Quotes from Rousas John Rushdoony

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 then relative terms.

Socialism is a product of humanism, because humanism claims the right to legislate at will, and thereby to define sin at will.

History as it comes from the hand of God has a preordained meaning and direction, and it moves to a purpose neither decreed by man nor conducive to man's sin. As a result, man is in revolt against history. Man pits against history the imagination of his fallen heart.

Man's mind, as well as his feet and devotion, wander easily, and we are readily given to changing our minds. Our attention wanders always, and we are better at drifting than commanding in our lives.

The only true order is founded on Biblical Law. All law is religious in nature, and every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion.

Man as an Idea in neoplatonist religion is again an abstraction, less a monster and more a bad joke. The religious idea of man is of a bodiless being who works to undo his flesh, deny his appetites, and to rise above the ordinary requirements of the body. This abstraction has a horror of the material world as a kind of fatal allure seeking to corrupt his soul. But no man finds himself more beset by lust than the man who tries to deny he is a man.

In every era, law and grace are operative and unchanging.

A professor, who had left teaching soon after World War II, lectured to a group of students at a major Western university a few years ago on the decline of liberty. To his shock, one of the first questions asked by a student was simply this: "What's so wonderful about liberty? What makes you think it is necessary for man?" For the students, security was a necessary social objective; liberty was not.

A man's life, from birth to death, is guided, affected, and colored by family relations. The basic unit of the social order is the family. The family is the socially stable unit where the family has liberty and property.

The heart of post-millennialism is the faith that Christ will through His people accomplish and put into force the glorious prophecies of Isaiah and all the Scriptures, that He shall overcome all His enemies through His covenant people, and that He shall exercise His power and Kingdom in all the world and over all men and nations, so that, whether in faith or in defeat, every knee shall bow to Him and every tongue shall confess God (Rom. 14:11; Phil. 2:11).

Mysticism is always incapable of dealing with the problems of culture because it is a denial of their validity.

For the Christian the environment can only truly be changed as men are changed, and these men then remake their world and place it under God's law. For the Marxist men are changed by changing the environment, because man is only a reflex of his environment, not a lord over it. Between these two positions there can be no peace nor any coexistence.

The postmillennial view, while seeing rises and falls in history, sees it moving to the triumph of the people of Christ, the church triumphant from pole to pole, the government of the whole world by the law of God, and then, after a long and glorious reign of peace, the Second Coming and the end of the world.

When Van Til says that 'the principle of unity and diversity must be equally original,' this is a biblical must, made necessary because God is one God and yet triune. The equal ultimacy of the one and many is directly derived from the doctrine of the Trinity.

The philosophy of statism is anti-Christian to the core. The necessity of our day is not political action but a return to a biblical faith. On any but a biblical doctrine of man, the state increases its power and plays the role of god and savior over man.

A verdade parece terrivelmente aprisionadora porque ela requer que nos comprometamos, contra nossos próprios interesses pessoais, com os mandamentos de Deus e sua Palavra.

The modern state offers a pretended ministry of service as a means to exercising a pagan dominion, and the result is a vulture society of hatred, crime, and exploitation.

The saved man seeks to conform himself to the Word and will of God; the self-righteous man seeks to conform God and the world to his word and will. The

All individuals and groups seek, in one way or another, to answer the questions: what am I, who am I, and what explains my being and existence? The sound answer to these questions is to identify ourselves, above all else, religiously: I am a child of God by His sovereign grace. Then, I am a member of a family. Finally, I have a specific calling or vocation under God.

If the origin of things is from within the cosmos, then, possibly, the control of all things can come from something within that cosmos. This faith leads to man playing God, to man attempting to control evolution, to a belief in a world state controlling all things, and to a religious belief in the powers of time and process.

To define man in Darwinian terms as a 'higher ape' is to strip man of his high seriousness. To declare man to be a creature made in God's image, but fallen, is both to stress his high potential as well as his present depravity outside of Christ. Even as Adam defines the old humanity of fallen man, so Jesus Christ, in His perfect and sinless humanity, defines the goal for redeemed man.

The hypocrite is against sin in other people. The godly man is against sin anywhere but, first and foremost, against sin in himself.

Similarly, in Scripture Satan is a creature, a fallen creature. Because he is a creature, Satan, like all creatures has a purely local appearance: he cannot be in more than one place at a time. He cannot thus be tempting me in California and another man in Vienna at one and the same time. His approach to any man is at best severely limited, however real. Too many men are ready to blame the devil for their sins when, the truth is, they needed no help in committing them, only an excuse.