Fifth Commandment

Authority of the Family

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Fifth Commandment

Lesson: 1-9

Genre: Lecture

Track:

Dictation Name: RR130N25

Location/Venue:

Year:

The Authority of the Family, Genesis 1: 27-30. So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He male and female created He them. And God blessed them and God said unto them be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth, and God said behold I have given you ever herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth and every tree in the which is the fruit of the tree yielding seeds. To you it shall be for meat, and to every beast of the earth and to every fowl of the air and everything that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life I have given every green herb for meat and it was so. We begin this morning our series of studies in the fifth commandment; honor thy father and thy mother. This is the commandment to which we will devote a considerable amount of time because it is so central to an understanding of the problems of our generation as well as the meaning of scripture. Four of the Ten Commandments deal with the family. Honor thy father and mother, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife nor anything that is thy neighbors, and thou shalt not steal. Because as we shall see when we come to that commandment, property in scripture is family oriented. Now the biblical perspective is alien to the Darwinian world view, and today the central thrust although very few people are aware of it of evolutionary thought is directed against the family.

Now this seems strange to many people because they can call attention to the fact that there is a great deal of attention paid to the family and importance ascribed to it in our anthropology textbook. I just reviewed a series of anthropology textbooks recently, and of course this is very true. A great deal of attention is given and importance ascribed to the family by evolutionary anthropology, but this an historical importance. It is seen as a central social institution in man’s history. But, the perspective is that this is something that is virtually a part of our caveman past, as it were. And several generations ago Letourneau the great French anthropologist laid down the guideline for the Darwinian perspective, the evolutionary perspective on the family. When he said the family is of great importance because it represents the old collectivity in mans history, but in the future the new collectivity will be the state. In other words in mans evolution the old collectivity or collectivism has been the family. But now the new collectivism is the state and so the family is obsolete. It must be abolished, it must give way Letourneau said, to the state. Now this is the modern scientific religious and educational view, and we cannot understand what is happening in the churches today or in science or in the schools, until we realize that they have this anti-family perspective. They will pay great lip service to the family as the great institution of the past, the old collectivity, but it must give way to the new collectivism of the state. This was very baldly stated at a Nashville council of churches general assembly when the study guide for the churches written by Colin Williams said that the family like the tribe of the Indians and of the primitive people had to give way had to give way to the new which is the State. Now as we analyze this evolutionary perspective we have to understand first of all how importance it—how important it is in determining the world around us and what it is that it is saying, so that we can determine what it is trying to do.

After Darwin one of the key figures in understanding this perspective is William Robertson Smith, whose central book was religion of the Semites. Thus he exercised a double influence, in the world of science on anthropology and on psychiatry and psycho analysis in particular and in the world of religion because he examined the background of the Semitic people, ostensibly the background of the bible. We are best familiar with the thinking of Robertson smith which of course now is the decisive influence on the modern seminary, and therefor on the pulpit, by going to Freud because Freud was the great populizer of William Robertson Smith. Now according to Smith mankind originally had the primal cord, but the time came when a problem was created, because the primal cord was dominated by the father. The father claimed all the women and he drove out the sons. The sons then finally banded together to kill the father and to eat him, and to possess the mothers and the daughters. Now according to this perspective the three basic drives in man his will to live, are to commit incest, parricide, and cannibalism. The three basic aspects of the will to death in man are the feelings with respect to these three drives of guilt, a guilt feeling with respect to incest parricide and cannibalism.

Now in terms of this basic aspect of man’s background is primal cord theory. Religions are classified as of two kinds. Religions of the father and religions of the mother, and of course in terms of this they classify biblical religion as a religion of the father and the cannibalism appears in the communion service, eating of the son in this case. How they get around that is a long and bald story that does not concern us, but enough of this rather gruesome and totally false as well as evil theory. Suffice it to say that the important aspect of this is that religion is seen as a projection of the family, I am going to repeat that because you are not going to understand the modern world until you understand that fact. Religion is seen as a projection of the family. Religion is the mother cult or the father cult. How then are you going to destroy religion? If you are humanist, if you are a socialist or a communist, a revolutionist, you are going to destroy religion by destroying that which projects it, the family. But this isn’t all, because as religion developed and as the modern biblically oriented family developed, according to these theorists, the biblical concept of the family is the private ownership by the man of the woman and of the children. And a part of this is also the concept of the private ownership of property. Therefor as these anthropologists said and Marx and Angles simply picked up this kind of thinking from the prevailing anthropology, they did not invent it. What for example Frederick Angles in his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State wrote, was simply a popularization of what Morgan, the American anthropologist had written. You see then, the centrality of the family. Out of the biblically oriented family comes religion, the religion of the father which is the religion they are especially concerned with destroying, but religion as a projection of the family.

