3. Preaching - Q&A

Preaching - Questions and Answers

R.J. Rushdoony

[Audience Leader] Thank you Rush. In just a moment we will have time for questions and answers, but I would like to take this opportunity to say how very fortunate we have all been here today to hear such fine and able, excellent speakers; and on behalf of everyone I would like to thank both Marshall and Rush for taking the time and effort to be with us today.

Now we are going to put them on the hotspot, so to speak, and we will get a couple of chairs I think up here, and you can direct your questions at will to whoever you wish.

[Audience Member] Two ideas; one put forth the idea to Marshall Foster of dominion, godly dominion by free enterprise, we have had another idea with regard to charity, Christian charity. Can you give some sort of appraisal or look at the so-called ‘third world’ situation, can they wait for us, so to speak? Are they doomed to waiting till we get together something? I mean, it doesn’t seem as if under God’s cursing they could do anything on their own, and there is a natural sense in which I kind of feel sorry for them, or grieve for the… I don’t know how to respond to that?

[Rushdoony] The condition of the third world countries is very grievous and to a great extent it is self-inflicted. And some of these countries are putting road blocks in the way of missions and missionaries. They recognize that the Christian faith represents another form of government under Christ.

Now, this is not going to change until they are ready to open the door to the gospel; they are paying the price for their sins. It is horrifying, especially as you see some of the victims, famine victims, in some of the African countries. There is a drought there, throughout the world today, in fact we have a drought, which we can only say is the judgement of God, we pay a price. Now, what we need to do as far as possible is to be ready wherever there is a door that is opened to any degree to move in.

We have, as I have indicated, a world crisis. You mentioned third world countries; Somalia. Somalia has a population of three and a half million; it has been in a long-standing war with Ethiopia and the Marxist regime in Ethiopia, and it has had the Ethiopians, the Cuban troops, and on top of that some Russian planes and military experts and technicians throwing their everything against them. Out of a population of three and a half million, there are nine hundred thousand widows and orphans, about a million and a half in refugee camps. Consider the crisis that is for a people like that! We are, through one or two Christian organizations, extending some relief there. But it is a frightening, it is a horrifying situation and there doesn’t seem to be any full solution in sight until there is a change in the basic faith of the peoples, because the warfare is an unrelenting one between the two countries and it is over a piece of desert, a strip of desert. Can you imagine doing that to your own people for a strip of desert? Now maybe some day that desert will be very wealthy, I don’t know, but it is just a strip of barren land that is creating that horror. There is no way in the world you and I can solve that problem, because they refuse any solution, they refuse any arbitration, they refuse any kind of referral to any other agency. So they are creating an enormous tragedy, one of the worst in the third world today.

Well, as Christians some have been reaching out there to help the refugees in the camps. We are not God, we cannot do everything, but what we can do we must do, and there are some in the name of Christ who are ministering there right now, and the rest of the world is doing nothing.

[Marshall Foster] Thank you for that comment Rush, and in light of that, in the long-term solution as Rush is saying, is that we need to see a change in the character of the people in these lands, and we have through liberation theology and the teaching of missionaries in the last few decades, we have been stripping them of the potential of teaching these indigenous people how to be self-governing, how to be enterprising under Christ, and how to use their property that they do have, to multiply it and to be able to use that in the service of God. And because of liberation theology, you tie that in with Marxism, it destroys the productivity of a people just like what is happening in Russia today, they can’t feed their own people, they are dependent on our productivity. So the ultimate solution is to take these principles of self- and civil government from the scriptures and apply them to the people through the missionaries, and then through the indigenous people. A change of character will breed productivity and prosperity, and that is not the message of affluence, of Adam Smith, which is to just go out and get rich and all have cars; that isn’t what we are talking about here at all, we are talking about productivity that will increase Christ’s dominion and will feed the poor, and it can result in great benefits to the world.

