December 5, 2025 Show with Mark R. Rushdoony on “Rousas John Rushdoony: A Brief History of the Life & Ministry of My Father”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend

Jim Thorpe. It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now here's your host, Chris Arnson. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this fifth day of December 2025.

Before I introduce my guest, I have sad news to announce to those who especially may have not heard this before, but if any of you benefited from the wonderful publishing ministry of PNR Publishing, formerly known as Presbyterian and Reform Publishing, PNR Publishing, which has been an enormous blessing to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio ever since we first launched this program in 2005 and supplying free books for us on a regular basis, especially at my free biannual pastor's luncheons where they donate a couple of hundred books to the men that gathered there, that continue to gather there.

And, well, my friend of many years, Bryce Craig, the president of PNR Publishing, has passed on.

He was battling Lou Gehrig's disease, and he went home to be with the

Lord God and Savior that he served so well for so many years on November 23rd.

And I know for a fact that as much as we who knew him will miss him, he does not miss being on this planet.

I can tell you that. And he is no longer in agony from the horrific disease known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

He is in indescribable joy right now in the presence of his Savior. Please pray for the

Craig family. But today, I am honored to have a first -time guest who is actually a descendant of Armenian royalty.

And I mean that not only in the ethnic realm, but also in the theological realm.

In fact, my guest today and his father, of which my guest wrote a biography, are

Armenian Calvinists. And no, that's not an oxymoron, because Armenian is an ethnic group, not a theological position.

That's Armenian, and people frequently make that error. I see it all the time.

And by the way, it's not Calvinists. It's not spelled

A -N -I -S -T at the end. It's I -N -I -S -T. But today, we have the honor and privilege for the very first time to have

Mark Rushdooney on the program. And Mark Rushdooney is president of the

Chalcedon Foundation and Ross House Books, editor -in -chief for Faith for All of Life magazine, formerly known as the

Chalcedon Report. He's a pastor and conference speaker and author.

And we're addressing today his biography of his father, Roussos John Rushdooney, A Brief History of the

Life and Ministry of My Father. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Mark Rushdooney.

Hi, Chris. It's good to be with you. Oh, the pleasure is all mine, brother. And your father and I do have a connection that goes back decades, actually.

Well, first of all, I first learned of your father, believe it or not, when an

Amillennial Reformed Baptist pastor was a guest speaker at the church where I was saved in Amityville, Long Island, Calvary Baptist Church, which was a

Reformed Baptist church that in 1995 became Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island after a merger with another church.

And this pastor who preached for us had photocopies of an article written by your father, and he passed them out.

And I said, who is this guy with the unusual name Roussos R.

Rushdooney? And I began to do a little research, and I began to become very captivated by things that he had to say, became a subscriber to the

Chalcedon Report. And something interesting over the years started to occur.

I know that you have said your dad just loved reading. It was one of his favorite things to do.

And when I fell in love with a book, I would get a second copy, and I would ship it to your father.

And nearly every single time, he found the same value in the book that I did, and he wrote a review of it in the

Chalcedon Report. And so I was very blessed by the fact that in at least in some major way, we were in the same wavelength in our thinking.

And I have to say that I am an amillennial Reformed Baptist. I'm not postmill or theonomic, but I don't live in an echo chamber either.

A lot of folks make the assumption that I'm a postmill theonomist and Reconstructionist because I have so many people reflecting those views on my show, and so many have supported this show and advertise on the show.

But I don't think that we need to isolate ourselves into some conclave of folks that only agree with us on every jot and tittle.

But since you're a first -time guest, we always have first -time guests give a summary of their salvation testimonies, but in this case, since we're doing a show on the biography you've written on your father, your own salvation testimony will be intertwined with the whole story of your father and his own ministry.

So, rather than having you give your testimony first, we'll have that mingled in with the rest of this fascinating story that we're going to tell.

Now, to start off, I know that your grandfather was the first Protestant in the

Rushduny family and that you come from the Armenian Apostolic Church in your roots religiously, which is a branch of Oriental Orthodoxy.

Your grandfather became a Presbyterian and actually fled with your father during the

Armenian persecution by the Turks. And if you want to pick up that story where I left off there.

Well, yeah, the history of the Rushduny family literally goes back to the time of Isaiah.

And we know that just because of the origin of our name. And the name

Rushduny comes from a king of ancient Urartu, which is the kingdom of Ararat that became

Armenia. And from the 8th to the 6th century

BC, they were kings. And that's a very interesting history all by itself.

But when Armenia became the first Christian nation and when it converted to Christianity, it really defined the people and it made them very distinct from the people around them.

And they have a very long history. It's actually many histories put together.

But since the late Middle Ages, they were under the control of Ottoman Turks. And so my family, that had once been royalty, actually very early became priests in the

Armenian Apostolic Church. And there was a long tradition of someone in the family supporting priests.

And I believe there were five generations up to my grandfather that had been priest, father, son.

And my grandfather was destined to be a priest in the Armenian churches as well.

However, he was orphaned by the age of 14 and he found himself alone on the streets.

One of the few cities, true cities in Eastern Anatolia.

And he was taken in by American missionaries who were largely congregational.

And so that became his association with Protestantism. And he pursued that.

And he served, my grandfather served actually in several Presbyterian and several congregational churches in his ministry.

And my father grew up in Kingsburg, California, in a

Presbyterian church. And so the ship there was from the

Armenian church to the Protestant denominations. The Armenian church was organized more along the lines of kind of a combination, my father said, between Presbyterianism and Congregationalism.

And so those were the two mission groups that made the greatest inroads into the

Armenian people. And so he, that became our entry into Protestantism.

Obviously, that's where your father was nurtured in the Reformed faith.

