Jurisprudence

Jurisprudence and Biblical Law Q&A

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 1 of 3

Track: 95

Dictation Name: RR150A1

Date: 1960’s-1970’s

[Announcer] Let us begin with a word of prayer. Lord we bless Thee this night in the name of Jesus Christ, we are rejoicing oh Lord for all of the teachers of the gospel that you’ve given us in your church, and we’re thankful for brother Rousas Rushdoony and for all that he’s contributed to American Christendom. And we ask Lord that you will bless his mind and words tonight, that his spirit will be a blessing to our spirit and that you will enable us to perceive the message which he has for us, and all that is true and Godly and wholesome. May we apply it to hearts in the power of the spirit. Lord give us a good time together and in the weeks to come as we think about his words, give us the wisdom to discern all that you would have us to do, and we are thanking you for this moment together. We are praising you Lord, we are thankful in Jesus Christ for your many provisions, in whose name we pray, Amen.

I’ve been telling you about Dr. Rousas Rushdoony and many of you know so much about him I will just say for those of you who know almost nothing about him, that he is of Armenian descent, his people are from Armenia which is in Turkey today, and also he has been writing on a number of Biblical subjects throughout the years; particularly Calvinistic philosophy and the subject of Biblical law and its particular relevance to American law. We are using one of his books for a textbook; the second textbook in this course is The Institutes of Biblical Law. Which means the principles, the foundational principles of Biblical law, and I’m just going to say finally that he is director of the Chalcedon study center in California. And brother Rushdoony we just turn it over to you now, and the Lord bless you.

[Rushdoony] To a great many people the subject of Biblical law seems to be a novelty that’s been introduced into the church in recent years. To some few it seems something that has always been there, and why the fuss? We can perhaps understand the situation that Biblical law stands today by turning for a moment to another question, the question of infallibility. Is the doctrine of infallibility a novelty in church history? Now there are scholars who insist that it is a very recent doctrine. In fact the first formulation of it was in the 1600’s when the Westminster confession began with a chapter on infallibility. A book on the subject was never written until the last half of the last century, and almost every statement, every study of the subject of infallibility and inerrancy comes from our own generation.

Now does that mean that the doctrine of infallibility and inerrancy is a novelty? There are scholars who maintain that it is. There are scholars who have written that neither Luther nor Calvin believed in infallibility and inerrancy, and it has been necessary for some to write defending those reformers at that point. The fact is only in the last century has infallibility and inerrancy been a problem. As a result throughout the centuries it was not necessary for the church to discuss the subject, and as a result very little and next to nothing was said on the subject. The only reason why years and generations in advance of the rest of church the Westminster confession dealt with the subject of infallibility in its first chapter, was that at the moment there was an issue of infallibility within Britain. And the issue was this, who provided the infallible word? Was it the king of England who claimed divine right, or was it the word of God? And so it was the Westminster confession began by a declaration concerning scripture. Then the matter receded into the background. Only in the last century has it become a live issue. As a result in our generation more is written on the subject of infallibility then throughout all the previous centuries of Christian history. But this does not mean that the doctrine was dead all that time. It was there, but it was taken for granted and therefore not a lively subject of debate.

Now the same is true of the doctrine of Biblical law. Throughout the centuries Biblical law by and large was regarded as basic to human society. As a matter of fact in the first half of the last century cases were decided in this country by juries, not by statues, but out of the Bible. And the judge would quote passages of scripture out of the Bible. Now statute law was beginning to come in but it did not really begin to dominate the situation until after 1860. This is not to say it was a perfect situation, as a matter of fact the departure from Biblical law began in the colonial period in the south over a very interesting issue. In the Bible slavery exists, but on an entirely different basis than anything we have known in the modern world. In the Bible slavery is a voluntary thing, and hence no runaway slave could ever be captured or taken back, unless it was slaver for debt. Moreover if a foreigner were a slave, the minute he accepted the faith he had to be set free.

Very early in the colonial period Africans who were brought here learned to read and write, came to know the scriptures, accepted the faith and sued for their freedom. After a few such cases some of the Southern states, beginning I believe in Virgin, decided they would forget about Biblical law at that point. It was the first departure. But Biblical law was basic in varying degrees to this country for a long time.

Now, let’s stop for a moment to discuss the meaning of law. We take law for granted; we don’t analyze what it is. But the ability to make law is an attribute of sovereignty and deity. The God of any system of thought is the lawmaker thereof. This is why in various humanistic schools today, most of your law schools; they will tell you very frankly that when man began to assert his own sovereignty than man began to develop his own laws, and to replace Biblical law with state law. Law is an attribute of divinity and sovereignty. The lawmaker in any system of thought is the God and the sovereign thereof. Moreover wherever you have law, you have religion. The two are inseparable. All law is simply enacted morality, and morality is simply a branch of theology, or of religion.

