Contemporary Cultural Ethics

Ethics & Freedom

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Culture

Lesson: Ethics & Freedom

Genre: Speech

Track: 05

Dictation Name: RR132C5

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our subject this morning is Ethics & Freedom.

An Underground Press Anthology was published a couple of years ago, in which one of the writers, Art Johnson, wrote of modern youth’s, “insatiable drive to freedom.” One of the other writers, John Sinclair, wrote, “We demand total freedom for everybody. We are the solution. We have no problems.” He then proceeded, rather brutally and pornographically, and blasphemously, to deny all law, all morality, all religious inhibitions in the name of total freedom, and the concluded by saying, “We got nothing, Ma, to live up to.” Another writer, Dotson Raider wrote, “To destroy is to feel free.”

The gospel, according to this Underground Press Anthology was summed up in this statement, which I think, better than anything else, sums up the spirit of the modern age. It was this: “Good news. Two and two no longer make four. Good news. Two and two no longer make four.” Now, that was a telling summary, because in that statement, which was written in bold letters as the motto of the whole of these, the new leftist youth, the rebels against everything that the past has to offer in the spirit of existentialist freedom. You have, indeed, a great many strands of the modern age summed up. Two and two no longer makes four, and this is their gospel.

I began to read, as I was flying here, a very telling work, much of it is beyond me, because my knowledge of physics is limited, and although the author says he’s going to make it clear for any intelligent reader, I find myself falling by the wayside on many a page. Nonetheless, what I can understand of this work is very telling. Walter Edison Arno, This Dark Age of Science. His thesis is that, since Michelson and Einstein, of course, what modern science is assuming is that the Gospel is that two and two no longer makes four, and as a result, he says science is nearly its own dark age. It no longer is able to face up to the facts that confront it. It is so deeply imbedded in false presuppositions that it is near the end of the road.

Whether he is right or not I cannot say, but clearly I believe he is correct in that the assumptions of the modern age are premised on the same idea of what constitutes good news. Man is freed from any compulsion in the area of material creation, or the area of logic, because two and two no longer make four. This is an assertion of the radical freedom of man, his assaity. It is the world, not man, that must change, which means that the world and God must recognize they must permit the total freedom of man to be his own god. Man must be able to say, I will create a new system of mathematics. I will create a new geometry. I will create whatever I choose in whatever are I do, and it is as true as anything that has come before, because there is nothing that, of necessity, binds me. Good news. Two and two no longer make four.

The world, you see, with this kind of freedom, can be remade from God’s creation into man’s creation. It will then be frozen into immobility to allow for freedom for man from every requirement, and for every whim.

Of course, this is in line with the kind of thinking that Nietzsche represented when he called for a world beyond good and evil. If you have read Nietzsche, you will recall that he was most emphatic, that for us, the truth may be what the world regards as a lie. That very often, an outright lie is the highest truth for me, and therefore, to crucify man on an idea of what constitutes good and evil, or what constitutes right and right, truth and error, is, he said, no longer tenable. Man must live beyond good and evil, but beyond truth and error. Good news. Two and two no longer make four.

Of course, here, we see very sharply the antithesis between our faith and the temper of the modern world, the faith of the modern world, because for us, it is good news that two and two make four, that God is Lord, that the world is his creation, that in that world there is a law in every sphere of being, so that you can depend on God’s word. You can depend on God’s order. So that if you jump off a twenty story building you go down instead of up. There is a certainty, and this certainty gives with it an ethical imperative. Two and two make four.

The antithesis, you see, between what constitutes moral freedom and a more imperative could not be more sharply stated. For us there is freedom as Christians in the fact that two and two make four, that there is a hard and fast world of law all around us, that the wages of sin continue and always will continue to be death, and that the gift of God is eternal life.

Now, as we deal with the doctrine of assaity, God’s assaity, God’s self-being, what we need to recognize is that when we speak of God as sovereign, as absolute Lord, we mean thereby that God is neither responsible or irresponsible. That these are terms we cannot apply to God. Accountability, responsibility, is to God, not by God. Responsibility is a term that always means there is something or someone to whom we are accountable, but God is beyond responsibility, beyond irresponsibility. There is no idea of the good, the true or beautiful which, in Hellenic fashion, stands above God or the gods. In Hellenic philosophy, the ideas were above any god idea they had so that the gods themselves were constantly under the judgment of an abstract realm of universals, of ideas, but our God is the sovereign God. Truth is what God says and does, not something that judges got.