Yes, and that would have been the Presbyterian Church USA, which my grandfather was a pastor.

And my grandfather, my father grew up in that. He was originally ordained in the

Presbyterian Church USA in 1944 after his seminary work. And that was long before the

PCUSA was as corrupt as it is today with leftism and absolute apostate views.

I'm not saying that there wasn't any kind of seeds of it there, but... Correct. But he was having trouble even in the late 40s.

And there was a movement even within the Presbyterian Church trying to slow that process down and restore some

Orthodox. And he was involved in that. And by the 50s, it was becoming quite pronounced.

And he received some very extreme pushback in opposition to those who did not appreciate his ministry at all.

And how did your dad develop in his understanding of Reformed theology?

Because I know that he was not frozen in time with his thinking.

It developed, and a lot of it had to do with his discovery of Cornelius Van Til, I believe.

Yes. Just after the war, I believe it was 19... it might have been 1946, he read the

New Modernism. He actually picked it up when he was traveling in the East and he saw it at a pastor's home.

He had heard of it. He had heard very critical things of it as well.

And he picked it up and was browsing, and it was so interesting that the pastor told him to go ahead and take it because he wasn't going to get around to reading it in all likelihood.

So my father picked that book up. A few months later, he saw a review of the book in a theological journal put out by an

American seminary. And he wrote a letter to the editor objecting to the unfairness of that review and highly commending the book.

And he sent a copy of that review to Cornelius Van Til, who was a professor then at Westminster Theological Seminary.

And that began a correspondence. And in fact, my father's first book was actually a defense of the

Van Tilian perspective. And by what standard?

And Cornelius Van Til commented on the chapters. My father would send them to him, he'd comment on them and send those back to my father.

So they began a long communication. And we wouldn't have time to give a full -blown, detailed exploration of presuppositionalism.

We have done that on this program in different episodes and interviews for the full two hours.

But could you give a summary of what presuppositionalism is, which is at the root of Cornelius Van Til's legacy?

Well, if you wanted, I can give you a simplified version of it. Sure. And I think the simplified version of it is where does man begin in his thinking?

Is man's reason able to rise above all things and evaluate all things, including the divine, on its own?

Or is man's very thought dependent upon God and God's revelation of himself?

Can we even think without what God has given to us? So are we in any sense independent or do we have to, to use,

I believe, an expression that Newton used, do we have to think

God's thoughts after him? And this was the essence of what

Van Til was saying. We only know because we're creatures and we've been given things by God.

Part of what we've given is God's revelation of himself. Well, therefore, we understand all things only in terms of God's revelation of himself.

And in fact, we cannot really know. We cannot pretend to act and think independently of what we are given by God.

And so it's the starting place. And it's also understanding, though, really who we are when we speak on things authoritatively.

And to what extent can we speak things authoritatively? You either begin with God and you end with God.

And people object, well, that's circular reasoning. Yes, that's what faith is. Faith is beginning with certain assumptions.

And we assume that God is true. And if God's true, let every man be a liar.

And therefore, we have to think God's thoughts after him. And we self -consciously depend upon God for the source of truth and thought.

Now, your dad began to surpass

Van Til in his presuppositionalism. He took it to a further degree.

And if you could explain how that would play out and how he differed from Van Til.

Van Til was a philosopher of religion. And my father did not hide the fact that he really developed

Van Til's thinking into a full world and life view.

And he saw it as the basis of all thought and all action. And my father understood the whole idea of the kingdom of God as the development of the claims of Christ and of who

Christ was. And therefore, we were diverting ourselves from the cause of proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom of God.

If we were trying to pursue any sort of autonomy for man or any type of authority for man over the revealed word of God.

So the Christian has to self -consciously come back to the Lord. And so my father really developed that into a full blown worldview.

And did they have any conflict with each other? He and Van Til after the progression of your dad?

No, I don't. My father went places Van Til did not go, but I don't think Van Til ever objected to anything.

I've never found any evidence that Van Til really strongly told him he should pull in the reins at all.

In fact, the later notes that he sent to my father, sometimes very, very brief, were very complimentary and encouraging.

So there wasn't ever any conflict between them. If there was disagreement, and there may have been. And as I said, my father probably took

Van Til's thinking into whole new areas. Now, I know that he was raised by a

Presbyterian pastor, but every family has a different story.

Although it's always the same gospel and the same Lord Jesus Christ that saves anyone who is born again.

But at the same time, he doesn't save everybody at the same identical point in their lives.

You have some folks who have been raised by Christian parents who can't ever remember not believing.

You have others that had a prodigal son experience.

What was your dad's life like? Did he, to your knowledge, come to a point older or a later point in his life when he realized he needed to repent of perhaps a more openly rebellious life?

Or was it something that some children of Christian parents are spared by the sovereignty of God from ever entering into a period like that?

What was the situation with your dad? I don't think there was ever a point in my dad's life where he rebelled against the faith, certainly.

He believed the Bible. He was a very avid reader.

So he read the Bible from cover to cover. Once when he was a young man, my grandfather proudly told another pastor who came to the house that my father had read the

Bible cover to cover. And the congregational minister wasn't sure that was even such a good idea.

He specifically said, there's some parts of the Bible it's best that children not be exposed to.

And my father remembered that for the rest of his life. And he said he thought it was somewhat symptomatic of modern theology, in modern views of spirituality, that some parts of the

Bible were perhaps not fit for polite society.

But he always thought that was a bizarre thing, but he never rebelled against the faith. When he was at the university,

I think the communism that was then espoused, and there was a very powerful influence of communism, particularly in college campuses in America.

The 30s were probably, and the Depression was probably the heyday of Marxism in America.

