Conversations: Jeff Durbin and Rushdoony

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So I'm here with Mark Rushdoony, the son of R .J. Rushdoony, and we're at the

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Bonson Conference. So thanks for joining me, Mark. Good to be here. So you just did a talk, and it was about understanding your dad,

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R .J. Rushdoony. And so I'd love for people to hear just a brief kind of snapshot of what you talked about in terms of where your dad came from and the things that were influencing his mind and his thought.

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Well, he had a very unique background. And he had a very unique family history.

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Our family history actually goes back into ancient history. We know our name dates back to the 7th or 8th century

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BC, the time of Isaiah. But what really defined the family and the

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Armenian people was their Christianity. And they became very unique and a distinct people.

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When the Armenians became Christians, they stopped intermarrying with the pagan people. The Bible was translated into the

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Armenian vernacular as early as the 5th century AD. And so it really identified

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Armenia as a people. And so with this long Armenian history and the development of the

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Armenian people through the Christian religion, that was shattered in World War I when my grandparents had to flee.

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My grandmother was actually pregnant with my father when they fled the massacres during World War I.

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The Armenian people were eliminated from their ancient homeland.

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And this had a very powerful impact on my father because throughout his childhood, he learned about this history.

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And a lot of his family members had seen the massacres. So it was very much a part of his consciousness that the

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Armenian people had been a Christian minority in a non -Christian empire.

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And that empire had eventually decided to get rid of them because they were a

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Christian people. So he had this background of what happens when a non -Christian empire can so totally dominate a

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Christian minority as part of his upbringing and his consciousness.

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And when he came to America and he began studying American history, he realized that what made America great was its

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Christian history and its Christian faith. And the point is not whether America was institutionally

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Christian. It's that fact that the people were predominantly Christian. Their ethic was predominantly

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Christian. Their culture was predominantly Christian. And yet they were losing that. And so our family came over here and arrived in 1915, just before my father was born, as America is losing its

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Christian faith. And his upbringing in the 20th century saw a lot of this decline.

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And so he saw that what had happened to the Armenian people was now happening to the

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American people. It was a loss of the faith. And suddenly, a once Christian people were a minority in their own culture, for different reasons, obviously.

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But he saw the impact that this had in Armenian history, and it was happening again in American history.

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And it presaged something that he thought could get very ugly.

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But he was also an optimist because of his eschatology. So he believed that inevitably, the kingdom of God was going to grow.

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Inevitably, the kingdom of God was going to be victorious because he felt sin is suicidal, and sin is self -destructive.

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And so he said, a culture that turns away from God is self -destructive. So he died in 2001.

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And he often said, we're at the end of an era because so many aspects of humanism were self -destructing.

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And I think we've seen more of that in recent years. Oh, yeah. But he said he wasn't a pessimist when he saw that because his eschatology was, this is necessary.

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It's good that humanism fails. It's good that the evil is working out its logical implications in the culture because that means it's failing.

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And it's going to have to be replaced with something else. And his eschatology told him that the kingdom of God is going to continue to grow.

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And in fact, it is growing. Currently, it's not growing in North America. But in most of the world, the kingdom of God is growing.

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And it's sad that America is lacking behind the growth of the kingdom in many parts of the world, many parts of the world that haven't seen this kind of growth in the church in anybody's memory, such as the

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Middle East. Even in the midst of persecution, the church is growing, even in Islamic countries.

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It's growing faster than the population rate in most areas of the world except North America. So there are many good things happening.

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And so, but he was never discouraged. He was always an optimist because his eschatology gave him a reason to have hope.

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He wasn't an optimist because of what he saw in man. He was an optimist because of what he saw in God. He had hope in God, not man.

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Yeah, that's big. Okay, so your dad left a legacy, a huge legacy in his teaching, whether it's audio, the people that he discipled, taught, and his books,

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I mean, just massive. There's so much, and it's so helpful. And so he left such a great legacy.

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When you think about what he wanted to communicate, obviously, the kingdom of God issue is one thing, the optimism that Jesus is reigning, he will be victorious, his salvation will go to the ends of the earth.

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So there's that, but what did he wanna communicate to people in terms of, you mentioned humanism, secularism, these ideas, they fail because they're rooted in sin and it's suicidal.

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What was gonna replace that? I mean, let's take it for granted that salvation first, it's regeneration, people's hearts are transformed, they love

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God now. Okay, but what replaces now a secular culture? What does it look like?

