Politics and Liberty

Christian Social Ethics

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 4

Track: 14

Dictation Name: RR102B4

Date: 1960s-1970s

[Introductory speaker] We come at this time to the last of the lectures to be brought by Mr. Rushdoony. I’m sure that all of us have been challenged by him in these last two days by the various address that he has brought to us, and we look forward to having him back, I’m sure into this area again, to speak on other related subjects.

It’s been a great pleasure and a great delight to have you with us and we look forward now to your present talk on Christian social ethics, love, justice, and coercion.

[Rushdoony] It is all important for Christian faith to be firmly grounded on scripture and on a biblically-informed philosophy. If our foundations be the least bit shaky, we are apt, even when we believe we are most faithful, to come forth with rather strange conclusions.

A few years ago when I first picked up Billy Graham’s book, Peace with God, I noted in the introduction that he declared that it was his intention to expound simply that which God declared, and he said, this book has been written on my knees. But when I turned to one of the chapters which dealt with the Christian in relationship to the State, he began by declaring that man is a social animal. This is Aristotle, not the scripture. And Billy Graham on his knees had apparently made a little better contact with Aristotle at that point than with God. And this is what happens when we are not firmly grounded on a knowledge of the scripture, plus a knowledge of the principles, the philosophical assumptions that underlie all of scripture.

It is imperative for us today to be firmly rooted in the Christian faith because we face on all sides, deeply rooted traditions which claim to be grounded on scripture but which introduce many alien concepts. We are told quite extensively today that love and justice are incompatible, that very often justice must give way to love, and the true social order must be based on love, on the brotherhood of man, on unity. And I need not tell you that in the name of this love and brotherhood, many people are being coerced and being forced to unite and to integrate. And so love ends up in force.

This doctrine, the doctrine of love as the higher way and justice as an inferior way, has dual roots. One of the roots of this concept in the Western tradition is Monism. And Monism, which very often appears in mystical forms, has an ancient history. We meet at first, perhaps in Parmenides, we find it in prominent for certainly in Spinoza, certainly Mary Baker Eddy gives us a very extreme form of Monism, Josiah Royce, a milder form, but we need not go to these more conspicuous and open forms of Monism to identify it. We find it in very much milder form—and implicit, rather than explicit—in much of what passes for Christian theology.

According to Monism, the goal of being is “unity in the one.” The truth of being is its oneness. And therefore, the goal of all being, of all creation is to find itself in the one. Men are metaphysically brothers. They are all members one of another metaphysically. And therefore the true nature of all being is for all being to be united and to love every other aspect of it. Therefore, in terms of Monism, love is the higher way of life because love is unitive. Love binds everything together and love is the natural converging of all things into this one ultimate and glorious unity.

As a result of this concept, justice is seen as a lower way of life. Justice is divisive. And the man who stands on his rights is following a cruder, a primitive, a lower way because he is separating himself from his brother and he is saying his rights are more important than unity. Justice, moreover, emphasizes the individual, the particular, and therefore, it does not tend to unity, it tends to division, because it emphasizes the individual and his rights. It frustrates the goal of being which is unity, oneness, and hence, in every perspective which is monistic, love is seen as the higher way and justice as the lower way. Monistic thinking is very wide spread within the Christian church.

A second root of this concept that love and justice are incompatible is Dualism. Dualism also has a long history and tradition in Western thought. Certainly, the Zoroastrians, the Manicheans, the Gnostics in many cases, the Bogomils, the Albigensians, the Illuminists, and various other groups represent the more extreme forms of Dualism. In Dualism, which also has had a deep influence on Christian thought, in Dualism, you have ultimately, two gods, two ultimate powers, the good god and the evil god, or the good being and the evil being. And here you find love on the side of the good god, whereas justice, standing on one’s rights, is a manifestation of the evil spirit or the evil power in the universe. Similarly, spirit is a part of this good god and the manifestation of his being and power in the universe, whereas matter is seen as something lower and inferior and a creation of evil god. Unity is similarly a manifestation of this good god, whereas individuality or particularity is an expression of the evil god of being. Therefore, those who are interested in love and in the spirit and in unity represent the higher way, the true way, as against the evil way.

