333: Is Pornography Ravaging Churches?

Charles Roberts (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 co-hosts are Andrea Schwartz, a teacher and mentor, and Pastor Charles Roberts.

Andrea Schwartz (00:19)
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Out of the Question podcast. Theology and theological doctrines are not things reserved for intellectuals or professional clergymen. For the laity not to understand from the bottom up the principles of the Christian biblical faith leaves them susceptible to humanism and all its counterfeits. In fact, the very counterfeits of humanism are distortions of genuine biblical truths and have resulted in those who profess Christ to often become delinquent confessing him. In other words, one can say he believes certain things, but his actions betray his words. Nowadays, Christians are very eager to share the gospel with their unbelieving family and friends. But what they share often misses the objective realities of mankind’s condition. Succinctly stated, God created Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply and take dominion over the earth according to his law. Eden was a pilot project, if you will, where they would gain experience in faithful work, which would then extend to the entire earth. When they sinned, they lost the privilege given them without losing God’s demands on their lives. Sin was now central to their thoughts, words, and deeds, and it was imputed or transferred, if you would, to all their posterity.

Andrea Schwartz (02:01)
Now, what I have just done is state facts. There is never any reason for Christians to debate these facts as they have been clearly revealed in scripture, which is inerrant and infallible. Thus, the first thing that needs to be communicated to those whom believers wish to reach is the fact of this imputation of sin, the bad news, if you will. But following this information should be that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ for the express purpose of receiving the punishment due Adam and his descendants. Because unlike him, none were sinless or spotless, and thus could not pay the debt. Thus, Adam’s sin was imputed to Jesus Christ. Doctrinally, we call this the Atonement. Jesus’s resurrection overcame sin and death, and his righteousness, which he always possessed, is now imputed to his elect, who stand justified before God and are adopted into the family of God. Jesus removes our sin and transmits or imputes his righteousness and justice to us. That is regeneration. Atonement, imputation, justification, and regeneration are all necessary in the life of one who is saved and must be received and acknowledged as the only way of salvation. Today, Charles and I are going to discuss the counterfeits or false imputations, atonements, and justifications that are prevalent and rampant in a fallen society, and why it’s vital for believers to spot them and counter them.

Andrea Schwartz (03:58)
Charles, explain how our humanistic, rebellious society deals with these concepts of atonement and imputation.

Charles Roberts (04:10)
Well, I think the first thing right out of the starting gate is to understand that the idea of imputation is unavoidable, and it drives to the very heart of what Dr. Van Tille called the psychology of religion. And Dr. Rastuni also spoke of this issue, where Adam This sin, having been inherited by us, we find ourselves in a world in which we are at war with God, whether we think of that or not. And so unless, by God’s grace, our sin has been imputed to Christ or his righteousness imputed to us, I should say, this affects every aspect of our lives, the way we think, the way we discharge everything that we do in life, from eating, sleeping, going to a work. Everything is influenced by the fact that we are sinners unless we have been saved by God’s grace. And people realize this. That’s part of the biblical psychology of religion in that it recognizes and tries to communicate what Paul talks about in Romans 1, that the unbeliever knows there’s a God and knows that we are created in his image, and we try to close off that truth. We deny it at the fundamental level of our existence.

Charles Roberts (05:28)
And that creates, at a minimum, we say, a conflict in how we live our lives. And so unless people are redeemed by God’s grace and Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, and so we can start living a clear, full life the way God intended, we’re constantly looking for the counterfeits and the substitutes, and we see this in every area. This is so fundamental that I think this is one of the great challenges that we face in Christianity. And many Christians and churches don’t begin to understand the foundation of the problems that we face and why the transformation of the individual life by the mercy and grace of God is the only way, the only solution to bringing about the larger changes that need to take place. And one area that I mentioned to you, and we can explore this to some extent as we go forward, because Dr. Rastuni talks about it in his writings on this, is how the phenomenon and the plague of pornography links into this very issue. He wrote an entire book on this subject, several, if we include the one on the Marquis de Sade, in which he talks about how the substitution of God’s plan for men and women in the marital relationship for something that is decadent and, by biblical standards, evil, to say the least, becomes a means by which men try to avoid the awareness that they are sinners in God’s sight, and it permeates every aspect of their being.