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What were the foundations that your dad gave to us? Well, he coined a term 50 years ago, the term

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Christian reconstruction. And he used the term Christian reconstruction as an analogy of the

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Christian's responsibility in the world. Essentially, when our culture is failing, it's like a building that is on the verge of collapse.

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Sometimes when historic buildings on the verge of collapse, we have to decide how much of it can we can save?

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What do we have to tear apart completely and start to rebuild? And sometimes you have to tear apart a building entirely and rebuild, he says, this is what we have to do with our culture.

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Just as we have to rebuild people one at a time as people are converted and they have to start rebuilding their lives.

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So we also have to rebuild everything in our culture that is anti -God.

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And we have to start rethinking every aspect of our life and our culture in terms of to what extent are we in rebellion against God and how can we conform to God?

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If this is not something external that Christians can give to a failing culture, it requires regeneration.

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So none of this can happen without conversion. And Rob, I don't want you to lose your train of thought, but that's important.

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Just that point right there. Something your dad would constantly say, because it's just rooted in scripture.

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It's rooted in what he would point to in scripture is that regeneration is what has to precede all that we're talking about.

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So everything else is meaningless. All the talk of law and reconstruction is meaningless without the gospel.

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So your dad emphasized that. You emphasize that. Okay, so, right. It depends, ultimately, the future of the kingdom of God, even though we believe it's gonna grow, it's in God's timing and it's through the power of the

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Holy Spirit. We don't know God's timing. And if you look at the Psalms of David, David was constantly frustrated at the success of the wicked that he saw and that the righteous seemed to be, humanly speaking, failures.

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And we see this frustration in some of the prophets, like Jeremiah. And sometimes

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Jeremiah's frustration verged on blasphemy, almost.

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He was frustrated with God and what was happening and the difficult job he saw in his culture.

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And what he was seeing in his lifetime was the destruction of Judah, the destruction, eventually, of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple.

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And yet, ultimately, God said, but I have a purpose in this. The purpose is to get rid of the sin and then

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I'll bring back a remnant and I'll rebuild. And so, ultimately, what seemed like total destruction, total defeat for the kingdom of God in Jeremiah's day, it ultimately led to a new beginning.

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We don't understand God's ways. So we have this big picture of what God's doing, but it's in God's timing.

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All God expects of the Christian is faithfulness. God doesn't expect any

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Christian to change the world. God doesn't expect any Christian to cause a religious revolution.

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All God asks the individual Christian to do is to be faithful. But sometimes we're a bit lazy about the extent of faithfulness

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God wants from us. And so, my father's point was that we don't even think about how we could be more faithful to God.

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We've abandoned God's standard of righteousness, his law. And all it means is once you believe in God, once you're converted, how do you obey

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God? He saw that as in the law. The law is God's righteousness. It's not how you're saved, it's how you obey

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God. And if we reject God's standard of obedience, what we're saying is,

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I want your salvation, I just don't want to be obedient. Well, it's no wonder we're not getting blessed in the

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Western church when we repudiate obedience to God. So my father was very big on obeying

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God, self -consciously obeying God, and figure out how we as individuals can do that, but also as families and extending that to different aspects of our society.

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Because he talked about different aspects of our society, psychology, science, and all these different things.

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Now, I would say that many Christians who wouldn't necessarily agree with my father or his perspective on the law, have in recent years been critiquing our culture and pointing out what's wrong with it.

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My dad offered, what do we do about it? How do we build a new culture?

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Because so many of the Christian critiques of culture have failed to address, what is

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Christian culture? What's it even going to look like? And that's largely what my father wrote about, is how we build something that is more

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Christian. And it's not a simple process, it's something that will take generations, really.

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But unless we begin, we'll never proceed with it. So if I could, you stop me if I'm wrong here, but some steps, moving the way up, in the way of thinking.

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So there was the idea that the word of God is the standard for all of life.

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That God is the reference point for all questions about anything, he's the reference point.

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And we have to really align our thoughts with God's thoughts, in his light we see light. And so there's,

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God's the very foundation. So that was really the starting point. And so when the question is asked, and you asked it, when cultures today say, well, what does a

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Christian culture look like? What is it even going to look like? It's collapsing around us, we have the destruction of the human family, we have the destruction of our children, we have people, people are actually saying, well,

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I don't know, is socialism such a bad word today? Bernie Sanders and things like that are happening today.

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That's where we're at today. So people ask the question, well, then how do we know what we're actually supposed to be working towards?

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Beyond the question of how people must be saved, through faith in Christ alone, apart from any work of law, what would it look like?

