Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001)

Difficult to read.

Rushdooney, if you aren't used to him, is very philosophical, and uses long words with ease and comfort. Reading his writing for the first time and trying to keep up with him can be mentally taxing to the unprepared.

The subject material is... well, I think "disgusting" is a fitting descriptor. Anybody who desires to discuss pornography in a straightforward and matter-of-fact manner will have their resolve tested, for the depravity of the human heart can turn the stomach.

All that said, Mr. Rushdooney makes excellent points and provides superb material for someone looking for a reasons to condemn pornography for the filth that it is.… (més)

Theme: analyzing philosophies in terms of the one and the many
Type: philosophy
Value: 1-
Age: college (philosophers)
Interest: 2 (quite readable)
Objectionable:
Synopsis/Noteworthy: great (chronological) overview of philosophy (schools/philosophers)

(book jacket) Modern man faces a tragic impasse between totalitarianism and anarchism because his philosophies give him no other logical conclusion. Failure to solve the problem of the one and the many, of unity versus particularity, of the group and its unity versus the individual and his integrity, have led to a social crises of growing magnitude. ... The author has, in this study, analyzed the history of philosophy in terms of the problem of the one and the many, recognized that we are at the end of the modern age, which is now collapsing around us, and points to the Christian alternative as the only solution.

(theme, 203) When the ultimacy of the particulars, of the many, becomes progressively more and more immanent, and less and less transcendent, then unity is denied as both bondage and fiction to the same degree as particularity is affirmed...

1-2 a question of authority
2 defined, importance
chapter 1 gives good overview of book, as does chapter 2 (liberty, dialectics, answer)!
87 Aristotle was philosophically committed to the ultimacy of the one; he hoped pragmatically to provide a place for the many.
145 The Past issues, it proceeds, from the Future, through the Present...
175 grace and free will, free will is established by grace, great Augustine quote
194 The opposition, the city of man, must be either converted or fought.
194-5 But Aquinas, following Aristotle, held that man's intellect "is like a tablet on which nothing is written." ...
237 Like all the attributes of God, sovereignty and power, when denied to God, simply are transferred to the human order because they are inescapable aspects of reality.
249 Packer and Johnston stated it succinctly when they described free-will in Erasmus' sense as "an inherent power in an to act apart from God." Luther's answer to Erasmus, On the Bondage of the Will..., is clearly Luther's greatest work, and one of the greatest documents in the history of thought.
251 "Yet God does not work in us without us; for He created and preserves us for this very purpose, that He might work in us and we might cooperate with Him, whether that occurs outside His kingdom, by His general omnipotence, or within His kingdom by the special power of His Spirit." (Luther)
254 But, by demoting Christ, the determination of history could be transferred from eternity to time.
256 ...in the one person of Christ, the two natures are united in such a manner, that each retains its peculiar properties undiminished. (Calvin)
256 ...though Christ is everywhere entire, yet all that is in him is not everywhere. ...stupid notion of the corporeal presence of Christ in the sacrament. (Calvin)
258 It is not the humanity or flesh of Christ which in itself or intrinsically conveys life to us, but it is the humanity of Christ, which, by union with the divinity of Christ, makes us partakers of the divine nature, its righteousness, which is life itself... (RJR's summary wording of Calvin, which follows)
259 The whole Christ is in a sense given in the sacrament, but it is not in any sense other than an ethical one. (Calvin)
260 "But the word nature is not here essence but quality. The Manicheans formerly dreamt that we are a part of God... This doctrine was not altogether unknown to Plato, who everywhere defines the chief good of man to be an entire conformity to God; but as he was involved in the mists of errors, he afterwards glided off into his own inventions..." (Calvin)
296 Hume rejected a priori thinking, he felt, but did he? There is an a priori assumption at the heart of Hume's system, the presuppositions of the autonomy of the mind of man. This a priori characterizes modern philosophy. It is at the heart of Descartes' "I think therefore I am." ...
(good final chapter on "The Christian Perspective")
360 "The ontological trinity will be our interpretative concept everywhere. God is our concrete universal; in Him thought and being are coterminous, in Him the problem of knowledge is solved..." "Here is neither nominalism nor realism nor a combination of the two. Here is thinking done on the basis of the self-authenticating revelation of God. Here is a theology in which the primacy of faith over reason means that reason or intellect is saved from the self-frustration involved in the denial, virtual or open, of such a God and of such a Christ. Only those who know that they are not infallible, but are, by virtue of ever present sin within them in spite of their regeneration by the Holy Spirit, inclined to suppress this revelation, also know that they need such a God, such a Christ and His infallible word to tell them the truth which alone can set them free. For theirs is the knowledge that only by having such a God as their personal God does their search for knowledge have any meaning." (Van Til)
266 The concept of modernity is not common to all history. It is the belief in the relativism of all truth, coupled with an evolutionary concept of man and history. Modernity means that the present moment is its own truth, and that true freedom requires that the spirit of an age and of the people of that era be free to fulfill itself without reference to past laws and truths.… (més)