Human Nature in its First Estate

Personality

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Psychology

Genre: Lecture

Track: 07

Dictation Name: RR131D7

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1960’s-1970’s.

Our scripture is Revelation 22:1-4; our subject, personality.

22 And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. 2 In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 3 And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him. 4 They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads.

In this passage Saint John describes by vision the new creation. THe new creation begins with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul declares that he is the firstfruits of them that slept, and that with his resurrection the new creation began. Whenever any man is converted, he is, Saint Paul declares, a new creature or a new creation in Jesus Christ. Our homes therefore are aspects of the new creation. Our Christian schools are aspects of the new creation. Wherever God reigns, there you have an outpost of the new creation will advance as the cause of Christ will advance from one realm to another throughout the world.

The fullness of the new creation shall be ushered in. At the end of the world with the resurrection of the dead, the death of death and sin. But it is not only a future thing but a progressive and present and progressive thing as well. Saint John declares of the new creation that the people of God are fed by the river of the water of life which proceeds out of the throne of God and of the Lamb, and by the tree of life which bears perpetually. There should be no curse there on work, his servant shall serve him and his name shall be in their foreheads.

Name means nature. The name or nature of Jesus Christ who shall fully be revealed in and unto us as his people. The image of God which was marred and broken by sin will be restored in us so that we will be that which God created us to be. To manifest in knowledge righteousness holiness and dominion. Those things which God ordained that we should manifest so that we shall be fully and truly ourselves. But, some people say, ourselves. But, some people say, when man so thoroughly is in service to God, it isn’t freedom! They define freedom as separation from God. And man is only truly free insofar as he separates himself from God. This is the existentialist perspective. The Biblical perspective is not so. Man is truly man in Jesus Christ.

Saint Augustine  as he described his experiences before his conversion declared that he sought in everything to find some meaning or purpose in life. But he found in everything a frustration, everything witnessing to God against himself. But he set our hearts are restless til the rest in Thee. His experiences as narrated in his confessions, have been set to poetry by Frances Thompson who in “The Hound of Heaven” describe not only Augustine’s experiences but his own. How he fled from God, but wherever he fled in whatever aspect of being or whatever in the innermost depths of his soul he sought to escape God, God was there.

Man being a creation of God can never escape God. Having been made in the image of God, everything in him witnesses to God. Now the image of God in it’s narrower aspects in it’s more specific aspects. We have been analyzing it in these past few weeks. It is as we have seen, Knowledge, Righteousness, Holiness, and Dominion. But there is still a broader aspect that covers and comprehends all these things and is something more, and that is personality. Doctor Van Til has observed that the image of God in the more broader and wider sense means that man like God is a personality. In the redeemed man this means that man becomes progressively more and more a person self conscious in his growth and development, and steadily manifesting more and more of the image of God.

Sanctification is thus the development of the personality of man. The more we obey the law word of God by faith the more we develop our person and personality. Now it is not surprising that the unredeemed man manifests the fall here as in every other aspect of his being. Because man was created in the image of God which means he was created a personality, his personality witnesses against him to God! Therefore man seeks to become anonymity, he seeks to become a face in the crowd and become a member of an anthill society.

A few days ago a woman who is a fairly prominent stopped by to visit, and she was describing certain steps that are being taken by our leadership today. And she said “What they’re trying to do to us is to make an anthill society of the country and of the world.” And I said, “True enough, but what you have to realize is that this is what everyone, virtually, wants today and this is why they’re succeeding! Only a handful of us are opposed to this.” And she was very much upset and she called me the next day to say that she had not slept much that night, at the thought that most people want an anthill society.

Indeed they do! They want cradle to grave security, they want an anthill world. Two or three years ago in the course of the law I sighted the words of a very prominent writer who said he saw nothing wrong with a high authority anthill, and it was to him like the streets of paradise, a world in which everything was automatic and taken care of. And this is what people are working towards. There are books written, very popular books, which develop the thesis of this anthill society, when man’s alienation as they say will end, when man is no longer self conscious, when man becomes automatically that which he was supposed to be (a worker, or a lab technician, or whatever the case may be) and loses all self consciousness, he was a cog in a world machine, in a world society. The city therefore is appealing to modern man. Because man seeking an impersonal world does not like anything other than the modern secular city which strips the world and man of meaning. Man seeks to suppress his totally personal and self conscious nature because he finds it a burden to live with.