Andrea Schwartz (06:59)
So I’m glad you brought up the term evil because it’s not something that we normally hear in everyday discussion. Either on social media or regular media, we’ll hear about awful things that happen, and we hear that somebody was from a troubled background or there was a race component or there was whatever. There’s always reasons. But what you said earlier is that all these ideas that I mentioned earlier are inescapable ideas. Guilt is something everyone experiences because everyone knows, as Romans 1 says, that they’re at war with God, even though they don’t admit it. So you’re going to get a lot of explanations or reasons for why things happen: sinning with a good excuse, pleading to a lesser offense. I know I did that, but I did that because this person did something to me. So man yearns to be justified in his actions. And as I said at the beginning, justification only comes by Jesus’s death, resurrection, so his payment for our sins and our righteousness coming from him. Why do you think, when Bibles are readily available to people today, that even within the church, people seek justification for their porn problem or for their shady dealings with customers?

Andrea Schwartz (08:33)
What allows them to think that both of these things can be consistent at the same time?

Charles Roberts (08:39)
Well, because they either deny outright or they are ignorant of what the Bible actually teaches as to who they are in Christ or who they are not, if they’re not in Christ. And because churches, I think I can say largely, have given over sound doctrinal teaching and application imputation of God’s law word in every area of life for entertainment, church growth based on business tactics, where you don’t want to offend anyone else, you might not be able to sell the product, so to speak. It leads to everything being okay and open. Dr. Rastuni, in his systematic theology, where he talks about this, one of the chapters in the larger subject of atonement, section 5, concerning imputation, he makes this very interesting statement. He says, Because Jesus Christ is very God of very God, as well as very man and very man, our salvation is the work of eternity, not of time, and of the creator, and not of the creation. Now, that, I think, is a very fundamental point, because the people who want to operate in these areas that we’re talking about, whether it be pornography or shady business dealings or anything else, they’re operating from the perspective of everything being grounded in creation and time.

Charles Roberts (09:56)
They don’t see a larger transcendent factor to life. And so everything becomes bound by an evolutionary humanistic way of thinking to where pleasure, for example, or satisfaction, whether, again, that be through cheating people dishonestly in a business transaction or sexual fulfillment by proxy through pictures and films and who knows what else. All of these are corruptions of what the creator ordained for his creation, and they have implications generations, really, for all eternity.

Andrea Schwartz (10:32)
So when we’re talking about pornography, it’s really important to get away from the idea of the Playboy magazine, that being pornography or girly pictures or whatever. It’s really a world and life view, and a world and life view that’s in opposition to God’s law word. Sometimes it’s just too simple, and I think it’s too simple for people to just say it’s either it’s not going to be God’s way or it’s going to be sinful. Today, we have a lot of, and I’m sad to even have to admit it, there are a lot of men within Christendom who look at their pornography, addiction, or the use of it, like the way somebody sometimes overedes and shouldn’t do it. And so you have books like Every Man’s Battle. I don’t know. I don’t know that the Bible indicates that every man is going to have a battle with pornography, yet it almost becomes an affliction that, like other afflictions, whether it’s medical afflictions or whatever, that this is just a given. Is that part of the counterfeit that Rajduni talks about and we’ve been discussing this far?

Charles Roberts (11:52)
Yes, absolutely it is. I think that we need to keep in perspective that this is not a new problem. Of Of course, the prevalence and the availability, in this case of pornographic material is astoundingly available in our time because of technology. And it used to be if a man, much less likely a woman, wanted to go to some place to view pornographic films. That place that they would do that was on some dingy side of town, and they would go in the dead of night or something to that extent. Now, these things are right in your home, and you don’t have to worry about anybody seeing you and you feeling ashamed or guilty. Of course, we live in a society where guilt matters relating to God’s law is far less pronounced than it was decades ago. But yes, and I think this is something else that people who maybe want to excuse this on some level or other, whether… I’ve not read the book Every Man’s Battle. I’m familiar with the title, and I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that I doubt there’s one thing in that book that even begins to approach that subject the way Dr. Rushdoony, approached it on a far more fundamental level, and also from the standpoint of how this impacts society.

