Law and Life

Community and Family

Professor: Rushdoony, Dr. R. J.

Subject: Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 16 of 39

Track: 127

Dictation Name: RR156H16

Date: 1960s-1970s

[Rushdoony] Let us worship God. O give thanks unto the Lord, call upon His name. Make known His deeds among the people. Sing unto Him, sing psalms unto Him. Talk ye of all His wondrous works. Glory ye in His holy name. Let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto Thee that Thou art our God, and our hearts rejoice as we seek Thy ways. We thank Thee that Thy hand is upon us for good, that Thou art He who made us, who hast redeemed us, and whose promises to us in Jesus Christ are yea and amen. Bless us this day and always by Thy Word and by Thy Spirit, and lead us into all truth and righteousness in Jesus Christ, that we may ever serve Thee, ever rejoice in Thee, and ever magnify Thy holy name. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Our Scripture today is Ephesians 3, 8 through 19, and our particular attention will be on verse 15. Our subject: community and the family. Community and the family, Ephesians 3, 8 through 19. “Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ; and to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ: to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord: in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him. Wherefore I desire that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which is your glory. For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.”

We saw last week that the state wages war against the community and the basic community, especially the family. The family is the central institution of any society, and therefore we have been in the midst of a long warfare of several centuries to destroy, to undercut, to eliminate the family. A very clear example of this warfare was in last Sunday’s Herald Examiner, a statist educator John Holt, who has written several books along this vein, has come out with a children’s bill of rights, it was given a full page in the paper. As a preface to his bill of rights, Holt said and I quote, “I have come to feel that the fact of being a child, of being wholly subservient and dependant, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave, and super-pet, does most young people more harm than good. I propose instead that the rights, privileges, duties, responsibilities of adult citizens be made available to any young person of whatever age who wants to make use of them.” Unquote.

Now of course, Holt’s idea; the children are regarded by parents simply as an expensive nuisance, a slave, or a super-pet, is certainly a caricature. It reveals his anti-Christian, anti-family bias to the core. What he shows is not scholarship, but the most intense kind of hatred in his writings. Now his catalogue of rights for children is in line with this hatred of the family. I won’t read all of them, but just the last five to give you an idea of what they involve. The right to financial independence and responsibility; that is the right to buy and sell property, to borrow money, establish credits, sign contracts, etc. Now mind you this is for children of any age, as long as they want to make use of them. The right to direct and manage one’s own education. The right to travel, to live away from home, to choose or make one’s own home. The right to receive from the state whatever minimum income it may guarantee to adult citizens. Let me say parenthetically of course he believes that every adult citizen should have the right to a very sizable minimum income, something far in excess of what welfare grants today, whether or not they choose to work. The right to make and enter into, on a basis of mutual consent, quasi-familial relationships outside one’s own immediate family; that is the right to seek and choose guardians other than one’s own parents and to be legally dependent on them. The right to do in general what any adult may legally do.

Now this is not an isolated statement by an educator, as a matter of fact, it is very prevalent in social welfare circles, and more than one parent who has had problems with children has had the welfare workers spell out this type of right of the child to the parents, and of course to back them up. So, what Holt says is nothing new or revolutionary, but simply that which has been in process of legal formulation for some time. Very clearly this is warfare against the family. And the fact that this has been in process for a long, long time should not surprise us, beginning with the Renaissance; modern man declared his autonomy from God and therefore his autonomy from responsibility and men began to behave irresponsibility. The Reformation, for about a century and a half, set back this movement but after 1660, the modern movement has been moving very rapidly to its natural conclusion, which is suicide; death. Men were the first to feel the effects of the modern movement in the form of total irresponsibility. And of course it’s been a long familiar fact that apart from being irresponsible in the home, men have been irresponsible and when the home responsibilities have been too great, have just picked up and left. In the late 50’s and 60’s, this became common place with children, they got the idea, and now detective agencies have a new type of business; missing wives. Wives that decide the work is just too much, the responsibilities are just too much, and so they leave a note near the squalling baby and just take off. They want freedom. And so detective agencies now are finding that a booming area of business is to try to locate missing wives, although it doesn’t do too much good when they are located. Irresponsibility; a feeling that the family represents bondage and slavery, this is increasingly the temper of the day.

