Jurisprudence

Jurisprudence and Biblical Law Q&A

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 2 of 3

Track: 95

Dictation Name: RR150A2

Date: 1960’s-1970’s

[Rushdoony] Christians once took care of welfare in this country through tithe agencies. How many of you have read the unabridged Democracy in America by De Tocqueville? Two of you, three, very important study. Now what De Tocqueville says in that volume is that when he came over I think around 1828, 1830, 32, 33, was that the real government of the United States was a private association because state, county, and federal governments had no real power. They did very little; it was as close to being an non-existent state as far as civil government was concerned, as could be. The basic government was by the thousands of tithe agencies.

Some years ago I did a study of Salem, Massachusetts; I believe I’ve summarized what I read in Revolt Against Maturity. In 1795 Salem was a puritan community of 2500 people, a village. Fifty years later it had 4500 people, it was still a puritan community. But those people had come as immigrants from Europe. It should have been either a Catholic community as far as any church being concerned, and a godless community. But what happened? They had in that community, as in all over the United States especially outside of the south, they were not very prominent in the south. But in the Middle West, the west, the North, tithe agencies ministered to every need. When the ships landed with the immigrants they were met by Christians. They were shown where they could find housing; they were helped as they settled. The men were taught English and their wives also. Their children were put into Christian schools, the women were taught homemaking in a new world with different kinds of food, the men were given job core training. There wasn’t a thing you could think of that they did not minister to. Even the sailors who brought them were provided for, there was housing for them at the docks so that they could have lodging freely, with a chaplain there and chapel services so that they were working to evangelize the sailors.

This country today should be thoroughly godless country but for those tithe agencies. Or if any religion had any element of strength it should have been the Catholic Church. But most of the Irishmen in the United States are not Catholic; they’re Presbyterian, because in the particular cities where they landed it was Presbyterian tithe agencies that met them. In those days there were no immigration laws, as a result from the moment we started this country after the War of Independence what the European countries did was to get rid of their prisoners, they put them on, as soon as they were arrested, convicted, they give them their choice. You want to be executed; do you want to do this or that? These are your options, or we’ll put you on a boat for the United States. They chose the boat, they chose the boat. And they landed here in waves, every shipload discharging such. If a girl became pregnant and was a disgrace to her family in Europe or in England, they put her on a boat and shipped her over here, and there were pimps waiting for them. The big cities were such frightful places that in the five corners area of New York no policeman dared go alone. Five policemen as a minimum would venture together in that area, it was so savage an area that murder was just a routine thing. It became a problem when it was dozens at a time. In the five corners area, muddy streets, the pigs ran wild and would eat some of the dead lying in the streets, that’s the kind of place The Five Corners was.

De Tocqueville in a long foot note which you can find in the old unabridged edition, half of one page and part of the next, said that in all his travels no-where in Asia or Africa or Europe had he ever seen slums to compare with the slums of the big cities of America. And he said unless the United States raises a huge standing army it will be faced with a revolution because of the tremendous slugs of criminals landing daily on the shores of America. But did we have the revolution, or did we have to have a large standing army? No. Our army in those days by the way was a very small thing, at one time it was down to 200 men. I baptized sometime after World War II and old army colonel who had started in the 1890’s when he was 14 years old, he lied to get in so he could support his family. And he worked his way up through the ranks; you could do it in those days [laughter]. In his day there were 20,000 men in the US army, up until World War I, and he said he knew most of them by their first name. You see our country has changed quite a bit.

What happened to those slums? Why Christians went into places that cops couldn’t go, and they make Christians out of them they evangelize them. Something we ought to be doing today. Right now I’m talking to a group of men and I’m hoping I can raise the money because I feel very strongly about the Christian school movement, and I believe we need to go into the slums of the big cities of this country and establish Christian schools, I think they’re desperately needed, and I do wish you’d be in prayer about it. At any rate, it was Christians who went there and who did the work and the result was a tremendous change in those areas. Within twenty or thirty years a man could walk, and it was routine, a young man or a boy in his teens as a bank messenger carrying a sack of gold down the streets of New York and he was safe. And what happened if they bag broke? It sometimes did because fold is heavy, immediately every man around there would put his arms on everyone else’s shoulder and they’d stand in a circle. If someone was foolish enough to bend over and tie his shoelaces he got a boot in the rear. That messenger picked up and accounted for every gold piece, and if not every man there had to be searched by their own insistence.

The police didn’t get into that, now that’s law and order from the hearts of people. And what accomplished that? Why it was the revivals that went into the very slums of New York and of Boston and Baltimore and every other city; and they applied the word of God, they applied Biblical law. Men began to enforce it beginning with themselves and then in their families and in their community. God’s basic tax is the tithe. If a fraction of those who profess to be Bible believing Christians began to tithe and apply it to the needs of Christ’s mission to the world of our time we could change the world. And it’s about time we started taking God seriously, are we to be less than the Old Testament believers. Is there a lower standard in the New Testament than in the Old Testament?

