Rousas John Rushdoony

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

By what standard, by what standard have you dared to approach the problem of life? Any standard other than the Trinity, the triune God in Himself, is an offense against God, and the destruction of Christian faith and lif…

And any theology that seeks as its basic principle of interpretation Christ rather than the triune God seeks to reduce God to His relationship to man rather than to establish God in Himself as the basic principle of inte…

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 stu…

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 again…

Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course this has not always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct…

If Jesus Christ had only risen from the dead as a spirit, as a ghost, then His only victory and His only saving power would be limited to the world of the spirit. It would mean that He would be helpless to answer prayers…

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

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.

God's sovereign grace commands and directs man in His appointed and ordained way. Man cannot get 'off the track' permanently when he is truly a member of Christ. He has an inevitable and commanding direction which brings…

This is the world of polytheism: it knows no overall truth and order, only fragments and limited connections in the shambles of time and space. Polytheism is a fact of cultural decay and collapse.

A key fact, thus, of polytheism is that at best the area and scope of meaning is severely limited. There is no universal scope, sway, or meaning in the world of polytheism, except by imperialistic aggression. From Alexan…

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 any…

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

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 t…

The Sabbath is a sign of the covenant. Having received grace and law from God, the covenant people surrender themselves to Him, not only in worship but in the giving of time to God. To yield fifty-two days in the year, o…

Since man must, to play god, hate other men, it means that this pleasure must be a solitary one and must be exacted at the price of someone's suffering.

The future of the family is thus at stake in the future of the private ownership of property. And both rest alike on respect for the sovereign law of God.

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.

By making the vision of God and the contemplative life the highest aim of life, by emphasizing the spiritual as godly and withdrawal from the world as holy, the middle ages in a sense surrendered the world to the devil.…

For Spinoza, God, man and the universe are but individuations and aspects of the general idea of substance. But, as Van Til pointed out, to say that all is God is no different than saying nothing is God. 'Univocal reason…

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 de…

The knowledge of God is inescapable knowledge. Because man is created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26'28), he can neither avoid nor escape the knowledge of God, however much he strives to hold it back (Rom. 1:18'22). That…

Dr. Rushdoony saw cultural schizophrenia as a split between thought and feeling, a withdrawal from the reality of God and a flight into fantasies of world government achieved through an unattainable unity. Utopians are u…

Thus, an aspect of man's revolt against maturity and against life is his revolt against knowledge. Whereas the natural man may seek knowledge as a substitute for God, and as a means of becoming God (Gen. 3: 5), he soon t…

Anthropologist John Greenway has observed, Never in the entire history of the inevitable displacement of hunting tribes by advanced agriculturalists in the forty thousand generations of mankind has a native people been t…

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…

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…

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…

The question which haunts the dialectical culture is this: how to have unity without totally undifferentiated and meaningless oneness? If all things are basically one, the differences are meaningless, divisions false, an…

In the Bible, women are presented as no less intelligent than men, nor any the less capable of redemption; the question is one of authority, not of humanity or dignity, whereas in the neoplatonist tradition women are see…

Thus, the sons of Plato proclaim 'the death of God,' i.e., the God of Scripture, because He refuses to exist in terms of their definition. It does not greatly trouble them to proclaim God dead; in fact, the supposed fune…

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…

Thus a man will delude himself, believing that with his mind or spirit he is against committing fornication or adultery, but that by his lusts and bodily appetites he is being driven toward the act. His excuse for the co…

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 u…

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 b…

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 dep…

To deny to others their due praise and gratitude is not to rob them, for God will be their reward, but it is a judgment on ourselves. Never

Even as Jacob unwittingly embraced a bride who was not his choice, with unhappy consequences, so well-meaning Christian thinkers have unknowingly reasoned on premises they assumed to be Christian.

As a book for sight, Revelation becomes a frustration; as a book for faith, it becomes a joy and a comfort.

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

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 t…

The heart of postmillennialism 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 c…

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.

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

Men cannot give a meaning to history that they themselves lack, nor can they honor a past which indicts them for their present failures.

A great deal of our time will have to be taken up with the destruction of evil. We may not even seem to see much progress in ourselves or round about us, during our lifetime. We shall have to build with the trowel in one…

The world is in rebellion against that 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…

Just as loyalty is adherence to a trust, so treason is failure to abide by the terms of a trust. If all things are relative, and each is entitled to his own views with equal significance given to all views, then there ca…

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…