Rousas John Rushdoony - Man Quotes

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... because man has been created in God's image, sin is not natural. Sin is the deformation of man, it is a cancer, it is a sickness unto death which has infected man.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Whenever men began to talk about too many people, they are paving the way for their destruction. It represents a suicidal element in man. For children are the aspects of man's dominion. Moreover another aspect of that dominion is dominion over every living thing. Over the animal world. Man is thus created with a relationship towards animals established as normative with healthy psychology.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Peace with God means warfare with the enemies of God. Christ made clear that allegiance to Him meant a sword of division (Matt. 10:34-36). In a sinful world, some warfare is inescapable. A man must therefore pick his enemies: God or sinful man? If a man is at peace with sinful men, he is at war with God. Peace in one sector means warfare in another. God alone, however, can give inner peace now, and, finally, world peace through His sovereign law (Micah 4:2).

Rousas John Rushdoony
First of all we forget that one of the most common forms of divorce in the Bible and in all of history has been divorce by death, by execution. We are not used to thinking of divorce in such terms, but consider this. In the Old Testament, if a man were guilty of adultery, or a woman, they were executed. And we saw last week as we studied the New Testament teaching that adultery is in terms of New Testament law still a crime that calls for death. Now it does not exist, and therefore special provisions were made for those social orders wherein no such offense incurred the death penalty. As a matter of fact this is how the penitential system developed.

Rousas John Rushdoony
So that while we speak of the fallen man as the natural man, as against the supernatural man, who is a redeemed man in a very real sense we should say that sin is unnatural. With man, who was created into perfect knowledge, and his destiny is hell or salvation. Moreover man was created to exercise dominion and to rule the earth. This is man's calling and it is basic to man's nature.

Rousas John Rushdoony
The point Saint Paul... makes is that every one, whether they have ever read the Bible or heard the gospel, knows in his heart that God is God, and what his law order is. So that every man in his unbelief and in his immorality is without excuse, because God having made him has written His requirements in the tables of every man's heart, so that they all sin with knowledge, whether they are in the depths of the African jungles or in the heart of Asia, or in the heart of New York. Every man sins with knowledge.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Salvation is not in the manipulation of man's environment: it is the regeneration of man's heart, and hence … the apostles were clearly forewarned against proclaiming a social (or socialist) gospel in place of the atoning, redemptive work of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.

Rousas John Rushdoony
If the penalty for even an accidental case [of abortion] is so severe, it is obvious that a deliberately induced abortion is very strongly forbidden. It is not necessary to ban deliberate abortion, since it is already eliminated by this law. Second, if a man who, in the course of a fight, unintentionally bumps a pregnant woman and causes her to abort, must suffer the death penalty, how much more so any person who intentionally induces an abortion?

Rousas John Rushdoony
Instead of working to change a people, we have a static and racist view of a people and their culture. It is the Bible and the mission which must change, not the people! We must teach a black English if any at all, and a black, brown, or yellow Christianity, if any at all. It takes only a brief excursion into liberation theology, contextualization, and like doctrines to realize that it is not Christianity at all which is taught, but a counterfeit. Relevance is sought, not to the Lord and His word, but to fallen man and his racial heritage. Such is not the Gospel; it is the new racism.

Rousas John Rushdoony
If you and I have our histories abstracted from us, and our heredities as well, along with all our cultural conditioning and responses, we are no longer men, no longer human beings, but an abstract and theoretical concept of man. No real history of us can then be written.

Rousas John Rushdoony
One of the things that characterize my schooling from the early grades on up to university and apparently is still with us because I heard it on the radio this morning, was the idea that all bacteria are bad and that the scientific ideal is a germ free, bacteria free world. Of course, such a world would mean death. And yet, we are actually told now that by 1990 we will have such a sterile world that milk itself being rendered totally sterile, will sit on a table and will never spoil. In such a world not only bacteria will be gone, but man also. Such a world and such a science represents a travesty on God's creative purpose.

Rousas John Rushdoony
All the plagues and evils of the European mind are products of the fallen man and the relics of barbarian cultures, not of Christ and His word. All that is good in the European mind is a result of Christian culture, not of race.

Rousas John Rushdoony
The ruthless destruction of wild animals and the abuse of domestic animals is contrary to God's purpose. Our relationship with the animal world is not one of warfare, but one of dominion. Wild and domestic in terms of God's purpose. Finally we must say in terms of this text that man was created to live in a perfect world, in a good world, very good God commanded. To kill and to feed it, man was formed out of the substance of the dust of the ground we are told in Genesis 2:7. Man is therefore earthbound, psychological and physically, dust thou art and unto dust thou returnest.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Very clearly according to scripture, man's nature is not an open question but a given fact from God. Then next and of central importance in all that you're going to be saying in the next few months is this: Man was created in Genesis not as a child, Adam was not born a baby, but a mature man. This is a fact of central importance. Man was created into maturity. As a result, the key command is not child psychology, or animal psychology. Evolution cites that man must be understood in terms of the child, the child in terms of an animal ancestry, and the animal ancestry as an emergent out of chaos!

Rousas John Rushdoony
Men remain feeling guilty, for a false sense of guilt has no cure save the truth, and this is not forthcoming. Since the citizens are now guilt-ridden because of their education and political indoctrination, they are more amenable to robbery, and even murder. If the white man feels guilty towards the Negro, he is less capable of defending himself against the Negroes who turn into a revolutionary rabble, bent on theft and murder. The state finds it easier to rob men when men feel guilty for what they are and have, and the state drones on and on about the needs of the poor of the nation and of the world.

Rousas John Rushdoony
The creation mandate was precisely the requirement that man subdue the earth and exercise dominion over it. There is not one word of Scripture to indicate or imply that this mandate ever was revoked. There is every word of Scripture to declare that this mandate must and shall be fulfilled. Those who attempt to break it shall themselves be broken.

Rousas John Rushdoony
If creationism is at all weakened, the doctrine of salvation is weakened. Thus it is that in evangelical circles today, because there is a pervasive compromise there is a progressive weakening and instruction of the doctrine of salvation. Creation and salvation are different sides of the same coin. God has created man, God alone can redeem him. If we tamper with the doctrine of creation we have proportionally weakened the doctrine of salvation. Thus in our understanding of both the doctrine of man and the doctrine of salvation we must begin with a class, if God in the beginning, created man by his fathomed word on the sixth day of creation brought him into being. Our history is sure, it is well known, it is fully declared in scripture.

Rousas John Rushdoony
I, some years back, knew a couple of men who did go and who had all kinds of allusions about the exotic Far East, one a young man, college age, the other an older man. And it was a shattering experience for them that they suppressed, because it told them about the reality of evil and the reality of man as a fallen creatures which they did not want to admit. And I think their suppression of the reality marks our age. We do not want, as an age, to know what evil is, unless, of course, it was Hitler and we killed him and now we just mope up on a few of these extremists.

Rousas John Rushdoony