The Religion of Humanism
Humanism and the Law
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Humanism
Genre: Speech
Lesson: 4
Track: 257
Dictation Name: RR137B4
Date: 1960s-1970s
[Hear now] the Word of God as it is given to us in Isaiah 8:20. Our subject is “Humanism and the Law.”
[Isaiah 8:20] “ To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.”
We have seen this week that the basic document or charter of Humanism is Genesis 3:1-5, man as his own god, knowing (or choosing or determining for himself) what constitutes good and evil. Last night we saw that the philosopher Walter Kaufmann has said that this indeed is the first principle of Humanism. He has declared that a Humanistic society must be beyond good and evil, beyond guilt and justice, that to hold to ideas of good and evil, guilt and justice over man, whereby man is judged is to be still a Christian, and so we must abandon all such thinking, he holds, abandon all judgment in society, all ideas of justice, of right and wrong so that we have a society indeed in which because God the Lord is not King over men, every man does that which is right in his own eyes. This is the goal of Humanism, by their own declarations.
It means an anti-law society, a society beyond law, beyond morality. It is important for us therefore as Christians to understand what law means. And so this evening I shall be teaching, rather than preaching. In a sense I shall treat you as though you were a class in Jurisprudence 1 or an Introduction to Law. Law is an inescapable aspect of religion at the very heart of it. A religion without law is a dead or dying religion, a relic of the past.
When any anthropologist studies any culture, the two basic ways toward understanding what the religion of that culture is, are law and education. What faith informs the law and the education of that culture? Unhappily, if we examine our culture today, we find our laws increasingly being subverted as far as their biblical aspect is concerned, and more and more made Humanistic. Again, our education, our Statist education is uniformly and wholeheartedly given over to Humanism so that an observer, studying our society, would have to say here is a culture which is more than 50%, perhaps three-fourths taken over by Humanism, one in which Christianity may soon become only a memory.
As we turn to the dictionary definition of laws, we begin our little examination of law, we find that the two primary, the two basic definitions of law that the dictionary gives us are:
1. Law is the binding practice of a community. Its obligatory rules of conduct required by its basic or sovereign authority which in higher societies is the State.
2. Law is the divine commandment or revelation of the Will of God or the whole body of God’s commandments or revelations. It is the Will of God.
Now, modern humanistic scholars tell us that the second definition is the earlier and primitive one, that law originally was seen as the Word of God, as the revelation of God, but as society has evolved and civilization has become more and more progressive, we have reached to what the dictionary calls “the higher state,” the higher society level in which the State, as God on earth, declares what law is.
But can you have a Christian society unless you believe that the Word of God in its entirety is the Law-Word of God, binding upon man?
Now, I said I was going to act as though you were a class in jurisprudence. What kinds of law are there? Well, if you classify law, you can classify law as
Humanistic Law
Buddhist Law
Islamic Law
Shinto Law
…. and so on, in terms of the various religions.
But if you go through all these religions and their laws, you can also reclassify them in terms of four broad classifications.
The first, which is exclusively biblical is laws governed by the principle of restitution; restitution. This of course is fundamental to scripture. Take that away from scripture and you destroy the Doctrine of the Atonement because what our Lord did on the cross was to make restitution to God for the sins of His people. Moreover, in the relationship between man and man, God says this same principle that my Son sets forth on the cross is applicable among you. There must be restitution. He who steals must restore double to four-fold or five-fold. And in every aspect of the law, it is this principle of restitution which prevails. It is basic to the system of salvation, which scripture sets forth. That’s one kind of law: restitution.
The second type of law is law which is aimed at reformation. To save a man through reforming him by law; that’s why many of our prisons are called reformatories. The whole idea, whether it is by reformation through meditation, the old idea in a cell, like a monk, or reformation through psychiatric counseling or psychological treatments, is a plan of salvation, of regeneration, which is contrary to scripture, a salvation by works of man, so that the type of law we have, which aims at reformation by law is anti-scriptural.
