The Fifth Commandment

Family and Authority

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 7

Track: 31

Dictation Name: RR130R31

Date: 1960s-70s

Isaiah 3:12 – 4:1, “The Family and Authority,” With this we conclude our studies in the Fifth Commandment and will next week begin the Sixth Commandment, “thou shalt not kill.” The Fifth Commandment is concluded this week with Isaiah 3:12 – 4:1.

“12As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.

13 The Lord standeth up to plead, and standeth to judge the people.

14 The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of his people, and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses.

15 What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? Saith the Lord God of hosts.

16 Moreover the Lord saith, because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet:

17 Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts.

18 In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon,

19 The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers,

20 The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings,

21 The rings, and nose jewels,

22 The changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins,

23 The glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the veils.

24 And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well-set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.

25 Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war.

26 And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate shall sit upon the ground.

4:1And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, we will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach.”

The woman said, concerning the Jews, the conquered gave their laws to the conqueror. What they meant by this was that although Judea had been conquered by Rome, out of Judea came Christianity which conquered the empire.

Legally, however, the conquest of the Roman Empire did not come in the days of Constantine. The early so-called Christian emperors were by and large politically Christian. That is, they recognized that Christianity was now dominant in the empire, or sufficiently strong that it was wise to take a more or less Christian stance. It was not until the emperor, Justinian, that the law of the Roman Empire became Christian. And this was due not so much to Justinian personally as to the influence of his wife, Theodora. It’s a sad fact that Theodora is not better known to Christians today.

Theodora was the wife of a circus acrobat in the Roman circus. Her father died when she was seven years old, going on eight. And because the father owed money and was penniless, left no estate, the mother and three daughters were sold into prostitution. So at an early age, not yet eight, Theodora became an acrobatic dancer and prostitute. The story of her life is a grim and an amazing one. Her two sisters and her mother disappeared from history. They were scattered and sent to various parts of the empire and none of them ever knew what happened to the others. But Theodora wound up as a very prominent and successful prostitute when she was barely twenty-one, she met the emperor Justinian, or the emperor-to-be Justinian. About the same time too, Theodora who hated everything that her life represented was beginning to look for a faith, an answer to the grim, hard life that she had known, something that said there was something else in the world. And she became a Christian. And by means of her influence, her husband, Justinian, became the great emperor and law-giver of the empire. And Theodora has left her mark on all subsequent history. In fact, we can say today that the rioters and the revolutionists are all demonstrating in part against the law system that Theodora imposed upon the Western world—without knowing her name, they are in revolution against the Christian law order that Theodora established. She sat with the lawyers as they rewrote the entire body of Roman law, as they threw out vast sections of law and wrote Biblical Law into the law of the empire. And many, many passages clearly show her hand.

Our concern is, since we are dealing with the Fifth Commandment, the basic reforms she instituted with respect to family law and sexual regulations. And it was here in particular that she totally revolutionized civilization. All civilizations since that time (this was the middle of the 6th century, approximately 535 A.D.) has been a product of Theodora’s work, her study of the scripture and her reshaping of the Western world in terms of Biblical Law. Her basic reforms concerning sex and the family can be listed under five headings:

1.      Only marital sexual relations were made legally allowable. All non-marital sexual relations were made illegal.

2.      All other forms of sexuality were classified as objectionable. And this classification was applied to every social class without distinction so that the family was made the ray of light and the legal—the only legal—way of life for all. In the words of the law code, it was called “The standard form of life for all human beings for all time and everywhere. This is the Christian way of life.” This was a tremendous revolution. By making it applicable to all, it made it clear that the nobility, who had previously maintained a vast number of concubines as well as their legal wife, could no longer do so. It meant that that the poor masses which previously were outside the law, and it didn’t make any difference how they lived now also had to conform to the Christian standard.

3.      It made all the prohibited sexual activities punishable by law, and in particular every form of commercialized sex was made severely punishable by law.

4.      Contracts for non-family sexual relations were made illegal. Concubinage, for example, lost its legal status.

5.      The family was made the defined public way of life and status.

Now the effects of this legislation were extensive. Two important areas of its effect were inheritance and property. The inheritance laws now in terms of this law of the family governed the empire. The legitimate wife and her children only now had a status and a standing before the law and none other. The inheritance could not be alienated from them unless they inalienated it by lack of faith. In other words, inheritance now was by the family and by faith. Therefore, property no longer went to the state or to any illegitimate child or to a mistress. They were cut out from the laws of inheritance. And today of course, we are trying to undo this. The state claims its share of the inheritance increasingly more and more. And increasingly, illegitimate children are being a standing. This works to destroy the family. Theodora’s work established the family as the custodian of inheritances. The family only forfeited this by lack of faith.