As a result, God, when he speaks, speaks truth. As David says in Psalm 19:19, “The judgments of the Lord are true,” or very literally in the Hebrew, the judgment of the Lord are truth and righteous altogether, because God declares his word, declares his judgment, it is the truth because it is what God says, and his judgments are righteous altogether because they come from him.

Now, when man seeks to be god, to have assaity, he must, of necessity, declare himself to be beyond good and evil and beyond any possibility of any law in any sphere, so it is necessary for him to say that, “Good news, two and two no longer make four. There is nothing outside of me, nothing beyond me, nothing above me nor anything within me that requires me to be anything, or to conform to anything. Two and two can make five or five hundred if I choose to declare it so.” It is this kind of radical freedom, absolute freedom that is increasingly demanded in our current philosophical thinking and in our current youth thinking.

This is why, in a sense, Arno’s work is futile, because while Arno very tellingly indicts these men and cites examples of where he has called attention to the fallacy of some of the things they have done. For example, an experiment to demonstrate Einstein’s theory of time, recently indicated that Einstein was wrong. What did they do? They said the experiment was wrong, because of course, it would have reduced Einstein’s theory to nonsense and it would have indicated that this was something that was not relative. So, the experiment had to be wrong. Of course.

Their presupposition is the assaity of man, that two and two no longer make four, and Arno is the one who is illogical. From our perspective, we have to say Arno is right, but he is wrong in that he does not begin with a sovereign God. He still presupposes the world of God, and yet, he is a modern man, an evolutionary scientist, and as a result, there is a contradiction in his thinking. He wants the results of the kind of world scripture gives without scripture. He does not realize that his very book militates against the idea of evolution, which he accepts on faith. Man, having abandoned the sovereign and triune God must, of necessity, say, “It is my assaity which is my starting point, and therefore, I cannot allow two and two to make four, and for me, the ultimate in good news is to be able to say, and this is my gospel, two and two no longer make four. I am not bound.” Man determines all things for himself and is bound by nothing. Nothing is true save that which expresses man’s will.

One of the statements I quoted at the beginning from John Sinclair, has to be understood then in this context. We are the solution. We have no problems. Only a god can say that. God has no problems. God is the solution, and so when young John Sinclair says, in the true spirit of modern man, of modern Existentialism, “We are the solution. We have no problems.” He is declaring, “I am the lord and beside me there is none other. I have a problem if there is an absolute God over me requiring certain things of me. Then, it is my duty, day by day, to meet the requirements of that God as they are expressed in his infallible word, because such an absolute God can only speak an absolute word. It is impossible for God to lie. It is impossible for God to lie. It is impossible for God to give an uncertain word. The only kind of word an absolute, omnipotent and sovereign God can speak is of necessity an infallible word.

Now, the only kind of word a man who has assaity and self-being, and over whom and in whom, or above whom, or around whom there is nothing that can bind him, is an infallible word, and so you have developing today a doctrine of the infallible word of man. This was first manifested in some of the Unitarians of the last century, and I touch on this in a chapter on the Religion of Humanity in my book, The Nature of the American System, how the spirit of the age speaks the infallible word for the age. It’s a changing word because man cannot be bound by his own word. So that what is the word for today, in terms of this spirit, which is deeply imbedded in modernism, is not the word for tomorrow, and man speaks his own infallible word at the moment, and it is only valid for the moment because man cannot be bound by his own word, and man, having no essence, his being is one which is continually in a state of flux, and therefore, there is no certainty in any realm for him.

