Politics and Liberty

Politics of Predestination

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 1

Track: 11

Dictation Name: RR102A1

Date: 1960s-1970s

Hear now the Word of God as it is given to us in Romans 9:1-20.

“1I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost,

2 That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart.

3 For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh:

4 Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises;

5 Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.

6 Not as though the word of God hath taken none effect. For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel:

7 Neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children: but, In Isaac shall thy seed be called.

8 That is, they which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed.

9 For this is the word of promise, at this time will I come, and Sara shall have a son.

10 And not only this; but when Rebecca also had conceived by one, even by our father Isaac;

11 (For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth;)

12 It was said unto her, the elder shall serve the younger.

13 As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.

14 What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid.

15 For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

16 So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy.

17 For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth.

18 Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, why hast thou made me thus?”

The children of darkness are very often wiser than the children of light. And too often, the children of light have shied away from proclaiming predestination. And the children of darkness have been ready over and over again to assail this doctrine as a monstrosity. And surprisingly enough, many people are surprised to see why over and over again, this doctrine is assailed in all kinds of quarters. Someone told me recently that they thought it very strange that professors at certain universities in California were taking time out in the course of their lectures to deal with a completely unrelated subject, predestination, to caricature it and to ridicule it.

What business of theirs was it? And what relationship did it have to our world? A great deal.

If we analyze from the days of Augustine to the days of Calvin to the present, we will find recurring, over and over again, a very strongly political motivation on the attacks on predestination and with good reason. What Paul declared in Romans 9, what indeed all of scripture declares is the sovereignty of God, that God chooses whom He wills and there is no law over God whereby man can bring God to court and say, nay but why doest Thou thus? God is totally sovereign. His Word, His nature is the law whereby all things are governed. This is the offense because it de-thrones man, who has submitted to Satan’s offer, “Ye shall be as gods, knowing,” (that is, determining for yourself) “what is right and wrong;” every man his own god—a man-centered world, a man-centered society, a man-centered political and social order.

Man is a creature. He is come into this world after the world. He is born into it. He finds it here when he arrives, and that he is a secondary cause, not a primary cause. And as he faces this world which he did not make, he has three possible ways of regarding it.

First, he can declare that this is a world of chance, in which case, you reduce all things to chaos, in which case you deny that there is any purpose or direction or meaning, in which case you affirm the death of all meaning itself. Now, there are thinkers who have talked about the ultimacy of chance, but they have done so only in attacking our faith. They actually do not rest in chance as their basic philosophy. For to rest in the ultimacy of chance, is to commit suicide intellectually. It is an impossible position, but this is the first way in which we can view the world, as governed completely and totally by chance.

The second way in which we can view this world is in terms of God’s sovereignty and predestination. This does not destroy our freedom. And the old argument against predestination, that it is destructive of the liberty of man, is sheerest nonsense. We do not call God’s predestination of our race, our color, our time of birth, of our talent as destructive of our free will, of our free agency. None of us had the choice of when we would be born. We didn’t pick our parents, or the complexion of our skin or the color of our eyes or the height to which we would grow. We had no choice about those things, nor did we choose the age in which we were born. But this is not a limitation on our liberty, is it? Do you feel that God has restricted your freedom because you were born in the 20th century, rather than in the 16th or the 22nd? Neither is our predestination with regard to salvation any infringement on our free agency. We still act in conformity to what we are in terms of our inner nature. We are free to be ourselves. This then, the affirmation of the sovereignty and predestinating power of God is the second possible way of viewing the world.

The first is chance, second in terms of the divine sovereignty and predestination, and the third possible way is in terms of predestination by man. Predestination is a very popular doctrine today, outside of Reformed circles. Indeed, in terms of scientific philosophy today, it is a term that is very often used. Predestination is very widely believed in all the capitals around the world, in Washington, in Moscow, in London, Paris and elsewhere. They believe in predestination, but predestination by man—predestination by the elite planners, the scientific social engineers. And after all, scientific Socialism, as propounded by Karl Marx, is nothing more nor less than the affirmation that predestination is true, except that it is not true about God, it is true concerning man. Man is sovereign; man will seek power and predestine all things, and this is scientific Socialism. And predestination is a doctrine on the march today, around the world in this form. And you’re not going to defeat Marxism, which is predestination by man, nor are you going to defeat the Great Society, which is also predestination by man, unless you get back to an equally fundamental faith, but one which is the truth: predestination by the sovereign God.

We understand now something of why biblical predestination is hated, do we not? Because it means God controls all things. And these Humanistic predestinators say that man must control all things. And they cannot affirm this without waging war against God. And so they can be lecturing on political science or sociology or economics and they come out with an attack on Calvin and predestination and the student wonders, why did that come in? It’s very obvious why. You cannot affirm man’s predestination without attacking God’s predestination. Christians cannot surrender this doctrine without ceasing to be Christian. And every attack on it is an attack on the sovereignty of God. The doctrine simply affirms that God is God.