This is why in the last century and a half the concept of the unconscious has been so popular in the modern world. Froyd[?] brought that concept to it’s greatest popularity. Froyd said that guilt was an aspect of the unconscious, that man had had inherited guilt from his remote animal and cavemen past, and therefore guilt could not be called something personal, and therefore guilt could not be called something personal. Guilt was an impersonal, unconscious act of man’s being.

This made for tremendous popularity in the media place. It appealed to man everywhere in the world to think that the feeling of guilt was nothing personal. It was just something in the unconscious. But to depersonalize guilt means ultimately to depersonalize man, also. Man in commision against sin and in rebellion against God is personal. In his guilt he then insists on being impersonal, and blaming it on ancient unconscious urges. But this will not work. Schizophrenia can never be a permanent condition of man. Because man is created by God as the as a unity, and he cannot depersonalize one aspect of his being without depersonalizing all else in his being also.

Every sin thus depersonalizes man. Sin is an attempt to use life and other people in an impersonal or depersonalizing way. When a man commits murder he refuses to regard the person of the other man. When a person commits adultery in the act of adultery, they are using someone else to gratify their particular appetites. When a man steals he makes an assault on the person of someone else because property is very closely linked to our person. Sin depersonalizes the sinner and it is an attempt to depersonalize others as well.

The sexual revolution which is around us today is telling examples of depersonalization, some of the literature on the sexual revolution is very revealing. And the psychiatrist and writers on the subject testify against themselves in spite on themselves. The things they narrate about the sexual revolution attempting to promote it reveal instead a radical depersonalization. The attempt by people to use others merely to satisfy their own feelings, as a matter of fact this depersonalization where it involves people who know each other involves the attempt to dominate, to humiliate, to use the other person.

Where it is therefore between people who know one another that depersonalization sets in. With others, the appeal is the impersonalism. In one of these studies the thing that appeared very tellingly was that people would go to the swinging parties, where there is extensive wife swapping or just extensive sexual mingling, the great appeal is that they don’t know the other people, even their names. And one such character found the most exciting thing the ability to take a woman without her even knowing it. In other words it was then totally impersonal.

Every violation of God’s law means either the depersonalizing of man or the impersonal use of man. Only under God’s law and in Christ can man be personal, and a personality. Thus, our world today may talk a great deal about love and about people, but it works more thoroughly than any other age to depersonalize and personalize human relationships.

At this point it is well to take a moment or two to deal with a common belief that the law is impersonal, according to scripture. God’s law is never impersonal. What the scripture says instead is that God is no respecter of persons, Deuteronomy 10:17 and many many other passages emphasize this point. What does it mean? When we analyze the law, it tells us very specifically that when a judge or anyone in position of authority has some coming before them they are to obey God in being no respecter of the person, with respect to his wealth or his poverty. AND the law is emphatic that it is not the condition of man that we are to regard, whether he is rich or poor, but the act that he has committed. In other words, to enforce the law without respect of persons does not make the law impersonal or the accused less a person. ather it is to preserve the personal application of the law. It says the law has to deal with the person himself in terms of his act, not with regards to the fact that you may like him, or dislike him, or that you’re opposed to someone who’s rich or someone who is poor.

It is when there is a respect of the conditions of a person that the law becomes impersonal and does not deal directly with the person and his act. Let’s put it on a clearer basis perhaps by means of an illustration. Supposing you are a judge, a parent, or employer. And you have to deal with people who are transgressing in a particular form. And suppose you say “Well, this man is transgressing the rules, but I like him so I’ll let him by; and this man is also, but I’m going to clobber him because I don’t like him.” What you are then saying is that I can make man truly a person by my own law and that God’s law is not the way to make him truly a person. But what you do is to create a spoiled child, or spoil an employee and make him less useful, or corrupt the law and a man by condoning his offenses.

SO that when we apply God’s law faithfully we make it personal by having no respect for the conditions of a man, but only for the man and his offence. But when we set aside God’s law and put our own law into application, we then destroy the person. In terms of the Bible therefore personal relationships are only possible under God’s law. Only then can there be a respect for the person of God, or of our neighbor, our wife, our enemy, or our children. Existentialism as we have seen previously, wants an I-Thou relationship. It says, “Man can only be free and loving when he sets aside all law! When he eliminates God and other people and he has a direct I-Thou relationship with other people.