Only if there is no law of God can man say, “We have no problems. I am the solution then, the only area of meaning.” This is the logic of humanism and of Existentialism. In dealing with this idea of man as the solution rather than the problem, it is well to bear in mind the observation of Dr. Cornelius Van Til in Christian Theistic Ethic where he writes, “The Bible plainly teaches that what we are determines what we do, but we are here concerned to point out that in the case of original man, his instincts did not hamper his freedom. We might be tempted to express this idea by saying that before the Fall, man’s will controlled his subconscious life, while after the Fall, man’s subconscious life controlled his will. This, we believe is largely true. Man was created to be as nearly as that was possible for a creature a replica of the being of God. Now, in God, there is no difference between potentiality and act. There are, in God, no instincts and no drives of any sort. He is perfectly self-conscious. A temporal being, on the other hand, cannot be entirely self-conscious. Man can never become pure act as God is pure act. Man’s life is subject to the process of time, and this process of time, when it is an aspect of the conscious creature, involved a transition from some measure of potentiality to an ever-increasing actuality. The future will reveal to man an ever-increasing opportunity to do more of the will of God.

“Yet we have to be careful at this point. We cannot speak with any great certainty. The Fall of man wrought no metaphysical change in man. We do not mean, therefore, by saying that before the Fall, man’s will controlled his subconscious life, while after the Fall, man’s subconscious life controlled his will, that any real change has taken place in man’s metaphysical and psychological makeup. What is meant that a moral turnover has taken place.”

Now, Van Til has summed up the case very ably there. The goal of Existentialist man is to be like God, pure act. This requires denying any element of the subconscious, or the unconscious life in himself. Man must become, therefore, totally perfect, totally self-conscious. This is why, as I pointed out yesterday, there is increasingly, as it comes to focus especially in Sartre, a rejection of Freud. On the one hand, Freud is the culmination of the humanist tradition. On the other hand, there is a fatal aspect of Freud that they must reject, the idea of the unconscious. Sartre feels, despite his very great interest in Freud, and his delight in the fact that Freud makes clear that man’s being is not determined by anything outside of him, but what he did in past ages so that the unconscious is itself a human product. Nonetheless, he must reject that unconscious because man today cannot even allow himself existentially to be determined by his ancestors, by the unconscious that has in it the Id and the Ego and the Superego derived from the past.

So, as Dr. Barnes writes, “While still deeply indebted to Freud, Sartre has effected a sharper break with the Freudian tradition than any other contemporary psychologist. This break is, in every instance, linked with his concept of a free translucent consciousness, a position which leads him to reject all notions of an unconscious, with Id, Superego, and Ego, as well as any psychological determinism functioning in terms of a basic libido, will to power, universal Oedipus complex, and the like, all of which Sartre regards as secondary structures.”

Thus, man must seek to be pure act. So that his potentiality and his actuality are always one and the same, and that there is no unconscious in him. Hence, the slogan that Jerry Reuben made the title of one of his books, “Do It.” Identify that which is potentiality and actuality in a single instant. So that whatever impulse you have, express it immediately. Rid yourself of any unconscious or of any hesitancy to bring together the thought and the act. Become pure act.

When we understand the motive, it explains a great deal of what happened in the Student Revolution Movement of the 60’s, which continued almost to 1971. It explains also a good deal of the motivation in contemporary art. This kind of temperament, “Do it”, explains also much that appears in modern novels and in modern films, this attempt of man to become pure act, to disassociate himself from the unconscious and the past.

However, for Sartre, we would have to say, and for all of these moderns, even if their goal were possible here on earth, man’s potentiality is still only that of a creature, and the universe around him is in terms of his own thinking, still a meaningless universe, impervious to man’s will. So that when man says, “I have good news. Two and two no longer make four,” he is also saying, “I am now trapped in my own mind which is my universe. The world outside of me has no meaning and I’m not able, successfully, no matter how I try, to impose my meaning on it, because it is not only that the universe around me is hostile to my will, but that there are millions of others, of Existential individuals, who do not conform to my will.” As a result, there is a cosmic hostility, a cosmic emptiness, a meaninglessness, as well as time and death ruling man, and Sartre must conclude in the face of all these things, man is a useless passion.

The view therefore, of Johnson, of Sinclair, of all of these moderns who say, “Good news. Two and two no longer make four,” leads naturally as they intend it should, to the destruction of all ethics, but it does not give freedom. It only gives death, because the universe is still not their universe because of this manifesto, this proclamation and motto of their faith. The universe goes on, and as a result, there is an emptiness to it.

