305: How Do You Preserve a Legacy While Looking to the Future?

Speaker 1 (00:01)
Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your host is Andrea Schwartz, a teacher and mentor and founder of the Chalcedon Teacher Training Institute.

Speaker 2 (00:23)
My guest today on the podcast is Chalcedon President Mark Rushdoony. One of the most difficult shoes to fill are those left by a well-known and well-renowned father. R.J. Rushdoony passed away in February of 2001, having founded and led the Chalcedon Foundation since 1965. He left a legacy of Books, sermons, articles, lectures, and easy chair conversations, which really were the first podcasts, that continue to educate, inspire, and guide a generation of Christians eager to serve and further the Kingdom of God. Thanks for joining me today, Mark.

Speaker 1 (01:04)
Good to be here with you, Andrea.

Speaker 2 (01:06)
I’m guessing you will be the first to admit that when your dad left Chalcedon in your hands, he didn’t consider your role to be exactly like his was. What guidance did he give you in terms of what he saw as the vision for the future of the ministry?

Speaker 1 (01:25)
Well, to understand what he saw as the future of the ministry, you have to understand what he considered important. In his ministry, he considered his writing his legacy. Even his audio recordings, which many people find of great value, he personally did not consider great importance because much of what he spoke ended up as content in his books. He grew up in the era of a scholar was one who was knowledgeable about what had been written, and so he was a lifelong reader. And so his writing was what he considered very important. And so when he passed away, it was obvious that his writings were something that needed to be preserved, and many had not seen the light of day yet. I had a full of manuscripts to publish, and we’re just coming towards the end of some of that. It was his publication that was very important. In the last weeks of his life, he did give me specific instructions on what he wanted to prioritize, such as his articles that he wrote for a farming publication for many years. It was one part of his writing that he had never really organized well, and he wanted me to get those together and get them published.

Speaker 1 (02:56)
Those were articles that were in the California Farmer, and we later published a complete collection of those.

Speaker 2 (03:03)
That was what we now call a word in season, the volumes of a word in season?

Speaker 1 (03:08)
Yes. He considered that some of his best writing because they were brief articles, because he was limited on space in what was going to be in this farming magazine. The column was called the Pastor’s Pulpit. He knew the original publisher, so he wrote for them for some 25 to 30 years. And he never saw his audience. Each article had to be self-contained. So he had to choose his word very carefully. So he particularly mentioned to me that he wanted those collected.

Speaker 2 (03:40)
I know from experience working with Chalcedon that when you say that there were manuscripts that hadn’t seen the light of day, there kept appearing things like, Oh, wow, there’s something on this, there’s something on that. I remember reading the three-volume set, Good Morning, Friends, and being astounded that I had never seen that before. Did you know those existed, or was it just something that your dad didn’t consider very important?

Speaker 1 (04:05)
I knew he had done a radio program when I was very little. He had done a radio program when he was a pastor in Santa Cruz, California. This is before he founded Chalcedon. He was still a full-time pastor, and he did a local radio program. In most of those, he had written out. I found folders of these. At first, I wasn’t even sure what they were, but they were buried in his library somewhere, but I was able to pull those out. And fortunately, he had kept records, a lot of records, not all well organized, but he kept a lot of records of what he wrote and what he did. And so he had a list of the talks that he had given on this radio program, and I was able to find those talks and cross-reference them to his list and when they were done. And so we were able to publish those radio messages that took place over 60 years ago.

Speaker 2 (05:03)
It must have seemed like a scavenger hunt for you, except you didn’t know what you were looking for all the time.

Speaker 1 (05:08)
In a lot of ways, yes. I’m amazed at some of the things I’m happy to find. A few manuscripts that have missing parts to them that I still haven’t located, and may never find all of the parts to those missing manuscripts. But for the most part, we’re able to assemble all these things together and publish as much as we’ve been able to.

Speaker 2 (05:29)
So Did you say that publishing has remained a major focus for you as President of Chalcedon?

