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Includes the name: Michael Joseph McVicar

Obras por Michael J. McVicar

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Journal of Mormon History - Volume 46, No. 4 (October 2020) (2020) — Contribuidor — 1 exemplar

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Rousas John Rushdoony (1916-2001) was the founder of Christian Reconstruction, Theonomy or Dominionism as it has been variously designated. He has been described as ‘political heretic’ (Rodney Clapp), 'a man every bit as potentially murderous as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot or anyone else you may want to name amongst the annals of evil' (BCSE ) and as ‘founder of the Christian homeschooling movement and an intellectual catalyst of the Christian Right’ (Christianity Today 2 April 2001: 25).

The school of thought that he founded has been described as ‘a dangerous secret society intent on turning the United States into a theocracy’ and as the ‘think tank of the religious right’! As McVicar asserts Rushdoony is an ‘enigma — at once intellectually deep and emotionally distant, a complex mix of hubris and humility’. In this well researched and written book McVicar helps us to understand Rushdoony the man and Christian Reconstructionism the ‘movement’ a little better.

McVicar looks at the influences on Rushdoony by taking a biographical and chronological approach. It was as a missionary on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Owyhee, Nevada that he began to see what he saw as the overreach of the government. This shaped his view of the need for limited or minimal government. In March 1946 he came across Cornelius van Til’s The New Modernism. This seemingly caused a paradigm shift in his thinking and he adopted Van Til’s presuppositionalist approach. Van Til gave him the tools to critique the role of the state and to develop his Christian approach to the state.

In 1952 he took up the pastorate of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Santa Cruz. This was not an easy time for him and his family. His wife had a breakdown and sued for divorce. Rushdoony had custody of the their three youngest children. McVicar’s chapter 2 entitled ‘The anti-everything agenda’ tell of Rushdony’s association with several right wing Christian organisations, these included Spiritual Mobilisation, William Volker Charities Fund and Centre for American Studies (CAS). It during this time that Rushdoony came across Albert J. Nock’s idea of the remnant. Rushdoony ‘developed an explicitly religious notion of the Remnant’ (p 61). Rushdoony’s approach was separation rather than connection didn’t help to win many friends. He was eventually fired from the CAS.

Chapter 3, ‘A Christian renaissance’ describes the beginings of Rushdoony’s Christian Reconstructionism. It started when Gary North introduced Rushdoony to the women associated with the Betsy Ross Book Shop. The Chalcedon Foundation was started in 1965. The plan was to develop a Christian College but that never materialised, but the task of Christian reconstruction and Christian dominion had begun.

The main factors that contributed to the Chalcedon project were presuppositionalism, post-millennialism, and the need to return to biblical law which entailed a reduction in the reach of the state and the focus on the role of the family. Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty was utilised, but it was a truncated version of it. The only spheres Rushdoony recognised were the church, the state and the family. Missing from the influences McVicar cites is Robert L. Dabney. Dabney’s view of the American civil war was taken up and developed by Rushdoony and incorporated into his 'Christian' America view of history.

Rushdoony’s tussle with Christianity Today is well told in chapter 4. Here again Rushdoony’s separatist approach made him few friends. In 1969 Rushdoony began his lectures on what came to be his seminal work The Institutes of Biblical Law. Gary North later said of the book ‘I recognized early that this book would launch a movement’ (Christian Reconstruction 12(2), March/April 1988). In it Rushdoony posited that the biblical law was still binding and provided the ‘structuring blueprint for all aspects of life’ ( p 129). As McVicar notes:
‘Through the law, the reconstructed Christian male - or “dominion man,’ as Rushdoony called him — could “take dominion” over the plate and “reconstruct” all of life in Christ’s image.’
The exclusive language is deliberate - Rushdoony and the Reconstructionist approach is very patriarchal. Women were to be a ‘helpmeet’ to the men. For Rushdoony the family was ‘the most important institution in society’. It was during this time that Gary North and Greg L. Bahsen became more involved with Rushdoony.

North married one of Rushdoony’s daughters and has described himself as one of the co-founders of Christian Reconstruction (Christian Reconstruction March/April 1988). Both North and Bahnsen were popularisers of Rushdoony’s views. Bahnsen lectured at RTS Jackson and his students included Kenneth Gentry, James B. Jordan, David Chilton and Gary DeMar, a group McVicar called the ‘hard core of the second and third generation of Reconstructionists’ (p160). Bashen’s theonomic views weren’t appreciated by at at RTS and he was fired from his post. The catalyst for the firing was the publication of his Theonomy in Christian Ethics.

