Salvation and Godly Rule

Justice

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Justice

Lesson: A Return to Reality

Genre: Speech

Track: 52

Dictation Name: RR136AB52

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture is from Paul’s epistle to the Romans 3:24-26. “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; to declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.”

In every culture, in every age of the world, we find that men are intensely and passionately concerned about justice. If we go back to Ancient Egypt, and read some of the deciphered hieroglyphics, we find very moving accounts of the agony of men as they felt they were defrauded, taken advantage of, abused by people in power over them. We find again this intense sense of oppression when we go to Ancient Babylonian literature, so that as we look around the world, whether in Ancient China, Sumer, {?} Egypt, wherever we have traces and survivals of ancient cultures, we find man intensely, passionately concerned about justice and injustice.

We find this today also. If we look anywhere in the world, we find that men are protesting about exploitation, about the fact that they have been denied their just rights, and the cry for justice is worldwide. No culture, no civilization has ever been immune to it, and yet somehow, in spite of the fact that all men everywhere, at all times apparently, have been immensely concerned with justice, injustice seems to prevail the world over. Somehow, somewhere there is a missing factor. If indeed, as many men as the records would seem to indicate from the beginning of time, had been concerned with justice, certainly the one thing that we should be sure of today, anywhere and everywhere in the world, is justice, but nothing is more signal{?} by its absence. Nothing is more lacking in the courts of justice the world over.

The week before last when I was in Hillsdale, I heard a professor of law, who was one of the other speakers, describe some of the implications of recent supreme court decisions, and he felt that they not only established injustice, but that the premises which he expounded at great length of the recent decision on abortion made it possible now for the courts or for any legislature to rule that anyone’s life could be taken. The state now has the right to kill at its pleasure, not only unborn children, but now that life is within the providence of the state to kill without a crime, it can rule that anyone who is over 60 can be killed, or anyone who is of the wrong color, or of the wrong race, or the wrong religion. Injustice prevails, although men everywhere are preaching justice. Why?

Our concern is with a key word in our text: propitiation. Our subject is justice, and the thought that we are concerned with is that justice does not exist by and large in spite of all the demands for it, and that we cannot understand why this is so until we understand the meaning of propitiation. The word propitiation is not very popular. In fact, to most people, it has a very unhappy connotation about an angry God in heaven demanding blood. In a sense, that’s true. Propitiation does mean the covering of sin by cleansing and forgiveness. It has also the meaning of “to placate, pacify, conciliate, to satisfy.” It has reference to justice and atonement. It also has reference to law. So that, when we talk about propitiation, we are talking about atonement, justice, and law. We are talking about all three. We cannot separate these, one from another, in terms of the biblical doctrine. Propitiation means that God is propitiated in his wrath. God is angry because his justice and his law have been violated, and there can be nothing but wrath, judgment from God, until atonement has been made in terms of his standard of justice as set forth in his law.

John Murray, in his book, Redemption, Accomplished and Applied, has said, “Propitiation presupposes the wrath and displeasure of God, and the purpose of propitiation is the removal of this displeasure. Very simply stated, the doctrine of propitiation means that Christ propitiated the wrath of God and rendered God propitious to his people.” There can be no discussion of the doctrine of salvation apart from propitiation. When man concentrates on salvation as it affects them, they will talk primarily about the atonement. Now, the atonement is certainly central to our salvation. The atonement is an aspect of propitiation. We cannot overlook atonement, but if we concentrate on the man-ward side of atonement, then we have lost the front{?}.

The whole problem the world as faced with justice is that it has seen it humanistically. Eric Stottle{?} defines justice as giving each man his due. Well, what is each man’s due? At that point you get into trouble, and of course, if that is what justice is, I am concerned in getting what is mine. My due, and throughout history men have indeed been concerned with getting their own. We have seen again and again the downtrodden people who have cried out against injustice, taking over in ancient history as well as modern, and the result is only more injustice. Sometimes, if not almost always, far more injustice than before. That’s the cry of the people for justice and their cry against injustice has always been not premised on a principle, but envy of those that have more than they have, and purely a personal feeling that, “I don’t want anybody getting what’s mine.” The result is massive injustice.