Of course, Monasticism had both strongly monistic roots as well as strongly dualistic roots depending on the particular monastic tradition. And evil, of course, was manifested in this emphasis on particularity, on the individual, on justice, on matter. Wherever you have an depreciation of matter, you have elements of anti-Christian thinking.

I read several years ago in a theological work by a very, very fundamentalistic thinker, the assertion that spirit was higher than matter and that somehow, spirit represented also a nobler element in man than matter. This of course, is nonbiblical. Man, body and soul, is created by God and created wholly good. Man apart from God is fallen, body and soul. And the evil is a part of his whole being that is not a part of his body. His soul is not exempt from the fall. He is fallen, body and soul. And he is regenerated and his whole being now is in the sight of God a part of the Kingdom of God. And even as his soul is regenerated, his body is destined for resurrection.

Both these traditions, Monism and Dualism, see justice as divisive and love as unitive, and therefore, their basic doctrine of salvation is this: salvation is by love. At this point, they are united. And since men are going to be saved by love, it is important to make men of love. This is how they’re going to be saved. You’re going to save men, you’re going to save society, you’re going to save the world by love. Therefore, make them love. Coerce them into loving. Compel them to love. Otherwise, how are they going to be saved?

Now coercion is inescapable from a doctrine of salvation. It is inescapable. And your coercion is either going to be an external coercion through legislation, through men telling you you’ve got to love everybody else in the world because this is how the world’s going to be saved and men are going to be saved, and passing laws to make you do certain things which are defined as acts of love, or else the coercion is going to be internal, and under Christian Theism, the coercion is internal. It is total coercion; it is the act of the Holy Spirit. You had no part in it. but this is a coercion which does not destroy you, which does not infringe upon your liberty, which does not take away from the integrity of your personality, but brings it rather to fulfillment because it is the fulfillment of your being, whereas the coercion in Monism and Dualism imposes upon you something alien to your being and declares that you must submit to it.

It scarcely needs to be said that Christianity is theistic, not monistic or dualistic and only Christianity (although this is a separate issue, is truly theistic). Monism and Dualism say that man’s problem is metaphysical. It is finitude. The trouble with man is that he isn’t God. He isn’t infinite. And the goal of being in Monism and Dualism ultimately is not only unity, but self-deification. But Christianity says man’s problem is not finitude, it is not metaphysical. It is ethical. It is moral. Man’s problem is sin. And since man’s problem is not metaphysical in Christianity, the goal of salvation is not this great oneness of being. Ad if the goal of salvation is this great oneness of being, merging into the great one, or merging into the good power, or good god of being, in such a perspective, any individuality, and separateness, any division is an evil.

But our Lord said, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth, I came not to send peace but a sword for I am come to set a man at variance against his father and the daughter against her mother and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law”

In terms of ethics, there must be a division and a separation, a moral division, a moral separation is required. It is the act of holiness. Moreover, whereas in these two perspectives, Monism and Dualism, there is a tension between love and justice. In Dualism, they are opposites. In Monism, love is the higher way and justice the lower way.

In Christian Theism, love and justice are different sides of the same coin. They cannot be opposed the one to the other. For a man to say that we must emphasize justice rather than love or love rather than justice is to talk nonsense if he is a Christian, because these two are different sides of the same coin. Both have their common origin in God.

And having their common origin in God, they cannot be in conflict. And the supreme coincidence of love and justice as the Bible reveals it is of course the cross of Christ because in the cross of Christ we see the full justice of God manifested. We see revealed to us in the cross of Christ, the absolute requirement of justice against man, that his sin must be atoned for, that there can be no setting aside of the requirements of justice, but at one and the same time, the cross of Christ reveals unto us the fullness of God’s love. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. And in the Christian framework, love and justice are only operative together. They cannot be separated the one from the other without destroying them. And love and justice cannot be defined apart from the cross of Christ, which shows their supreme coincidence, so that to speak of any conflict between love and justice from the Christian perspective, is erroneous. They cannot be put in tension in the Christian system of thought.