Biblical ethics denies their doctrine of radical freedom. Rather, it asserts that absolute freedom is only the possession of God, so that over and over again, one might say the message of scripture is precisely what Joseph said to his brethren. “This do and live.” “This is the way, walk ye in it.” “The wages of sin are death.”

In one of the greatest chapters of scripture which originally had a very important place in American life, Deuteronomy 28, read it. The oath of office used to be taken, in the federal government, on an open Bible at that page, and the oath of office, the idea of an oath, as it was incorporated in the Constitution, was thoroughly biblical in its significance, and they knew it, and they intended it. The oath was an oath to the God of scripture in terms of his word. In Deuteronomy 28, it is very plainly and clearly stated that if we walk by faith and obedience, blessed shalt thy be in thy going in, and thy coming out, and the field, in the city, in the fruit of the field, and in the fruit of thy body, and so on. But, if ye will not be covenant keepers but covenant breakers, having no faith and without obedience, then cursed shalt thou be in the city and in the field, in thy going out and thy coming in, in the fruit of the fruit, in the fruit of thy body, the weather. All things shall curse thee. This is not Existential freedom. It declares that the world is God and the conditions in it are God’s conditions.

Thus, the old debate, you see, between freewill and predestination is ridicules. It’s a false antithesis, because the idea of an absolute freewill is an impossibility for man. The debate is really between will man accept on the one hand the impossibility of freewill which leads to a world of total chance which destroys his freedom? Or on the other hand, will he accept predestination by God and freedom under God as a secondary cause, a secondary freedom? It’s a false antithesis. Ethics perishes as we saw yesterday, if you have a world of brute factuality as the Greeks envisioned it, with man as the only point of freedom therein. Then, that hostile environment through heredity, through environment, in a number of ways overwhelms and destroys man, but it is only when man is created in the image of God and under the eternal decree of God, it is only then that man can have any freedom. Joseph is right. “This do and live,” and this is the proclamation of scripture as far as ethics is concerned. We are called to be covenant keepers, believers, and then “This do and live.”

What, for fallen man, thus, is a loss of freedom, is for covenant man, life and freedom. Psalm 119 celebrates the life of freedom under God’s law. “I walk at liberty for I seek thy precepts.” This is the antithesis, you see, of the Existential spirit, by precepts, the Psalmists (this is in Psalm 119:45), means the law of God, and so he says I will walk at liberty. How? Because I walk in terms of my consistent effort to seek, to obey, to understand, to apply more faithfully thy precepts, and the biblical position is that it is sin that is a loss of freedom, that constitutes slavery and death, but morality is inseparable from faith, and freedom and morality are different faces of the same fact, that ethics is a consequence of theology.

Now, the Existentialist would agree with that, but his would be a theology of himself as god, and out of his own being as god would flow his ethics, out of his assaity, but ethics can never be divorced from theology, and this is why we must maintain, in terms of what we were discussing late yesterday afternoon, that the political order and every other order of life is inescapably theology. Politics is simply applied morality. Every civil government is a law structure, and all laws are simply enacted morality, and all morality has a theological foundation, so whatever law structure a nation has is inescapably theological. Thus, the state is an establishment of religion. The United States was created as an establishment of the Christian religion. Pakistan is an establishment of Islam, as is Arabia, and Egypt, and other countries. Still other countries represent, as Seylan does, or I believe they call it now Sri Lanka, an establishment of Buddhism, Japan an establishment of Shintoism, moving rapidly into humanism, of a modern variety, and so on.

Every civil government represents an establishment of religion. Every kind of law order that you create is a moral order, and hence, we must insist that not only philosophically, but practically in every area of life, the only kind of freedom that is possible is a freedom under God, but as the political order departs from its theological foundations in God, it will depart from freedom. It will become a world in which two and two make four? No. It will become a world in which it is good news that two and two do not make four, and you have the world of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and of 1984, and its newspeak, in which all things are redefined continually. Why? Orwell, in 1984, caught the spirit of the Existentialist temper. Truth was what the state declared it to be, and truth was subject to continual changes so that overnight, the enemy and the evil could be somewhere else, and right and wrong were subject to immediate redefinition, because there was no longer anything that required that two and two make four.

