Studies in Political Philosophy

Return to Slavery

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: Return to Slavery

Genre: Speech

Track: 03

Dictation Name: RR124B3

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, again we come into thy presence with gratitude, rejoicing that we are thy people, that all thy promises to us in Jesus Christ are yea and amen, that we have the blessed assurance in all the experiences of life that thou art with us, and in and through every burden and problem, we know that underneath are thine everlasting arms, and so our God, we commit ourselves unto thee. We wait on thee. We hope in thee, and we rejoice in thee. Bless us now as we study thy word. In Jesus name. Amen.

Our scripture lesson is from the Gospel of St. John 8:31-36. “Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. They answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free? Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”

Slavery is a major fact in human history. It is not a finished fact. Slavery has been, never in history, as prevalent as it is today. This is the greatest age of history in all history for slavery. Before we analyze this prevalence of slavery in the modern world, let us first of all define slavery. The classic definition, the most accurate, as given by John Murray is that slavery is property in the labor of another man.

Now, there are three main forms of slavery, and it is important to distinguish these three, all of which involve property and the labor of another man. Notice the distinction says property and the labor of another man, rather than property in a man, because absolute ownership of another man is an impossibility. You cannot command his thoughts. You may have him under your dominion, but his mind is still free to think alien or hostile thoughts. So that what you command is his labor, and therefore, an accurate definition requires this qualification, that slavery is property and the labor of another man.

Now, of the three forms of slavery, the first is what people usually think of when the word slavery is used, but actually it is the most benign form of slavery, and that is private ownership. Private ownership is still in existence in some parts of the world. It is not too widely prevalent. It has never been the major form. The Bible does not issue an absolute condemnation of private ownership of slaves. Instead, it regards it as an inferior way of life, but as a fact of life that some people are going to be slaves, and what it does is to regulate slavery.

Now, the slavery of the Old Testament is different from what most people associate with slavery and some have even called it a form of bond service rather than slavery, but the Bible calls it slavery. One thing that characterized the biblical law was that man stealing, kidnapping for purposes of enslavement was strictly forbidden and punishable by death. We find this condemnation, for example, in Deuteronomy 24:7 and elsewhere, and it is repeated in 1 Timothy 1:10. Moreover, the slave, if he did not live the circumstances, unless his situation was one of debt, could leave his master and the runaway had full freedom and anyone had the right to give him refuge or to take him in. So that, slavery was, to a very great extent, voluntary.

Slavery was strictly regulated by a number of laws and humane treatment required, but more than that, let us turn to the nature of slavery. How did a man in the Old Testament become a slave? First, he became a slave if he were unable to make a go of it independently and he wanted the security of working for someone who had means and could provide for him, and so he sold himself into service. This was voluntary. He could leave at the end of every six years, the Sabbatical year, if he so chose. Foreigners could leave in the Jubilee year. So that his slavery was not permanent. Even those who refused to leave in the Sabbatical year and chose to remain on as slaves, and had their ears bored to indicate they were a member of the household, and found their security in the door or refuge place of the master, even they, on the Jubilee year, were released.

Now, the other kind of slave was the thief. A thief had to restore whatever he stole plus the same amount which he gained, hoped to gain. So that if he stole $100, he had to restore that $100 plus another $100, the amount he expected to gain. In the case of livestock, the restitution had to be fourfold or fivefold, because there was a substantial increase with livestock. Now, if the thief were unable to make restitution, he was sold and his services were to be in payment, either directly to the owner, or from the buyer to the owner of the property he stole, for compensation. This was private ownership of slaves. It was a thoroughly humane institution, very carefully regulated by law.

As we turn to other forms of private ownership of slaves, the most common variety that meets the eye is that which prevailed in the American South. Here we have been subjected to a great deal of mythology. It is easy, when you deal with any people, or person, or institution to go through their history and cut out everything that might be derogatory, and when you deal with an incident to give it a one-sided interpretation and condemn the institution thereby, but this is not historiography. This is propaganda, and this is using a partial truth to tell a lie.

