Power, Family, Community and Law

The Community and the Family

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Sociology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 2

Track: 33

Dictation Name: RR110A2

Date: 1974

{?} Public Foundation, whose purpose it is to further Christian research and writing in every possible area. There are three of us who are full-time staff members. We travel wherever invited and lecture at colleges and campuses. Gary North, one of my associates, for example, within the past month, taught a course at an Oregon State college, lectured at the University of Idaho, lectured at an Arizona college. And Greg Bahnsen has in that time also, lectured at a seminary in Colorado, and at numerous churches and to various groups. I have been on any number of campuses, Notre Dame, Purdue, Southern California, all over the country. We issue a monthly report which is a theological commentary on one area of life or another. We have started to issue a medical report to develop a philosophy in theology of medicine. We are going to start publication soon of a journal of Christian reconstruction. We hold seminars at least once a year in various parts of the country on the how-to-do-it of Christian school—how to start a school, how to operate one, the kind of curriculum, staffing, and so on. So wherever we’re asked to go we will go, and put on such a seminar. And we have, I’m very, very proud to say, been responsible for numerous schools starting across country.

What we want to do is to make possible Christian reconstruction in one area of life after another so that, because we believe the future belongs to us under God and that the meek shall inherit the Earth and delight themselves in the abundance of peace, we want to provide the intellectual tools whereby the people of God can exercise that dominion. It’s a joy to do that and as the Lord provides, we will enlarge and increase our ministry of godly reconstruction.

Our subject this morning is “Community and the Family,” and our scripture is Ephesians 3:8-19, with particular emphasis on verse 13. What I say this morning is, in essence, prelude to what we shall deal with tomorrow night, “The Family and Power,” tomorrow night. When we think in terms of the future, we fail to realize that all of us have in our hands the most powerful instrument for the control of the future ever known to mankind: the family. The enemy is aware of it and is therefore out to destroy the Christian family. And I shall be dealing tomorrow night with what it is about the family that is so important, so tremendous a key to the control of any society. This morning, “Community and the Family.” Ephesians 3:8-19:

“8Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ;

9 And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ:

10 To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God,

11 According to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord:

12 In whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him.

13 Wherefore I desire that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which is your glory.

14 For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

15 Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,

16 That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man;

17 That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love,

18 May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height;

19 And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.”

The Renaissance was deliberately an anti-Christian era, whose purpose it was to overthrow the bonds of the faith. The Reformation was an anti-Renaissance movement, which for a century and a half, dominated the world’s scene in terms of Biblical faith. But after 1660, except in the United States, in the American Colonies, the Enlightenment and Humanism triumphed. And the warfare against the faith was resumed.

Voltaire became one of the great figures of the Enlightenment. And his motto, repeated over and over again throughout his works, was, “Erase—wipe out the infamy!” And what was the infamy, the shame of mankind? It was Christianity. And therefore, basic to the liberation of man, basic to the welfare of the world he held, was the elimination of Biblical faith.

With Rousseau, this was carried to its logical conclusion. Rousseau defined freedom as the total destruction of the Church and the Christian influence in every area. As the destruction of community life, of free associations; a woman’s group, a men’s club, any kind of organization, the destruction of the family and the triumph of the Totalitarian State. Rousseau defined freedom as the Totalitarian State and its total power. Liberation for him, freedom, was from Biblical faith. As a result, the modern State began a long warfare against the family.

The first instrument it created to destroy the power of the faith and the family was the State-controlled school. It is not an accident that the idea of the so-called public (or Statist) schools, was imported to this country by the Unitarians in New England, men who were dedicated to the overthrow of Christianity, dedicated to a Socialist faith, and who felt that the first step in Socialism was the control of the child. And indeed they were right. What right does any parent have, morally, to complain if the State takes his money and his property when he has already surrendered his children? The warfare against the family continues.

Today the Statist educators are talking about campus schools. As a first step, they propose to take the black children from the ghettos and put them into full-time boarding schools and to begin at the age of 4 and then later to lower the age—to break the tie of the parents and to be able to restructure these children totally. They plan on having this for all children finally. This is not a new idea. It was first proposed in the 1890s by Col. Parker, the father, before John Dewey, of progressive education. It is now seriously in the hopper as a plan for the future. The idea is to destroy the family.

One very prominent educator, who has written numerous books on education (a Statist educator), in one of his most recent books has proposed a Bill of Rights for children. As a prelude he says, “I have come to feel that the fact of being a child, of being wholly subservient and dependent, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave and super pet, does most people more harm than good. I propose instead that the rights, privileges, duties, responsibilities of adult citizens be made available to any young person of whatever age who wants to make use of them.” Now, of course this is not scholarship. This is vicious, vitriolic hatred. Certainly no Christian can subscribe to the idea that children are regarded in the family as an expensive nuisance, as slaves and super pets. But this is the temper of the modern educator. I will not read the whole of his Bill of Rights, but just a few to give you an idea of what he proposes for children of any age who choose to claim them, preschool or school age.