The doctrine of propitiation puts all of this in another context. It puts God at the center of justice, of law, and of atonement. This is why the word is unpopular. Larry{?} has further said with regard to propitiation, “The antipathy to the doctrine of propitiation as the propitiating of divine wrath rests however, upon failure to appreciate what the atonement is. The atonement is that which meets edugencies{?} of holiness and justice. The wrath of God is the inevitable reaction of the divine holiness against sin. Sin is the contradiction of the perfection of God, and he cannot but recoil against that which is the contradiction of himself. Such recoil is his holy indignation. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness, St. Paul tells us. The judgment of God upon sin is essentially his wrath. If we are to believe that the atonement is God’s vicarious dealing with a judgment upon sin, it is absolutely necessary to hold that it is the vicarious endurance of that in which this judgment is epitomized. To deny propitiation is to undermine the nature of the atonement as the vicarious endurance of the penalty of sin. In a word, it is to deny substitutionary atonement.”

There is more to it than that, as important as that point is. We are created in the image of god. We are sinners, so that not everything we do shows forth God. But nonetheless, when we ourselves are the victim of injustice, we are angry, are we not? In fact, we seethe with rage, and everything in us cries out for justice. We want to avenge ourselves of our adversary. Everything in us is ablaze with anger so that sometimes, we cannot even sleep, we are so angry at injustice.

Now, when the Bible speaks of the wrath of God, it speaks about the anger of God at injustice, unmixed with sin, as in us. It tells us that there must be a propitiation, but without propitiation, there is no remission of sin. Very definitely then, God, because it is his law, his justice, that in all sin is primarily affected, it’s primarily the one who is angry in every case of injustice, and the wrath of God is indeed revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness, who know the truth, and yet, perverse it, deny it, and suppress it.

Therefore, propitiation sets forth the fact that there is a justice of God which calls for the enforcement of his law, and the only way that justice of God can be satisfied is through the atonement. These three things therefore, that propitiation sets forth; atonement, Jesus Christ, affecting our redemption by satisfying the justice of God and the law of God, because these three things are inseparable, wherever men try to obtain one of these, or lay hold on one of these without the other, you have trouble. The modernists today talk a great deal about justice, as men have from the beginning of time as we saw earlier, and the net result of what modernism calls justice is greater injustice. What they call justice is socialism. It is envy. It is robbing some to give to others. Having separated justice from atonement and law, they have, in effect, denied it. They have lost the God-centered meaning of justice and turned it into a man-centered doctrine which is empty, and is a mockery of that which it pretends to be.

Evangelicalism has become, in our day, antinomian. It affirms the atonement, but it turns its back on justice and law, and the result is, it gives us a humanistic doctrine of salvation in which the concern is man’s salvation, not the propitiation of God, not God’s requirement of us, not that God required, by the atonement, that his justice and his law again prevail.

The purpose of the atonement is not to set aside God’s justice and law, but to establish it, and God’s wrath is certainly not appeased by that which pretends to be of him, and denies him. The Bible, you see, puts justice beyond men, and it denies that men themselves can have justice apart from atonement and law.

Dostoevsky, in his notebook, saw the kind of world that men were creating without God, and he wrote, “Tyranny will become first a habit and then a disease. Blood intoxicates, and minds will be open to the worse abnormalities. Such degeneracy can take place that abnormalities will seem like pure joy. The opportunity for going on such a rampage often affects the whole people. Society despises the hired executioner, but not one who is provided with unlimited power.” The whole of Dostoevsky’s torment was that he saw what is coming. He recognized a century ago that men were forsaking God, and were going to create a world of monstrous injustice, in which the worse degeneracy would become normal. A world which denies God’s justice will very quickly deny men all their rights and privileges and think nothing of it. Having denied God’s justice, it will very quickly, deny men their justice.

Tacitus tells them that Nero reached a point where, having killed so many virtuous men, and having committed so many fearful and monstrous crimes and perverted practices, he reached out to try to kill virtue itself, to destroy the idea of virtue. The war against God means ultimate to war against everything. This is why when scripture speaks about justice, it never speaks of it in humanistic terms. It always speaks of it in God-centered terms.