North, Bahnsen and several of Bahnsen’s students went to Tyler, Texas. There they became involved with Westminster Presbyterian Church pastored by Ray Sutton. They developed their own form of Reconstructionism which McVicar aptly describes as ‘a complex mix of Rushdoony-style Reconstructionism, paramilitary survivalism and an aggressive theological polemics’ (p 182).

They fell out with Rushdoony over the nature of the church. For Rushdoony the key institution is the family, for the Tyler Group it was the church. And they developed very strict measures of church discipline. Sutton is now a bishop in the Reformed Episcopal Church, unfortunately the story of this radical change is untold.

McVicar’s book received a warm review on the Chalcedon website — this is testimony to McVicar’s even handedness; McVicar even had articles on Rushdoony published in Chalcedon’s Faith and Life magazine:
2008. Working with pygmies: R. J. Rushdoony, Christianity Today, and the making of an American theologian’. Faith for All of Life (Jul/Aug): 14-18,32. [http://www.scribd.com/doc/30522420/July-Aug2008#scribd]
2008. ’“First Owyhee, then the world”: The early ministry of R. J. Rushdoony’. Faith for All of Life (Nov/Dec) 18-22, 33. [http://www.scribd.com/doc/30522581/Nov-Dec2008]
Comparisons have to be made with Julie Ingersol’s Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Unlike McVicar, Ingersoll was once an insider; she was married to a key Reconstructionist. McVicar had direct access to Rushdoony’s library (of over 40,000 volumes!) and papers. Ingersoll concentrates more on the legacy of Rushdoony as seen in Christian education, creationism, biblical economics, the religious right and the revision of Christian American history. She is also more academic and empirically based than McVicar. For McVicar Rushdoony is main focus, for Ingersoll he is the background.

For a good introduction to Rushdoony the man the best staring point is McVicar, for the on-going legacy then Ingersoll. The books complement each other.

Originally on http://stevebishop.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-review-of-christian-reconstruction-b...

… (mais)
 
Assinalado
stevebishop.uk | 2 outras críticas | Jul 23, 2020 |
Rousas John Rushdoony (1916-2001) was the founder of Christian Reconstruction, Theonomy or Dominionism as it has been variously designated. He has been described as ‘political heretic’ (Rodney Clapp), 'a man every bit as potentially murderous as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot or anyone else you may want to name amongst the annals of evil' (BCSE ) and as ‘founder of the Christian homeschooling movement and an intellectual catalyst of the Christian Right’ (Christianity Today 2 April 2001: 25).

The school of thought that he founded has been described as ‘a dangerous secret society intent on turning the United States into a theocracy’ and as the ‘think tank of the religious right’! As McVicar asserts Rushdoony is an ‘enigma — at once intellectually deep and emotionally distant, a complex mix of hubris and humility’. In this well researched and written book McVicar helps us to understand Rushdoony the man and Christian Reconstructionism the ‘movement’ a little better.

McVicar looks at the influences on Rushdoony by taking a biographical and chronological approach. It was as a missionary on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Owyhee, Nevada that he began to see what he saw as the overreach of the government. This shaped his view of the need for limited or minimal government. In March 1946 he came across Cornelius van Til’s The New Modernism. This seemingly caused a paradigm shift in his thinking and he adopted Van Til’s presuppositionalist approach. Van Til gave him the tools to critique the role of the state and to develop his Christian approach to the state.

In 1952 he took up the pastorate of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Santa Cruz. This was not an easy time for him and his family. His wife had a breakdown and sued for divorce. Rushdoony had custody of the their three youngest children. McVicar’s chapter 2 entitled ‘The anti-everything agenda’ tell of Rushdony’s association with several right wing Christian organisations, these included Spiritual Mobilisation, William Volker Charities Fund and Centre for American Studies (CAS). It during this time that Rushdoony came across Albert J. Nock’s idea of the remnant. Rushdoony ‘developed an explicitly religious notion of the Remnant’ (p 61). Rushdoony’s approach was separation rather than connection didn’t help to win many friends. He was eventually fired from the CAS.

Chapter 3, ‘A Christian renaissance’ describes the beginings of Rushdoony’s Christian Reconstructionism. It started when Gary North introduced Rushdoony to the women associated with the Betsy Ross Book Shop. The Chalcedon Foundation was started in 1965. The plan was to develop a Christian College but that never materialised, but the task of Christian reconstruction and Christian dominion had begun.

