Salvation and Godly Rule

Christian Liberty

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Doctrinal Studies

Lesson: Christian Liberty

Genre: Speech

Track: 53

Dictation Name: RR136AC53

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture lesson of from the first epistle of Peter 2:13-19. Our subject: Christian Liberty, and next week, the other side of the picture: Christian Obedience. “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well. For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: as free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God. Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king. Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully.”

One of the sad facts is that we often take past victories for granted. This is commonly the surest way to lose those victories. Christian liberty represents one of the great victories of civilization. It is important for us to understand what it means. One of the great landmark statements of church history is chapter 20 of the Westminster Confession of Faith, of Christian liberty, and liberty of conscience. Unfortunately, all too little has been done with regard to the significance of that chapter in world history.

Recently, a professor wrote a very important study which will be mentioned in our next Chalcedon Report, precisely on the subject of liberty of conscience in which he does pay tribute to the central work of the Puritan, William Perkins, and of the Westminster Confession. Chapter 20 reads (a rather long chapter, but important to read in full). “The liberty which Christ hath purchased for believers under the Gospel consists in their freedom from the guilt of sin, the condemning wrath of God, the curse of the moral law; and, in their being delivered from this present evil world, bondage to Satan, and dominion of sin; from the evil of afflictions, the sting of death, the victory of the grave, and everlasting damnation; as also, in their free access to God, and their yielding obedience unto Him, not out of slavish fear, but a child-like love and willing mind. All which were common also to believers under the law. But, under the new testament, the liberty of Christians is further enlarged, in their freedom from the yoke of the ceremonial law, to which the Jewish Church was subjected; and in greater boldness of access to the throne of grace, and in fuller communications of the free Spirit of God, than believers under the law did ordinarily partake of.

“God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are in any thing contrary to His Word; or beside it, in matters of faith or worship. So that, to believe such doctrines, or to obey such commands, out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience: and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also.

“They who, upon pretence of Christian liberty, do practice any sin, or cherish any lust, do thereby destroy the end of Christian liberty, which is, that being delivered out of the hands of our enemies, we might serve the Lord without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him, all the days of our life.

“And because the powers which God hath ordained, and the liberty which Christ hath purchased, are not intended by God to destroy, but mutually to uphold and preserve one another; they who, upon pretence of Christian liberty, shall oppose any lawful power, or the lawful exercise of it, whether it be civil or ecclesiastical, resist the ordinance of God. And, for their publishing of such opinions, or maintaining of such practices, as are contrary to the light of nature, or to the known principles of Christianity, whether concerning faith, worship or conversation; or, to the power of godliness; or, such erroneous opinions or practices, as either in their own nature, or in the manner of publishing or maintaining them, are destructive to the external peace and order which Christ hath established in the Church, they may lawfully be called to account, and proceeded against by the censures of the Church.”

This statement has, as we shall see this week and next, tremendous importance in the history of the Western world. Its importance, in fact, cannot be overstated. It has helped reform a whole world, but it helped to make possible the right of the individual as against the power of the state or the church, to stand under God in terms of liberty of conscience. Unfortunately, because we no longer have the faith and the conviction, which undergirded that confession, we are losing its victory. The modern church and state are hostile to Christian liberty and are working to destroy it.

Some years ago, in the mid-thirties as a matter of fact, a young man, now recently retired, whose name is known to some of you, Henry Corey{?}, presented himself before the board of the Presbyterian church for ordination, to go to China as a missionary. It was known that this young man did believe that the boards and agency to that church were infiltrated with modernists and socialists, and in the course of his examination which he passed with flying colors on all points of doctrine, his academic credentials were excellent, he was asked whether he would support the boards and agencies of the church. He replied, yes, he would support them insofar as they were true to the Bible, did not compel his conscience in any matter contrary to the word of God. This answer did not please the presbyter, and he was asked to support the boards regardless of what they did. When he refused to make any such blind promise, they refused him ordination. As a matter of fact, as matters then proceeded, the presbytery and then the general assembly wound up declaring that where scripture was concerned, you could believe as you pleased, but where the church was concerned, you had to do and to believe what the church directed or else. Now this, of course, is precisely what our Lord said with regard to the Pharisees, that they had substituted the commandments of men, their own commandments, for the teaching of God.