But it’s significant that Sarcor[?], who said this, has also said “For me, my neighbor is the devil.” And he had an I-Thou relationship with Simone Gavar, the French woman writer and her account of it is a rather nasty one. So that he was not able to have a truly personal relationship with her, in other words, because God’s law had no meaning to either one of them they were both trying to use the other and ended up hating each other. The only truly personal relationship is one that is mediated by God’s law, it is under God’s law, one which is an I-God and His law-Thou relationship.

To leave out God and His law is to create a communications gap, and hell is the totality of the communications gap. There is no community and no communications in hell, between one person and another. They are forever trapped in their own selfish ego. There is weeping wailing, and gnashing of teeth. Forever self torment! A total inability to communicate with any other person.

But in the new creation man is free from sin, there should be no more curse. But the throne of God and of the land shall be in it, and his name shall be in therefore his men then shall be wholly what Christ recreated them to be. Their personalities shall be free and open, entirely personal, revealing the new humanity of Jesus Christ fulfilled in them. They shall manifest knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion. The new humanity of Christ will shine forth in them, and that which God ordained to be. A person created in his image, a personality. Man shall fully and freely be in the new creation. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father, we thank Thee that having created us in Thine image, Thou hast restored us in that image through Jesus Christ, and we thank Thee Our Father that Thou art day by day manifesting Thyself in us more and more as we obey and serve Thee. Use us O Lord to restore all things unto Thee. That men women and children may be restored to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, to serve and magnify Him unto the end of the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ. Bless us to this purpose we beseech Thee, in Jesus name, Amen.

[short pause]

Yes?

[audience member speaks] [audience member is unintelligible]

Yes, a very good point. Revelations tells us that the anti Christian city of man, Babylon the great will seek to number every man, to put it’s stamp on everyone. To the point that there can be neither buying nor selling without permission, total control. SO that the freedom of the unregenerate-- we talked about being free from God as real freedom ends up as the total tyranny of a world state in which there is no ability to buy or sell or do anything apart from God. But in God’s order we are free, and each of us reveals the image of God in us.

[audience member speaks] [audience member is unintelligible]

Yes, name means nature. So that it means that the nature of Christ, the redeemed image of man will show forth in us, as clearly as you can see a man’s forehead so what we are will reveal itself in us. That’s it’s symbolic meaning.

Any other questions on our lesson?

[short pause]

Well, if not I’d like to share a couple of things with you, on related subjects.

Some time ago when we were dealing with the law we saw what God had to say about the Sabbath of the land, how the land had to be allowed to be fallow every seventh year. I was very much interested last week after our meeting here and talking with our host Jim Andrews, who had been back in Oklahoma visiting his in laws, and he said that Judas brother-in-law was a farmer who was showing them the fields and they had been having a serious drought there and he said that this one particular field there might be the only one to survive, and if it did not it would be the last to dry up. The reason for that is, he said, that it was allowed to lie fallow last year, and a field that lies fallow produces better than a field that is heavily fertilized.

And Jim told them, he said that’s exactly what the Bible teaches. And they said, oh I didn’t know that! Well, of course, this is the survival in some parts of the country of the Biblical requirements, of allowing the land to rest every seventh year, as the means of restoring it. And the law makes clear that if one does not do this, the yield of the earth will decrease and there will be blights, and there will be a progressive deterioration.

Now it is significant that we have not been doing this and the results are beginning to manifest itself. Last year there was the corn leaf blight, and the cost was very great. And some of that blighted corn which was fed to pigs in Miami, preliminary reports indicate that there was a very high death rate for those pigs and those that did not die didn’t put on weight with it! Already this year there’s more corn blight appearing, or uh, leaf blight. It’s also manifesting itself in wheat, and oats, and soybeans. This could be very serious for the future! Very serious.

In Ireland, in the last century they had a fungus and a blight appearing on the potatoes and they payed no attention to it and then finally one year it spread over everything and wiped out all the potatoes in Ireland! And you had the great famine, the population I have it in my book that the population I think dropped from 8 million to something like 3.5 million what with the immigration and the fantastic death rate. So here again we have a very telling example of the law of God and it’s truth.