For love and justice are not man-centered, they are God-centered. They are not concerned in the Christian theistic framework primarily with human rights or with the love of men, but with the righteousness of God. And you can only create a tension between love and justice if you have a Monistic and Dualistic framework with a Humanistic emphasis.

But in the biblical perspective, love and justice have their primary reference to the righteousness of God and the fundamental principle of God’s righteousness and Law is restitution. And without restitution, there can be no love, no justice. When we study Biblical Law, we find that the basic premise of Biblical Law is restitution, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, which means that the punishment must fit the crime and the basic aspect of punishment is restitution. If a man, according to the Biblical Law, stole $100, he had to restore not only the $100 he stole, but another $100, the exact amount he hoped to profit thereby. In the case of cattle, because the cattle could increase and multiply, he not only restored what he stole, but four-fold or five-fold depending on the particular type of stock, because of the increase potential. Restitution had to be made in terms of Biblical Law, to the injured party and to God. In other words, it was a restoration of godly order. This is justice in the biblical perspective, and this also is love.

Now when we analyze nonChristian concepts of justice, we find a different concept of what constitutes justice and law. We need not look at modern criminology. We can go back to one of the earliest writers in this field, a Greek scholar writing during the Roman period, Aulus Gellius. Now Aulus Gellius, as he deals with law, says that it has a three-fold purpose.

1.      He says punishment is to correct and reform.

2.      To save the face of the offended man

3.      As an example, as a deterrent

Now this sounds very familiar. This is the kind of rationale we meet with all the time, and of course the orientation is humanistic. It is not in terms of the righteousness of God, but in terms of man and the criminal is to be saved by coercion and his prison sentence is for this purpose—to save him, to rehabilitate him. This is basic to the pagan doctrine of salvation and the religions of love always means salvation by legal coercion, by compulsory sharing, by compulsory loving, by compulsory integrating, by some form of external coercion. Now as I indicated earlier, coercion in some form is inescapable. It is also basic as I indicated, to the biblical position. But we need to examine afresh the nature of coercion and what it does.

For example, I was coerced this morning by the institute here because I had to get up at a certain hour to be here and have breakfast. Now, I’m not used to having breakfast that early in the morning. And I like my own hours. And I eat about 11 in the morning and then about 4:30 in the afternoon and then about 10:30 or 11:00, I have a snack before I wind up my work for the night. But I was coerced these past three days because I ate at hours that are not normal for me. Now, the purpose of this coercion as exercised by Dr. Smith and the other members of the institute was not to do me any harm or it was not directed against me personally. Its purpose was social order. We could not function here if I had meals at my time and you had them at your time. The whole thing would break down. The purpose of this coercion was social order.

But it would be different, if instead of social order, the purpose of that coercion became my salvation. And salvation from the Latin (salve) means ‘health.’ And of course salvation is simply the fullness of health, bodily and spiritually. And our regeneration is our spiritual health, our restoration from death to health, and the fullness of our salvation, our health comes with the resurrection of the body when we have a perfect body.

Now, for my salvation, Dr. Smith and the seminary could say you must have grits for breakfast (I didn’t have them), and you must have tomato juice (which I did not take) and for lunch you must have this and that and certain other things, which perhaps are objectionable to me but which may be good for my health. In this case, coercion becomes personal and its purpose is not social order, as set times for meals are, but it reaches out. It interferes with my personal life and coerces me and says eat it, it’s good for you, and you’ve got to because we’re going to save you whether you like it or not.

Now, when these social gospelers replace justice as the social goal, with salvation by man-made laws, by love, as opposed to justice, for in their system it is opposed, they are not using law to create social order, they are using it to save man. And the purpose of law is not to save man. They are introducing salvation by law. They are also guilty of the great and central sin of playing God, of becoming man’s savior, of saying we are going to save man, to give him perfect personal and social health by means of law—man’s law.