However, there was no contradiction involved in their attitude. They were fulfilling what our Lord, long before, had declared, that no man can serve two masters. Either he will love and serve the one or hate the other, or he will hate the one and serve the other, and very clearly today, the churches are requiring increasingly, radical and total commitment to their policies and refusing to permit any deviation therein, while allowing total latitude where scripture is concerned. It is ironic that, just a few years ago, one of the leading modernists in that same church was kicked out. Why? He protested over the plan to raze the church to the ground and rebuild it on the grounds which were true, that the old structure represented a very important historical monument. It was a beautiful structure. It had an important part in the history of that state, and it should be retained as some kind of monument, and because he fought them and refused to give in, he was kicked out. The commandments of men as binding. The word of God as nothing.

If God is our ultimate and absolute authority, then God is the source of our liberties, of our liberty of conscience, of our civil liberty, of our religious liberty, of every kind of liberty. If God is our ultimate authority, then we are free only insofar as God, through his word, gives us freedom in an area, and we are found insofar as God binds us. Now, this gives us a great deal of assurance, because we have an unchanging word of God. It tells us wherein we are free, and it tells us wherein we are bound and we have sure guidelines which do not change from year to year, and we know that we have freedom in terms of the word of God, in our homes, in our property, in our calling, in our conscience. Thus, if the state or man is our ultimate authority, then we are only free insofar as the state chooses to allow us to be free, and we are bound insofar as the state chooses to bind us, and when the state changes the guidelines continually, what freedom to you have? And if the state says it is ultimate, which in effect means that it is God, then the implication of it very clearly is that you cannot criticize the state, and in every country in the world today, the growing implication is that criticism of the state is progressively made more difficult, and the freedom of man is more and more restricted. The state becomes the keeper of our conscience. It becomes our doctrine{?}

Now, of course, from the Old Testament, no country in Antiquity had any idea of liberty, of liberty of man apart from the state or in separation from the state. This was unthinkable. I know that many textbooks speak of Greece as having been a place of liberty, Athens in particular, but this is ridicules when anyone studies the history of Athens. For one thing, Athens, although a sizable community, had 5,000 free men living as lords of the slave state, so that the majority of the people, the overwhelming majority, were slaves held under control by a small minority. It is interesting that one of the requirements was that there be no distinguishing garment of a slave, because if the slaves ever realized how they were overwhelmingly, many, many, many times over, in the majority, in a matter of seconds they could have taken over Athens, and so they had to be dressed like everyone else. There was no liberty of conscience, and we see it in every historical incident in the history of Greece.

And yet, in Israel, when we turn to the scripture, we find over and over again kings, good and bad alike, being corrected in terms of, “Thus saith the Lord.” The prophet Nathan confronts David and says, “Thou art the man,” so that at every point in the history of Israel, we find that however wicked the king, they recognized still the voice of the prophet. There was a word that was hard in the word of the king. There was an authority above the authority of men and nations. This is why conflict between Christianity and Rome, between Christ and Caesar, was inescapable. The whole idea of the Roman Empire, like every state in Antiquity, was simply that religion as a part of the Department of the Public Works of the state, its purpose is to maintain morale. Every religion can be approved if it applies for a license. Otherwise, it is illegal, and if it applies for a license, the primary thing is that it recognizes the superiority of the state in the person of Caesar or the emperor, to whatever gods they may worship. So, if they only offer incense at the statue of the emperor, they are free to go and practice their religion, because then their Christ or whatever god they may worship is recognized as being subordinate to Caesar. The whole problem in the persecution of the church was not that Rome was unwilling to recognize Christianity, but that Christianity was unwilling to submit to licensing, to acknowledge that Caesar was above Christ.

The battle did not end when Rome fell, or when Constantine before that recognized Christianity, because the church had to wage a long battle for centuries to establish itself as an independent realm under God, to assert the fact that the state was not prior to the church, but that both were alike under God.

The third phase of the battle began with the Puritans{?}. William Perkin, the Elizabethan Puritan, devout in terms of the thinking of John Calvin, a thorough doctrine of the liberty of conscience, each area of life, a separate law sphere under God. The state as the ministry of justice. The church as the ministry of grace. The family as God’s sphere for the life of man. The vocation of man, the economic sphere, still is separate and neither under church nor state. The school is still another sphere, separate but interdependent. Neither church, nor state, nor any other area controlling the various spheres of life, with God’s authority limiting all human authority. It was in terms of this faith developed out of scripture that we gained the freedoms we’ve had in the modern world, but we are not in the fourth faith.