[Rushdoony] If I may say one thing more to indicate the problem that exists today, the next Chalcedon Report, the June number - and if you are not on the mailing list just give me your address if you would like to be. But the next Report will have an article by John Quade on the Chet Bitterman murder in Bolivia. Why was he killed? Well, anthropologists, who everywhere are showing nothing but total venom against Christianity, whose attitude is: “Let these primitive tribes stay primitive, so that we can always send graduate students in there to write dissertations on their culture, don’t spoil them with Christianity!” They went into some of these fields where, say Wycliffe Bible Translators were working, and they said that they wanted to take pictures and they wanted to illustrate some of the things the missionaries were doing, and the missionaries didn’t object; and they went around here and there, but with all their filming they would come back with something like this, they would tell one of the natives. “Pick up a broom and sweep off the steps in front of the translators shack.” Or, “We need some action in this shot, take a hoe and work in his garden, just pose there.” And they got them to do a number of things, and that was all they showed, they did a documentary, supposedly, the gist of which was that the missionaries and especially the Wycliffe Translators are making peons of these primitive tribespeople, so they are just houseboys and yard slaves. And the net result of this film, which was shown month after month after month at campus theatres, was to create the widespread belief that missionaries are exploiters of these native peoples, who turn them into slaves and out of that came the murder of Chet Bitterman. And who were these anthropologists financed by? Why, the Federal government. You as a taxpayer contributed to the financing of Bitterman’s murder.

Now, do you see the kind of responsibility this places upon us? We’ve created a monster there that is now destroying our own missionaries and is not doing these peoples any good anywhere in the third world we have a responsibility to do some housecleaning in Washington, as well as to minister all the more to these peoples all over the world.

[Audience Member] Do you suggest being involved directly in the political system?

[Marshall Foster] Well, yes, we need to get involved in the political system, Christians built the political structure of this nation, and we need to get involved immediately. When I speak, I often speak of the importance first of understanding principles, of understanding our heritage, before we jump into the arena and run out in front of the media and say, “Here we come!” We awaken the bear, unfortunately, many times, without knowing where we are coming from; and as a result, we can get shot right out of the saddle. But we need to, as we are learning our principles, get involved in the political process right now because there are some events taking place, that if we don’t get involved in the next few years, there may not be the foundation left on which to build a long-term Reformation.

The long term answer, as far as I am concerned, is education through the Christian Schools, reeducating a whole new generation of men and women in God’s Law, that is the ultimate answer, but specifically as far as political involvement, we have got to get involved in the process right now. God is not going to long tolerate a nation that kills its babies, He is not going to long tolerate some of these things that are happening, so we need to pour ourselves into political involvement, but knowledgably, spending our nights not watching television but studying to show ourselves approved, and then spending our days politically, lobbying, to overcome the humanists that are controlling our system.

[Audience Member] I wanted to provoke some more discussion with perhaps a simplistic question, it seems that Jesus Christ was known as someone that evidently frequented the taverns of His day, and was known as a friend with drunkards and gluttons and what have you, and at the same time it seems like He reserved His wrath oftentimes for those that would deal with the problems of the age by shutting the taverns down, the Pharisees of His age. And I am just concerned in this whole realm of discussion is there a difference, or what is your response in the area of…do you feel the meeting of problems is working with people and dialoguing with them, do you think that is possible that through that there must be a change of heart, that would then close the taverns down, or are these two areas meant to be exclusive of the general reserve wrath for those that had a system by which they condemned others that didn’t measure up. I ask this just to be very specific, again I am not wanting to be antagonistic, I ask this in relationship to your conversation that you mentioned with the legislature, that the bottom line there was that: “I am going to put you out of office.” You see what I am saying? And I wanted to know if in that you still have the possibility of a dialogue in anything but the image of an enemy in the mind of your legislative friends, and what is the basic direction that you are working?

[Rushdoony] I happen to know who the legislator was. He is a man who sneaked in legislation to control and wipe out the churches, to give the Attorney General a total power to walk in and shut down any church, if he didn’t like it, without cause, it was specifically stated. Then we had a sensational case in our State capitol, Sacramento. It seemed that a Doctor, an Anesthetist at one of the hospitals, was putting women under anesthesia and molesting them sexually. It took two years of complaints by some nurses to get that before the courts, before a District Attorney, and lo and behold this same legislator introduced a measure that would have legalized such activity. Can you imagine that? We actually had such a bill introduced in two, three states by other men, one of them New Jersey.