Speaker 1 (05:36)
Yes. When my father passed away, before he passed away, it was pretty obvious that he was irreplaceable. I knew that certainly I wasn’t the person to do what he did and to produce what he did and to honor the leadership that he did for Chalcedon and the Christian Reconstruction Movement in general. We couldn’t find anybody that would really serve that role of leadership at Chalcedon. When he passed away, in one sense, it was a daunting task, but in another sense, because of the priority of getting his books in print and those that were out of print, back in print, became a fairly obvious need. In that sense, my role was clearly defined for me. It was pretty obvious what I needed to do and that that was going to take a long time. There were things that Chalcedon produced, like the journals of Christian Reconstruction, which we have digitized. They’re not all available online yet. It’s one of those things that we’re doing as we have time. We’ve not only been publishing his books in print, past books and the manuscripts that we published after his passing, but we’ve also been producing ebooks and most recently, audiobooks.

Speaker 1 (07:01)
So we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress. And the reason for all this is not just an archive with the sense of the sake of an archive, but the purpose of this is because I think that my father’s influence in the future is going to be more than it has been in the past because he addressed so many things that the church needs to address. The church has largely been resisting much of what my father said, the need even for Christian reconstruction, much less putting this into action. The need for theonomy has been debated by the church, much less actually seeing how we obey God. We’re not going to see a great change in our culture. We’re not going to see a great change in the church and its work until we start addressing some of the things, which is really addressing the fault of the church and the fault of our culture in its post-Christian manifestation. We have to address these issues. He spoke to a lot of these issues. As you know, something interesting about my father’s writing is very, very little of it reads as if it’s dated. Even those references, such as to the Soviet Union, that are obviously dated, he wrote about them in such a way that we can see how applicable it is to the current situation.

Speaker 1 (08:35)
It’s actually remarkable the extent to which his writings are very timely today, even those that were written in the ’50s and ’60s. His was really a pioneering work, and it’s been pushed to the side, largely by the 20th century Church and to this date. But I think we’re going to have to address these issues. When we address these issues, I think People are going to have to fall back on some of these ideas. My Father’s Writings are going to be a tremendous resource for the future. That’s why we keep going. It’s not just for the vanity of saying, My Father’s Work endures. You see, Most writers’ works disappear permanently after their passing. Only a few works are considered important enough to be published 30, 40, 50 years after someone’s passing. Then there’s copyright issues. There’s many books that would be interesting to regrant are still copyrighted, and somebody owns that. But there’s no repository of information on where we find the copyright. It’s not like a car. You could find the legal owner of a car through the Department of Motor Vehicles. But when you have a copyright, well, the author, who is the author’s heir?

Speaker 1 (09:53)
Often, nobody knows who the author’s heir was or where they are or what family member actually inherited. And so the ownership of authors’ things alone, who has the right to print it again, is very difficult. So we’re keeping all this alive, and we’re keeping his books available because I think these are all issues that he talked about that are going to have to be addressed in the future.

Speaker 2 (10:21)
Getting back to immediately after your father’s passing, you just described for us what you considered most important. Did you have to battle with some people’s expectations of you? I mean, you had the same last name. You were a Rushdoony. Did you have to really figure out what God wanted you to do? Because you’re not your dad. You are now President of Chalcedon. As you put it, this isn’t about a museum to your dad. How did you come to decide, Okay, this is the lane I have to be in?

Speaker 1 (10:56)
Yes, there were people who thought that we needed to have a person. We needed to have a personality to lead Chalcedon. In fact, I was in a meeting once where after my father’s passing, where the question was aptfully raised, Can anybody think of a Christian organization that has survived its founder’s passing and is still prominent. People had trouble coming up with anything. Most major ministries just disappear with someone’s passing, or they just become entirely different. We didn’t want that to happen. Things like a school will continue because there’s an administrative aspect to a school. There’s an institutional quality to that. There’s not much of an institutional aspect of Chalcedon. It is the work of Christian reconstruction. People saw, and I told everyone, I was not who my father was, and I could not serve that role. Some people wanted us to try to find somebody, maybe even hire somebody, to be the President of Chalcedon, and to fill that role. It was an obvious suggestion, but it proved to be impractical and really unnecessary because we had enough work just in the publication field alone. We don’t want to necessarily say that we’re going to be limited to being publishers.

Speaker 1 (12:18)
Certainly, we haven’t abandoned the whole idea of new scholarship, and that’s why we continued our current publications. And Martin Selbrede is certainly an intellectual force that theological force that needs to be recognized. But there was plenty for us to do just in the archives of making what we had available, and we’re still working on that. So we’re accomplishing something very good and something I think that is going to be very useful in the kingdom in the coming years and even beyond our own time.