As Christian faith has waned, the state has taken over the powers of God in every realm. The issue of state as a source{?}. If our authority is derived from the state, our only possible view of life is that the state is God walking on early, to cite Hegel, and therefore, what the state says is absolute in any area. The state has the right to take rights, whether you are innocent or guilt, and of course, the abortion case does establish now the right of the state by legislation at any time, to take innocent life. We do have, therefore, capital punishment now, for innocent life, at the will of the state. If our authority is man, then we are logically anarchists, and what the individual man does is beyond criticism. Jean Paul Sartre, as an existentialist, has maintained that there is no difference between a man who is a leader of nations and a man who is an alcoholic. Each is doing his own thing, and there is no law beyond the individual to judge the individual. In fact, he goes so far as to say the alcoholic may be the superior man, because he is really doing his own thing whereas the leader of nations is looking over his shoulder at what the people want, so he is not entirely doing his own thing and is inferior as a result. He has not been fully liberated. But if our authority is of God, then and then only can we have a society in which there is true liberty.

With this in mind now, the historical situation, we can see the significance of our texts. Now since we are discussing Christian liberty, perhaps it seems strange that the text begins, “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him (God) for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well.” We’re talking about Christian liberty, but this is a text about obedience. As a matter of face, what St. Peter says here is familiar. We get it in Romans 13. We get it in longer or shorter form in most of the epistles. So that some people say, “The big emphasis therefore, in the epistles is obey the rulers.” Nothing could be further from the truth and yet, having at the same time, a form of the truth. Why was it necessary for the epistles, over and over again, to stress as our text does here, obedience? For the simple reason that because the gospel declared there is a higher authority and a higher law; the law of God, and because what the apostles preached wherever they went, Greece, Rome, Partheus, Egypt, was that Jesus Christ is Lord and savior. It had far-reaching implications.

Now to us, because we have taken the words for granted, when we say Christ, it doesn’t mean much. It can be rendered as Jesus Messiah, or Jesus Christ, depending on which language we derive the word from, because Messiah and Christ are the identical, same words, both a translation of what the scriptures are telling us about Jesus. What does it mean when we say Jesus Christ? Why was that so radical a statement for anyone to make that he believe in Jesus Christ? To say Christ was to say that he was king, absolute Lord, and when the Christians confessed Jesus Christ as Lord and savior, they said Jesus, king and God, savior, because Lord, “curios,” as the article, meant God. Christ meant king, the anointed one, the anointed world king. Now, consider what that meant. It meant that this man who, up until now, had looked upon Caesar as his god and king, suddenly had another god and king, and it mean immediately that every official in the Roman Empire was alerted, and we know because, almost at once, we have a letter from Pliny to the Emperor which has survived, and there is no question that this was one of any number of requests that went out to provincial governors all over the Empire, asking about these Christians. What’s this new subversive group that has another king and god than Caesar? Give us a report on it, and Pliny filed a report which we still have a surviving copy of, about these Christians, this subversive group with another king and god.

Now, the immediate implication for every person, whether he was a philosopher, an official, or a simple person off the streets who had accepted Christ as king and God, or Emperor, world king and God was. I now serve someone else other than Caesar, and so the epistles over and over again stress obedience, because their whole point is, we are not revolutionists. We change the world not by revolution. That changes nothing, but by the regenerating power of God through Christ. Indeed, he is Christ and Lord, King and God, but we obey governors, for so is the will of God, “that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men.” What does that mean? Well, now it should be plain to you. All these people are accusing you of being revolutionists, of being subversives, of refusing to obey any authority except that of your king, of being a nation within a nation, and that was the charge, an Empire within the state, and we are that, the Christians accepted that, so that the Latin phrase which describes empire within an empire was the name for the people of God, but we are to render obedience as unto the Lord, for the Lord’s sake, “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake.” The word ordinance is very interesting. It can also be translated as, “To every creation of man, or to every human creation,” but the word that is rendered ordinance, or creation is, in the Greek, a word that, with this exception, is always applied to the work of God. This is the only time when it does not refer to something that God has created.