Charles Roberts (13:07)
Let me mention, as I said at the very beginning of this, that what I’m saying now, this is not a new problem. And one of the things that people who travel to the sites of ancient Rome and Greece can rather disturbingly come in contact with, are the pornographic images that are available in some ancient structures. I’ve not seen it, but it remains of the ancient city of Pompeii. I think there’s a whole section. I’ve seen a few documentaries about it, but apparently, they had an area for, I don’t know if it was prostitution, but the whole thing was decorated by very graphic pornographic images that would equal or rival everything that we have today. So pagan man was very much in tune with this way of thinking because he was locked in a mentality that everything was based on creation, and man is the highest expression of that creation. And so the seeking of pleasure, divorce from any biblical concept was high on his agenda. But it was also a very hopeless and pessimistic way of looking at life. And so whenever there is this emphasis, Especially in a society that has aspired on some level to be obedient and faithful to God’s way of life, it becomes, I mean, pornography in particular, a revolutionary premise.

Charles Roberts (14:26)
And it’s not too unusual to find that in places where there have been historically Christian societal roots, medieval Europe, for example, when people began to think about throwing off the way of looking at life that was totally dominated by a Christian worldview. Pornography played a big part of that. I’m thinking specifically of the French Revolution and the work of Marquis de Sade.

Andrea Schwartz (14:53)
A lot of people may or may not know that the term sadism comes from the application of the principles worldview of the Marquis de Sade. I think people are probably familiar with the term sadomasochistic, which means that the infliction of harm or destruction or whatever you want to call it to another person from one, and then the other person feeling like this is deserved, and so I’ll take it. A classic example would be the battered wife, that her husband is angry and takes it out on her, but she feels like, Well, I must deserve this, and so the cycle continues. Is that a religious worldview, sadomasochism?

Charles Roberts (15:42)
Absolutely, it is, as all of this that we’re talking about. Dr. Rastuni brings us out both in the section on imputation, but also in the book that is available from the Chalcedon store, Noble Savages, the retitle of a book that he had written many years earlier called The Politics of pornography. It is at heart a religious issue, as is everything in human society, and is either going to be the religion of humanism, which gives rise to this type of thinking and activity, or the religion of Holy Scripture, biblical Christianity, humanity. I think that people need to also be aware that we’re not talking about or advocating some distorted view of human sexuality. God created man and woman. He created sexuality, but he created it to be within the context of a monogamous married relationship, not some weird medieval distortion of it. So it’s not the issue of, should this type of relationship exist between men and women? But what is the proper context for that relationship to exist? And because there’s this fundamental denial of who human beings are outside of God and within the context of what he created us, we find these counterfeits. We find these aberrant examples of trying to pursue those things.

Charles Roberts (17:04)
And the sadomasochistic approach is one of them, where I’m the victim, I’m the one being beaten, and that’s somebody else’s fault, or it’s my fault. And so you get wrapped up in this whole way of thinking that is completely distorted. Human beings don’t treat each other this way if they understand who they are in God’s image. So it’s not unusual to find this type of pornographic material appealing to certain type of people. I think I may have mentioned this in previous podcast. I think I’ve mentioned just about everything else in previous podcast. But when I was an undergraduate and a philosophy major, I also double majored in religious studies. And oddly enough, my first encounter, and my only encounter, thank goodness, with the writings of Marquis de Sade was in religious studies. And it was a typical 1970s class called, and I’ll get this title now, Religion and the Literature of Stress. That was the title of the class. And among other things, we had to read one of the works of the Marquis de Sade, at least major sections of it. I don’t know if I should call the name of it or not, but it was one of them.

Charles Roberts (18:11)
At the time, I was thoroughly a pagan. I was not a Christian. And even for me, it was more than I could stomach. I mean, this guy was just so totally out to lunch. It’s hard to imagine that any human being could think and write like he did, and apparently, live like he did. But this is the phenomenon of man totally divorced from any accountability to anything other than himself and his own urges and desires, divorce from anything, but that being the highest expression of man.

Andrea Schwartz (18:40)
So I understand society in general is going to have obvious manifestations of rebellion against God. What often surprises people is within the church, within the body of professing believers, there isn’t a clear picture in this. And I think it goes back to the whole idea of antinomianism. And that is, if God’s word is what the Bible claims it is, then, as I said earlier, we don’t debate whether adultery is okay, is it understandable? It’s forbidden. Now, that doesn’t deny the fact that it happens, but it’s still forbidden. And I think with the idea that pornography is just a battle, as opposed to the manifestation of an idolatry of pleasure, if a person is married, that it is a form of adultery. If a person is not married, it’s a form of fornication. In either case, the Bible is clear that who will not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven? So we end up having this idea that as long as we feel bad about these sins that we commit, then we’re on a better path than not caring at all, but not having the discipline and acknowledging, wait a minute, if God says this is and I am born again, then I have the power to turn away from it.