         The right to financial independence and responsibility

         The rights to own, buy and sell property, to borrow money, establish credit, sign contracts, etc.

         The right to direct and manage one’s own education

         The right to travel, to live away from home, to choose or make one’s own home

         The right to receive from the State whatever minimum income it may guarantee to adult citizens.

Let me stop a moment to explain that. There are some who believe that every adult should have as a minimum income given to him by the State (or to her) $10,000. Without working. Now, John Holt proposes this should be done for any child who wants to claim it. So if a 5 year old or a 10 year old wants to claim it, he should have that right.

         The right to make and enter into, on a basis of mutual consent, quasi-familial relationships outside one’s immediate family, that is the right to seek and choose guardians other than one’s own parents and to be legally dependent on them.

         The right to do in general what any adult may legally do.

Now lest you think these are the wild dreams of one irresponsible man, let me tell you that social welfare workers across the country in many major cities are making these matters of principle and operation and have for some time. But in many schools in major cities, parents are the object of attack by the counselors who have assured children that if your parent is too restrictive and makes you go to church, we can see to it that you are put into a foster home. There are also cases where the courts have implemented this type of thinking in their decision, ruling against parents in favor of delinquent children.

I could go on at some length and cite examples of this type of thing, but to give you an example of the kind of thing happening in the schools, a week ago yesterday, the Van Nuys Valley News in California, had this front-page story. “John L. DeSault, Sixth Grade teacher at Vintage Street Elementary School in Sepulveda has dropped the regular program for his pupils for the rest of this semester. ‘I thought otherwise I would not be doing my duty as a teacher,’ DeSault told the news in explaining why the last weeks of the semester will be devoted to what he considers primarily human development.” The article goes on to say that he’s dispensing with the 3 R’s for the time being (and this is in a grade school), teaching such things as witchcraft and other inexplicable phenomena that haven’t been studied scientifically. The class is also delving into such matters as yoga, meditation and breathing exercises that can elevate to a higher state of consciousness and so on.

I knew a teacher in that school. He is one of our most faithful supporters in our work and with our encouragement, he and his wife started a Christian school. They’re doing very well. This is their first year they are not concluding. He teaches to support the family until the school, which is wife is now teaching, grows sufficiently that it can pay for the entire family’s support. And I asked him about DeSault, and he said I’ve got news for you; he’s never taught the 3 R’s, so he might as well be teaching this as anything else! And he said, to give you an idea of how ignorant this young man is, he spells ‘ladder,’ the ladder you climb up, ‘l-a-t-t-e-r’ and ‘scissors,’ ‘s-i-z-e-r-s.’ And he said, this is the kind of young teacher now teaching in our public schools. He said, however, I went and thanked DeSault for the article about him in the paper and the stand he had taken. He was very surprised because he knew where I stood, because I stand out like a sore thumb in this school. And I said, DeSault, we’re going to use that article very heavily. It will bring us more pupils in our Christian school.

The kind of thinking, however, represented by John Holt is increasingly prevalent. We have the same idea of the future everywhere—irresponsible freedom. This is a product of Humanism, of the idea that man is his own god, a law unto himself. Men were the first ones in our culture to be infected by this, and men all too often in our age have abdicated from responsibility in the home, in the church and in the community. In the 1950s and especially 60s, this cult of irresponsibility, of freedom from God, from law, from morality, caught up with the students. And we have today the irresponsibility of the student generation. In the last few years, the women have picked this up and we have today something new in our society, something that did not exist before. Once the bread-and-butter of detective agencies was to hunt for missing husbands, men who had become weary of the responsibility of supporting a family, of being tied down to responsibility and who simply took off. Today, a booming area of business for detective agencies is the search for missing wives, young women and sometimes older women, who fell that, I’m going to live it up before I die, who will stick a bottle in the baby’s mouth and prop up a note for the husband and say I’m tired of all this and I want freedom, and take off! The cult of irresponsibility, of hostility to the family as a form of bondage and slavery is very extensive.

Throughout history, going back to the ancient Persian Empire, when the Mazda-type Communists took over and destroyed that country, one of the great civilizations of antiquity, right down to the present, every revolutionary regime has begun its climb to power by attacking the family. And this is still true in our day.