But there is a third type of law which we have on all sides increasingly in the last 50 years, regulation—regulatory laws; so that by controlling man with a multitude of regulations, we’re going to keep him from straying, we’re going to keep everybody on the right path, and eliminate sin. And of course, the ones who feel the full weight of this type of law, which is a plan of salvation, are the law-abiding people, those who are godly, because instead of punishing the evil businessman or the evil citizen, it regulates all of them. So that law’s regulation gives us an anti-biblical system of law.
The fourth type of law is redistribution, and of course the Marxists are great on this—salvation by redistribution and we increasingly are getting this, are we not, taking from the haves, and the haves now are most of us, according to the government, and giving to the have-nots all over the world; salvation again, by works of law.
Do you see the implications of this? Four types of law, three of them work against our faith, because if you believe in law as reformation, law as regulation, law as redistribution, you are holding to a doctrine of salvation by works! But if you believe in the biblical principle of law, law as restitution, then you’re saying that God’s program, as set forth in the cross is the pattern for all of society. Then instead of punishing the godly, who, if robbed doesn’t get his money back, and then pays taxes to support a man in prison, and the more modern our prisons get, the more they look like country clubs (in California, we have some where they have swimming pools, tennis courts, a color T.V. in their cells, and to make sure than they are properly treated, they fly them—with their girlfriends or their wives as the case may be—to Catalina for a little holiday, to assure them that society really is interested in them and trying to save them. I’ve never made it to Catalina yet. I’ve been too busy supporting a lot of convicts as they fly there). But you see what this means—if you deny the biblical pattern of law, you create a social order in which an anti-Christian law structure works to destroy the Word of God and to destroy the godly people by supporting a legal system which is anti-God and against also the people of God.
Now how did we get in this pickle? There was a time when it was taken for granted that a Christian was one who believed in the Biblical Law. When the Puritans, for example, regarded it as something to be working for, to establish a Christian order in which the Word of God was the law book, when this country, up until the 1850s and 60s, judges and juries decided cases out of the Bible. What changed all that? Well it disappeared in Europe long before it disappeared here, but one of the first great blows against Biblical Law came with the Enlightenment, and the triumph of Deism and Rationalism and Agnosticism. Pierre Bayle, the Enlightenment thinker, was the first to set forth most clearly the principles of Antinomianism, this anti-law position. He said in effect that religion represents mere belief and superstition. He wasn’t as bold as that, but the successors made it that explicit. But law and morality are products instead, of reason, so that, he said, there is no connection between morality and law, and religion. And he said law and morality are never derived from any religious faith, but only from the right use of reason.
Now that was something new in civilization. The sad fact is that the Enlightenment figures made that the respectable opinion of educated men. It meant also, as they pushed the implications, that right reason determines law and morality through the State because the State should be the realm of reason. And the philosopher kings should set forth law and morality through the State. Later as they set aside kings, they said it was the ruling elite who were to be a scientific intellectual group, the Marxists said the dictatorship of the proletariat. But whatever the form, this Enlightenment principle separated law and morality from religion so that religion no longer had anything to do with law and morality.
Second, the first religious group that bought this was the new movement which began in Germany, Pietism. Pietism agreed with the Enlightenment principle and it aid that religion is experience more than the revelation of God’s Law-Word. The Pietists became radically Antinomian. The sad fact is that our church history textbooks do not tell us of the radical Antinomianism and immorality, including sexual immorality that marked those early Pietists.
John Wesley, when he took it over, had to fight that in his own ranks. He had to deal very summarily with one leader in his own circle who insisted that the biblical laws with regard to sex were done away with by the cross. In fact, in the Great Awakening, Edwards and others had to deal with the same impulse, a product of Pietism, so that Pietism furthered this Enlightenment separation of law and morality from religion and gave it to reason, and to the State.