It was openly espoused on campuses. And he said he was somewhat influenced by that, but he always came around to an understanding that that was not the direction of the gospel.

So he said he was impacted by it, he was influenced by it, but he also resisted it as best as he was able.

And then when you're in the midst of things, sometimes it's a little difficult to know exactly how to resist and what way you should push back.

And he certainly felt that at the university. Now, how far was his development into presuppositionalism when he entered into seminary?

I understand that he actually was educated in a liberal seminary.

And that was, unless I'm wrong in remembering, wasn't that an intentional thing where he was fully aware of what he was getting into?

Yes, the Presbyterian Church had a seminary north of San Francisco.

He felt it was going liberal even then, but it still professed to be orthodox.

And there were other seminaries there, but he just didn't see any point.

So he decided he might as well go to a very liberal university called the Pacific School of Religion.

And it didn't pretend to be conservative. So he thought it was just a little bit more honest in what it was offering.

He also took a number of courses at other nearby seminaries, including a

Unitarian seminary. And while he was going to seminary, he still took courses at the nearby

University of California, Berkeley. So he was getting a lot of ideas from a lot of different areas, and so he would read these things.

And he said sometimes he would take courses, particularly at the university, and he would take them for what he wanted and then he would drop them.

He said he was surprised he graduated with honors because he was a little bit rebellious in that vein.

Rebellious against the liberal school, you mean? Yes, particularly their philosophy department.

Yeah. And we have to go to our first commercial break. If anybody would like to join us with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

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Joseph Piper of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary sent you. Welcome back.

If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Mark R. Rashtooni, and we are discussing.

The biography is written about his dad, Rusas John Rashtooni, A Brief History of the

Life and Ministry of My Father. If you have questions, submit them to chrisarnson at gmail .com

and give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. And we have some folks waiting for their questions to be asked.

But before we go to them, first of all, am I butchering the pronunciation of both your dad's first and last name?

It's there's no accent in Armenian, so the correct pronunciation would be

Rusas Rashtooni. OK, and I don't know if I said that appropriately or not, because it's the way that you said it.

It sounds like that's what I said. So I think you're good. And before we continue on, as far as where we left off about his seminary education,

I'd love to know how, where and when he met your mom. And I don't know if that predated his seminary or not, but tell us about that.

Yes, my father went to the university, excuse me, the Pacific School of Religion.

He graduated in 1944. And so and he met my mom about a year and a half before he graduated and they were married the

December. Before he graduated, which would be December 1943, they met at a conference.

The exact nature of the conference, I think, was some kind of a missions or church conference.

And it may have involved his work at the time in the Chinese Presbyterian Church. She had been an off -and -on domestic missionary in various capacities, in various places.

In fact, the last place she had served before their marriage was actually in Milwaukee, Nevada.

And she made him aware of the need there because they were having intermittent vacancies in that church.

And so that's how my father even became aware of that work. And the need for a pastor there when he graduated.

So that was his first pastorate. And they've been married about six months. But when he went to Owyhee, Nevada, which was a very remote

Indian reservation, about 100 miles from small towns to the north or south, 30 miles from the nearest paved road.

Yes, and I know that you are his only son. And how many siblings?

There were six of us. I had an older brother who was adopted. He's passed away. But I have four sisters.

And so tell us now about your own upbringing under the parenting of such a giant in 20th century

Christian history. And about your own journey in the

Christian faith. Do you have any recollection of not believing in what your father was teaching you in that kind of thing?

Or is it one of those circumstances where as long as you can remember, you always believed in Christ?

I was raised in a

Christian home. I was the youngest of six children. And so particularly

I can recall when I was about four or five years old, when the other children were all at school,

I would sometimes accompany my father on his pastoral visits, particularly when he went to hospitals.

I can remember many times I would be waiting. I'd be parked in the waiting room.

And while my father would do visitations at local hospitals, I'd also go with him to Bible studies and so forth.

And I didn't realize until much later that was a pattern that his father had done with him.

His father often took him on pastoral calls and such. And in fact, his father had done much the same thing for his father in the old country.

And so it was sort of a tradition, apparently, that I didn't even realize that I was often accompanying my father on various aspects of his pastoral work where it was practical.

And then we had family devotions. And I can remember learning the catechism very early on because something was expected of me to learn the answers to the catechism questions.

My dad would explain, but I can remember that from preschool days.

And so I was raised in the faith. I never doubted it. I never had a period of rebellion against it, which is really the grace of God, because I became a teenager in the 1960s when it was happening in our culture.

And fortunately, in fact, Santa Cruz, where we lived until I was eight later, probably a good thing we were able to move away from there.

It was a retirement home, a retirement community, largely in a weekend beach retreat for Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area people.

But very soon after we left there, the University of California built a campus there, which became known as one of the most leftist campuses in the very leftist

University of California system. And also the hippies found that area as very desirable.

So there was a huge influx of hippies to that area.

And that area changed radically. And it's been very, very liberal.

It's the most liberal area of California today. So it's a good thing that I didn't have to grow up in that environment.

We actually moved over the mountains to what later became Silicon Valley. And then for about 10 years, I lived in Los Angeles when my father started

Chalcedon. And when we left Santa Cruz, I was then able to attend

Christian schools. So I went to Christian schools on my upbringing, Lutheran, Missouri Synod Lutheran schools, and then

Fundamentalist Baptist schools. And then I ended up going to more of an evangelical

Baptist college in Southern California before I began my teaching career.

But I never doubted the faith. And my father was always worked.

Most of my life, my father worked out of our home. So he was always nearby.

And so he was always a resource. If I had a question about something, he could give me an answer, sometimes a more lengthy answer than I wanted.