All laws are simply enacted morality, and morality is an aspect of religion. As a result every system of laws is an establishment of religion. The religion can be Christian or Humanism, it can be Buddhist, or Islamic, or Shinto, or Hindu, each will have its own characteristic system of laws. Law can never be neutral. Law always represents a perspective, a religious faith. The U.S. Supreme Court came face to face with that and had to wrestle with it in the last century in a series of cases between, about 1850 and 1890. The first case was the Mormon polygamy case, the Reynolds case. The Mormons argued that polygamy was necessary to them in terms of religious freedom. But the Supreme Court had to face this problem; if we give absolute freedom of religion to any and all religions then civil government disappears. Why? Because you have, for example, the Thuggees’ in India who practice human sacrifice and theft and murder as an aspect of their religion. You had at that time still a number of Indian tribes who practiced cannibalism right here in the Americas. Incidentally the very word “cannibal” comes from America. Originally it was “caribale” for the Caribbean Indian, and from Caribale it came to be corrupted to the present form “cannibal” and they went on down, the Supreme Court Justices did with every type of offense imaginable and they could pin-point some religious faith that required it. Absolute religious freedom then meant no law possible, total anarchy. And so beginning in that case they had to first say that religious liberty had to be limited. And little by little to indicate that there could be religious liberty only in so far as these other faiths did not violate common law Christianity. The laws of scripture, this was the norm. Not that there was a theological, or an ecclesiastical establishment, an establishment of a church in America, but an establishment of Christianity.

You can, and I believe should, separate church and state. You cannot separate religion and the state because every state is an establishment of a religion, because every state is a law structure and it has to choose which religion is going to be the foundation of its law. Today we are in the midst of a battle, a warfare, a religious warfare to determine which religion will inform the laws of the United States. You have a humanistic establishment which is determined to make humanism the religious establishment of this country. It has to public schools in its possession, it controls many of the courts and it seeks to control the entire country with a humanistic establishment. And as a result there is a tremendous battle underway.

Three years ago this month I was at the University of Notre Dame Law School I believe the Reverend Alan Grover was there at the time, and they were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of one of the more famous cases in American law, Peirce versus Society of Sisters. As a result the lecturers there were to speak on the subject of the law and Christian education, Christian schools. The summation that evening for this very important conference, the papers of it are now published my talk was entitled The State as an Establishment of Religion, the summation in the evening was to have been given by a Supreme Court justice from Washington. The minute he found out what the subject of the days discussions was he cancelled out. Why? Because, he said “We expect for the next decade the major type of case confronting this court to be cases involving Christian schools.” Now that was in 1976 before these cases really began to pop anywhere except in Ohio, and yet those judges knew what was going to happen, why? Because there was a clash of two religions, humanism determined to destroy Christianity; and Christianity fighting to survive and recapture this country, coming together head on. Now this is why Biblical law is so important.

Now let’s look at the law just briefly, as though this were a class in jurisprudence one, and you’re all budding lawyers; which you all should be incidentally because theology is the basic discipline historically for law. You can never understand what law is about until you are first disciplined in theology, and once theologians were all first of all lawyers, which was a very healthy tradition. Now originally Biblical law in varying degrees governed all the nations of Europe with some conflict from royal law. Rulers insisting that their law had priority, and continual conflicts over that. In the English speaking countries a particular type of law began to develop and become prominent, common law, common law. Now common law is a mixture of custom and tradition and Biblical law, common law is not codified. Common law depends on a general sense of equity. A common law judge is not bound by a statue. A common law judge can say “this is evil and I don’t care what the statutes says, I rule so and so.” But little by little another tradition beginning with royal law and culminating in the French Revolution came into being, the civil law tradition, the civil law tradition. In the civil law tradition all law had to be codified. If the statue did not cover precisely the provisions of the offense then the man went free. There are cases in civil law states where men have committed murder and they could not be punished because of the way the statute was formulated, their particular crime and the form of it, the nature of it, was not covered.

This is why in the civil law traditions, as someone has pointed out very humorously, you do not say to someone “I give you an orange” you say “I, the party of the first part give to you, the party of the second part, this orange which can be so described and all the appurtenances thereof, the rind, the seeds, the pulp and so on.” And you take a paragraph to describe what you’re doing, because in civil law you have to cover every possible contingency or else there’s a loophole that invalidates it.