As we pointed out last time, the Africans who were brought here moved from one form of slavery, which was particularly severe, to a milder form in this country. They were slaves owned by their chiefs in Africa, and the economic unit of exchange, the money of Africa, was slavery, slaves, for what they made all payments with. Thus, the Negros moved from a very severe form of slavery to a very mild one in this country. As we read the accounts of slavery, we are told of the horrors of the slave ship, and it is true that there were several very ugly episodes in which quite a large number of slaves died because of overcrowding. This we cannot overlook, but when we have said that, we must point out that most slave traders were dealing with expensive merchandise that they were going to sell, they hoped to profit by it, and it was up to them to take care of the goods until it reached the market. So that these particular slave ships that were especially bad were not representative.

Moreover, when we compare the slave ships to the emigrant ships, we find that the slave ships and the emigrant ships come off about equally as well. In fact, a member of a legislative commission from Canada, in 1857, reporting on the emigration of the Irish to the Americas, Canada in particular, said that the slave ships and the emigrant ships were about equal, that there was little provision for food and water on the ships that brought the Irish to this country, and the Irish came over here, moreover, without any means, often with barely enough clothing to cover them, because they were escaping from famine in the old country, and their condition on reaching New York, or Toronto, or Boston, was often far worse than that of the slaves and their condition after they arrived, since they had no one to provide them lodging or food, was far worse, and yet after a little more than a century of life here in this country, and almost the same amount of time of freedom for the Negros, compare the relative position of the two. The Irish are in positions of leadership in every walk of American life, and the Negros are still on the lowest scale of society, and the difference cannot be reduced to color. It is a difference of character, without any question, because the lot of the Irish was far worse when they landed in this country than that of the Negros in slavery and the Negros after their release, because the Freedmen’s Bureau was set up and every kind of welfare legislation and provision made for them. The difference was one of character.

This then is private ownership of slaves. It is the form of slavery that, as I stated, is the most benign in history, the least severe. There have been occasionally bad masters. It is true also that there are occasionally sadistic and vicious parents, but shall we condemn parenthood because of such persons? This is not sound scholarship.

Now, the Constitution by amendment abolished the private ownership of slaves but not any other form of slavery, because the second form of slavery, state ownership of slavery, has been far more prevalent in history then private ownership. It is indeed today the most prevalent form of slavery in the entire world. The pyramids in Egypt and must of the so-called “glory” of the ancient world was built by slave labor, slaves owned by the state. People in socialist and communist countries are slaves. They are subjects of the state. The state has, as a property right, their labor. It can command it at will, and this is a form of slavery which is severe, because unlike private ownership, there is no loss to the state if the slave dies, or if he is overworked, or if he is killed off. They do not operate in terms of profit and loss. The have the power of confiscation. They can always take what they want.

Private ownership of slaves was abolished in the United States and many another country around the world in the last century, and slavery was made, as a result, a state monopoly. It is that in the United States today. The federal courts will not hear an appeal from any employer when he protests that the Constitution which forbids involuntary servitude, which is slavery, requires an employer to keep books freely and involuntarily for the government of withholding taxes. This is slavery according to the Constitutional definition, but no federal court will hear such a case, because slavery is, by definition, only forbidden if private persons own slaves. The state can enslave every one of us tomorrow, and has reserved the right to do so.

It is significant that the Pharisees, when they were told by our Lord, that they were slaves, answered him and said, “We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?” They lived according to the myth that they were a free nation. Now they were actually under Roman rule, but the Romans had made Herod king of one area, and place another area, Palestine, under another jurisdiction, and had constituted Palestine into a couple of independent, or ostensibly independent realms. The fact that Roman coinage was used, and that Roman troops moved through the land, and that the officials ruled on approval from Rome, was often overlooked by these Pharisees as they lived in terms of the fiction that, because they had this ostensible independence, they were a free nation.