And property is a creation of the family in terms of its biblical character. So, destroy the family and you will destroy religion and private property. As I said before, you cannot understand the modern world, you cannot understand education today or evolutionary science, or revolutionary socialism until you understand this fact, hence the hostility to the family. This is why in the Soviet Union immediately after the revolution, the first thing that was abolished was the family. Long before they began any real attacks on the churches, because in terms of their theory this was the key thing, abolish the family, abolish the family and then you make possible the abolition of religion and property. And so, and we shall come to this at a later time, there was the immediate communization of all women sexually. Something you don’t read in the textbooks, but it was a law that remained in effect for about fifteen years, and the purpose was to destroy religion and property by destroying the family. And this is why today when the public schools represent this kind of evolutionary thinking to the core of their being, they are first and last anti-family. They work to destroy the authority of the family, to create rebellion, the best product of the modern revolutionary. It is the student rebel; he has learned his lesson best of all. And you cannot cope with the revolution of our day until you recognize this fact.

Of course in my two books on education, Intellectual Schizophrenia, and The Messianic Character of American Education, I deal with the philosophies of education and the extent to which they are geared to this perspective and more definitely than Freud I analyze the background of it. Now as we turn to the biblical doctrine of the family, there are a few things by way of generalization that we have to say as we begin. First of all the biblical doctrine of the family is plainly God centered. The family is God centered in function and origin, the family is part of God’s purpose for man, it is that area in which man is to function to the glory of God and to his self-realization. Man is truly man in terms of the family, he finds himself in terms of it. Second, in terms of Genesis 1:27-30 God created man to subdue the earth and to exercise dominion over it under God. And this is essential to the family, to the function of the family to the role of man in particular. Man was created to exercise dominion over the earth, to subdue it, to develop it, and woman was created to be his helpmeet in this calling, this calling is not changed because of the fall it is become more difficult because sin and death has entered into the world, and so there is all the more in the way of development and subjugation. We have now the effects of sin and death all around us in our own bodies, all of which have to be fought and overcome and subdued as a part of our calling to subdue the earth, and to exercise dominion over it. Now this calling gives to man a possessive function, to subdue and to exercise dominion means private property, does it not? You bring the earth under your dominion or you bring an area of life under your dominion, as an engineer, as a scientist, as a doctor, as a farmer. Or you develop something through business, all of this involves private property, a possession of an area, and man is Gods appointed governor, to use the earth to exploit it to develop it to the glory of God.

Third, the exercise of dominion and possession clearly involves responsibility and authority. Man is responsible to God for his use of the earth and he must discharge his duty in terms of his sovereigns royal decree and work. God’s word is the authority we find in work, the royal decree in terms of which he subdues the earth. It is interesting to note that in the early church and in some churches to this day the reading of the whole of scripture, any portion of scripture is treated as the royal decree, and therefor as in ancient times when the kings proclamation was read the people stood. So in some churches to this day there is a standing for the reading of scripture. In the Marxist scheme, authority is transferred from the family to the state. The family is in effect abolished, wherever the state determines education as well as the vocation and religions and the discipline of the child. If the state has jurisdiction in these realms, if it takes over the education of the child, as well as its discipline, and controls the child’s religion through its teaching then the state has superseded the family. There is only one function then left to the family and that is procreation, and even that is increasingly an area where the state proposes to control. In the Soviet Union of course the family as a procreative instrument was called back into being in the mid-thirties by Stalin when he realized how drastically the birth rate was being affected, and for military purposes in the future he felt that the family simply as a breeding factor had to be recreated, that this is its only function.

