R. J. Rushdoony

...Without Rushdoony's contributions, it would not have been possible...

...His concern, above all, is to demonstrate what the Christian church has forgotten since Christians founded this nation...

...A classic example was bis obituary, in 1937, for J. Gresham Machen...

...He demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Revolution was a Christian counterrevolution against the applied sovereignty of an increasingly secular Parliament...

...Roosevelt, Dr...

...Some of his books are essays in criticism (Rushdoony is primarily an essayist...

...Thus he faced the religious issue of guilt with a messianic faith in science's ability, if not to dissolve guilt, at least to reduce it to biology and then to answer it with scientific understanding...

...It indicates that they have thrown out their own heritage, that they have been untrue to their faith, that they have failed to preach "the whole counsel of God...

...Not to mention revenue-sharing (defi cit-sharing), the family assistance pro gram, and full-employment budgets...

...It will provide an explicit, concrete alternative to the conservative Protestants who are always crying for "relevance" and who can only offer a bland pietistic theology of cultural retreat...

...Thus, the battle between the early Christian church and the Roman Empire (Foundations...

...As Rushdoony shows in The One and the Many, the debate reveals the fundamental intellectual antinomy of secular thought, and the resolution of it is found in the doctrine of the Trinity: unity and plurality exist simultaneously in one God...

...He put "Dr...

...You can count on the fact that no Protestant denomination will even acknowledge its existence...

...But his most recent efforts have become positive applications of explicitly biblical concepts: The Biblical Philosophy of History (1969), Foundations of Social Order (1968), and The One and the Many (1971...

...Those who hold to such a system of law may well be regarded as hopeless mental cases by the secular world, but at least they will have finally escaped the warmed-over Kantianism which has infected our churches for a century...

...Graham's attempt to make the "old fashioned" gospel seem relevant, American fundamentalism is generally written off by secularized Americans because of fundamentalism's bumbling intrasigence to the twentieth century...

...The Nature of the American System begins with the Writings of that greatest of all Federalist theoreticians, Fisher Ames...

...Coolidge, Dr...

...So can I, which is why I get to publish my articles in The Whole Earth Catalogue and the Birch Society's American Opinion, which is a Stage II journal...

...As he says in his chapter on "The Conspiracy View of History," conspiracies always exist, but their success or failure depends upon the prevailing intellectual and religious climate of a culture's citizens...

...Charles H. Cochrane's Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford, 1940) set forth the thesis that the ancient world collapsed from its own philosophical contradictions...

...Both are in the tradition of revisionist historiography...

...But for conservative Christians who are marginally connected with the churches and marginally connected with contemporary political conservatism, the book should be the testament of Christian reconstruction...

...When serious religious faith was involved, he pulled in his horns...

...have found, the link with, conservative nnlitical eonnomv The book's thesis is found in its closing lines: "The myth of man's autonomy from God is the source of man's slavery to man in the form of the state...

...in front of everyone's name - Dr...

...they want to manipulate us into paradise...

...The Alternative is basically Stage I stuff, except that unlike the typical Stage I man - the Liberal who despairs that men won't listen to good, liberal reason - The Alternative thinks that men would be crazy if they did...

...is it ultimately unified or ultimately chaotic...

...This position has been stated most rigorously by Cornelius Van Til of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, the institution founded by Machen in 1929...

...It is to be the savior of mankind, through a rigorous application of statist law over all areas of life...

...You haven't heard of it, have you...

...One quote from this book should do more to open the inner heart of modern political life than any other I can think of at the moment: "...Freud made the question of man's guilt basic to psychology...

...America's legal foundation was built on the concept of a responsible commonwealth under God and God's law...

...Best known to the "civilized" folk he despised so intensely through the characterization of him by Gene Kelly in that historical abomination, "Inherit the Wind," Mencken always retained his big guns for the pompous, the cultured, the formally educated baboons, who manage to become political columnists, university presidents and chairmen of Senate committees...

...In the early 1960s the "missing link" began to be supplied...

...America was pluralist, decentralist, and self-consciously Protestant...

...They treat the forgotten yet enormously important philosophical issues that have centered around the doctrine of the Trinity...

...Francis Schaeffer's L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland is a respectable, scholarly, evangelical mission, and his books are geared to the serious student (The God Who Is There, Death of the City, etc...

...Rushdoony expects a similar transformation of our contemporary culture...

...It is the sovereignty in the world of man, and man is the ultimate god...

...He can thus be classified in Esquire's (April, 1971) "Paranoia, Stage III...

...Machen (MAYchin) was the unofficial academic spokesman for orthodox Protestantism in his day...

...To accomplish its goals, the state's elitist planners use the inescapable fact of human guilt to manipulate man - through foreign aid programs, domestic welfare, and schemes of international empire to save the downtrodden masses...