Then third, a major factor that contributed to this was the rise of Arminianism or Neothomism, which led to the break-down of law and morality even as it did under Thomism in the late Middle Ages. Why did it do so? Let me read a quotation to you from a man who was one of the best men in his own circle, a very earnest and devout man, one of the last of the old evangelical Methodist bishops in the Northern church, Bishop Francis Wesley Warren, who died in 1932. In a very well-written and sometimes moving book on the Lord’s Supper he wrote (the book was written in 1924) “In the Old Covenant, God by miracles and wonders tried to show forth his love and to make the people trust and obey Him. That method failed. In the New Covenant, the great contrast is that to prove His love, Christ died. Jesus shed His own blood and said, I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” Now, as Warren went on to say, he really believed Jesus’ method was going to work but he had no way of knowing that it would. So for two-thirds of the history of this world he believed God had been a failure, he had struck out. And now in the last third, up to bat again in the person of His Son, he hoped He would not strike out, but he had no way of knowing that He would not, because for him, God is not sovereign.
Now, such a god as Warren had and others like him in the Arminian camp (I’m smiling because I’m Armenian and I didn’t mean to say Armenian, I should have said Arminian; there’s a world of difference between the two!), such a god can give no law. In fact, he cannot give any kind of binding word, because not being sovereign, and being a failure most of history, what can he say that is really binding? His word is an uncertain word. From such a god, no law can go forth.
You see, the power to create and to ordain laws is an attribute of sovereignty, of divinity. And if we say the State can make laws, and we say the State is god, but if we say instead the State is, as Paul says, a diaconate, a ministry, its function is to administer an already-given law by God. What is the meaning of this pulpit? A pulpit in a church has a Bible on it so that when a man speaks in the Church of Jesus Christ, he speaks of that word. He is not a priest speaking an independent word, because Jesus Christ is the only priest, and all priests before Him were substitutes, stand-ins, until He appeared, so that their garment was prescribed, where they could go in the temple was prescribed. Their every step was prescribed because they [tape blip!] acting as stand-ins until the True Priest appeared.
Now, we are a ministry, administering His Word, having no independent authority, and the State is called a ministry, ministers of God—deacons, literally, because they too have according to scripture, no independent law word. It is the Word of God they must set forth. It is the only consonant law word with a Christian state which believes in the atonement, a principle of restitution. For to go to other kinds of laws, law’s reformation, law’s regulation, law’s redistribution is to believe in another plan of salvation so that the Antinomians are pointing us to another plan of salvation implicitly whether they know it or not. Antinomianism is very much with us.
One of my family members came to me a week ago, very much upset. He has a new position. He has a very prominent and powerful boss over him who runs, who owns the company. The man claims to be a born-again preacher—ah, Christian, who believes the Bible from cover to cover. He has a Bible on his desk in his executive suite and he witnesses to everyone who comes in. He has a Bible in his car so that when he’s driving with somebody, he will open it and shove it at them and witness to them. And he has a pocket testament in his pocket. He puts a lot of money into various gospel causes. He plans himself in two years to go on radio and television. He’s an able speaker and he believes he’s going to be bigger than Billy Graham. Those are his words.
But it’s his Antinomianism that’s driving this relative of mine up the wall. For one thing, he and his soul-sister are living together without marriage. Why? He believes that we’re in the end times, and I Corinthians 7 says that those who marry have too much care for their wives and the affairs of their family so this way they’re going to get around it. Besides, we’re not under the Law and marriage was a part of the Law. Is that godly? Now in terms of Antinomianism, in terms of those who oppose biblical law believe, he is logical; but not godly. He is a son of the Enlightenment, of Bayle, not of the Lord.
Hagel, of course, developed this whole doctrine to its logical end, the State as God walking on earth, the visible, sovereign, the incarnation of the divine in history, therefore the source of law and of morality. But for us who hold to the Word of God, law and morality are inseparable from the Word of God. They are expressions of God’s requirement of righteousness which is another word in scripture for justice and of holiness. Law is simply enacted morality, God’s requirement of us.
The division of biblical law into civil and moral is artificial and modern. It has no roots in the Bible. When does ‘Thou shalt not kill” cease to be a moral law and become only a civil law? Such distinctions are absurd and ridiculous. God in scripture sees man, church, state, schools, the arts, the sciences, all things as under Him and under His Word.
