art upon the throne. Teach us so to walk our father day by day that mindful of thy government we may take hands off our lives, and commit them into thy keeping knowing that thou doest all things well. Bless us as we give ourselves to thee and to the study of thy Word. In Jesus name, Amen.

Now first of all, how many of you were in this class this last hour? Anyone? Would you bear with me then since you're the only one if I repeat just a few things because I feel that it will help set the temper for what we are going to do this hour. I'll try to pick up a few pieces and put them together this hour as a kind of pulling some things together.

So that I'll start where I did the last hour since there's only one person who heard me by repeating an illustration I also used yesterday because it was a very disturbing thing to me. A nurse, here in the emergency hospital, as some of you heard me say yesterday afternoon, reported that during the time she has worked there she has had only one person - as they've been brought in from an accident or on a serious condition - actually think of the Lord and pray as they went to the table, the surgery.

Now, as I indicated, I would have expected this kind of reaction in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, but in Jackson I would have expected more than that because there is a stronger church-life here. What it means is that for these people, to all practical intents, God is dead. They do not have a Christian mind, they may have some sort of faith, but God is a kind of life insurance for them, a policy to take care of the hereafter, but not the living God, so that in a crisis they do not think of Him.

This presents us with a very serious problem. Then again, in the last hour I pointed out I'm just summarizing a fewthings for my said that. The one point of view at the Reformation, which did not have a powerful state behind it, was the Reformed faith. Catholicism, Anglicanism and Lutheranism had powerful rulers behind them. Even Anabaptism for a while, occupied important areas, and, militarily, had a force. But the Reformed faith, apart from a small city state, Geneva, had nothing, and yet it was the faith that cast fear, before long, in the hearts of all rulers. It had a power, because it had a world-and-life view, it provided the answer in every area of life in terms of Scripture.

Men were desperate then for such a faith as they are now. I cited, also, the fact in some detail how, when scholasticism arose, there was a parallel rise in another kind of faith among the common people. Although there had been, on a limited basis, before, the use of images and candles and the blessing of fields and so on, as scholasticism arose and it eroded the biblical faith and presented an abstract religious concept that meant little to the people, so that God became remote, they felt desperately on the local level, on the everyday level, the need of having something that made God real in everyday life. So the blessing of the fields before they planted, the blessing of their boats before they sailed to bring God down to the world - this was their feeling - man needs God in his everyday life. The church finally had to accept that kind of practice, although early it was against it simply because the people had to have something.

Today, as people have nothing, they are again turning to something that will give meaning to everyday life - occultism - the witchcraft movement - because they feel the need for an overall answer on the practical everyday level. Now the only philosophy, theology and faith that has consistently provided this in the past has been the Reformed faith, and we cannot be truly Reformed if we limit the Bible to the church. As I said in the last hour, it is not just the church book, it is a book for the state, it is a book for the school, for the family, for vocation, for every area of life.

The point of this, of course, is, let us continue, that no piecemeal defense of the faith is possible. In the Reformed faith we must begin with the totality of the sovereign God and His Word, or we end up with nothing. We presuppose the whole. We do not begin by saying: “well, I'm going to begin by trying to defend the idea of God, that there is a God, and then I will go on from there and try to build out the doctrine of the Trinity, and then I will go on from that to creation and then to the Word,” and so on. An apologetics which does this will get nowhere. Instead, you begin with the whole of the faith; It's a seamless garment. You defend the totality, the sovereign God, His infallible Word, the essentials of doctrine, the claim of God on every area of life; on church, state school, home, everything! That God is a total God, and He has a totalitarian claim on the whole of life. It is only this way that we can have a consistent apologetics that presuppose the full truth. Nothing else can answer the needs of man, nothing else can give anything to man. Thus, it follows that the best defense of the faith is to take the offensive.