The main factors that contributed to the Chalcedon project were presuppositionalism, post-millennialism, and the need to return to biblical law which entailed a reduction in the reach of the state and the focus on the role of the family. Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty was utilised, but it was a truncated version of it. The only spheres Rushdoony recognised were the church, the state and the family. Missing from the influences McVicar cites is Robert L. Dabney. Dabney’s view of the American civil war was taken up and developed by Rushdoony and incorporated into his 'Christian' America view of history.

Rushdoony’s tussle with Christianity Today is well told in chapter 4. Here again Rushdoony’s separatist approach made him few friends. In 1969 Rushdoony began his lectures on what came to be his seminal work The Institutes of Biblical Law. Gary North later said of the book ‘I recognized early that this book would launch a movement’ (Christian Reconstruction 12(2), March/April 1988). In it Rushdoony posited that the biblical law was still binding and provided the ‘structuring blueprint for all aspects of life’ ( p 129). As McVicar notes:
‘Through the law, the reconstructed Christian male - or “dominion man,’ as Rushdoony called him — could “take dominion” over the plate and “reconstruct” all of life in Christ’s image.’
The exclusive language is deliberate - Rushdoony and the Reconstructionist approach is very patriarchal. Women were to be a ‘helpmeet’ to the men. For Rushdoony the family was ‘the most important institution in society’. It was during this time that Gary North and Greg L. Bahsen became more involved with Rushdoony.

North married one of Rushdoony’s daughters and has described himself as one of the co-founders of Christian Reconstruction (Christian Reconstruction March/April 1988). Both North and Bahnsen were popularisers of Rushdoony’s views. Bahnsen lectured at RTS Jackson and his students included Kenneth Gentry, James B. Jordan, David Chilton and Gary DeMar, a group McVicar called the ‘hard core of the second and third generation of Reconstructionists’ (p160). Bashen’s theonomic views weren’t appreciated by at at RTS and he was fired from his post. The catalyst for the firing was the publication of his Theonomy in Christian Ethics.

North, Bahnsen and several of Bahnsen’s students went to Tyler, Texas. There they became involved with Westminster Presbyterian Church pastored by Ray Sutton. They developed their own form of Reconstructionism which McVicar aptly describes as ‘a complex mix of Rushdoony-style Reconstructionism, paramilitary survivalism and an aggressive theological polemics’ (p 182).

They fell out with Rushdoony over the nature of the church. For Rushdoony the key institution is the family, for the Tyler Group it was the church. And they developed very strict measures of church discipline. Sutton is now a bishop in the Reformed Episcopal Church, unfortunately the story of this radical change is untold.

McVicar’s book received a warm review on the Chalcedon website — this is testimony to McVicar’s even handedness; McVicar even had articles on Rushdoony published in Chalcedon’s Faith and Life magazine:
2008. Working with pygmies: R. J. Rushdoony, Christianity Today, and the making of an American theologian’. Faith for All of Life (Jul/Aug): 14-18,32. [http://www.scribd.com/doc/30522420/July-Aug2008#scribd]
2008. ’“First Owyhee, then the world”: The early ministry of R. J. Rushdoony’. Faith for All of Life (Nov/Dec) 18-22, 33. [http://www.scribd.com/doc/30522581/Nov-Dec2008]
Comparisons have to be made with Julie Ingersol’s Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Unlike McVicar, Ingersoll was once an insider; she was married to a key Reconstructionist. McVicar had direct access to Rushdoony’s library (of over 40,000 volumes!) and papers. Ingersoll concentrates more on the legacy of Rushdoony as seen in Christian education, creationism, biblical economics, the religious right and the revision of Christian American history. She is also more academic and empirically based than McVicar. For McVicar Rushdoony is main focus, for Ingersoll he is the background.

For a good introduction to Rushdoony the man the best staring point is McVicar, for the on-going legacy then Ingersoll. The books complement each other.

Originally on http://stevebishop.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-review-of-christian-reconstruction-b...

… (mais)
 
Assinalado
stevebishop | 2 outras críticas | Apr 2, 2016 |
The following article is located at: http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2015/julaug/battlefield-surgery.html

Battlefield Surgery
Rousas Rushdoony and Christian Reconstruction.
Douglas Wilson | posted 6/18/2015

McVicar does acknowledge that the Reconstructionists were hardliners, giving unflinching and sometimes brutal solutions to the problems posed by modernity. But at the same time, he also understands the brutal nature of the problems they were trying to address.

His insights were needed in the battle, but to cite them as coming from Rush would simply make the battle more complicated by giving the enemy material for a counterattack. "You're quoting Rushdoony?"

Another reason this happened was because Rushdoony was so pithy and so memorable that a number of his insights took on a life of their own. Take his "inescapable concept"—not whether, but which. It is not whether we will impose morality, but rather which morality we will impose. It is not whether we will have a theocracy, but rather which god will be the god of that theocracy. You learn something like this and it is not long before the letters to the editor are writing themselves.