Now the civil law tradition governs Europe. There the judge is a flunky, he has to interpret, he’s a civil service man, he has to interpret the law very rigidly in terms of the statutes, and he’s not a very important person and he is usually a bureaucratic mentality. Let me say that in the United States the common law tradition prevails in most places to a degree, but 48 of the states and the federal government are civil law orders. The only two states that are common law states are New York and California. As a result in those states the judges can sometimes give rather slashing decisions. They can cut through a lot of red tape. They can say “the law says so and so but I’m not going to be bound by that because it isn’t just.” Now sometimes these common law judges will be bound by something that is a humanistic sense of justice, other cases by a Christian sense. But they are not bound by the statute. Equity prevails in their thinking.

Then finally we have another form of law, socialistic law. Civil law says that it’s against as the source of the law, the state is the source of the law. That’s a fundamental premise of civil law. Civil law is positivistic it denies systematically and methodically that law comes from God. It says “Law comes from the state, it is enacted by man.” As chief justice Fred Benson in the late forties or early fifties “The only absolute is that there is no absolutes in law.” In other words the law is what man chooses to make it be. In England Sir Hartley Shawcross, attorney general of England in nineteen forty seven or forty-eight told parliament “Parliament can decree what it pleases. If parliament chooses that all blue eyed babies be executed at birth parliament has the right to do so because there is no law above parliament.” Now do you see the religious implications of that? The civil law tradition very emphatically wages war against God. It says man is the lawmaker, man cannot be bound by any word of God, any law from God. And so the civil law tradition says “Law is the product of the state.”

But Socialist law goes further. Socialist law says “law is the product of the class.” So that in some societies law is the product of the upper class, the ruling class. Or law is the product of the ruling class and we are going to make law the product of the working class; and so socialist law says that law is always exclusively an instrument of class warfare; that there is no truth, nor justice to it beyond that fact.

Now, do you see our problem? We are in the midst of a legal war the world over. Civil law atheistic to the core at war with Christianity, saying emphatically that there can be no word of God that binds man; it must be the word of the state. And what’s the issue now in the conflict between the Christian schools and the internal revenue service? We have a man here whom you should hear sometime on this because he’s an expert in this field. The Reverend Alan Grover of the Christian schools of Ohio. The IRS says the Christian schools must conform to public policy. Public policy, well what does public policy mean? Well it could mean having homosexuals in the school two or three or five years down the line, or requiring that abortion counseling be given to the students, or whatever “public policy” dictates. Remember Sir Hartley Shawcross? We can kill all blue eyed, or black eyed, or brown eyed babies at birth; because there’s no law beyond the state and public policy must prevail.

Now how can a Christian live at peace with that? If he lives at peace with that he’s not going to live at peace with the Lord. And how can a Christian live at peace with socialist law which says “law is an instrument not of justice but of class warfare”? Can you live at peace with that? In a sense the socialist however are right. Law is an instrument of warfare, it always has been. It’s one of the basic instruments of warfare but in the site of God it is a warfare against sin and against injustice, and only God can define what that sin is and what that injustice is. Moreover law is a means of dominion. By means of law you say that “this shall not be so”, and therefore you say to a whole world that God blesses, this shall stand. Law thus is basic, basic to any society; law is basic to the Bible. In fact you make a serious mistake if you take the Bible and you say “well the law is in some portions of the books of Moses” no, no. The whole of scripture is the Word of God, and every word of God is binding so the whole of the Bible is God’s law word for us and his grace word for us because whenever God speaks to man it is grace, unless it be judgment. It’s all God’s law, all binding on man.

You know, let me digress for a moment, I get very impatient with people who say “the Bible is an inspiring book.” I don’t believe that for a moment. It’s an inspired book, not an inspiring book. Sometimes it’s a very upsetting, instead of inspiring because when you read it certainly hits you between the teeth, and it tells you what you are and what God requires of you. And God never stops making demands on you, if you read that book you’re always being hit by God and what He demands of you. It’s not an inspiring word it’s a command word. A command word, “this do and thou shalt live. Hear and obey.” And it threatens us. I don’t like being threatened, but when God does it I know He means business; and when God makes a promise I know He means business. You see law is basic to the scripture because it is the word of God, and when God speaks His word is binding; which is another way of saying it is law. So that even when God declares the way of Salvation that’s a law, it’s binding, and there is none other way so that a binding word is a law word.

