The Fright Peddlers
The creation of the world and its government is the work of the Lord, and it is not in His declared plan that man will destroy it. The fright peddlers are giving too much power to man.
- R. J. Rushdoony
California Farmer 245:1 (July 10, 1976), p. 31.
I read something last night which took me back to my school days, to the earlier years of elementary school, but not very pleasantly. It was a statement by a prominent “authority” that we have only enough coal, oil, and gas in the world’s reserves to last another twenty years. I recall hearing that statement fifty years ago in a classroom! I was also told that the new weapons of warfare would lead to the obliteration of the human race if a second world war began, and that man’s hope was in something called, I think, the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, which almost all nations signed, promising to end all wars, and in the League of Nations. In fact, I heard quite a few horror stories in school about what was going to happen to the human race unless something or other was done. Since then, the world has gone from bad to worse, sometimes because of some of the answers then proposed!
But our children and grandchildren still get the same horror stories, and college classrooms are full of them. We are running out of gas and oil (although some good “authorities” less publicized say we have enough for at least 2000 years); we are running out of air, space, and everything, or so it is claimed. All of this, besides being false, breeds fear and hopelessness. It exalts some scientific planners as the only ones with the answers, and it makes the rest of us a herd of cattle headed for the stockyards, unless we listen to them.
Above all else, it exalts the power of man to destroy, and it produces the fear of man. And this is sinful. God demands of us, “[W]ho art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man which shall be made as grass; And forgettest the LORD thy maker…?” (Isa. 51:12–13).
The creation of the world and its government is the work of the Lord, and it is not in His declared plan that man will destroy it. The fright peddlers are giving too much power to man. It is God’s power they need to recognize, not man’s. If man is the basic power, then the answers must come from man, but if God is the sovereign power, then the answers must come from God, and none other. God has provided the answers, and they are in His Word. Our problem is that men pay no attention to them.
- R. J. Rushdoony
Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965. His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.” He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.