Speaker 2 (12:50)
I’m glad you brought up Martin Selbrede, because many times I’ve heard you say that you don’t consider yourself a scholar, and Martin certainly fits into that category. It’s not that Martin doesn’t have original ideas, but I think what we would all agree is that Martin understood your father’s theology so that as people develop, which your father always said, that there was more things to develop, that Martin is able to have a discerning view that says, This is in line with Rushdoony’s thinking. This is not in line with Rushdoony’s thinking. Do you feel comfortable that he has that role role? And was it a difficult choice to say, I think Martin should hold this position?

Speaker 1 (13:35)
No. And so Martin, by the way, is our Chalcedon’s vice president, and he does not work for us except very part-time, and He volunteers a lot of the time that he does spend with Chalcedon. But he has his own employment, and he dedicates a lot of his time to Calcedon and Christian reconstruction, merely because he is very knowledgeable in my father’s writings, as well as his own scholarship and his own research. I’m very confident that Martin is intellectually capable of doing important things. I wish that he was in a position where he could be writing and researching full-time because he has certainly a lot to give.

Speaker 2 (14:18)
People often tell me, because I did get to spend 15 years under the discipleship of your dad, they often tell me they wish they knew Rush personally. I say, Well, if If you’ve read his books or heard his sermons and lectures, you do know him. Would you agree with that statement, or are there aspects of your dad that many have still failed to appreciate or realize?

Speaker 1 (14:42)
I think that’s a correct assessment. He truly believed in what he wrote, and that was his understanding of life, which is one reason his writing is so powerful. He had this assurance that God reigns. He had this assurance that the Kingdom of God was going to grow. He had this assurance that the powers of evil would not overcome, which is one reason he was very impatient with conspiracy thinking, because he said the tendency of conspiracy thinking was to always point out the evil in the world. He said a lot of conspiracy thinking assumed or spoke in terms of the inevitable victory and advance of evil. In Instead, he actually said, No, the inevitable advances of the Kingdom of God, and we’re part of that, and we should be working towards that. Jesus said, Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, not the study of evil, not worrying about evil. So even though he saw some credibility in some conspiracy theories, he saw plausibility in some of them, he would become very impatient because he thought this conspiratorial view view of sinister forces of evil, overcoming us and controlling everything, really became an eschatology for a lot of people.

Speaker 1 (16:09)
And it prevented any positive view of the advance of the kingdom in Christian action. It became a very defeatist way of thinking.

Speaker 2 (16:20)
I mentioned earlier that it has been 23 plus years since your dad has been gone, and it’s obvious that the world It has changed. He died before 9/11, for example. We never got to see commentary or his points of view and things like that. But in a lot of ways, the world has changed technologically, things that people can do and things that have been lost that, as you pointed out, if a new technology doesn’t replace an old one, some of the things get lost. In what ways have you had to pivot in terms of promoting your dad’s work?

Speaker 1 (17:00)
Well, a lot of people might be put off by the context of some of what he wrote, because much of what he wrote was in the era of the Soviet Union. When he referred to, say, statism and the examples of the evil of statism and what statism leads to, he was pointing out to something which is now gone, in many cases, the Soviet Union. And yet that really wasn’t the point. That was a current example. So it would be easy for people to say, Oh, some of his stuff is really dated because he was writing in that era. And people don’t realize that what the Soviet Union was, say in the ’60s or ’70s, is very much part of where Western culture is in 2024. The intellectual atmosphere that he saw amongst academics and where public education was heading is now where the common man very often is. Our culture has become increasingly anti-Christian. This isn’t something you see in examples from here and there, read between the lines, or in some Ivy the individual who was an anti-Christian. Now you see this on the street. You see this in our culture. You see this commonly.

Speaker 1 (18:23)
He wrote 50 years ago, that our world was becoming increasingly anti-Christian, and there would be an increasing hostility towards Christianity, and we can very much see that today. Islam kills people by the tens of thousands and has for a millennium and a half is considered a very respectable religion, but Christianity is held in contempt. Not only the de-christianizing, but the increasing anti-christianity in our culture has become very marked. So there has been a shift in our culture, and people sometimes don’t realize that this shift has taken place. Actually, what he said is sometimes more applicable, despite its references to something 40 or 50 years ago than ever before.