...Fundamentalists were forced to hitch their programs to his coattails, simply because they had nobody else, (One year after Machen led the minority out of the liberal Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A., Carl Mclntyre succeeded in splitting Machen's own denomination, a skill Mclntyre has developed into a science in the last three decades...

...There was no one who was able to make a serious intellectual link between explicit biblical religion and principles of political conservatism...

...Thus no state may claim to be sovereign over all spheres of life...

...But his real commitment is to a re-examination of Puritan legal concepts, especially in the writings of John Cotton, who seems to have been rediscovered in the 1960s, primarily through the work of Larzer Ziff...

...Shortly after the publication of Messianic Character, his two historical studies were released, This Independent Republic (1964), which had been the lectures he delivered to the West Coast Summer School of the I.S.I, in 1962, and The Nature of the American System (1965...

...It should be obvious what Rushdoony is leading up to...

...These last two are essentially a single book...

...Rushdoony's operating hypothesis is simple: without a proper doctrine of God, man is left at the mercy of a self-proclaimed divine state...

...The conservative Protestants closed in on their world of narrow biblical studies, leaving the realm of the external to the religious charlatans, the ideology salesmen, and all the other pitchmen of panaceas in the American menagerie...

...The book will stand as an indictment of the whole of modern Protestantism - conservative, liberal, radical - and as such it will not be appreciated...

...Thus, Christians are intellectually schizophrenic when they seek to fuse biblical philosophical presuppositions and secular presuppositions...

...But his is a scholarship of intellectual criticism of contemporary art, philosophy, music and not an attempt to reconstruct society along explicitly Christian and biblical lines...

...What the secular messiahs of science really want is magical power...

...The materialists, as Screwtape wrote to Wormwood, have at last begun to believe in demons (but not in God...

...For two and a half decades after his death, Machen's Protestant brethren were without a voice in the realm of politics, economics, and historical scholarship...

...He might be theologically and politically conservative, but the link between the two was one of temperament, tradition or personal style...

...Membership involves no obligation to purchase anything and no annual fees...

...another is Charles H. Cochrane...

...What Rushdoony is setting forth C.S,.Lewis pyt forthin his classic novel That HIDOUS Strangth (1945), which should be the conservative's 1984 or Animal Farm, but which is known generally only to the Tolkein-Lewis cultists...

...The resolution of the totalitarian-anarchist dualism is to be found in a concrete application of Old Testament biblical law...

...This is an unheard-of thought among contemporary conservative Protestants...

...it focuses on their philosophical and exceedingly religious presuppositions by which they hoped to remake America into a secular New Jerusalem, owned and operated by the educational elite...

...Despite Mr...

...He does not believe that such a reconstruction is possible before Christ returns to earth...

...Would Mencken have had a field day with Mclntyre...

...Mencken saw Machen as a scholarly, serious defender of Protestantism (as well as 19th century liberal economics), unlike the "coffee-klatch" Presbyterians who harassed him out of the denomination...

...The Virtuous Republic The Reconstruction of a Christian Order Insofar as conservative American Protestantism is even considered by educated Americans, two images appear, embodied in two great archetypes: the entertainment version of William Jennings Bryan in "Inherit the Wind," and the more polished, subdued image of Billy Graham...

...It will pffer, at long last, a thoroughly self-conscious philosophy of biblical law, without which even the most zealous Christian will find himself committed to a "baptized secularism" of one kind or another...

...This is why the Westminster Theological Journal has put a reviewing blackout on Rushdoony's books for a decade...

...He found a great title for the book: Freud (1965...

...Thus, we are told, white racism explains the violence of the cities, and atonement is available: Vista, the Ford Foundation, the Black P. Stone Nation's educational fund, and so forth...

...The modern state has returned to the cosmology of the ancient theocratic kingdoms: it denies that there is any voice of authority beyond its own realm...

...But, when this is noted, it must then be added that Freud faced the guilt question openly and plainly, not in any even remotely religious sense, but in order to destroy ruthlessly the possibility of a religious concept of guilt by a biological, anthropological, non-moral and non-religious interpretation thereof...

...R. J. Rushdoony, a former Presbyterian missionary to the Nevada Indians and the San Francisco Chinese, produced two crucial works on American education, Intellectual Schizophrenia (1961) and The Messianic Character of American Education (1963...

...Rushdoony's long-run optimism - again, a minority position in contemporary Protestant thought - is displayed in his recent study, Thy Kingdom Come (1971), a commentary on the books of Daniel and Revelation...

...Next year he intends to publish his magnum opus, a 1300-page study of biblical law, with applications of the whole of that law structure to contemporary institutions and practices...

...H. L. Mencken, America's most delightful reprobate after Mark Twain's departure from the land of the booboisie, had a lot more skill in distinguishing religious chicanery from serious faith...

...He relies on the secondary studies of Edmund S. Morgan of Yale and the late Perry Miller of Harvard, as well as on Carl Briden-baugh's Mitre and Scepter (1962), and Alice Baldwin's The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (1928...