Now, historically, apologetics is called “the defense of the faith” and Van Til has given that title to his book. But by the time you read it, you will very clearly understand that he is not defensive in the defense of the faith, he is taking the offensive. And the essence of his position is that he is out to cut out the ground from the claims of fallen man in every area of life, and to establish the crown rights of Christ in every area of life. We do not allow to the natural man anything. We say that only the man in Christ is sovereign, Lord over every domain under Christ. The Covenant man is Lord of all Creation, Wycliffe said.

One of the fallacies that some people have is that if a man denies God, he still has the rest of life to himself. But what the doctrine of Hell tells us is that when a man denies God, he ends up with nothing but the little closed circle of his mind; nothing else exists for him. So that, in taking the offensive, what we do is to push the fallen man into recognising that, without Christ, he can have nothing; there is no community possible, there is no philosophy possible, his epistemology collapses. There is no doctrine of the state possible it, collapses into anarchy that in every area of life. In terms of its faith, he winds up with nothing, nothing. Our approach, then, cannot be anthropological, that is man-centered, it cannot be love-centered, it cannot be church-centered, it must be theological.

Yesterday, when the Ledger reporter was interviewing me for about forty-five minutes, she went back to my Indian missionary experiences because of the wounded knee episode, to ask me about Indians, a great many questions. What about their religion? And I said to her, well, the thing that we must avoid doing is to look at the Indian and his religion in our terms. Why? Well, I said there are two kinds of religions, basically, among the American Indians, but you have not described the Indians’ religious life with these two. I said anthropologists can classify the Indian religions first in terms of those tribes that were agricultural tribes. They worshiped the sun and the moon, the stars because weather was important to them and they were aware that the sun and the moon had some kind of relationship, apparently, to weather. So, since they were concerned with agriculture, they were concerned with worshiping the forces and nature that were oriented to the weather.

But, I said, the hunting tribes were concerned with hunting, and therefore they worshiped the wolf, and in some cases the coyote, because the wolf was the great hunter, and the coyote was a good hunter. And for them, these particular animals were important and they worshiped their spirit, and felt very, very strongly about the wolf in particular. Where I was, the wolf cult was very prominent. But I said this was not basic to their lives. They recognised that these spirits had a lot to do with things. But, I said, that their basic concern was was anthropocentric, man-centered. What kind of a religion did they have? [How could you answer this question?] Why, not by going to what the anthropologists say and classifying these two types of religions and all the variations. This was secondary, because, first and foremost in the mind of the Indian was healing, healing.

His position had become so completely man-centered that for him, the beginning and end of religion was healing. And the medicine man there had a tremendous power on him. It was very interesting to me that before I ever heard about Oral Roberts, these Indians, many of whom could speak very little English, knew a great deal about Oral Roberts, who was just beginning then. And it was only because I suddenly began to hear a lot of Indians in broken English asked excited questions about Oral Roberts that I first started to investigate who he was - I hadn't heard of him, and they were amazed! Why! doesn't every white man follow him? Doesn't every white man believe in Oral Roberts? And for them it was obvious, here was the man who was supposedly a great healer, and healing was the essence of religion. Therefore, Oral Roberts, certainly, if he was what they had heard he was, was the man every white man was following.

This was the essence of religion, it had become totally anthropocentric, totally man-centered. Well, what had happened with that? Healing in the old Indian life in the days when the white man first came still was very important, but the more Indian life collapsed, the more humanistic it became. It went from humanism to even greater humanism so that the culture of the Indian was totally broken. There was nothing in life for him that had any meaning except at this point, healing. And as a broken culture, he was unable to do anything for himself; Indian family life was broken, Indian Community life was broken, the Indian was a broken person, an alcoholic. If he wasn't an alcoholic, he was almost inevitably taking peyote, a narcotic, and was a member of the peyote cult. The only ones who weren't on one or the other were Christians.

And the whole reason for this was that there was no longer any kind of faith which could bind man to man. There was no world-and-life view, there was only a piecemeal, faith, and a piecemeal faith ultimately revolves around the individual and his faith, and this is the be-all-and-end-all of his life. If the salvation of man is made central, we take the beginning of the road to the Indians.