Think back on the Hearst Kidnapping (if indeed it was a kidnapping). If you read the taped messages of Patricia Hearst, there was one theme in all of them, a vicious diabolical attack on her father! Striking at the authority of the father! And this is basic to the revolutionary movement. Karl Marx declared, and Engels with him, that first we must attack the authority of the holy family, and then the authority of the earthy family; first the authority of the Father in Heaven and then the authority of the father on earth. And so hatred of the father has systematically been inculcated by revolutionaries through the ages. As a matter of fact, one revolutionist of the last century wrote, “The dominant of the revolutionary complex is to be sadistic. This means that hatred of the father should always be stronger than love of the brother.” In other words, the idea of equality has behind it not the brotherhood of man. That’s the pretext for attacking the authority of the father—the Heavenly Father and the earthly father—and then to replace it with a new kind of authority—not with the brotherhood of man. That’s a façade! Equality is a façade! The first authority always attacked, of course, is that of God. And freedom in the modern era means essentially, freedom from God.

The world of literature today, the world of entertainment is an assault on the family. The religious presuppositions of films and of television in particular are rampant Humanism and anti-familial ideology. Freedom means independence from the Christian family, from Biblical Law, and freedom to experiment sexually. Television is geared to violence. And today, we have around us a generation of children, of young men, of college-age men whose babysitter through the years, whose entertainment several hours a day was television. The answer to all problems on television is violence. The answer to evil and to oppression is violence. The way of heroism is violence. So that today, we have on our college and university campuses, a generation who believe that violence is the highest virtue. Now, I have been on dozens and dozens of secular college and university campuses across country, and let me tell you, they believe in violence. They think it’s the coward who criticizes violence and is unwilling to undertake it.

I hesitate to point this out. It seems so far out and so insane, and it is insane, but it is in line with this cult of violence in terms of which they have been babysat, by television, that you actually find some of the youth underground press (so-called underground press; Leftist press) actually insisting that rape is most enjoyable for women, and it’s only Christian middle class hang-ups that make women think it is something horrible. They seriously believe that! Because to them, the one great virtue, the one cleansing factor is violence. And hence, they are impatient with peaceful means, with Constitutional means, with godly means. Their answer to problems if violence—the greatest virtue. As a result, sadistic acts increase. Convicts are regarded as heroes of the future, and sadism, once regarded as a perversion, is now held to be a legitimate human expression. And an artist who is regarded as a {?} of pornographic artists a few years ago is now regarded as a modern classic in the world of art.

The result is the exaltation of sexual experimentation and violence. And a brutal effect as a result upon the family and the community, a rift between the generations, a distrust between husband and wife, because elementary sexual faithfulness is eroding all around us. What we are seeing is the destruction, the erosion, the collapse of the natural community, from the family on up and down.

All over the world, the natural community is disappearing and the thing that is destroying it is the logical out-working of the Fall: every man his own god, doing as he pleases, determining for himself what constitutes good and evil. The natural community, whether it’s the family or any other form of community has no future. Only the supernatural community has a future. The family that is based upon God and His regenerating power, whose foundation is supernatural, the Church whose foundation is supernatural, the community, the Christian state; only those institutions and communities and organizations which have a supernatural foundation in the regenerating power of God through Christ shall stand. Everything else will go! And it will be destroyed by its own children.

Last night, we dealt with Exodus 3, Moses’ request of God that He name Himself, define Himself, and God said, “I Am that I Am. I Am He who is,” the source of all definition but beyond definition. I reveal myself, I reveal myself, and I am known by my revelation. And the only extent to which I can be named (and it is not truly a name) is that I Am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who reveals Himself to His people, to His covenant man, your God and my God.

Now, St. Paul tells us, “For this cause I bow my knee unto the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in Heaven and earth is named.” Commentators in recent generations have lost the significance of that verse. A few older ones are still aware of it. Named; defined; everything in Heaven and earth, all creation, every family of being, angelic and human and nonhuman is named, is defined by God. And this is why the supernatural community can alone command the future. The Christian family, the Christian school, the Christian church, the future belongs to us under God because there is nothing else with meaning, with any possibility of definition when it separates itself from God. Its end is Hell, total isolation. The whole creation, St. Paul tells us in [Ephesians 3] verse 11, is defined or named by God and that eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

In Ephesians 5:22-33, St. Paul defines marriage. He names it; he defines it in terms of the triune God and the relationship of Christ to His Church. So that we do not understand things heavenly in terms of earthly analogies, but we understand this world and ourselves in terms of things from above. They are defined in terms of God. We are only defined ourselves in terms of God, having been created in His image in terms of His communicable attributes: knowledge, righteousness, holiness, dominion and with the Law of God written on the tables of our hearts. So our meaning, our definition is only in God. And if we deny Him, we deny ourselves meaning.