Now let us stop for a moment now for questions before we go into things a little more deeply. Are there any questions at this point?

Yes?

[Audience member] I’m having a problem concerning the premise of separation of church and state. I don’t understand how you can make the separation.

[Rushdoony] You don’t understand how the separation of church and state can be made? Or how I make it?

[Audience member] Both. [General laughter]

[Rushdoony] Yes. The church is the ministry of grace and through the church the Lord commits the word of God as the ministry of grace. To the state the Lord commits the word as the ministry of justice, so it is the function of the state under God to be His minister, to administer justice. God’s justice, not his idea. And neither the church nor the state can declare their own word, I don’t have the right to get up and preach from the pulpit “thus says the Lord, but you know I don’t think that’s very nice of God to talk like that to us, we’re very sensitive people. Therefore here’s my word.” Now that would be a grievous sin. Similarly it would be a grievous sin and is a grievous sin on the part of the state to say “well here are our own ideas on what law should be” Rather than applying the laws of God. Now each has a different ministry but they are working together, or should be working together, under God; so just as my two fingers or two hands are separate, but they’re working for me so church and state should be separate but working together for the Lord. If I try to make my two hands one I am helpless, I hinder the usefulness of both hands. But if I keep them separate but faithful, then they function. So church and state are two separate ministries, and they’re called ministries in scripture.

Does that help? If not, don’t hesitate to…

[Audience member] The problem we have is one of definition of church. I {?} physical beings from being the pride of the church and I being one of those members, that cannot be split in two. One time I’m state, the next time I’m church, that’s where I have my…

[Rushdoony] Yes, well of course in a sense you are split because you are a father, and a husband, you’re a churchman, and a citizen. You do your work, but when you move in all these area under the Lord there is no split. The split comes in, if we’re Christian Sunday morning, but when we vote on Tuesday we’re not. You see, that’s when the split comes in. Does that help?

Yes?

[Audience member] Do I understand you correct to think that you’re aiming towards the area of saying God’s law should {?} civil law and we should and we should build on God’s law? And if that’s the case I guess my next question, what are we going to do with civil law?

[Rushdoony] Yes, what are we going to do with civil law that should be under God’s law, I would say…

[Same audience member] The reason why I raise the question is because of what’s happening in Iran. The country going back to the Islamic law and so forth, and that was turning over in my mind as we were talking is that that’s exactly what has happened now and I can say it’s God’s law being broken. And they turned around to go back to a religious setting. I mean I see more sinning and more butchering going on now then I guess what’s happening under the shelf {?}. And I’ve got an impression of it if we just abandon civil law, the same thing is going to happen here too because we have people in the religious sect too that want to be entirely Christian, and yet would view their law just like civil law today is not really just or justice, you can’t receive justice {?} I’m afraid that under the administration of God’s law it would be worse.

[Rushdoony] Very good question. Now you started by citing Iran, and that’s a good illustration. What has happened in Iran is very, very important. The Shah set out to modernize the country, what he did was to tear it apart, he brought more progress to Iran than Iran has known in its entire history. But most of the people in Iran are Muslims of a very primitive character.

I was sitting next to a man who was over there, well I don’t know whether I want to quote all of what he said, but he said there was an obvious difference, you could tell them as they were coming towards you whether they were Christian or a Muslim. And all the progress, all the intelligence, the commerce, the industry, was in the hands of Christians, they were the advanced group there; maybe half a million at the most. The Shaw of Iran brought in humanistic law and ran the country in terms of it. It was a Muslim country, so that immediately upset all the Mullahs, the Islamic priests. The only ones who were capable of bringing in and applying the technology, the advanced civilization that he wanted were the Christians and the eighty thousand Jews. Naturally he had to favor them, even though he was a Muslim. So what he did was to create a tremendous barrier with all those what is it, thirty million Muslims; hating the handful of Christians and Jews, and hating the west because it was western humanistic laws. So it was really a schizophrenic situation because he was trying to force something as an absolute ruler whose word was law, on to the country. Now he was trying to do it for their welfare you see, and really he improved their standard of living, there was no getting around that.

Moreover he was sending students over to this country wholesale to study. And the sad fact was that 85% of the students are going back as Marxists. So he had all the young men he trained against them, he had the entire country against him because he was pro-Western and pro-Christian and Pro-Jewish and so it finally exploded and the most backward element took over. So now there’s a conflict between the reactionary element and the radical element. The Jews are leaving the country, they can go to Israel, but the Christians, that’s their country and they’re really caught in the middle.