Speaker 2 (19:12)
I know when you published those two three volume sets, one with his position papers and one with his Chalcedon Report articles, it was good to see the dates when they were done. However, when you’re listening to some of his lectures, sermon series, people will often ask me, Do you know when this was recorded? Sometimes I have a vague notion, but it’s always fun when he’ll mention the president who’s in office or something that you could actually date. But for so many people, I’m sure you hear this, it’s like he could have written it yesterday. Well, of course, we know he couldn’t have written it yesterday because he wasn’t here, but that it was so timely. I think what you said earlier, your father spoke to people in real time. But the principles and the biblical orientation in a lot of ways is timeless. Wouldn’t you agree?

Speaker 1 (20:07)
Yes. I think that’s a weakness of a lot of Christians thinking. If they see something as an immediate threat and so they speak in a very immediate context, he tended to step back and say, This is what’s really happening. There’s a timelessness, even to some of his examples that go back to the ’60s and ’70s.

Speaker 2 (20:33)
Chalcedon supporters usually hear from you, either in the Chalcedon podcast or in your blog pieces. You don’t tend to sugarcoat the situations in our culture. You continue to repeat that we are witnessing the collapse of humanism. And yet you remain hopeful and persistent in our duty and success, ultimately in furthering the Kingdom of God. Is this a laborious task ask for you or one that actually energizes you?

Speaker 1 (21:03)
Well, I think it helps in any situation to be a realist. If you go to the doctor and you get a bad prognosis, at least you have a realistic assessment of where you stand. You wouldn’t want a doctor, for instance, to say, You’re going to be fine. Just go home and don’t worry about it. If you have something serious, then you want to address it because that may save you some grief and some pain and some complications down the road. You need to address a serious medical condition. Well, if our cultural condition, if the condition of our churches today is a dire one, a serious one, we need to do that. Having a realistic assessment of where we are helps. Now, our assessment is always present or past-oriented. We cannot see into the future except to the extent that God gives us an awareness of his future. Our eschatology, where things are heading, helps in that regard because God has given us the end of the story. We can read the last chapter. We just don’t know exactly what the story looks like between now and the end of the story. But we do know that the Kingdom of God is going to continue to grow, and it’s something my father pointed that the forces of humanism are going to fail.

Speaker 1 (22:33)
In fact, he characterized our current age as the death of humanism. It’s failing. People look back to the post-war era, let’s say, at good times. Actually, it was an artificial bubble. I mean, the economy was an artificial bubble, recovering from the war, and the positive effects of inflation by the federal government gave us an artificial prosperity. Community coming out of the war, and that looked really good. We also had a certain character from the war years and people’s upbringings prior to the war that had a more traditional, more moral perspective. And so we looked at that as the good times. In reality, we were already in decline as a culture. Religiously, philosophically, we were already on the downside. And we have been for a very long time. We could go back a long time and see the problems in Western culture. It all real stems from the fact that we’re getting away from Christian influence in the Christian basis for life and culture. In a de-christianized world, we’re going to have problems. His ministry really began when things looked pretty good. Then well into the ’60s, things really looked pretty good. Secularly, people had a very, very positive attitude in the ’60s.

Speaker 1 (23:58)
Remember, that was the space race. That was part of this cult of science. Science was going to solve all man’s problems, and man’s faith had really already transferred to technology and science as the hope for man’s future. The economy was going along pretty well still in the ’60s, and people were just optimistic. Well, since then, we’ve had a series of problems. What my father pointed out was that humanism is failing us. Some of his first writings in the late ’50s were on the problems in public education. He pointed out where it was going, logically. It was because it was thoroughly humanistic, and we had abandoned Christianity in favor of humanism, and this was becoming apparent in the schools. He predicted these problems in the schools and what was going on there. But the problems in laws, why do our courts seem to be making no sense? Why is there such irrationality? Why are young people rioting, destroying, renouncing the past, destroying what is good and stable with nothing to replace it? He discussed things like this, and he basically said that this is the result of our rejection of God, our rejection of Christian faith.