Today, we hear a great deal of use of the same fiction, and today, we have set free ostensibly, many a nation around the world, and I believe the Afro-Asian block numbers at least ninety-states, or nations, and these are called by our president and politicians, the free nations of the world, together with the others which are in the U.N., but a free nation does not mean a free people. In fact, the two concepts are quite different, the one from the other, and we talk a great deal today about free nations, but nothing about free peoples, and the peoples in the African states are not free. Outside of South Africa and Rhodesia, there is not a single state in all of Africa where the people have any freedom. The others are free nations and slave peoples, and the purpose of the founding of this country was not to establish a free nation, but a free people, and when the Constitution was written, it was not to give the federal government freedom, but the people, and the purpose of the Constitution was to bind the federal government with the chains of law, to chain the federal government in order to free the people. There is a vast difference between a free nation and a free people. We can be free from foreign rule, and be slaves of our own civil order.

This then is the second form of slavery, the first private ownership, the second state ownership, and the third, the basic, the root form of all slavery, slavery to sin, slavery to Satan. Satan has a property in the labor of every sinner. Everything he does is productive, is fruitful, for Satan. He is bound to him, and our Lord said, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” This then is the beginning of liberty. Man cannot have true liberty until he begins with that liberty which Christ gives him through his atoning work, through his saving power. Thus, the foundation of all liberty is Christian faith, and men who lack this are inwardly slaves, and a slave seeks a master wherever he is. He requires a master to give him security. He demands a master and speedily creates one.

This morning, an elderly man came up to me after the service in Santa Ana, very fine man, one of the members there, and said that in his particular state where he lived as a boy, in the years before World War 1 and earlier, although his family had moved North, many of the Negros who had been slaves on their plantation in the South before the Civil War moved into the same area and whenever they were sick or in trouble, moved in on his family. They continued to expect care, and today, those Negros who are not free, who are inwardly slaves, are demanding that the United Stated federal government become their new slave master, and give them all the security which slavery offers, and unfortunately, they are joined by millions of white Americans who, because they have forsaken the faith of their fathers, are themselves inwardly slaves and are demanding a slave state, are demanding that the federal government become their slave master, and they want from their slave master cradle-to-grace security, or in the English phrase, womb-to-tomb security. A man who is inwardly a slave wants to be saved. He wants to be rescued, but the thing a slave wants to be rescued from is liberty. This, to him, is a frightening thing, a fearful thing. The world is such a fearful world, and there are such dangerous things that can happen to you. You can fail. You can lose your job. You can have trouble, and they want the security of slavery, and their greatest fear is freedom.

The beginning of true liberty is Jesus Christ, and thus it is that the first and last target of subversion is biblical faith, Christianity. When the French Revolution began, Edmund Burke, in analyzing the French Revolution said that when the war was over and the Revolution ended, the real revolution would still continue, because what had happened was this, that forces had come to the surface, out of the sewers of Europe which were waging war, revolution, against Christendom, and it was now war to the death, and either Christianity would destroy these forces, wipe them out, or it would be wiped out itself, that it was a war to the death. A century and a half and then some years have passed, and many people have not yet awakened to the truth of what Burke said. The enemy has invaded the churches, captured virtually all of them in varying degrees, and works to make men feel guilty before God, and yet the purpose of our Lord’s coming was to give us a good conscience before God in Jesus Christ, because guilty men are slaves and the purpose of our Lord’s coming was to free us from the bondage of sin, guilt, and shame, so that as Paul said, that we might have a good conscience before God.

The purpose of Christ’s coming and of his salvation is to save us from sin, and the issue today is Christ or Caesar, and Caesar offers to save men from the perils of liberty. The privilege of being in Christ is liberty, the glorious liberty of the sons of God, St. Paul declared. The privilege of living under Caesar is security. The security of the Christian is in Christ. The security of the slave is in the state, and in slavery to the state. The Christian cannot be a slave to the state, to sin, or to any man. Slavery is property in the labor of a man, and God has absolute property rights to us and to our labors. The scripture declares over and over and over again, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein.” Everything in us and around us belongs to God, and God has full title to us and to all our labors. As Paul declared to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 7:23, “Ye have been bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men.” The Christian who was a slave was not to revolt, but he was to seek his freedom legitimately, and no man who was a believer, was to serve men as a slave in any capacity. This is an inferior way of life, legitimate, but inferior, and not for the Christian. A Christian cannot allow sin, or the state, or the church, or any institution to own him. He is the Lord’s, and the Christian alone, can be a true libertarian, because he begins with the true principle of liberty, salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ. “Whosoever committeth sin,” our Lord said, “is the servant (or slave) of sin.” “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”

This then, is our destiny as Christians: freedom, and Christians are the only true freedom fighters the world has ever had. The rest offer slavery as freedom.