Now let’s go on to another basic premise. We have seen first what forgiveness means in the Bible, that this is at the heart of law. Theological and civil forgiveness, restitution as basic to it, we have seen that the state has a very limited power, a very limited place in scripture. What is the basic institution in scripture? It is the family; the family is God’s basic institution. There’s only one power that is not given to the family in scripture and that’s the death penalty. That’s why Cain was not executed, because it would of required someone in the family to do it. All the basic powers in a society are given to the family. Whenever the family collapses, the civilization collapses. There are some excellent studies of the family and I recommend them to you. Carl C. Zimmerman, the Harvard sociologist Family and Civilization look for it in the library, it’s not in print now, and Zimmerman and Cervantes, simply The Family. These men point out the importance of the family in civilization in fact Zimmerman says that when you come down to the atomistic family such as you have now, it’s the end of a civilization. And unless you have a renewal of the family the civilization is finished no matter how greats its achievement.

Another great writer in this area was J.D. Unwin. Unwin was the man who never accepted Christian faith to any degree at all, was very, very, hostile to it in fact. And he set out to prove that the Christian’s were wrong as to what they said, the Bible was wrong about the relationship between morality and character and morality and civilization until he studied all the data about every known civilization past and present. Every record of every Indian tribe and South American tribe and Asiatic tribe and tribes of the pacific Island; and he found a relationship so exact between sexual regulations and cultural behavior that he said it could be expressed mathematically, and he spent the rest of his life in dismay over that. What did he find, that what determined civilization is not race or anything else, what determines civilization is what we would say more bluntly than he did is Biblical morality. But where you have a culture that has promiscuity before and after marriage you have a civilization or a culture at such a dead level that they can’t count beyond the ten fingers, their two hands. They are incapable of abstract thought; they are incapable of any housing but the most primitive. But when the sexual regulations begin to enter into any culture, you have an immediate and a dramatic increase in their potentiality so that when you reach the point where you have premarital and post marital chastity you have a high civilization. But in three generations you can reach from the highest point of civilization to the point where you can’t count beyond the fingers of your hand; if immorality sets in.

Now he demonstrated that, he was very unhappy with it, he didn’t like it at all, but he found an exact correlation. We would put it more bluntly “except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it.” And how does the Lord build it in terms of people who believe in him and who obey him.

Now what does the family teach us about sexual regulations? Why very definitely that sex is legitimate in marriage only, and we owe our Western civilization to the laws that were put into it, the family code that was written into the code of Justinian by the empress Theodora. How many are you familiar with the Empress Theodora? Yes one or two of you listened at some time or another perhaps to my tapes, yes. [laughter] Ok, she’s a favorite heroine of mine although most books today really slander her because the modern world hates Theodora. Theodora had a very ugly life, her father was a Roman Animal trainer in the circus, in the arena where the chariot races where held and the like. He died young leaving three daughters; I believe their ages were something like 7, 9, and 11. No money the girls were sold into houses of prostitution at that young of age began as prostitutes. By the time she was in her late teens Theodora, very intelligent little girl had worked her way up to become fairly high priced call girl.

A business man took her on a trip to North Africa and she got into an argument with him and he dumped her without any money or without any pay. She became ill, a Christian took her in and nursed her back to health and in the process told her the plan of salvation and read scripture to her. It didn’t take then, but the seed planted for fruit in a relatively short time, in a year or two. She went back to the capitol and there she met a young lawyer. The young lawyer was a country boy living out in the country, his mother was a very poor widow. His mother’s brother had gone and joined the army and worked his way up to become a general, was an older man and childless. So the old man, Justin was his name, wrote to his sister and said “send me your son I’ll give him an education and adopt him.” Mean while the empire was childless also, and he was afraid if when he died the empire would be torn asunder in a war to seize the throne, and so he adopted his old friend and trusted General Justin. Justin succeeded him and was Empire for four or five years and died. This country boy who’d walked all the way to the capitol and been robbed in the process, so he got there hungry, was now the Emperor; and the young call girl he had fallen in love with and together they came to know Christ, was now the Empress; one of the most dramatic stories in all of history.

Well when Justinian set about to revise the law of the Roman Empire, the code of Justinian which has been the foundation of Western civilization and its law, Theodora said “I’m taking a hand in this. Where anything has to do with the family I’m going to sit down with the lawyers and tell them just what they’re going to put into it.” And so she did, and so she applied the Bible very strictly. She said “only heterosexual relations in a monogamous marriage are legal.” Moreover she said “This law applies to every class without exception, the rich aren’t going to get away with it. If they want mistress it’s illegal.” All illegal sexual activities were made punishable; there could be no commerce in sex, no prostitution, no homosexuality. Moreover she said “non-family sexual contracts, concubines or mistresses, are illegal.” And the family was made the defined way of life and status; and the family as the custodian of property. .

Now the sexual revolution has been at war with Theodora and the Bible. What we see today is a concerted effort to overthrow everything that Theodora did to make the Bible the basic instrument of family law. Now what does the Bible say in the way of family law? First; all the basic powers in a society by the way are given by scripture to the family; the family is the key institution. First, in the Bible the family has custody and control of the children. That seems like an obvious fact to us because we have the benefit of Christian civilization, but it has not always been so, there have been philosophers in antiquity as well as thinkers today and judges today who say the child belongs to the state; and I’ve been in courtrooms where that’s been stated. But the Bible says the child is in the custody of the parents, and they are the God given custodians of the child. What does this mean? Why children represent the future, if you control children you control the future. That’s why the first thing Russia did when it became the first Western society to go socialist under the old Kaisers was to get into education, state control of education in order to control the children.

