Power, Family, Community and Law

Power and its Meaning

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Sociology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 1

Track: 32

Dictation Name: RR110A1

Date: 1974

{?} to me. I hope all of you have an opportunity some time to go to Jackson and to see what Reformed Seminary is doing and to see the caliber of the training and the students. It is a thrill. I’m very happy to be here. The last couple of years, every time I’ve come into the South, somebody has told me after listening to me, you and Mr. Donahue ought to get acquainted. You will like each other. Now sometimes, I haven’t been altogether too sure that what they meant was that we ought to be quarantined in some corner together! [Laughter] But I have found it a delight to get acquainted with him this afternoon.

Our scripture this evening is from Exodus 3:13-25:

“13 And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, what is his name? What shall I say unto them?

14 And God said unto Moses, I Am that I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you.

15 And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name forever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.”

Our subject this evening is “Power and its Meaning.” The name of the game today in the world is power. And we stand today on the brink of World War III. When Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union, he brought out with him messages from highly-placed leaders in the Soviet Union, who were sympathetic to him, messages to President Nixon. The jist of these messages, as Paul Scott and others have reported them, was that we are on the brink of World War III.

Red China is close to a break-through to the mass manufacture of atomic weapons. If they succeed, when they are ready, they will strike at the Soviet Union to take possession of Siberia. If they make the break-through, the temper of the Kremlin is to strike the minute they do. It is possible, therefore, if that break-through comes, that war could begin within a year. Solzhenitsyn issued a warning to the Kremlin, that such a war would last 10-15 years and cost at least 60 million Russian lives. His warning to Nixon was, stay out of the war, or it will be the end of civilization as we know it.

We live in the bloodiest of centuries. Between 1914 and 1945, the span of the two World Wars and the span of the intervening periods, 70 million—not 17, but 70—million died from famine, from massacre, from war. And this estimate is low, if anything. Since then, we have had more horrors: the mass murders in Red China, Korea, Vietnam, the wiping out of Christian groups and various tribal groups in Africa, and this is just the beginning. We live in the most murderous of all centuries, when more people and a higher ratio of people have been killed by various horrors. And yet we fought one war to make the world safe for democracy, another one to rid it of oppression in the name of Nazism, but both really did nothing but make the world safe for a particular brand of sinning. The name of the game is power.

What is power? For a long time, from pre-Christian times, the world has defined power in totally pagan terms. We cannot understand the modern world and its idea of power, its quest, unless we go back to the Greek period and see how they defined power, because it is their definition that has prevailed in the mind of man, their definition which is taught to this day in schools, is implicit in all our Statist, Humanistic, antichristian education. Aristotle defined power as change. Three forms of change, but basically, the power to change others. And as a result, there has been this lust for power, to control, to manipulate people. It is the pathology of fallen man, an expression of Original Sin.

The temptation of Satan to man was, ‘ye shall be as god;’ every man his own god, knowing, that is determining for yourself, what constitutes good and evil. To be as god means that every man claims autonomy, ultimacy; and power since Eden has meant to fallen man disobedience, manipulating others, imposing one’s own will upon the world in defiance of God’s Law.

Now the power to change can be used two ways: to create (or build), which is at best, slow, or to destroy, which is quick and immediate. And thus, sinful man has rarely used his powers creatively when he has been able to express his lust for power. He can best demonstrate power by manipulating, compelling, coercing, killing others. George Orwell, a Humanist and a Marxist, in disillusionment before his death, saw the meaning of power to fallen, to pagan man, and he gave expression to it in his book, 1984. In one of the concluding passages, one of the leaders says to one of the other characters, “You think of power, you think of the world’s Socialist revolution as designed to improve the lot of man, as designed to further humanity and equality and brotherhood.” But, he said, the goal is power! And the best image of the future is of a boot grinding down a human face forever. This, Orwell said, is the future. And if there were nothing but Humanistic man, if there were no God, it would be the future.

The ungodly have spelled out the issues for us. We had better realize what they are. Even more eloquently than Orwell, the French Existentialist, Camus, described the face of the world. He said there can be only two kinds of world. The world of grace, the world of faith, of obedience, the world of God’s Law on the one hand, and on the other, the world of rebellion, of revolution, the world of evil, the world of lawlessness, the world of destruction. And since he said, there is no God for us, there can be for us no hope in terms of law and of righteousness, no hope in terms of the world of grace. For us, power therefore is revolution and destruction. And the world of revolution, he said, must choose evil. And thus, as he described the world of today and tomorrow as he saw it, and the people of today and tomorrow he called his book, The Rebel, revolution for the sake of revolution, change as power, destruction as change, perpetual destruction as the name of the future.