As a result, all the attempts at social justice in our time are doomed only to produce only greater injustice. It is only as the atonement, closely linked with justice and law, only as we understand the fact of propitiation, that we can have again justice. We are angry at injustice. How much more so is God? Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that we have been justified freely by thy grace, that through Jesus Christ, propitiation has been made. We fear {?}, our Father, that now, as the people of grace, we may set forth unto all the world the healing power of the atonement and the majesty of thy justice and law, and to declare thy righteousness and thy purpose, and thy calling for men. Thy word is a path unto our feet, and we thank thee, our Father, that thou art ever with us to protect, strengthen, and bless us in the paths of righteousness. Bless us, O Lord, in thy service, and bring all men and nations to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.

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

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] The question was to give some of the highlights of my visit back East to Hillsdale College. I was there for the entire week from Sunday evening to Saturday morning, and I was one of a number of scholars who were there. If I can recall of them, there was Enoch Powell of Britain, who is a member of Parliament as well as a professor of Cambridge, Dr. Arthur Shenfield, an economist from Britain, president of the Mont Pellerin Society, an international society of economists with its base in Switzerland. There was Irving Crystal, professor of urban affairs at New York University, and a writer for the Wall Street Journal. There was Gottfried Dietze of the graduate school of Johns Hopkins, Dr. Charles Rice of the Notre Dame Law School, Dr. Thomas Monah{?} of NYU also, an historian, specialist in French letters and history, Hans Sennholz from Grove City College, an economist, myself, and I don’t recall who else. There was also there, very briefly, H. Gardner Ackley, whom I mentioned last week briefly, who was there just for a debate on wage and price controls with Enoch Powell. It was an unmitigated disaster for Ackley, who is perhaps the top economist on the left in this country and has been very influential in federal policies from FDR through Johnson. In the course of that debate, which I wish you could have all seen, because Enoch Powell is a master at debate. It is as though it were rehearsed to the letter. He makes mincemeat out of his opposition. Every person who ever gets into a debate with Enoch Powell is putting his head on a chopping block. It was very, very painful for Dr. Ackley, and he was bleeding all over the landscape and answering by expressing his utter contempt for every one of us, in particular, Enoch Powell. Ackley was denying that inflation was due to the increase of money power by the federal government. He said it was due to market power, the market power of the unions and the corporations, and there were two answers. One was to abolish all unions and all corporations which would be complete and total socialism. However, he was very gracious. They weren’t going to take this route. They were going to take the route of increasing wage and price controls, and I believe I mentioned his classic remark as he waxed lyrical about how wonderful a world there would be when they could get in and control everything. He said emphatically, “We can eat our cake and have it, too.”

The address by Irving Crystal was very interesting to me. Crystal is an ex-socialist who’s become rather conservative. Now, he still doesn’t’ understand economics but he is very telling in his dissection of his former comrades, and it was a pleasure to see him rip them up. He described his work as a professor of urban affairs, how he is regularly called in to state and federal planning sessions where the planners work out their plans, and he said of late he’s begun to speak up, because he said, these planners, as they sit down and draw up a master plan for say, Boston, or New York, or Chicago, or Philadelphia, simply have a total plan as though if you only trust enough, what I will do is to take a bulldozer and tear down the whole city and rebuild it from scratch. I’ll preserve a few things for historical interest that might be good museum and tourist sites, and he said, after awhile, he started to look very closely at these plans which he said, they believe in like a religion, and he noticed something in all these plans, and he started to speak about them, and he said, “I would tell them there is no provision for a cemetery or a mortuary in your dream city. Doesn’t anybody ever die in your dream city?” and he said they only get angry, and he said, then he brought up the fact, “What’s going to happen to your city when it gets old? Everything is going to get old all at once?” and they insisted their cities would not get old. They said it is really an area of unreason when we’re dealing with these planners. They simply believe that they’re going to create the unchanging, eternal order which will be perfect. All we have to do is to give them enough power, and they’re working towards getting that power.

