Power, Family, Community and Law

The Family and Power

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Sociology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 4

Track: 35

Dictation Name: RR110B4

Date: 1974

Our subject this evening is “The Family and Power.” And as we begin I’d like to call your attention to three verses among many that deal with the significance of faith and obedience. In the Ten Commandments, Deuteronomy 5:16 we read, “Honour thy father and thy mother, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee; that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” A very specific promise of physical material returns for obedience to God’s Law in a particular area. The last verse of Deuteronomy 17, in counseling the future king requires in the previous verse, that he study the Word of God and ”…keep all the words of this law and these statutes to do them, that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel.” Then in Ephesians 6:1-3, “1Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. 2Honour thy father and mother; (which is the first commandment with promise) 3That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.” Two promises: prosperity and long life to the family that honors the family and keeps God’s Law in that domain.

We shall be summarizing this hour something of the significance of the family in Biblical Law and the family as the means of power. Power is the name of the game today. People long for ways to grab ahold of the reins of power. And they think that power is through commanding the White House or some such thing. But not according to scripture. Power comes from God through faith and obedience. The family is a key area, the key area of power, according to scripture.

Now the Women’s Lib Movement has generated a tremendous hatred of biblical faith. This is not new. Humanism for many generations has attacked the Christian family. The Women’s Lib writers present the biblical standard of the family as a form of slavery. In reality, it came into the world’s scene as a liberating force. True the pagan family was often strong, but its strength in essence was the strength of ancestor worship. When the pagan family was strong, its only function was to look back toward the dead. And therefore it had no vital function in society. The pagan family all over the world has easily been overthrown in its influence because it is past-bound, it is past-oriented. This was true within the Roman Empire where the background of the Roman idea was also ancestor worship. And where, apart from that, when it collapsed, there was nothing but degradation. We fail to realize today how deeply embedded in all the law structures of the Western World are the biblical laws with regard to the family. And unfortunately, we have lost sight of the woman who accomplished this.

Before we go further in our analysis, I want to tell you a little bit about her because I suspect many of you have not heard of her. How many of you know of the life of the empress Theodora? One, who has heard me. [Laughter]

Now the empress Theodora was born in the early 500s of the Christian Era. Her father was an animal trainer in the Roman Arena, for the Roman circuses and games. He died when his three children, three girls, were 6, 8 and 10. Theodora, I believe, was the middle of the three. There was no support. They belonged to the circus and they were sold—all three of the girls, at that early age—into prostitution. It was a hard, ugly, vicious and bitter life. Theodora made her way into her teens, very quickly became a high-priced call girl, accompanied a wealthy businessman into North Africa where he became angry with her and abandoned her. She became very ill as well. A Christian presbyter took her in and became responsible for the nursing care and spent some time daily teaching her the scriptures. While it did not take then and there, within a year, that girl, back in the capital of the empire, had begun to think seriously of the faith. And the Holy Spirit had begun to work within her.

Meanwhile, she had become acquainted with a young lawyer who was the nephew of the general of the armies. Subsequently, they fell in love, became married. The emperor died childless and to prevent civil war over the succession, before his death, he named the old general Justin, as emperor, and when not too long thereafter, the old general, Justin, died his nephew and heir, Justinian, became emperor. And so Theodora, who had been sold into slavery at about the age of 8 wound up in her 20s as the empress of Rome and a Christian.

When Justinian called for the total recodification of all Roman law, Theodora took the leading role in directing the lawyers to make sure that law was in terms of the Word of God. And her basic concern was with family law; that the scriptures in all that they had to say about the family be written into the law structure of the empire.

Now the family had no real status in law prior to that. If a man died, very commonly, the family would be tossed out into the street the next day. He could have made a secret contract with someone, a business friend, whereby all his possessions were alienated. Or he could make a contract with a mistress, a concubine and leave all his property to her or to his illegitimate children. What the empress Theodora required as a matter of law was that all sexual activity outside of marriage be prohibited by law and punished by law. That the only heirs to property and the only owners of property would be the legitimate family and the legitimate heirs. Now this was in terms of the Law of God as given to Moses. The result was the basic legal revolution in the entire history of the world.

Everything we see going on today in our courts, in our schools, in our colleges and universities is a revolution aimed at undermining what the empress Theodora did. This is why it is virtually impossible to find anything written about her that is any good. And some of it is downright foul, they are so determined to degrade the woman who wrote scripture into law for the Western world.

But what was the legal revolution? First of all because legitimate sexuality was restricted to the marital relationship, sex and marriage were identified. The biblical standard was made the standard of men and nations, to this day. We are trying to undermine it, but it is still basic to our law structure. Thus, this was a tremendous factor. The only legal marriage moreover, became the monogamous marriage: one man and one woman.

Now there are three tremendous powers in society, control of which means control of any society. We do not understand the goal of revolution if we fail to understand that revolutionary forces aim at the destruction or the seizure of these three basic powers.

