IBL06: Sixth Commandment

The Social Inheritance of Landmarks

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Genre: Speech

Track: 53

Dictation Name: RR130AC53

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1960’s-1970’s.

Social inheritance of landmarks. With this we conclude our studies of the sixth commandment and next week we begin the seventh commandments.

Deuteronomy 19:14

“4 Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee to possess it.”

This commandment has several parallels elsewhere in scripture. For example, in Deuteronomy 7:17 there’s reference to it: “Cursed be ye who removeth his neighbors landmarks; and the people shall say Amen.” Again in Job 24:2 there’s a reference to the same fact: “Some remove landmarks; they violently take away flocks, and the feed thereof.” Then in Proverbs 22:28: “Remove not the ancient landmarks which thy fathers have set.” Again in Proverbs 23:10-11: “Remove not the old landmark and enter not into the field of the fatherless, for their redeemer is mighty and He shall plead their cause for thee.”

Obviously therefore, this commandment in Deuteronomy 19:14 does have reference to the eighth commandment rather than sixth in that it deals primarily with property. In ancient times every property had its landmarks at the corners of the fields. Those landmarks or boundary stones marked--

[short pause]

-- in order to destroy property lines and expand ones property. The way it was done usually was to go out to the corner of the field during the night and move the landmark over, say, two or three feet. Then plow quickly in the morning at sunrise so it wouldn’t appear that it had been moved, and over a period of time, by moving the landmark over two or three feet per year you had added a few acres of the neighbors land onto your own. This was called removing the landmark. However, although the reference to the eighth commandment “thou shalt not steal” is very obvious we do know from scripture that it had reference to the landmarks of history, of doctrine, of morals, and of similar things as well as property. The references in Proverbs makes it clear and then of course in Hosiah 5:10 we read: “The princes of Judah are like them that remove the landmark; I shall pour out my wrath upon them like water.”

And of course the meaning is very obvious there is Hosiah, because what he is saying is that the princes of Judah, as judges and as rulers, are breaking down the barrier between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood, between God and Baal. They are therefore removing the spiritual and moral landmarks, destroying them. The commandment, the sixth commandment, is “thou shalt not kill.” And to destroy the barrier between the truth and a lie, between God and a false God, is to murder society. So in the sense that both Solomon and Hosiah understand this commandment it also has reference to the sixth commandment “thou shalt not kill” because it is the destruction of society.

When the landmarks of morality and of religion are removed. The removal of landmarks of course has been a major task of education and politics in recent years. This past week I was reading a book on the history of textbooks in America, and the author who was very happy about what was going on commented, as he surveyed the education of nineteenth century America he caricatures it somewhat but nonetheless his description is basically sound, and I quote:

“As we look back on those years we can see that the textbooks and the schools themselves held the puritan epic as their basic moral principle. It was this ethic that shaped and unified the nation. The value judgement writes Bruce Miller Elson is their stock in trade, love of country, love of God, duty to parents, and the necessity to develop habits of thrift, honesty, and hard work, in order to accumulate property the certainty of progress and the perfection of the United States. These are not to be questioned, nor in this whole century of great external change is there any deviation from these basic values. In pedagogical arrangement the school book of the seventeen nineties is vastly different from that of the eighteen nineties. But the continuum of values is uninterrupted. The child is to learn ethics as he learns information about his world, unquestioningly by rote. His behavior is not to be inner directed or other directed but dictated by authority and passively accepted. Thus, we entered the twentieth century.” Unquote.

And of course the author Black feels that with the twentieth century we began to wake up, and we began to discard all these authoritarian standards such as love of country, love of God, a distinction between right and wrong, and we began to question all things which of course is the proper intellectual attitude according to him. The old landmarks, in other words, were denied. And by denying the old landmark the sovereignty of God was replaced with the sovereignty of chance.