And today of course what are they talking about these statist educators? Campus schools beginning at the age of three or four. What does that mean? Why campus schools where they keep them all week long, you don’t go home when the school day is over, you live there so you can be brainwashed. And of course they say the basic necessity is to separate the ghetto child from his parents; as though they represent something superior. Control of the child is control of the future and every tyrant seeks to separate the child from his parents, but God’s law is clear on this.

Second, control of property in the family is in the hands of the family. Biblical law says that the eldest son, unless he is to be set aside for either being weak or ungodly; an ungodly child cannot inherit; is to receive a double portion. Why? Well if there are three sons for example the oldest receives half and the other two a quarter, but the oldest has the care of his parents for life. They are his responsibility. Moreover property is not something that belongs to the individual but to the family so that the Bible sees us as stewards or trustees of what we have. What we have received is something that is to be passed on to Godly seed, and when you have that kind of thing then you have power because you’re controlling the future. Children and property, the two basic powers in any society; and today of course the state increasingly claims to own the child. And today increasingly the state owns your property; you don’t own your property the state does. You hold it according to the law and fee simple and free sockage {?} What does that mean? You’re a lawyer you know what that means. Alright, for the rest of you let me explain it. Fee simple, fee comes from the word fief, feudal. You hold it from a Lord, it’s his but you have the right to it and your heirs have the right to it, and you could even sell it. But whoever has it the lord at anytime can take it back; it’s really his all the time. And he can charge an assessment or a tax for the use of it or confiscate it at will.

Fee simple and free sockage means that the state owns your property, and you’re paying for the privilege of use. You only have ownership in the use of your property, and then only as long as the state sees fit. Now that’s not my statement, there’s some very competent lawyers in the area of property who’ve written books on it. Most people don’t realize it; that is exactly where we stand with regard to property, you certainly know it when you pay your tax bill.

Then the third basic power that God gives to the family is control of inheritance; the right to give it to Godly heirs, to your Godly seed. But who is the firstborn according to law now? Why it’s the state, it is literally. They take the first cut before anyone else can touch it, the inheritance tax does that; and they come in and they appraise the property. If you’re an executer sometime when the appraisal is made and the property is divided if you have under appraised it and the federal government or the state government comes and says you have, you pay up. So what are you going to do? You will put a high appraisal on it and penalize the family; and if you have an kind of estate they are really going to hit you hard. Why in one case where a man who was an executer was in the house and he was just upset at what was going on as he saw this appraiser going around appraising things; and he took off his glasses and put them down to wipe his face and the appraiser looked at them and appraised them. [laughter] They will because they’ll collect something on it and all those little things add up. And if you have a sizable estate you’re in trouble.

Marilyn Monroe died a few years back in California and left an estate of six million. At that time the law stipulated that all the property had to be sold in nine months, and the estate settled; which means you have to turn it into cash. Well most of that was in film rights and what not, only one or two bidders for that. They got it at their price. So what was left for Marilyn Monroe’s heir, her mother? Under five thousand dollars. Ernie Kovacs, some of you remember him, he left an estate of about 7-8 million; and Edie Adams his widow went around working night and day doing Cigar commercials and some of you may remember them and nightclubbing, trying to raise enough money to pay the estate taxes, and she failed. And we know what happened in that case because there were two heirs, she and her mother-in-law; and her mother-in-law took her to court figuring she had to have been cheated, and Edie Adams proved in court that the estate that came to less than fifty thousand had cost her more than that in trying to save it, and she lost it all. And that’s routine, that’s routine.

And that goes on every day 75% of all deaths result in wiping out the family because of the inheritance tax. It’s only the extremely wealthy whose holding are in corporate form who can escape it. It’s a devastating thing. Well you say the inheritance tax now only hits those with an estate of two hundred and forty thousand or above, well forget that because there are many loopholes in it and with inflation, and the worst of inflation is ahead of us in the next six years. The poorest slum dwelling in Los Angeles within two years will be selling for a hundred thousand dollars; that’s the estimate of realtors there. The poorest slum dwelling in Los Angeles will sell for a hundred thousand. Everybody’s going to be paying that tax and everybody’s going to be wiped out; and that’s godless, it’s godless. And God’s law places inheritance in the power of the family.

Then, first we’ve seen control of children, control of property, third control of inheritance and four control of welfare. Do you know that the greatest welfare institution in the United States and in the world is the family? The family takes care of more people than the federal government and the state and the counties and cities do. And the Christian family is the greatest welfare institution ever devised in the history of the world. A few years ago I was very, very deeply moved. I was in Alabama two rural counties there predominately black, poor, not one person on welfare and not one child on aide. Why? Because they were Christian. Anybody who died and left a homeless child there were people to take him in and they never went to the state about it because the state would interfere and say “that child should go into a better home.” No delinquency; never had a problem with delinquency with the children in that county. Why? Because the Christian family was dealing with the problem, and they were taking in children that were not even related very often, but they were taking them in. Now that was once common place, and it was done on the frontier when sudden death was a routine fact and there were children left without parents. But Christians did, when they had far less in the way of means. I’m old enough to remember some of that sort of thing.