Now, it is well to note that slavery does offer certain advantages as well as certain penalties. We need to examine this fairly and honestly. The penalty of slavery, of course, is the surrender of liberty. But the slave wants to escape from liberty, so for him, it is no penalty. Its advantage is cradle-to-grave security, and slavery simply is the hunger for security worked out to its logical implications, and in every age where people begin to prize security, they end up as slaves.

On the other hand, liberty offers penalties, as well as advantages. Its penalty is insecurity, and problems attendant thereupon. When you walk in liberty, you must walk by faith, that not a state with its compensations, and Medicare, and social security, and every kind of slave provision is going to back you up at every turn, but that the invisible God is the rewarder of them that diligently seek him, and he will take all the insecurities of our life and, according to his word as declared in Romans 8:28, “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to his purpose.” So that God takes all those insecurities and failures, and trials, and errors, and makes them work together for good when we walk by faith. The advantage of liberty is liberty. We are then men indeed. We declare that our security is not in the state, which is a frail thing for any man to trust in, but in God.

Thus, the choice for men is between the security of slavery, a legitimate but a lower way of life, and the security of liberty in Jesus Christ. Men cannot have both, and it is high time we said to those who want to be slaves, Be slaves, but you lose your right to be free men, to have the right to govern, to vote as free men. This was the American system originally. Anyone who was a slave and anyone who did not own real property, and anyone who received help in the form of charity from his county had no right to vote. He was not a free man, and self-government is the privilege of free men. Slaves can only destroy the country if they are given authority. Slavery is a way of life, and if men prefer it, let us tell them, Be honest about it. Accept your slavery and live in terms of it, but if you want liberty, be prepared to take its responsibilities, and its penalties. Profit and loss. Success or failure. Responsibility under God.

Some years ago, in 1946, New Years Day, I was still on the Indian reservation. I was at the home of a young Indian who had just gotten out of the service. The war was still on, and as we sat by the window side after dinner, he told me of his experiences in the Army and he enjoyed especially his leaves in the various cities across country, and told me how drunk he got in this city and the big fight he had with the MP’s before they finally corralled him, and how much he enjoyed it all. It began to grow dark and one of his sisters came up and lit the gasoline lamp, and as we looked out across the valley from the side of the mountain, we could see the lights being lit in the other log cabins across the valley. The young man waved at them and said, “Look at them, my people. Good for nothing like myself. Uncle Sam has to put us on a reservation and put a fence around us, and take care of us,” and he said, “You know, I’ve been back and forth this country the last few years,” and he said, “The white man’s got reservation fever, and he wants to turn the whole united States into a big reservation and have somebody put a fence around it and take care of it,” and he said, “The Germans and the Japanese aren’t going to do it, but the next outfit that comes along probably will, because the white man’s got reservation fever.” He had seen what was taking place, and the key to it has been, indeed, the loss of liberty in Christ.

This is the foundation. “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.” “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed,” and this is the foundation, the starting point, of reestablishing liberty, to summon men unto the saving power of Jesus Christ, to declare unto them, “Ye have been bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men.” Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made ye free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee for the liberty wherewith Christ has set us free, and we pray that in the boldness of thy spirit, and in the power of thy word, we may stand fast in this liberty. We may proclaim it and summon all men unto it, and reestablish this land and this people again in the glorious liberty of the sons of God. Confirm us in this liberty and unto thy service. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions at this time? Before we have our first question, I’d like to tell you we have some pamphlets here that Mr. Paul Hacksteady{?} has made available freely to all of you. It’s an exceptionally good one by Robert Dick Wilson, one of the great Old Testament scholars, Is the Higher Criticism Scholarly, A Defense of the Integrity and Inspiration of the Scriptures.

Yes? Our first question.