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Your dad pointed people to, by what standard? By this standard, the word of God.

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And that was the standard. And so all of the work your dad invested himself in, and your dad was just,

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I think, just, from my perspective, just a theological ninja, a warrior.

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In terms of reading a book a day, your dad read a book every day. So he really took the time to learn and to study and to get in the right frame of mind when he critiqued something and tried to increase his ability to think through things and to get into the scriptures.

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But your dad pointed to the scriptures. So here's the blueprint. God's already told us what his standard is.

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So when we think about social institutions, this is what God has revealed his standard is for that institution.

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When it comes to areas of justice and sanctions, this is what God has revealed as his righteous standard.

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And that's what your dad pointed people to. But it's interesting because people ask the question, they'll say, yeah, but are those standards that, yeah,

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God said that's what he wants us to do. That's what he says, that's what he upholds as this is righteous and just and holy.

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Are those standards for us today? Is that part of what we should anticipate in eschatology, that the law of God is actually a relevant thing for the kingdom of God in the world today?

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The alternative to obeying God is ultimately going to be subjective.

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If God hasn't given a subjective standard, then he's left us to figure it out on our own. He's left us with a command to obey subjectively.

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The fact is you can't obey subjectively. There's no such thing. If you get stopped by a policeman and you tell him you obeyed the traffic laws subjectively, he's not gonna accept that.

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And when God gives us an objective standard, he's saying this is what I want you to do.

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And instead of studying that objective standard and say, well, how do we apply that to our culture?

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How do we apply that to our institutions? We are saying that there's a subjective standard.

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The subjective standard that's been very prevalent in the modern church is a vague spirituality.

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And yet that spirituality, when you come right down to it, is subjective.

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It's man decides what is spiritual. And that's nothing on which we can build a culture.

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That's nothing which we can take before the throne of God and says, here God, this is what I think is the right thing to do.

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And because that's in effect what subjective spirituality is doing. So you can't say you're obeying

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God if you're just obeying him by your standard of obedience. There has to be some objectivity.

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And we see that. My father, when he talked about biblical law, he said the 10 commandments are the major principles of the law.

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The rest of the law is a minor case law. Well, in civil law, we have case laws.

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How the law was applied in a particular. And a judge will look at that, and an attorney will bring this to the judge, look,

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I found this case law how another judge ruled on this. And so the judge says, we have to be consistent.

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So he has to look at these different case laws and how this particular principle of law has been applied in the past.

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Well, God has case laws. And sometimes they seem absurd to us and people laugh at them. For instance,

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Paul used this in the New Testament. And when he said, you shouldn't muzzle the ox that treads your corn.

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In other words, you shouldn't starve an animal that's doing physical labor for you. The ox was actually turning this thing which ground the wheat.

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And he says, you owe that animal food. That's a moral obligation you have to an animal.

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Now, in reality, no farmer really wants to starve his work animal.

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He knows he'll kill it. He'll know it'll become weak. So it's an obvious principle of the law.

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It's a minor application. If you owe an animal food because it does work for you, then you owe a man wages.

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Okay, then Paul says the labor is worthy if it's higher. Now it's applied to man. And then

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Paul extends it to your ministers who are laboring for you.

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And he says, you owe them double honor. They're doing far more than a beast of burden.

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They're doing far more than a man who's working for an hourly wage. Your ministers deserve not only wages, they deserve double honor.

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So Paul applied these principles, these minor laws that seem to us kind of silly almost.

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It says, why would God talk about muzzling an ox? Because it's a minor principle.

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And if you can appreciate the fact that an animal deserves its food, then it says you need to really pay someone a proper wage.

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That's right. And that's an animal husbandry law. Such a small thing.

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But Paul, this is post cross, post resurrection, post ascension, takes this minor little part of the law.

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We'd see as well, it's insignificant. He takes it over and he just assumes it's continuity.

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You're supposed to know. You don't muzzle the ox while it treads. Right. Paul gave, there's another example of the law in the

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Old Testament that people think is kind of minor. In fact, the

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Jews called it the least of the laws. The New Testament uses the phrase the least of the laws.

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The Jews had a tradition of what the least of the law was. It was about when you find the bird in the field and you can take the eggs, but you can't take the mother.

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There's another similar one about don't see the kid in its mother's milk. That's right, yeah.

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You see, it's about honor, it's about honoring parents because there's a blessing attached to that.

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He says, I'll make you live long in the land. That's the same blessing as honoring your father and mother. In other words, you should so honor your mother and father that you should extend that principle to the fact that if you find a bird on the nest, you can have the eggs for food, but you can't kill the mother and the eggs.