Andrea Schwartz (20:05)
We don’t have to struggle with it. We have to be saying, this is not right, and turn away from it.

Charles Roberts (20:13)
Yeah, and I’m thinking of something that was… I don’t think he… I don’t know if he said it or wrote it, but the comedian Woody Allen, who in some ways manifestsests the epitome of these types of things, not so much the pornography side, although that could be included in it, but the idea of humanistic man being a law or a God unto himself and the pessimism that goes along with that. He once made a statement that he did not have a problem with or he liked masturbation because it was having sex with someone he loved. And it meant to be humorous in the context, but wow, what a telling statement. Man is in love with himself, and his highest expression, according to that rather cynical statement, is to turn to run away from other human beings. The late Dr. Greg Bonson had, I don’t know if it was a written article, I think it might have been one of his lectures, that also had a very interesting take on this called Sex Without Persons. And all of this are distortions of what God’s plan for humanity is. And so, as I said, it inevitably leads to a pessimistic, hopeless life.

Charles Roberts (21:23)
And so human beings, whether it has to do with pornography, gluttony, whatever institute is being rolled out to try to fill that void that God’s law word is meant to fill in Christ, in humanity, the seeking of justification is constant, and it has to come from somewhere. And I think we both know where humanistic man almost always turns for his justification. He turns to the state. He turns to government. And so his government tells him, his state tells him, This is okay. This is permitted in a liberal permissive society. You are free to pursue your highest expression of who and what you think you want to be. And so it’s not unusual then to find that in a godly biblical society, as many of our states were, again, greater or lesser extent, things like pornography, blasphemy, these things were banned and illegal. And they were so because they violated the understanding of what God’s law requires for us. And as I mentioned before, in many places, the visible example of that was the availability of such things, whether it be prostitution or pornography or whatever else. It was on the other side of town. It was not readily available.

Charles Roberts (22:44)
And you had to risk being seen and that thing. Now, it’s dial up a number or get on your laptop or whatever it may be, or turn on your local TV station or even your local TV commercials. Some of them are more pornographic than some of the pornography was 50 years ago.

Andrea Schwartz (23:04)
And so this goes back to man knows he needs to be justified. Man knows that he’s a sinner. Deep down inside, everyone knows. But if you reorient yourself and to say, Okay, yeah, I’m a sinner, but the reason I’m a sinner is because of that person, whether it’s my spouse or someone in a relationship, a child, or because of the color of someone’s skin or because of someone’s ethnic origins. In other words, we’re going to try to find relief from guilt somewhere. And these are the ways they play out if it’s not done God’s way.

Charles Roberts (23:47)
Yes, exactly. And one of the things that Dr. Rastuni points out in the articles that we have been referring to is the fact that, especially in the 20th century and moving forward, people have been sold a bill of goods based on philosophical ideas that are based soundly in atheism, and that there is not only not a God, there can not possibly be a God. And he quotes or makes reference to the French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in these articles. And this is important, I think, because whether people have heard of Sartre or not, whether they’ve heard of him and are tired of about him, the fact is, what this man articulated has largely informed, whether acknowledged or not, the philosophy of life that many people in our society have adopted. And that is this, that man is born into a world that has no reason for being, and he finds within himself, he has no reason for being. There’s no God in whose image he’s created in. So if he’s going to have any meaning at at all, he has to come up with that himself. And so that creates this idea that whatever I can find to give my life meaning is okay for me.

Charles Roberts (25:10)
And if I run away from that responsibility, according to Sartre, That’s bad faith. I am exercising bad faith. And so I gravitate toward the idea that there’s a God, and the God, whatever it is, it defines who I am. So I don’t have to be facing up to this issue of defining who I am and choosing to be what I think I should be. The big philosophical phrase that was used is that man’s existence precedes his essence. So I exist first, but I have no essence. There’s nothing there, except I realize I’ve got to give myself meaning. And whether I’m Marquis de Sade or Stalin or whoever, I’m going to invest myself with the meaning of dominating others, a life of pornographic passion, a life of gluttony, a life of accumulating wealth, whatever it may be.

