Law and Life

Communion and Culture

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Lesson: 26 of 39

Genre: Speech

Track: 137

Dictation Name: RR156N26

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

[Rushdoony] Our scripture this morning is from Leviticus 26 verses 3 to 21. Leviticus 26:3-21, and our subject is Community and Culture. On the previous occasion, we studied Communion and Culture. Now, we go a step further, Community and Culture. Leviticus 26:3-21. “If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time: and ye shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely. And I will give peace in the land, and ye shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid: and I will rid evil beasts out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land. And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. And five of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight: and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword. For I will have respect unto you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, and establish my covenant with you. And ye shall eat old store, and bring forth the old because of the new.  And I set my tabernacle among you: and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people.  I am the Lord your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that ye should not be their bondmen; and I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright. But if ye will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments; and if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but that ye break my covenant: I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you. And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins. And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass: and your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits. And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins.”

The chapter continues to specify the ever-increasing crescendo of judgment that God will bring upon those who disobey him. As we analyze the significance of the doctrine of the Lord’s Table, of communion, we saw that many non-Christian ideas have infiltrated, from neo-Platonism to outright Manichaeism, leading to various Monophysite and other ideas which warped the doctrine of the Lord’s Table.

Now, in the non-Christian world, culture is seen as a product of tension between two kinds of being, varying from a neo-Platonist version to a Manichean version. Those terms, with varying designations, fit the philosophies and the religions of the world, other than biblical faith. Now, in neo-Platonism, you have a moderate form. In Manichaeism, an extreme form of a philosophy which says that there are two different kinds of being in the universe, and the extreme form it is said to be the god of spirit, light, goodness and on the other hand, the god of matter and of evil, and of darkness. Form and ideas, spirit and flesh, this is the dualism that you find in varying degrees in all non-Christian religions. Culture then is seen as a tension of these two and always they gravitate to seeing the dark side as the productive. Sin as the exciting aspect of life.

When I was a student at the University of California in the 30’s, the first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was over and over again cited as one of the great and obvious truths. That sentence reads, “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Now get the implications of that. All happiness is boring. It’s all alike, but every unhappy family, every sin in unique and so, the world of fiction should concentrate on that. The world of adventure, the world of excitement, of that which is interesting is precisely therefore, in that area.

Now, this was the philosophy that was taught, but Tolstoy’s sentence can easily be reversed to read, Unhappy families are all alike. Every happy family is happy in its own way, but the world has not read it that way.

Now, what these people are saying is that culture is a product of sin, of tension, of unhappiness, of evil, but such things do not create cultures. They destroy them, and as a result, these people have never been able to get to the heart of what culture is, what is productive of a culture, and no sooner does a culture arrive, than as this dialecticism and/or dualism develops, they destroy the culture that has developed despite their philosophy. If you hold to this kind of a tension between spirit and matter, between two kinds of substance, you either demand a flight from one to the other, a flight from matter to spirit or the surrender of one to the other, or the destruction of one or the other, and the result is, instead of a culture, schizophrenia, suicide, quietness, withdrawal. Much of Christendom today is incapable of creating a culture precisely because it has been infected by neo-Platonism or Manichaeism. It either surrenders to the world or it runs away from it.

One of the most horrible experiences I’ve ever had as a Christian was to be asked to speak at a major university, it happened to be Stanford, in the latter 50’s to a Christian group of students. I tried to deal with the basic issues of conflict between the humanism that the university represented and the faith of scripture. That was the last thing they wanted to hear. They did not want to hear about conflict. They were too busy absorbing everything and believing that they could add to it as a kind of frosting on the cake of pietistic faith. They began singing before I spoke a lot of kindergarten choruses. Afterwards, when I asked for questions, there were none and the leader of the group popped up and said, “Let’s sing This Little Light of Mine.” That was going to liven things up, a kindergarten song, sung by university students. A flight from reality. Such people cannot create a culture.

On the other hand, we have non-Christians who say that Christianity cannot create a culture. W.H. Auden has written, “I sometimes wonder if there is not something a bit questionable from a Christian point of view about all works of art which make overt Christian references. They seem to assert that there is such a thing as a Christian culture, which there cannot be. Culture is one of Caesar’s things. One cannot help noticing that the great periods of religious painting coincide with the period when the church was a great temple power.” Now, there are many who share Auden’s point of view, but of course, Auden identifies culture with various art forms, not with life and moreover, Auden, as a degenerate, a pervert, who hates God, refuses to see that Chrisitanity can contribute anything, but culture is not a product of artistic activities. It is faith in action.