Now closely related to this is the second aspect. The family was made the agent and power with respect to property. The family became the social system now rather than the state. Wherever control of property resides, there is the power in a social system. And the entire work of Theodora in terms of scripture was to make the family, the godly family and the godly heir in the family, the inheritor of the property and the controller of the property. This immediately undercut the power of the state. And this is why in order to re-establish the power of the state, the ancient Justinian code, the laws that have been a part of every western nation from the days of Theodora, have had to be undercut; first for the state to enter in and claim a part of the property and the inheritance of the family, and second to destroy the family in its integrity. Without the Christian concept of the family, without the Justinian laws, without Theodora’s work, any society quickly moves into social anarchy.

Theodora rescued the Roman Empire from that social anarchy. The kind of thing that had been commonplace before and which she had experienced in her person began to disappear. It was now illegal. And when it existed it was in defiance of the law and punishable by law. The wife and the children were protected by the law. The purpose of the law was to protect the Christian family and the Christian heirs in the family. Because Theodora saw in terms of scripture that the source of the family’s authority is God and the immediate locale of authority in the family is the father or husband, as St. Paul spells it out in I Corinthians 11:1-15.

Now Theodora is one of the strongest women in all history. And it is significant that there was not a trace of feminism in her bones. She didn’t put her trust in a woman’s power, but in the family’s power with the husband or father as the head of the household.

Our scripture this morning, on with which Theodora was very familiar, for she knew her Bible, speaks of what happens when there is an abdication by the father or a denial by the state of the father’s authority. It leads to social anarchy. “As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.” Isaiah declared that when women rule over men, children gain undue freedom and power and they become rulers over their parents. And the rulers then are simply emasculated men who lead people astray. And the end result is social collapse and captivity which is described in the latter part of the chapter. And this the end result of a system where women and children rule in is the humiliation of women which culminates in the declaration in that, “And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, we will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach.” Society is in such a state of anarchy, that a lone woman is so defenseless that seven women lay hold of one man and say we will provide our own food if we can only have your protection; “If you will only take away our reproach,” our defenseless state.

Isaiah saw the absence of man’s authority or his abdication of it as productive of social chaos and anarchy. In terms of scripture, throughout the Bible, man as the head of the household is the necessary principle of order.

Now dominion is God’s principle for man over nature. This is declared in Genesis 1:28 and it is emphasized throughout all of scripture. Dominion is the calling of the man. It is his responsibility. And when he abdicates it he throws the entire family and ultimately the entire social order out of kilter. Dominion as the nature of the male, we find demonstrated by God not only in mankind but throughout nature.

Studies by biologists in recent years have demonstrated how fallacious Freud was in reading The Nature of Man and Animals basically in terms of sex. Robert Ardrey in his book has reported for example, that dominion is the basic drive in every species of animals in the male. And it reveals itself in three different ways.

         First in territoriality or property instinct. All animals have it, all male animals, so that a male animal will have a particular territory that is his. He will patrol it. Or a bird will have a particular branch on a tree, a male bird and he will guard that against other male birds of his species.

         Second, there is a sense of status or hierarchy; a pecking order. In every barnyard in nature—everywhere

         And third, basic to the animal concept of survival is order. And this is the function of the male animal. It is only in zoos, which our welfare economy, as I’ve pointed out previously, that the animal is more concerned with sex than he is with dominion.

Now with the female in nature, as well as in man, the sexual and maternal instincts are personal. Her concern is personal, not social. When women become concerned with problems of law and order, it is because these problems have become personal, because her family and its safety is in danger. It means things are far gone. In every age, when you see that women are concerned with what’s going on in the world of politics and economics, when they are the ones who are reading and studying and carrying aloft the cause of Conservatism, as today, it means that there has been an extensive abdication by men so that women are compelled by necessity to defend law and order. It is an unnatural condition and it puts an undue strain on the woman. She carries an undue share of the responsibilities. Her normal function and nature is to be personal, to be concerned with the personal—her husband and her children. Whereas the normal inclination of the male is to be concerned with that which is law and order, dominion, the social, the broader perspective. This is why men and women need each other. Without each other, they tend to become caricatures.