Speaker 1 (25:23)
Faith in man is faith in nothing. It’s putting your faith in something that’s going to fail because man a sinner, and man is going to make a mess of things, basically repeating the sin of Adam and Eve, trying to be a God, and man makes a lousy God. When man plays God, he makes a mess of everything. That’s what we’re seeing in our day. It’s going to worse, but he wasn’t a defeatist. His eschatology said, The Kingdom of God is going to grow. The Kingdom of God will outlast the secular state. Now, how that plays out, you can observe that, and I think it’s pretty observable in pretty much every aspect of life today. We are at the end of the earth of humanism. How it falls, how fast it falls, what’s going to replace it, we don’t exactly know, because one of the missing elements that we can’t predict is when the Holy spirit moves. When God wants things to change, things will change. When God wants people to change, when people turn to God, that’s the work of the Holy spirit, and we can’t really predict that. The timetable, we don’t know. Are we going to live to see a dramatic turnaround?

Speaker 1 (26:36)
We don’t know. We don’t even know how this collapse is going to play out. Is it going to be something rather dramatic, such as a worldwide depression? Is it going to be war? We don’t know. There’s a lot we don’t know about what’s happening. What he wrote about the failure of humanism and the growth of the kingdom was theologically oriented it. Even though he said it was certain, he couldn’t predict a timeline. There’s just a lot that we don’t know, but he was certainly able to give the big picture of things. That big picture that he started talking about 60 years ago or more is certainly turning out to be rather prophetic. He saw it before most people had, because many people back in the ’60s thought the answer was political. All we needed to do is elect the right as President and things would turn around. All we needed is a majority in Congress or in the State House and things would turn around. My father said, That’s not going to precipitate change. The only thing that’s going to really precipitate change is when we’re going to Christian people.

Speaker 2 (27:49)
When you were talking, I thought of the book, and again, their accompanying lectures, Our Threatened Freedom. It’s easy to just put Rushdoony into a theological basis. Yes, he did commentaries on books of the Bible, but he really was an observer of people and how people will reflect what they actually believe. In other words, you don’t really have to figure out too much. What does somebody believe? Just look what they do. He has a long history of being perceptive and wanting to understand. So long before Chalcedon, there were books that were being written. He was a Missionary on a reservation in Nevada. Speak a little bit as to why he thought this was a good preparation for what he felt God was calling him to do.

Speaker 1 (28:42)
Well, he was still in seminary, his last year in seminary, and he heard about this Mission work in Nevada. It was a mission church in a tiny community on reservation. Most of the people on the reservation, they were widely dispersed, and this was just a tiny little community. The Mission Church had been without a mission pastor on and off for several years and had been run by the denomination he was then in, which was the denomination he had been raised in, Presbyterian Church USA. He knew of the work and its need, but the remoteness didn’t really bother him because he missed being on the farm. He liked the rural lifestyle. When he was a boy, being in a farm was pretty isolated because it was a mile into town and he had to walk it. The family never owned a car. So you were somewhat limited. And so the isolation of being on a reservation 100 miles from the nearest small town. It didn’t bother him. He also thought, Here’s an opportunity. If I have big ideas, if I want to express these in my writing, here’s a pastoral opportunity that I have to speak to a people about the importance of Christian faith.

Speaker 1 (30:09)
If I can make the faith relevant, he said to the Indians on the reservation, then I’ll be able to make it relevant to anyone. So he just saw this as an opportunity, really, and a training.

Speaker 2 (30:23)
Now, if I’m not mistaken, time-wise, you were not alive when he was on the reservation, correct?

Speaker 1 (30:29)
I was born about a year after he left, and he was a pastor in Santa Cruz, California.

Speaker 2 (30:35)
This may seem like an odd question, but at what point, while growing up, did you recognize that your dad was someone special?

Speaker 1 (30:44)
That’s hard to say. He was always a pastor, so people looked up to him. In that sense, it was pretty obvious. I knew he was different than a lot of dads because he often worked at home. From the time I was about nine years old, he was working at home to a large extent. I think probably when I saw that a lot of people outside our circles, beyond our immediate community, regarded him was when I was in high school. I actually spent a year in my high school in Virginia, and the school there was familiar with him, and they often referred to him. In fact, we actually used one of his books in a history class, This Independent Republic. I saw that people spoke of him in very, very different ways, and that his influence was much bigger than I had really realized. I was in high school, probably before I realized that his influence was much, much greater than I could observe at home.

Speaker 2 (31:44)
So along with that, you must have been aware of the fact that your father evoked some really strong criticism inside the church. Was that a difficult thing for you to understand, or by that time, did you realize that it wasn’t so much a personal attack as what your father was saying in terms of implications of scripture?