The Fall was the claim by man to define good and evil in terms of himself. Man made himself the yardstick, the source of meaning, the definition of all things, and the result is situation ethics, morality relative to man, man as the source of meaning—but a purely personal meaning, a meaning that cannot go beyond the imagination of man, that cannot account for a single thing in the universe so that Camus could say if I could define one thing in the universe, find meaning in one thing outside of myself, I could be saved. I could find a world of meaning. But without God, no meaning; only destruction as the only power.

But for us in terms of the Word of God, reality is defined by God, who is Himself power. “God hath spoken once, twice have I heard this, that power belongeth to God,” David said in Psalm 62:11. And St. Paul in Romans 13:1, “There is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God.” Not only power, but reality, meaning is defined by God.

In our scripture, we find Moses meeting God at the burning bush. In a world which in its way was as bleak as ours is, and he asked God, ‘what is Thy name?’ Now the name of God (Jehovah) appears in the Book of Genesis. It was familiar to the patriarchs. The problem Moses faces was, he did not understand God. Names in the Old Testament are definitions. A man therefore could change his name during his lifetime as he changed in character. We do not know Abraham’s original name, we are never told that. We are told that when he was called out of Ur of the Chaldeas, his name was Abram, “father of many,” in terms of the calling and the promise God gave to him. And later his name was made Abraham, “father of a great multitude” (many nations}. This defined Abraham. That was the name he had to bear by faith. No doubt as he went into Canaan and men met him and asked him his name, ‘Oh. Father of many, how many children do you have?’ ‘Well, none.’ And they must have snickered behind his back. And later, father of a great multitude, ‘how many children do you have?’ ‘One.’ And a little later, ‘two.’ Abraham carried that name by faith. We, too, now have a family name: Christian. Christian—belonging to Christ. And we are told in Revelation we have a new name. We don’t know it yet. As we obey the Word and grow in terms of our calling, we understand more and more of God’s will for us, His purpose for our lives, and we are feeling our way, working our way as we grow in grace and sanctification, in holiness, toward the meaning of that new name which we will know in the world to come.

Names are definitions. And Moses was bewildered by God. Centuries had passed since His last revelation of Himself. His people who were in bondage, the male children for a time had all been murdered. Why had not God spoken? Where was God in all this? And so, ‘What shall I tell the people is your name? How are they going to understand you, God, in view of this long silence?’ And God said unto Moses, “I Am that I Am. Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me.” I Am that I Am—or, I am He who is, the eternal one, the ever-present living one, the one beyond definition. God refused to define Himself, because God is beyond definition. His attributes can be named: righteousness, holiness, love, jealousy, much, much more. These are descriptive of various aspects of His being. But God Himself is beyond definition, because He having made all things defines all things by His creative will, so that nothing has meaning apart from God. God cannot be judged by any definition because He is the source of all meaning, of all creation. But He goes on to say, “Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, the Lord God of your Fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me unto you. This is my name forever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.” God cannot be defined but He reveals Himself, and so His revelation is His name; the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, you God and my God, the God of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

He reveals Himself. And the whole of creation is revelational of God. “The Heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork.” We ourselves are revelational of God in that we are created in His image and manifest His communicable attributes: knowledge, righteousness, holiness and dominion, as the catechism and the confession tell us. Moreover, the image of God in us includes the Law of God written in our hearts, as Romans 2:14 declares.

Change and the power to change in pagan thought is power. But God says, “I am the Lord. I change not.” God is the power in the universe and the one who brings about changes. But God’s change is creative and regenerative. Man’s change is destructive and coercive; external. Man cannot change the essentials. “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil,” Jeremiah 13:23. And Solomon counseled in Proverbs 24:21, 22, “21My son, fear thou the Lord and the king: and meddle not with them that are given to change: “22 For their calamity shall rise suddenly; and who knoweth the ruin of them both?” Thus on the one hand, we have the lust for power, to bring in change by force.

And we have seen in the modern era, Humanism dispense entirely with God, and since Hegel, define change, historical process as god. This today is a matter of theology in the churches, the so-called Theology of Hope of Moltmann and others, is one that says time, historical process, change, is god. And therefore, the future is god, when the whole world has been changed by man. When the scientific socialist elite can remake man and the whole of humanity is remade in terms of man’s desired image, then time and man will alike be god. And this process involves a rejection of history in essence, insofar as it constitutes the inheritance of the past. Wipe out the past! And so the effect of Statist education today is to separate the child from church and home, to undercut the effect of church and home; to eliminate the past, to wipe the slate clean, beginning all over again by destroying past institutions, forms and cultures, by declaring that evil is in the environment and the environment is described as the Christian past—not in man.