Andrea Schwartz (26:01)
And you know, Roche Duny, if he did anything, I typeset a lot of his books and commentaries over the years. And the verse of scripture that he probably highlights the most is Genesis 3: 5, the Fall, Man determining for himself right and wrong. And yet throughout his writings, the Marquis de Sade shows up a lot. And what Rushdoony has to say, even though he knows that Sade was antithetical to everything Christian, he was consistent in what he thought. If there is no God, then anything is permissible if I say it is. And so even though he didn’t get a chance to live out every aberration, because according to Rajduni, he spent a good amount of time in prison because the society at the time, at least, was rejecting him superficially, that in so many ways now, he has become almost the patron saint point of humanism in as much as even those churchgoing folk really don’t have a solid view that says, if the scripture says this and I don’t endeavor to receive it as truth and apply it in my life, and I look for ways to excuse my sin, to excuse those parts about myself that I know are unsavory.

Andrea Schwartz (27:24)
You hear it a lot when people say, Hey, I’m only human. And I always point out that after the sixth day of creation, God looked at humanity and said it was good. So our problem could never be that we’re human. Our problem is that we’re sinful.

Charles Roberts (27:41)
Yeah. And one of the things that he points out in the article on imputation is that man in the fallen state that he finds himself, he finds the whole idea of imputation as totally offensive. And so, again, this is a part of the battle, the war, I should say, that we find ourselves in against God’s standards unless he opens our eyes. And like we’ve already said, he cites Marquis de Sade as a classic example of false imputation and the irrespons that goes with the idea that I’m only accountable to myself and my passions, and this is what informs and gives my life meaning. And he talks about false imputation as an aspect of sin. And therefore, and this I think you’ll agree with me, the other popular passage in scripture that Rastuni quoted quite frequently was Proverbs 8: 36, all they that hate me are in love with death. And the me there being the wisdom of God personified.

Andrea Schwartz (28:51)
Scripture tells us that there’s nothing good in man, fallen man. But there’s everything good in redeemed man in as much as his sins are forgiven, and he’s been given the ability to not only not sin, but to pursue righteousness. And so I imagine there are a lot of people who cannot imagine a society without these kinds of evil perversions. You talk about commercials being pornographic. In many malls, the movie theaters are up on the second floor, and when the escalator goes down, you’re glaring at a lingerie store with big pictures of women in underwear. And nowadays, some of the pictures include men pretending to be women. And it’s pretty obvious that that’s what you’re looking at. So that this stuff is hitting people in the face all the time. And that’s what I said earlier, that if you don’t know what you’re looking at, it’s very easy to fall prey to it. So if somebody says, That’s wrong. They shouldn’t have that there. Well, don’t you think the human body is beautiful? I mean, after all, but that’s not the point. These things are all pointing to lead people into a perverted mindset. So the norm isn’t grow up, get married, have children, and be an intact family.

Andrea Schwartz (30:21)
It’s to have an exciting life, a playboy life, the James Bond life, or whatever it is. So we have these counterfeits that are going to tell people, This will make you happy.

Charles Roberts (30:31)
I think you were right on target with something you said earlier about the factor of antinomianism in the churches and in the Christian world being one source of this problem. We can both think back to the era of the 1960s, maybe late ’50s, included in which there was massive cultural upheaval among younger people, and a lot of it had to do with throwing off what was perceived to be the stuffy surface only religious faith of their parents, whether that was Protestant or Catholic, or in between. And maybe there was something to that on one level. But the problem was that there was no one coming forth with a biblical explanation as to what the problem is and a biblical solution. So I think that the Satanic elements in our culture at that time recognized an opportunity to capitalize on destroying the biblical foundations of our culture, and that included the promotion of so-called free love, and the distortion of music, all of these things that had informed Christian and biblical culture. So it wanted to create a distortion of those things. So we’ve gone from the dirty movie house on the other side of town to where the dirty movie house is now right inside your living room on your desktop.

Charles Roberts (31:53)
Or your phone. Or your phone. Yeah. And it’s no longer considered, quote, dirty. What considered dirty, is the opposition to such a thing. And when humanism begins to decay and degrade, as it is in our time, it never stays where it was. And so we have gone from a place place where they’ve always been, for example, pedophiles, but they’ve either, thankfully, been put in jail or executed. But now we’ve gone to a time where it’s not only severely as punished as it once was, in some areas, not at all, but in some, it’s openly acknowledged and celebrated. And I think that we will see a continued spiral in that one area of the direction where the decadence becomes even more and more pronounced.