Speaker 1 (32:07)
I noticed that also probably in high school, even before I saw his larger influence, I would hear people discussing what he said when he wrote Institutes of Biblical Law, I saw people characterizing that who obviously hadn’t read it in a very negative way and saying, Oh, well, that he’s talking about justification by works, which he wasn’t. He said that in his introduction. People who say that, and that’s probably the biggest criticism in the church throughout the years, they haven’t even read the introduction where he says, I’m not speaking about justification. That’s a settled doctrine. But I’m speaking of the doctrine of sanctification. It’s how we obey God and grow in grace. That was probably one of my first influences, probably in my earlier mid high school years, where people were speaking negatively of what he was saying about biblical law. That’s probably even before biblical law was originally published.

Speaker 2 (33:05)
I mean, the lines were drawn. I know one of the issues that gave him a lot of criticism was that he made the statement that if you limit the Kingdom of God to the church, you’ve limited it extensively, that the Kingdom of God includes everything, not just the family, not just the civil government, not just the church.

Speaker 1 (33:28)
I could see very often where people referred to him, their attitude was generally, without even understanding all of the issues involved, their attitude was, Christian, he goes too far. And yet, in a lot of ways, maybe he didn’t go far enough. He really saw what people of his time and that failed to see. The church, generally, was somewhat oblivious, and a lot of it had to do with their eschatology, a lot of it had to do with their theology. That was a problem in the But even in churches that really had even a better theology, they were really stuck in defending the Protestant Reformation and the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation, and they weren’t really applying the reform faith. So even in reformed communities, there was and remains a hostility to any specifics about how we apply the faith and what is the duty of a Christian today in society.

Speaker 2 (34:26)
There’s a fact that most people probably won’t I don’t know, because why would they? But before Ross House Books, which is the publishing arm of Chalcedon, was formed, your father had written the Institutes of Biblical Law, and he gave the printing rights. He maintained the copyright But he gave the printing rights to, I believe it was Presbyterian and Reformed. They kept the printing rights until at some point, I believe we asked and said, Could we have it back because it would be easier for us to discount books, et cetera. Anyway, the person who had taken over a PNR from his dad asked me, just in general, How many copies do you think we sold of Institutes of Biblical Law from the outset? Now, Knowing the widespread effect your father’s writing had, I thought it was going to be something like 500,000. And his answer was, No, it was about 25,000. Now, that’s remarkable when you consider how far and how extensive Christian reconstruction has developed. Would you attribute that to the blessings of the Holy spirit?

Speaker 1 (35:42)
Yes. And we’ve often quoted the truism that ideas have consequences. My father knew that his early books… Let me go back. His early books, such as Intellectual Schizophrenia, Messianic Character, One and the Many, by what standard These were really geared more towards academics. They were written in a somewhat different style. By the mid ’60s, they realized he wasn’t getting anywhere by just influencing or speaking to scholars. He said his real receptive audience was laymen. So he began writing to what he referred to as educated laymen, people who wanted to understand what was going on and who were receptive, particularly with the disillusionment of a lot of Christians when Barry Goldwater lost the presidential race. It just looked like this left wing invincible force was controlling our country for a time. He said people then were ready to recognize. What he was trying to move people from is from a political perspective to a theological perspective and saying, Here’s our problem. Here’s where we’ve gone wrong in the past. There’s a lot of history involved in what he writes. A lot of the intellectual leaders of the left are discussed in his writings, and this is why we are where we are, and this is where it’s heading, and this is the Christian alternative.

Speaker 1 (37:10)
This is how we should be thinking as Christians. He had to lay a lot of groundwork for what he said. That’s the warp and woof of his writing. We still have to tread a lot of that same ground coming away from the errors under which we’re now living. We have to re examine what God’s word says, and we examine so many areas of life and thought in terms of the Bible, and this is what his real gift was. It’s easy to get lost in my father’s writings, though, because he says so much and he covers so many aspects. One of the problems of reading my father is, periodically, you have to stop and try to intellectually digest what he said. Because he comes at something from so many angles, and he gives you so many ideas, and discusses so many fallacies of humanistic thought that you just have to stop and slow down until you can mentally catch up in some way and get the big picture.