The Supreme Court of the United States, as far back as the reign of King Harry Truman, adopted the premise that there are no absolutes that government. Chief Justice Vincent{?} stated it in one of his decisions. All things are relative, relative to man. Now this means therefore, that slavery is freedom as Orwell said, or as one Chinese diplomat who fled from Red China has written in a very telling book, The Thought Revolution, the idea of truth can be so dramatically different from hour to hour and from month to month that, he declares, The men who rise to the top are the men who are the most consummate hypocrites and liars. We heard in chapel a little earlier on God’s hatred of hypocrisy, but what this Existentialist mood enthrones is the ultimate of hypocrisy as the way, the truth, and the life, so that the young man who fled Red China and wrote The Thought Revolution says, that it was a friend of his who expected in not too many years to be at the top, some day after the death of Mao Tse Tung and one or two others, who told him, “You’re still too high bound to truth. Get out, because sooner or later it will be apparent that you judge the presents in terms of something else.”

Van Til is right. The Bible teaches that what we are determines what we do. If we are covenant keepers, it determines what we do. If we are covenant breakers, then we are children of the father of lies, and we enthrone the ultimate lie, that man is his own god as the truth. Ethics is not an independent domain. The god of any system is the source of law and of all morality in that system. So that, in order to understand what the god of any system of thought is, look to where they source of law is. Does it emanate from man? From a Supreme Court or a legislature, or a senate or a Parliament, or a {?} bureau? Or does the idea of law come from God, from his infallible word? The god of any system is the source of law, of ethics in that system, and either God is the source, or man is.

So that ultimately, all religions resolve themselves, all systems of ethics, into either one of a God-centered, biblical faith, or humanism. As St. Paul said, “Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” The quest for total freedom thus, of the Existentialist, is doomed. It is instead, a quest for total slavery, for total death, for hell itself.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] In your lectures, you seem to imply that the moral and civil law still stand for today. Would you comment briefly on the extent of how the civil and moral law, whether all the moral and civil law apply today, and also, could you speak briefly about the new commandment, the Lord Jesus’ commandment, of love and particularly, perhaps how the love of enemies might fit into the {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, first of all, I believe that the distinction which came into being in the 17th century between moral and civil law, and which in the twentieth century, has predominated, is an artificial one, because civil law is moral law, too. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill and so on, all your civil laws really are moral laws. Now, some of them are immoral laws, but I mean they are ethical, and they embody moral principles. Traffic laws have, as their essence, Thou shalt not kill, and Thou shalt not steal, by destroying somebody’s property.

Now, “A new commandment I give unto you,” the word “new” is there used as in “Sing unto the Lord a new song,” in the Psalms. It’s not new in the sense that it is a different, but a fresh statement of the same old praise and thanksgiving. So, when our Lord said he is giving them a new commandment that “ye love one another,” he is saying, “I am giving you a fresh, this commandment.”

Now, was it new in the sense of being strange and alien? Well, when the commandment in Leviticus 19 is given, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” what does Leviticus 19 then give us? The latter part of the chapter, at some pains, it is spelled out. “Remember the Egyptian.” Now, when Moses spoke at that point, the real enemy for any Israelite was an Egyptian. So he said, “Remember the Egyptian.” Think of him as thy neighbor. So, he was saying, through Moses, God was saying thy neighbor is also your enemy. So, what our Lord was putting his finger on when he said, “Thou hast heard it said that Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thy enemy,” he was dealing with a Pharisaic perversion of God’s word. Definitely not what God had declared. So, it was not new.

Moreover, both in Matthew 5, I believe it is, in the Sermon on the Mount, and in Luke 16:17 or maybe it’s 17:16, he makes it emphatic that heaven and earth shall pass away but not one jot nor tittle of the law, till all be fulfilled. Well, as I point out in Biblical Law, and Mr. Greg Bahnsen, in his forthcoming book on Theonomy, goes at great length into the history of the Greek word. The meaning of fulfill in the Greek is, “Till all be put into force and kept in force.” That’s the implication there. Now, the law of God is the expression of God’s righteousness. It hasn’t changed. The presupposition throughout scripture as at the end of the first chapter of Romans, is “They that do these things (homosexuality is referred to) are worthy of death,” and over and over again, as you go through the New Testament, you see the clear presupposition that God’s law is still binding. It’s not the law that is dead. It is we who are dead to the law, as an indictment, a death penalty, handwriting of ordinances against us, but we are redeemed now, St. Paul goes onto say, “That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us.” Yes?