But now Christians have grown very self-centered and you talk to them about this sort of thing “well that’s legalism.” Sounds a little more like grace to me. But it is also God’s law, the family is God’s basic welfare institution. The family has a responsibility to all its members. “He who does not care for his own is worse” Paul said “than an infidel.” He’s simply applying what the Old Testament had said very concretely, and the Christian family has an obligation to those outside of it. What does God’s word require at the time of rejoicing before the Lord? Why that you bring in the strangers, the foreigners, the widow, the orphan, and rejoice with them. You’re to care for them and provide for them. But of course we’re too advanced for that sort of thing now; but that was what thanksgiving used to be about. That’s why the Indians were present at the first Thanksgiving service. But how long has it been since any Christian family has gone out of its way to invite even one of the widows in the church into their home for Thanksgiving? And don’t tell me that’s legalism, someone tried to once. [laughter].

The basic powers of the family: first control of children, second control of property, third control of inheritance, fourth control of welfare, and fifth control of education, control of education. Do you know a few years ago there was a very interesting study conducted by a group of liberal scholars headed by Dr. Colman of Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Coleman is a passionate liberal. Now this was something that was decided upon I think when John F. Kennedy first became president and the report on it was made when Johnson was president, it was the Coleman report. You don’t hear much about it because they were very unhappy with the results. What did the Coleman report show? Well the Coleman report was ordered to show the effect of segregation on education, and so they studied the segregated schools of the time. What they did, since computers had just come into being, was to get all the educational data they could from one end of the United States to the other and feed them into computers. Well the results were a real shocker, a real shocker. First they found there was no correlation between the amount of money spent in a school district and the results, no correlation. Second they found there was no correlation between segregation and educational results and integration and educational results. Contrary to their expectations that they found the students in the black schools segregated schools as good as those in the integrated schools, and as capable in their achievement tests, standard achievement tests as the white students.

Grade for grade they were equal so the myth of an inferior education was exposed. It didn’t make any difference, integration or segregation. They went right down the line trying to find a correlation and they found one, finally; one area of correlation - that was the family. If the child black or white came from a stable home that child was a good student 999 times out of 1,000. And if a child came from an unstable home that child was a poor and an unstable student. That was the correlation, so what was determinative in education? It wasn’t money, it wasn’t integration, it wasn’t segregation, it wasn’t anything except the family. And what’s happened since? Why they’ve done one thing after another in education but as the family has been breaking up in the almost twenty years since that report was studied, education has so declined that what in 1960 was college freshmen reading is now what was then ninth grade reading. Ninth grade reading and they are lowering the standards continually.

Maryland recently abolished, made it impossible for anyone to use the Stanford achievement test and the California achievement because they were showing up all the students so badly in Maryland, they were really showing up not the black and white students but the state board. So they devised their own state testing, and even that they did badly on [general laughter.] Did you know that today there are twenty-three million who have graduated from our schools who are functional illiterates; they can’t pass a driver’s test. You go to our airports now in the last few years everywhere they’ve put up a figure to illustrate male or female so a lot of these kids will know what kind of restroom they’re going into. That’s how bad it is, and even terms of what the liberals themselves will admit there are nine million functional illiterates in the schools who will be graduating. That means thirty-two million illiterates in this country. Thirty-two million illiterates, the highest percentage of illiteracy this country has ever known.

In all these Christian school trials the interesting thing is now increasingly they bar any standard testing of the Christian school pupils, because it makes the public school look so bad by comparison. And the interesting thing is that in these Christian schools the greater the sacrifice and the dedication on the part of the parents the better the performance of the students. So that by and large across the country, and I visit any number of Christian schools all the time, I know, I always ask or almost always when I think of it “who are your best pupils here?” “Oh it’s the black pupils” or “it’s the Mexican” or “it’s the Chinese” or whatever, because there they have the most pressure from the parents. They don’t take it lightly and they want their children to excel. The family has always been God’s purposed educator and the best educator of all. The family is the basic educational institution. Every mother performs the most difficult tax in all of education from kindergarten through the graduate school. Do you know what that task is? Yes, teaching the child who doesn’t understand a word of any language the mother tongue. That’s the hardest task there is, most men aren’t capable of it, but every mother does it; routinely, patiently, so that by two years that child is speaking the mother tongue.

the most difficult task in all of education, all the basic education, the best education is by the home. When you tamper with the home and when you destroy the home and the integrity of it, you destroy a civilization. That’ why Zimmerman and Cervantes made clear, and why Unwin made clear “you destroy the family in any historic, Christian sense; in any Biblical sense we would say, you destroy the civilization.

Now I’ll stop again I’ve gone on a little longer than I intended to, are there any questions, yes?

[Audience member] I do have one, what are some of the steps we should do, or should we just wait until the whole thing collapses and pick up the pieces?

[Rushdoony] First of all as Paul told the Philippians jailer “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” First there’s faith, then there’s obedience. We take the whole word of God seriously and we apply every aspect of it to our lives; and we don’t trust our children or any part of our life to Caesar. We put our children in Christian schools, we put ourselves under God’s word wherever we are and things begin to happen then. For one thing a lot of church people will be very unhappy with you.