It is moreover a part of the revolutionary movement of our time and of the past two centuries to attack the family. Warfare was first of all declared by the socialist, as I have pointed out briefly last week, against the Holy Family; the Trinity. And then against the earthly family; against the authority of the father. And in attacking the father they were of course attacking the idea of all authority. And so the attack was launched against the authority of the father in the name of the brotherhood of man; equality. But this was just a pretext. The people who have most preached equality are the most elitist of people, and their whole argument for the brotherhood of man and equality is simply a means of attacking the authority of God; the authority of everything that represents Christian civilization. One French leftist of the last century, Nicolas Calas wrote, and I quote, “The dominant of the revolutionary complex is to be sadistic. This means that hatred of the father should always be stronger than love of the brother.” Freedom thus, in the modern era, means essentially freedom from God and on the earthly level, freedom from the family. And so we have all kinds of propaganda continually about how horrible the Christian eras were, and how much given to persecution and bloodshed. This is an ironic fact coming from the bloodiest of centuries; the 20th, when more people and a higher percentage of people have been butchered than in any other era of civilization, and we’ve only begun our work. The bloodiest years may be ahead of us. But of course it is important to make slaves and semi-slaves think they are free.

Moreover, the world of literature, and especially the world of entertainment is a continual assault, not only on Christian standards, but on the family. One English critic with a very unusual name, Peregrine Worsthorne, who apparently is the thorn in the side of television in England, has summarized the consequences for child education of modern television, as well as the whole of our modern world. He writes, “A contemporary child is pampered and cosseted in the home from the earliest infancy, where its parents slave around him, indulged in the school where the teachers are forbidden to lay a hand on him, and where bullying (once rampant), has been largely eliminated, pandered to in adolescence by a whole commercial structure, designed to react enthusiastically to a slightest whim so that he reaches maturity accustomed to getting his way. But alongside this protracted training in in-discipline goes a cultural diet that promotes the belief that violence is the highest form of human expression: the quickest and most direct way of getting things done, irresistible to women, the only civilized response to a stinking society, the sharpest instrument of freedom. For every taste and inclination and every level of intelligence, a good justification for violence can be supplied pretty well on every bookstall, and in most evenings’ television entertainment.”

Peregrine Worsthorne is right. The answer to all problems on television, the solution to every kind of evil, the proof of manhood and heroism and courage is always violence. And so it is that our college youth today who were baby-sat by television have come to be a generation whose faith is in violence. Their faith in violence is so great that in the underground press it’s a matter of serious faith that the only reason why some women are against rape is because they have Christian and middle class hang-ups, because it has to be pleasurable. Violence is the best answer to everything. And violence is in particular directed against the family. The hatred of the family in contemporary literature is intense. The cult of Sadism, once regarded as a perversion, is now held to be a legitimate human expression. In fact, one underground artist of sadistic qualities who was once regarded only for the pornographic world is now regarded as a classic artist. Why? Because he glorifies sadistic impulses and nothing else. And against what are his sadistic impulses directed? Against the family, against women; and the result is therefore the exaltation of sexual experimentation and violence, and the destruction of the family as a matter of principle.

And so the family apart from Christ is disintegrating. There is a rift between generations; a distrust because of a lack of elementary faithfulness between husbands and wives. All over the world the natural community is in process of radical erosion. It is collapsing. The ability of man to maintain community in any form; from the family on to the larger groups, apart from Christ, is now in process of worldwide disintegration and collapse. It is collapsing because humanism the world over is going to its logical conclusion, which is total anarchism; every man his own god, every man his own universe, recognizing no ties, no law, no principle outside himself. And so the natural community is dying. The only kind of community in the world today that is able to withstand these erosive forces and to grow is the supernatural community; the community created by the sovereign redeeming grace of God; the Christian family, the Christian church, the Christian school, the Christian community, any kind of Christian fellowship. Everything else is in process of collapse, and the Christian knows the reason for this.

Saint Paul declared in our text that he bowed in adoration before the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named. This is one of the most important statements in all of Scripture. Unfortunately, pietism has virtually destroyed its meaning and reduced it to a purely Christian level, rather than the cosmic framework Saint Paul gave it. What is its meaning? Saint Paul earlier in verse nine emphasizes the creation of all things by Jesus Christ, and then in verse eleven declares that this is according to the eternal purpose which He purposed in Jesus Christ our Lord. This eternal purpose therefore, he says, is now manifested and revealed in the coming of Jesus Christ our Lord. The same Lord, therefore, who made all things, who is responsible for our redemption, is also the crown of the development and of the meaning of the whole creation, and every family in the broadest sense of the term; every classification, every area of life can only be understood, can only be named in terms of Him; of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.