And it is now subject to very strict controls, as one set of planners say, we’ve got to have more breeding and the others say no more birth control. And so they fluctuate from one to the other purely in terms of state planning. One side argues we need more labor and the other says we are not producing enough food, so even though your department needs more labor, we can’t produce enough food so you’ve got to discourage births. The family in effect is abolished, and the meaning of the family is not to be sought in procreation, there are some churches that define marriage and the family in terms of procreation, but the family must be defined in terms of Genesis 1:27-30. That instrument which God called into being as his chosen instrument whereby man is to exercise dominion over the earth, it is to be the home base as I were for dominion, for authority. Fourth we must say that the function of the wife in this aspect of Gods law order is to be a helpmeet to the man and the exercise of his dominion and authority. Her position is like that of a prime minister to a king, his calling is to exercise dominion in a particular realm, and she is to be his right hand man as it were in the fulfillment of that calling to subdue the earth and to exercise dominion over it in his domain. A prime minister is not a slave because he is under the king, neither is a woman a slave because she is under the authority of the man and those who so represent the woman’s position in scripture are guilty of perverting it. The description of the virtuous woman the good woman, in Proverbs 31:10-31 give us a picture of a confident wife who is a manager of a sizeable estate, a business woman, a mother, a person of real confidence and authority.

In terms of scripture therefor the family has the central function in society, and great authority for the man and the woman in terms of it. It is the key institution. It is significant therefor that the family has been under the evolutionary frame of things the center of attack. Their reasons for attacking it, this whole evolutionary scheme are completely false. But they are right in seeing it as the key institution; they are determined to destroy it. They can tolerate private property and religion to a far greater degree than they can the family, because they know that once they have destroyed the family the others will crumble. It is not surprising therefor that today there is a rapid crumbling of religion and of property, because the family has been undermined. We shall see as we analyze the significance of the family in relationship to property, what has happened to the concept of inheritance, what has happened to the concept of society in the culture. The family as God created it was the one institution in paradise because it is the central institution under God for man and his being. Let us pray. Almighty God our heavenly Father we thank thee that thy word speaks plainly, clearly and authoritatively. We thank thee that thou hast called us to be men and women under thee, to live in family. We thank thee for our families, we thank thee our father that thou hast made us as families thy chosen instruments, thy bulwarks of strength against an evil world and we thank thee that as we face this evil world and its assault we have the assurance of thy word that we shall conquer in Christ’s name, that that which survived the assault of Satan in the fall, and that which survived age after age the assault of tyrants and of the enemy, shall by thy grace prosper and abound, and to thy glory be the instrument for the re-conquest of the kingdoms of this world. Bless our families therefor to this purpose and give us joy and pride and thanksgiving in our family lives; In Jesus’ name, amen.

Are there any questions now first of all with respect to our lesson? Yes.

[Audience] Could this resistance rise where (?) at a younger and younger age into the tool (?) the idea of more breeding and more birth control so that the family can be manipulated (?).

[Rushdoony] Its purpose is the intrusion of the state into the domain of the family; the family is to disappear as it were. It is simply to become a department of state. Yes.

[Audience] The wipeout (?) in 1960 placed a great deal of emphasis on treating family life as (?) and they (?) into three kinds of family: the nuclear family the biological family and the traditional family. And this just goes along with what (?).

[Rushdoony] Yes exactly.

[Audience] The nuclear family was one where the mother is poor and the father can be anyone who is has been told to be the father. The biological family the mother is the traditional mother model (cut off in the tape).

[Rushdoony] This has been part and parcel of our entire educational and sociological world view. It has saturated everyone’s thinking so that we have picked this up without realizing what it means. But of course this is basic now to psychiatry, and an important part of any psychiatric cure you see, is to undo the families work. That’s why the parents, the family is always the guilty party. This is essential; you have to undo the family first.

[Audience] (Unintelligible) is another area that puts emphasis on the family but it really is of course a (?).

[Rushdoony] Right, very very definitely. What I have given here today comes right out of textbooks. Yes.

[Audience] I was (?) what we were talking about (unintelligible) he says that we are not under the old law but under the law now of the heart, we are not necessarily even under the Ten Commandments. And (?) I’m not that far along with that idea (?) it’s all really massive (?) What could I have said to him?

[Rushdoony] You’ve asked her well it’s interesting to meet someone who doesn’t believe in worshipping the one true God, who doesn’t believe in honoring his father and his mother, who believes in committing adultery, stealing, and killing.