When I was on the Indian reservation one of the things that interested me, I had a young Indian come back he’d never heard anything about Jesus Christ all he knew was that Jesus Christ was a cuss word. He was a tough marine, when he came back some of the other Indians made fun of his uniform and within five minutes there were a half a dozen of them spread out on the ground. Well he got married and he and his wife were a really wild couple, and they had a baby boy and that baby boy wandered out into one of the streams because the valley there was just a network of slews, streams, ponds, and what not. If an Indian had forty acres he might have twenty-five of it under water. And that little baby was drowned. They came to me for the funeral, and I talked to them and Earl was concerned about his baby. Where was his baby now, what had happened to it? So I talked to him and witnessed to him and he got a Bible and started to read it.

Well he was very literal minded person, and he took every word seriously. The first time he came across the word tithing he came running over. And Earl was the kind he would come whether it was six in the morning or ten o’clock or night; he wanted an answer because he was serious. And I told him what it was about. So he took the whole word seriously, began to apply it literally. Started to come to church at once, oh you know he always came and set up in the very front row, and he would take out his paycheck, and he wouldn’t even spend it for groceries or anything until he first gave it to the Lord. The lord required the first, so he took that very literally. He’d come there and he’d peel it off and put it in the plate. And we had a government agent who was coming to church then, most of the government men were about as godless a lot as you could hope to meet, and he would help with the offerings and he began to complain, he said: “Does he have to sit in the front row and take that money out and plop it into the plate? Makes me feel rotten when I put a dollar bill in.” That’s why I say, that was the first time I saw it happen but I’ve seen it lots of time. You begin to apply it and things will happen, things will happen

[Audience member] Could you comment a little bit on the Owen case which is pretty near to {?}

[Rushdoony] The Owen took place in Mount Vernon which is somewhere around here, I don’t know which direction. And I was here last November to testify in that case. James Owen I believe is a graduate of this college, Ashland. He’s a young farmer, a fine Christian. There’s no Christian school around him except one next door to his farm, and Amish school. He put his daughter Jennifer into that Amish school that was in September of ’77. He was immediately arrested; the charge was contributing to the delinquency, wasn’t it? Of his daughter, something like that…

[Audience member] Failure to send child to school...

[Rushdoony] Yes. Any rate he was hauled into Juvenile court as an offender and the trial was held last November, November of ’78. At the end of June of 78 after Jennifer had completed her first year she was given the Stanford and California achievement tests and she tested between high third and low fifth. But Jim Owen was convicted, a case is under appeal. It was interesting to be a witness in that court and to see the hostility that was there. It was really incredible. At one point witnesses were not supposed to be in hearing anyone else but I had to step into the court and I heard them questioning the Amish principle. He had been giving could answers as to the caliber of work they had there, and so they were going to nail him on something and the prosecutor got him with this question very triumphantly “and do you teach the metric system in your school?” As though it was with difficulty he could call it a school. And the man thought, “yes he said I forgive whether we start in the sixth grade or the eighth grade, but we teach so and so and so and so.” And gave a full outline on what they taught. And you couldn’t have seen a more angry man that prosecutor. [General laughter]

The hostility is intense in some of these cases. Yes?

[Audience member] You said that the ideal goal is to go back to God’s law; now whose going to do the interpretation of what is God’s law. You mentioned a minute ago about the Sabbath being on Sunday. Well there are certain groups that believe the Sabbath are on Saturday. Now you can see how you could have a conflict unless you have it already understood, now who’s going to do the interpretation of what is God’s law. Much the same as they have it in Iran you know, so aren’t we supposed to wait until Jesus comes back before the true system of God’s law will rule on earth?

[Rushdoony] First of all let’s get back to the question of the Sabbath since you raised that as an example. There are groups which hold to the fact that the Sabbath is supposedly Saturday. It’s interesting that those groups are having problems with that now, and are trying to make it a closed question. Because researches have indicated that in the Old Testament there was a different kind of calendar. The calendar there was of twelve months of thirty days each, which means 360 days. That perhaps we don’t know for sure the extra five days was observed in between the first six months and then the last six months at the end of it, three at one time and two at another. That is a matter of question, but at any rate they were even calendars and when you study the references to the Sabbath in the first month the Sabbath was to be celebrated on the first, on the eighth, on the fifteenth, on the twenty-second and twenty-ninth and so on through. What does it mean? It means that the Sabbath in the Bible is not in terms of the day of the week but the date of the month like your birthday and mine. For example today happens to be my wife’s birthday, so I’m sorry I’m not at home although I’m happy to be with you. But then I’m rarely at home at her birthday or at mine so we pick an arbitrary date to celebrate our birthdays. Now my wife’s birthday is on the tenth of April. But it is a different day of the week you see each month.

Now the Sabbath in Bible times, Old and New testament times would be on every particular day of the week, it would change so it would be every day from Sunday to Saturday. And the Jews finally regularized their calendar sometime after three hundred to conform with the general practice in the Roman Empire because Jerusalem and Judea were now long dead, and they chose Saturday. But Saturday was not the Sabbath in the Bible; it was by the day in the week.

So you see that’s just a question of information.

[Audience member] Well here’s my point, where does it say in the New Testament that Sunday should be a day of worship.

[Rushdoony] It was the first day of the week that our Lord rose again from the dead, and just as the Passover was the Jewish day of salvation so we celebrate the Christian Passover the day of our Lord’s resurrection. And that’s our day of salvation.

[Audience member] So you don’t celebrate it one time a year but you celebrate it every week.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now just as we do not wait until our Lord comes to keep the commandment “thou shalt not steal, nor commit adultery”, neither do we with anything else God says. To be a Christian is to be faithful now.