Now names, in Scripture as I have pointed out some time back, are definitions. When God commanded Adam in the Garden of Eden to name the animals, what He required them to do was to classify them, to understand them, to interpret them in terms of God’s creative purpose. So to name, to classify, is to identify in terms of what things are, in terms of God. The whole family in heaven and earth, the whole world of creation, is called into being; is named, is interpreted by the Father, Saint Paul declares. And therefore nothing can be understood apart from God’s naming, and that which God names is therefore truly named. Names are definitions. Abram had a name before he was called Abram, and Scripture does not tell us that name, because we know him only as the man God called in Scripture, as the type of the true believer. So we have his second name, Abram; father of many. And then Abraham; father of a great multitude, names he had to bear by faith because when people met him they no doubt were amused that he called himself Abram, father of many, when he was childless. And Abraham, when he only had one child, and subsequently only two. And we are told that we have a new name, which we will know only in the world to come. And that new name is one God gives us, it is His definition of us from all eternity, and we are, as we are redeemed, to work out our salvation, to sanctify ourselves by the Holy Spirit, to name ourselves as it were, to know our name in Christ, to find ourselves through obedience, and then we know what God’s definition, what God’s name is. If we do not know God’s name, if we do not know Him as our Lord, then we cannot name ourselves, we cannot define ourselves, we cannot know ourselves. And so our life disintegrates.

We knew, a few years ago before we moved down here, a family where the young man, totally reprobate, was thrown out by his father but sneaked into the house on Christmas Eve by the mother, who was filled with pity for her only child. A serious quarrel developed over that, and the father died on New Year’s Eve. The son inherited a very, very great fortune, and yet at nineteen he was able to say, I have tried everything, nothing is worth living for, and was on the brink of suicide the last I heard. He had indeed tried everything, in the way of drugs, experience, sexual and otherwise, there was nothing worth living for and he was toying continually with suicide and driving his mother to distraction and drink. Of course, he had no name, no definition, no meaning, because he had denied Christ, the faith of his father. And therefore he rejected meaning in himself and in the world around him. The whole creation is defined and named by God, and by that eternal purpose which He purposed in Jesus Christ our Lord, Saint Paul says in verse eleven. And so the supernatural community alone can exist, therefore the future belongs to us in Jesus Christ. The natural community is everywhere in process of disillusion through suicide. The humanist is destroying he has, but the supernatural community is being established and prospering in Christ.

Saint Paul goes on then through the rest of this book to define one thing after another in terms of the Trinity. This is why, having declared that God the Father is He of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, defined, given meaning, called into being, then as he comes to marriage (for example) he speaks of the relationship of Christ and the church. Not a mere figure of speech, but what he is saying is that all meaning comes from the triune God, and we can understand the meaning of nothing, and the relationship of nothing apart from the meaning He gives it. And so authority, relationship, meaning in every sphere, we derive from the triune God, because all things are God’s creation and not brute facts, and hence only defined, only meaningful in terms of Him, and apart from Him natural community finally becomes no community, and its end is hell and total isolation. But for us nothing is meaningless, for we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose. And we have, as Saint Paul says in verse twelve of our text, boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him. And so, when we have our name in Christ, our meaning, and as we grow in His grace, we apprehend more and more, dimly in this world but openly in the world to come, that new name, that ultimate and final and glorious meaning that He has defined us with. And so Saint Paul’s prayer is that “He would grant you according to the riches of His glory to be strengthened with might by the Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.” And so as we look at the world of community, and the world of the family, we have to say of course it’s disintegrating, it has no other future. It refuses to be named, to be defined by God, and therefore it is in process of disintegration. The natural community is dying all over the world as epistemological self-consciousness forces the unredeemed to develop the implications of the fall to their natural conclusion, which is hell. Therefore, it is all the more urgent for us to stand in terms of the Word of God, and to realize that the supernatural communities are indeed the wave of the future, that they stand not in terms of man’s defining, which is ultimately meaninglessness, nothingness, but in terms of God’s definition, God’s predestination, and God’s blessing. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto Thee for Thy Word. We thank Thee that we have a new name, and that new name sums up the meaning of our lives, the meaning Thou hast ordained. We thank Thee that all things have been named by Thee, and that we have been called by Thee to understand Thy naming; Thy defining in every area of life, to serve Thee, to magnify Thee, to rejoice in Thee, and to know that the supernatural communities that have been established by Thy redeeming grace in Jesus Christ shall prevail, and the gates of hell cannot withstand their triumphant march. Our God, we thank Thee, in Jesus name’ Amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all on our lesson? Let me call to your attention something that you might call documentation of what we’ve just said about the natural community destroying itself. This Thursday, the Valley News and Green Sheet had a very interesting article on education; the title of which is “Teacher drops three R’s in waning days of semester.” John L. Dussault, 6th grade teacher at Vintage Street Elementary School in Sepulveda has dropped the regular program for his pupils for the rest of the semester. “I felt otherwise I would not be doing my duty as a teacher,” Dussault told the news, in explaining why the last weeks of the semester will be devoted to what he considers primarily human development. Admitting that his actions have engendered controversy within the school, Dussault said all the parents with whom he has spoken so far, those of 18 of the 39 children in his class, support him. The class is delving into such matters now as yoga, meditation and breathing exercises that can elevate to a higher state of consciousness. “We are asking also why such things as witchcraft and other inexplicable phenomena haven’t been studied scientifically,” Dussault said, and so on and on. Reading and writing and arithmetic are just to humdrum for the children, so they’re going to be studying higher states of consciousness in witchcraft and magic. Yes?