In early centuries, many people became Christians, because they felt, in a dying world, the dying world of Rome and then the dying world of Europe, the dying paganism, only Christianity could provide social order and so people cold-bloodedly said, “There is no hope for anything. The world around us is collapsing, it is falling. There’s only one group that can create a culture, that can provide law and order, that can provide stability. It’s the Christians. Therefore, let us go and become Christians.” It was that cold-blooded. This was done by individuals. It was done by rulers taking their whole kingdom into the church. It was done by parliaments, and this was done not only in the days of the very early church. It was done for centuries thereafter.

For example, we read in the Icelandic saga, Burnt Njal of an event which is historical. It actually took place in the year 1000. Christianity was, at that time, just coming into Iceland. It was still very much a minority. Conflict, including battle, had been developing between the Christians and the pagans and so they came together at their offing, which was their parliament for all of Iceland, and we read in Burnt Njal, and this is, as I said, an historical episode from the year exactly 1000 A.D. “The Christian men set up their booths and Gizur the white and Hjallti were in the booths of the men from Mossfell. The day after both sides went to the Hill of Law and each, the Christian men as well as the heathen, took witness, and declared themselves out of the other’s laws and then there was such an uproar on the Hill of Laws that no man could hear the other’s voice. After that, men went away and all thought things looked like the greatest entanglement. The Christian men chose as their Speaker Hall of the Side, but Hall went to Thorgeir, the priest of Lightwater, who was the old Speaker of the law, and gave him three marks of silver this was no bribe but his lawful fee, to utter what the law should be, but still that was the most hazardous counsel since he (Thorgeir, the priest of Lightwater) was a heathen.

“Thorgeir lay all that day on the ground, and spread a cloak over his head, so that no man spoke with him; but the day after men went to the Hill of Laws, and then Thorgeir bade them be silent and listen, and spoke thus: ‘It seems to me as though our matters were come to a dead lock, if we are not all to have one and the same law; for if there be a sundering of the laws, then there will be a sundering of the peace, and we shall never be able to live in the land. Now, I will ask both Christian men and heathen whether they will hold to those laws which I utter?’ They all said they would. He said he wished to take an oath of them, and pledges that they would hold to them, and they all said ‘yea’ to that, and so he took pledges from them. ‘This is the beginning of our laws,’ he said, ‘that all men shall be Christian here in the land, and believe in one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but leave off all idol-worship, not expose children to perish, and not eat horseflesh. It shall be outlawry if such things are proved openly against any man; but if these things are done by stealth, then it shall be blameless.’ By all this heathendom was all done away with within a few years' space, so that those things were not allowed to be done either by stealth or openly. Thorgeir then uttered the law as to keeping the Lord's day and fast days, Yuletide and Easter, and all the greatest highdays and holidays.”

Now, this is a startling episode to us in our day because we still, although we are not too many years from it perhaps, do not see anarchy all around us, but the ancient world and the world of Iceland in the year 1000 A.D. saw nothing but anarchy, and so it was the priest of the heathens, Thorgeir, who himself made the decision that all were to become Christians. Had there been a war, the Christians could have been exterminated. They were very emphatically in the minority, but there was the recognition that culture had collapsed. There had to be law, and so there, on the Hill of Laws, the pagan priest himself said it shall be Christian law. He recognized that Christianity alone, biblical law, could provide for a culture.

Now, this is something that Christians today have lost, because they have become influenced by neo-Platonism and alien philosophies, they have forsaken biblical law. So, they hole up in their churches, they withdraw from the world and they let the world go to hell as fast as it can, which is very fast. It is a retreat, not a victory.

In the 1890’s, there were more than twice as many Christians among the American Indians as there are today. Why? We fail to realize how many Indians simply disappeared, became a part of the white population from the early days on, because they recognized the superiority of the white man’s religion, just as they recognized the superiority of his gun and they had it, his religion had to be superior also, but then after 1890, they began to realize the white man believes not in the Bible but in something called evolution, and so they began to drop it. Power, they said, has to be with this. It has to be more powerful, and today the American Indian is a very confused person because suddenly, the white man is idealizing the Indian’s religion. So, somehow what he had in the beginning was best. It doesn’t make sense to him, but it has to be because the white man is obviously out in front, and if you wonder why the American Indian is practically psychotic and a very mixed up person, that’s the reason.

Now, what we are trying to make clear is that Christian faith has material and social consequences when it is true to the word of God, when it obeys God’s word. What our scripture tells us in Leviticus 26 can be summed up very briefly under four headings. God is saying in this passage if you obey me and if you obey my laws, certain things are going to happen. If you don’t, certain other things are going to happen. Now, this is a familiar theme in scripture. The whole of Deuteronomy 28 is also given to it. The whole of the law and the prophets is given to it. The whole of the gospels and the epistles stress the fact that there is a reward to those who obey God and that the wages of sin are ever death.