But he always could put things into perspective. And so that was a great help.

So my world and life view was Christian very early and never rebelled against it.

It became my whole framework of my existence. So I was blessed, really, with not having that period of rebellion.

And did any of your childhood involve being raised on the Indian reservation that you mentioned before?

No, I was born a year and a half after he left the reservation. All my siblings were there for time.

And a couple of them remember it still. And I want to get back to that reservation because your dad did write about that.

But before I do that, let me go to one of our listener questions. We have

Chris from Coram, New York, who is a pastor at Hope Reform Baptist Church in Coram, which also happens to be a sponsor of this program.

And he says, I can't believe you're not post -mill, Chris. Here is the actual question he has.

Aside from the scriptures, what do you think is a good introductory work to recommend to folks who are just being introduced to post -millennialism?

That's hard to say. Probably of my father's works, I would recommend God's Plan for Victory, which is really just a large pamphlet.

And as well as His Thy Kingdom Come, it was a kind of a perspective on his view of eschatology.

He did not write extensively on eschatology. It's kind of intermixed in all of his other writings, his post -millennial view, but he never did write extensively on eschatology as an isolated subject.

Right. As I said, one of the things I found appealing about him and reading his articles as a subscriber to the

Chalcedon Report was that he was not a one -string banjo.

He did not just get on a hobby horse about post -millennialism that can get monotonous after a while when anybody, no matter what their views are, if they isolate the majority of their teachings to one area of scriptures,

I think that could be damaging and harmful. But he didn't strike me as doing that.

In fact, one thing I forgot to mention before, your father was actually a client of mine when

I worked for 15 years at WMCA 570 AM in New York, which is an affiliate of Salem Communications, the largest

Christian radio network in the world. I had developed and created a program called

The Voice of Sovereign Grace. Every night, Monday through Friday, there was a different host of the program who was theologically

Reformed. Your father was one of those hosts, and he was on his segment, interviewed every week by our mutual friend who has gone home to be with the

Lord, Steve Schlissel. This was years before Steve departed from his previous theological positions and became more extreme in his federal vision views.

But I have fond memories of listening to Steve interviewing your dad.

I don't know if you were even aware of that. Yeah, I remember him doing those.

Oh, wow, great. So, by the way, Chris in quorum,

Pastor Chris, you have won a free copy by virtue of your question,

Roussos John Rashtouni, A Brief History of the Life and Ministry of My Father by my guest

Mark R. Rashtouni. Make sure I have your mailing address so that that can be shipped out to you as soon as possible.

But let's go back to the Indian Reservation, and your dad, from what

I understand, had an indictment against not only the government of the

United States and their welfare approaches to the Native American Indians, but also the church in somehow making the

Native Americans dependent upon others other than their own community, if you want to elaborate on that.

Right. The influence of Christianity, in fact, the number of Christians amongst the

Indians declined precipitously at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century.

It continued. The reservation system was essentially the largest experiment in socialism to that date ever produced by the

American government. And it destroyed the

Indian, my father said, the old time Indians. And he met Indians who remembered fighting against white men in the late 1800s.

He knew Indians who remembered the old ways.

They were not romantic about the Indian past. In fact, they were often very upset that anthropologists thought that they were helping them by suggesting that they should maintain the old ways.

The old Indians said they're interested in us as to be interested in a museum piece.

And we don't want to be museum pieces. We want what the white man wants. And part of what took that away was the reservation system, because it meant that it separated the

Indian from the rest of culture. And it also gave him a protection.

And by the way, the United States government went back and forth on their policy on what would be best for the white man.

And that's bad when the entire government is trying to decide what's best for an entire group of people, because they'll go one direction for a time, and then a new administration is going to go in another direction.

And they varied between integrating the Indian with white culture and segregating them and supposedly helping them by preserving their identity.

So the Indian was the victim of this experimentation. And the reservation was seen as a way to guarantee some security for the

Indian. But it also meant that the Indian could not fail.

He couldn't sell his land. He couldn't lose his land permanently. It was always a check for him the next month.

And so the Indian learned that they could be rather improvident. Father said that you could be successful on the reservation.

It was good cattle country. And if you were responsible, you could make a decent income raising cattle on the reservation.

And so he said the successful element on the reservation were usually the

Christian Indians, because they had a moral framework for their life.

And they were less inclined to dissipate their income and dissipate their life through immoral means.

But the old Indians said, we're proud of the fact that we were survivors in very difficult conditions, very difficult times.

There was no backup there for us, but they survived. And they thought that that's what developed their character.

And the reservation system pulled that need to survive out from under the

Indian, and it didn't replace it with anything. And so the Indian basically was now leading a pointless life.

Even their old religion didn't really mean anything, because much of the religion for the

Paiutes and Shoshones was based upon the wolf and hunting the wolf. And now that they were sedentary on the reservation raising cattle, that really wasn't particularly became irrelevant.

So nothing replaced what was lost. As far as the church goes, the church was responsible, too, for this mess, because the church

Christians really thought it was a good idea to put the Indians on reservations because it would be easier to evangelize them there.

And, you know, put them in one place where they could have churches.

And the Christians thought that this would simplify the integration of Indians into Christian culture.

And so Christians tended to support the reservation system. And it's done nothing but harm for the

Indian. And a lot of Indians who had some get up and go and some ambition left the reservation.

And they sought their future outside the reservation independently of the reservation.

And it did them probably a lot of good. I once asked my students when

I was teaching early in my career, I said, well, how many of you are Irish? How many of you are this or that?

A few people raised their hands for this. I said, how many of you have Indian blood in you? And about half the class raised their hand.