I mentioned the fact that Dr. Rice dealt with the Supreme Court decision of abortion in particular, which he rightly feels and pointed out the implications of it, now gives Congress and the states and the courts the right to say that irrespective of crime, life can be taken. This is the significance of it. There can be mercy killings now. There can be an elimination of any group, after Stalin and Hitler, if the federal government so chooses. There is no longer any immunity. Crime is not necessary for capital punishment. So we have eliminated capital punishment, virtually, for crimes, and instituted it for no crime. We’ve turned the corner, as it were, as far as any Christian law and order is concerned. We’ve had a background of Christian law. There’s a lot of it still on the books, but as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, it has denied any principle of justice in anything that we can call a Christian sense.

Then, I’m trying to recall what else. We all spoke in classes as well as in the auditorium with our position papers. Mine was on “Toward the Theology of Politics,” and all the position papers will be published as a book which will be out later this year or early next year, and will be published in this country and France as well. My paper, they decided, to publish in advance and send out to their entire mailing list at the college, so that is in the mails now, I think, and the American Conservative union saw a copy of it and asked for that to mail out to its entire mailing list of 80,000 across the country.

On the economic side, the economists, both there at the college and those that were visiting, felt that the crisis that we were in at that time, that was before the weekend before devaluation, was a very critical one. Of course, the general statement to the press that it was speculators was nonsense. The speculator no longer has any role, if he ever had a sizable one. It’s just been basically banks and corporations who have been loaded with dollars{?} that they cannot use. If you {?} to the United State and you accumulate dollars, above and over what you use to buy goods in the United States, you have a growing pile of dollars. You might keep them to use later, but as the value of the dollar is dropping and you have a payroll to meet in Germany, England, Japan, or France, you take those to the bank and the bank takes them to the central bank, like our Federal Reserve, to cash them in, and this has been the problem. Very large number of these dollars has been going in to be kept. Now, it presents a problem for us in that, as for all the countries, in that if the dollar has a high value, then it makes it easier for them to sell to us and harder for us to sell to them. So that, if you’re selling records, as the English are in great numbers, they are the producers of phonograph records. Now {?} have almost wiped out the American industries, or selling Toyotas or VW’s to the United States, if the dollar drops in value, it means that you’re product goes up in value and is more expensive to sell to an American and therefore, he’s less likely to buy it. Every time it has been computed that the Canadian dollar goes up one cent higher than the American, 100,000 Canadians are out of work, because Canadian goods are that much more expensive.

Now, this whole problem comes about because the exchange rates today are artificial. You didn’t have this problem when you had a gold currency. Then there was a stability between country and country. There was a real value everywhere, but when you have paper currencies that are artificially pegged{?}, one will be worth more than the other and the other lower than the other, and it gives one an advantage over the other. So, the dollar has been somewhat overvalued, and this has enabled people to sell more to this country and get more dollars which they want to {?} before the dollar drops in value. So, the dollar was revalued, downward, to adjust it. However, we then said even more, we’re going to prevent you from getting dollars by imposing tariffs again you, which would mean foreigners would be less able to sell from us, and then they would take reprisals by increasing their tariffs against us, which could produce an economic depression, and this has been the problem that they’re wrestling with since. That could lead to economic fascism all over the world, a very serious crises. We threatened to do this a year and a half ago and then we backed down, and whether we’ll back down now, no one knows. Yes?

[Audience] {?} economic fascism?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Fascism is just another form of socialism, except it is a nationalistic form of socialism, whereby the economy is controlled in a nationalistic way so that you close the barriers to other countries and you trade less and less with others.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. As a matter of fact, you can say that communism is giving way to economic fascism in the communist empire, too.

[Audience] {?} fascism actually {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. There’s political fascism and there’s economic fascism. Political fascism is where you have a dictator. Economic fascism is when you have controls in the economic sphere.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No. We do not have political fascism but we are moving into economic fascism. I can’t of yet{?}

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. That idea is a very modern one, and it’s a very ridiculous one. It’s the idea of alternative consciousness. That, at one moment, Jesus was God and the next moment he was man, and that the disciples then would never know when they came near to Jesus whether at the moment he was really all human or whether he was all divine. It is such a ridiculous theory that it’s really a joke. It produces only a schizophrenic idea of Christ. We must hold in terms of a formula of Chalcedon, which is a summation of scripture that he was very God of very God, and very man of very man, in perfect union without confusion. So that, at all times, there was a perfect union of these two natures in Christ with the divine always governing. So that you could never say, “Well, at this moment he was totally human.”