Moreover, Christians cannot logically or morally be socialists or political liberals or advocates of a welfare state. Because all these things are aspects of this tremendous body of belief that is infiltrating its way into every facet of our society, the dream of reason, the dream of the total predestination of man by man by the scientific elite, by the planners, by the sociologists. Political liberalism, and theological liberalism rests on a common ground; the sovereignty of man.

The theological liberal attacks the Word of God and he says I cannot accept this doctrine. It doesn’t conform to my reason. And I affirm that my reason is a judge over the Word of God so that I can go through and assess what I consider to be valid for our time, and accept that and worship God in my own way, in which case, he has set his reason above God’s, in which he has ultimately deified himself and said I can determine what is true faith and I am the true judge, the ultimate judge of that which constitutes truth. Theological liberalism, I believe we can all recognize. We know what is its fault. It is an assault on God and His Word, on God and His sovereignty.

But political liberalism is the same thing! The political liberal says I do not like the world the way God has predestined it. And the Doctrine of Predestination is such a fearful, such an ugly doctrine because it says something that is an offense to the Humanist, to the planner, to the Humanistic predestinarian. It says that God makes the difference between men, and how can you reconcile that with a belief in equality? Why, it simply affirms that inequality is written into the very nature of the universe by the infallible and ultimate and sovereign decree of God, that God has said there is a difference, an inescapable difference between the present natures of men. Some are called to one thing and others to another. Others are given great talents while some are given inferior ones. And some are called to be vessels unto honor and others to dishonor, some to election and some to reprobation. Do you realize what that doctrine does to the Great Society? Do you realize what that doctrine does to every champion of democracy and of equality? It shatters its position. It either has to surrender or to wage war against the sovereign God and the Doctrine of Predestination. The sovereignty of man is its base.

And having declared man to be sovereign, he has to have a unity in the godhead because basic to any true theology is this: a theology that does not have a unity of the godhead founders. So that whatever your religion, whether you’re a Muslim or a Christian, or a Shintoist or whatever you may be, there is a unity in our godhead, or your system collapses. And if you are a Humanist and you are affirming the sovereignty of man, you are going to have to assert the unity of the godhead, and so you’re going to say we’ve got to bring all people together from all over the world and have a one-world order an integrated order, and therefore it has to be an order that is characterized by equality, otherwise, our godhead, man, will fall apart.

A true Christian theology asserts the unity of the godhead—three persons, one God. There is no subordination of persons in the Trinity. There is a perfect equality of the three persons, and the minute you tamper with that, you destroy the Doctrine of the Trinity. And the same way, if you tamper with the doctrine of the unity and the equality of man, you tamper with the godhead of Humanism.

It isn’t an opinion they come to in terms of observation. They come to it in spite of observation, because they have only to look around them and their observation will confirm the truth of scripture, that God in His sovereign decree ordained that men should have differences, and different destinies. But no, against all this, with its fantastic faith (And these are the people who demand a great faith. When we ask people to believe in scripture, we’re not putting faith to the test that the Humanists are with their belief in the unity and equality of man.), they are really demanding a great faith with this! But they must, or they would have to surrender their religion—their religion of humanity, their religion of Humanism, their religion of man as sovereign and as the predestinator.

And they would have to surrender their Statism. Because it is only when you deny these differences have any right to resist that you can give all power to the State to try to right this terrible wrong and unite all peoples and integrate all peoples, and equalize all differences. And the result is, because you can’t raise some of them up, you’re going to lower all of them. You’re going to have, to use Van Till’s excellent phrase, which is applicable to every realm, “integration downward into the void.” This is political liberalism.

This is the politics of predestination by man as against the politics of predestination by the sovereign God. The two liberalisms, theological and political, go hand in hand. Wherever you see a political liberal, though he may profess to be a good, sound churchman, the theological liberalism will not be far behind. The time is coming when we must challenge the right of political as well as theological liberals to remain in the church.

Now, since God is sovereign, not man, it is most important for us to realize therefore, that officers in the church, in the state, in the school, must first of all represent God rather than man. A church, of course, is a monarchy, whose monarch is Jesus Christ. It is under His Law and there can be no deviation from that law, no pastor and no member has any right to repeal an iota of it. And the representation that our Sovereign allows us within the church is within boundaries firmly fixed by Him. And so it should be in every area. The State has an obligation under God to be Christian. The school has an obligation under God to be Christian, as does the home and every vocation. And we need to elect men who will first of all represent God, and us in God.

For there is true freedom, not in a democracy but in a godly state, and a Christian order where the Law of God is honored and obeyed, where the Word of God is above and over all men, officers and people, where God is our Supreme Court and judge, and our conscience is bound by God and unto men only under God and His Word. For in a democracy you have what the word literally implies, mob rules. There’s no appeal beyond the people, no rights except State-granted rights, and man becomes a slave.

It is important therefore for us as Christians, if we are to move in terms of the politics of predestination, to re-establish the crown rights as King Jesus, to use the old Calvinist battle cry, in every sphere of life and to recognize that any sphere that departs from Christ enters into slavery. For the first slavery is unto sin, according to our Lord in John 8, and every other slavery is derivative from that departure and apostasy from Jesus Christ.