They knew they had some Indian blood in them and they were proud of it. The Indians, most

Indians married, intermarried into white culture. We didn't destroy them.

We didn't kill them. We actually integrated them. And so they're part of every group now in America.

The anthropologists came along and said, no, no, no. If you're really going to have Indians, we have to have people who are living the way

Indians did at some point in the past as to what we define an

Indian to be. And the Indians on the reservations who wanted to live and have a good life and they wanted the same things white people wanted.

And they were very offended by that treatment. Yeah, that's the common impression you get in movies and media that the

Native Americans want to preserve the old ways and stop intruding on us and all that kind of thing.

But they wanted the American dream in their own lives. Yes. And those who have tried to reclaim things of the past.

That came along really in the earlier to mid 20th century that became a more popular thing.

And my father said he witnessed the old Indians making fun of some of the new

Indians who wanted to preserve a way of life they had never known. And the older generation says, you know, we froze to death with barely any clothes on.

And we don't want to go back to that. So it was the older ones that didn't want to go back to that.

Right, right. They were happy with the life as ranchers.

That was a good life for them. It was an improvement. And they certainly didn't want to go back to being hunter gatherers in a sense of the word.

Yeah, that's counterintuitive when you think about it. It's the younger folks that wanted to go back to the older ways that they never experienced personally.

Well, we do the same thing. We look back nostalgically at some things in the past, but very selectively.

There were a lot of things about the past that we would want no part of today. We like the conveniences that we have now.

So we're very selective and we romanticize certain things about the past and want to hang on to those and think about those.

But we need to be future oriented. And if you're a Christian, it automatically forces you to be future oriented.

Because Christianity is about our responsibilities now, but it's always moving towards a future in Christ.

And Christianity has that big picture. And you need some sort of a big picture in life to make it purposeful.

And we really destroyed any purposeful life for the

Indians. When people are just getting by from one government check to the next, it leads to such things as fornication, alcohol that were just endemic on the reservation, and they still are.

Did your dad witness conversions to Christ and even to Reformed theology amongst the

Native Americans? It was not overwhelming, but there was a strong Christian element, he said, on the reservation.

And he always commended the three men who were his elders there, and he greatly admired them.

And by the way, folks, you can go to irontripandsirenradio .com and type in Cherokee in the search engine and you can hear an interview

I had conducted with a brother doing missionary work amongst the

Cherokees in North Carolina. But for those of you who want to order the book that R .J.

Rushnoony wrote on the American Indians, it's called

The American Indian, A Standing Indictment Against Christianity and Stateism in America.

And now, is it only available in audio and Kindle or is it also in a paper version?

It's available in paperback. Okay, great. And just go to the

Calcedon Foundation's website, calcedon .edu.

And by the way, that's spelled C -H -A -L -C -E -D -O -N, calcedon .edu.

And you can also go to calcedonstore, all one word, calcedonstore .com.

But we are going to our midway break, and when we get back, we'll get to more of your questions, your listener questions.

And if you would like to join those already waiting, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chris Arnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Mark Rushnoony after these messages. I'm Dr.

Joseph Piper, President and Professor of Systematic and Homiletical Theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylors, South Carolina.

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Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. We have

Levi in Providence, Rhode Island, who has a question. He said, are you comfortable telling us why there was a falling out between your father and his son -in -law,

Gary North, and did they have theological differences as well? I also was wondering if they ever reconciled before your dad died.

The falling out between my father and Gary North was, there were a lot of issues, some of them just personality that didn't really precipitate a break.

But I think the issue that really caused the split was an article that Gary had written, and my father did not agree with the theology of it.

He thought it was highly speculative theology, thought it was just too offbeat to publish.

And Gary dug in his heels and wanted that, insisted that that be published.

And Gary said some inflammatory things, and basically they separated over that.

And Gary at that point had been a regular contributor for many years to the Chalcedon Report, and that ended it.

Did they ever reconcile before your dad went home to the Lord? Not really.

Gary sent a very nice email to my father just at the very end.

But not a true reconciliation, no. Okay, that's sad to hear. Levi, you've also won a free copy of the book by my guest

Mark Rastuni, so make sure that you give us your full mailing address in Providence, Rhode Island, so that we can have that shipped out to you.

We have David in Duval, Washington, and David wants to know, when your dad had been involved in his ministry early on, was he a lone voice for theonomy and reconstruction, or how quickly was he rallied by the side of such men as Greg Bonson and others?

Well, you have to remember, when my father started talking about biblical law, he usually referred to it as God's law.

Greg Bonson tended to use the term theonomy. But when that issue was going on,

Greg Bonson was still quite young. Gary was, I think, just graduated from the university, and so he was young.

So Gary and Greg Bonson in those years were fairly young, although Greg did admirably take up the cause of theonomy in his ministry to a remarkable extent.

My father first spoke on the issue of theonomy when he was in seminary, and he said something to the effect in a group that the

Bible applied to all areas of life. And he said in his words,

I got clobbered. You recognize that that was a position, that general position was going to be so unwelcome.

He said someday he was going to research that and study it more fully, because he didn't think when he was in seminary he was in a position to defend himself on that.

And he never had the time to go into that, because he went into some other areas of his early writings, such as presuppositionalism, and then on Christian education and statist education.

And those were his earliest writings. And he never had the amount of time to really dedicate to it.

It wasn't until after the formation of Chalcedon in 1965 that he was working full time, and then he began a series on biblical law that was later published in 1973 as the

Institutes of Biblical Law, Volume 1 it's now called, because he later published two other volumes.

So it was, if you read some of his very, very early things, you can see it basically he held to these positions, but he didn't want to come out and openly on it too much until he was ready to defend it, and he had had time to study it extensively.