Now, there is a subtle distinction here in the meaning of the word. What St. Peter does not say is submit to every law that men may pass, for the Lord’s sake, but to submit to every ordinance, or order of creation, or creation of man, and the implication, in terms of the technical use of the word, refers to things which yet man has done, man has a part in, but which are also areas of God’s ordering. In other words, it refers to the areas of authority, such as state, schools, vocation, family, areas which are God-given areas of life, but which are still areas that man has state{?}. So, we are to be obedient in this areas, for the Lord’s sake, because God has a purpose in these things and we are not to destroy these orders or ordinances, or areas of creation, but to work through them obediently, recognizing God’s purpose for them, and that through regeneration, we have been changed, and through regeneration, other men are to be changed, and then the world is transformed. With well-doing, this is the will of God, and Peter goes on to say that freedom is not to be used as a cloak of maliciousness, that is, a curtain for {?}, but as servants of God, for this is, the 19th verse, thankworthy. This is a mark of grace. The word thankworthy can also be rendered “grace,” literally. This is grace. “If a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully.”

Therefore, honor the king. Honor Caesar, but this word that is used, a very important word, “to show respect for,” which should have pleased, of course, any government official who read these doctrines {?} that these subversives were passing around, is also used in the same verse, “Honour all men.” In other words, we, as Christians are not destroyers. We do not use our liberty as a curtain for vice, as a means of killing, of destroying, of breaking down law and order. We honor a king which is what is required, and we give the same honor of all men in their just and legitimate authority, dignity, property, possessions, and we expect the same kind of liberty in our case{?}.

Thus, we have here a very remarkable statement, a doctrine of obedience because there is a doctrine of liberty. Man are not under men, but under God, that we honor men as a right under God, and God is their judge, and God is their executioner if need be, and not we. Obedience, in other words, for the Lord’s sake, because both our liberty and a requirement that we obey comes from God, but we are also, by the same token, required to obey God rather than men in critical areas. Where men require us to sin, we cannot obey them.

Christian liberty, therefore, is basic to any culture. If it perishes, slavery returns, and the return of slavery all over the world in our time is precisely because the doctrine of Christian liberty has been forgotten as men have lost faith. Liberty will return as the faith returns, and because God is Lord, we know what the future shall be{?}. He shall prevail, and the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly father, who of thy grace and mercy hast called us to be thy people, and hast established us in thy liberty. We thank thee, our Father, that thou art he who dost prevail, and in this confidence we move today and tomorrow, mindful of whatever man may plan, thou art he who dost order and govern in and through all things. Make us ever bold and confident in thy affairs, and bless us in thy service, and bless us in victory. In Jesus name. Amen.

We have time for just a very few questions. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. What was the point, I don’t quite get what your question is?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. I see your point. Now, this is in areas where we are not apt to sin. In other words, if the state should require that we commit acts that are sinful, as for example, when the Persian Empire required certain acts of immorality of Christians within the Empire, in fact, required incest, to destroy their character, saying, “You do this or else,” they rebelled. They were duty-bound under God to rebel when they were ordered to commit sin to prove that they had no Christian scruples. On the other hand, when the state become oppressive and unjust, and overtaxes us, or gives us injustice in its court cases and legislation, in such cases, we do suffer, but in such cases we are not to take lawless means, that’s the point, but to take it patiently. This is acceptable, or this is grace with God. Yes?

[Audience] {?} said if {?} submit yourselves to the ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, and {?} I’ve heard some people say that, you know, if you have someone in authority, you don’t {?} you will do it and they don’t praise him to do well {?} not really {?} that their authority is not true like the economy {?}, they punish people who do well and they praise people {?} authority.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now, the state is required by God to be a ministry of justice, and the problem is what happens when a state becomes a very evil state as the Soviet Empire definitely gives us evidences of many states being. Well, very definitely, what we have to say is that the experience even within the Soviet Bloch where we have in Soviet Union, until Red China came along, the most depraved state in history, the greatest mass murderer of men. No one in Antiquity ever killed more innocent men than the Soviet Union has killed, and that what you have to recognize is this: that even with that kind of evil there, directed against Christians, and against certain classes of people; middle class, upper class, the experience has been that without some kind of justice, the state collapses, so that it has become imperative for the Soviet Union at one and the same time that it is perpetrating all this injustice, to make sure that you have some measure of peace and security in spite of the fact that all this prevails. In other words, they have to take strong measures against thieves. They have to take strong measures against alcoholics who disturb the peace in the apartment building.