The first is the control of children. If you control the children in any society, you control the future. This is why the modern State created the public school. A new thing, less than two centuries old; only a century and a half and not quite that in the United States. In the South, it was imposed as a part of Reconstruction to break up the old faith, the Reformed faith and the old-fashioned Christian family in the South. That was its purpose, in case you didn’t know it. But its purpose, everywhere has been to destroy the biblical doctrine of the family, to create a way of controlling the children, altering their thinking, alienating them from their parents, creating what you have today outside of the faith; the generation gap. This is the basic power, one of the three great powers in any society; control of the children.

The second great power in any society is control of property, and in terms of Biblical Law, the control of property through Theodora’s work was tied to the family, because this was the biblical pattern. So that a father could not alienate the property from the legitimate children, from his wife. She was given an endowered right in the property. It became community property belonging to the family. We played games with this doctrine in our modern legal structures, but it’s still there in some form or another. Property is tied to the family.

Now you see, here are two tremendous powers! Children (control of the future), property (the control of wealth, of material things), and in both cases the power is vested by the Law of God and by the Code of Justinian as the result of Theodora’s work, in the Christian family, in the biblical family, the monogamous family.

The third great power is closely related to the first two. Inheritance. Inheritance is tied to the family. The Bible gives us laws of inheritance. The eldest godly son (if he were not godly, he could be set aside and disinherited), was given a double portion, which meant he had this because it was his duty to provide for the parents to their life’s end, to support them, and also to be a help to the others in the family in case of need. Proverbs tells us that a godly man leaveth an inheritance to his children and his children’s children. The Bible, you see, is an eminently practical book. And it vests the three basic powers in any society in the hand of the family. Children, property and inheritance.

Today of course, through taxation, confiscatory taxation, the modern Humanistic anti-Christian State is striking at property. Through the modern educational systems it is striking at the control of the children. And through the inheritance tax, the most ungodly of our taxes, it is striking at inheritance. As a matter of fact, in terms of modern law, the first born is the State. Before anyone else can take anything else in the inheritance, the State claims it—claims its share as the first born and says that we will provide for the old and we will provide for the needy. We are the new family. This is not accidental, this is deliberate, to replace the biblical family with the State.

On top of that, the Biblical Law concerning bastards, to which Dr. Smith referred yesterday, is being set aside. In some countries, already has been; in France, for example, Picasso left a very sizeable estate to his one legitimate child. He had two illegitimate children. Reprobate though he was, Picasso did not want, and said before his death, that he did not want the illegitimate children to inherit. The courts set aside his will and his wishes and gave portions of the inheritance to the illegitimate children, breaking down the old barrier of the law. And there are moves to do this in almost every other country in the Western world.

But there are other tremendous powers that the family exercised. Control of the children means control of education. It’s not an accident that in the Old Testament Hebrew commonwealth, there was education (universal education) such as existed nowhere else in the ancient world. And it is not an accident that with the Reformed faith, this old pattern was again instituted and one of the first things that was required in this country by the Puritans was that all children be taught, that they might know the scriptures and that that old deluder Satan might not gain power over them because of their inability to study and know the Law-Word of God. Throughout the centuries, Christian families have been responsible for their children’s education and today they are again assuming that responsibility.

Moreover, the family is the world’s most important welfare agency. {?} is nothing, compared to the family. Every family virtually, except those on welfare, supports its children to at least 18 (and often to 21, 24, 25 if the children are going through Graduate School). That’s welfare—godly welfare. That isn’t all. Have you ever considered what a form of welfarism and subsidy by parents to children, the various gifts are? The babysitting, the various things that a family does for itself. Take the family out of the picture, and all of that becomes a very costly matter. Welfarism, by the family; a tremendous force in the world. The care of the young, the care of the old, the care of relatives, education, what the family does in the area of welfare is staggering and is without equal in the world. And it is a tremendous form of power.

Do you know that in the Soviet Union it is counter-revolutionary activity to give charitably to anyone? If we were all living in an apartment building there and were workers for the great Soviet Socialist State, and I became ill and you felt sorry for me, and took up an offering and gave it to me, you’d all be under arrest. Why? Because you have created a government, a tremendous power. You have given me help and I will be grateful to you rather than to the great Soviet Socialist State. We fail to see the power that there is in these things.

Moreover, family provides motivation, guidance, direction with regard to marriage, with regard to careers, with regard to many things for the young. Consider the amount of subsidy to young couples by their parents, by their friends and relatives in the form of gifts when they get married. And then think about the same thing in a Soviet Socialist State or a Red Chinese State and see how poor the young couple is by comparison when they start.

The family, you see, has tremendous power. The enemies of Christ know that the family is the key. This is why the attack is first and foremost on the family. Destroy the family, and you have destroyed the church. You’ve destroyed everything else in society. And so their assault is continuously on the family.

I said that the family provides motivation and guidance. There is a great deal that could be said here. We are beginning to appreciate in terms of some recent research, how tremendously powerful the determining force of the family is upon children. Let me cite perhaps just one because the hour is getting late.

When Kennedy took office as President, he felt it was important that a study be made of schools across country, black and white, to demonstrate the evils of segregation. And so a massive study, the most thorough study ever made of education in the United States was made. Using computers, they compiled statistics and data as well as going out and collecting and testing on every school in the United States. There were many important conclusions to The Coleman Report, but I’ll cite just three.