[Audience] Is all of the law, the Old Testament law, applicable today, or are just parts of it, and how do we distinguish between which parts can be applied today? You know, dietary laws, and things like this. How do we tell which parts can be applied, and which not?

[Rushdoony] Alright. I take the whole of God’s law very seriously, unless it was a part of the sacrificial law, which was put out of the way in Christ, all of it being merely a forerunner of the sacrifice, but even there, I being an Armenian, give emphatic assent to the practice of the Armenian church which still continues, not in the cities, because the eyes of the Communists are on them there, but the farmers in the countryside still take their animals, if they’re going to kill a chicken or a calf, or a lamb, for family use, they take it to the door of the church, and there they kill it and they place their hands upon the animal and there is a ritual prayer, I cite it in one of the latter chapters of The Institutes of Biblical Law, and they say, “We know, O Lord, that it is no longer the blood of bulls or of goats that saves us, but that it is the atoning blood of Jesus Christ, but in shedding the blood of this animal, we remember and rejoice that it is the shed blood of Jesus Christ which hath redeemed us.” Then a portion of it is given to the clergymen and take the rest home.

Now, this was once practiced in Europe. I believe it last lingered in Scotland, but it was once the practice of the early church. So they didn’t feel, you see, the necessity of remembering the clergy when they killed the animal. It was done away with, and they celebrated the atoning work of Christ is every shedding of blood.

Now, with the dietary laws, we find first of all, that in the New Testament, there is evidence that the Apostles kept them and did not keep them, that they felt that it could no longer be used to put a barrier between themselves and the Gentiles. So that they ate whatever food was put before them, and yet purified themselves when they returned, and remember it was Christian Nazarites that St. Paul sponsored. He provided the funds for their purification. So that even the Nazarite vows were being taken seriously, something we don’t do, but it was regarded still as a means of making a vow and keeping it for a limited period of time. The evidence in the Apostolic Fathers and in the early church of the seriousness with which the law was kept is really startling, and the dietary laws, I feel, God gave originally for our health. At home we keep them. I’ve found them to be most beneficial. I don’t pay any attention to them when I am out traveling. I’ll eat whatever is put in front of me, except tomatoes, because I break out from head to foot as though I’d rolled in poison oak or ivy, because I don’t feel that’s to be any barrier between a Christian and anyone else, a non-Christian or a Christian, but I believe God gave them for reasons of health, and there seems to be more than a little medical evidence that this is so. Now, it’s very interesting as you study church history, that the hardest thing to change on the mission field was diet, and this is why that was the first thing that was dropped, and even then, by and large, the biblical laws of diet have prevailed with two major exceptions. One is pork and the other is scavenger seafood; shellfish and catfish, and one or two other things, but apart from that, all the other biblical requirements have been maintained, and yet, it was once commonplace throughout Europe, for example, as well as elsewhere, to eat the scavenger animals, to eat dead animals, and so on. So even there, the biblical requirements have, to a great extent, prevailed. Yes?

[Audience] Mr. Rushdoony, in Psalm 5 and also in Romans 9, there is the mention of God’s hating the doers of iniquity, certain sins and also there is the injunction given in scripture to Christians to love their enemies. Someone asked me a question one time, “Does God expect of us something that he himself either is not willing to give or does not give?”

[Rushdoony] Scripture makes a difference between the requirement of loving our enemies and loving God’s enemies, you see. “Do I not hate them that hate thee? Ye, I hate them with a perfect hatred,” and we’re also told in the New Testament, that if anyone receives someone who denies the word and bids him God’s speed, he has sinned. So we are to distinguish between the enemies of God and our enemies. We can’t confuse the two. I have enemies who are not necessarily God’s enemies. They’re my enemies. I’ve won them. Yes.