Now, I think all we can say is…

[Audience Member] Can I make one little rephrasing; basically, what I am asking is, is the way to get rid of humanism to get rid of humanists, or is there another approach?

[Rushdoony] Yes, alright. When humanists are in power and they are doing that sort of thing to us, you get rid of them by voting them out of office, you have an obligation. It would be a sin to allow such a man to stay in office and put through the kind of legislation he was regularly proposing.

Second, our purpose is to present Jesus Christ as Lord and savior to all men. Now, our Lord did not frequent the taverns, but because He had the answer people came to Him. He was ready to go into the house of Simon, someone the leaders despised, but He was as ready to go into the house of the Pharisees on occasion too, but He was also just as ready to denounce them as He was to be friendly to them. In other words, our Lord does not give us an example which says you are always going to be sweetness and light to all people; the duty of the Christian is not to be sweetness and light, but light and salt, which is something different. So our Lord was sometimes very abrasive, very abrasive.

I had, when I was in the seminary, a professor who was a reprobate, this was a very liberal seminary, and he made clear every Christmas, he would preach about the myth of the virgin birth, and then at Easter the myth of the resurrection, he felt he was being honest, and he despised the dishonest preachers. But he interrupted once in chapel, and he was a terror in chapel, because if he felt anyone were wishy-washy and dishonest with the text he would get up and walk up there and shake his finger in their face and denounce them. He was a prominent archeologist by the way; I won’t mention his name. He never bothered anyone who was sound, he didn’t believe what they had to say, but he knew they were faithful to the scripture. But on one occasion when a student got up with this love bit and about being nice to everybody, that was the gist of his sermon, he made it clear to him immediately he was assigning him a special project, to go through and to list all the passages wherein our Lord either patted people on the back and said, “I love you, brother,” and those where He denounced them. And he said: “It will change your opinion of the ‘meek and mild’ Jesus, He was a fire brand.”

Now, I think there was a lot of truth to what he had to say, and we have wrongly equated sweetness and light with love. I have never spanked any of my neighbors’ children over the years, but I have spanked my own, and sometimes I have been pretty rough on them because I love them. Precisely because we go to the world with the love of God, sometimes we have to face them with God’s judgement, with these problems. I think we find it much easier, then, to reach people. I know that I began my ministry among, first the Chinese, and then among American Indians in the most isolated reservation and I had to deal with some very rough characters at times, in the mining camps around, as well as on the reservation. I never got anywhere on my own, but if I went in the power of God and by His Spirit, I found I could work in the most difficult places, and I have preached in some strange places, including bars, and standing on an overturned wooden beer box to bring the Christmas message at their request. The doors will be opened in surprising places when you go in the confidence and power of God and of the Holy Spirit.

[Audience Member] You seem to paint a picture of people who believe in the Rapture that they sit on their hands, can’t they believe in dominion too?

[Marshall Foster] Yes, we were talking about this over here this afternoon, about the whole story about what we are learning this afternoon, can it be communicated to churches of different denominations, different prophetic views? I think it can be. Rush and I have a specific understanding of scripture and of prophesy, and we share that with people, and there are others who vary in viewpoint. There are many, Jerry Falwell and others that are involved in working to transform our society and working to ‘occupy till I come’ that may not share our full dominion perspective. We can in voluntary union work together with them. We are not trying to say that Christians have to believe everything we believe before we will work together with them to the glory of God to restore our land. But I find, this is my opinion, I find that as I studied, because I came out of teaching prophesy and a friend of Hal Lindsey’s, I found that as I studied our founding Fathers and I studied the Reformers, and I got into America’s Christian history and began to the study the commentaries of the Pilgrims and the Puritans, I found a theology of hope, I found there an understanding of scripture that satisfied me. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t work together…

Now, I haven’t been answering your question, I have been going around in circles; let me say this: Yes, there are Christians who, because they believe that we should ‘occupy till I come’, even though they are premillenialists, believe in a cultural change; Francis Schaeffer was there for many years and he has done a tremendous job, even though he was a historical premillenialist, a tremendous job in awakening people to the need of cultural change. So, not everybody is a postmillennialist who is involved in this movement; so yes, you can.