[Audience] Well, I didn’t have a question, but when you were talking about {?} it reminded me of something I heard {?} yesterday. I don’t know if they’ve actually started work on it, or just plan, in Germany to build a building 400 stories high and it will be possible for people to be born in there and die, and never leave the place. Absolute cradle-to-grave security. It was ghastly{?} when he was telling me about it. It’ll have their own police system, their own hospital unit, they’ll {?} visitation {?}, and it really was something.

[Rushdoony] Well, there was a similar plan extensively promoted in this country a few years ago by Frank Lloyd Wright who designed a building a mile high, but it fell through. Yes?

[Audience] Yesterday you said that we should {?} but in the meantime, {?} because the more they become slaves, the more are interesting in {?}. Now, there’s a move on now, I don’t know, I’d like your opinion of whether it’s right or wrong. I understand {?} and a few other people have been sending back their income taxes {?} Now, the suggestion was made that in enough cases throughout the whole United States, if the conservatives woke up and did this, that the move could succeed. What’s your opinion?

[Rushdoony] I think it’s highly questionable that it would, because first of all, it would involve breaking the law, and we’re not trying to further anarchy, and second, we would be the first ones that would be picked up, so that this would give them an excellent means of eliminating the conservatives. They would move in on them rather than the radicals who are doing this sort of thing.

[Audience] Okay, that was what I thought, but then what is my answer, because I say I am resentful of {?} slaves and {?} because I have to pay for it.

[Rushdoony] Yes. First of all, I think we need to get across to people that slavery is a fact of life, and many people are slaves, but the Bible does not absolutely condemn slavery. It simply describes it as an inferior way of life which is to be regulated. Then, the minute we begin to get people to recognize that slavery is not to be condemned absolutely, then to recognize who the slaves are and to say, “Alright, take your place. We will provide for you as slaves, but we will not allow you to be slaves with the privileges of liberty.”

Now, I wrote some years ago a study of this situation in Ur of the Caldees, in Abraham’s day and before, and it was published, oh, perhaps ten years ago in maybe a little longer ago than that, in the Freeman. Freedom and Slavery in Ur of the Caldees, and briefly, this was the situation in ancient Ur. There were three classes of citizens. There was the slave class. The slave could own property. He could conduct a business and sometimes he could be fairly wealthy, but he had no right of vote, he had no say-so about anything in the city. The second class was a merchant class, those who wanted to do business and didn’t want to be involved in civic affairs or assume any responsibility. They paid a tax, they were exempt from military service, but they were a free men. The third class was the free men. The free men paid a heavy tax. They were subject to military service, but they alone could vote and have the right to rule. You had your pick. What were you going to be? If you were a slave, you were a slave. You didn’t cross the lines, and you weren’t associated with, except as a slave. In other words, you accepted a situation in which you paid virtually no taxes, in which you could make money and have no responsibility, but you went around as a slave and people knew you for what you were.

Now, this system worked for centuries and centuries, and it was based on the realistic recommendation that there are differences in men and you have to abide by it. Now, we had a similar system in this country in that we did have, of course, the African slaves, but then we did have those people who are not entitled to vote, because they were recipients of some form of aid, or had failed to meet their debts, been in bankruptcy or something and, as a result, could not bear responsibility, and this was a healthy system. It was only when we began to break with that system as a result of subversive influences from Europe, and from the Unitarian movement in this country that we began to see a disintegration. There are people who are slaves by nature, and there is no getting around it, and people who are sinners are the ones who are slaves by nature. Yes?

[Audience] Could you tell me, in reading the Redrow{?} material, and so forth, they used the term “free people” and “freedom-loving people” and this sort of language great deal. Just specifically, what do they mean when {?}

[Rushdoony] They mean freedom for the state, not for the people.

[Audience] Are they conscious of this?

[Rushdoony] For them, freedom means socialism. So that by definition, freedom is the socialist state. Now, Stalin could say with a straight face in his speech (I have a copy of the text which he delivered in the thirties), and he meant every word of it, the sincerity rings out, that the Soviet peoples were the freest people in the world, and he believed it. He truly believed it. He had put them through famine, he had put them through purges at the time, and he recognized that they had had difficulties, but in spite of that, they were the freest people of the world because they were communists, and communism is, by definition, freedom.