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That was to teach them about honoring their parents. See, it wasn't an irrelevant law.

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It was to teach them in a very, if it's true for an animal,

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I want you to observe this so you remember how you would honor your parents.

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See, these laws had meaning, they had relevance. If you don't think about anything, you could find a reason to think of something as irrelevant or even silly.

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And that's how we often view the Bible. Since we don't think it's relevant today, we think of it as being silly instead of looking at really what it was talking about and how it really is relevant.

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Yeah, and so one of the, I think, helpful things of your dad's ministry and his life's work that you're continuing on today with Chalcedon is just going through the

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Bible to say, this is what God has said about these things. How would we apply this today? Because these are his standards.

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And that is very difficult. And that's something the modern church hasn't even begun to address. The church still wants to talk about, do we really have to obey these laws?

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And they haven't ever gotten to the point. If they ever get to the point was, maybe we should, then maybe they'll start looking at some of these things.

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You can't start rebuilding a culture as I'm talking about the church as a whole. The church can't really help rebuild a culture unless they have answers.

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And the church is only giving them some vague spiritualities. But Mark, here's the thing.

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This is all that God requires of us to love our neighbors. You're talking to all these things that are so complicated and birds and nests and eggs.

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And you're talking about oxes, but this is it for the new covenant. Mark, I'm not sure if you've caught up with this yet.

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It's love your neighbor. Right, and we're told in the New Testament, love is the fulfilling of the law. If you really love your neighbor, you'll fulfill the law towards him.

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For instance, do you want a neighbor who has some vague emotional feeling towards you? Or do you want a neighbor who is gonna respect your property?

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He's gonna respect your marriage in relationship to your wife. He's going to do all the things that he would do to uphold your rights to your private property.

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And he won't slander your name. This is the kind of neighbor you want. This is the kind of neighbor that you can trust.

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And you're going to have a solid relationship with. Vague emotional love means nothing.

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In the name of love, people have committed horrible evils, including murder. That's right.

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And so Jesus says two greatest commandments in the law, love

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God, love your neighbor. And that all the law and the prophets are built upon those. And so love is the foundation of the laws of God.

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And so it moves its way from love up to descriptions of love. So love God, love neighbor.

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What's that look like? Well, don't have any other gods in his sight. Don't make a God that looks like him. And onward, we're going honor your father and mother.

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Don't covet, don't steal, don't murder, don't lie. And then what are

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God's consequences? What does he say is the righteous standard for if somebody does violate love for a neighbor?

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What does it look like if somebody steals from them? Doesn't love them, steals from them. And so your dad did a lot of work in the area of the civil penal sanctions.

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So a question might come up, because people go, okay, that makes a lot of sense. That is what Jesus says. And that is God's righteous standard.

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But the penal sanctions, Mark? My father said you can't start with the penal sanctions.

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You have to start with what God tells people. The church should be telling

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Christians, this is what God expects you to do out of obedience. We should also be telling the world, this is why your culture is failing.

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We should be telling the unbeliever that you have problems in your culture, and your culture is falling apart because you are violating

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God's basic principles. And as long as you violate God's law, things are gonna go bad.

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And so we have to be honest with people. It's just, this is what God says.

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And if you want things to go to a systemic failure, which is where many areas of our culture seem to be headed right now, says you've got to change the way.

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Now, telling that to people isn't the mean to their salvation. But it's a prophetic word, says

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God means what he says. And if you want a way out, you have to believe him, including his word of salvation.

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And then obedience to him is the way of further blessing beyond your salvation.

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And so we have the whole package. We're telling people not just how to go to heaven, but how to be saved and have a more productive and a more rewarding life here on this earth, how to build a better culture in a failing culture.

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And we live in a unique period of history because our culture is failing. And even the secular world realizes the extent to which things are falling apart in many areas.

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But they don't know what to do with it. They have no way to process this. So ultimately our hope is the moving of the spirit of God.

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And there's no simple answer. We can't change things overnight, even by obedience, because we have to build up what disobedience looks like.

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How do we apply these different laws and rebuild our culture? Because we really don't know what it's all going to look like.

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And it's going to look a little different. God gave us principles of law, but how that works in a very modern culture is gonna look a little different than it did several thousand years ago.

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The principles are still the same, but their application to modern situation and modern institutions is going to be a little different.

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But the question is always the same. By what standard? Right. I love you,

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Mark. Your dad is such a blessing and gift to me and has had such a dramatic impact in my life.