Now the problem there was the imposition of something by man on a situation unnaturally. What I am saying is that first of all, you and I put ourselves under God’s word absolutely. And we reach out to bring more and more people under it until finally we have brought this nation under the kingship of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We’re not forcing it on people, we’re trying to evangelize the country and bring it about. And do you know the humanist are afraid of precisely that because they say that with the growth of the Christian school movement by the end of this century virtually every child in this country will be in Christian schools, and all believe the Bible from cover to cover. And can you imagine anything worse than that? Now that’s the attitude of these humanists. Well that’s what’s going to happen in twenty years, really; and that’s why all these efforts to head it off. So in twenty years you could have Biblical law running this country because that’s what everybody is practicing and believes in.

[Audience member] But would you say when the changes are going to take place by the growth of Christianity, they’ll be elected to political office and offices in the house and senate and changing the laws?

[Rushdoony] Exactly. It’s going to come on the faith of believers as they extend this more and more in one area after another. Right now one of the most exciting things to me is the number of judges across country, and lawyers, who are showing interest in Biblical law. I’ve spoken twice on the subject to sizable gathering of congressmen in Washington. And you know I just spoken before I went the second time to speak to them on the subject, to a group of churchmen; and one of the men told me after the meeting ,one of the churchmen, he said “Well it sounds good but it isn’t practical.” One of the congress men came up to me and he said “You know we’ve tried everything except God’s word, and nothing else works.” [laughter]

Yes?

[Audience member] I was just wondering if you see this happening, at least I think I see it some ways, that you were speaking in the beginning about laws and government and so forth, and hopefully our government started to build its foundations on God’s law, but yet a few years ago the government took a neutral stance on God. Would you see that this is, as far enacting a law at least if I remember right they took a neutral stance on God, that this would somehow destroy the foundation from which our laws built on.

[Rushdoony] They pretended to take a neutral stand, but you can’t take a neutral stand about God. You’re either for him or against him. God is the maker of heaven and earth, our Lord, our creator. We cannot be neutral about God. IF we say we are we are liars and we are waging war against him. ON that foot unhappily to many men in government have been doing in recent years.

Yes?

[Audience member] You made the statement “Every word in scripture is binding.” Now in terms of, say Leviticus, where we’re supposed to make a morning and evening sacrifice. I’ve heard that said “well the moral law is binding, the ceremonial law is not.” Do you make that delineation or a different delineation?

[Rushdoony] Very good question. Alright, first of all scripture is binding on us from beginning to end unless scripture itself tells us that a particular thing has been ended by Christ’s atonement. I do not make a distinction between ceremonially law, and moral law, and civil law. That’s a modern distinction. As a matter of fact the distinction of ceremonially law, which is a terrible term, came about because some Protestants were so hostile to Rome that they wanted to downgrade the ritual of Rome. And therefore they spoke of ceremonial law in Rome and then they applied the term to the Bible. But what you have in the Bible that they call ceremonial law is something not ceremonial, but it’s sacrificial law. Now it’s an important distinction because ceremony refers to outward rights and performances and the way you do things, are sacrificial. They have to do with the atonement, and that’s something substantive not external and ceremonial.

Yes?

[Audience member] So you would say that there are three branches of law?

[Rushdoony] Does the law stop being moral and become civil? Now some people would say murder is a civil law, I think it’s an immoral think to kill somebody. Some people say kidnapping is just a civil law, well I don’t see any morality in kidnapping, it’s a moral law. All law has moral connotations, so all law has to deal with morality. At this point I usually get a question “What about traffic laws?” Well the answer to that is, traffic laws are based on the Ten Commandments “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not steal” by destroying someone else property. And it’s interesting per cars and per miles driven there is a high correlation between the religious faith of a country, its Christian faith and its number of accidents. We have the lowest number of accidents per cars and miles driven of any place in the world because we have a puritan background, a Christian population still basically that believes in the Ten Commandments. But you go to some parts of the Far East and there what do you see? [General laughter] Why, they have no regard for life and they will drive as though they’re trying to hit somebody and very often they are. Get out of my way, or I’m coming at you! And they’ll swerve to drive someone off the road who’s walking. So traffic laws are related to the Ten Commandments.

[Audience member] Did you hear president Carters press conference this afternoon? He was asked a question about prayer in the Public Schools, and he made what seemed to me kind of a nebulous statement that he felt like it was between and individual and God and he wasn’t in favor of having any legislation on it. I wondered how you evaluated that.