Then I think one the the frightening things that the paper reveals to us last week Wednesday, of the story of the boy who was crucified in Northern California. The worst part and the most fearful part is a woman’s reaction went on a few days later about how she couldn’t hold it against those boys 7 and 10 years old because probably they hadn’t been loved when they were babies, and therefore they really didn’t know what they were doing. I believe that is a greater offence, her words, than what the boys did because she is destroying all basis of law and order in denying responsibility and there can be no social order where you deny guilt to such a fantastic and radical extent.

Then this last week there was a meeting of the board of directors of the Christian Freedom Foundation all day Wednesday, and I am a member of the executive committee in the board of directors. We had during the morning someone come in to speak to us, a man who is a tax expert and state fining is his work. A Mr. Bernard Brazarr of Century City. And he spoke on the confiscation and disintegration of wealth through taxation. Since we dealt with the biblical laws of inheritance some time ago, I felt this was important to bring up. He said most people are familiar with form 10 40 and the income tax, and what it does. But it is mild compared to what form 706, the inheritance tax form does. Form 706 is forty pages and it is a plan for designed confiscation.

[recording faded in and out for a moment]

--in an estate of a hundred thousand dollars, twenty-seven hundred dollars on the average goes for taxes now. And an estate of a hundred thousand is a modest one, because he said, when you figure what your house is worth, the furnishing, your clothing, your insurance policies and a few other things, you have a hundred thousand very quickly. A modest estate. Now, he said, one of the things that very few people realize is that their estate is worth far more than they realize because the executor in an inheritor tax is liable if the U.S. feels it has been underpaid.

Therefore, the only safe course he can pursue is to over pay the inheritance tax! Increasingly it is so detailed that the suit the tie in, or the dress you die in, is appraised! In fact, someone told me that the appraiser was in their house and they happened to lay down their glasses and before they knew what was happening their glasses were appraised as part of the estate. If you’re suit was worth fifty dollars when you bought it a year ago, and the price of suits for that particular style or make has gone up ten or fifteen dollars it will be appraised in it’s full value today so that the appraiser will risk no kick back whereby he has to pay the taxes.

So you’re estate will be appraised at it’s highest maximum value. This in itself is a devastating fact because it adds thousands to your estate. The executor must collect all items, liquidate, and pay the taxes. The heirs may go hungry meanwhile because the estate is tied up! Especially in community property states, if the wife predeceases her husband it is usually a catastrophe. Usually the husband carries a good sized life insurance policy which helps toward paying the taxes, and remember 20,700 on a 100,000 dollar estate, and with inflation your house is  appreciating every year. So if you have $7000.00 in life insurance it almost all goes, but the wife rarely carries much insurance! If she dies, the husband has to sell out just about everything and stand in line to buy back some of his property.

He went on to cite, very specifically, he started with an old one. J.P. Morgenson's estate, it was $17,000,000.00. $12,000,000.00 of it was taken in taxes! And he said two things, first that was some years ago. He wouldn’t do as well now. And he said second, J.P. Morgenson was one of the richest men in the country and one the most powerful, but he only had seventeen million. This is what inflation has done to us. At that time, that made him fabulously rich! And he said, I know two men under thirty in my building in century plaza that have that much already!

And he said, Marilyn Monroe’s estate was two and a half million, but because she died young the estate went in taxes because two million dollars of her estate was in residual or postponed income. Post spective income that was going to be paid her she’d earned it, and it was residuals that were going to be paid her annually over a number of years. The taxes abounded on that two and a half million dollar estate to a million and a half! But the residuals were sold for eight hundred thousand only. So, there was no estate.

Barney Clobex died with a two million dollar estate, his widow, Edie Adams went to work on television in Los Vegas and elsewhere; tried to earn enough money to salvage the estate. She poured in thirty thousand trying to salvage it and came out with only sixteen thousand, a hundred and eighty dollars.

A. S. Kirkeby, the builder and the hotel man, he died with an estate of 14 million and only $250,000.00 remained and his son is now working for wages at the company he was supposed to inherit!

When Dixie Lee Crosby died, taxes took everything and Bing Crosby had to borrow money to eat, he said. And was fortunate in that he regained popularity and became rich again. And he said, the inheritance taxes can go up to 77%, in California you have to figure that the executor, the accountant, the attorney, the appraisers, etc. take 8.6%, but in California you have to add another two and a half points because we have a state appointed appraiser-which is a political racket- and he said, add the funeral expenses, the court cost and so on. And he said, you see what a disaster it it?! You can’t afford to DIE.

And he said, moreover the gimmicks they pull are incredible, and he said -let’s take a hypothetical case- supposing you want to give son a thousand shares of a stock that’s one dollar now. They’ll jump you immediately and say “oh, oh. What are you trying to pull on us? Those shares, that’s a terrific growth company and they’re worth really $6.00 apiece! So you have to be taxed on the basis of six dollars a share.” But if you give it to your favorite charity, a church, or an welfare agency, they’ll come around and say “Look, are you trying to beat us out of our due taxes? why, you can’t claim a thousand dollars for those! So they’re selling for a dollar apiece right now, but they’re only worth a dime apiece.”

So he said: This is what they do to you. He said: The way to beat them on that, there are a few loopholes, it’s my business to think these through. He said: When you’re ready to give to your son, you give to your favorite charity. Because when you give the both the same kind of shares they cannot diddle you on the price. Because, if they try to raise or lower the value, they lose either way. But, he said, the significant factor is this. That because inheritance taxes are so oppressive, seventy percent of all businesses die with the man. because of the taxes. In other words, virtually every small business is wiped out! Unless the man has gone to someone like this and spent a lot of money trying to work out the details so his estate will not be liquidated by the government. But today, seventy percent are wiped out.

Then, this significant fact. All non profit charitable organizations today depend, for their income, 80% of it is from bequests. What’s happening to estates? They’re eliminating this. On top of this, a new law requires that all the big foundations -Ford, Rockefeller, and all the others- have to give away either all their income, or 6% of their taxes. So whichever is the greatest in any single year. This means, over a number of years they’ll all be gone.

It is, he said, planned confiscation. And of course, it is aimed at the destruction of the family. It is one of the points of the communist manifesto, one of the very first I believe the third point of the communist manifesto. That an inheritance tax must be introduced.

Are there any questions or comments?

[audience member speaks] [audience member is unintelligible]

Well, you can see the direction of this yes. Now such legislation of course is not likely immediately going to go through, but with the inheritance tax we’re getting there indirectly. Because the inheritance tax is accomplishing almost the same thing. He cited a case of Senator Per, of Oklahoma, who died just a few years ago. And Senator Per had helped write more of the tax laws, including inheritance tax laws, than any other single man, and had tried to work in a lot of gimmicks for his own benefit, but he died before he could utilize them and they took him for over half his estate.

Yes?

[audience member speaks] [audience member is unintelligible]

Mhm. Yes?

[audience member speaks] [audience member is unintelligible]

This is the tragic fact. Your house may be taxed twice by inheritance taxes. I don’t know how completely, but this is the..uh, you, you bought back your estate twice in effect, or your errors do the second time. It is an ugly situation.

[audience member speaks] [audience member is unintelligible]

It is, it is diabolical. And that’s why it is so important to do some careful planning here. It’s the only way to utilize what loopholes exist. You must remember that with the increasing appreciation of homes, a hundred thousand dollar estate is routine nowadays and with the over appraisal of everything you can be sure that thousands will be added on to your estate in appraisals.

yes?

[audience member speaks] [audience member is unintelligible]

Yes... yes. That’s quite a painful story. [audience member continued speaking] Mhm. Yes.

Well it is planned confiscation, and he quoted F.D.R. as stating very baldly early in the game that the purpose of it was to confiscate.

[audience member speaks] [audience member is unintelligible]

Yes. Right. And that’s why Pane gave up in disgust in America. He is in the textbooks given credit for a great deal but he had nothing to do with starting the War of Independence, it had already begun when he landed here and wrote his books. He left in disgust after about a year and a half or so because he couldn’t radicalize the Americans. He went to France and there he was very much at home. But he was a little more than the French could stomach because he became a leader in the revolution but he had also well, a {?} complex, he was a great one for molesting very small girls, and finally they arrested him for that. James Monroe was our ambassador over there at the time and Washington had told him, hands off Pane, leave him alone. But Monroe was anxious to intercede for him so he interceded and got him out of prison (where he almost certainly would have been executed) and gave him refuge in the American embassy.

Well, in no time at all he regretted it! Because to have a filthy character like that around, plus somebody who was not the least bit grateful and wanted to run everything in the embassy.... it became a major headache for Monroe. Monroe was the one softheaded president we had before 1860 and he was on the softheaded side.

[short pause]

Well, I think that’s just about it, our time is up.

[recording ends abruptly]