Salvation is the province and work of God, not of man. And the saving society or the loving society, or the hating society, whatever you want to call it, is the great society of anti-Christ. When law becomes salvation, it becomes hostile to justice and to liberty. When the law says it’s going to save me, the law has to take away my liberty. The law says to me I must eat what the law commands me to eat; I must associate with whom the law commands me to associate with. And this of course is literally what the law increasingly is doing. It is saying I must drink fluoridated water because that is good for me. Maybe I don’t want to be healthy. And maybe I don’t believe it makes me healthy. And I must integrate with people for my good. But maybe I don’t care to be good in their sense. But the law is out to save me because the law says we are going to save, we, the men who are the planners are going to save society and we are going to save men and don’t you dare refuse salvation!

But for the Christian, law can never save man. And when law is restored to its rightful place, under God, law and liberty in the Christian sense are not opposite the one to the other, but they are different sides of the same coin. It is not for us of bondage to obey God’s Law. We were in slavery. We were in bondage when we were lawless, when our heart was in perpetual rebellion and hatred with respect to the Law of God. But now by the grace of God the law has been written upon the tables of our hearts and the law is our nature so that it is no longer a handwriting of ordinances against us (Thou shalt not kill, steal, commit adultery, bear false witness or covet), but this is now our nature. Not perfectly, because we are not perfectly sanctified, but it is now our nature and it is our liberty because we are freed from the bondage and the slavery to sin and to death. So that in the Christian perspective, law, which is not salvation, which is restored to its rightful place under God, becomes identical with liberty.

Man’s law’s control as a saving power means tyranny and civil rights become civil wrongs. And man’s rights are made more basic than justice and then law.

The goal of this doctrine of love, of the human rights, of unity, is brotherhood. It’s human solidarity. It’s unity. It’s corporateness. But let us examine briefly the concept of corporateness and community. This of course, is what we believe in—community; the community of Jesus Christ, established upon His atoning work, and its focal point the Lord’s Table. And the world as a whole is saying the goal of man should be corporateness and community. How?

There are two ways in which corporateness or community, being members of one body, can be achieved. One is by imposition from above, by the total power of the State. In this case, liberty is lost, justice is lost, and tyranny prevails. And although this is done in the name of love, there is no love in it, because this enforced corporateness only drives men further and further apart. The other means of attaining corporateness or community is from the heart of the people, by God’s grace in free association, and in terms of this there must be liberty.

Certainly when you have this, the free association in terms of the moving of God’s grace, you do run the risk of tensions and of divisions and of hurt. And it would be so easy, would it not, for us as pastors, if we had the absolute say-so and could lay down the law and the people had to listen to us to have no problems in the church. But we would have a greater problem in that our imposed law would then take the place of the grace of God. And it is the grace of God which must be nourished and fostered in the hearts of the people so that it is the grace of God that brings them together rather than our imposed law, for community is personal, and societal; not statist when it is true community.

The religion of love, whether in its monistic or dualistic forms, is a religion of salvation by man’s law, by man’s love, and by the coercive actions of that humanistic love. And the churches of this faith inevitably must gravitate to statist action because, grant them this—they do in their twisted way, have a tremendous passion for souls. And they do want to save souls by legislation, by works of law. And unhappily, they far-often excel us in zeal. They do feel the world must be saved—and quickly! And they are ready to march; they are ready to work in state assemblies, ready to do everything: lobbying, marching, compelling people to be loving, because they do want the world to be saved. But the weakness of their position is of course that it is their zeal, not their god. Their zeal is great, but their god is nonexistent, and their conception of him very trifling.

I was amused a few months ago to pick up a paper when I was in the northwest and to read that the Reverend Paul Beeman, a Methodist in Seattle, Washington, a legislative representative or lobbyist to the Washington State legislature said, “If the church doesn’t take an interest in the corporate lives of men, who will? If Jesus were alive in America today, He might very well have run for the legislature.” Well, I believe if Jesus were here today, He would set His sights a little higher than the Washington State legislature. After all, there are better states. And our Lord did refuse the kingship of Israel, according to John 6. Beeman’s Jesus is a very limited creature, not the King of Creation.