[Audience Member] In Sunday school class we were talking about America's Christian history, one of the women brought a book in next week and said: “I would like you to read it.” And it seems to be something I guess has been taught in public schools, and may be forgotten about, the idea that being a Christian country founded on Christian principles, there was a lot of rhetoric going on that had been picked up from Christianity that has been used, and actually there is, I forget what they called it, but it is a national religion that our politicians have adopted, and when they use phrases like: “We pray that God would bless our country.” They don’t really mean that there is a God up there, it’s just tradition to use this…

[Marshall Foster] Civil Religion.

[Audience Member] Civil Religion, right, and what I am wondering is, is there a good refutation of that, maybe point by point or something like that? Because this is a study by two theologians, college professors, who said: “This is really what our nation’s history is all about, this is really where it comes from. And these people that talk about our Christian history really don’t understand the latest thinking about civil religion.”

[Marshall Foster] Do we have a couple of hours?

[Rushdoony] I think the best analysis of civil religion, which is essentially your Liberal, modernistic religion, is in a long introduction to an anthology of various writings on political science by Richard Bishirjian,i and it was reviewed sometime in the past four, five years in the Chalcedon Reports. If you will drop me a note, Terry, I will give you the specific reference. It is the one good thing written on the subject. Civil Religion, by and large, is a recent thing, and it is a product of Liberal theologians.

[Marshall Foster] Let me say this too, chapter 1 deals with that, we didn’t get into it in the first lecture, but the fact that we were a Christian nation is not that everyone was a Christian, but that the principles and the institutions were founded upon God’s Word; and that was the predominate view in early America, and it wasn’t a superficial thing, it was in the warp and woof of our documents, and it has been hidden from us.

[Audience Member] There has been a lot of discussion about whether parachurchs organizations are valid….

[Rushdoony] Yes, the church is a God-ordained institution whose ministry is the ministry of grace; the proclamation of the saving word of God. Now, there are all kinds of ministries then that are required of Christians. The definition then, of what is the church’s province requires a definition of what the church is. And here we have a problem because our English word ‘church’ comes from the Greek, kuriakon-doma, ‘the house of the Lord’ referring to the building, which was the place of worship, whereas the Greek word which we have in ‘ecclesiastical’ is ‘ecclesia.’ An ‘ecclesia’ is the same as two words in Hebrew, and in fact in the Septuagint is used for two words, which we encounter in English as ‘assembly’ and ‘congregation,’ which are used sometimes of the entire nation of Israel, sometimes of the sanctuary, sometimes of the army, and sometimes of the family. So that what we have to say is that very obviously the word ‘church’ in the New Testament is equivalent to what we find for example in Matthew, the kingdom. It refers to Christ’s kingdom wherever it is. So the church in Corinth is Christ’s kingdom in Corinth, those who are a part of that realm. It was also called a ‘parochia,’ ‘parochial’ we have, and ‘parish,’ from the same word, meaning a foreign enclave, an embassy of a foreign power that was under the law of that foreign king and had extra-territorial rights, as say the British embassy would have in Seattle.

So, the church was this community of the king, from heaven. There is a church in Florida that calls itself ‘the Community of the King,’ and I think that is a most beautiful name.

Now, everything that is a part of God’s requirement of us must be a part of the church in that sense, so a Christian civil government would be a part of the church in that sense. But when we are talking about the institutional church, the ministry of grace, then I believe that we must say that various ministries must be separate for example medical missions, I believe, should be separate from the church. Christian schools can be in the church building proper, and a part of the ministry of the church, but they should have a separate board. Christian foundations and all, things that are called ‘para-church ministries’ today, are really aspects of the life of the church.