A few years ago, a very dear friend of my wife Dorothy and myself, died rather tragically. He was coming down on New Year’s Day to spend some time with us in Southern California, and he died the evening before. His son, young Chris, 18 at the time, was a thorough reprobate and at Thanksgiving, John kicked him out of the house. His wife, Olive, grieved deeply over the fact (her only child). Christmas Eve she brought him into the house again after John had gone to bed. They had a bitter quarrel over that in the week that followed, and he collapsed and died New Year’s Eve. I flew north for the funeral. A year later I saw Olive and she broke down and wept. She didn’t know what to do. She found life hardly worth living. Her son was destroying her life. Nineteen years old and he said, ‘I’ve tried everything and nothing has any meaning. Nothing is worth living for.’ And he was talking of suicide. Indeed he had tried everything; every kind of drug, every kind of perversion, he had unlimited money now (running into the millions) and he was using it. Nothing had meaning. Of course not! Since he no longer defined himself in terms of God in Christ, he had separated himself from meaning.

“All things were made by Him and without anything made that was made.” And so nothing can be known, nothing has any meaning apart from Him. And the family, the natural family disintegrates when it ceases to see itself in terms of Christ and the Church, when it ceases to see the authority as given by God and its purpose as defined by God. The school loses its meaning. The Church loses its meaning. The State loses its meaning. Work loses its meaning. All things lose their meaning when men forsake the Lord.

But for us in Christ, nothing is meaningless, because we have entered into the realm of total meaning, into a totally personal universe in which every fact, every event is a God-created fact and a God-created event, a God-ordained one, so that we can say with St. Paul, “for we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” This is a glorious fact. Everything has total meaning, because everything comes from the hand of God.

When I first went out into the pastorate, into an Indian reservation, a hundred miles from any bus, town or train line, and I was the only pastor within a hundred mile radius, to miners, ranchers and indians, I believed the Doctrine of Predestination, but I was uncomfortable with it. I believed it because the scripture taught it. I wasn’t happy about it, but very quickly I found that I was teaching it to the dying. Why? Now I realize why Calvin called it a doctrine for the comfort of the saints. Nothing was more terrible for people who were dying to believe that it was all senseless and meaningless. But when I said all things came from the hand of God and worked together for good and had a glorious purpose in terms of His purpose, His plan for our lives, and while we could not see this glorious purpose in this life, but in the world to come, everything was going to add up for good, and that as St. James said, we could “count it all joy,” not feel it all joy, no. It would be very painful. But we could count it all joy in the Lord. I found they were lighting up with joy at that! It was their questions that led me to give them those answers out of scripture. And I learned and was humbled as I taught them that this was indeed not a difficult and rather painful doctrine to believe, but a most joyful one. Because it meant that we are in a world of total meaning because ours is a total God.

Today as the world, having denied God in Christ moves into total meaninglessness and hell, the family is stronger than it has been for generations because the family as it is being deepened in faith, as churches are separating themselves an establishing themselves firmly in terms of the Word of God, as the Christian family is deepening its roots in the faith, becoming more clearly a supernatural body, and as the Christian school is strengthening the family, we are seeing the revival of the family as never before, not since Colonial and early Constitutional years has the family been as strong today as it is among many Christians. So that while on the one hand we are seeing its disintegration as a natural community, we are seeing its tremendous revival as the supernatural community of Jesus Christ.

Tomorrow night, we shall deal with the areas of tremendous power, why the family controls the future. But for the moment, let us bear in mind the family as a supernatural community, as an aspect of the New Creation of the Kingdom of God, is commissioned by God with a great task, to train up the future, for the responsibility of bringing all things into captivity to Jesus Christ, to reconstruct every area of life and thought in terms of His Word and His meaning. The family is the one institution from Eden which we still have, but now on a firmer base, on the supernatural basis of the regenerating power of Jesus Christ. The future belongs to us; the family is the key to it.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, that we have been called to be Thy people, to be priests, kings, and prophets unto Thee in Jesus Christ. We thank Thee for all Christian families, and we pray, our Father, that by Thy grace the fathers in Christ may become strong and bold in their faith, teachers of their households, exercising authority in Thy name and to Thy praise and glory, that mothers may be prime ministers unto their husbands, exercising authority to the end that their children might in all things honor and exalt Thee and serve Thee. We thank Thee our Father that Thou hast given us so great a calling in Jesus Christ, that Thou art He who does surround us with Thy love and Thy grace, Thy providence, that our down-sitting and our uprising are all known to Thee and ordained of Thee and that all things work together for good to them that love Thee, to them who are the called according to Thy purpose. Our God, how great Thou art and we praise Thee! In Jesus’ name, amen.