[Rushdoony] The question in case you didn’t hear it was did I hear president’s Carter press conference this afternoon. No, thank God I did not. [General laughter] And he said with regard to the proposed legislation about prayer in the schools that he felt prayer should be a matter between an individual and his God rather than a matter of public performance.

Well I don’t see the issue worth commenting about, because what is prayer in the public schools going to accomplish? Now in L.A. I know some of the teachers there. As I flew from San Francisco to L.A. this morning, picked up the L.A. paper and read it on the plane, the picture on the front page was of this teacher. Somebody had walked into her classroom and shot her and tried to rape her. I don’t if the prayer before the class began would have helped, because the situation in the classroom is one of total lawlessness. Total lawlessness and it affects every class and every element of society. I know enough of the teachers in L.A. to know that. Schools in the best neighborhoods and in the worse are the same. Why? Because it’s a godless education, and kindergarten kids according to what the teachers tell me, cuss out their teacher if the teacher tells them what they should do, or tells them to get into line. Now I don’t see how that’s going ot improve with a prayer in the schools. It takes more than putting prayer back into the schools, it means taking the state out of education and putting God back in. Rosenbranch {?} And when I say God, I mean the triune God. Not a vague Unitarian God, but the God of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And I don’t think that’s what the senate has in mind. [Laughter]

Alright one more question.

[Audience member] Are you familiar with some of the articulation that Francis Schaeffer has done in determining {?} a number of things on the number of books he’s written about law and society as generally relates to the full evaluation of the culture.

[Rushdoony] Francis Schaeffer is a good friend of mine and he’s incidentally very sick now, as cancer of the lymph glands and of the bones and his {?} and he does need your prayers. The last letter I had from him indicated that he was making some progress and felt better. But I do hope you will be in prayer for him.

We have our differences of opinion but I wouldn’t criticize Francis Schaeffer and he doesn’t criticize me, we’re Christian brothers. [Laughter]

[Audience member] Do you feel that some of his things that he’s put forth during the recent film series in {?} are in line with what, as far as your evaluation of what we’ve done.

[Rushdoony] I didn’t see the film series. I don’t, they put {?} out to be able to see anything like that, or to listen to President Carter so there’s some pluses and minuses to my traveling.

[Moderator] We have about fifteen minutes to the break; I think a question, since some people have to go at the break. A real source of tension for many people in the class would be “we’re with you, but we’re not sure we want to go as far as you want to go, in fact we don’t know how far you want to go.” We’d like to hear from you. Is if God sends us a revival that leads not only to personal Christians but to legislator and reform that goes deep down to American roots, idealistically how far would you like to see the application of Biblical law go? How much of Mosaicism for example would you like to see applied? And, a specific example that troubles many people for example, would be Sabbath legislation and blue laws. Maybe you don’t want to become that specific but I think we could use some specificity.

[Rushdoony] Alright. Let me answer that question and then go into one of the premises of Biblical law so that you have a little more of what I have to say from the standpoint of scripture.

You mentioned Sabbath observance. Now the Sabbath laws of scripture are part of the covenantal relationship of the nation, of the people, to God. As a result where you have no covenant you do not have a Sabbath. Now this nation was once a covenant nation, self consciously. When the president or any man took an oath of office, he took it on an open Bible, opened to Deuteronomy 28. Now the very oath, the idea of an oath is entirely scriptural, it isn’t a pagan thing. And on Deuteronomy 28 he was invoking the covenantal blessings and the covenantal curses for obedience and disobedience. Read Deuteronomy 28 when you go home tonight.

Well one of the last times I watched a presidential inauguration, I nowadays spare myself such gruesome sites, [laughter] it was taken on a closed Bible, which was a fitting symbol of what Washington has done [laughter]. So the Sabbath no longer represents a covenant between the United States and God, therefore there can be no law governing the Sabbath. We’re outside God’s Sabbath and God’s blessing as a nation. SO until we become a covenant people, until the people of the united states from end to end are again God fearing, a Sabbath law has no place because we’re not a covenant people. It can be my personal Sabbath with the Lord, and as such we keep it. My wife is very strict on that. I’m Armenian she’s a Scott, and Scott’s are very literal minded ya know, and she observes it in the Old Testament fashion and the New Testament fashion and the old Biblical fashion, began sundown the day before to Monday Morning, sunrise. And she will not work then, believe me. She even prepares her food beforehand and just serves it.