In a recent issue of Saturday review, Charlotte Willard stated it very plainly. She wrote and I quote: “Chance is the only certainty in the universe.” Unquote. Now chance is the only certainty in the universe, it means of course that you cannot therefore educate in terms of any moral standard. Because there cannot be any more law if chance is ultimate in the universe. As a result, Charlotte Willard continues as she discusses a recent book, Jack Burnham's Beyond Modern Sculpture, to say and I quote: “Mr. Burnham’s climaxes his thesis by quoting from Intelligence in the Universe by Roger MacGowan and Frederick Ordway. The former is chief of the scientific digital branch, army missile command computation center, Huntsville Alabama, and the latter president of the general astronautics research corporation, London.

They prophesy that the intelligent life we may encounter in stellar space will probably be the product of biological evolution but will be inorganic, artificially constructed intelligent life. Political leaders back on earth will soon learn that intelligent, artificial automata having superhuman intellectual capabilities will be built. They believe in fact that these automata will take over the earth. Man in short will bring about his own transformation from a biological creation to an in-organic concentration of information processing energy. Mr. Burnham concludes triumphantly that the physical boundaries which separate the sculptor from the results of his endeavors may well disappear. The final illustration in the book is a fence, an upright (type?) arrangement which is labeled God.” Unquote.

Now the implications here I think are very obvious, if you deny God ultimately you must deny man. This is the consequence of removing the ancient landmarks. The death of God philosophy spells the death of man. The reason is obvious to these people! Man is still in some sense God’s creation. Man still wrestles with the idea of God even as he denies God so how are you going to eliminate God from the universe? As long as man thinks about God, why, by eliminating man! So man to kill God and systematically bring about the death of God believes that the only thing he can do is to bring about the death of man and replace him with automata. Robots. Who will then rule the universe and will be programmed without God. Then you will have with the death of man also, they believe, the death of God.

This seems fantastic to us, but mind you these are not fools but the prized scientific minds of our day which are thinking along these lines. Man’s plays God, in other words, by committing suicide. And of course this is a point made over a century ago by Dostoyevsky in his novel The Possessed. He said ultimately that men who deny God must commit suicide in order to eliminate God from their world. As a result in the world around us we are seeing man moving towards that suicide. In law the old landmarks have been replaced. This has been the work steadily of our courts in particular of the supreme courts. Instead of the landmarks of scripture, of absolute law, we have relativistic landmarks according to supreme courts. Almost twenty years ago chief justice Vincent said the only certainty is that there is no certainty. In other words there is no ultimate law or morality. Thus with this relativism we have a rubbery yardstick which measures according to every man’s wishes.

But men cannot cope with reality, with rubber yardsticks. And as a result we find man increasingly unable to understand the world around him. He has a rubber yardstick, he can measure nothing. Thus crime grows very drastically between nineteen sixty-seven and nineteen sixty-nine, but the majority of Americans according to the Harris survey believe that crime has dropped in that time.

This is an interesting fact. Why? They’ve become more accustomed to riots and campus disturbances and so it doesn’t seem as extreme to them in nineteen sixty-nine as it did nineteen sixty-seven. And so they believe there’s been a major drop in crime. This is the majority of Americans! Since they have no objective standard, how can they see an increase? They measure everything with a rubber yardstick. It is not surprising therefore in a relativistic world that people do things not in terms of an absolute law but in terms of the group.

Twice this last week from totally different authorities I learned that with many people it is the in thing to be for Bradley. In other words, the only criteria for voting is, is this the in thing to do! Is it any wonder that we have problems? To war against landmarks as our world is doing is to war against progress, and against hope. In a world of chance nothing exists but change. Meaningless change. Therefore how can man know the future and educate in terms of the unknown?

Last week one of this group reported to me the problems confronting her in classrooms of education, and I’ve had this reported repeatedly to me by students who are in education and of course I’ve encountered this repeatedly in my reading. Well, the professor said last week in class, feeling that this was a most learned pronouncement: In a world of chance and of change, how could a man know the future? Therefore how could you educate children in terms of the future? Because any fact you teach them today may be completely obsolete by the time they are adults. Therefore there is nothing really that you can say this the child must learn! What the child must learn however is that we are in a world of change and chance and must be educated to this.