And that didn't happen until the late 60s. And at that time, how many years was he almost a lone voice?

I know that he didn't invent these things, but at the same time, obviously it wasn't widely believed and taught before there was some kind of a resurgence of the

Theonomy and Reconstruction somewhere in the 70s and 80s. And even much of the

Reformed community that was much of the basis of his early listeners had developed into something of a de facto two dispensation.

There's law and grace. And just separating those out, even though they were vaguely defined at times, but that was their distinction that they wanted to hold.

And my father thought that was a false antithesis and that God's law was itself an act of grace.

And when God tells you, we're familiar with the expression of someone who is frustrated in a relationship.

I don't know what you expect of me. Well, God's law, he saw as a grace because God was telling us what was expected of us.

So we should see God's law, not as an alternative to grace, but as itself a grace.

When God gives us specific instructions that says, this is how you obey me.

And this is how you are to understand righteousness. That revelation is itself an act of grace.

And so he very much objected to that idea that we were separating out by artificial distinctions parts of the word of God.

And we were really largely dismissing them. And he felt that the

American church had come to dismiss far too much because it was creating an artificial distinctions.

And so he saw biblical law as basically instructions in how we obey

God. It's not the means to justification. He never said that. And so when people criticize him for salvation by works of the law, it's obvious to me, they haven't actually read what he said on it.

He saw biblical law as how we obey God, how we grow in grace. It's our means of sanctification, not our means of justification.

Amen. Well, thank you, David. Please give us your full name and address so that you can also receive a free copy of the biography of R .J.

Rustuni that we are discussing today with the author, R .J.

Rustuni's son, Mark. And we have Corbett in Dublin, California.

And Corbett says, why do you think amongst Reformed people there is such an apprehension to even dialogue about theonomy and reconstruction?

And it seems to be in the minds of many, a pariah, even though so much is agreed upon with the theology of prominent theonomists and reconstructions.

Well, that's a good question. I would say that, this is a very general statement, but I would say that people today, including myself, tend to be somewhat lazy intellectually and it's easy to fall back on a category or dismissal that we've been handed.

And to say, well, if I avoid that, I'm staying within the correct bounds without even having to think about it.

And if I don't go over this far on this side, I'm okay. And I don't really have to figure out the issue.

I don't have to think too hard. So it's a real tendency. That's why I was speaking of this law versus grace.

If you are thinking in those terms of maintaining a distinction between law and grace, and you think that is the path of orthodoxy, then that's going to be your comfort zone.

That's going to be your default. And I think correcting, and it's not just true in theology, correcting people's views on anything means you not only have to present the truth to them, but they have to see the error of their previous position, including why they are dismissing something or why they are resistant to something.

And you have to get to that fundamental issue of where they're coming from. And that's very difficult.

And that's a very time -consuming process. When my father first started, it was great opposition to his position.

It's very slowly becoming, I wouldn't say mainstream, but it's becoming far more common.

And his ideas have seeped into all sorts of communities of faith that they were probably very resistant to a few years ago.

Actually, the next question very much is a great segue to that.

We have, let's see, I was just looking at the question and it seems to have escaped my view.

Oh, Byron, and Byron is located in Universal City, Texas.

And Byron asks, sometimes when people in a theological camp witness others starting to adopt many of their beliefs, but not all of them, the original folks feel uncomfortable by their intrusion or think that they are really making more problems than they're worth.

I'm speaking even in particular about the growing acceptance of theonomy and Reconstruction amongst many

Reformed Baptists, which decades ago was nearly unheard of.

That's interesting. I have witnessed and know personally a number of Reformed Baptists that have become theonomists and Reconstructionists.

And in fact, I remember when I was reading the Chalcedon report back in the perhaps late 80s, 90s, the only

Reformed Baptist I knew of who was a Reconstructionist or a theonomist was Bill Einwechter here in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

I didn't know of any others, but what's your experience with that? And how can you respond to the listener's question?

Well, I think it's very true that there's a suspicion of how ideas are adopted and whether they're going to be, when they're partially adopted, whether they're going to be twisted and whether the original idea is going to lose its distinctiveness.

So I think suspicions like that are probably pretty normal in human character.

As I say, we sometimes look at peripherals.

We sometimes see what we don't like about something and an idea.

So why aren't they dropping that idea on the way? If they're going to adopt our ideas, we don't really want to associate it with these other ideas.

But ideas are a funny thing. They're subtle, and Richard Weaver back in the 50s wrote a book titled

Ideas Have Consequences. One of the great titles of any book, certainly in our lifetimes, ideas do have consequences.

And sometimes we guard those ideas so carefully, we just forget that ideas percolate through different people in different ways.

And I think we have to leave the results of some of that to God. And we can't control how ideas develop and how movements take shape.

I mean, the Christian church has been developing now for 2 ,000 years, and none of us are really going to control how it develops in the next 1 ,000 years or even the next 20 years.

We're all just servants, and we faithfully do our work and leave the results to God.

I could see the frustration more in an author thinking that perhaps his ideas are being adulterated or co -opted.

But we just can't worry about the purity of an idea or whether it's good that a particular group adopts them.

Let's leave the development of God's kingdom up to the Holy Spirit.

Amen. And before I take any more listener questions,

I want you to start to highlight some things that you've written about your father in the biography that you believe are the most prominent things you want people to remember him for.

And if you could just go through some of those before we go to our next commercial break, which will be briefer than the others.

Well, I went into a lengthy description of the family background, and my grandparents' escape out of the

Ottoman Empire and then out of Russia before the Russian Revolution happened through a series of providential events that enabled their escape and their survival.

And so I think the grace of God was very, very apparent in my father's life, even when he was in my grandmother's womb, because he wasn't born until after they got to New York.