Perhaps a dramatic and extreme example of the male and female concern is apparent in Henry VIII and his first queen, Catherine. Henry VIII is very badly treated by history. He was a very brilliant man. When he took over as king, the scholars of Europe, the humanistic scholars all rejoiced. Here was a man after their own heart. He was a scholar. He was a very talented musician. He was a brilliant intellect. He was a very capable man in every respect. In fact, his brilliance was one reason why he went astray, because give a mind as brilliant as that of Henry’s do much power and he will be able to exploit his power more readily. Catherine on the other hand, was an intensely personal sort of person, a very devout intensely religious woman who went to mass several times a day and spent several hours in praying so that five hours of religious exercises each morning to begin the day was quite commonplace for her. And yet, the tragedy of this situation was that Henry was concerned with preserving the stability of England. Every foreign power was trying to overthrow it. And if he had no male heir, then a war of succession for the throne would immediately ensue as had torn the country apart until his father took over and the foreign powers would intervene and England would be finished. A male heir—this was what he was concerned about. On the other hand, Catherine’s interests were so purely personal that she never saw that her father, Ferdinand of Spain was using her as a tool to the point where England was being badly harmed. And because here were two people, one representing a male concern with order, the succession, the stability of England, to the point of immorality, having no thought of his marital vows, and she so purely personal that she could be used to the nth degree and you had a crisis and a tragedy develop.

Men and women need each other. And therefore, scripture says, a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife that he may exercise dominion not in an unbalanced way, because he becomes unbalanced without the woman, but that he might exercise it together with her help and with the full {?} and healthy perspective.

A matriarchal society always comes about when society is in breakdown, when men have abdicated. Look around to see where you have full-fledged matriarchal societies. In America today, the Negro populace has been from the time it landed here, as it is in Africa, matriarchal. Women ruled. Why? Because the men are irresponsible. They cannot be depended on to support the family. And so it is a matriarchy. It’s unhealthy. And nothing the federal government can ever do will change Negro society until Negro men become responsible. The same is true of Indian, American Indian society. I lived among the American Indians eight and a half years. It is a matriarchy. The men are irresponsible. They are alcoholics. And so the women must take over and the consequence is deadly. It is a society in state of collapse.

A matriarchy does not mean that women are in power. It means that women are burdened because there is no real power. They are trying to do two things—be father and mother and cannot do either successfully when they are so burdened. And the trend to matriarchy is present today in all western culture. “As for my people, children are their oppressors and women rule over them.”

Today’s revolutionary activity is directed first and foremost against the family, against these family systems that the Empress Theodora gave to the west. We cannot understand the revolution of our day unless we realize that both law and the state and the school are waging war against the family. The school is doing everything day-by-day to destroy the family through its teaching, to make it impossible for the parent to help the child with his schooling, with the new math, with the new English, and so on, so that the family will be broken. And psychology and education are promoting ideas of permissiveness which strike directly at parental authority. Permissiveness is a revolutionary concept. It prevents the growth of self-discipline. It destroys parental authority. It is the real reason behind juvenile delinquency today: the destruction of parental authority and the growth of permissiveness. A lack of discipline, self-discipline and discipline, leads to self-importance. If you have watched the television programs when they have youth speaking, or read the youth pages that some of our daily newspapers have, you have this theme over and over again: listen to us. We want to be heard. Alright, listen to them. They have nothing to say. Nothing to say! Delusions of grandeur, tremendous ideas of their self-importance. But when 200 years ago, teenagers were commanding troops and conducting business and were ship captains, today they are immature, incompetent juveniles, barely literate and demanding, “Listen to us!” when they have nothing to say. This self-importance destroys all standards, save that of shared humanity. We are people, therefore we must be heard.

This fall, I was amused and disgusted in reading the account of the San Fernando school teacher, San Fernando Valley school teacher who had taken a group of her students, well-to-do students on a trip through the Soviet Union. And they came back and they had a front-page interview in some of the papers. And the first sentence read, and the rest of the long article simple repeated the same thing in different words (and I quote), this was the conclusion of the teacher and the students, “People are people no matter which side of the Iron Curtain they all home.” Now was it necessary to go to the Soviet Union to decide that the “Reds” are people? I can tell you without going to Africa that they are people there, the Negros, and without going to China, that the Red Chinese are people. What’s the meaning of it? It means that your only standard is man; therefore good and evil have no meaning. You are beyond good and evil. You’ve destroyed all standards and you have nothing but anarchy, so people, that’s the great wisdom, the great law, the great standard. And of course the students are only just a little step ahead of their parents. Listen to what their elders have to say. Read the letters to the newspapers. Listen to the talk –in radio shows, or read Abigail VanBuren’s and Ann Lander’s columns and you realize they have no sense of law, no sense of standard. One woman wrote in recently to one of these columns and she was upset because some people, some of her family and friends, were objecting. She was planning to have a 25th wedding anniversary, a big party, invite all her family and friends even though she and he husband had been separated for many years. She couldn’t see anything wrong with her desires for a party.

