Chalcedon Report No. 5..........................................................

Rushdoony, Report No.5 … cont. from page 3
faith and character. And this eradication
is basic to man’s enslavement.
Am I advocating political preaching
by the clergy, and is not this position
too close to the social gospel attitude of
political involvement? The answer on
both counts is no.
Two similar questions have been
received: What is the relation of clergy
and politics? Should men in the pulpit
speak out on social and political questions,
and if so, under what circumstances?
Answer: The clergy cannot
faithfully expound the Word of God
without dealing with virtually every
social and political question. The Bible
speaks not only about salvation but
about God’s law with respect to the
state, money, land, natural resources,
just weights and measures, criminal
law, and a variety of other subjects. The
clergy are not to intermeddle in politics,
but they must proclaim the Word
of God. There is a difference: political
intermeddling is a concern over partisan
issues: preaching should be concerned
with Biblical doctrines irrespective of
persons and parties.
Too many clergymen are operating
with a “shorter Bible,” one limited
to a fairly few passages and pages. One
class of “shorter Bible” preachers are the
modernists, who refuse to believe most
of the Bible and limit themselves mainly
to a few chapters, such as those that talk
about love. The other class of “shorter
Bible” preachers claim to believe all the
Bible but they drop almost everything
except passages dealing with the saving
of souls. These men are too spiritually
minded to be of much earthly good.
The excuse of this second group,
who are Pietists, is that the law has been
done away with by grace, and so there
is no reason to preach the law of God.
This is a false doctrine. The law is done
away with only as an indictment against
30 Faith for All of Life September/October 2005
Faith for All of Life Bible, not only on doctrines or social
us; it stands as the righteousness of God,
which we must uphold. Every aspect
of the Old Testament law still stands,
except those aspects of the ceremonial
and priestly law specifically fulfilled by
the coming of Christ, and those laws
specifically re-interpreted in the New
Testament. We are saved from the law as
an indictment but not to break the law
freely. Is the law done away with and the
Christian “free” to kill, commit adultery,
or steal? Rather the Christian is saved to
be able to live in and under God’s law
and the law now is written on the tables
of his heart.
We are used to talking about the
apostasy of the modernist clergy. Equally
serious, if not more so, is the apostasy
of the clergy who claim to believe the
Bible but surrender the world to the
devil, who refuse to proclaim the whole
counsel of God to man.
The Bible is totally relevant to our
world, and it must be so preached. Men
are not given grace to despise the law
but to enable them to keep the law. We
have a lawless land because we have lawless
preachers. The Bible speaks plainly
in many passages on debt, theft (by
individuals or by the state), on justice,
and other matters. Is it not contempt
of God’s word to neglect these passages?
Salvation must be the starting point of
all preaching, but, if our preaching be
limited to this only, we are doing two
things. First, we are, like the modernists,
tossing out more of the Bible. Second,
we are limiting God’s word only to what
concerns our own souls, a very humanistic
emphasis.
An interesting aspect of colonial
Puritan preaching was the election
sermon, sermons on fundamental moral
issues preached before every election to
instruct people in the Biblical mandate.
Modernistic social gospel preaching is
relevant to our world, but it is anti-Biblical
in its perspective. What we need is
relevant Biblical preaching of the whole
issues of interest to us but on all that the
Bible teaches.
Rushdoony, Recollections … cont. from page 5
was mentioned to President and Mrs.
Clinton, they both recognized the name
and knew him for his involvement in
education.
I joined the staff of Chalcedon in
1978 after teaching school for three
years. I served in several capacities; I
was, at first, even again given my old
job of collating the materials for the
Chalcedon Report and inserting them
into envelopes. I suppose you could say
I started in the “mail room,” but back
then that was in my parents’ home or
mine. My wife, Darlene, my mother,
Dorothy, and I, as well as other volunteers,
would mail the Chalcedon Report
out each month. It was only in the mid
1980s that we began using the services
of a mailing house.
Economy has always been a byword
at Chalcedon. The foundation
could have built several elegant buildings
for the cost of what it gave to other
Kingdom-builders. I have no doubt this
is part of the reason it has been blessed.
Chalcedon has sought to promote the
Kingdom of God, not an organizational
structure.
The legacy of Chalcedon is its message
and the writings of R. J. Rushdoony.
He looked at a culture and a
church and saw its errors as deeper and
more systemic than others.
Before my father founded Chalcedon,
a wealthy man offered him a nice
home and a good salary if he would
work toward reversing the drift of his
denomination toward modernism. My
father refused. He did not want to reverse
a failing institution, but to call all
believers to Christian Reconstruction, a
rebuilding of themselves, their families,
their callings, and all else in terms of
their faith. In this sense he was truly