But she was pregnant with him during all those upheavals and that escape into Russia.

And their survival was even endowed in places. And they saw bloodshed around them and they lost family members.

So I think the grace of God in his life early on, I think, is something that came out very much to me as I was writing them.

And then, too, that he faced opposition throughout his entire ministry, but he didn't let it affect him personally.

And he kept moving forward. And he did that because really of his theology. He believed in the eventual growth of the kingdom.

He believed if he did what was right, if he stood for what was right, that the results, if not for his work, then his testimony of what was true, what was right, would at least be a part of that eventual growth of the kingdom.

So he didn't think it really depended upon him and his work. He didn't try to build

Chalcedon up into a super organization. He encouraged other people to pursue what he called

Christian reconstruction, an analogy he used for the Christian responsibility in days such as this, to rebuild the foundations and to stand in terms of what is right.

But ultimately, it's all about the Holy Spirit. We are called to be faithful.

When you look at the course of history, there are very few individuals that you could name who pushed

Christianity forward. The people we remember in the history of Christianity are really individuals who were faithful to the preaching of the gospel, or they were faithful in recalling the church to a better understanding of biblical doctrine.

We remember them for their contribution, but no one person really advanced Christianity substantially in their lifetime.

We are all just contributors and we act faithfully. The movement of the kingdom of God, I believe, is something that's inevitable because the

Holy Spirit is not going to let it fail. He stood in terms of what he felt was right, even though he had some serious setbacks.

There were times when he was close to big money, and it came and it went, it didn't happen.

He didn't let that upset him because he didn't see having money as really the vehicle that was going to advance the kingdom of God.

It was faithfulness, and he just stood faithful. Praise God, a very admirable trait to have because I know that that's something that most of us, including me, battle with.

Envy and disappointment and all that kind of thing when it comes to the hopes of having a more affluent life and seeing our dreams getting crushed and all that kind of thing.

Let me take one more listener question before we go to the final break.

We have Ruben in Brooklyn, New York. Ruben says,

Did your dad have any unlikely heroes, favorite authors, or preachers that people might be surprised to hear about?

Unlikely? I'm not sure if I could answer that specifically.

He liked people who acted out what they professed.

And so he, particularly when he was helping persecuted ministries, particularly in the 80s, 70s and 80s, he admired people who were doing something.

In fact, he once said, if someone has very different theology than me that I might not disagree with, but if they are actually doing the work of the

Lord, the Holy Spirit works through that. And I don't have to be concerned that they're errant in one area of theology.

God is going to sort out whether their ministry is productive and what it leads to.

And it's not that man, it's not me. And he said, you know, people who don't even agree with my view of Christian reconstruction, because there are many people who are

Christian reconstructionists who don't know it because they're building the kingdom. He said, if you're translating the

Bible and you have very different theology than me, but if you faithfully translate the

Bible into another language, you are a Christian reconstructionist. If you're involved in Christian education, you are building something for the future.

You are building the kingdom of God and trying to nurture it. So he said, you don't have to agree with me specifically.

And he really greatly admired people who were out there doing. That was what caused him to admire individuals.

And so William Booth, who founded the Salvation Army, he often used him as an example of what great things a person could do.

And he would use other people as an example. Well, look what they've done because they've gone out and they've actually done something and he didn't have to agree with them 100 % if he said that this is contributing to the glory of God and furthering the kingdom work.

Yes, one of the things that impressed me, if you recall earlier in the program,

I said I used to mail books to your father that I enjoyed and almost every single time he wrote a positive review for them in the

Chalcedon Report. I know that there are people who argue over how it should be pronounced.

But those books were not typically by theonomists and sometimes not even

Reformed people. And I can even remember him writing a very glowing review for an excellent book that was opposing feminism, feminism in the

Bible, by the late Dr. Jack Cottrell, who was a

Church of Christ minister and professor. And he, your dad, really thoroughly enjoyed that book, as did

I, and didn't allow the differences that they had over Reformed theology and other things.

He didn't allow that to stop him from seeing great value in something that the man had written.

And that was the case with other books by dispensationalists that weren't on the topic of those things that he disagreed with.

There weren't defenses of dispensationalism, but it just so happened that the author had views different than your dad.

And it was interesting to see how often he really was glowing in the way that he would write about these works.

Yes, when he was defending Christians in school trials, he found that sometimes the state knew that if they picked a small

Christian school with an independent church and they went after it, it was going to be easy pickings.

And so my father would often go defend people who probably had never heard of him before.

But he felt that in attacking that little offbeat group, the state was really attacking

Christianity as a whole. And so he said, now, this is something that will surprise you.

He even was supportive of legal defense of Scientology to their right, because he says, yeah, they'll go after the easy pickings, the low hanging fruit.

They'll go after groups that nobody cares about and would just like to see eliminated. But if their legal rights are abused, if they lose their legal rights against the state, then we lose ours also.

And so he would even defend people with whom he didn't even consider Christian at times in the case of Scientology.

I don't think he actually testified to them, but he was interested in their case. And he certainly wanted them to be vindicated, because he knew then if they could go after somebody with as much money as Scientology, they could go after any

Christian group as well. And we're going to our final break. And if you have a question that you'd like to ask,

I would strongly urge you to send it immediately because we're rapidly running out of time. ChrisArnson at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least. City and state and country of residence. If you live outside the

USA, don't go away. We're going to be right back. I'm Dr.

Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love,

Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Corham, Long Island, New York, pastored by Rich Jensen and Christopher McDowell.

