R. J. Rushdoony

Rousas John Rushdoony
Born	April 25, 1916
Died	February 8, 2001(2001-02-08) (aged 84)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Calvinism, Presuppositionalism, Christian Philosophy
Main interests	Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Education, Epistemology, Cognitive Metaphysics, Psychology of Religion, Predestination
Notable ideas	Christian Reconstructionism, Christian homeschool

Rousas John Rushdoony (April 25, 1916 – February 8, 2001) was a Calvinist philosopher, historian, and theologian and is widely credited as the father of Christian Reconstructionism and an inspiration for the modern Christian homeschool movement. His prolific writings have exerted considerable influence on the Christian right.

Biography

Rushdoony was born in New York City, the son of recently arrived Armenian immigrants. Before his parents fled the Armenian Genocide of 1915, his ancestors had lived in a remote area near Mount Ararat for about 2000 years. There are claims that since the year 320, every generation of the Rushdoony family has produced a Christian priest or minister. Within weeks of arriving in America, his parents moved to Kingsburg, California, where his father founded an Armenian-speaking Presbyterian church. Except for a time when his father pastored a church in Detroit, Rushdoony grew up on the family farm in Kingsburg.

Rushdoony attended public schools where he learned English. He continued his education at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a B.A. in English in 1938, a teaching credential in 1939 and an M.A. in Education in 1940. He also attended the Pacific School of Religion, a Congregational and Methodist seminary in Berkeley, California, from which he graduated in 1944, the same year he was ordained by the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Rushdoony then served for eight and a half years as a missionary to the Shoshone and Paiute Indians on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in a remote area of Nevada.

It was during his mission to the Native Americans that Rushdoony began writing. His first book, By What Standard? was published in 1959. In the early 1960s he was active in the homeschooling movement, appearing as an expert witness to defend the rights of homeschoolers. He moved to Los Angeles in 1965. That year he founded the Chalcedon Foundation; the monthly Chalcedon Report, which Rushdoony edited, began appearing that October.

After divorcing the mother of his five children in 1956, he married his second wife, Dorothy Barbara Ross Rushdoony. She died in 2003. His daughter Sharon married to Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist writer and economic historian. Rushdoony's only son, the Rev. Mark R. Rushdoony, is the current president of the Chalcedon Foundation and editor of the Chalcedon Report. R. J. Rushdoony died in 2001 with his children at his side. Gary North states that Rushdoony read at least one book a day, six days a week, for fifty years of his life; underlining sentences, and making an index of its main ideas in the rear.

Intellectual career

Early writings

Rushdoony began popularizing, albeit densely, the works of Calvinist philosophers Cornelius Van Til and Herman Dooyeweerd into a short survey of contemporary humanism called By What Standard?. Arguing for a Calvinist system of thought, Rushdoony dealt with subjects as broad as epistemology and cognitive metaphysics and as narrow as the psychology of religion and predestination. He wrote a book, The One And The Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy, using Van Tillian Presuppositional philosophy to critique various aspects of secular humanism. He also wrote many essays and book reviews, published in such venues as the Westminster Theological Journal. Like Van Til, Rushdoony's philosophy was based on the presupposition that the Bible is true.

Homeschooling

Rushdoony's next focus was on education, especially on behalf of homeschooling, which he saw as a way to combat the intentionally secular nature of the U.S. public school system. He vigorously attacked progressive school reformers such as Horace Mann and John Dewey and argued for the dismantling of the state's influence in education in three works: Intellectual Schizophrenia (a general and concise study of education), The Messianic Character of American Education (a history and castigation of public education in the U.S.), and The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum (a parent-oriented pedagogical statement).

History

Rushdoony then pursued history – of the world, of the United States, and of the church. He famously maintained that Calvinistic Christianity provided the intellectual roots for the American Revolution and had thus always had an influential impact in American history. The American Revolution, according to Rushdoony, was a "conservative counterrevolution" to preserve American liberties from British usurpation and it owed nothing to the Enlightenment. He further argued that the United States Constitution was a secular document in appearance only; it didn't need to establish Christianity as an official religion since the states were already Christian establishments. He would further this study in his works on American ideology and historiography, This Independent Republic: Studies in the Nature and Meaning of American History and The Nature of the American System.

