Showing results by author "R. J. Rushdoony" in All Categories

Genesis begins the Bible and is foundational to it. In recent years, it has become commonplace for both humanists and churchmen to sneer at anyone who takes Genesis 1-11 as historical. Yet, to believe in the myth of evolution is to accept trillions of miracles to account for our cosmos. Spontaneous generation, the development of something out of nothing, and the blind belief in the miraculous powers of chance require tremendous faith.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries that was a self-conscious move away from the Reformation's emphasis on faith and revelation. It was the mind of man that became the new standard. "My own mind is my own church," wrote Thomas Paine in his Age of Reason (Part First, 1794), which was an attack on all religion that claimed to be authoritative and Christianity in particular.

To attempt to study Scripture without studying its law is to deny it. To attempt to understand Western civilization apart from the impact of biblical law within it and upon it is to seek a fictitious history and to reject 20 centuries and their progress. The Institutes of Biblical Law has as its purpose a reversal of the present trend. it is called "Institutes" in the older meaning of that word--i.e., fundamental principles, here of law, because it is intended as a beginning, as an instituting consideration of that law that must govern society.

All law is based upon morality, and morality is itself based upon religion. Therefore, when the religion of a people is weakened, so also is its morality undermined. The result is a progressive collapse of law and order, and the breakdown of society. Men, though, see law as a limitation on their liberty, and Christianity is held to be the most restrictive with its emphasis upon Biblical law as the foundation for morality and liberty.

An entire generation of victory-minded Christians, spurred by the victorious postmillennial vision of Chalcedon, has emerged to press what the Puritan fathers called "the Crown Rights of Christ the King" in all areas of modern life. Central to that is Rousas John Rushdoony's jewel of a study, God's Plan for Victory. The founder of the Christian Reconstruction movement set forth in potent, cogent terms the older Puritan vision of the irrepressible advancement of Christ's kingdom by his faithful saints employing the entire law-word of God as the program for earthly victory.

Exactly what has public education been trying to accomplish? Before the 1830s and Horace Mann, no schools in the US were state-supported or state-controlled. They were local, parent-teacher enterprises, supported without taxes, and taking care of all children. They were remarkably high in standard and were Christian. From Mann to the present, the state has used education to socialize the child. Public education became the means of creating a social order of the educators' design. Such men saw themselves and the school in messianic terms.

Why listen to a book on Freud? As long as man views guilt as a problem for science instead of religion, the influence of Sigmund Freud will remain lurking in the mind of modern man. Freud was an architect of the modern mind - and unholy builder - like Marx and Darwin. Freud was also a hater of religion - specifically the Bible and its absolute standard.

Man has trampled God's law underfoot. In doing so, he has misused himself and trampled on the God-given rights of his fellowman. He is conscious of his guilt and seeks self-justification through self-atonement. The author makes it perfectly clear that there is only one way of escape from present slough and despair. It is in turning in heartfelt repentance to God who has already provided atonement in the sacrifice of his son. And true repentance includes a return to the doing of God's will as revealed in God's word, the Bible.

First published in 1970, this book helped spur the modern rise of postmillennialism. Revelation's details are often perplexing, even baffling, and yet its main meaning is clear: It is a book about victory. It tells us that our faith can only result in victory. "This is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith" (1 John 5:4). This is why knowing Revelation is so important. It assures us of our victory and celebrates it. Genesis 3 tells us of the fall of man into sin and death. Revelation gives us man's victory in Christ over sin and death.

The Lord desires a people who will embrace their responsibilities. The history of Israel in the wilderness is a sad narrative of a people with hearts hardened by complaint and rebellion to God's ordained authorities. They were slaves, not an army. They would recognize the tyranny of Pharaoh but disregard the servant-leadership of Moses. God would judge the generation he led out of captivity, while training a new generation to conquer Canaan. The Book of Numbers reveals God's dealings with both generations.

The book of Leviticus has not been a popular subject of study in the modern church. Much like the book of proverbs, any emphasis upon the practical applications of God's law is readily shunned in pursuit of more "spiritual" studies. Books like Leviticus are considered dull, overbearing, and irrelevant. To be spiritual, in the modern sense of the term, means to live on a "higher" level where today's Christian is governed more by the impressions of the heart than a carnal commandment.

The Christian school represents a break with humanistic education, but, too often in leaving the state school, the Christian educator has carried the state's humanism with him. A curriculum is not neutral: It is either a course in humanism or training in a God-centered faith and life.

Statist regulations. Quackery. Addiction. These are the modern symptoms of a disease that has infected Western medicine for thousands of years: the disease of humanism. In a series of 13 "medical reports", R. J. Rushdoony traced the Christian and pagan roots of Western medicine in history, and demonstrated how humanist thought has produced vicious fruit in both modern medical practices and in the expectations of patients.

The Beatitudes are the kingdom commission to the new Israel of God, and R. J. Rushdoony elucidates this powerful thesis in an accessible and engaging commentary on the world's greatest sermon.

Long before state health care or food stamps, before the creation of welfare ghettoes in our major cities, America’s first experiment with socialism and government dependency practically destroyed the American Indian. Government experts created the Indian reservations. America’s churches whole-heartedly supported it, convinced the reservation would be the key to winning souls for Christianity.

For the orthodox Christian who grounds his philosophy of history on the doctrine of creation, the mainspring of history is God. Time rests on the foundation of eternity, on eternal decree of God. Time and history, therefore, have meaning because they were created in terms of God's perfect and totally comprehensive plan. The humanist faces a meaningless world in which he must strive to create and establish meaning.

Dr. Rushdoony had predicted that the humanist system, based on anti-Christian premises of the enlightenment, could only get worse. Rushdoony was indeed a prophet. He knew that education divorced from God and from all transcendental standards would produce the educational disaster and moral barbarism we have today. The title of this audiobook is particularly significant in that Dr. Rushdoony was able to identify the basic contradiction that pervades a secular society that rejects Gods sovereignty, but still needs law and order, justice, science, and meaning to life.

As the last installment of R.J. Rushdoony's commentary series on the Pentateuch, it stands as one of the more dynamic expositions in the series in that it addresses God's demands upon man, family, church, and state. In short, Deuteronomy is the defining volume on theocracy. The redemptive power of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit are the enabling forces for a people to once again live faithful to God's covenant—and Deuteronomy provides the details for that covenant. Rushdoony's study represents a sizable deposit into securing the obedience of the church.

Faith and Action is the complete collection of the essays of R. J. Rushdoony written for the Chalcedon Report between 1965 and 2001 along with several transcripts of his recorded talks. The large volume The Roots of Reconstruction only contained his Chalcedon Report essays up until 1985, so most of the essays included in Faith and Action were unavailable to listeners for many years until now.

One of the most neglected but pervasive threats to the Christian world and life view is that of neoplatonism. This leftover of ancient Greek philosophy is grounded upon a dual aspect to reality: It views that which is form or spirit (such as mind) as good and that which is physical (flesh) as evil. Neoplatonism is a "dialectical" philosophy that tries to reconcile two basically hostile concepts and retain both within its system.