Rj Rushdoony Quotes

It must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society.

History has never been dominated by majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith.

Life is rarely easy, but, with Christ our King, it is always good.

To control the future requires the control of education and of the child. Hence, for Christians to tolerate statist education, or to allow their children to be trained thereby, means to renounce power in society, to renounce their children, and to deny Christ's Lordship over all of life.

People do not avoid the Bible because it is difficult to understand as much as because what they understand condemns their conscience and throws light on dark corners in their lives which they prefer to keep dark.

We cannot use our thoughts and feelings as a standard: only God’s Word is the test.

There can be no good character in civil government if there is none in the people. You cannot make a good omelet with bad eggs.

We are very much in need now of Christian pioneers. This means a people who are zealous to grow and to exercise dominion in Christ.

Godly men are not revolutionists: the Lord's way is regeneration, not revolution.

Socialism is politicized envy.

The result of becoming tolerant towards sin is that we become intolerant towards God and His Word.

Our basic problem today is that we have two religions in conflict, humanism and Christianity, each with its own morality and the laws of that morality.

The Lord supplies our needs, but not our selfishness

Children are no longer seen by many people as a blessing from God but as extensions of personal goals and pride. As a result, the family under humanism is in a state of crisis.

The precondition of giving thanks with sincerity is always humility.

Our increasingly humanistic laws, courts and legislators are giving us a new morality. They tell us, as they strike down laws resting upon biblical foundations, that morality cannot be legislated, but what they offer is not only legislated morality, but salvation by law.

Humanistic law aims at saving man and remaking society. For Humanism, salvation is an act of the state.

Law is good, proper, and essential in its place, but law can save no man, nor can law remake man and society.

We may disagree with the morality of a law, but we cannot deny the moral concern of a law.

Man lives in time but his life transcends time.

All too many churchmen view the undisciplined & amoral products of statist education as evidences of the failure of these schools. On the contrary, they are evidences of their success.

It is significant that, as innocent babies are killed, and capital punishment is withheld from their murderers, the same men who plead for the murderer's life also demand the “right” to abortion. Usually, the same picketers that carry a sign one day, “Abolish Capital Punishment,” also carry “Legalize Abortion” another day. When this is called to their attention, their answer is, “There is no contradiction involved.” They are right: the thesis is “condemn the innocent and free the guilty.

Our character is revealed under pressure.

Freedom in the Biblical sense is always at a price; it is a costly gift, and it requires great things of us.

To be fearless in the Lord does not require us to be great and powerful men, but only to believe in the great and powerful God.

In any age, our problems are a result of sin, and the solution is faith and obedience.

The purpose of Christian education is not academic: it is religious and practical.

It is the fear of God which gives us the confidence to face men and their evil and to be confident of ultimate victory.

Slaves are governed by the fear of man, and, whenever the fear of man replaces the fear of God in a society, slavery reappears and increases.

[T]he more man accepts his limitations, the better is he enabled to know things truly.

The resurrection of the body forbids us to despise the material realm.

The triune God exercises total government over all things, and He requires us as His image-bearers to exercise government in Christ in our own spheres in terms of His law.

The Bible is God's law-word which must govern every sphere of life and thought.

It needs more than ever to be stressed that the best and truest educators are parents under God. The greatest school is the family. In learning, no act of teaching in any school or university compares to the routine task of mothers in teaching a babe who speaks no language the mother tongue in so short a time. No other task in education is equal to this. The moral training of the children, the discipline of good habits, is an inheritance from the parents to the children which surpasses all other. The family is the first and basic school of man.

Problems are a part of life in a fallen world, and they are necessary part of it, necessary to our testing and to our growth.

We sin if we do not confront sin as sin.

If God be denied, then His sovereignty and infallibility accrue to other agencies.

The end of an age is always a time of turmoil, war, economic catastrophe, cynicism, lawlessness and distress. But it is also an era of heightened challenge and creativity, of issues, and their world-wide scope, never has an era faced a more demanding and exciting crisis. This then, above all else, is the great and glorious era to live in, a time of of opportunity, one requiring fresh and vigorous thinking, indeed, a glorious time to be alive.

Our progress in the past usually came slowly, and our recovery will come slowly. It will come as men, each in their sphere of action, begin the task of reconstruction. Reconstruction begins with our lives and God's grace; it extends to our vocations, our institutions' homes, and society' Life and progress are made up of a great number of little things; we cover a mile by small steps, and the surest move forward is that small step rather than a giant day dream.

because the world is God’s creation and law order, it is the truth which in time shall prevail and triumph.

We are getting what we paid for, and if we want something else, we are going to have to pay for it, in work, sweat, and sacrifice.

Before the rise of Deism, Calvin condemned the pragmatic deism which relegated God to heaven and left the government of the world to men.

For Dewey, the Great Community was the basic fact of history. The individual and the soul were invalid concepts, man was truly man, not as an individual, but as after Aristotle, in society and supremely in the State. Thus, for Dewey, true education mean not the development of the individual in terms of learning, but his socialization. Progressive education... educates the individual in terms of particular facts of the universe without reference to God, truth, or morality.