[Same audience member] You realize that you have all these different denominations and all these different denominations have different doctrines. So who’s going to be able to say? Well naturally as the Catholics fit in, they got to do things their way; Baptists get in they going to push things their way, and so on and so on and so forth.

[Rushdoony] I’m not asking you to agree with the Catholics or the Presbyterians, or with me, or anybody else.

[Same Audience member] {?} I’m just saying, I’m just saying.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes, right. That doesn’t concern me, that doesn’t concern me at all sir. What does concern me is that we take the word of God seriously and then each of us apply it because you see I’m not responsible to you, or to the Catholics, or to the Presbyterians, or the Baptists or anybody else, I’m responsible to the Lord. So what these other people do doesn’t trouble me in the least. But I feel that I’ve got to apply that very literally, very seriously.

As Dr.{?} mentioned I am an Armenian in my background. Well even under the communist, my people there, and I have relatives there, and they’re people who are farmers and the like still practice some of the things that used to be practiced in this country but are forgotten. One is sacrifice.

[Same audience member] Aren’t we supposed to be a living sacrifice?

[Rushdoony] Let me explain. In the Bible it says that the animal is to be sacrificed, it’s blood shed upon the ground and a portion given to the priest. In the old country what they did was to take the lamb or the calf to the door of the church, and there was a stone slab and they killed the animal there, placed their hands on it and still do. My cousin’s been over there and he’s told me it’s an everyday thing. And they would say “Lord we know that it is not the blood of bulls nor goats that makes atonement for sin; but the blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And we shed this blood remembering that the old sacrifices are done away and it is the shed blood of Jesus Christ which now saves us, and we remember by the shed blood of this animal the shed blood of our Lord.” And then they would divide the animal and leave a portion with the pastor.

Well do you know that was done in this country, was done in some parts of this country. Some of the Indians were doing it when I went over there…

[Same Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] You see that’s how literally I take it; I believe those things have a memorial function which is very important in teaching. No one who remembers, each time they kill an animal to use, Jesus Christ and His shed blood is going to forget His Lord very readily.

[Moderator] What is your answer to his general question? That if God leads this country more and more into theocracy, the rule of God’s law, who will be the final authority? Is your answer to him you’re going to trust the Lord for a Christian consensus? That the Holy Spirit will bring these denominations to resolve infant baptism, the iconic sacrifice, the day of the Sabbath, are you relying upon a Christian consensus or work of the Spirit that way? What will make the final decision?

[Rushdoony] Alright. You see, the answer to that question is that we are too much under the influence of say, Romanism. Too much under the influence of federal directives so we think somebody has to be at the top saying “this is the way.”` But I’m saying the Lord is at the top, and all you’ve got to do, you see I’ve pointed out the State is a very limited thing, the power of the church in scripture I didn’t go into, is very limited also. The family is very strong in scripture, so each of use serves the Lord in his way and we are responsible to the Lord. I don’t look for a human authority over us.

[Moderator] So you’re content to live in a theocracy in which our religious practices and penalties there-on will be very different from family to family and subculture to subculture within this nation. You see a theocracy of considerable diversity.

[Rushdoony] Yes, as each grows in the direction of greater faithfulness to the Lord, as the Holy Spirit directs them. Now I’ve reared my family in terms of these things and the results are a joy to behold, even now in my Grandchildren. And I don’t interfere with anybody else’s, I tell them what the word of God says and I leave it to the Holy Spirit to direct them.

[Moderator] Would it be fair to say in conclusion that you would see far greater diversity, then for example was enjoyed in Massachusetts Bay Colony?

[Rushdoony] Oh my yes.

[Moderator] Because that’s what some people are fearing, a theocracy we had it once in this country.

[Rushdoony] That was not a theocracy, that was a churchocracy.

[Moderator] I see.

[Rushdoony] I don’t blame the churchocracy.

[Moderator] I’m going to have to reframe all questions and I think since I’ve followed this area for so many years, the following question is on everybody’s mind, and I’d love you to respond to it and then we’ll have to close. We’re already over time. Nobody in this room wants this paradigm in which we have the state over the church. The state over the church is totalitarianism. We don’t want that. I would assume no-one in this room wants the church over the state, because that was tried by medieval Catholicism, right? Everybody in this room would like some form of state and church as parallel institutions, each with their responsibilities.

[Rushdoony] Under God.

[Moderator] Under God, ok. [general laughter] Now I think what we will be looking for in the next ten, twenty, thirty years if Jesus tarries, is what does that mean? I think everybody in the room is who’s here, church and state under God. But we haven’t got the foggiest notion as to what that means, and I’m going to put myself in that category and I just want to give this word to the Lord {?} that the reason we’re having this course and having you here is so that you can give us some prophetic direction from scripture as to what God wants, and we thank you tonight for your witness, and I just want to say the following things as we close and then we’ll allow you fifteen or twenty minutes to see him privately.

And that is tapes of this lecture are available, just see me or Tom {?} we’ll keep a list of it and we’ll see that you get them at minimal costs. The next thing is I want to close in prayer for the following two requests. Francis Schaeffer’s illness and Christian Schools in the slums of the United States, especially the funding of this massive project. Now we’re all going to stand and we’re going to bring these before the Lord, let us stand.