Now, what this passage tells us is first of all, God declares that he will capitalize a people that obey him. This capitalization includes a variety of things, material and spiritual, natural and social. It means peace and safety, internally and externally. It means good rains, good harvests. This wild animals will not take over the land but will gradually be pushed back. Above all, it means that God will dwell with them, he will tabernacle amongst them. And therefore, they shall flourish. There is, therefore, and this is the first thing God declares, a capitalization wherever people believe and obey. Their culture will flourish in a battle.

Second, God says emphatically that he will de-capitalize a disobedient people. There will be bad weather, there will be poor crops, the wild animals will take over the land as will enemies, as will drought, and much more. He declares moreover that he will strip them of the pride of your power and will leave them weak and impotent. The modern world is precisely in a period of de-capitalization. God is de-capitalizing us and just as God declares in his scripture and every time of judgment, every time when people abandon him, the weather itself, the earth will become perverse in relationship to them, so we see today a super-abundance of natural disasters, droughts, and the like. The capital of faith is waning in our day. There is a de-capitalization and a judgment that goes with it.

Then third, God declares in this passage that the basic capital is always faith ideas which have consequences. The premise of all stable cultures is stated at the very beginning in the third verse: “To walk in my statutes and keep my commandments.” Apart from God, all things collapse into meaninglessness. It is interesting that in the last century, one American poet saw what was ahead: Edward Rolland Sill. And in a poem entitled “Infirmity,” he depicted what was ahead in the century to come, the twentieth century. He wrote this in very peaceful days, but he said, as he dealt with the fact that men had lost the certainty of truth. No longer had a sure ground in the word of God.

What is the truth to believe,

What is the right to be done?

Caught in the webs I weave

I halt from sun to sun.

The bright wind flows along,

Calm nature’s streaming law,

And its stroke is soft and strong

As a leopard’s velvet paw.

Free of the doubting mind,

Full of the olden power,

Are the tree, and the bee, and the wind,

And the wren, and the brave may-flower.

Man was the last to appear,

A glow at the close of day,

Slow clambering now in fear

He gropes his slackened way.

All the up-thrust is gone,

Force that came from of old,

Up through the fish, and the swan,

And the sea-king’s mighty mould.

The youth of the world is fled,

There are omens in the sky,

Spheres that are chilled and dead,

And the close of an age is nigh.

The time is too short to grieve,

Or to choose, for the end is one:

And what is the truth to believe,

And what is the right to be done?

That was quite a confession by a man who had become a modern man, an evolutionist. It was the close of an age he saw because man no longer knew what was the truth to believe and what was the right to be done. All things had been made equal, equally meaningless and God says that ideas have consequences, that what a man sows that shall he also reap, and if you sow meaninglessness, you reap meaninglessness and irrelevance.

Then finally, God declares in this passage that a strict causality in the form of rewards and punishments does prevail, but also always the personal factor, his covenant. “I will establishment my covenant with you and I will set my tabernacle among you.” He is always the totally personal God and culture is not a product of causality, but of personality and when men abandon God, when they render all things impersonal and they look at the universe as though it were not the personal handiwork of a personal God, they eliminate meaning from the world and from their lives, and culture disappears. Culture and personality are inseparable. There is no culture in any sense that we can define outside the world of man.

What the animals have is not to be called a culture. With them it is something instinctive. It is something that is a part of their being and they do not change. There is no progress, development, personality, the personality that creates something personal, a culture. Any philosophy and any theology which de-personalizes the world of man will, to that extent, destroy the development of culture and of civilization, materialism, naturalism, idealism, neo-Platonism, Manichaeism, Manophsophism, Aryanism. Name them off, all the heresies of all the pagan philosophies all tend to de-personalize or divide reality and therefore, inhibit and destroy culture. Only when men bow down to the sovereign and totally personal God and obey him and only when they recognize the totally personal cause behind all causes, can personality flourish and express man’s cultural mandate. False or deformed doctrine of communion means a deformed community and a deformed culture, and any doctrine, any theology which tampers with the word of God, to that extent, destroys culture and civilization.

The ultimate blessing, God says, is “I will establish my covenant with you and will set my tabernacle among you.” The greater the faith and the obedience, the closer the relationship to the absolute personality, God, the more personal life and reality become, and then, culture truly comes into its own. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto thee that thou hast called us to be thy people and that we have the blessed assurance that, behind all events are not blind, impersonal causes, but thou, O Lord, all things come from thee, O Lord. Teach us, therefore, Father, to walk mindful that thou hast called us as persons to serve and magnify thee wherever we are, to build a culture and a civilization on thy word, thy law, to magnify thee therein, and to bring ourselves to fulfillment in terms of thy word. Bless us to this purpose, we beseech thee, in Jesus name. Amen.

End of tape