The Indians, therefore, felt close not only to Oral Roberts, they could feel that. Billy Graham was on the right road, you see. These were non-Christian Indians talking. It wasn't that they wanted to accept Christ, or ever believe what Billy Graham had to offer. In fact, none of them ever did, not those people. But they liked it that the total concern was about their own soul, their own life, their own health, ultimately, this was everything. And a piecemeal apologetics, ultimately, puts us on the collapsed level of Indian culture. And the only way these people could be saved was by saying whether you are healed or not, whether you live or die now that you are ill is not the important issue, the world is bigger than you, it's bigger than I am, it's bigger than your problems and bigger than mine because I have problems too. There is a God and He has a claim upon us, and His claim upon us and His judgment upon us must occupy our mind before we think about our sickness or our problems, or our troubles or anything else. The sovereign claim of the sovereign God - this was the only way the Indian could be shaken out of this total isolation in his own world of need.

You see, if we follow the chorus, we end up with the Indian and on the other hand we end up with Feuerbach. Feuerbach said in his day, early in the last century, that all theology is disguised anthropology; this was his indictment of Christianity in his day. It was true because Pietism ruled the scene, and Pietism was concerned, essentially, with man. Pietism did not want to hear about the sovereignty of God or about predestination, or about God's judgment upon man. And certainly, pietism regarded with horror such statements as “the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Pietism made a concerted assault upon all of this as irrelevant. And so Feuerbach said “theology is disguised anthropology.”

As a consequence, since then, the world has drifted from one crisis to another because it has not had a true apologetic, an apologetics that begins with God, and sets forth the sovereign claims of God, that shakes man out of this self-hypnotism, this concern endlessly with himself. Now, there were some Puritan theologians in the period from about 1750 to about 1815 in the United States, who recognised this trend as it was coming in. It made them lean over backwards to be a little more aggressive and hostile against it, and they formulated a test question as a kind of something to wake up people with. This nurse who told me about the hospital, said. We get a lot of people come in who are in such hysteria and shock that what we must do immediately is to put ammonia under their nose and he said they come to with a jerk. It snaps them out of there hysteria. And he said they will be babbling wildly, and he said it's no different than the tongues manifestations I have seen in some churches. But the ammonia just brings them to like that, and then you can talk to them in their calm and rational. Well, this was the purpose that Hopkins and Bellamy and others of our American theologians devised this question. They knew the answer was impossible, but, in effect, the answer was like this ammonia under the nose. They would ask people who had become converts: “are you willing to be damned for the glory of God?” Now, in a sense, they knew that no man can and God doesn't ask us to do that. But in a practical sense, “are you ready to take what God gives you and to say it is the Lord, let him do what seemeth him good, though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” In other words, the point of the question, however phrased for shock-purposes was the sovereignty of God. And it did have something of a healthy impact.

Now, Hopkins and Bellamy are two of the most important of American theologians, extremely well worth knowing, but I'm not saying that everything they said I would agree with. And I cite this to indicate that they realized something of the problem that was coming in. They had to cope with some of the very egocentric, antinomian evangelists like Davenport, who was going around saying that believe in Jesus Christ and do as you please, and he himself to prove he was free from the law left his wife and took up with several women. And he made his theology a total vindication of everything a man wanted to do, he was now under Grace, he could do as he pleased. And, of course, you had a whole string of movements, like a little later, John Humphrey Noyes’, sexual communism that arose out of this type of thing. So this is what you have to understand when you read Bellamy and Hopkins with their ‘ammonia under the nose’ technique. That they're beautiful reading in spite of the fact that there is this shock element in them.