[Audience] Well, would you say then the reason that a lot of people fall for this {?} and so forth is because when we read the word “free” we have an entirely different concept and this is the way they {?}, they think.

[Rushdoony] Yes, they take our language and give it a different meaning. Now, freedom means different things for different people. For a Buddhist, freedom means to die. Then you escape from the bondage of this world. So, true liberty is emancipation from this world, and that’s why Gandhi, because he was a Mahatma, and he felt he was never going to be born again, he was going to be free from the cycle of Karma, and the Hindu’s, like Gandhi, have a similar free, was going to be free. He was never going to be born again, and he said so. Now, this is freedom for a Buddhist or a Hindu; death, ultimately. Freedom for a communist is for us, slavery. When we say freedom, when we say liberty, our conception is completely one that is born of the Bible, and take away the biblical faith and our idea of liberty is going to go down the drain. Yes, you had a question?

[Audience] {?} before the Civil War as well as after, you know, the Negro automatically, consciously or unconsciously, accepted the white man’s religion, as you know. Most of it, basically the fundamental Christian religion, and {?} that he had, was in any way paradoxical in his mind to feel that he was {?} this religion should {?} and be enslaved at the same time. Today, {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now the question we need to ask ourselves there is this: how much of the Negros’ Christianity was really Christianity, and how much of it was really paganism under a semi-Christian guise, and I think most of it was paganism. Most of it was paganism. So that he picked up the old time religion, but he put into it African paganism. For example, I mentioned recently when I returned from Jackson, Mississippi, the report of this elderly minister in the Delta country, Southern Presbyterian, a white man, who said that he had spent most of his life, I think he was close to eighty, not only taking care of his own pastorate, but teaching Negro pastors and laymen Bible every week, and he said he had not been able to get across to them that fornication was a sin. They still had the African connection to the idea that it was just a connection, nothing wrong with it. Only when you took somebody’s woman was it a sin, because then you were stepping on somebody’s toes. You could get into trouble, but any other kind of sexual relations with a woman was entirely alright, and you find, mixed up in their religion, all kinds of paganism, to the “nth” degree, and this is true today.

I heard a service on the radio, in Northern California, just about a year ago this month, or next month, and it was supposedly the old time religion, and it was fantastic. I turned it on and the Negro was preaching about the old time religion. Now, what the old time religion? They sang the song, “Give me the old time religion.” Then he went on to say what the old time religion was, and the old time religion was loving your neighbor, giving his rights, and so and so forth. So he had a smattering of the whole of the civil rights thrown in as a part of the old time religion. “And this is what the Lord commanded,” so he started talking about the Lord and then he went into another song because it would be from one song to another, and the sermon had about six or seven songs in it, and what was the song they sang? Shamach{?} Israel, From the Synagogue Worship. They picked it up somewhere and in kind of a half Jewish, half Negro fashion they were singing it. So he went on to talk about the Lord a little more, and then about the Virgin Mary, so then they sang the Hail Mary. About that time I reached home so I didn’t hear the rest of the service, but I’d had about all I could take. Now, this is the way they are, and there are clearly discernable strata of all kinds of paganism in their faith. So that there has been very little Christianity that has really gotten a hold of the Negro peoples.

Moreover, while there was a smattering of it and there’s no denying, some were very fine Christians, a limited number, today there is very little even of that, because virtually all of the Negro churches today are in the Civil Rights Movement, outside of the South, and more and more of them in the South are being infiltrated by it.

I mentioned sometime ago that I met, a couple years ago, a young Negro student, had quite a discussion with him. He was from Harvard. He wanted to go into the ministry. He has since dropped out for which I am glad, but he admitted there was only one church in all of Harlem where real Christianity was preached, and he said the pastor there was a white man and it was a very small congregation. There was one other church where he said they get some real Christianity and it’s because the pastor steals all his sermons and reads them, and occasionally he gets one that’s really Christian, but this young man was planning to go into the ministry, was very earnest, but mixed up, admitted he didn’t know where in all of Harlem he could find a girl who was moral enough to be the wife of a clergyman. Now, this is the reality. What little they had they virtually lost, and today you see the results. What little restraint there was from the smattering of this old time religion that they did have is virtually gone now. So that their religion was very, very sub-Christian in most cases. There have been studies made of this and even one or two from the Negro perspective which recognized this was the case.