Speaker 2 (38:13)
It’s interesting that you say that because I’ve taught through the Institutes of Biblical Law for over 20 years. The tendency is for someone to say, I want to get through this book as fast as possible. I always advise them, don’t. Take it chapter by chapter, section within section, because if you can’t see how it’s applicable to your day-to-day life, then you’ve even missed the thrust of why Rushdoony wrote this.

Speaker 1 (38:40)
Also, once you see where he’s going with something and his evaluation of where we are, it really helps disabuse you of this simple conspiratorial thinking. It was a cartoon strip back in the ’60s, Pogo, I think it was called. One of its famous was, We have met the enemy, and he is us. We have been destructive of a Christian influence because we are so influenced by humanistic ideas, and it’s going to take time for us to weed them out. Maybe they will collapse quickly. We don’t know. Maybe it’s something we’re going to have to work through for many, many decades beyond our lifetime. We don’t know how things are going to play out. Certainly, we don’t know, as I said, what the Holy spirit is going to do. And yet there’s going to be a change. Our eschatology tells us of the increase of his government, there’ll be no end. And that’s still a promise. And that’s the blueprint we have for the future. We just don’t understand how we’re going to get to that conclusion from where we are today, but it’s going to happen. That’s why we can be confident in our faith.

Speaker 1 (39:54)
That’s why we can speak negatively of things and yet still have a positive outlook on life.

Speaker 2 (40:00)
We’re coming to the end of the time, and there’s a couple of things I want to bring up. Originally, when Chalcedon started, your father’s lectures, his conversations were produced on cassette tapes. Who still has cassette tapes? Who can still even utilize, even if you kept all those cassette tapes, what would you do with them? Then there were CDs, and now we have MP3s. What’s it like keeping up with emerging technologies? Are you like, Oh, my goodness, what are we going to do when the next one comes out?

Speaker 1 (40:31)
Well, that’s an interesting question, and you just keep plugging away. Unfortunately, I’ve had, because I didn’t understand a lot of the technology involved in real-to-real or preserving the cassette tapes or the CDs or putting them on computers. I’ve gotten good help, a lot of volunteer help. Churches have helped sometimes with financing a lot of this work, so it hasn’t all been done directly by Chalcedon. It’s very gratifying to see a lot of this come about and where we’ve gotten it. Sometimes it’s easy to be discouraged in what we have to do with a small staff and a very limited budget. But then you step back and you say, Well, look what we have preserved. Look what is still available in the modern technology. It’s very gratifying to see what we’ve managed to accomplish. The good that I think that’s going to be done from keeping this material available. The great influence of Christian reconstruction is really from individuals. You mentioned how relatively few copies of institutes of biblical law I have been produced over the years. It’s people who spread these ideas. And a Christian reconstruction movement, because it doesn’t have a lot of prominent leaders, individuals producing new material, it’s still bigger than it was when my father passed away, bigger than it was in the ’70s or ’80s or ’90s, because people have adopted the ideas.

Speaker 1 (42:09)
People have been influenced by reading it. Families have been influenced. Churches have been influenced because their pastors have read the material. So the ideas are dispersing. They’re getting out there. There’s a lot which is encouraging about what we’ve been doing in the past and where we are now.

Speaker 2 (42:28)
You did mention that Chalcedon has a relatively small staff. I think sometimes people envision big ideas necessarily have big institutional administrative functions. And yet I know and you know that we’ve got people behind the scenes that do the proofreading, typesetting, designing book covers, handling office duties of shipping books, taking orders, and processing donations. Is it a concern for you that Chalcedon has a small staff? What would you say at this point is Chalcedon’s greatest need? What do you think Chalcedon’s greatest need is at this point?

Speaker 1 (43:08)
That’s difficult to say. Certainly, as I’m in charge of paying the bills, I’m always concerned about where we stand financially, what projects we’re even capable of undertaking. We do struggle financially at times. One of the things I hate spending money on is the facilities. We have a large amount of pavement and it’s beginning to look like a gravel road because it needs so much work. I hate spending tens of thousands of dollars on asphalt when we don’t know what our income is going to be like next year. Often, then we just have to ignore certain things on our physical facilities because we don’t have the income. Knowing we had a strong financial base is always helpful, but I don’t think that our problems are essentially financial. What we really need is we need to keep focused on what we’re doing, and we don’t always know what are going to need to be involved in six months, a year, or two years from now. Making sure that the ministry stays focused and we use what we have in the best way possible and the most efficient way possible. It’s just always a challenge.