Now I want to go in briefly into one of the first premises of Biblical law. That it is forgiveness, forgiveness. Today our problem with the doctrine of forgiveness is that when we say “Forgiveness” we have a humanistic doctrine in mind. We have been so saturated with romanticism that to us forgiveness is an emotional thing rather than a legal thing. In its origin when you trace the word forgiveness back it means charges dropped because satisfaction has been rendered. It can also mean at times charges deferred for the time being so that when our Lord said on the cross “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” He said “Father defer the charges for the time being for they know not what they do.”

Dr. Schilder, a great Dutch theologian has written on forgiveness and I commend his works to you. Now Forgiveness such has to do with the legal fact. And forgiveness in our relationship to God means exactly that, it’s a legal thing. We, because of our sins, have the death penalty against us in the court of almighty God, and are the charges dropped because we cry and we’re sorry about them? No, they are dropped because satisfaction has been rendered by the blood of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ makes atonement for our sin; He renders the satisfaction and pays the price for the death penalty. He keeps the law perfectly, and so our sins are blotted out in God’s court of law. We are forgiven because satisfaction has been rendered.

Now how do we make satisfaction between man and man? The same way, restitution; you make amends for what you have done and the law over and over again gives you examples of that. I think one of the best summary statements is in chapter 22 in the book of Exodus. And there it tells us that restitution in order to affect forgiveness must be at least double and it can be fourfold or fivefold. Let’s put it this way, if I steal a hundred dollars from you, you have no right to forgive me because forgiveness is ordained by God according to His word; unless I restore the hundred dollars plus another hundred. Now that was once a part of American law. That’s why the saying goes “crime does not pay”. Today it’s really paying [laughter].

Do you know that today only one percent of all crimes in this country are punished? It really pays. One percent! One percent. If you get into white collar crime the percentage is lower.

Now, it could be up to fourfold and fivefold. If I stole a sheep I had to restore four. Why? Because that sheep could produce wool, it could produce young, it was good for meat, it was valuable; fourfold restitution. Restore the sheep, plus four. With oxen it was fivefold, that was the maximum restitution. Now what did that mean? Well the oxen had use not only for its meat, for tithe, but also was a trained animal; very, very important as a means of freight carrying. Oxen by the way were slow, they could only travel twelve miles a day, but oxen could carry weights that horses could never touch; they were very important to the economy of antiquity; fivefold restitution.

Now throughout scripture this is the requirement, this is the meaning of forgiveness. Restitution where our sins are towards God, Christ alone can make restitution. Between man and man we make restitution. You know when I was in the pastorate I applied this and I told people to start applying it in their personal relationships. And I made it a very precise and a detailed sort of thing that worked beautifully because I was very young in the pastorate and on one occasion I mentioned that one very fine woman in the church [audio interruption] to another woman. And I spoke very highly of her, and this other woman said “oh yes I guess Mrs. So and so is alright but she broke a dish of mine at one of the potlucks.”` Now that happened about four or five years before but she still remembered that broken dish. Well you know that’s a human trait, isn’t it? We all are that way; we all have broken dishes that we remember about people. So I immediately began to talk about that, I said “now look, if you woman are working here in the kitchen and you break somebody’s dishes she’s going to say, you all will say “oh forget about it, it was an old dish it wasn’t anything.” And I told them “Don’t you do it! You go out and buy one that’s twice as good and take it and give it to her.” It worked beautifully, it was restitution and there was real forgiveness. God’s law works, the only practical law there is. So when I have applied it to very concrete situations as harmless as dishes broken at a potluck, believe me it paid off; because God’s law is the only practical law.

You see, God made us and since God made us our beings tick to His words. Saint Augustine said “Our hearts are restless ‘till they rest in Thee.” So we need to speak of two kinds of forgiveness. Now these terms are not original with me, they’re just forgotten terms; theological forgiveness, forgiveness for all our sins against man and against God through Jesus Christ. Civil forgiveness, forgiveness of our sins in dealing with people and in courts of law where we make restitution for what we have done. There’s only one area today where there’s still restitution, do you know where it is in our civil law?

[Audience member] Internal revenue?

[Rushdoony] Yes. The federal government wants restitution for everything. As a matter of fact when I worked among the American Indians back in the 1940’s there was a government official who gambled away, I’ve forgotten now, it was ten or twenty thousand of government funds. This was in northeastern Nevada up in the mountains. And the federal government didn’t want him to go to jail, they wanted their money back. Well on his salary how was he going to make it? Well they gave him a promotion. [laughter].

To continue briefly with the subject of restitution, in the Bible there is no prison system. In the Bible people were held in prison only pending trial. The outcome of a trial was to adjudge whether a person was guilty or innocent, if guilty the penalty was either restitution in the form of some kind of restoration or else the death penalty. The death penalty was given for certain offenses and for habitual criminals. The prison system has a very interesting history. While we don’t realize it the prison is a relatively modern thing. Prior to the prison system there were dungeons which Lords and Kings had in which they would throw people, usually for a shake-down or to demand ransom.