Now is it any wonder that we have revolution on the campuses! If the child is taught that there is nothing real except chance and change then it is the duty of that child to wage war against any and every establishment! So that even if his own crowd becomes the in crowd of the establishment he must declare war on them! Because only chance and change are ultimate. And this is the philosophy of education as it is taught. In school after school today it is your students who have learned their lesson who are doing the rioting, and this is why a non Christian school has no logical philosophy of education. It has no right to exist, because either it must line up with its philosophy of chance and change, or with a Biblical standard in terms of the landmarks of scripture. In a world without landmarks every law or landmark is a criminal offense because it is standing in the way of chance and change.

As a result the moral premise of the Marquis de Sade was and I quote: “In a criminal society one must be a criminal.” Unquote. And this of course is the premise of your radical student. They have a duty to break the law because ours is a criminal society. It is dedicated to the old landmarks and therefor it must change, it must change perpetually and therefore one must be a criminal in order to overthrow it. This is why in one of the burglary episodes one of the young men who was arrested was the son of one of the more prominent judges of the state of California. The tragic fact is that judge agreed with his son’s philosophy. And of course when you have this principle in a criminal society one must be a criminal it means total warfare against every establishment and every social order.

It means also total isolation for every man. Because if the only thing that is real is change and chance, what is there to link man to man? Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist, is thus logical when he says that God is no problem to him that his neighbor is, because what contact can he have with his neighbor? The Marquis de Sade stated it long before, he said and I quote: “My neighbor is nothing to me. There is not the slightest relationship between him and myself.” Unquote.

As a result, Sade was at war with the idea of law and the court, the only justice he could approve of was the vendetta. His attitude was it is legitimate for every man to commit rape and it is legitimate to kill to prevent being raped because there is no law except what the individual wishes and the only thing that is wrong is not getting away with what you were doing. And of course, this is why Jean-Paul Sartre the existential philosopher to whom I just referred, lost many of his student following in recent years because he took a stand on something. How could he, in a world of chance take a position on anything? And with that he lost his following.

And so (Markoos?) who is at San Diego now has taken unto himself as a more systematic existentialist Sartre’s following. If a man’s own wishes are his only landmark, then in a world without meaning man himself becomes meaningless. And so he should commit suicide! And Sartre admitted that many of his student followers had committed suicide and this was a logical step, and he had no reason himself for not committing suicide. As a result the only contact with other people is aggression, and the only possible meaning crime. Sade again, as the logical existentialist has said and I quote: “Ah... how many times, by God, have I not longed to be able to assail the sun and snatch it out of the universe to make a general darkness or use that sun to burn the world. Oh that would be a crime.” Unquote.

The greater the crime the greater the man. The only reality is aggression. But ultimately even that fails. China, which was the first country of the world to become relativistic, to deny the ancient landmarks at the beginning of the Christian era did so. And this is why China is stagnated. The only time China advanced was when an alien group took over China and for a while China would profess under alien leadership, but as soon as the alien group that conquered China became themselves Chinese by faith... embraced the relativism of Taoism and Chinese Buddhism and Confucianism they themselves stagnate.

But by the eighth century Wang Wai was saying do not count on good and evil, you will only waste your time. And what was the cure for everything? The doctrine of non being. There is the only remedy. In other words, to be dead. Deny all meaning as the cure for meaninglessness and finally life. In a world where the landmarks are destroyed, deny the possibility of landmarks. In other words, tell the starving man that hunger is a myth. This is the conclusion of relativism. Thus, we are in a suicidal age because we are an age that is bent on destroying the landmarks. And if it is a crime to alter property landmarks and defraud a neighbor of his land, how much greater to alter social landmarks, the biblical foundations of law and society and thereby bring about the death of that social order. If it is a crime to rob banks, then surely it is a crime to rob and to murder a social order.

Remove not the ancient landmarks for by them your forefathers lived. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly father we thank thee that thou hast surrounded us with thy landmarks and made us strong therein. Give us strength faith and courage our faith that we may reestablish thy landmarks and recall men and nations to those things whereby our fore fathers lives, that we may build in terms of the old landmarks and progress in terms of thy holy calling. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name, Amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes.