Contemporary Cultural Ethics

The Kingdom of God & Ethics

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Culture

Lesson: The Kingdom of God & Ethics

Genre: Speech

Track: 06

Dictation Name: RR132D6

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our subject this morning is The Kingdom of God & Ethics.

Throughout the history of the faith, one of the serious problem has been that men have tended to restrict the concept of the kingdom of God to themselves, to their institution, or to their national or racial group. On the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord denounced this kind of restriction among the Judeans. He said, “Thou shalt love they neighbor and hate thine enemy is a saying among you, but I say unto you,” and he restated the full scope of God’s commandment. The trouble, of course, was that Israel had restricted God’s moral boundaries and the boundaries of his kingdom to Judea. They had come to equate the kingdom and the nation. This was, of course, in direct violation of God’s purpose. God had called Abraham, and then called Israel, that they might be the instrument whereby the kingdom was to be known unto all nations. So that the worldwide scope of the kingdom might be set forth and promulgated through a covenant people.

This is very clearly set forth, for example, in Psalm 87 where, as the psalmist sees the pilgrims marching into Jerusalem joyfully at the time of the great feast, he looks at them, men from Egypt, men from Philistia, from Ethiopia, from all corners of the world, and he says of them, “All our springs are in thee. Zion, the city of God, the true city of God which is from above,” and this man, that man, as he singles out these foreigners, was born there in the eternal city of God, so that the psalmist makes it clear that all our springs are in thee, the City of God, and its scope is more than Judea, more than the Israelites. Again, when Solomon prays at the dedication of the temple, and his prayer of dedication, he asks God in particular that he give special attention to the prayers of all the foreigners that come to the temple, which makes it clear, of course that, at times, they were a missionary people and that foreigners were coming to the temple, because, he said, “We want them to go back to their countries as mighty witnesses to the sovereign God who hears and answers prayer.

For scripture, the kingdom of God is not centered on an institution, the church, nor on a people, Israel. Not even on the whole of humanity, it is not to be equated, as liberals would, with mankind. It is the kingdom of God. It is theocentric. It is theocratic, and our Lord declares in Matthew 6:33, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” so that the priority in our lives cannot be simply one aspect of the kingdom, which is the church, or the state, or the school, or the family, or anything else. It is a mandate to us that we seek first the kingdom of God, the totality of his commission to us.

Now, one of the great heresies that has plagued the church through the centuries is the equation of the church with the kingdom of God. This has been in particular the heresy of Rome, so that Rome, as we saw the other afternoon as we were dealing with the doctrine of the state, sees the church as the umbrella and the modern states sees itself as the umbrella, under which all things are to be subsumed. But this is not so. The church is simply one aspect of the kingdom of God, and to say that it is the kingdom is a heresy. In fact, it is blasphemy.

To illustrate, I am a member of Christ’s body, but if I say I am Christ’s body, I am guilty of blasphemy. The church is a member, a part of the kingdom of God, but for the church to say it is the kingdom of God is a fearful offense. It makes an equation which is untenable.

Now, how did this doctrine of the church as the kingdom of God develop? This is important because it points very clearly to what we have been considering this week. Among other things, we’ve dealt with monastic ethics versus biblical ethics. We have dealt with the ethics of assaity, man himself as the universe and the kingdom, as against biblical ethics. The idea that the church is the kingdom goes back to one of the great church fathers to whom we owe a great deal, St. Augustine. St. Augustine is both the father of the reformed faith with his emphasis on the sovereignty of God, and his emphasis on the divine decree on predestination, but as the church of Rome rightly declares, he is also the father of the Medieval world and the Medieval church. How did this happen?

Well, one of the things that characterized Augustine was a stain of neo-Platonism which, while he tended progressively to discard, he never fully discarded. As a result, that fact added to the fact of his deep despair at the Fall of Rome, had very serious consequences. To great churchmen surveyed the Fall of Rome: Salvian the Presbyter. I recommend Salvian’s Governance of God to you for the best single account of the Fall of Rome, written from a thoroughly scriptural perspective and declaring that Rome had to fall, because the judgment of God was upon it, and Christians therefore, should welcome its fall, because for it not to fall would mean that God’s law did not govern, did not prevail, and so he titled his book The Governance of God, so that Christians might see in that judgment, no matter how fearful it might be for them personally, the hand of God in it and the blessing of God. But St. Augustine did not have the very robust perspective of Salvian, and so it grieved him intensely, and as a result, his thinking developed in channels, which today we term amillennialism. He is the father of amillennialism, and so he, as he looked to the future, previously you had had pre-millennial thinking and post-millennial. Now you had another eschatology introduced with overtones, and I add this emphatically because this is not true of most of your modern amils, of neo-Platonism, so that he was ready to spiritualize away so much of the kingdom, to idealize it, but as he surveyed the future, he did it naturally from a perspective that had overtones of an ascetic neo-Platonism, and also a feeling that outside the church was a world that was collapsing and would continue that kind of collapse until the Second Coming. So that there was no hope outside the boundaries of the church.

As a result, because Augustine’s perspective on history, and on the nature of the church in eschatology prevailed through Rome, the church was seen as a monastery whose function it was to bring in the people as a refuge from that world that was only plunging forward to the ultimate catastrophe. And thus it was, as the Middle Ages developed, and they began to develop a doctrine, for example of the state, they could only visualize a Christian state existing under the church, and so the popes, as a result of the logic of Augustine’s position, could say to kings and emperors, they could only be a Christian state if they were under the church. The church had to government them, and so you had the long controversy which marked the Middle Ages, the struggle between church and state, each seeking to gain dominion over the other. The church triumphed to its own disaster. It triumphed by equating the kingdom and its entirely with the church.

This doctrine, unfortunately, has not left either Rome or Protestantism, and too often we do find that kind of equation, and too often we find it associated still with a great deal of amil thinking. For premillennialism, the kingdom is in the future rather than the present, and now there is nothing but soul-saving for the rapture and for the kingdom to be created thereafter.

As a result, the doctrine of the kingdom of God has not been properly developed. It has not been given the attention that it should have been given. The Reformation began to give consideration to it, but the Reformation was so concerned with two basic doctrines, justification and ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church) that it did not have the time, in the heat of battle, to develop the doctrine of sanctification for example, or eschatology, or the doctrine of the kingdom of God in other directions. Now, Reformed thought in recent years has called attention to the evil of identifying the church with the kingdom, and let me say some of the outstanding amillennial scholars have been as vocal as any others as denouncing the association in their circles of the church with the kingdom. This has been especially true in the previous generation among some theologians in the Netherlands.

Now, by the kingdom of God we mean the reign of God, God as king ruling the whole earth, the whole universe, and there is a two-fold aspect to the reign of God. First of all, it is by his eternal decree. He does indeed govern all things, even the wrath of man shall praise him. The very hairs of our head are all numbered. All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to his purpose, but as Obadiah and others make clear, all things work together for evil to them that do not love God, so that everything is under the absolute government and reign of the Almighty.

But second, the kingdom of God and the reign of God means those areas brought under the grace and law of God through Christ. This should include every area of life. Unfortunately today, neither church nor state, nor school, nor family, nor vocation are very often in the kingdom because we are in a time of apostasy, but all are to be brought under the dominion of God in Christ, to be made aspects of Christ’s kingdom.

Dr. Van Til has said, “The kingdom of God is man’s Summum Bonum. By the term kingdom of God, we mean the realized program of God for man.” He adds further, “Righteousness is the sinews of the kingdom of God,” and of course, the righteousness of God is set forth in his law. Van Til goes on further to declare, “The individual believer has a comprehensive task. His is the task of exterminating evil from the whole universe. He must begin this program in himself. As a king reinstated, it is his first battle to fight sin within his own heart.” Now you can understand from those quotes that while Van Til still classifies himself technically as an amillennial, Dr. Greg Singer, in Jerusalem, and Athens charged that he was really a post-mil. Well, there’s a group of people who call themselves optimistic amillennials, and I’ve never been able to figure out what separates them from post-millennialism.