This lack of standards, this lack of discipline, this lack of law is far gone. The family is virtually gone in law. There are only six states in which the father is still by law the head of the household and is also the logical legal custodian of the children: Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Texas. Everywhere else, the man is gone as far as the law is concerned and it’s very interesting that the Jews who for centuries preserved themselves by a strong sense of the family have so eroded it that the law today in Palestine is that a child takes the nationality of its mother, and several cases are before the Supreme Court, a people in Israel who had been denied citizenship even though their father is a prominent citizen because their mother is not Jewish. In their circles, too, the breakdown is far gone.

Added to this social erosion and legal erosion is the erosion or assault on the family from within the church. And today you find this everywhere. You find it even in your conservative churches, they boast about having so many activities that a family has no time to be a family. They have Mother down there for activities for Monday through Saturday and the children, and the Father, and you’re supposed to be, if you’re a good church member, in the church three, four, five days a week. The family is virtually outlawed by this. But if you go into the liberal churches, what do you find? Well this book cites the popular positions today in the churches, Rustum and Della Roy, their book, Honest Sex. And it comes out for total permissibility of every kind of sexual activity. In fact, they try to play the role of a prophet and they declare that in ten years at the most, homosexuality will be entirely permissible. There will be polyandry and polygamy and there will be a variety of other practices that will be fully recognized as moral. Again, another work by Dr. Lars {?} a Swedish doctor and psychiatrist goes a step further. In this book which has been published throughout Europe as well as in this country, this psychiatrist demands that we treat these people as minority groups that have been long discriminated against and therefore we give them subsidies now to atone for what they have suffered through the centuries. And so he is for not only legalizing, but giving subsidies to those who practice incest, exhibitionism, pedophilia, saliromania, algolagnia, homosexuality, s{?}ophilia and other deviations. There isn’t a single kind of perversion that he leaves out of his list. And there are actually moves in many countries today to legalize homosexual unions as well as various other perverted practices. The end result of this is that women are being stripped of their rights that were won by Theodora and are being thrown into a sexual market and an anarchistic society.

The Empress Theodora learned the hard way out of the ugly experience of her childhood and youth and came to a Christian faith like a drowning person to a life preserver. And through her effort, the west was given Biblical Law as its foundation and the biblical standard of a family was made the law of every western country until now. They are trying to undo what Theodora did and they will throw the family—and women—back into the same cesspool out of which Theodora, by the grace of God, came forth.

Thus we are in a critical age and we must say to this generation that they are heading for suicide. Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.

Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto Thee that Thou art on the throne and that the government is upon Thy shoulders and that age after age Thou hast raised up unto Thyself people to do Thy will and by Thy power to overturn the powers of darkness. We give thanks unto Thee that the Empress Theodora, by her knowledge of scripture, laid down so good a foundation which we have enjoyed for fifteen hundred years. Give us grace therefore, our Father, to establish again the house of our culture on that foundation, on Thy Word and Thy truth. Bless us to this purpose, in Jesus’ name, amen.

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

Yes…

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Moral Re-armament really has nothing to offer because it has no biblical concept of morality. It is also more or less socialistic, very congenial to it. It does not follow a specifically Christian stand. It wants moral re-armament by individuals and by nations but it overlooks the family to a great extent, or touches on it lightly. Edith Stafford is not with us today. Any person interested in getting a group together to hear her talk on moral re-armament and what a dangerous group it is should do so. She has made a very thorough and excellent study of the implications of MRA

Yes…

[Audience] {?} … after Rome fell… {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes….

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Rome fell at the beginning of the 4th century, about a hundred and five or ten years later, Empress Theodora ascended to the throne. Now, what had happened was that the empire relocated its capital of Constantinople earlier, so she was at Constantinople, the Eastern Roman Empire, but at that time Justinian had again re-established his rule to the Southern half of Italy and more or less ruled the entire empire and a good deal of Europe, the Middle Ease, North Africa. So Justinian re-established to a great extent the power of the empire.