This is why the Reformed faith as it confronted the Renaissance was so emphatic in its apologetics about the sovereignty of God. The great statement of Luther, which as he had been true to in all his writings, would have made Lutheranism stronger with The Bondage of the Will, Luther's great classic. Now the Renaissance was the main target of the Reformation, even more than the Church of Rome, because it was the Renaissance humanism that had captured church and state philosophy, every area of life at the time of the Reformation. And so they were waging war against the principles of the Renaissance - in religion as well as in society. And they did this in the name of the sovereign God and the doctrine of predestination. The Bondage of the Will, if you have not read that, read it, it is marvelous reading, it was the answer of Luther to Erasmus. So that the three great classics of the Reformation are Luther's The Bondage of the Will, Calvin's Institutes, and, third, the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and all three are Reformed. The Book of Common Prayer was written with in consultation with Calvin during Edward VI’s reign, with John Knox having a hand in it too.

You may not know this, but John Knox is one of the fathers of the Church of England. So he, in a sense had a great deal to do with both the Church of Scotland and the Church of England. There's a very beautiful book on Knox, which is very fair to both his virtues and his faults; Jasper Ridley John Knox, published by the Oxford University Press, just off the presses recently. It's marvelous reading, just a joy to read.

What they emphasized was the doctrine of the sovereignty of God and predestination. Now they had two things to contend with as they emphasized this in their apologetics. They had, on the one hand, doctrines of free will to a radical degree, and on the other hand, the doctrine of determinism. And their disagreement was with both; they could not agree with either. The doctrine of determinism holds that a temporal process of cause and effect governs all things. Or as the doctrine of free will says that a temporal will governs all things, in other words, determination in both is in time, it's in this world, it is in history, not in the sovereign God. Whereas predestination says there is an establishment of all temporal processes and beings from all eternity by the sovereign God. To give you an idea of how these two can be reconciled in humanism, and often are, and why it is that the reformers stood against both of these, let me read to you a passage from a book which is a very blunt statement of just what its title describes; Humanistic Ethics by Gardner Williams.

Incidentally, this is totally irrelevant, but it has always tickled me so. Calvin, of course, argued the matter of predestination with Pighius, or tried to. Pighius, who was very much against Calvin's, position, wrote a nasty, backbiting attack on the doctrine and on Calvin. And Calvin sat down to answer Pighius. And to tell off Pighius, too, for his ungodliness and the whole thing, because it was an outrageous document. But, to Calvin's annoyance, Pighius died before he could write the thing. So, Calvin, who had a temper, although he usually controlled it, wanted to tell off Pighius, and here he was dead, and if he attacked a dead man it just would not look good. But he wanted to say something about Pighius. So on the first page of his Of The Eternal Predestination Of God, he starts out and he says that he had intended to say something about Pighius, but since Pighius is now dead, he said, I will not do so lest I be accused of kicking a dead dog.

Sometimes I think someone ought to write a book on controversy at the time of the Reformation, because I think it would be a lot of fun to read. There was a lot of very heated give-and-take, and they weren't afraid to dish it out or take it, and sometimes their sense of humor, in so doing was really superb. I cite that because sometimes Calvin is portrayed as though he very humorless person and he wasn't. He was a quiet, scholarly man, but he had a good sense of humor and he knew that people would read that and laugh, and that's exactly what he wanted to do. He got his point across, his opinion of Pighius, but he did it in a humorous way so that all Europe laughed when they were at that, which is what he wanted.

Now to get on to Gardner, Williams and what he has to say here about ethics. First, I'm going to read what he says about ethics so you get the framework of the man.

“This axiological theory is also in the tradition of the interest theory of value, the essential truth of which is that the chief intrinsic good. Of any individual, is the satisfaction involved in and resulting from the fulfillment of his major interests or desires. Such as love, ambition and the desires for truth, for beauty, and for sensuous enjoyment.”

“We come now to the definitions of right and duty. These are equivalent terms. One always has a duty to do what is right, and it is always right for one to do his duty. The meanings of these terms are to be derived from the meanings which we have already found for good and value. An individual always has a duty, from his own point of view, to attain as nearly as possible his highest good, which is what is most deeply satisfactory to him in the long run. An equivalent statement is that he always ought to do what will meet his deepest needs. This duty is the categorical imperative. It is unconditionally binding upon every individual who is capable of experiencing satisfaction or dissatisfaction. It is universal and absolute.”