God calls civil magistrates His ministers or servants. He does not surrender authority or law-making or legislative power to any agency under the sun. And what the state is called upon to implement is God’s Word, not man’s word. The Old Testament prophets denounced kings as apostates and idolaters for assuming it was their word rather than the Lord’s that governs men and nations. But Humanism, with its worship of man, demands that man be free to rule himself by his own law word. Satan in Genesis 3:5 says that God’s Law is an oppressive law and man’s own law word is the key to morality and freedom. Humanism and Antinomianism cry out against our Lord, saying we will not have this man to rule over us. But the Word of the Lord is to the Law and to the testimony. If they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no truth in them.
Moreover, as we approach the problem of law, to think primarily in terms of the state and civil law and other such distinctions is to think in terms of this world rather than God’s Word. The Triune God speaks His entire Word to man in terms of His eternal kingdom. We are assured that of the increase of His government and peace, there shall be no end. And Paul is emphatic as he speaks of the righteousness which is by faith, that do we make void the law through faith? God forbid! Rather, we establish the Law.
Now, one of the reasons in our age why there is so much Antinomianism is because of Darwin. Why? If we believe that God created the heavens and the earth, and all things therein, the logical implication of that is that this is a universe of harmony of interests. That’s another way of saying that Romans 8:28 is true. Everything is created by God and all things work to His determined end, that even the wrath of man shall praise Him. And therefore, there is no conflict between God’s justice and God’s grace, between God’s Law and God’s mercy, God’s love and God’s hate. It all serves one purpose. But Darwin challenged that. Darwin said the universe is not the product of God’s sovereign decree, but of chance and variations and accidents so that it is a universe not with a harmony of interests, but with a total conflict of interests. The survival of the fittest, nature red in tooth and claw in endless conflict and therefore, because of that mercy and justice, love and law had to be in conflict. All things are in conflict. You see, Antinomianism rests on that presupposition.
But let’s look at scripture and see how Paul sees the harmony. Three verses, all of them identical except for their second half.
I Corinthians 7:19, “ Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God.”
Galatians 5:6, “For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love.”
Galatians 6:15, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.”
Now what has Paul done? He has repeated this same sentence three times (with a variation on this last part) to make it clear that all of those things he mentions are one and the same, to be a new creation in Christ is to be one who keeps the commandments of God, one in whom faith worketh by love. Paul sees no opposition in being born-again, in keeping God’s Law, in faith, nor in love. They’re all part of one fact. God’s workings, God’s regenerating power and grace in the life of man. We cannot separate these things, you see. It wrongly divides the Word of Truth. It surrenders to Humanism to drop any one of these.
Unhappily, it’s the Humanists today who too often show the strong faith, who declare that their works of law will manifest true love and lead to a new creation, but they are wrong. They show strong faith and it was their youth who a few years ago were crying out, “Hold the faith, baby!” But to all Antinomians in the church and out of the church we must say with James, show me thy faith without thy works and I will show thee my faith by my works. The regenerate show forth their salvation by their faith, by their love, by their works. And we must cry out today with the psalmist of old who declared it is time for Thee, Lord, to work, for they have made void Thy Law.
Let us pray.
Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, who of Thy sovereign grace has made us a new creation in Jesus Christ and hast written Thy Word, Thy Law upon the tables of our hearts and who has manifested Thy love unto us in Jesus Christ and Thy so great salvation. Make us mighty instruments of Thy kingdom, that we may show forth that we are a new creation in whom faith worketh by love, who in the keeping of Thy commandments, show forth the fruits of righteousness. Oh, Lord our God, undo the works of Humanism which for the past few centuries has done mightily the work of the tempter in the Garden. Grant that Thy true Church stand forth. Proclaim the whole counsel of Thy Word, delight in Thy Law, sing forth with Thy love and by faith go forth as more than conquerors in the name of Him who loved us and died for us to make us His elect nation. Bless us to this purpose we beseech Thee in Jesus’ name, amen.