[laughter]

[Audience] In your topic, Ethics & Freedom, you said that in Psalm 119:45 that for liberty, you must follow God’s precepts. Then the quote by Nietzsche, outright lying, may be proof for me. In the background of {?}in the Westminster Journal, concerning your book, The Institutes of Biblical Law, how would you distinguish your way you speak of Rehab’s lie?

[Rushdoony] Yes. This is only the second time the question of Rahab has ever been raised in the South, which is a very interesting regional difference. That’s one of the three things that’s most often raised with regard to biblical law across the country, very, very heavily in the North, but as I say, this is the second time only that that question has been raised in the South, and I’m not saying there are two people who have it, but it is significant that it’s a minor thing in the South, that question. Why? Well, because the interpretation I give there has a good solid background in southern Reformed theology as in Dabney, and if you will recall in Biblical Law, I quote Dabney, and what does Dabney say? We do not owe the truth to people who plan to use it to commit a crime, to do evil. Now it’s that simple. The purpose of God’s commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” is that we speak the truth in the situation of courts, in the situation of daily human behavior and communication, but if someone comes to us and wants to use the truth to murder, to steal, to rape. For us to tell the truth then, is to be an accessory to that crime. Now, the midwives refused to be an accessory to the crime of Pharaoh, the murder of the infants. So, in the eyes of man, they lied, and we are told very plainly God blessed them. Rehab refused to be an accessory to the murder of two men of God. It was an act of faith on their part. She risked her life. She lied in the eyes of men, but she didn’t owe the truth to anyone who was going to use it to do evil. Yes?

[Audience] Mr. Rushdoony, I believe Calvin said in this instance that it was a denial of God’s providence at this point, to lie, and I don’t know if reformed thinking is along the lines that God has sent you to lie, as a matter of fact, {?} strong evidence to the contrary, but to me the problem lies in how do we get away from those situational ethics where lying sometimes is just fine, but this seems to be a very hard problem in {?} and my question is how does this differ between Nietzsche when lying can become a truth?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, of course I’m aware of what Calvin says, and I quote Augustine and Calvin, and several others, so I try to give the pro and con, but this is not Existential. I think it’s biblical, because scripture not once, but a couple of times says what Rehab did and what the midwives did we are told, and for this reason, God blessed them. It doesn’t make a distinction and say that somehow it was something else. “By faith, the harlot Rehab perish not with them that believe not, when she received the spies with peace. Likewise also was not Rehab the harlot justified by works when she received the messengers and had sent them out another way.”

Now, it’s very obvious there, or if you turn to Exodus with regard to the midwives, “But the midwives feared God and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive,” and then they go in and say in verses 19, that they claimed the children had already been born before they go there, “ And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them. Therefore, God dealt well with the midwives.” Now, I submit it takes all kinds of scholastic sophistication and playing around with God’s word to say there is not a cause and effect situation there. So that God very clearly blesses them because they do not cooperate with evil.

I had a minister confront me with this once, and I said, “Now, if say some criminals burst in here and wanted to know where your money or your wife were, and they were in hiding and they wouldn’t have found them unless you told them, and you told them, would you tell them if they asked you?” and he said, “I most emphatically would.” I’ll never forget the look on his wife’s face. I don’t think she was impressed by his holiness, and what he was saying was that he would cooperate with their evil. Now, one of the charges against the people the Psalmist makes in Psalm 49 or 50 is that you cooperated with evil. You saw men steal and do this or that and you did nothing. Well, if you step forward and say when they ask you, “That’s where the money is,” or “That’s where the person who’s hiding who you’re chasing and trying to kill,” that’s even worse. Now, we’ve had some fearful crimes in recent years (and I’ll close with this) where say somebody has been killed on the streets, or in a bus station in one case, and they’ve done nothing. They’ve just stood by and ignored it. In fact, I know one ugly case where a minister did that. He was in a car at the intersection and the man came up bleeding and battered, and banged on the car window, and he said, “Let me in,” and he was afraid to do so and drove off. He had two young people in his car that he was driving home, and they, to this day, have no use for that man. Now supposing that man escaped and was able to hide himself around the corner where you were, and they came and asked you, “Where is that man?” Would you say, “He’s hiding there” or would you say, “I don’t know.” Which do you think God would bless, in terms of his word here?

End of tape