And social improvement is directed not against any supposed evil in man but against evil in the environment, and it is held that by changing human institutions, human nature itself will be born again. And this is to be done by a new society of managers, scientific planners who can bring in the millennium of secular man. I.K. {?}, a Soviet philosopher, has been most eloquent in championing this position, in declaring that the future is going to see humanity reborn, made anew, with all the evil brought in by priest and Bible wiped out! And a new creation brought in by the scientific socialist planners. Change; power, and mankind to be reborn. How? By destruction. Destroy the past, destroy and eliminate the idea of God. Destroy and eliminate Biblical faith and morality, the family, and somehow out of that destruction, mankind will be born.

The Bible never asks us to change men. Regeneration is a power reserved to God and it is not change, it is recreation. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation.” We are called upon to preach the Word. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” We are called upon to exercise dominion when we have been restored to our original calling. St. Paul, as he rebuked the Corinthian church in I Corinthians 6:2 reminded them the saints are to judge the world (and judge here used in the Old Testament sense of govern—exercise dominion) and the church be made clear, was to be a training ground for dominion.

John Wycliffe has been called The Morningstar of the Reformation, and with good reason. Without agreeing with everything that Wycliffe wrote and said, he did put his finger on certain key issues. He recognized that the pattern then was in essence Aristotelian and pagan, that men were trying to change the world and men by force, coercion, with a pagan doctrine of change. And Wycliffe stressed regeneration and dominion, that there can be no change unless God institutes it, and when man is reborn then his calling is to exercise dominion, to bring every area of life and thought, activity—everything—into captivity to Christ. Dominion, he said, is authority and lordship, and God is the universal Lord, having absolute dominion. Men hold all that they possess from God as a grant, a beneficium, and every beneficium, every area of dominion we have from God requires a corresponding service to God and to men under God. Every righteous man, said Wycliffe, is lord over the whole sensible world. And he declared that, while the righteous have dominion, they do not always have the actual power that goes with dominion, but he said it can never be seized as the world tries to seize it, by revolution, by power in the Aristotelian, pagan sense but only through the Word of God.

When Wycliffe translated the Bible into English, in his preface he included a statement that was stolen by a Yankee named Lincoln. And that statement, which Lincoln altered, said this book (the Bible) is for the government of the people, by the people and for the people: dominion through the Word; dominion under God. Dominion, where regenerate man, having been made alive in Christ, goes out to bring every area into captivity to Christ, to exercise, to use the old Puritan battle cry, the crown rights of King Jesus.

The modern world sees power as change. And change as its god. This is the thesis of Hegelian thought, whether it be in Karl Marx or in John Dewey, whose pupils today run our public schools and our colleges and our universities. But the Word of God declares that the warning of the Lord to Adam was that if you eat of that fruit, if you disobey me, then ye shall surely die, or dying ye shall die the process of death will begin. And as man separates himself from God in his attempt to find power on his own terms, his life loses meaning and he finds himself progressively more and more powerless as time goes on, to do anything but commit suicide.

One of the disciples of Hegel, in disillusionment over the hope of changing the world, of seeing change as god, Nietzsche, called for a revolution to destroy history, to destroy the god of Humanism, to destroy change, to negate hope, to negate man. He called for the death of man, and superman who would do nothing but destroy, to bring universal death upon everything. And he declared, “I shall usher in the greatest period of war and destruction the world has ever known because I call for the death of God; the death of the Christian God and the death of the god of Hegel.” And in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche pronounces the death of the god of Humanism, power as change.

And so modern man is indeed without hope; without Christ and without hope. And progressively more and more impotent to do anything other than to destroy himself. And so, as we live in these trouble-filled times, we should not be fearful. “Therefore will not we fear. Thou the earth be moved, though the mountains shake with swelling thereof, thought the mountains be moved into the depths of the sea, for the Lord of Hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge.” He is the Almighty one from whom comes all power. And the only true power that can move and change the world is that which is His, the power to make all things new, to make us a new creature in Christ, to use us as His ambassadors, to bring all things into submission to Jesus Christ as Lord, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, to obey Him as He commanded His saints of old, to march forward and “wherever the souls of your feet shall tread, I will give you that ground.” And in this faith, we should move forward—establishing schools, churches, new institutions, Christian hospitals, going out and conquering one area after another, one field of the arts and sciences after another, in terms of Christ as Lord and King, “for this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.”

Let us pray.

We praise Thee oh God, for Thou hast made all things new in Jesus Christ. And Thou hast summoned us to be Thy people and made us a new creation in Him. Oh Lord, our God, how great Thou art and how marvelous Thy works! Teach us, Lord, so to walk, that our eyes may be fixed not upon the evils of this world, but upon Thy Word. Grant that we march not to the beat of men but in terms of Thy calling, that we see not the failing power of men, but Thine omnipotent and mighty power. Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee that Thou hast declared that there is nothing impossible with Thee, that all Thy promises in Jesus Christ unto us are yeah and amen. Give us therefore the boldness of faith that we may be more than conquerors through Him that loved us, even Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray. Amen.