Now, very emphatically what Dr. Van Til is saying in his Christian theistic ethics and elsewhere is that, the scope of the Christian’s calling, the scope of the application which he must make of God’s word is unlimited. It is universal. It is either universal, of course, or else we are polytheistic. We believe in many gods. Now of course, polytheism can be explicit. In explicit polytheism, as in Greece among the populace, and in Rome there were many temples and many gods. Incidentally, let me add one thing about the religion of Antiquity. It did not involve worship. We too often, as we look back on the past, and this is important in terms of ethics, assume that other religions are like our own, and we project what is scriptural onto these other religions, but other religions do not have worship except insofar as they have been influenced by biblical faith and have copied it.

I’ve been told by missionaries that there are Buddhist services of worship, and I know this is true in California in some of the Buddhist churches we have. That in itself involves a contradiction in terms, and that in some parts of the Orient you can hear in some of these Buddhist churches, such songs as “Buddha loves me this I know.” But, in non-Christian religions, insofar as they are not influenced by biblical faith, and therefore have been altered in terms of it, there is no worship, and this points to their essential humanism. What is there instead? What transpired say, in a temple in Greece or in Rome? Not worship as we know it. What you did when you went to one of the temples, for example, if you were taking an ocean voyage, you went to the temple of Castor and Pollux and left a sacrifice or a gift, and you said, “Castor and Pollux, I am taking a trip from Corinth to Rome, and the weather this time of the year is bad, and I’m making a good payment and I want insurance on this journey for myself and my cargo.’ What you bought from the gods was insurance, and if you didn’t like the kind of policy they sold, if things worked out badly, you went to a different insurance agency, to another temple.” In fact, we have inscriptions from Ancient Egypt as well as other parts of the Mediterranean world, in which we find that people leave a gift with a statement to the gods saying they are very unhappy with their insurance policy, and if the gods fail him once again, they’re going to come in and break his arms. In fact, we have one such case where somebody who left a gift in one temple left an statement that this gift was to help him get a particular girl he was after, and he was really going to break the arms and smash the head of the god if this time it didn’t work.

Now, in polytheism, there is, you see, neither worship, nor is there, in any real sense, an ethics. I don’t know what kind of schooling you had, but in my day in school, we had nothing of scripture and we had a great deal of Greek and Roman mythology. Was that true in your day? Yes, I see a lot of heads nodding, and I think the thing that must have impressed you was that Jupiter and Mars, and Venus, and the rest of them didn’t have much morality. Of course. You see, if you have a polytheistic religion, it has no universal scope, and therefore, it cannot provide any kind of morality that is binding in any sphere of life. Ethics is either universal or it is non-existent. The gods could express a whim, and you could be afraid and keep in line to avoid their wrath, but as far as prescribing a particular course of action and saying, “This do and live,” it was an impossibility. There could be no ethics from a polytheistic system, because the scope of the god was limited, and you could go out from under his jurisdiction to another one, and it was always possible that that god could be bounced by another god or another set of gods, because you had the imperialism of the gods, and so it was that when, in the Old Testament for example, we read that as the Philistines or someone else conquered one nation, they took their gods and put them in their temple to indicate, “You are now subjects of our gods.” Well, they tried that with the ark, and remember, there were fearful consequences. It didn’t work with the Lord God of Hosts, but that was the set pattern.

So that whether your god was a successful one and you perhaps ruled over a vast empire as the Assyrians and the Babylonians did, you could not, by any means, assume that that god had a command that was valid for all men and all places. The only one whose commandment you obeyed was the king, because the king, in a sense, had a priority over the god.

In Babylon, for example, whenever a king took power, what he did to confirm the fact that he was now the monarch was to go into the temple of Bel Marduk and walk up to the god who stood there with an outstretched hand, and to shake his hand, to indicate that the power was now in his hands, that he had gained power on earth, and now he had seized the power that the gods had. So that in him, the power of heaven and earth insofar as the jurisdiction of Babylon was concerned, was focused in himself. So he was, in a sense, over the gods and over the men. So if there was any ethics, it was the ethic of Nebuchadnezzar, or the ethics of Nero, and nothing more.

Now, if we limit the kingdom of God to the church or to the state, or to any limited area, we become implicit polytheists, and we say, “Thus far and no further can the Lord God of scripture function. He is the God maybe of the hills, or maybe of the valleys, or he’s the God of the church, but he’s not the God of the state, or of the school, or of anything else. We have them become polytheists.

Not too long ago, a Southern Baptist leader actually made the statement and a Baptist cut it out and sent it to me, that it was a very great wrong to work for a Christian state, that good Baptists had to believe in a secular state, in a non-Christian state. Now, he was denying the Lordship of Christ. He was, by that, a polytheist. He was reducing Christ the Lord to the realm of Jupiter or Mars, or Venus, or any of the pagan gods of Antiquity by saying he is the god of the church. He has a very limited sphere.

Well, such a god can then only give you insurance. Remember what I said about the worship say, of Caster and Pollux, or any of the gods of Antiquity. We went to them for insurance. You did not find an ethics in them. Now, it is interesting that at a major fundamentalist, Armenian, anti-Reformed university, which shall be nameless, it is now a fearful sin if you affirm the Lordship of Jesus Christ. He is only savior, and students have been kicked out as well as a faculty member for affirming the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Now, what does this do? Why, it reduces Jesus Christ to somebody who, like Caster and Pollux, issues an insurance policy. In this case, it’s a fire insurance policy. You’re buying insurance against hell, and of course, that kind of theology, if we can call it that, is also antinomian to the core, so it has no real ethics. It retains some little snatches of ethics here and there, but in essence, it has denied the fundamental principle of biblical ethics. Simply that God is Lord, creator of heaven and earth, and all things therein, and that his kingdom, both by his decree and by the necessity that we have of extending his reign into every sphere, bringing every area under grace and under the morality of his law, under his ethics, is of necessity, an aspect of his kingdom. So that there is no neutrality, you see.

You’ll be getting this, or I’m sure you have already, in both this class and the 1:00 class from Dr. Smith and Bahnsen, that presuppositionalism denies the concept of neutrality. There is no such thing as a neutral realm. Men are either covenant keepers or covenant breakers. Because ours is not a polytheistic ethics, we cannot say that there is a domain out here where some men are the kind of limbo and function in neither realm.

Now, of course, this is very interesting point. It was an implicit kind of polytheism, was it not, that led to the creation of the doctrine of limbo in Catholic theology? Limbo is an area between heaven and hell, as it were, where there are people who really weren’t covenant breakers or covenant keepers, and so they didn’t have a chance, supposedly. This is, of course, the denial of the first chapter of Romans which says that “all men are without excuse,” that because God created them all, the witness of God is indelibly written into the mind, heart, and being, into every atom, every fiber of every man’s being, so that all the things visible and invisible of God’s revelation are known to them, that they suppress it, they hold it down, they hold it back in unrighteousness.

That is a universal word, you see, a universal ethics. If we have polytheism, we have a limited jurisdiction for God, which ultimately becomes none, and a limited tenure, a limited tenure. What do I mean by a limited tenure? Well, the monastic ethics of the Medieval world, combined with this kind of implicit polytheism that it involved restricting God to the church and saying, the rest of the world out there somehow was never going to be fully under the government of God, because this is where it went as they developed, because you see, as they developed, they discarded Augustine’s faith in the divine decree. Within a few centuries, a very short time as history goes, one man who affirmed predestination, Gottschalk, was imprisoned. They thought he was crazy. It seemed so outlandish and strange a doctrine that he was actually imprisoned as a man out of his mind.

Now, another monk developed the implications of this. Joachim of Fiora, or also Anglicized Flora. Now, Joachim posited that there were three ages, or three dispensations in history. Joachim, in some respects, is a father of dispensationalism, and also of Hegelianism, and a great deal more.

The first age, said Joachim, is the age of the father. The age of the father is the Old Testament era. It is the age of law. It is the age of justice. Therefore, God had one way of dealing with mankind in that age, and one kind of morality. It is a morality, he said, which you find in the books of Moses, in the law. So that the whole of the Old Testament, in a sense, is concerned with a dispensation that we have nothing to do with now. But, he said, the age of the father was succeeded, with the New Testament, by the age of the son, which is the age of grace, and the age of salvation. Now, we have nothing to do, as it were, with the law. The father is the emeritus partner of the Trinity, and the son rules through the church. As a result, we can now have nothing to do with anything that belongs to the first dispensation. We respect it. We honor it. We regard it as basic to the present, but this does not mean that we move in terms of it or obey it. We are now in the age of the son, but, said Joachim, we are approaching, and he hoped it would be something like 1230, or thereabouts, the age of the spirit. The age of the spirit will be the age beyond the church. It will be the age of love rather than law or grace. It will be the age in which it is neither justice nor law, nor state, nor church, nor salvation that will concern men, but it will be, as it were, and while the texts are dubious and some scholars would dispute this, some very good scholars like Frederick Here{?}, a great Austrian, Catholic historian, will say, very definitely, it will be the age of the death of God.

Now, that kind of thinking you have very much in our time when supposedly, and this was being predicted in the forties and fifties, and was hailed in the sixties as the birth of the age of Aquarius. All this thinking is very much in line with this kind of dispensationalism, a secularized version with very obvious and deep roots in Joachim, and in the age of Aquarius, of course, all that belonged to the world that we live in yet, supposedly being not aware of what’s happening, is obsolete. The whole world of law, of course, is very, very antiquated, and the world of grace is antiquated, because now we are in the age of love, total love, free love, in which we no longer need God the Father or God the Son. Now, the Spirit, which is everyone who is possessed by this, will function, and there will be a new world.

Of course, all of this creates nothing but the destruction of ethics, because a God who has a limited jurisdiction has a limited tenure, as I said earlier, and so in this kind of dispensational thinking, God the Father had a limited tenure, God the Son had a limited tenure, and who knows when God the Spirit, who really is putting the Trinity and himself out of business (that’s the implication of the third age), will end and there will be a world beyond even love, when you do your own thing totally. That, of course, is a slogan of the third age. “Do your own thing,” but you won’t even need love. You will be beyond love.

Of course, I think you get the point. We can only have the sovereign God and an ethics that is total and a kingdom that is total, that is more than the church, more than the state, that is theocentric and theocratic, and we cannot fall into the trap of dispensationalism, because then we destroy ethics, and we dethrone God. We give him a limited tenure. Ethics is not, thus, from man, nor can it ever exist from a limited God. It can only come from the sovereign God with an absolute and all-inscribing word.

Are there any questions now?

[Audience] Can I ask one that leads into another, and {?} for another. If we were to take this whole system of thought, say out of the moral and philosophical realm into a local church situation, then could you say {?} the church’s responsibility is to make disciples?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Then the process of making disciples in itself means teaching people that they’re to submit every area of their life to God.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Then, through this process, and this is really what I’m leading up to, the kingdom of God is advanced by making disciples rather than by imposing God’s law upon covenant breakers. You see what I’m getting at here? It’d be easy for me to just take what has been said all week, and say, “Alright, well, I’m going into the pastorate. My responsibility is to go out and impose God’s law on the city, God’ s law on the state, go in there and tell them, “You’re wrong, this is what you’ve got to do.” Which, I’m not saying we don’t have a responsibility to point out God’s truth to them, but what I’m saying is it won’t work until they’re brought into the covenant family.

[Rushdoony] Right.

[Audience] So our emphasis must be to spread this through the Gospel, in a sense, and not through an imposition upon covenant breakers.

[Rushdoony] Exactly. There has to be an imposition at some point. You have an imposition of Thou shalt not kill on murderers right now, but it’s not the church’s function. The church’s ministry is the ministry of the word of grace. The church needs to train, to make disciples of men, so that they go into their families and create covenant families. They create covenant schools. They create, in the area of government, a covenantal kind of government. They must see that they have a responsibility in every area of life. It isn’t the church that goes out and does it. It’s the Christian man that must, and the church trains up the Christian soldier. So, the church has a training task, you see, and the Christian school has a training task. The family has a training task, but the church, through the ministry of the word, has a key task here, a very central one in arming them through the word.

Now, it used to be that, in the old Scottish Kirk, it was one of the functions of the pastor and the elders to make a visitation every year in every home in the church, to catechize the children, to test them, have they been taught the catechism? And they were expected to learn it not only at school but at home, and to see that there was the right kind of Christian training and discipleship in the home. Now, that was a very healthy function, you see, because they were saying the family has a basic function here. They were recognizing that. Then, it used to be, in terms of the Westminster Confession, ministers were consulted by state officials in cases extraordinary for their counsel, so that the word, in terms of problems, could be administered.

Now, we have a lot of educating to do, and of teaching, and of course, first of all, converting before we reach that point, but we must work towards that point. The church cannot Roman-fashion say, “We’re going to lay down the law to everybody,” but it must create people who are themselves a walking law of God, and will develop it and apply it in every domain. Yes?

[Audience] Would you comment on the need and the office{?} of the deacon’s fund in the local church in the local community?

[Rushdoony] Yes. I’ve spoken in one of the groups, I forget where about that, but I will again. The deacons were once one of the most important offices in all of society, and in some respects, you might say that from the sociological implications, they were the most important people in a community. Why? Because it was the deacons who saw needs in the community, as well as in the church, and met them, and they had the funds to do it. They performed a basic task of evangelization which was one of the most important means whereby the church grew. The idea that people were to be cared for by state welfare is a new one. The family and the church once did it all.

In the early church, you remember, the widows who were widows indeed had a function of teaching other women at home, going from home to home. They also took care of needs in the homes, if mother had problems, they went in and they would help her. They also ministered to a variety of other things. The deacons, for example, became together with the widows, and I spoke of this in passing in one of the groups, one of the most important agents in rescuing the abandoned children in Rome and elsewhere, where if they couldn’t abort the child, they would very quickly dispose of him after birth by tossing him under the bridges, there to die. Christians were rescuing those babies. They were rearing them, and it became a tremendous means of evangelization, because they were doubling their normal population increase through this means, more than doubling it, and it was such an offense to Rome, because everybody knew, “Look at these Christians. They’re a lot better to our own kids than we are to them, and a lot better to our sick and needy that we throw out in the streets than we are.” At one point, an imperial decree forbad Christians to rescue such abandoned babies because it was too upsetting. It troubled too many consciences, but to pass such a law made them look even worse. So, the empire quickly had to withdraw that decree.

Now, this is the kind of thing they did. The deacons can look through the church and take care of the families where the people are elderly. They can organize the help, cases of need. Cases where there is temporary help needed, helping people to locate jobs, that sort of thing. When I was quite young, this sort of thing was still being done quite extensively, but the deacons have become a nominal office and a meaningless office by and large in all too many churches, and it’s a tragic fact. Yes?

[Audience] Would you think that there is any conscious relation between Altizer and Joachim of Fiore? The two systems have {?} but I wondered if there was any conscious influence, or just the basic {?} with that kind of humanism {?}

[Rushdoony] I couldn’t say whether there is any conscious relationship, but Altizer proclaims the death of God, not because he said God does not exist. He never makes that statement. What he says is that now God does not exist for us, you see? So when he says God is dead, he says God is dead for us in our culture because of our development, which is a very different thing. So, in terms of that, in effect, he is saying, whether there is any connection or not, we are now in an age where we don’t need the Father, and to all practical intent, the Father and the Son are dead for us. Yes?

[Audience] Dr. Rushdoony, I have a question that I’m again getting my mind out of the {?} I didn’t know how to state it, but I think today you hit me {?} understand it. You said that the kingdom of God is the reign of God as king, as he rules in the universe, and the quote from Dr. Van Til {?} the Christians calling it unlimited and universal, either it is universal or we are polytheistic, and then you said that {?} worship of Christ is to be a polytheist. My question is, what is the relation between the worship of Christ, polytheism, and the so-called carnal Christian? Is there a relationship there?

[Rushdoony] Of course, I don’t understand the term “carnal Christian.”

[Audience] In the way it’s used, you know.

[Rushdoony] Yes, there is a connection, yes. It’s in those circles where the Lordship of Christ is denied, and where you have an implicit polytheism that they also talk about the carnal Christian, which means there is no ethics. Theoretically, ethics is denied. Practically, they still retain some kind of ethics, but it’s dying, because they’ve cut the root, and therefore, they’re continually talking about the problems they have with carnal Christians. Yes, you’ve seen the connection very well, so very good. Yes?

[Audience] I’d like you to comment in light of what we’ve been saying about no neutral areas {?} and sociology and presuppositional. There are some people today that say that they’re neutral economic system. In other words, there’s no economic system, there’s biblical {?} and would you comment?

[Rushdoony] Of course, I do not believe there is any such thing as a neutral economics. Every economic system is premised on certain theological premises, and when the theological premises die, the religious premises, the system, dies. This is why capitalism is gone, because capitalism began on a laissez faire premise. Laissez faire is very much damned now a days, but Laissez faire is simply a secularized version, as Jacob Viner{?} has shown, of the biblical doctrine of providence, that there is a law order, a structure, a government in the universe, and that there is an invisible hand, to use Adam Smith’s phrase, at all times present in all things. Once you had Darwin, the whole idea of Laissez faire died, and one of the champions of it, John Stewart Mill, wound up a Fabian socialist, because it was an impossibility in terms of Darwin to say that, in a world of chance, there was a law. As a result, those today who call themselves Laissez faire capitalists or theoreticians, like the libertarians do, are totally schizophrenic, because they’re maintaining a world view, they’re Darwinists to the core, which makes utterly impossible their ideas, and as a result, it is a school that is increasingly breaking down, because the logic of Darwinism requires either social Darwinism as with the robber barons after the civil War, an atomistic Darwinism, or the collectivist form of Darwinism. This is why Karl Marx wanted to dedicate his Kapital to Charles Darwin. Because he and Engels, when they read Darwin, wrote back and forth with delight to each other. Why? The old idea that the universe was governed by God, and the providence of God prevailed, and therefore, you had a harmony of interests, which doctrine is simply Romans 8:28 applied to the whole universe, was now impossible. What you had in the struggle for survival was the radical conflict of interests.

Now, the idea of the radical conflict of interests, and the universe of chance meant that there were only two possible alternatives. Total anarchism, or total collectivization, and Karl Marx said total atomism is an impossibility. It’s the only logical conclusion, but since it will destroy mankind, we have to go to total communism, total control, because what the God of the Bible provided which does not exist in the universe, the absolute totalitarian state must now provide. So, we must replace the predestination of God with the predestination of the totalitarian state.

Now, of course, there was one thinker who refused to take that conclusion, a Hegelian named Max Sterner. Max Sterner is the ego on his own, and Max Sterner was the total egoist, the total libertarian, who said he didn’t care about anybody or anything. It was the “I” that mattered, and he condemned all the other atheists. He said, “You are theological atheists but ethical Christians, because you still believe it’s a sin to commit incest.” He used that illustration and wrote quite a devastating passage on that, and he said, “What law is there to make anything good or evil?” So, to be consistent libertarians, consistent anarchists, you must throw overboard everything, moral as well as theological Christianity.

Now, perhaps the longest most violent book Karl Marx ever wrote, one which you rarely see because they’re not very happy about it, the Marxists, is against Max Sterner, because Marx knew that logic was on Max Sterner’s side, that while he said pragmatically we must replace the predestination of God with the predestination of the state, logically, the only tenable position for the humanist is this total anarchism, but this is self-destruction, he felt. So, this is still the problem, because today, the whole world of Marxism always has this inner tension. It demands total control, but there is no center. It flies apart. Yes?

End of tape.