[Audience] Some of these Negro ministers {?} today are highly educated. {?} Now would you say that would be generally true in {?} churches {?}

[Rushdoony] These men are especially the worst because they have gone overboard on the Civil Rights Movement, yes. I have known a number of them. I went to seminary with a number of them, and I don’t know one who is not deeply involved, and involved moreover in very dangerous institutions.

[Audience] Rush, somebody was telling me the other day about this family up in {?} who had, for 18 years, a Negro woman who was a minister. She preached on {?}. She lived in a family {?} She quit {?}, she gave her notice, and she left the family and {?} she was preaching the Gospel, and {?} had it in for her, and {?} and she warned them not to ever hire another Negro {?} but she was a Negro {?} preaching the Gospel and she was afraid {?}

[Rushdoony] Of course, I don’t believe a woman can be a minister, but

[Audience] Well, she {?}

[Rushdoony] {?} when I was in seminary, there was this one Negro student {?} and I’ve often wished I knew what happened to him. {?} Deep South {?}, and he left after about three months, and he came into my room and said, “I {?}” and he said, “The just want you [?].” And he said, “I’m just a black boy from the Deep South and I’m going back home,” and so he was going to find a school where he could {?} solid biblical training and become {?} a preacher of the word of God, not going to get involved in anything {?}, but there weren’t many like him. He was, however, outstanding. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Because the word of God prohibits it. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, in the Pauline epistles, it’s in 1 Corinthians, very definitely and in the letters to Timothy {?} for office. It is to be a man and even for church officers like elders, not only is it to be a man, but he is to be one who has proven himself by his personal conduct, by his exercise of authority in the home, by his general stability in business, and in personal relations.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Women at that time did have rights.

[Audience] No, didn’t have {?} We have different right now {?} some of the rights we had then, I’ll grant you {?}

[Rushdoony] What rights does she have now?

[Audience] {?} office {?} that kind of thing. {?} Now today, she does have {?}

[Rushdoony] She had many of those rights at that time. You see, we forget that in the world of Greek and Rome at that time, the old family stability had broken down. Women had become emancipated. Women were managing their own affairs. Women were increasingly moving out into the world. So, you have a situation that was not unlike our own, and this was the problem in Corinth that compelled Paul to {?} because so many of these Christian women felt, “Well, we have this same liberty that men have and therefore, we’re going to use it,” and they immediately began to act like the women around them, pagan, Greek women and others, and in Greece, {?} very far gone centuries before Paul arrived there, and as a result, Paul had to say, “No, your position is under the word of God, and the word of God is not governed by these things that govern women around you,” so the reason you had {?} is not because this was the convention of the time, but because you had to prevent them from following the convention of the time. Otherwise, it would have been unnecessary.

{Audience} {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, because these women were going to imitate the pagan women, or before they were converted were living as these pagan women who were taking authority unto themselves, thought that they were the head of the household, or that they had the same status before God as a man. So that coming from a pagan Greek background, it was hard for them to accept this and Paul had to lay down the law to them.

[Audience] What says the women doesn’t have the same status as a man?

[Rushdoony] Well, the scripture does.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] It isn’t my word.

[Audience] {?} It’s a different status, perhaps, but {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, very definitely. Let’s look at this verse because I think this is important. Now, this is what he says, “Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” Now that’s pretty blunt, and that’s in 1 Corinthians 11. There’s no way of getting around that. I know some years ago when I first began studying, that sounded awfully harsh and I tried from the Greek and from the commentaries to see if there was any way you could take some of the punch out of that, but I realized it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t work. This was the word of God, and I was trying to establish my word, and that never stands. So that whether we like it or not, this is the way God’s word speaks.

Well, our time is up, and we stand dismissed.

End of tape