[Audience member] I read that article and I wondered at the end why he went on {?}.

[Rushdoony] Well I think he is fairly sure that the overwhelming majority will be favorable. This unfortunately is the case. Yes?

[Audience member] I teach in school with this man, and he never has taught the three R’s, so.

[Audience laughter]

[Rushdoony] Well he might as well then be openly doing what he’s always done. Does he have tenure?

[Audience member] Yes. And I told him, I said, I appreciate what you’re doing if you would {?}. I said, because of {?} our Christian school.

[Laughter]

[Rushdoony] What did he say to that?

[Audience member] {?}

[Laughter]

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well this kind of thing is excellent publicity for Christian schools, it certainly is. In fact it’s a good thing to copy and pass out, do you want this or this? Any other questions or comments? I think we ought to realize of course that these people are, as Scripture says, blinded judicially. The verse that’s most quoted of all in the New Testament is from the 6th chapter of Isaiah; the vision. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up.” And then at the end, latter part of the chapter, in verses 9 and 10 of Isaiah 6, “Go, and tell this people, ‘Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not.’ Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.” That is quoted more often than any other passage in the Old Testament by the New Testament. Judicial blindness; when people go beyond a certain point, God blinds them so that they suicidally proceed to destroy themselves. Do you know incidentally what is the second most quoted passage of the Old in the New? It’s from the Psalms, Psalm 2, yes, Psalm 2 is quoted over and over again, the triumph of Christ, you see. So on the one hand, the judgment of God upon the reprobate and then on the other, the triumph of Christ, His conquest of all peoples. Yes?

[Audience member] {?} Isaiah 10:1

[Rushdoony] Isaiah 10:1, yes, “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of the people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless.” Here of course is a pronunciation of judgment upon legislators and judges, and what God is saying is woe unto them, judgment is going to hit them in a particular way for decreeing unrighteous decrees, and making evil and misery their prescription. And I think this is so commonplace now that you would think judges would quail in terror before God, but they are blinded.

Incidentally, some of you may have seen (this is a related subject) the article by a professor of criminology at a university who spent some time as a policeman on the beat, and how it changed his whole perspective. How many of you saw that? It was in U.S. News and World Report about two or three weeks ago. None of you, oh. That was a tremendous article because he was a man who had the usual idea that the police were brutal and so on, and they should try to reason with people, and suddenly he found himself, when he went out there and he was going prove his argument by being a policeman on the beat. He found that he was overreacting and was ready to be brutal, and the police were telling him, now look, cool down, restrain yourself. He was filled with terror and fear, and he realized you don’t reason with a man who is shooting at you. All his arguments went down the drain, so he said it would be a good idea for judges and for professors of criminology to get out there on the firing line for a while. But nobody has made a move to do that. Yes?

[Audience member] {?} Isaiah the third chapter because the Bible gives children {?}. They shall rule over them. {?}

[Rushdoony] Right right, yes. And Isaiah elsewhere says that the time will come when men of wisdom will not want to rule, because there’s no sense in ruling over fools. I thought this was very interesting because just the other day, I read a very interesting account by a man who was criticizing the leadership in World War I, and in the decade or more after that; Churchill, de Gaulle, Eden, and he thought they were very bad. But he said at least you could say of the leadership then it had some intelligence, although they were knaves. And now they have been succeeded by the reign of the children; intellectual idiots.

Well our time is virtually up, and apropos of absolutely nothing, except that I think it’s a wonderful thing to enjoy life and to see the ridiculous now and then, I’d like to read this little news item. New York City is considering single-story fire houses, since a study has established that 69 firemen were injured sliding fire poles last year. Children facing surgery at the Garland Clinic and Hospital in Texas ride to the operating room in a little red wagon to keep them amused right up to the knife. A man in Flora, Indiana was taking a soothing bath when his wife told him there was a snake in the bedroom. He jumped out of the tub and ran into the bedroom getting down on his hands and knees to look for the snake. At a critical moment the family dog padded up from behind and poked him with its nose. The man fainted, and the wife phoned for an ambulance thinking he had been bitten by the snake. As the man was being placed on the stretcher the snake reappeared. The wife yelled “snake”, and the ambulance attendant dropped the patient, breaking his collarbone. I don’t know how with their safety rules they’re going to get away from that kind of accident. They dream of an accident free world, and they forget that man is accident prone when he is a sinner.

Let’s bow our heads now for the benediction. And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

[End of tape]