For one who could rarely be named, Rushdoony was remarkably well-placed and influential. This is one of the real surprises of McVicar's book, and it comes out in two areas. First, Rushdoony was a real player in the world of right-wing politics. In the postwar world, when the nascent conservative movement was finding its identity, an awful lot was up for grabs. This was the era when the John Birch Society was forming (and Rush had connections there), when William Buckley was founding National Review, and when the Volker Fund (later "merging" with the Hoover Institution) was funding the work of intellectuals in revolt against the liberal order. The details of Rushdoony's activity here are really fascinating.

Second, Rushdoony was a very real presence—just offstage, but still there—in the development and rise of the evangelical movement. In the early years, Rushdoony wrote for Christianity Today, and he had the ear of one of CT's big donors. He and Francis Schaeffer, despite disagreements, had many fruitful interactions over many years. Rushdoony was interested in pulling the whole evangelical movement to the right, and into a more self-conscious form of high-octane Calvinism.

I was once in conversation with Greg Bahnsen and mentioned to him why I did not self-identify—that's how we say it these days, right?—as a Reconstructionist. Having heard my reasons, Bahnsen made a distinction that I have since found descriptive and helpful. He said there is a difference between a movement and a school of thought. A movement is more disciplined and defined, with set boundaries, and requires a leader. A school of thought can be bound together by nothing more than a loose set of similar assumptions. When we say that Spinoza and Leibniz were both rationalists, we do not mean that they put out a newsletter together.

Nicholas Wolterstorff once noted that there are three distinct currents in the Reformed river. First we have the pietists, to whom personal conversion and the resultant personal devotion are everything. Then there are the doctrinalists, to whom precise and absolute doctrinal conformity to the Canons of Not Trent are everything. The third group is the Kuyperian, which believes that every aspect of life needs to be brought under the functional authority of the lordship of Jesus Christ. This third group encompasses the first two, but the first two don't necessarily encompass anything else. And so it is in this sense that we can say—and perhaps thanks to Rushdoony—that we are all Kuyperians now.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________
We expect scholarly works of history to be level-headed and even-handed because, of course, that is what scholarship is for. But we then give the game away if we act too surprised when works of scholarship actually turn out that way—despite easy opportunities not to. The Christian Reconstruction movement was a genuine hot rock just a few decades ago, and so it is somewhat surprising to see anybody discuss it, even today, without their oven mitts on. But that is what Michael McVicar manages to do.

McVicar is a careful writer, and not in anyone's corner. He is certainly not writing as an apologist for the Reconstructionist project, but neither is he functioning as a partisan for Reconstruction's many critics. At the same time, he clearly grasps what everyone was maintaining—recons and their critics both—and gives them all their due. The unvarnished views of his Reconstructionist subjects do leave him obviously aghast in a few places, but he recovers nicely and doesn't really let it affect his overall analysis. And, at the same time, he is clearly sympathetic to Rousas Rushdoony as a man, and he goes out of his way to place the radicalism of the Reconstructionists in context. A partisan Reconstructionist might object that this sounds too much like an anthropologist being scientifically dispassionate about the cannibal's dinner, but more is going on than that:

Rushdoony and the Reconstructionist project he cultivated cut to the very heart of a brutal century dominated by the technocult of the modern state and a global autophagic capitalist order. If his vision of the world is disturbing, it is because it grew from cultural soil fertilized with the rotting offal of modernity: three world wars (two hot, one cold); industrialized genocide; mass revolutions; the rise of omnipresent governmental and corporate surveillance systems; corrupt political regimes; skyrocketing domestic crime; and corporate piracy. Rushdoony's political theology spoke to all of these issues and offered prescriptive, often nauseatingly violent responses to deal with a century that was, in so many ways, an unmitigated disaster for a significant portion of humanity.

In short, battlefield surgeons often suggest hard solutions, but we should never forget that they are making their triage decisions under pretty grim conditions. McVicar does acknowledge that the Reconstructionists were hardliners, giving unflinching and sometimes brutal solutions to the problems posed by modernity. But at the same time, he also understands the brutal nature of the problems they were trying to address. This separates him from many critics of Reconstruction, for whom the modern world represents baseline normality. The 20th century was a century of enormous progress, but one also filled with enormities. The Reconstructionists saw that, at any rate, and McVicar gives them their due.