...Is the nature of the world essentially one or essentially many...

...The doctrine of the Trinity states that Jesus Christ was fully man and fully God, i.e., the only historical link between God and man...

...The Myth of Overpopulation (1969), The Mythology of Science (1967) and the popular collection, Bread upon the waters(1968).They are attempts at demonstrating the highlv unneutral presuppositions and applications of modern liberal scholarship and modern political centralism...

...Obviously, Rushdoony is not the only conservative Protestant scholar who is trying to challenge the secular world...

...He had fun with the hoopla specialists of the sawdust trail, but he was careful to use his reserves of real contempt for the more respectable charlatans of society...

...Not so with Rushdoony...

...Their reaction is that of Stalin to Trotsky: you axe the person closest to your own position before you bother with the official enemies, for it is he who is challenging you to remain true to your own presuppositions...

...Rushdoony's Politics of Guilt and Pity (1970) is the manifesto for conservative Protestants, who...

...It will not be liked by the churches, and it (will be regarded as absolute lunacy by any ^secularists who might stumble across it, out at least it will offer a new avenue for the theological dead end of pietism...

...It then argues that it was the invasion of Continental Unitarianism and other forms of Enlightenment thought that marked the beginning of the end of the Christian culture in America...

...Rushdoony therefore wrote a brief but thorough analysis of Freud...

...Van Til has been the subject of two books by Rushdoony, Van Til []%o]and By What Standard...

...l958] The Messianic Character is an in-depth study of the two dozen major figures in the history of American public education...

...Machen was worthy of respect...

...Man's nature thus is not only burdened with a sense of guilt (with no meaning or responsibility behind it), but man is also doomed to seek expiation of that guilt through masochistic activities, to inflict self-punishment upon himself by way of atonement, or by sadisr, to lay his guilt upon an innocent one...

...The Dooyeweerd school - or the conservative faction thereof - also provides numerous skillful treatments of the internal inconsistencies of modern secular thought, but the criticisms are all negative exercises...

...He alone is sovereign, and any claim to total sovereignty by any earthly institution is illegitimate...

...Without question, Messianic Character is the finest book on the history of progressive education's philosophy that any American conservative has produced...

...Moreover, it must be recognized that no man apart from orthodox Christian thinkers has faced the guilt question more plainly than Freud, who has made it central to his psychology...

...The first argued that education can never be neutral - that it is always a religious act of faith...

...Thus, the politics of guilt and pity becomes a political reality...

...The thought that biblical laws are to be taken seriously boggles the minds of all the official Christians who are operational antinomians and culturally impotent...

...The psychological basis of this in modern thought is Freud's discovery of guilt...

...Harding - precisely because he knew so well that the earned doctorate was indistinguishable in the minds of the American public from the honorary degree, and so he was offering us all instant prestige...

...the liberals were worthy of the zoo...

...When they begin to pen "positive" Christian answers, they produce systems that can only be described as a kind of Protestant medieval guild socialism...

...His books are available at a discount from the Presbyterian & Reformed Book Club, Box 185, Nutley, New Jersey, 07110...

...It is rather like the New York Review of [Each Other's] Books: what it will accept as valid criticism of American education from Paul Goodman, it regards as redneck neanderthalism when expressed by Spiro Agnew...

...The first one sketches the Christian foundations of the American constitutional experiment, from the Puritans to the American Revolution...

...If a Protestant were a serious scholar, he was, by definition either culturally irrelevant or theologically liberal...

...The innocent one, in today's grab-bag of liberal cliches, is the criminal...

...Machen received far better treatment by Mencken than he did from his liberal Presbyterian "brethren," who spent most of their time calling for love and dispensing discipline on the conservatives...

...The foundation of modern politics therefore rests on the hypothesis that man is in need of a savior...

...The state is therefore messianic in its claims and goals...

...Thus, the perpetual philosophical debate between nominalists and realists, statists and anarchists, monists and dualists, mechanists and organicists, rationalists and romantics...

...The chapters of Politics cover such diverse topics as "Hell and Politics," "Scapegoats," "The Purposes of Law," "The United Nations: A Religious Dream," "Christian Social Ethics," "The Royal State," "Democracy and Divinity" and "The Moral Foundations of Money...

...More than anything, it is a question of style...

...Ideas do have consequences, and the dualism between chance and fate, form and matter, could no longer be bridged by the overarching sovereignty of the Roman Empire's theocratic kingdom...

...the guilty party is society, especially the law-abiding elements of that society...

...The world under God's law must reflect this God...

...The antiquarians who invariably occupy the chairs in church history have neglected these issues for centuries, and only a few of the secular historians have had the knowledge or the courage to raise them (one of them was once Rushdoony's teacher, Ernst Kan-torowicz...

...The same is true of the Calvinist school that centers around the Dutch philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd (DOUGHaywierd...