[Audience] (Unintelligible)

[Rushdoony] If she’s not under them then she is free to break them. You see. Just push her to the conclusion; you are an adulteress then? You believe in murder and killing? You feel you have the freedom to do it, you either have the freedom to do it and it’s your right and liberty to do so or you are under that law and God will hold you guilty if you commit adultery and if you kill.

[Audience] The bible shows where laws have been changed during the time (?)

[Rushdoony] Wherever laws have been superseded the New Testament makes it clear, but our Lord said in the Sermon on the Mount that he had come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.

[Audience](Unintelligible)

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] With the destruction of the family don’t they also destroy the (?)

[Rushdoony] In a sense yes it will but the state doesn’t see it, it sees it as its fulfillment. It believes that the old collectivism, or collectivity to use their term, must give way so that the new collectivity can flower and flourish. This is their thesis.

[Audience] (Unintelligible)

[Rushdoony] But, from their perspective this growing anarchy is an assault you see, on everything we cherish. They want to see that assault, they believe that they can direct it to their ends ultimately, and in a sense they are right in that these anarchists look to a social order you see, as the answer. Anarchists and communists ultimately are in one camp, they unite, they work together to destroy the old order because their solution is ultimately in a social order, and the family of man to use their expression, the family of man replacing the biblical family. Yes.

[Audience] Theoretically, um the Marxists preach that the (?) will eventually wither away but (unintelligible) then it becomes stronger.

[Rushdoony] Yes, and you see, their definition of the state, this is an interesting point that is often missed is: the democratic or the monarchic or the republican state, and the communist state is not a state, it is the people, it’s the workers governing themselves, so they will have a totalitarian order of their own which replaces our state, and that’s the withering away of the state. Yes.

[Audience] (Unintelligible)

[Rushdoony] Well for example.. For example murder. I could bring books here to you and read them an entire hour, on justification of murder. Books which are being published today. Why? The idea that there is an absolute law that says thou shalt not kill is what they oppose; the idea of any absolute law. Once they break this down then they will say well, we will determine what is most socially useful, it may be socially useful to murder you, but not to murder me. But the idea that there is an absolute law, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, or commit adultery and covet and so on, this is what they hate about the Ten Commandments. It imposes they say, a tyranny, an absolute law, and hence their radical hostility to the Ten Commandments. Yes.

[Audience] (Unintelligible)

[Rushdoony] Exactly. An absolute law means an absolute judgment, you are so right. Yes.

[Audience] (Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] They are even more radical than their rulers. What we must realize is that the youth protest behind the iron curtain is not geared toward any absolutes, it is geared toward a total relativism, and so they are against any strong action by the state because they are against a stand on anything. Now (?) Pasternak Doctor Zhivago is assumed to have been a protest against the Soviet order in terms of our kind of thinking, but it was a protest in terms of a total relativism, and when one American writer visited Pasternak, he expressed bewilderment that Americans saw his entire work in terms of a theological protest, it was a Marxist protest. A Marxist is a total relativist, a communist is one who is a relativist about everything except communism.

The students you see are more relativistic than the government, they are better Marxists. Yes.

[Audience] When Christ said in that verse with the adulteress and he said he who is without sin throw the first stone, now that.. that term referring to stoning, where did that (?)

[Rushdoony] We.. Yes. Right, we will come to that when we deal with the command on adultery as well as a commandment with regard to bearing false witness. So if you will hold that we are going to deal with that.

[Audience] (?)

[Rushdoony] Yes, right. And we are going to deal with it very directly. Our.. well one more question and then we’ll..

[Audience] (Unintelligible)

[Rushdoony] Yes, this is the attempt to blame chemistry rather than character, and not too many years ago, if a doctor said that ulcers were caused by worry, a mental condition, he was ridiculed in medical schools because it was a matter of chemistry you see, and they could prove it. Now we keep trying to explain everything in terms of chemistry rather than character, and this is simply part and parcel to this picture. I want to pass on a few things to you that I think are of interest, the Dan Smoot (?) report for October 28th 1968, I would just like to read a little bit from it, because I think this is so telling a description of what our country is like today and I quote: on July 27 on 1968 a small group of black militants booed vice president Humphrey off the platform when he was trying to make a political speech in a Watts section of Las Angeles. On July 29, Humphrey returned, determined to woo the Watts votes. His host was Negro soul singer James Brown, presenting the vice president to a gathering of about a hundred and fifty Negroes who seemed bored, Brown said he would not endorse Humphrey for president unless Humphrey promised quote: “to give the black men what he wants, ownership. He wants his own things, houses, banks, hotels, hospitals.”