Now, I have taken a little time to make this distinction because we have a problem today with the IRS. The IRS is trying to define the church purely in terms of the worship service and the liturgy so that the Sunday School is educational and not a part of the church, the sermon now, it is being said by at least one Attorney General of a State, is educational and not under the First Amendment, do you see. So, what we have to say is that everything that God requires of us is a part of the life of the church, when we speak of the church in Christ, the church not as an institution, but as the mystical body of Christ but when we are talking about the church as the building on the corner, then we say its function is the proclamation of the Word.

[Audience Member] Rush, how do we draw the distinction between laws given in the Old Testament, which were to be observed as I see it, solely by the Israelites, versus the, I hate to make the distinction, but the difference between law and grace as I guess is what my point would be. How does one go about understanding the keeping of the tithe in relation to say, statements that are made as Paul makes for example, about the thankfulness of the grace, the over-extension of that offering versus tithing, and how do we relate to that as New Testament believer, who is obviously a member of the pure catholic church?

[Rushdoony] Yes, first of all the reference in the New Testament to offerings and thank offerings, that is thoroughly Old Testament, because tithes were one thing, offerings were something above and over that. Now we cannot understand the relationship of law and grace without understanding the doctrine of the covenant, something that is very much neglected today. A covenant is of two kinds- do you mind if I take a few minutes to explain this?

A Covenant is of two kinds; it is a treaty, very simply. It can be a treaty between two equal powers, or it can be a treaty between somebody who is a nobody and someone who is infinitely above him.

Now, the covenant of scripture is a treaty of the second kind, between unequal powers, between a great king and an emperor, and the humblest subject; between the Creator of heaven and earth and someone He has created. Such a treaty is a treaty of grace, so that every treaty between God and man is automatically, inevitably, a covenant of grace because there is nothing that requires God to enter into covenant with man, there is no advantage to God, while there is an advantage to man. But every covenant is by definition a legal relationship, so there is no covenant if there is no law. So, a covenant is at one and the same time a matter of law and a matter of grace. It is, well, the Puritans called it “the grace of law.” God, because He is gracious to man, has given man His Law. So we would have to say that instead of law and grace being in contradiction as modern theology says, law and grace are different sides of the same coin, which is the covenant. Therefore, if there is no law, then no covenant, no grace. So we keep God’s Law, not out of works, not because it saves us, but because this is what shows that we are God’s people, it is our way of growth in the covenant, our way of sanctification.

Now, I believe the Law of God is binding upon us, I take it very seriously, God pronounces blessings; and they are very obvious — they follow our obedience. So we have to see all of the law as binding upon us except insofar as Scripture says in this or that respect it terminated.

Now, people traditionally speak of some of the laws as ‘ceremonial laws,’ I stopped doing that some years ago, I did it because everybody called them ‘ceremonial laws.’ They are not ceremonial laws, they are sacrificial laws — there is a world of difference between sacrificial and ceremonial laws. The sacrificial laws of course, culminate in the sacrifice of our Lord on the Cross, His atoning death. Now there is no longer any need for the blood of bulls and goats - but we also find that the New Testament, the Council of Jerusalem, forbids the eating of blood, which is an Old Testament requirement. So that the blood is still to have some significance for us.

Now I happen to come from a people in Armenia, who would take every animal that they were going to slaughter for family use to the church, give the pastor a portion after they killed it, but before they killed it they would put their hands on it and say: “Lord, we know it is not the blood of bulls and of goats that cleanses us from sin, but the blood of Jesus Christ, and we shed this blood in remembrance of His shed blood.” So never was a chicken or a lamb or a calf slaughtered without the prayer of thanksgiving for the shed blood of Christ, and the shedding of that blood to commemorate what had been done at Calvary. That is still being done in Soviet Armenia by the farmers and their attitude is: “We don’t care what the Soviet Government is going to say, we are going to do it!” And they do it.