One area we need to recapture very quickly, for the time is growing short, for Jesus Christ, is education. Education, like every other sphere of life, is under sovereignty, but to whom? What is education? I was interested not too long ago to read an editorial by a scientist in which he defined slavery very directly and very bluntly. “Education is currently very widely held to be the great panacea for all ills whether the problem be social, economic, international or physical, education, we are told, is all that’s needed. But education is simply slavery. The essence of slavery is the loss of freedom of choice; being compelled to learn a new way of life. The essence of education, the process, is teaching the pupil a new way of life, a new set of values and goals, a set of ideas which he did not choose to have before. ‘We’ve got to teach them a lesson’ has usually meant the intention of applying force and pain to change the value judgment of an opposing group; education, in other words. Now in the language, ‘to be taught’ is a passive verb, while ‘to teach’ is active. Briefly, education may be a panacea. But the process of applying it does, in actuality, involve enslaving the pupil. That’s why war has, down through the ages, let to so much intellectual and social progress. It’s highly educational. Surely, education is slavery. But that just represents the fact that nothing, not even slavery, is inherently evil or destructive.” So speaks the plain-speaking editor who is not a Christian.

He has spelled it out! Education is slavery and dare we hand our children over to slavery to Statism? Have we not an obligation to give our children unto the Lord and only to Him? Is not a Christian school an imperative for the Christian church and for Christian parents? Education as it exists today in the state schools is submitting to predestination by the State and although we have forgotten it, education as it was begun under State auspices in this country (and I have traced its history in my book, The Messianic Character of American Education and dealt with it also in The Nature of the American System), had two purposes, as it was introduced by Horace Mann and his associates.

1.      To destroy orthodox Christianity

2.      To socialize the child, to introduce Socialism by beginning at the most basic point, to socialize the child.

And how can you object if the State comes in and takes your property and your money if you’ve already surrendered your child?

To accept Romans 9, the sovereignty of God, means that we must acknowledge His sovereignty in our every institution including our schools and that we have a positive obligation to establish Christian schools, to declare that only God is God and that we cannot make unto us any graven images and declare them to be our potters. For slavery to God is our freedom, and slavery to man, suicide. And the politics of equality says that the child, that man, must be taken and unified. It insists on doing violence to man and to property, and to liberty and order in order to produce this equality and this unity. That the politics and the education of predestination declares that the ground of our unity is the Triune God. And it shows a respect for differences, for man and his property, for man and his liberty, as God-given. And beyond the state’s legitimate power where no man, nor institution, church or state can go beyond God’s appointed boundaries, according to the biblical faith.

It has been the decline of the politics of predestination that has led to the decline of liberty in this country. And we cannot fight against the politics of slavery, the politics of predestination by human planners in Washington and in Moscow unless we fight it with the truth, with the sovereignty of God and His predestinating power. It has been the absence of this doctrine from the pulpit that has led to the storied decline of this country. The decline began first of all in the churches.

And our liberty as well as the liberty of Western Europe a few centuries ago was borne out of this faith. I was greatly moved some years ago when I read of Cromwell’s army, an army that never lost a battle, that was feared all over the face of Europe for its discipline, for its fearlessness, and for its courage. They were all of them, men who believed in the Doctrine of Predestination. And when that army disbanded, it was a remarkable thing. There were no beggars from that army. All of them, no matter how crippled, were gainfully employed within a very short time. And I had a glimpse of the power of those men when I read through the army debates, theological debates, political debates, and the political debates were based on this doctrine, the sovereignty of God. And I realized that then and there they were hammering out American liberty although they were not thinking about this country, because they were hammering out a system that was based on law and that law was the sovereignty of God and His purpose. And they were ready to say, concerning themselves, that perhaps they did not have the right to vote under certain circumstances, even though they had been wounded and perhaps might be dead very soon in that war which they were fighting, because they were not interested in human rights, but in the right as the sovereign God had decreed it.

This then must be our proclamation, the crown rights of King Jesus in every area, because He is sovereign. He is the predestinating God. And this is the only gospel that has joy to it, a gospel that proclaims the saving power of an efficacious God who is sovereign. One of the joys of this doctrine is this, and one of its privileges, that it enables us to accept the fact that we are creatures, moreover that we are sinful creatures, and that we stand before God not in our righteousness, but in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, and we stand not in terms of what we have done or may do, else then we might fall. In what He has done and in what He has decreed, and none can say nay unto Him. Therefore, there is nothing in heaven or in earth, in life or in death, in anything in this world or in ourselves that is able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, for it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy. He that spared not his own Son but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? Can there be a more joyful gospel?

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee that the government is not upon our shoulders but upon Thy shoulders, that Thou art the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, that of the increase of Thy government there shall be no end. Give us grace, therefore, our Father as we come unto Thee to seek for a man whose breath is in his nostrils, to take hands off our lives and to commit them into Thy keeping, to move forward boldly in the confidence that if God be for us, who can be against us? To know oh Lord, that Thou art God and beside Thee there is none other, to overturn, overturn, overturn the powers that set themselves up as little gods until He comes again, whose right it is. Strengthen us, empower us, and make us bold in Thy service unto the end that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ; in Jesus’ name, amen.