Christian Reconstruction

See also: Dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism

Rushdoony's most important area of writing, however, was law and politics, as expressed in his small book of popular essays Law & Liberty and discussed in much greater detail in his three-volume, 1,894-page magnum opus, The Institutes of Biblical Law. With a title modeled after Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, Rushdoony's Institutes was arguably his most influential work. In the book, he proposed that Old Testament law should be applied to modern society and that there should be a Christian theonomy, a concept developed in his colleague Greg Bahnsen's controversial tome Theonomy and Christian Ethics, which Rushdoony heartily endorsed. In the Institutes, Rushdoony supported the reinstatement of the Mosaic law's penal sanctions. Under such a system, the list of civil crimes which carried a death sentence would include homosexuality, adultery, incest, lying about one's virginity, bestiality, witchcraft, idolatry or apostasy, public blasphemy, false prophesying, kidnapping, rape, and bearing false witness in a capital case. Although supporting the separation of church and state at the national level, Rushdoony understood both institutions as under the rule of God, and thus he conceived secularism as posing endless false antitheses, which his massive work addresses in considerable detail. In short, he sought to cast a vision for the reconstruction of society based on Christian principles.

The book was also critical of democracy. He wrote that "the heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state ... Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies." He elsewhere said that "Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristocracy," and characterized democracy as "the great love of the failures and cowards of life."

Rushdoony's work has been used by Dominion Theology advocates who attempt to implement a Christian theocracy, a government subject to Biblical law, especially the Torah, in the United States. Authority, behavioural boundaries, economics, penology and the like would all be governed by biblical principles in Rushdoony's vision, but he also proposed a wide system of freedom, especially in the economic sphere, and claimed Ludwig von Mises as an intellectual mentor; he called himself a Christian libertarian.

Rushdoony was the founder in 1965 of the Chalcedon Foundation and the editor of its monthly magazine, the Chalcedon Report. He also published the Journal of Christian Reconstruction and was an early board member of the Rutherford Institute, founded in 1982 by John W. Whitehead. He later received an honorary Doctorate from Valley Christian University for his book, The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum.

Criticism

Rushdoony was, and remains, a controversial figure, as does the Christian Reconstructionist movement that he was involved in.

Pointing to Rushdoony's dislike of democracy and tolerance and the wide use he would make of the death penalty, the British Centre for Science Education called him "a man every bit as potentially murderous as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot or anyone else you may want to name amongst the annals of evil" and "a thoroughly evil man."

Racism and Holocaust denial

Rushdoony has been accused of Holocaust denial and racism. Rushdoony wrote that interracial marriage, which he referred to as "unequal yoking", should be made illegal. He also opposed "enforced integration", referred to Southern slavery as "benevolent", and said that "some people are by nature slaves".

In The Institutes of Biblical Law he uses the 1967 work Judaism and the Vatican by Léon de Poncins as a source for Paul Rassinier's figure of 1.2 million Jewish deaths during the Holocaust, and the claim that Raul Hilberg calculated the number at 896,292, and further asserts that very many of these died of epidemics. He calls the charge of 6 million Jewish deaths "false witness" against Germany. In 2000, Rushdoony stated concerning this passage in his Institutes "It was not my purpose to enter a debate over numbers, whether millions were killed, or tens of millions, an area which must be left to others with expertise in such matters. My point then and now is that in all such matters what the Ninth Commandment requires is the truth, not exaggeration, irrespective of the cause one seeks to serve." Carl R. Trueman, Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary wrote in 2009 regarding the passage and Rushdoony's Holocaust denial:

His sources are atrocious, secondhand, and unverified; that he held this position speaks volumes about this appalling incompetence as a historian, and one can only speculate as to why he held the position from a moral perspective... He deals with the matter under the issue of the ninth commandment and, ironically breaches it himself in his presentation of the matter.

Quotations

• “The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of magic are control and power… Voodoo or magic was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo ['civil rights'], a modernized power drive.”
  • The Institutes of Biblical Law, p. 61

• Moral order establishes society in more than itself; it grounds society in truth and thereby makes possible the health and welfare of society as a whole, and it provides the best possible framework for the liberty and development of man.
  • Law & Liberty, p. 110

• Dissolve man's self-government, and you make a totalitarian authority over him a social necessity.
  • Law & Liberty, p. 18

• When man's sinful will is the only source of the law, as it is for humanism, then the law becomes legalized robbery, which is, after all, the simplest and best definition of socialism.
  • Law & Liberty, pps. 91-2