Speaker 2 (44:21)
Calcine has an underwriter program where people donate so much every month, and that helps with the basic operations of the ministry. Then there are people who give regularly. I would underestimate the importance of people praying for the Ministry, praying for wisdom of those who are making decisions and things of that nature. Would you agree that that’s not, Oh, yeah, and if you get a chance, pray for us?

Speaker 1 (44:48)
Oh, absolutely. We really, really would appreciate people praying for us and just remember our needs. Asking for funds is something I’ve always hated doing. We got to do it on a regular basis. But I would mention one thing before we close, and this is true just in the last eight weeks. We got an estate gift. Our checkbook was dry. I was trying to figure out how we were going to make payroll. We got an estate gift that’s probably going to get us by. Until things pick up, usually our income picks up at the end, at the very end of the year, year-end giving. But several times throughout the year is when we’ve had a real financial crunch, a serious crunch, crippling financial crunch. An occasional estate gift will come in. Never millions, but something that will get us by. Chalcedon has always managed to get by, but I’m constantly aware that some of our more serious financial crunches have been answered by estate gifts of people that we cannot even thank anymore. So remembering us in your state giving, not to the of your family and your family obligations, but it has been a tremendous help in the past.

Speaker 1 (46:06)
Their planning and their foresight in remembering us in the work of Christian reconstruction has done a tremendous amount of good for us and has helped us, sometimes in very trying circumstances.

Speaker 2 (46:20)
I often have the opportunity because your wife, Darlene, shares it with the staff, things that people write in when they give their donations and such. For a lot of these people, we’re talking about people who are in their 70s and 80s, and they remember, and they were young people when your dad first started his work. They always talk about how much Chalcedon helped them. They consider that the help that they received far outweighs any financial support that they were able to give. I think that’s a really important maybe fact to end on and get your comment on. Chalcedon wants this to be a two-way street, a personal help for people like, How might I deal with this? Or, What’s a good book to give to my neighbor, my daughter, my friend? We’re really interested in taking all the resources that your father’s work produced, since we know what they are, being able to share them with people and saying, Oh, this would be something really good, or, This is something to share with your professor. Any comment on that?

Speaker 1 (47:29)
My father often noted that the tithe was given to the Levites. The Levites serve various functions in society. This is before the government programs. They were involved in education of various kinds. They did a lot of social functions such as charity. You gave to whichever Levites you wanted doing a work that you thought was important. The Levites then gave a 10th of what they got to the Aaronic priesthood who were in charge of the temple. The tithe was not taken to the temple given to the temple priest. It was given to the Levites who were doing social work. The tithe represented how you thought that you were giving it to the Levites. You thought we were doing important work. When people give us their tithes or offerings, we recognize it as them saying that we think you’re doing an important work for the Lord. We realize there’s a A lot involved in people writing a check, and we greatly appreciate it. But people will sometimes say, My work is not Christian work. My work is very dull. It’s very harder for me to see how my work is actually furthering the Kingdom of God. Well, God provided for that.

Speaker 1 (48:48)
That is the tithes. That’s the tithes and offerings. Your work provides you an income. And so your work then becomes productive in the Kingdom of God to the extent that you are giving by tithes and offerings to God’s work. It’s actually you’re doing something very substantial, and you’re making a very substantial contribution to the Kingdom by funding it. Tithes and offerings are the funding mechanism of the Kingdom of God. Everybody is involved in building the Kingdom, even if they’re not directly involved in the work. They are directly involved in building the Kingdom.

Speaker 2 (49:24)
I think that’s a good thing for people to keep in mind. Well, Mark, I really appreciate you spending the time giving us a personal look in what it’s like to be you in the role that God has given you. Anything else before we close that you hoped we would cover but didn’t?

Speaker 1 (49:42)
I would just say that I do very much appreciate our givers, and Darlene and I do pray for you on a very regular basis, and thank God for you.

Speaker 2 (49:51)
OutoftheQuestionpodcast@gmail.com is how you reach us, and we look forward to being with you next time.

Speaker 1 (49:59)
Thanks for listening to Out of the Question. For more information on this and other topics, please visit chalcedon.edu.