Stepping up and declaring that he had favored four years all the things James Brown specified Vice president Humphrey said, and if you elect me president you will get them, I can promise you that. James brown said: if the man do this, I got the feeling I endorse him. Vice president Humphrey replied: thank you, thank you, thank you. You stick with me and I’ll stick with you. Having endorsed Humphrey, James Brown undertook to initiate him as a soul brother, he demanded that Humphrey dance the boogaloo for the entertainment of the small crowd. When Humphrey demurred, Brown said: you can do the boogaloo man, if you got soul. Oh my goodness Jimmy, Vice President Humphrey gasped, as he tried to follow the beat of the band. Humphrey often wanders beyond the limits of propriety and good taste even in his serious moods, note this crude mixture of blasphemy and mockish sentimentality from a political speech he made on September 27 1964 while campaigning in Ohio. Quote: “John Kennedy loved Ohio more than any other state except his beloved Massachusetts, yet he lost the state in 1960. You owe something to his memory, you have the opportunity to redeem your state, I want you to undo what you did in 1960, I want you in honor of our late president to go to work between now and November 3, vote. And send the message so that John Kennedy in heaven will know we won.” Now, Humphrey is clearly the worst, but I don’t see how we can follow the campaign of any of the candidates without being profoundly embarrassed as Americans. We indeed have sunk low, when this kind of thing is political campaigning. And I think we are much further along than the country was some years ago, when the crash of 29 hit it and we didn’t know what had happened. I was reading recently of the contemporary accounts. First I remember it at the time, and this certainly confirms my impressions as a boy. When black Thursday came along, nobody believed it was anything more than a very brief thing, the world was going to go on in terms of their illusions. For example, this was one comment, the country enjoys a good banking system and a powerful and liquid super system in the federal reserves. The people are richer as a whole than ever before. The overwhelming majority can look with equanimity upon convulsions within the market. Then the literary digest completely ignored the crash in its issue of November second. On November the ninth it carried an article titled: Wall street’s prosperity panic, and it treated the whole thing as a joke, and then it concluded: future historians it is freely predicted, will speak of it as the prosperity panic of 1929. The panics of the past were brought about by something fundamentally wrong with finance or business, crop faders, earthquakes, strained international relations, prohibitive rates for money, inflated inventories and the like remarked the Wall Street Journal. But this October catastrophe on Wall Street is purely a speculative stock market panic, all authorities agree, the essential soundness of business is emphasized everywhere. So it was nothing at all, the federal reserves had all the necessary powers and would take care of it, so nobody need worry, there was no depression coming.

Well after that I think this might be in order, now this is a little bit of wisdom from Smidgens, if the last minute checkup on his candidacy by a candidate in congress, and as he looks over things he says I got this election all locked up, every poll shows I’ll win by a landslide. It’s a good thing too, I don’t know what I’d to if I didn’t get reelected. I’d hate to go home and try to make a living under the laws I helped pass. [Laughter] And this one I liked from Mortise Nichols (??) some of you may have seen it, Winthrop and his girlfriend are watching two men fight, look Winthrop, those two men are fighting. Who is that man they keep shouting, hit him in the mouth, hit him in the mouth. That’s Doctor Farley, the dentist. [Laughter] Well with that we are.. oh, one thing more, one thing more. I was chatting with Bill Richardson, our state Senator this week, and we were discussing the economic situation, and he said of course that the best way to describe what was going on in Washington and Sacramento among governmental authorities as well as business men was in terms of a story that he knew about three ministers who wound up in hell, and they had all applied at the gates above and when they got there the Devil said why are you in hell? And the Baptist said rather sheepishly, he said: “Well I got sent down here because I’d been dipping into church funds.” The Methodist minister said: “Well I was refused entrance and sent down here because I was a little too affectionate towards somebodies wife.” Then he turned to the Christian scientist and he said: “I am not here, and it’s not hot.” [Laughter] and Bill Richardson said that’s exactly the mentality of business and government today, we’re not here and it’s not hot. And with that we are adjourned.