It was very interesting, there was a study recently here in this country made primarily with reference to New York and one or two major eastern cities, and the study was made by men who were definitely neither Christian nor conservative, but the interesting thing they said was that urban life reaches a point of breakdown and collapse; productivity, everything, declines, when people are no longer safe on their own street or in their own home, when they feel uneasy, and he said as if that uneasiness about living on your own premises, or on your own street, or being away from your own home, what will you find when you come home, begins to increase, everything in the culture begins to decline, that the one thing that people cannot take is feeling insecure in that respect, and so they felt that one of the most urgent problems today was to promote that kind of thing. Of course, they never use the dirty words, law and order, because these were not conservatives, but that’s what they were saying, and that this was the critical problem in some of the cities already, reaching the danger point, and so they felt they had to give major attention to this. Well, this same problem has confronted and has become a problem in the Soviet Union and they’re desperately concerned to remedy it. This is why, in the last year, they virtually shut down all bars in the Soviet Union. They limited the amount of liquor you could get. They’re cracking down rather brutally on {?} thieves and young hoodlums, of which they have a lot. Why? Because production is collapsing. You’ve got to maintain law and order to a degree or your society collapses utterly, and so the Soviet Union, who couldn’t care less about the welfare of the common man has a problem because if they don’t have security in their homes, they’re cramped in these apartments in small spaces, and if their hallways in these apartments are not safe, or drunks make all kinds of racket so that a worker cannot sleep, production collapses and they’re production rates or man-hours is declining. So, believe me, law and order has become a major passion with them. “Let’s crack down on these hoodlums. Let’s have some law and order.” So, the demand for law and order is not just by conservatives in the United States. It’s by the government now in the Soviet Union, and it’s also on the part of these liberal sociologists who recognize what it does in some of these cities.

In other words, for its own survival, the state ultimately has to say we cannot allow law and order to go below a certain level, because, as scripture says, they are for the punishment of evildoers, and “for the praise of them that do well.” If you destroy that, the culture collapses, and this is why, you see, Rome fell. Now, this is one of the very interesting things about the fall of Rome. Long before Rome fell, the Roman government had left Rome, and it left Rome because it was no longer safe, at the hands of the Roman mob, the welfare recipients that it had created, and so the Roman government transferred to Milan, and then it transferred to various other capitals, and it finally wound up at Ravenna, a small town, when Rome fell, and because life had deteriorated to that point in the big cities, Rome didn’t fall because of battles. It fell because no longer was there anyone who felt it was worth defending, and so handfuls of tribes that could have been defeated by any Roman legionnaires just wandered in and took the city, took the entire Empire. Nobody felt it was worth defending. They no longer had law and order in any community to the point where, since the state no longer existed to provide the basic function of the state, people didn’t bother to defend it. So, there was no battle which you could point to and say, “Here, the Roman armies lost.”

William Carroll Bark{?}, the historian, said that tens of millions as against at most a few ten thousands, the barbarians in little bands, and no one to defend the tens of millions. No one felt there was anything worth defending. That’s the thing. For its own survival, there is a point beyond which a state cannot go without committing suicide. This is the way life is. So, God says that this is their function. They’re going to maintain it to some degree. There was a book written not too long ago by someone, as a dissertation, on the Moscow courts, and it was very interesting. The young graduate student who got his PhD as a result of that, has gone back and done further work. He started as quite an admirer of the Soviet Union, but now they’ve kicked him out and if he ever returns he goes into a slave camp, he was just {?} recently. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Very good illustration. Yes. But, you see, this is the way it is. Even now, today, the courts of Moscow are loaded with these cases, law and order cases, and the judges are told to crack down. Well, we’re really past time. Just, a quick . . .

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, you see, the whole purpose of Calvin in Geneva, that’s a big question, but in my Politics of Guilt and Pity, I have a chapter on Calvin in Geneva that goes into some of these questions.

[Audience] Politics{?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. But basically, you see, the whole point there was there was a society that was in collapse, and they called in Calvin as a kind of social planner, an engineer, to chart some kind of course to recover social order because Geneva was an important commercial center, and with collapse confronting them, they were not going to be able to function. So, let’s call in somebody who can provide some law and order. They didn’t agree with Calvin. They didn’t like what he was suggesting. They never made him a citizen of Geneva until they knew he was dying for sure, and then they gave him citizenship, but the whole point was, ”Much as we dislike what this man represents, it’s the only way we’re going to get any kind of law and order so that we can function, and we have a great deal of investment, we’re a powerful commercial center, and yet we’re going to lose everything because of total breakdown.”

Well, 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