[Audience] {?} not something that {?}

[Rushdoony] No. He did them as Christ, the incarnate one. Always in perfect union. So, he was at all times in everything he said and did, God and man, both, but in perfect union. Are there any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] The first chapter of Genesis tells us, in verses 26 through 28, that man had dominion over the animals. It means that man is lord over creation, that he rules all things, that he can use all things under God, to promote his welfare and development of the earth. This means, therefore, we can use the animals for food, we can use them to plow earth, or to milk. They are there for us to use in our exercise of dominion. Now, our dominion over them is under God and therefore, is subject to the law of God. Does that help explain? Yes?

[Audience] Referring back to Genesis {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, the lectures, the position papers by all of us, eight or ten, I forget how many there were, were delivered one or two a day during the week, for a special honors course to the honor students, and those are the ones that are being published. Then we were in various classes to give lectures. For example, I was in social anthropology, and I was in philosophy and I was in the intellectual history of the 18th century, and a number of other classes, so I spoke thirteen or fourteen times during the week.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, the present administration is conservative; George Roche, a very fine man, so he’s trying to take the college in a healthy direction. It’ll take some years to alter its situation entirely, but basically the present direction is good. Yes?

[Audience] {?} the animals {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. I imagine the man was a Christian and I would say there is a sense in which man is related to the animals. He is a mammal, but the distinctions between man and the animals is so great that to classify man as an animal is absurd. He is related to the animals, but he is a creature created in the image of God, and so he cannot be spoken of as an animal. He is man. Now, behind these classifications is a concept on which I’m doing some work and hope to write a book some time before the year is over, the idea of the great chain of being, a thoroughly anti-Christian concept which comes from paganism, and in the 18th century became very popular. It’s essentially a pantheistic idea. The great chain of being concept holds that all creation was made up of things which had a next-to-next relationship, going from the lowest to the highest, from the smallest atom on up, so that if you could index or classify everything is created, you would find from the smallest particle of an atom, on to the most important thing under the sun, there would be a ladder, with each thing so close to the next that it would be almost impossible to distinguish them apart, so that they’d be on a graded{?} basis, you see. All being just going up on a great ladder on a next-to-next relationship, each link being almost identical with the link just below and above it.

Now, you can see, when I tell you, where the idea of Darwinism came from and why they were looking for a missing link. It was the belief that everything, having come out of nothing, then the lowest thing under the sun would be something, it would be just next to nothing, and then something next to next to nothing, on up to man. So that they expected to find, and some are still looking, for creatures that will be virtually man and then something virtually next to virtually man, and so on, the idea of the missing link. All this rests on a faith, a religious faith in the great chain of being which is essentially a pantheistic concept. Now, the division into the kingdom and the classification of things partly has its origin in a belief that God has created an order so that things are classifiable, and partly in the belief that all things have its next-to-next relationships, so you’re going to start and file{?} everything in terms of this kind of relationship. So, in terms of the great chain of being concept, man is one of the animals. In terms of our belief, man is a special creation who is created separately from the animals, so that while, in terms of certain things, there are common characteristics, one God made everything so that you find atoms and molecules in everything, it doesn’t mean because we find atoms and molecules in wood and man we are cousins, you see.

I believe there is a question over here, we have time. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, I want to get to it but I’ve had so many special lecture series to prepare that I haven’t been able to. I hope to yet. I’m collecting material. Right now I have to prepare a lecture series for Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi. I have to prepare a lecture for Grove City College. So, I’ve got so many special lectures which have to be written because they’re supposed to come out in a symposium, or something, that is keeping me going fourteen hours a day, six days a week, to try to keep up with all that I have to do, but I do want to get to that because I am collecting material and hope to write a textbook on American history, and I have come across some information which, to me, is very exciting, so I would like to get to it. The question is just when I can.

Let’s bow our heads now for the benediction.

And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape