1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Rousas John Rushdoony

Rousas John Rushdoony Quotes
page 2

Rousas John Rushdoony was a Calvinist philosopher, historian, and theologian and is widely credited as being the father of Christian Reconstructionism and an inspiration for the modern Christian homeschool movement. His followers and critics have argued that his thought exerts considerable influence on the evangelical Christian right. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. April 1916 – 8. February 2001   •   Other names 루서스 존 러쉬두니
Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Rousas John Rushdoony: 99   quotes 2   likes

Rousas John Rushdoony Quotes

“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”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Micah 4:2
Source: Writings, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), p. 781

Men , God , War , World

“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

Audio lectures, Creationism and Psychology (n. d.)

Men , Children , People , World

“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

Writings, The New Racism (1980)

People , Change

“… homosexual culture is bitterly hostile to the family and to small town culture, the stability. Today it controls very largely, this is recognized by many writers, the world of fashions and the world of publishing. And it uses these two media, communications and styles, to war against the family and small town culture against the law and against standards. The canons of homosexual culture today are the standards of the Jet-set, very emphatically, and more and more of all society. The homosexual culture today is infecting the world at large.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Audio lectures, Homosexuality (n. d.)

Hostility , War , World , Family

“Now we have New Age thinking infiltrating our law, our courts, our schools in that everyone chooses his own values and those are good for him. And the same was for a long time, but you could do anything you chose, just as long as you did not do physical harm to someone against his own will.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Audio lectures, Decadence and the New Age (March 10, 1989)

Age , School , Law , Thinking

“A great many people have tunnel vision. Now tunnel vision is when you have a problem with the eyes so that you can only see a little spot ahead of you. You don’t have a broad range of vision. It is a very sad kind of eye defect. But Ford Schwartz was telling me a while back how some years ago when he spent a while in Mexico he stayed with some people in a village, the only non Mexican there. He found them to be very kindly and gracious people, but very limited, because all they could see was to do things exactly as every one else did so that their daily food was limited, day after day, to tortilla and beans, but they were living on the edge of the ocean. And he said day after day he caught fish in a matter of minutes, excellent eating, tasty varieties. But the Mexicans rarely ever touched the fish. They did things only as they had done them generation after generation. Now that is tunnel vision. That is a lack of any real vision. And that is exceedingly common. We can see it in the Mexicans, but we don’t see it in ourselves.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Audio lectures, Decadence and the New Age (March 10, 1989)

People , Sadness , Food , Problem

“Now [Leviticus 24:10-16] is a very unpopular text to the ungodly. They cite it regularly of the primitivism of the Bible. This is a very odd charge coming from the smug members of the world’s most bloody and brutal century.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Audio lectures, Blasphemy (n. d.)

World

“The University of Timbuktu never existed. The only thing that existed in Timbuktu was a small mud hut.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Writings, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973)

Universe

“The education which breeds Amalekites must be replaced with Christian education…. The state must become Christian and apply Biblical law to every area of life, and apply the full measure of God's law. The permissive family must give way to the Christian family.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Source: Writings, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), p. 323

Life , God , Education , Family

“The state is a bankrupt institution. The only alternative to this bankrupt 'humanistic' system is a God-centered government.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

As quoted in David Cantor and Alan M. Schwartz (1995), Anti-Defamation League book -The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism In America

God

“Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Source: Writings, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), pp. 286

People , Nature

“The Bible declares blasphemy to be a very serious offense, because any society which begins by profaning God and His authority will soon profane all things. Nothing will be sacred. No authority will stand. The alternative to authority is total terror by the power of State. This is why, as I’ve pointed out more than once, when the authority of God is destroyed, and when the doctrine of Creation was replaced with the doctrine of Evolution, Marx and Engels congratulated one another in that now their position was established. The foundations of all godly authority were shattered when God was no longer viewed as the creator. His Law, His Word, His person became thereby irrelevant to creation. If the Lord God of scripture did not make the Heavens and the earth and all things therein to the last atom, His Word does not govern creation. If Creation is a product of Evolution, then no law outside of itself can govern it. So the alternative to the authority of God is total terror by the power of State. Where there is no authority, there is soon no justice, because men then no longer speak the same moral languages of law and authority. The respect for God’s authority establishes communication and healthy dissent, the kind of dissent which thrives in an anarchist situation is the dissent of increasing evil, violence and destruction. Godly dissent is constructive, not destructive, and its goal is justice and holiness.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Audio lectures, Blasphemy (n. d.)