The first proposal for a prison system came from William Penn, the Quaker leader. Penn’s doctrine of course was the Quaker doctrine of the inner light. William Penn believed that every man had a spark of God in him, which is of course heresy, and he felt that the best scripture any man could have was his own heart and the opportunity to listen to it. And so William Penn said that “if we take criminals and put them in monastic cells for a stated period of time then having nothing else to do they will meditate on their sins and the inner light will save them.” This is why prison cells are called “cells”. The word comes from the monastery. This is why they are called also “penitentiaries” harking back to the penitential system of the medieval monk. This is also why they are called “reformatories” because the idea is that they will be reformed by prison. In reality of course the entire prison system created a progressive crime explosion, a snowball effect, because it took away the actual penalty of crime, restitution. And we now face a very serious problem because we have taken the heart out of law, as God ordained it, which is restitution

Now to go on to another basic premise of Biblical law. Most people when they think of a theocracy think not in terms of the rule of God, but the rule of a church or a harsh group of men who lay down the law to everybody. Nothing could be further from the truth. A theocracy literally means the rule of God, and as God in His law makes clear the civil government is to be an exceedingly limited order; so limited that its functions are to be simply justice and the protection of the country from invaders. The only tax for the civil order in the Bible was the poll or head tax of which we read in Exodus 30:11-16 to make civil atonement, or civil covering, civil protection for the souls of all who were a part of that civil order. This was the civil tax.

Now this tax has a very interesting history, it provided in the Old Testament period and in the time of our Lord and to the fall of Jerusalem for the civil government of Israel. We can trace this poll tax; at least I have traced it to about the tenth century. Because even after the fall of Jerusalem the Jews collected the temple tax, as it is called sometimes, and used it for maintain courts among Jews wherever they were in the dispersion. It is called the temple tax because the throne room was in the Holy of Holy’s and because the elders of Israel who rule the civil government ruled from within the temple precincts.

Now, a very interesting thing is that we meet with this temple tax in France in the years 850 to past 900 because a Jewish Princedom actually ruled two realms in Southern France. The ruler was a member of the house of David and Jews throughout the dispersion paid their temple tax to him and he provided courts and government wherever Jews existed throughout the Mediterranean world into the Middle East and into Northern Europe. Very interesting fact about this royal family, this Jewish royal family was that the European monarch courted that family. Charlemagne in particular arranged a marriage of one of his sons to the daughter of this Jewish prince because it thrilled him to think that he as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire would have a grandchild who was of the same blood as Jesus. In fact this family disappeared before very long because all its members were sought by Christians in marriage in order to have the Davidic, the Messianic bloodline in their family. But until they became sometime in the 900’s, so thoroughly Christianized that the Jews no longer recognized them, the so called temple tax or head tax was paid to them

Now this is the first tax we meet with in the Bible, it gives us a very limited state, a very limited one. The other tax is the tithe; and the tithe provided the social financing for the state. Health, welfare, education, all the basics were provided by the tithe not only in the Old Testament but throughout most of the centuries. Do you realize that hospitals until fairly recent were all Christian hospitals? Health was a part of the ministry of the Christian church. The idea of a hospital being a civil hospital, or a privately owned hospital, is very modern. Only a few generations. All schools were originally Christian schools, the Christians provided them. Welfare was once provided for by Christians as recently as 1907 this was a governing factor in welfare in this country.

We had a depression in 1907, at that time one young politician saw what the Christians were doing there in Missouri and among the things they did was to buy rock quarry and set the unemployed to breaking rocks for construction of houses, buildings, roads, whatever the case might be. The rock accumulated until the depression was over and then they sold it and recovered the money they had expended, it was a very practical means of providing welfare. This young politician went around from church to church and civic group to civic group and he said “what a wonderful thing these Christians did. But why not relieve them of this responsibility and let them go their way and concern themselves with things more spiritual. Lets add a quarter of a penny to the tax and let the county and the state take care of welfare.” Well the young man’s name was Pendergast, and that was the foundation of the Pendergast political machine and of every great political machine in the United States, welfare. And it still is the basis of political power, welfarism does not have the welfare of the poor in mind, modern welfare has political power in mind. And it destroys the people it ministers to, it’s an ugly thing. Christians once took care of welfare in this country through tithe agencies.