One of the bracing attractions of the Reconstructionists was their commitment to the dictum that he who says A must say B. If you get him onto the subject of Third World debt and the World Bank (which isn't hard), N. T. Wright can sound just like a theonomist. Three cheers for the Jubilee and debt forgiveness. Call it smiley face theonomy. But then if you were to ask him about "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," he would go hot-footing it back to the 21st century, where we have hot and cold running water, antibiotics, and liberal democracy. The Reconstructionists were made of sterner stuff than that, and so some of them were willing to debate whether firing squads could be used in lieu of stoning, for what were bullets but very small stones thrown at high rates of speed?

One of the bracing attractions of the Reconstructionists was their commitment to the dictum that he who says A must say B.

McVicar shows how Rushdoony became a controversial figure, even as his influence was growing remarkably. Hence his arguments and insights were frequently used but rarely cited. One of the themes that comes up often in McVicar's book is how often Rush (as he was called) was cited and applied by respectable conservatives, without attribution. His insights were needed in the battle, but to cite them as coming from Rush would simply make the battle more complicated by giving the enemy material for a counterattack. "You're quoting Rushdoony?"

Another reason this happened was because Rushdoony was so pithy and so memorable that a number of his insights took on a life of their own. Take his "inescapable concept"—not whether, but which. It is not whether we will impose morality, but rather which morality we will impose. It is not whether we will have a theocracy, but rather which god will be the god of that theocracy. You learn something like this and it is not long before the letters to the editor are writing themselves.

For one who could rarely be named, Rushdoony was remarkably well-placed and influential. This is one of the real surprises of McVicar's book, and it comes out in two areas. First, Rushdoony was a real player in the world of right-wing politics. In the postwar world, when the nascent conservative movement was finding its identity, an awful lot was up for grabs. This was the era when the John Birch Society was forming (and Rush had connections there), when William Buckley was founding National Review, and when the Volker Fund (later "merging" with the Hoover Institution) was funding the work of intellectuals in revolt against the liberal order. The details of Rushdoony's activity here are really fascinating.

Second, Rushdoony was a very real presence—just offstage, but still there—in the development and rise of the evangelical movement. In the early years, Rushdoony wrote for Christianity Today, and he had the ear of one of CT's big donors. He and Francis Schaeffer, despite disagreements, had many fruitful interactions over many years. Rushdoony was interested in pulling the whole evangelical movement to the right, and into a more self-conscious form of high-octane Calvinism.

So in both these arenas, Rushdoony was a significant player, but from both of them he was forced into exile. He established the Chalcedon Foundation in California, and from that place began providing the ungarbled answers that many Christians were longing for. He became enormously influential in homeschooling circles as he began traveling the country to provide expert testimony on behalf of parents who were in trouble with the law for providing a truly Christian education for their kids. Though in exile, Rushdoony and his colleagues (North, Chilton, Jordan, Bahnsen, et al.) began dominating the conversation of the entire conservative Christian world, and they were able to do this through a torrent of publications. Richard Weaver, one of Rush's adversaries, was right. Ideas do have consequences.

I was once in conversation with Greg Bahnsen and mentioned to him why I did not self-identify—that's how we say it these days, right?—as a Reconstructionist. Having heard my reasons, Bahnsen made a distinction that I have since found descriptive and helpful. He said there is a difference between a movement and a school of thought. A movement is more disciplined and defined, with set boundaries, and requires a leader. A school of thought can be bound together by nothing more than a loose set of similar assumptions. When we say that Spinoza and Leibniz were both rationalists, we do not mean that they put out a newsletter together.

Nicholas Wolterstorff once noted that there are three distinct currents in the Reformed river. First we have the pietists, to whom personal conversion and the resultant personal devotion are everything. Then there are the doctrinalists, to whom precise and absolute doctrinal conformity to the Canons of Not Trent are everything. The third group is the Kuyperian, which believes that every aspect of life needs to be brought under the functional authority of the lordship of Jesus Christ. This third group encompasses the first two, but the first two don't necessarily encompass anything else. And so it is in this sense that we can say—and perhaps thanks to Rushdoony—that we are all Kuyperians now.

When I have been asked if I am a theonomist, my reply is usually something like, "Oh, no … I hate God's law." This should reveal, of course, that all Christians need to acknowledge that God's authority in this world is absolute, and that Christians should all live the way He wants. The debate after that point is hermeneutical and exegetical, not theological. So perhaps Rushdoony's legacy in death is similar to what it was when he was alive—a significant presence, but not found anywhere in the footnotes.

Douglas Wilson is pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and a faculty member at New Saint Andrews College. He is the author recently of a new verse rendering of Beowulf (Canon Press).

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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keithhamblen | 2 outras críticas | Aug 13, 2015 |

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