Now, you see, that kind of thing was much more extensive throughout Christendom, and I encountered in the deep South among some of the Baptists there, some few years ago, the fact that some of them were practicing this not too many years ago, doing the same thing. Now that is regarding the Word of God with a high seriousness, you see. And if you treat the blood of animals that way, and you say: “I remember the shed blood of Christ, when I shed this blood.” You are taking the whole word of God with a seriousness that is going to have an effect on the whole of your life. That is my faith, and I know that the Lord blesses such a faith. He blesses us when we keep His laws. They are a means of blessing to us, they are a proof of His love, just as when I lay down my law to the children, feeble and faulty as my law was at times, it was for their good; and when they kept it, whether they understood it or not, it blessed them.

[Audience Member] Could either one of you comment on some sources or references of Liberation Theology, to maybe hear it expressed and expounded, and other articles that would seek to point out some of the fallacies of it?

[Rushdoony] Ron Sider’s book is the classic, the most popular and the most influential in this country - Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, Inter Varsity Press puts it out. The book that has been written to answer that and other like things put out by Geneva seminary in Tyler Texas, is Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators by David Chilton. Counter Productive Christians. If you want to order it, just send the order to us and we will forward it to Tyler,Texas.

[Audience Member] Do you think our legislators are afraid of the growth of the Christian faith in this country? ii

[Audience Member] Rush’, could you comment on the result of your discussion with the politically powerful in the country? i

[Rushdoony] Their fearfulness is that these Christians are going to take it over. This has been in hallways of courtrooms and public buildings, and I’ve been talking with these men and arguing and of course their attitude is, it’s a return to the Dark Ages, “These people, who believe the Bible from cover to cover, don’t you know how primitive they are? Don’t you know what you’re associating yourself with?” This is their attitude. So they are worried with reason. Let me add that the public school attendance records are doctored. This came out in Los Angeles, California when two students went to the public authorities, and they didn’t get any attention and finally the San Francisco Examiner published the data, that they were regularly in roll books with non-existent pupils, who were marked present day after day to collect funds. When they checked out their story, they found that the public schools had collected in those cases $3 million that wasn’t owed to them but there was nothing in the law to penalize the principals of those schools for collecting such funds. Now that’s being done quite generally.

On the other hand, we don’t know how many Christian schools there are or what their total attendance is because in many States it’s a hush-hush matter. I have been at states where you cannot get in and out of the civic auditorium, for the Christian school convention of the State without a badge because State officials want to infiltrate them and find out how many schools there are in the state and how many pupils they have because they’re concerned about the steady loss.

[Audience Member] Could you comment on the biblical limits of obedience, Dr. Rushdoony? With particular reference to the thirteenth chapter of Romans. iii

[Rushdoony] Charles Hodge long ago dealt with this matter of obedience in his commentaries, he dealt with it with the matter of civil authorities, he dealt with it with regard to the command “wives obey your husbands in the Lord,” and he pointed out that all human authorities are to be obeyed in Christ and are subject to a prior obedience to God. So that no human authority; whether it be a husband or a pastor or a civil ruler can claim an authority above and beyond the Word of God. And husbands, by the way, are commanded to obey the Lord, and how can they demand obedience if they are themselves disobedient, you see?

What Paul tells us there in Romans 13 is, as I mentioned earlier, we are to obey for conscience’s sake. Not because the Caesar deserves it but because the Lord requires it up to a point, so we do obey, but our higher obedience is always to God. Now it was that qualification that upset Rome. They knew these are the most obedient citizens they had, but their obedience was always to a higher authority, and this they resented. So we cannot obey men and disobey God, that’s forbidden to us. But as far as possible we are to live at peace with all men the Scripture says, and to obey civil authorities, provided it does not put us in active disobedience to God.

Let us stand and bow our heads for the benediction.

* * *

Our Lord and our God it is fit and good for us to be here. We thank thee that thou art on the throne of the universe and the government is upon thy shoulders. Make us ever bold and confident in thy government so that with holy courage we may go forth as more than conquerors. And now dismiss us with thy blessings, give us all traveling in our homeward way, a blessed night’s rest, and joy in thy praise and worship on the morrow.

And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

i. The Development of Political Theory: A Critical Analysis

ii. Question added due to unclear audio.

iii. Question added due to unclear audio.