“I think that we ought to adopt this definition because it is the only one which will help us the most in understanding man’s moral experience. It is the meaning which men use when they speak most intelligibly of right and wrong.” 1

In other words, what you really want to do, you have an absolute requirement to do.

“Whatever the ultimately right principle of duty is, it is categorical. Any act that is right, is so only on condition that it conforms to this absolute principle. Also all that conform are right. If incest, sadism, matricide, bigamy, and arson were in accordance with it, they would be right,

whether the principle actually is Kant’s, Paley’s, St. Thomas’s, Calvin’s, J.S. Mill’s, mine, or some other. These sins and vices, like all sins and vices, are wrong only because they violate the correct principle of duty, whatever it is.” 2

In other words, it's what you say it is, and if you don't do what you say you want to do, that's wrong. Now, incidentally, he has a doctrine of God. God is the sum total of men as they find themselves and realize themselves. Now he comes out very strongly in terms of determinism, but also winds up by identifying it with free will.

“Some make the mistake of thinking that if the future is all predetermined then human effort is futile. Actually the future is unalterable, but still man can probably make further progress by exerting his will, courage, and intelligence.

It is fundamental that the past cannot be made different from exactly what it was, that the present cannot be made different from exactly what it is, and that the future can never be made different from exactly what it will be. This is due essentially or formally (in Aristotelian terminology) to the determinism of being, and only efficiently, not essentially, to ordinary causal determinism. The latter, has, of course, in fact made everything just what it is at the time that it is it. But even if everything were partly or wholly uncaused, still past, present, and future could never be different from exactly what they were, are, and will be.

All past crimes and all past social injustice have been 100% causally inevitable. The criminals could have acted virtuously if they had preferred, but heredity and environment caused them not to prefer. The people who voluntarily set up social laws, customs, and institutions, involving social injustice, could have set up other laws etc., if they had preferred to,—laws etc., which would have involved other forms of social injustice and perhaps much less of it. But heredity and environment caused them to prefer to set up just the laws etc. they did, among those which they had the power to establish. In the same sense all present and future crime and injustice are and will be 100% causally inevitable. This may make it look futile to attempt to prevent criminal violation of just laws and to renovate unjust ones. We are not permitted to break the laws of natural causation in order to enforce or to reform our man-made laws.

Still, moral and social reform is not really futile. When the causes of crime are, in accordance with the inexorable laws of nature, caused to be removed, the non-occurrence of crime will be just as causally inevitable as all the crimes of history have been. When the causes of social justice are caused to occur, social justice will be equally inevitable. It is a matter of education and wise social leadership, and possibly a bit of negative eugenics to wipe out some of the bad hereditary strains. This education and leadership and eugenics will not occur unless they are caused.” 3

Now, do you get to the point of this? He very definitely recognises the free will and determinism are both in the area of time of history, and therefore he says things that happen, happen because they were caused, and causality is here. And if, through the right kind of social leadership, the scientific socialist elite, we can control the lever. The lever is in time, we can get rid of those with the bad heredity we can have vasectomies for them so that they won't reproduce their kind. We can remove the causes of crime through legislation, so we will have determinism and we will also have free will because both of these are determined from within history and therefore the lever for the control of history is right there available. If only we produce a society, or an elite group of philosopher-kings take control.

But the whole point of our faith that we must stress in our apologetics is that the lever is not here, the lever is in eternity. And predestination means that the eternal Counsel of God from all eternity governs all things, and it is not of man. And therefore, the kind of tyranny that is inevitable with this kind of view, which is the time that is dominating our politics today, the kind which is planning our future. Where men like Skinner actually dream of having a lever over all of us in the form of an electrode planted inside of our brain so that the whole world can be predestined in terms of an elite group of scientific socialists, you see. Then this becomes impossible, yes.

[Student] Could you comment on Karl Barth and his view of history?