Men , God , Justice , Law

“… there are sometimes [in mixed marriages] some genetic advantages, there are sometimes genetic disadvantages, but there are generally markedly social disadvantages which tend to warp the child’s entire life. And these social factors are extremely strong. So in countries where you do have this kind of group, they do represent a rather bitter and an unhappy group, a rebellious group.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

Life , Marriage , Strong , Country

“I was told by a teacher in the Deep South once when I spoke on the necessity for Christian education at the request of the pastor, it was a hostile congregation, they did not like the fact that their pastor was strong for a Christian school, and one person after another at the door told me ‘well, you, of course, are not southern, you don’t know the south. This is the Deep South, every person in our schools, every teacher is a born again Christian’. After everyone was gone, this teacher had been standing, watching, came up and said ‘they don’t know what they’re talking about. We may be born again Christians, but our textbooks that we are required to stick to are anti-Christian to the core’.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Audio lectures, Dangers Inherent in Public Education (March 24, 1986)

Hostility , Education , School , Strong

“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

Audio lectures, Creationism and Psychology (n. d.)

God , History , Understanding

“Adam was created mature, and we are born as babies and developed. However the basic nature that is in us is not one of immaturity, but of one of maturity! The idea of child psychology was totally unknown until a couple of centuries ago. And until that time there was no such thing as the kind of child we have today. But a modern child is a creation of the modern age!”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Audio lectures, Creationism and Psychology (n. d.)

Age , Idea , Nature , Time

“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.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Source: Writings, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), p. 113

Religion , Law , Nature

“The Negro moved from an especially harsh slavery, which included cannibalism, to a milder form. Much is said about the horrors of the slave ships, many of which were very bad, but it is important to remember that slaves were valuable cargo and hence property normally handled with consideration.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Source: Writings, Politics of Guilt and Pity (1978), p. 25

“Love is total acceptance of everything. It means then that you have to accept everything, tolerate everything, it means that there is no discrimination with respect to good and evil, right and wrong. This is the modern definition of love, and of course it is thoroughly anti Christian.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Audio lectures, Hybridization and the Law (n. d.)

Love , Evil

“Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristocracy.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

As quoted in David Cantor and Alan M. Schwartz (1995), Anti-Defamation League book -The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism In America

“… 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

Audio lectures, Creationism and Psychology (n. d.)

Death , God , Nature

“The hybrid frustrates the purpose of creation. All things, we are told according to Genesis, were created with their seed in themselves, destined to be fertile. Hybridization seeks to improve God’s work. It seeks to gain the best of two diverse but somewhat related things. The result is a limited advantage but a long range launched including sterility. Second, these laws clearly require a respect for God’s creation. We are not to change one kind into another, or to attempt it. All things we are told were created good. Now when we hold to evolution we cannot see all things as created good. Because evolution is the survival of the fittest, and the best you can say about anything is that it is the fittest. Not that it is the best, not that it is morally the most desirable thing. And though it has survived thus far it may not survive in the next ten thousand years, so that man for example, we are told may be a mistake. Thus we cannot under an evolutionary perspective see all things as created good. But man under God has been created good and the world around him has been created good. Man can kill and eat plants and animals to use this creation under God’s law. But he cannot tamper with it, he cannot hybridize; which is to violate God’s kind. And the penalty for it, of course, is sterility. You can cross a horse and a donkey, but the mule is sterile. You can put all kinds of new variety of squash and carrots and the like on the market, but the penalty for these is sterility. They will not produce a seed. And while they will have certain advantages --the mule has certain advantages over the horse-- they have marked disadvantages, and a greater frailty, sensitivity, nervousness (as with the mule), so that they are a real handicap.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Audio lectures, Hybridization and the Law (n. d.)

God , World , Law , Penalty

“…the covenant people must wage war against the enemies of God, because this war is unto death. The deliberate, refined, and obscene violence of the anti-God forces permits no quarter…this warfare must continue until the Amalekites of the world are blotted out, until God's law-order prevails and His justice reigns.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Source: Writings, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), P. 308

Death , God , War , People

“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

Audio lectures, Decadence and the New Age (March 10, 1989)

Men , Age , Thinking , Reality

“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

Writings, The New Racism (1980)

Evil , Christ

“It is important to recognize that racism was in origin a scientific doctrine. Whenever a scientific doctrine is discarded, as witness the idea of the acquired inheritance of environmental influences, the old scientific doctrine, as it lingers on in popular thought, is blamed on religion or popular superstition!”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Writings, The New Racism (1980)

Religion , Idea

“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

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

Death , Law , Penalty , History

“Now a sovereign, a Lord, is always the source of law. Law making is the pejorative of the Lord or sovereign of a God. In every religious faith, in every religion, in every culture, the God of that system provides the laws. They are of his making. And if you allow any other law to come in you are acknowledging another God. This is why in Europe when the doctrine of the Divine right of kings arose there was a militant hostility on the part of the keys for any aspect of Biblical law. And the war against Biblical law began under the kings of Europe as monarchies began to rise in the late middle ages.”

Rousas John Rushdoony

Audio lectures, Dominion (n. d.)

God , Faith , Religion , Hostility