Lets bind our hearts in prayer now for brother Schaeffer and for Christian schools in the slums of this country. Let us pray. Our father God we praise Thee and thank Thee for Jesus Christ and His grace. And we’re thankful for the commandments that he has given us, and that we are to go into all the worlds and make disciples and to baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and we are to tell them that they are to keep Jesus’s commandments. That they are to obey all things which Jesus has commanded. Lord we want to know what those commandments are in our social life, thank You for this course on law in society. And Father we pray for brother Schaeffer, we pray him the promise Father that you forgive all of our sins and heal all our diseases, and we ask now that according to your will Your immediate will we ask that brother Schaeffer will be granted complete deliverance in the name of Jesus. And Father we pray about the slums of this country and the vision that our brother Rushdoony has for Christian schools. The very thought of it is staggering, Lord we know this will require millions and millions of dollars and great sacrifice on the behalf of all Christians, in time and in labor. Father we ask that You would lead us into a life of obedience with regard to Christian schools in the major cities of this country. Father do it, and we will bless Thee for it. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

{unintelligible audio}

[Rushdoony] Now you have humanistic law prevailing so that first of all in terms of God’s law, they’re under His blessing, all of them whether they’re faithful to their wives or not .Their all under God’s judgment and death sentence. The whole society is under the death penalty, so what they do then is trifling. What difference does it make? We’re all guilty in the eyes of God.

Now when you have a Godly society it’s very different. My hometown in California, where I grew up as a boy, I think there are 900 more people there now then when I was a boy. When I was a boy there was one cop in town, now there’s 17 with an office staff. When I was a boy I could remember in high school once someone got tossed in for being drunk. A big Swede {?} who drank to much and got disorderly with the cops, it was the sensation of the town. All the high schools had to walk by and see “Oh he’s got a man in jail, big crime wave in town.” That’s what it was like when I was a boy. What happened? When I was a boy say if someone was a wife beater {?} the men in the neighborhood called on him and said “look, you’re not treating your wife properly, and you do that again and we’ll take care of you.” And they’d tell his {?}, and his {?} would get on his tail. One man who did it, and in fact one of his relatives told me about it, he said when he called on him “you’re mistreating your wife.” So he pulled down his britches and ripped off his underwear and dragged his butt through the nettles. And he said “now this is mild compared to what will happen next time.” That’s why it was rare. It wasn’t that people were better then, you had so many Christians and Christians felt a responsibility so it meant that somebody like that stayed in line.

Now today nobody cares what happens next door. So in that same town the same kind of people there you know, it’s basically a Swedish town although I’m not Swedish 90% of the people there are Swedish. Seventeen cops today plus an office staff where one took care of it and there was nothing to do. You see the difference is the loss of Christian faith. When I was a boy everybody went to church in that town, and everybody took the Bible seriously. There was one family that didn’t believe and boy everybody looked at them as though they were out of their minds. It’s the Stobbers {?} the Stobbers didn’t believe in God and they didn’t believe in the Bible, everybody looked at them as though they were freaks.

[Audience member] Is there a tendency to confuse theocracy with anarchy?

[Rushdoony] Usually with dictatorship which it certainly isn’t. But you see if people are godless there‘s no government that can take care of them. Now one of my staff members {?} who is a policeman, well more accurately he was a finger-print expert and a detective. And he said the problem today is that in most cities the lawbreakers far outnumber the cops. He said “what can you do?” Well you can do is try to keep records of the crime, you can’t go after them. In Berkley California there are more pot parties on any weekend night then there are cops in the entire city. What are you going to do with a pot party? And there’s more thefts then there are cops. What are the police going to do, there’s just helpless in this situation.

[Audience member] So you kept saying that the way to get back to the way things should be is {?} salt and light.{?} and that will gradually salt the whole society.

[Rushdoony] Salt in the Bible was the means of preserving meat. When I was a boy in the summer in the valley heat and we worked out in the fields you had salt meat. We had the salted herring. We had some kind of salted meat we’d get it out of the basement. When I went to the Indian reservation I didn’t have anything like refrigeration or light, I’d fish heavily in the summer and salt it and rinse it out in the winter and we ate a lot of {?} and venison, we could hang up outside because that was high up in the mountains and it would freeze, and then cut off a chunk and take it home.

Salt was a preserving agent in antiquity. We Christians are to be the salt of the earth to preserve it from the corruption that it will run into apart from the word of God.

[Audience member] You mentioned about diversity, you know saying that {?}. What would be the basis of when you get to much diversity or what not?

[Rushdoony] Most of the diversity that you have among Christians is that secondary thing. For example look at the hassle, I don’t know whether you have it around here but out in California a lot of people can never quite fighting about infant baptism and immersion. Where I could care less, you know there are people dying out there without the Lord, that I should worry about whether you get dunked or sprinkled. I happen to have my convictions but I don’t care as long as they believe you see. So the more trifling people’s faith becomes the more they’re divided. But I can work right now, and I’m working with people diverse background and in fact I’ve got a couple catholic priests that are supporting and helping my work, because they’re real Christians. Now it doesn’t mean they agree with me about church or anything else but they feel that the Lord’s work is being done so they’re listening. I’ve got people of all kinds of church background helping in my work and helping support it. Because it’s not the trifles, the more strongly we become in the faith the less we’re concerned about the things that divide it.