[Rushdoony] Well, I went into that last night and I simply refer you, if you were there, were you there? No. Well, I refer you to the section in my By What Standard in which I quote Hans Ehrenberg with regard to Karl Barth. There is no God that is beyond the world, in my estimation, and in the estimation of many others, including Van Til, except as a limiting concept. Bruner was honest enough to admit it, so his God is timeless, spaceless, and being-less, so he's not real.

[Student] If Dr. Gardner Williams has just spoken in this classroom and you now had the chance to answer him, how would you begin, let's say in one minute? What would be your starting point?

[Rushdoony] I would say to him the inevitable conclusion of your position Dr. Williams is that you want to be God over me. Now, let me be the God over you and Skinner, and let me put the electrode in your brain. How does that sit with you? I don't think it was sit very well. In other words, they are all for this because they believe they are the ones who know what's best for you. But if we were to turn tables on them and say “a very good idea, but you are the one who should have the electrode put into your brain.” I think they'd have a different idea of things, especially if you had the power to do it. Now, that's a very nasty answer, but I think it gets to grips with the issue. You are saying you are God, but in your world I can then play God and make you the creature.

[Student] How does the difference between your theology and Van Til’s affect the way you would like to reconstruct the world and take back what is ours?

[Rushdoony] Well, Van Til has never said much about his eschatology and in Jerusalem and Athens, Gregg Singer, one of your very fine Southern Presbyterian scholars and a good friend of mine said to Van Til that his position was quite implicitly postmil’, and in the answers Van Til never criticized Gregg Singer for that. Van Til has never wanted to get into the area of eschatology, he has concentrated just on his area. But I think it's interesting how many of his followers and students are postmil’, I think that says a great deal about his position. So that it is implicitly postmil’ so that whether it's Gregg Singer or myself or Gary North or. Dr. Smith here we have seen these implications in his position.

[Student] Could you define ‘man’ for us?

[Rushdoony] Yes, man is that creature who is created in the image of God, in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. It is the duty of every man to glorify God and to enjoy him forever, and men who will not do so are judged by God. Now, you see, every man is summoned to obey God, to glorify God, and men who will not do so are judged. The Bible is for all men, the Word of God is spoken unto all men, and therefore the judgment of God applies to all who will not hear.

[Student] So, the Word of is man’s University?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Student] I have a real problem with Christianity and politics. It seems to me like governments, all governments, are formed on the basis, what's best for the masses of people. How, how can you give Christianity into government? How? What's the Christian view of running a, a gambling joint? Something it just seems morally government is morally problematic. I have real problems, you see?

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, that's a very good question, very good. No, it is very good. It's an important question. First of all, let me call for a precision in the use of ‘government.’ We use the word loosely, and I fall into the habit myself often. But our Puritan forebears were very meticulous about the use of it. When they said ‘government’ they didn't mean Washington or the State House or anything like that, they meant the self government of the Christian man, the basic government. They meant, then, the family, they meant the church, the school, they meant a man's calling, they meant the community, which had a governing effect because you're sensitive to what people around you say, and that governs you to a degree. And ‘civil government,’ their term for what we call ‘the state.’

Now, your question is about civil government and it is important. There have been a number of views with regard to the role of civil government and this has constituted very, very significant aspects of our history. First, there has been the Manichean view. The Manichean view holds that the world is hopelessly corrupt and evil because it belongs to the material world of the evil God. And so, the attitude of the Manichean is that government, like a cesspool, civil government like a cesspool, is one of those things which in this life we put up with. But the further away it is, and the less we have to do with it, the better off we are because we know more want to be involved in rolling into a cesspool than we do into government, you see, civil government. Now, that idea which is heretical to the core, which comes out of paganism has nonetheless very deeply infected the church.