It's such a joy to witness and experience fellowship with people of God, like the dear saints at Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Corham, who have an intensely passionate desire to continue digging deeper and deeper into the unfathomable riches of Christ in His Holy Word and to enthusiastically proclaim

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That's 631 -696 -5711. Tell the folks at Hope Reformed Baptist Church of Corham, Long Island, New York that you heard about them from Tony Costa on Iron Sharpens Iron.

I'm Pastor Keith Allen of Lindbrook Baptist Church, a

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At Lindbrook Baptist Church, we believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired

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We believe in salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. This salvation is based upon the sovereign grace of God, was purchased by Christ on the cross, and is received through faith alone, apart from any human merit, works, or ritual.

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Lord's Day, we'd love to have you come and join us in worship. For details, visit LindbrookBaptist .org.

That's L -Y -N -BrookBaptist .org. This is Pastor Keith Allen of Lindbrook Baptist Church, reminding you that by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves.

It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

The Lord bless you in the knowledge of himself. Bill Sousa, Grace Church at Franklin, here in the beautiful state of Tennessee.

Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support Iron Sharpens Iron radio financially.

Grace Church at Franklin is an independent, autonomous body of believers which strives to clearly declare the whole counsel of God as revealed in Scripture through the person and work of our

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If you live near Franklin, Tennessee, and Franklin is just south of Nashville, maybe 10 minutes, or you are visiting this area, or you have friends and loved ones nearby, we hope you will join us some

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This is Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our sovereign

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Puritan Reformed is a Bible -believing, kingdom -building, devil -fighting church. We are devoted to upholding the apostolic doctrine and practice preserved in Scripture alone.

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And we have Amethyst in Jupiter, Florida, who says, do you think that there is anything going on in modern theonomy that would greatly disappoint your dad if he were alive to see it and make him want to disavow them or not associate with them in any way?

I don't think there would be anything that dramatic that he would see.

Obviously, ideas, he came to these ideas throughout over several years of studying scripture.

He did not have all the answers. Theonomy is basically the principle of God's law and how they were applied in specific circumstances.

But I think theonomy needs to be applied in different areas. And I think that was his thing.

We have to understand how to create a more godly, a more obedient society.

I'm sure there are things in any group, any movement, that he or anyone else could disagree with.

But we can't let a desire for perfection interfere with what seems to be, in many cases, the advance of the kingdom.

And we can say this about any number of areas. So would he see something in modern theonomy that would cause him to regret it or think that that was going in a dangerous direction?

I kind of doubt it because that's not the nature of how most ideas develop.

And so, yeah, he might have some disagreements, sometimes maybe a strong disagreement, but leave the work of the kingdom up to the

Holy Spirit and we move forward. And our measurement is not whether we agree with something or disagree with something, but is it faithful?

And that's where we should be discussing things with others, not that you don't conform to my ideas, but is it faithful to Scripture?

And as long as we can maintain that discussion with different people we disagree with,

I think we're going to move things in a positive direction. Now, there was a split, if you will, amongst theonomists during the rise of the federal vision movement.

And I know that there were theonomic churches that openly opposed federal vision while others embraced it.

Where do you think he would have been with that? It's a good question.

It depends how people define the federal vision. Right, because they're not monolithic, I know.

Right. I think on the whole, because all that came about after his passing, so I couldn't ask his opinion on that.

But from my perspective, what was concerning about federal vision, I think, would have been the confusion of justification and sanctification.

He worked very clearly in terms of traditional reformed understandings of what was justification, what was sanctification.

And I think he would have seen that movement as blurring the line.

And so I think that would have distressed him for sure. Yes.

And I want you to now, in the several minutes we have left, to leave our audience with what you most want etched in the hearts and minds today.

I wrote this biography because I wanted to put my father's life and the body of his work into a context that would force his critics to at least have some touchstone they had to refer to.

I wanted the truth of his life out there because there are all kinds of fanciful things that have been said.

And you could say almost anything on the Internet and it's going to come back. And so I think this at least will create some kind of a framework in which to understand who

R .J. Rushdoonie really was, and thereby exclude some of the nonsense of who he was not.

So I really wanted this because I felt I had a response. I did this because I had felt

I had a responsibility to at least keep the discussion honest. And so I had to go on record.

And I'm sure that all those who not only cherish the memory of your dad, but have been influenced by him, blessed by him, and still continue to be nourished by his writings and the recordings of his teaching today, are very glad that you wrote this.

And by the way, this is a gorgeous hardback. Rosshouse Books really does a top -notch job with their publication.

They do not take a second place to major publishers at all in the quality of the publishing.

And if you want to order this book, you can go to the Calcedon Foundation website, calcedon .edu,

calcedon .edu. And you can also go specifically to their store, calcedonstore .com,

calcedonstore .com. And once again, Calcedon is spelled C -H -A -L -C -E -D -O -N, store .com.

And I just want to ask you folks, I want to remind you folks listening, if you really enjoyed programs like the one we had today, please consider prayerfully helping us to remain on the air with your financial support and advertising.

Please go to www .irontripandzioneradio .com, click Support, then click

Click to Donate Now. And you can donate instantly with a debit or credit card, or you can mail a check to the address that appears on your screen if you prefer that.

And checks are made payable to you, Iron Trip and Zion Radio. I want to thank

Mark Rustuni for doing such an exquisite job today. I look forward to having him back on the program.

I want to thank each and every one of you who listened, especially those who took the time to write questions.

And by the way, everybody who has written a question today is going to receive a free copy of the book,

Roussos John Rustuni, A Brief History on the Life and Ministry of My Father by Mark Rustuni.

And so make sure we have your mailing address if you didn't submit it already. I want you all to have a wonderful, joyful, healthy, happy, safe, and Christ -honoring weekend and Lord's Day.

And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your entire lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions next week on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.