Humanism believes in salvation by works of law. By vast appropriations of money, and dedicated labor, [it] is trying to save all nations and races, all men from all problems, in the hopes of creating paradise on earth. [It] is trying to bring peace on earth and goodwill among men by acts of state and works of law, not by Jesus Christ.

According to Scripture, it was not man's flesh that fell into sin, but the whole man. The doctrine of total depravity means that the extent of the Fall is total, that every aspect of man's being is tainted by sin, and that the root of it is the 'heart' of man, in his mind, nature and being. To seek refuge in the spirit to escape from the flesh is to seek sanctity in the capitol of sin, for it was and is man's desire to be as God, to be his own god, determining good and evil for himself, which is the essence of original sin (Gen. 3:5). The ascetic quest thus took refuge in sin from sin! It flew from the suburbs of temptation into the central city of sin and was then bewildered to find the enemy there.

The family is the world's greatest welfare agency, and the most successful. What the federal government has done in welfare is small and trifling compared to what the families of America do daily, caring for their own, relieving family distresses, providing medical care and education for one another, and so on. No civil government could begin to finance what the families underwrite daily. The family's welfare program, for all its failures from time to time, is proportionately the world's most successful operation by an incomparable margin.

As we grow in grace, we become a blessing to the world around us, and the world, in terms of its relations to us, is blessed or cursed. This means that the politics of the world capitols, however important, is not as determinative of the future as the faithfulness of the covenant people to their God and to His covenant law-word. When history wallows needlessly in the seas of politics, it is simply because the rudder of the ship, the Christian, is giving no direction and is neither a curse nor a blessing, only salt which has lost its savor and is good for nothing except to be thrown out on the road of history, “to be trodden under foot of men” (Matt. 5:13).

The doctrine of vocation or calling gained currency as men began to take time and history seriously. If the goal of the Christian life is a neoplatonic flight from this world, then pietism has effectively undermined the doctrine of non-ecclesiastical callings. To speak of having a calling is usually to speak of the clergy and clerical office.

There are more ways of stealing than simply holding a gun to a man’s head. Whenever and wherever by fraud, deception, or coercion we take from anyone what is rightfully their own, and which they have no desire to surrender, we have robbed them.

Those who hold to the Christian faith see law as an ultimate order of the universe. It is the invariable factor in a variable world, the unchanging order in a changing universe. Law for the Christian is thus absolute, final, and an aspect of God's creation and a manifestation of His nature. In terms of this, the Christian can hold that right is right, and wrong is wrong, that good and evil are unchanging moral categories rather than relative terms. From an evolutionary perspective, however, we have a very different concept of law. The universe is evolving, and the one constant factor is change. It is impossible therefore to speak of any absolute law. The universe has evolved by means of chance variations, and no law has any ultimacy or absolute truth. As a result when we talk about law, we are talking about social customs or mores and about statistical averages. Social customs change, and what was law to the ancient Gauls is not law to the modern Frenchmen. We can expect men's ideas of law to change as their societies change and evolve. Moreover, statistics give us an average and a mean which determine normality, and our ideas of law are governed by what is customary and socially accepted.

Only in the biblical revelation is the tension between law and love resolved, with vast social and historical implications, in the person and work of Jesus Christ. By His perfect righteousness and His vicarious atonement, the strictest requirements of law and justice were fully met and fulfilled, and the statutes of God observed to every jot and tittle, and yet, at one and the same time, the love of God unto salvation was manifested in and through Him. The cross thus is the symbol of the unity of law and love in Jesus Christ and of the full requirement and mutual integrity of both.

The basic function of law is to restrain (Rom. 13:1-4) not to regenerate, and when the function of the law is changed from the restraint of evil to the regeneration of man and society, then law itself begins to break down, because an impossible burden is being placed upon it...Only as we return to a Biblical foundation for law shall we again have a return to justice and order under law.

If we expect perfection from man instead of God, we are indeed in trouble, and our personal problems, with others and with ourselves, are many. Our lives will then be easily soured. Take, for example, a common situation: wedding invitations. More than a few people are annoyed when they get one, because it means a gift, and they "feel cheap" sending just a card, even though only casual friends. However, if they do not get an invitation, they are then hurt or offended. In brief, sinful man will always milk trouble out of any situation. What then do you do? "It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes," that is, men at their highest and best are still not to be trusted, for they are sinners. Our trust or dependence must be in the Lord. Thus remember, people are sinners. If they hurt and disappoint you, it is because there is first of all something with you: you have put your trust in the creature rather than the Creator. We can enjoy people, be good friends and neighbors, and live best with them if we know ourselves and them as alike sinners, either saved or lost, but even as saved, still very capable of thoughtlessness and sin. Our trust must be in the Lord.

In fact, my relationship to myself must be at all times a mediated one: I can only live my life through Christ, my mediator, and in terms of His enscriptured Word. I can have no direct or one-on-one relationship with anyone, only and always one under God in Christ and through Him. My wife, Dorothy, once told someone very close to her, who was trying to use and exploit that closeness, “You are trying to have a one-on-one relation-ship with me, but that’s impossible. I can only have a relationship that is mediated by Christ and His Word.