Andrea Schwartz (32:42)
When I was growing up, it wasn’t unusual for families to be celebrating grandma and grandpa’s 50th wedding anniversary. There were a lot of those celebrations. Well, this year I’m coming up on 50 years of marriage. And when I share that information conformation with people, they’re astounded. A lot of young people like, I just don’t know how you do it. It was never a question of how you did it. You got up in the morning, you lived your life, you dealt with what was going on, and you continued. Not that it was all flowers and roses and such, but we’ve gotten such a view that says, If it’s difficult, it must be repudiated, and I’ll find temporary enjoyment, pleasure, fulfillment without considering the fact that oftentimes what they’re doing is signing their own death warrant in one way or another.

Charles Roberts (33:37)
Yes. And just to cycle back for a moment, something I was saying earlier about the revolutionary nature of this type of activity and the things we’re discussing. In James Bellington’s book, Fire in the Minds of Men, which is a massive study of revolutionary activity across the Western world, in particular dating back hundreds of years. And he focused an entire section on the French Revolution. He pointed out that what we would have thought of as pornographic houses, coffee shops where people would get high, the things that bubbled up to the surface in the ’60s and ’70s, to some extent. All of those things were around in the era of the French Revolution, and they were manifestations at the time of throwing off this medieval, in that case, Roman Catholic culture. And again, people who have a vested interest in promoting a Satanic way of thinking, they will seize on these things and drive them even faster. And it’s worth considering insofar as our listeners are concerned about having a biblical world and life view for themselves and their families and their society, who are the people behind the promotion of pornography or gluttony or a host of other things that distort God’s plan for humanity?

Charles Roberts (34:59)
Humanity. They are, without exception, people who hate the name of Christ, who hate the very idea of being accountable to a sovereign God in his law.

Andrea Schwartz (35:09)
And as you pointed out earlier in terms of the state, the whole public school system, we’ve discussed this in the past, started as a countermeasure to Christianity, but they were patient in as much as they couldn’t come out and say that right in the beginning. But a lot of the battle that goes on today between homeschool families in the state has everything to do with wanting children to be exposed to such things. Now, let’s face it, even 15, 20 years ago, having men dressed up as women coming in to read to young children would be considered an aberration. Today, it’s somewhat mandated in certain places. On top of that, when Christian families say, No, we don’t want this for our children, we’ll take care of education. In many places, the state, the Board of Education comes after them. Yeah, some people say it’s because they want the money that would be allocated for students, but that’s just a byproduct. What they want to do is instill a different world and life view. And that’s why it’s very hard for me to go face to face with Christians who say, this is our reason for our children going to the public school.

Andrea Schwartz (36:26)
It’d be like saying, this is the reason for me to let my child out in the midst of herd of wild animals because you see, we have to do this or that. When all is said and done, either you believe what the Bible says or you don’t, and how many people are literally sacrificing their children for their own pleasure or their own, some lifestyle that they want to maintain.

Charles Roberts (36:49)
I’m glad you brought this up because even here in what used to be one of the buckles of the Bible Belt in South Carolina, and especially the part where I live, a few years ago, we went through a brouhaha about Drag Queen Story Hour. Those were being done at public libraries. And it’s interesting to consider, I don’t know if this is an issue out where you are in California, maybe it was, and it is no longer, but here and in other places, one of the big, big controversies, at least it’s still a controversy, is people who are wanting to put into public libraries books that can only be defined as pornographic under the guise of being educational or part of a story, but they’re aimed exclusively at children. And so there’s just been huge legal battles about trying to corral this activity. And in many places, it just simply isn’t successful because, again, the larger society has no other ground to stand on except humanism, and what the state says is okay. And that leads inevitably to the decadence that we’re seeing in that area.