• The Western liberal pays lips service to a few Christian ideas, holds to a Marxist environmentalism, and an English parliamentarianism: like the mule, he is a hybrid and just as sterile.
  • Law & Liberty, p. 117

• Nothing is more productive of social chaos than the attempt to create a perfect system.
  • Law & Liberty, p. 122

• On political infrastructure of a Christian theocracy: "The world is in rebellion against that [Christ's] government. From these rebels and revolutionists, we hear much talk about "peace" [...] and a great deal of hostility to government. But Isaiah tied the two together: "Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end". True peace, in other words, is a product of true government. When there is true law and order, then there is also true peace. Abolish law and order, and you abolish peace and create a situation of revolutionary warfare and anarchy. By abandoning Christ as Savior and King, by abandoning His government and peace, we are moving into a world of perpetual warfare. We are engaged in "perpetual warfare for perpetual peace" because we are seeking it without Christ" (Dec. 16, 1967).

• On Christian unity in evangelistic endeavors: "When we are Christians, to the extent to any degree we are faithful to the gospel, we are bigger than ourselves. And that is why whether they are Arminian, Roman Catholic, or Calvinist, people who are truly serving the Lord are bigger than their own thinking, bigger than their own faith. We transcend ourselves. And that is the glory of the gospel. It enables us to do more than we can do. It is the grace of God working through us. It is not that we teach different gospels; we are trying to teach the same gospel even though at times our emphasis will be a warped one, a limited one, a partial one. All the same, God can use it".

• In colonial New England the covenantal concept of church and state was applied. Everyone went to church, but only a limited number had voting rights in the church and therefore the state, because there was a coincidence of church membership and citizenship. The others were no less believers, but the belief was that only the responsible must be given responsibility. One faith, one law, and one standard of justice did not mean democracy. The heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state, and it has worked towards reducing society to anarchy.
  • The Institutes of Biblical Law, p. 100

• Deuteronomy 13 cites three cases of instigation to idolatry, first, in vv. 1-5, by the false prophet; second, in vv. 6-11, by a private individual; and, third, by a city, vv. 12-18. The penalty in every case is death without mercy. To the modern mind, this seems drastic. Why death for idolatry? If idolatry is unimportant to a man, then a penalty for it is outrageous. But modern man thinks nothing of death penalties for crimes against the state, or against the "people," or against "the revolution," because these things are important to him. The death penalty is not required here for private belief: it is for attempts to subvert others and to subvert the social order by enticing others to idolatry. Because for Biblical law the foundation is the one true God, the central offense is therefore treason to that God by idolatry. Every law-order has its concept of treason. No law-order can permit an attack on its foundations without committing suicide. Those states which claim to abolish the death penalty still retain it on the whole for crimes against the state. The foundations of a law-order must be protected.
  • The Institutes of Biblical Law, p. 38

• All men are NOT created equal before God... . Moreover, an employer has a property right to prefer whom he will in terms of 'color,' creed, race or national origin

Selected works

• The Institutes of Biblical Law (3 Vol.)
• By What Standard?: An Analysis of the Philosophy of Cornelius Van Til
• The One And The Many: Studies in The Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy
• This Independent Republic: Studies in the Nature and Meaning of American History
• The Nature of the American System
• The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church
• Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis, and Education
• The Messianic Character of American Education
• Politics of Guilt & Pity
• Roots of Reconstruction
• Law & Liberty
• The Biblical Philosophy of History
• The Mythology of Science
• Christianity and the State
• The Word of Flux

External links

• The Chalcedon Foundation
• Interview with R.J. Rushdoony (RealPlayer streaming video format)
• R. J. Rushdoony: Champion of Faith and Liberty
• R. J. Rushdoony - R.I.P.
• Tribute to the Father of Christian Reconstruction
• The Reformed Patriarch
• Rushdoony's Work and Legacy
• Meet the Theonomists, by Thomas P. Roche, Ph.D., SUNY at Buffalo, NY (2000)
• Rousas John Rushdoony (April 25, 1916 — February 8, 2001)
• Foreword to A Comprehensive Faith: A Festchrift for R.J Rushdoony (1996) by John Frame
• "The Vision of R. J. Rushdoony" - a biography by Rushdoony's son
• A 1976 Review of The Institutes of Biblical Law by John Frame
• Articles of Rushdoony in "Résister et construire"(FRENCH)