A Review of the First Academic Book on Rushdoony
May/June 2015
No results were found while searching for “[% query %]”
The story of Chalcedon is really my life’s story. Being an Armenian, many of whose family members died for the faith, and coming from a long line of clergymen, the faith was identical to life for me. Before my birth, I had been dedicated to Christ’s service by my parents.
The failure of man’s repeated attempts to control the future should come as no surprise to us when we see they are rarely able to agree on the past. So many people today start with a distrust of establishment power that conspiracy thinking is not limited to major events, but now includes relatively routine ones. Often such ideas gain a foothold before anyone really knows any facts. If an airliner is lost over the ocean, then a grand conspiracy is thought to be underway to supply terrorists with a plane. If the price of crude oil drops we soon lose track of the theories on who manipulated it and for what purpose. The restructuring of our thoughts about the more distant past is also prevalent. It is called revisionism.
Dr. Michael J. McVicar has written the first major scholarly work on the history of Christian Reconstruction, unraveling the complexities of the impact made upon our culture by the work of R. J. Rushdoony. While the work’s 1,017 endnotes underscore the academic workmanship of the author, the value of the underlying research is in its reliance on original sources (rare in a field of study where second- and third-hand sourcing and hearsay are the general rule). The quality and relevance of Dr. McVicar’s sources are as important as the comprehensive range they cover.
Those who embrace the law of God as binding on their lives see God’s laws as blessings; those who do not, see them as hindrances to their autonomy. God’s law acts as a boundary that we move at our peril. By obeying it we are performing our duty before the Lord, (Eccles. 12:13) and we are living a life that is lived according to God’s instruction manual.
This is the eighth in the ongoing series of articles about Dr. Punyamurtula S. Kishore, the Christian doctor who pioneered a non-narcotic, sobriety-centric approach to addiction that proved to be clinically superior to conventional treatment protocols.
You may wonder why I’ve been reviewing so many fantasy novels, most of them marketed as Young Readers fiction. I do it because it’s important.