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 Arnzen.

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 Arnzen, 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 have 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 Rush Dooney on the program.

And Mark Rush Dooney 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 Rush Dooney, 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 Rush Dooney.

Hi, Chris, it's good to be with you.

Oh, the pleasure's 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. Rush Dooney? 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 Rushduni family and that you come from the Armenian Apostolic Church in your roots religiously, which is a branch of Oriental Orthodoxy.

And 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 Rushduni family literally goes back to the time of Isaiah. And we know that just because of the origin of our name. And the name Rushduni 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 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 became our entry into Protestantism.

Armenian Roots and the Family's Move 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 and 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 Vantill, I.

Believe. Yes. Just after the war, I believe 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 interested in it 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 Vantill, 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 Vantillian perspective.

And by what standard? And Cornelius Vantill 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 and 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 Vantill'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 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 Vantill 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. Therefore, we understand all things and only in terms of God's revelation of himself.

And in fact, we cannot really know and 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 couldn't—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 self of 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, and 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.

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

Van Til, Presuppositionalism, and a Worldview of God's Sovereignty

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

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Welcome back. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Mark R. Rashtouni, and we are discussing—the biography is written about his dad, Roussos John Rashtouni, 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 Roussos Rashtouni.

Okay, and I don't know if I said that appropriately or not, because it's—for the way that you said it, it sounds like that's what I said.

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.

He—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'd been married about six months, but when he went to Owyhee, Nevada, which was a very remote Indian reservation, about 100 miles from a small town 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. 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, and my dad would explain, but I can remember that for 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 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.

And 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 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. I never rebelled against it. It became the whole framework of my existence. 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 a 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 in 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, you know, 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.

And I had developed and created a program called The Voice of Sovereign Grace. And every night, Monday through Friday, there was a different host of the program who was theologically Reformed, and 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.

The Reservation System, Native Americans, and Christian Responsibility

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. And 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. We had 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 where he 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 it 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 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. Most Indians intermarried into white culture.