Justinian was an able military man, a general. Theodora, as the Christian, and her husband was a Christian, but as a person who out of her experience wanted the answers, was the one who moved her husband to call all the lawyers together and say we have to establish a new foundation for law; a Christian foundation, so the one man re-established the one (Justinian established power again, over a vast domain). Theodora, his wife, gave the law to that domain in terms of scripture and Justinian was with her 100%. They were a marvelous team, one of the most wonderful husband and wife combinations in history. It is indicative of the fact that our age is not interested in this sort of thing that they are so little known today. None going through school should be ignorant of Justinian and Theodora.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, then second, Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. God’s law order, His government is everywhere, in Heaven and in hell so there is no place under all creation where all things are not ordered by His law order, His government.

And of course, the “Do I not hate them that hate Thee? Yea I hate them with a perfect hatred. I count them my enemies.” Now, David there is not talking about his personal enemies. We are, where it’s a personal thing, we are to love our enemies. But the enemies of God, it’s a different thing. They are the enemies of all law and order, of all decency, of all morality, therefore we cannot love them. We are to hate them.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, another question now. Our time is limited today.

Yes…

[Audience] Well I have heard {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh…. Uh-hm. Very interesting.

Another question? Comment?

Yes…

[Audience] … talked about {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes….

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] We’re not told that we do not have to pray for the enemies of God. We can, although some people we are not to pray for, scripture says; those who sin to the point of reversing good and evil. They are beyond hope, scripture says.

But we are not to love God’s enemies. Our personal enemies—if someone dislikes me and is malicious towards me, and it’s a purely personal thing, I am not to hate them. I am to love them. I am to pray for them. I am to show kindness and grace to them as far as possible. But when it is an enemy of God, there they are at warfare with everything that is godly and holy, that is decent and moral. They are trying to destroy it. And therefore I have to be at war with them and I have to hate them, just as I hate evil.

Yes..

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Because they are waging warfare against everything and if you pray for them, you can pray for their conversion unless they have reached the point where they make evil good and good evil, self-consciously and deliberately overturn the whole moral order.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] It would apply to some of the leadership. It wouldn’t apply to every last individual, you see.

For example, you could say of the leaders of Communism, they know deliberately what they are ordering. But the common Red Army soldier? No.

[Audience] {?} … deliberately… {?}

[Rushdoony] Some of the people who are behind these youth movements know deliberately what they are doing and you cannot pray for them.

For example, this is not a pleasant thing to mention, but it will give you an idea of the depravity of some of the leadership. In some of these revolutionary youth movements (and I have this from authoritative sources, law enforcement sources), in Berkeley for example, in order to ensure the loyalty of the young college students, men and women, whom they recruited, they compelled them to perform various acts of sex, normal and abnormal, with someone of another race, of a black race, publically in front of the group, figuring the only way we can ensure their allegiance is to take them and so corrupt them that they will know when we are through with them, they can never re-establish themselves with normal society. So this kind of thing has become mandatory in the inner circles of these leaderships if you really are going to be at the top level of some of these groups—and I’m talking about the thoroughly revolutionary groups.

Now the men who devise this sort of thing, you have to say they are totally morally depraved. And they must be hated. And this is one reason why, incidentally, the FBI cannot infiltrate these groups, because they cannot ask this of anyone, of a student whom they would like to plant in the groups, and this is why the local police cannot infiltrate these groups. You have to hate when you see things like that.

And I think this has been a point where we have been very much weakened by a couple of generations of liberalism. We’ve lost the capacity to hate evil. We have become so tolerant that we feel guilty when faced with an obvious evil and we feel apologetic because it makes us angry, because it moves us to hatred. And it should.

Yes….

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Right. The whole purpose of modern education at the higher level in particular is to move civilization beyond good and evil, to say that good and evil are no longer valid categories of thought. After all, they are people; people. And if you read some of the accounts of the moonshot this last week, what was the conclusion? For example, Archibald MacLeish wrote something in which he said, this started, several said this was the beginning of a new millennium; we’d entered into the millennium. Isn’t that interesting? But that now all the old categories of thought are obsolete. We would have to view all men as men; in other words, not in terms of scripture—good and evil, but in terms of the fact that they’re men. Now why a moonshot should outlaw the Bible, I don’t know! But this is their thinking. It’s totally illogical, but they’re trying to din this into people. And one of the things that created a bit of a anger and the paper said this week it would probably be forbidden in the next moonshot, the astronauts read portions of the Bible, and portions of Genesis. And there was great anger in the scientific and governmental circles over it and it was inferred that the next time there was any kind of space flight any such thing would be forbidden!

Well, our time is up and we are adjourned.