First of all, they found that there was no real difference between the black schools and the white schools. They were about equal in value. At the same time, they found that money made no difference to the caliber of a school. Now these were two devastating conclusions, because they had all been so convinced that the segregates schools were very bad and that money was what was needed to correct schools everywhere, to improve them. And they found that it was neither segregation nor integration that made any difference to education, nor was it money. What made the difference? The determinative force in the performance of the child, The Coleman Report concluded (and there wasn’t a single Conservative or Christian to my knowledge on that committee of scholars), was the family. They found, moreover, that 85% of all the white homes were stable and the good students almost all came out of the 85% stable homes, that about 55% of the colored families were stable and the good colored students came out of those homes in virtually all cases. So that the determinative factor was the family! That’s why you haven’t heard about The Coleman Report. The educators don’t talk about it. It has been ignored. You can no longer buy copies of the report from the Government Printing Office.

Since then, they have also found that the family that gives loving attention, discipline, care and training to the child (in other words, they’re describing the Christian family), vastly improves the IQ of that child. Because in the early formative years, a great deal can be done to improve the learning capacities of any child. Everything is pointing to the strength of the family.

But the Christian family is under major attack—major attack from the State. Monogamy is being attacked by the sexual revolutionaries. We are told that all forms of perversion should be legalized, the Christian family destroyed. The Existentialist spirit of the age puts a priority on experience and despises morality. It calls for total experience of everything that is perverse: occultism, magic, witchcraft, sexual perversion. And the family is held to be dull and the forbidden exciting.

We have too, the Antinomian spirit of the age which has deeply permeated the churches. Recently I saw a statement issued by a major Evangelical Armenian seminary, citing with whole-hearted and emphatic approval, a statement by the Rev. Donald Gray Barnhouse, made in the early 1950s, that the great tragedy of the Reformation was that the reformers did not junk the Ten Commandments. They don’t want to hear anything about it. They are Antinomian.

Moreover, modern man, modern Humanistic man has abdicated from responsibility and authority. He is no longer the head of the household, nor does he want to be. He is the childish playboy. The Playboy vision of life, and that magazine is perfectly titled, is studied irresponsibility. You know, I saw a little leaflet not too long ago advertising articles that were being sold by the Playboy Corporation, and one a very expensive little item, was a small little sand box for executives to have on their desk, so that when they felt frustrated, they could revert to childhood and play for a few minutes in the sandbox before they faced their problems; a fitting symbol. [Laughter]

Again, we have the suicidal temper of our age, the urge to mass-destruction, such wicked ideas as zero population growth and zero economic growth. We have Marxism which attacks family as the stronghold of Capitalism, and is determined to destroy the biblical family and to create barbarians. As a matter of fact, Engels, Marx’s associate, declared, “Only barbarians are able to rejuvenate a world in the throes of collapsing civilization.” We believe that there can only be regeneration through Christ! The Marxists believe only through creating barbarians.

I could go on to cite all the various groups that are out to destroy the biblical family. But let me cite instead, what Carl Zimmerman, a Harvard sociologist has written, that family life means more now and is stronger now than it has been for generations. The greatest revival in the world today is the revival of family life. It is the revival of family life that is creating Christian schools, that is creating stronger churches. It is as parents have seen what is happening in the world today that they have begun to strengthen the ties of the Christian family, the Humanistic family is in total collapse. The Christian family is becoming stronger every year.

The key to the future, the key to godly power, is to develop the Christian family, to take back control of the children from the State, to use every lawful means to develop and to hang on to your property, to study the law so that you know every little angle of inheritance laws and know how to get around them, legally, because you’re fighting against anti-Christian forces. To develop Christian schools and Christian churches, Christian organizations and institutions, but always to build up the family more and more, knowing that the enemy understands its importance, but God declares in His Word that where the family is basic to a society in terms of the Word of God, beginning in childhood with obedience to parents, then with maturity with honor, obeying God’s laws for the family and with regard to sexuality, with regard to the family and property, the family and inheritance, he family and all its ramification, what God says is that it will be well with thee or, you shall be prosperous. That’s exactly what it means. You shall prosper. My hand shall be upon you to bless you and to make you strong. And that thou mayest live long on the earth.

Now, I believe God means what He says. I think it’s very dangerous to act as if God is being merely poetic. When God makes a statement, a flat statement like that, it is to be taken very literally. The key to the future, the key to godly power, is in your home. Be sure to exercise it. It is the key to dominion, to subduing the earth under God because it is the key to the basic powers in any and every society.

Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee that Thou hast blessed us with godly homes, with Christian parents, with god-fearing children and hast tied us together by Thy grace and by Thy regenerating power. We pray, our Father that we may be mindful of Thy promises and Thy Law-Word concerning our homes and that we may realize the power that is ours and the promises which are ours in Jesus Christ whose word unto us is every yea and amen. Bless us, oh Lord, as we exercise dominion in Thy name and bring all things into subjection to Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray. Amen.