About this episode
In “Total Meaning” (Chalcedon Report No. 380), Rushdoony argues that because God created all things, the universe is a realm of total meaning, with no brute or meaningless facts. Meaning does not arise from human interpretation but from God’s sovereign purpose; when man insists on judging meaning autonomously, facts become confused and nihilistic. Original sin is thus epistemological as well as moral man’s desire to determine meaning, law, and truth apart from God. Modern humanism, existentialism, and deconstructionism represent attempts to escape God’s total meaning by retreating into purely personal or subjective meanings, a move Rushdoony calls implicitly suicidal. Because man is made in God’s image, he cannot live consistently with a purely biological or man-centered worldview, and this explains the modern preference for sermons about man rather than God. A universe of total meaning demands total allegiance: faith cannot be partial or compartmentalized. Only wholehearted love for God and obedient service under His Word restores coherence, purpose, and strength to both personal faith and the church.
Interactive timestamps
Jump to segmentGet every episode summarized
Each time CR101 Radio - Podcast Network publishes, we email you a written briefing from the transcript — the topics, who appeared, and any specific claims, with the ad reads skipped.
Email me new episodesFree for 3 shows. No card needed.
Hosts & guests
Transcript ready
47 searchable segments. Every word is indexed and playable.
Full transcript
CR101 Radio - Podcast Network — Total Meaning. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
0:00C-R-101 Radio dot com, podcast and more. 151 Total Meaning Keltzieden Report, number 180, March 1997 Because all things were made by God, and with our Tim was not anything made that was made. John chapter 1 verse 3, we live in a world of total meaning. As Cornelius Vantel stated it, there is no brute factuality. There are no meaningless facts in creation. All facts are God created, God are the end facts. We find them meaningless because we choose to ignore the fact of sin and its distorting nature. Facts do not derive their meaning from man, but from God. If we insist on being the judge of their meaning, they will indeed be inexplicable and meaningless to us.
1:02Original sin is our desire to be our own God, to determine or know good and evil, law and morality, in terms of our will rather than God's word. Genesis chapter 3 verse 5 Man want to know and determine all things by themselves without reference to God. There are epistemologies or theories of knowledge or man-centered, not God-centered. They will not have life on God's terms. I recall one man who insisted that no meaning could be acceptable to man unless it were a man-centered one, which is another way of saying that no answer is valid unless man gives it. We must begin by recognizing that our man-centered answers are corrupt and fallen ones and that our lords, not my will, but thine be done. Look chapter 22 verse 42 must be our answer also.
2:05History is a struggle to establish meaning whose shall prevail, gods or man's. Some humanists like Kamu were ready to deny any and all meaning in the universe in order to establish man's purely personal and existential meaning. In existentialism, the death of God's school of thought and like currents of modern thinking, we see the extent to which humanism has gone. To escape from God, a cosmic meaning is denied in favor of a purely personal one. This is, of course, the logic of Genesis chapter 3 verse 5, every man has his own God and his own private world of meaning. In such a literary interpretation as deconstructionism, we see this retreat into a purely personal world of meaning played out to its insane end. Because we are created in the image of God, Genesis chapter 1 verses 26 to 28, we cannot rest content with a purely biological view of life.
3:10That is, a simply physical and no more. In Augustine's words, our hearts are restless until they rest in the... An existential meaning is an implicit form of suicide. The first Adam sought the wrong meaning to be as God, came to be the death of man, the entrance of sin and death into the world. The fallen sons of Adam, then and now, love preaching that is anthropology, that is the word about man or psychology, that is the word about man's psyche. But not theology, the word about God. When did you last hear a sermon about the doctrine of God, of Christ, of atonement and so on? For a people most interested in themselves, the illogical sermons are offensive. Is it any wonder that the churches are weak? A world of total meaning, God's meaning, calls for total dedication and total service.
4:16There is no past-time Christian service or living. God's world of total meaning surrounds us. We are all called to an unequivocal faith and service. Our Lord tells us that the essential requirement of us is this. Now shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy strength and with all thy mind and thy neighbor as thyself. Book chapter 10 verse 27 The word all seems to be replaced in current thinking. Where there is total faith and service, total meaning follows.
More episodes