[Audience member] think that there needs to be a renewal in the church in the sense that we have so many people today claim to be Christians and they don’t even attend church regularly but they’re lives are so {?} and unaccountable you couldn’t, if you’re an elder or deacon in the church or a pastor, you can’t speak to them unless it’s about adultery or some gross immorality, they say “well {?}

[Rushdoony] Right and people feel they’re doing the Lord a favor. I actually had a man once who was an {?} and was guilty of adultery and I got mixed up in the situation because they brought me in they thought and outsider might be able to talk to him, and he got mad, he’d get mad at me you know. And he was guilty very flagrantly of adultery, and he said “look, at all that I do for the Lord. {?} I’ll give more work on the building fund, and raise more money than any 3-4 men put together. And I teach a Sunday School class and I take charge of this and I do this and I do that. Seems to me that nobody should object if I have a little fun {?}.” In other words, he was holding a ledger book of works that was a count of glory {?} and salvation by grace, and he was saying “when I’ve done all this for the Lord I’m entitled to a little fun on the side.” Well when you have that kind of attitude there’s nothing you can do except to say “by your fruits shall ye know them.” And he was unregenerate.

[Audience Member] So would you say that you need a renewal of the Lord’s church? I come from Los Angeles where it’s uncommon if you walk to church or if you drive less than five minutes, it’s more common if you drive ten minutes to twenty minutes on the free way. It seems that kind of thing people just become spectators, the elders and deacons they don’t know their people, they don’t shepherd them, I’m not talking about authoritarian kind of thing but a Godly {?} accountability.

[Rushdoony] Even there in such cases it can be done, I know where it has been. The Bible says there should be one elder for every ten families.

[Audience member] Is that in the Old Testament?

[Rushdoony] Yes. And that one elder should have a responsibility for those ten families.

[Audience member] Dr. Rushdoony when you’re talking in terms of reconstruction do you see any place for working in viable structures themselves such that well different structures, like the political part a guild, things like that can be restructured without everybody within the context of that guild becoming a Christian.

[Rushdoony] I believe that we need to go into all the world and I think that means all the institutions and areas of the world.

[Audience member] What I’m saying is in the different institutions the {?} Does everybody in the state or in the government have to be a Christian?

[Rushdoony] No, they do not. I know some young men who work for various legislators or government men. The men they work for are churchmen, may or may not be Christian depending on their {?} but they’ve chosen some Godly young men to be their legislative aide or their aide and they’re doing a great deal to direct their thinking in a Godly direction.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] {?} can do a great deal, for example one very fine man, he’s done some writing for us is Judge Mitchelle Wright {?} in North Carolina. Now there is a young man in his earlier thirties and he went to law school, he’s come to our position he became a district attorney in the state capital and was sensationally good, till he called it in when the criminal code was being revised. And he wrote in on the responsibility of the judge was to order restitution and subsequently because of his brilliant work the governor who would be against everything wrote {?} because he found this one man he could depend on absolutely there is such an integrity about him. He appointed him to one of the top positions as a judge. And the criminals practically fell over in a faint when they’re told “you’re not going to jail, you’re going to make restitution, you’re going to be in a half-way house and you’re going to pay in terms of {?}” and it worked. We got some policemen who had never heard of this to apply it in a {?} working on it beautifully. Here there and everywhere you see even though the men are not Godly we’re getting in and it’s producing remarkable results.

In the Reno case it was a young fellow who had run away from home, from college and become a narcotic addict. And one of the woman who is a basic supporter of ours was traveling to Reno and he tried to snatch her purse, she only had fourteen dollars in it but she’s the kind of woman that made this country. A God fearing woman who doesn’t believe anyone should lie down and let a criminal walk over them and she’s just a little thing but she had that over her arms and she wouldn’t allow him to get it. He wrestled her to the ground, picked her up and thumped her against the ground and she wouldn’t leave go. Well somebody in a store saw, must have been a shop owner, what was going on and called the cops and they came and they got him. It took her a year to recover, but when she got out of the hospital, that is used her right hand to write they wanted her to sign the complaint and take him to court and jail. And she said “What good will it do? I want restitution.” Police Sergeant looked at her “Well what’s that?” She explained it and he said “ok, that sounds pretty sensible. So then they said we’ve got a half-way house here we’ll put him there and put him to work after we dry him out form his narcotics. .

Meanwhile his folks seen notice of his arrest came into town and they were very happy at her solution. Well he’s been working it off slowly and the parents wrote a very fine letter to her which she passed on to me, it was the first time they felt hopeful about their son because now he’s seen that crime does not pay. He’s having to live with it, it’s been a year and a half now and every check a portion has to go to make restitution, double restitution; all the hospital expenses plus the same amount.

Now you see we’re getting that sort of thing here, there, and everywhere step by step.

[Audience member] There was a show I was watching; I forget the name of it. The speaker mentioned something about you know, we seem to be moving more, you know there seems to be a swing to the right in a lot of you know things now in the reaction to the whole sixties thing. What ar…?

[Rushdoony] I think that’s wrong, it’s not a swing to the right. It’s a return of {?} What you’re seeing now is the Christian movement and it’s exercising a great deal of power. What’s left of the conservative movement is in the hands of the conservative.