Empty Tomb Books

The question of where ultimacy lies should be central to the Christian. It is easy to see the social implications of allowing priority to fall to either the one or the many. This volume examines in-depth the Christian solution to the problem of the one and the many – the Trinitarian God. Only in the godhead is this dilemma resolved. Only in the Trinity does there reside an equal ultimacy of unity and plurality. Rushdoony examines the history of Western thought from the standpoint of the one and the many and demonstrates clearly that the most astute thinkers were unable to resolve this philosophical conflict. What is needed now is a complete return to the Trinitarian view of God and its implications for a Christian social order.

Selected Quotes

“The question which haunts the dialectical culture is this: how to have unity without totally undifferentiated and meaningless oneness? If all things are basically one, the differences are meaningless, divisions false, and definitions are sophistications, in that the tyranny, or destiny, of oneness is the truth of all being. But, if all things are basically many, and if plurality is ultimate, then the world dissolves into unrelated particulars and becomes, as some thinkers insist, not a universe buta multiverse, and every atom is in a sense its own law and being. The first leads to the breakdown of differences and the liberty of atomistic individualism and particularity; the second is the breakdown of fundamental law into nihilism and the retreat of men and their arts into isolated and private universes.” (page 22)

“In orthodox Trinitarian Christianity, the problem of the one and the many is resolved. Unity and plurality are equally ultimate in the Godhead. The temporal unity and plurality is on a basis of equal validity. There is thus no basic conflict between the individual and the community. The individual lives in community, and the community flourishes as the individual finds himself and grows in terms of consistently Christian faith. Instead of a basic philosophical hostility between individual and government, believer and church, person and family, there is a necessary co-existence. Neither the one nor the many is reducible to the other. They cannot seek obliteration of the other, for it involves self-obliteration. The Augustinian and Calvinistic faith, by its hostility to subordinationism, holds, if developed, the possibilities of true social order, and, to the extent that Augustinianism and Calvinism have been followed, Western culture has developed both freedom and order.” (page 16)

“The essence of the ancient city-state, polis, and empire was that it constituted the continuous unity of the gods and men, of the divine and the human, and the unity of all being. There was no possible independence in a society for any constituent aspect. Every aspect of society was a part of the all- absorbing one. Against this, Christianity asserted the absolute division of the human and the divine. Even in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the human and the divine were in union without confusion, as Chalcedon so powerfully defined it. Thus, divinity was withdrawn from human society and returned to the heavens and to God. No human order or institution could claim divinity and therefore claim to represent total and final order. By de-divinizing the world, Christianity placed all created orders, including church and state, alike under God. By denying divinity to all, and by reserving divinity to the triune God, all created orders were freed from one another and made independent of each other and together interdependent in their dependence on God. Church and state were alike required to be Christian, but neither was able to be total Christian order.” (page 124)

“The universe, time, and man had been created by God, and the time of their end would eventually come, when time should be no more, But, meanwhile, history is important precisely because it is determined by the omnipotent and sovereign God and is an area of valid secondary causes rather than fortuitous events. Because the universe and history are created by the triune, absolutely self-conscious and self- sufficient God, it is totally predestined and governed by Him, since nothing can be unknown to Him or exist apart from His decree. Hence, the world of time and space cannot be an atomistic and meaningless world of independent particularity. Neither can it be a world with its own independent universals and plans, because it was created in total accord with and in terms of the plan or the universal of God. The one and the many, the universals and the particulars, cannot exist in history in independence of God or in independence of one another. They are interdependent upon one another since they are from a common and equally ultimate creative act, and hence they are both derivative from His decree. In God, the One and the Many are equally and absolutely ultimate. History, therefore, is completely meaningful.” (pages 183-184)

(Empty Tomb Books is indebted to Dr. Gary North for the selection of these quotes.)

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