But this is the religion of salvation by works of law. For as salvation by God, justification through faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ, rests not on man’s law, nor on man’s coercive power, but on the coercive power of the Holy Spirit which totally acts within us for our redemption and recreates man. And this supernatural coercion is within the framework of the human personality and without violence to its integrity, but in fulfillment of its potentiality under God. When God by His Holy Spirit coerced us—totally coerced us—and saved us, He did us no violence to our being, but rather liberated, brought it to life from death, and released it into all its potentiality. This too is total control, but it is also the glorious liberty of the sons of God.

The religion of salvation by law, of coercive love in dualism and in monism, cannot work on man’s heart. It tries to do so, by education and by mental health programs, but these are secondary to their salvation by coercive and total law. The biblical faith and the biblical social ethics provide a slower, but a surer way. And in terms of it, God is sovereign, not man. And in terms of it, God is the savior, not man. And the function of the state is justice, not love. The function of the state is to provide godly order, not to save man. We must reserve to God the sole power of salvation and the essence of all these social gospel ethics is that salvation is transferred from God to the State and it is s the saving power of the state that confronts us. We then must assert as against this false gospel, the power of God unto salvation. This is the only answer. And we must reconstruct godly order, a Christian America, a Christian church, because we scarcely have it today, in terms of the biblical faith. And we need to do it in confidence.

Someone yesterday raised a question. I’d like to close by repeating the answer I gave to that question, how can we, when we are a handful, hope to establish again a Christian America, an America in which God’s Word is honored, in which again Christian Law is the foundation of society? How can we hope to do so when we are so small a minority?

The answer is: history has never once been dominated by a majority, always and only by dedicated minorities. Will we be that dedicated minority?

The premise of the Communists in operating is simply this: they believe that all they need to control any country, any institution, any church, is 1% of its members, with another 9% sympathetic, whether knowingly or not. And the only thing that can prevent them when they have this from controlling it, is to have another 1% leadership and 9% following at the other end. They have their 10% already in the churches and in these United States. The only reason why they do not govern fully is because there still exists at the other end, the 1% and the 9%, and hence their attack is centered on discrediting and destroying that element.

But a minority can govern. A minority, if it knows its position and moves in terms of it, can control a situation. In Korea, it is significant what happened in the prisoner of war camps. Dr. Mayer, of the Army Medical Corps, made extensive studies and reported extensively until the army imposed a black-out on him and on his information, on the men who were brainwashed. And the reports were very illuminating. When Americans were taken prisoners, after asking the name, rank and serial number, they asked two or three harmless questions. The purpose of these questions was to determine two things. Did these men believe in the Bible as the Word of God and did they believe in the free enterprise system? If they did, they segregated these men. And it amounted to roughly 15 out of every 100; 15%. These men were put behind barbed wire, well cared for, well fed, well-guarded, but they never bothered them.

They took the other 85% and put them into Korean villages out of which they had driven the natives. They didn’t have a single strand of barbed wire around those villages, only one or two guards walking around it, but not a one of those 85% tried to escape. They gave these men the food, they gave them the equipment, they told them, now go ahead, take care of yourself, prepare your food, build your own latrines. They didn’t. The villages became so filthy finally, the Chinese Communists had to come in with squads and clean them up and build the latrines themselves. Only then could they come in and begin lecturing them. They didn’t have any trouble brainwashing those men. There was a vacuum there. There was no faith. And so it was very easy to influence them.

This is our situation today. And I think the percentage they found was fairly accurate, fairly reflective of the condition in this country, 85% without any conviction about anything, about liberty, about Christ, about anything.

We must be that dedicated minority. And we must move in the conviction that God’s judgment is on this present order, and I believe it will be manifested in not too many years in the form of a total world-wide economic collapse that will shatter every existing regime. I believe we will go into a period of chaos. But if we prepare now, if we proclaim the Word of God in all its majesty and in all its implications, if we become that dedicated minority, we can, and I believe must and shall command the future.

May God bless you to that purpose.

[Concluding speaker] Mr. Rushdoony, I’m sure that I speak for the entire audience in expressing our thanks to you for expressing so well the thoughts that many of us have had along these lines but have not been able to articulate in the same way and as clearly as you have. We certainly appreciate you bring us these messages and this challenge, and gives us a definite purpose in the present culture in which we live, as Christians to seek to be this minority.