Rousas John Rushdoony
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Rousas John Rushdoony (25 April 1916 – 8 February 2001) was the seminal leader of the Christian Reconstructionist theology in the United States. He was the founder, in 1965, of the Chalcedon Foundation and the editor of its monthly magazine, the Chalcedon Report; he also published the Journal of Christian Reconstruction.
Rushdoony was born in New York the son of recently arrived Armenian immigrants who had narrowly escaped the Armenian Genocide of 1915. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a B.A. in English in 1938, a teaching credential in 1939 and a M.A. in Education in 1940. He also attended the Pacific School of Religion. He later received an honorary Doctorate from Valley Christian University for his book, The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum.
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[edit] Intellectual career
Rushdoony's first focus was on behalf of homeschooling, which he saw as a way to combat the secular nature of the U.S. public school system, and he vigorously attacked the progressives who had influenced the development of said education system, such as Horace Mann and John Dewey. He also stressed that Christianity had always been present in U.S. history; and while he supported separation of church and state at the national level, he claimed that the First Amendment was designed to protect the already existing "state churches" in each of the colonies — thus, the amendment had not been designed to wholly secularise society as it had been used to do.
His first book, in 1959, was an analysis of the philosophy of Christian apologist Cornelius Van Til entitled By What Standard? He also wrote several book reviews that were published in the Westminster Theological Journal, and many other books applying the Van Tillian Presuppositional philosophy to critiquing various aspects of secular humanism.
Perhaps his most famous work, however, was The Institutes of Biblical Law. With a title modelled after Calvin's The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Rushdoony's Institutes was arguably his most influential work. In the book, he proposed that biblical law should be applied to modern society — to wit, that there should be a Christian theonomy; he discussed how to go about doing this. His work has been used by Dominion Theology advocates who attempt to implement a Christian theocracy in the USA. He also proposed great freedom in the economic realm of public life, following in this the ideas of Ludwig von Mises and calling himself a Christian libertarian.
Rushdoony was an early board member of the Rutherford Institute, founded in 1982 by John W. Whitehead. His son-in-law, Gary North, is a Christian Reconstructionist writer and economist.
[edit] Quotations
[edit] On political infrastructure of a Christian theocracy
"The world is in rebellion against that [Christ's] government. From these rebels and revolutionists, we hear much talk about "peace" [...] and a great deal of hostility to government. But Isaiah tied the two together: "Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end". True peace, in other words, is a product of true government. When there is true law and order, then there is also true peace. Abolish law and order, and you abolish peace and create a situation of revolutionary warfare and anarchy. By abandoning Christ as Savior and King, by abandoning His government and peace, we are moving into a world of perpetual warfare. We are engaged in "perpetual warfare for perpetual peace" because we are seeking it without Christ" (Dec. 16, 1967).
[edit] On Christian unity in evangelistic endeavors
"When we are Christians, to the extent to any degree we are faithful to the gospel, we are bigger than ourselves. And that is why whether they are Arminian, Roman Catholic, or Calvinist, people who are truly serving the Lord are bigger than their own thinking, bigger than their own faith. We transcend ourselves. And that is the glory of the gospel. It enables us to do more than we can do. It is the grace of God working through us. It is not that we teach different gospels; we are trying to teach the same gospel even though at times our emphasis will be a warped one, a limited one, a partial one. All the same, God can use it". - R.J. Rushdoony
[edit] External links
- "The Vision of R. J. Rushdoony" - a biography by Rushdoony's son