Andrea Schwartz (37:56)
Anything that’s perverse usually starts in California. So I’m pretty sure that the people who instituted this in South Carolina are devotés of the California brand of humanism, where the state will tell everybody what they have to do. But I think another important point here is to recognize that sometimes the counterfeits are more pleasant to look at. And by that, I mean conservatism. Every now and then, I’ll tune in to, quote, unquote, conservative news sources, stations, whatnot. And it’s amazing to me in how much of the dialog that goes back and forth, whether it’s strict news or commentary or even late night entertainment, how base they are, how the illusions to sexual promiscuity are there. It’s littered into their conversation, and they’ll make comments, or their conversation will be quite base. But you see, they’re conservative. And so are we looking at a tone and imputation and justification through conservativism and thereby having to accept, there’s some good with the bad, but these guys are right politically? How can you be right politically if you’re not right scripturally?

Charles Roberts (39:15)
Yeah. As we begin to wrap this up, I want to quote Rushdoony again in the article from the section on Atonement and Imputation in a systematic theology, Fallen man imputes sin and guilt to others, and he requires the sacrifice of the victim’s social class as the remedy for his sin. And fallen man thus denies responsibility. He imputes responsibility together with sin and guilt to his appointed scapegoat. And he says, Fault imputation is thus at heart an imputation and transfer of responsibility. The society of fallen Adam is thus not a society, but a state of war. To me, this is just astounding in Insight. And we, at our peril, at our disadvantage, have failed to pay attention to the insight that he had on this topic. And it’s not so much Rushdoony’s insight, it’s the biblical perspective. And if you don’t start with scripture as the absolute standard and God’s law word, you start spiraling out onto other areas, and you wind up with the situation we have today in the churches.

Andrea Schwartz (40:27)
Noble Savages is a book. It’s not an easy read. I can remember being at homeschool conventions and selling Rushdoony’s books, and then I would have a section on the table that said, For Fathers Only. And it’s amazing how many men went to that and they started looking at it and I said, You have to understand what your family is going to be exposed to and is being exposed to. When I say it’s not an easy read, Rushdoony doesn’t hold back in describing what people think and what they do and how they do it. But it’s so important to know. It’s not like reading about it will make you sin. No, reading about it will let you understand exactly how much of a war this really is. And then you also mentioned his systematic theology in volume one. There’s a whole chapter on the Atonement where he really goes through all the different aspects of what we call salvation. But then once you read and understand it, you’ll see how many false methods of salvation are promoted, even within churches.

Charles Roberts (41:37)
Yeah, and I’d like to mention one other resource that’s available from the Chalcedon.edu store, and that’s his book, called To be as God, which is a study of the philosophy of life of Marquis de Sade. Maybe that’s too academic description of it. I mean, it really highlights the example of this despicable man, and and how he chose to live his life as one totally divorced from accountability to God. It’s a fascinating read. It’s not anything high-brow academic in that sense. I would encourage anyone who wants to pursue this further in that particular instance to get hold of that book as well.

Andrea Schwartz (42:14)
Yeah, and when I said difficult read, I didn’t mean it was going to be over your head. I knew Dr. Raj Jr. Personally, and I would read his books and I’d say, I’d see your footnotes. How do you read these books? Because he said, Well, I don’t recommend The average person read these books because in many cases, they’re gross and they’re despicable. But I need to highlight for people the contrast. And so consider this like we have a lot of discussion on the roots of COVID and are vaccines good or not. You can’t really get into the issue unless you understand the underlying issue. If you’re against vaccination, you would know that, okay, there are certain things that are included in vaccinations that aren’t necessarily helpful to people, and you’d examine it, and as I said earlier, from the bottom up. People need to do the same thing with these topics. Otherwise, they’ll just think that, well, I don’t know, maybe it’s a good thing when an actual fact, as you pointed out, it’s actually warfare.

Charles Roberts (43:22)
Exactly. I would exhort our listeners to make themselves aware of this challenge relating to the corruption of pornography, specifically, but the larger issue of imputation, insofar as people even are familiar with that word, it’s something in a systematic theology book, Other Than Rushdoony, that has a classic definition the reckoning of Christ’s righteousness to us, and then just leave it there and go on to the next topic. But it is a far more significant point than that.

Andrea Schwartz (43:53)
Well, Charles, thanks. I hope we gave insight to people, if nothing else, for them to realize there’s more they need to investigate. Right. Outofthequestionpodcast@gmail.com is how you reach us, and we look forward to you joining with us next time.

Charles Roberts (44:09)
Thanks for listening to Out of the Question. For more information on this and other topics, please visit Chalcedon.edu.