Then, second, and there are a number of ideas here, I'm just hitting some. There is the classical view in terms of which there is a spiritual domain which religion can concern itself with, but the material world is under the realm of the state. And the state, as the main institution of man has also the duty of governing this, because this is not as important. The important area is the world, and the state governs the world. And the Pagan doctrine of the state was that the state had sovereign sway in every area. Rome was ready to allow any church, any religion that is, to exist, provided they got licenced, you see? And the process of licensing meant that you recognised the priority of Caesar and offered incense at his altar. So that the church was just an aspect of the life of the state and recognised the priority of Caesar over God, of the state over the Christian faith. And the problem with the early church was that they refused to apply for licensing. And, as an illegal cult, the church was prosecuted.

Now, the classical view heavily influenced Aquinas and passed into the Christian tradition very heavily. Then a third view is the Lutheran. Now I call it the ‘Lutheran’ rather than Luther’s, because although it is based on a saying of Luther’s, I don't think it does justice to Luther. But the Lutheran view is that the state is God's hangman. It has a purely negative function, it's a nasty job, but it's one you've got to have in society. The state must simply eliminate the criminals and act as the policeman and do the nasty, dirty, brutish work, because otherwise society falls apart.

Then fourth, we have the Reformed view in which the state is an aspect of the Kingdom of God, and is required to work for the establishment of God's order, God's righteousness upon Earth. Now, it is this kind of view that the Puritans held emphatically. It was in terms of the Reformed view that the Pilgrims felt that the state had a positive obligation to serve God, to set forth a godly law-order, to recognise the validity of Scripture. For example, they simply enacted as much as the British Government would permit them, the Bible as their law. And as late as the 1830s and 40s, I have found decisions of courts that were based purely on a verse of Scripture. Because the common law of the land was Scripture, you see. Laws like ‘the incorrigible son,’ this was enacted. It ended delinquency overnight, by the way, and they passed the law that delinquent children could be executed, they certainly behaved well after that.

Now, in terms of the Reformed view, what we must state is that the civil government has a positive duty to be godly. The point I made yesterday before the House of the legislature was that all law is a form of theological order. Every law-structure is a theological establishment because all law rests on morality, it is enacted morality. And all morality is an aspect, the relational aspect of religion. So every law order is an establishment of religion. Our problem today, of course, is that, from a Christian law-order, we are moving to a humanistic law-order. And let me close with this word. Not only as a word of warning, but as a word to urge you to intensive action as you go out into the pastorate. In the last year, our Supreme Court has made it clear that we are no longer a Christian law-order that the religious foundation is humanism in the two recent decisions on abortion. Because there were two decisions that they ruled on at one at the same time, and I have both of those decisions at home on my desk. I intend to write on them soon for our Chalcedon Report.

In those decisions, they made it clear that in coming out for abortion, they were using religion as their authority, but it was Pagan, ancient paganism. So they made it clear that the foundation of law for us now is no longer Christianity, but paganism; ancient humanism revived in mind. Now, in the death penalty decision, they made it virtually impossible to execute a guilty man. And the abortion case - they've said that innocent lies can be taken. If it can be taken seven months after conception, why not sixty years after conception? So that you could eliminate everyone at the age of sixty-five - no problem with Social Security then if it goes bankrupt. Or you can eliminate all Blacks, or all whites, or all Christians. And don't think they won't try it unless you turn it around. You are fighting for the life of Christendom, and for the life of your people, because humanism will do what Rome did.

Having now Pagan religion through religious basis for its law, it will use that law against any other religion, ultimately, unless you reestablish the foundations. As a result, it is very important for us to stress the Reformed doctrine of the state, to have an apologetics that is a world-and-life-view, and to go out as conquerors because we're either going to conquer or be conquered. I look for very rough days in the immediate future, very rough days, a really hard battle, but I also look to the certainty of victory. And May God bless and prosper you in that battle, because it's going to be one.

Thank you.

1 Gardner Williams. Humanistic Ethics. New York: Philosophical Library, 1951, 28 - 29.

2 Gardner Williams. Humanistic Ethics. New York: Philosophical Library, 1951, 30.

3 Gardner Williams. Humanistic Ethics. New York: Philosophical Library, 1951, 175,176.