Justice

The Loss of Justice

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre: Speech

Track: 01

Dictation Name: RR174A1

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1960’s-1970’s.

[introductory speaker] But at this time I’d like to ask Pastor John Hamen of the Christ’s church of North Gate to give the invocation.

[Hamen] May we stand together? Father, we come before you this morning in the name of your son the Lord Jesus Christ. And father, our hearts are filled with thankfulness for what you’re doing in the earth today. We thank you for raising up men with vision that are understanding, at least in a measure, your heart and your purposes. And we gather today to posture ourselves to hear the word of the Lord through them. We come before you expressing to you God by our posturing and by looking to you as we begin this day in prayer to say that we’re dependent on you. We need you desperately in todays world, we thank you for the hope that’s being birthed for we that are in the church today. We thank you for the renewing of our minds that’s taking place today... we thank you for helping us to understand your ways and your purposes in a greater measure.

We trust that today Lord there may be the spirit of revelation, the spirit of illumination, concerning your son, concerning your father heart. Lord may we be as the men of Issachar that are able to understand the times and able to act appropriately concerning our understanding. And again, we thank you for your faithfulness. We thank you for your continuing work in each one of us corporately in your church. Deal today with any strongholds that are in us of humanism, the stronghold and bastions of religiosity that need to be torn down, we present ourselves before you this morning in the name of your son, the Lord Jesus. Amen.

You may be seated.

[Introductory speaker] Our first speaker will be introduced by Mr. Wayne Johnson of Sacramento California. If I can call on Wayne at this time...

[Wayne] Good morning. Well isn’t that nice? [chuckles] Well, I think to introduce Mr. Rushdoony who probably does not need an introduction to this audience; the best way I can do that would probably be to tell you how he was introduced to me. It’s been --1970-- so it’s been thirteen years ago that I first met Reverend Rushdoony. I was a sophomore at Purdue University: sophomore is another word for know it all and that’s what I was. [laughter from the audience]

And I recall that I was very very active in political activities on the campus, of a very conservative nature, and active in all the conservative groups. It was a very hot time in 1970 on the major college campuses. And, ah, we were looking for speakers that would just tweak the other side’s nose and I happened to run into a fellow of the name Larry Prap who at the time was a midwest direct of the ecclesiastical studies institute in Indianapolis. And I told him that, he said: “Boy, have I got the speaker for you! He’s written a book called The Myth of Overpopulation.” Now if you remember 1970 and the way you’ve had the population control and all those things going at that time. I said: “Great! Send him up.”

And so that was our first occasion to run into Reverend Rushdoony. My introduction to him at that time, he arrived about ten minutes before he was to talk, I went down and I said: “Now you’ve written this book The Myth of Overpopulation have you written anything else? I was jotting it down on the back of my envelope, because I was gonna list -- [he is interrupted by the audience laughing] -- well, he looked at me and he said: “Yeeeess...” And for the next ten minutes until I said: “That’s enough!” I realized perhaps I had been a little unfair to the person I was about to introduce.

I did the best I could at that time, and I could tell you most assuredly that it has become more and more difficult throughout the years to introduce this man that has meant so much to me in my life and I know to many of you in your lives as well. It doesn’t get easier, it gets more difficult! Because you begin to realize through the years all of those junctures where I could have turned one way or the other and how he was so instrumental in my life. In career decisions and many other things. I remember later, he told me about Larry Prap who now is a legislative advocate in Washington, DC, he represents some of the large conservative organizations back there.

And he told me about Larry Prap, he said: “You know, you should stay in touch with Larry, you could do him a lot of good.” See, that’s how you talked to a sophmore. [audience laughs] And later I got several of his books from another fellow whose name was Fred (Andréa?) who at that time was deputy commissioner of motor vehicles, and he gave me one of the- one of the many In Politics of Guilt and Pity which I put on my shelf. Then a year later out of desperation for something to read one night I read them. Fred (Ondrea?) today is the commissioner of the interstate commerce commission in Washington, DC, appointed by President Reagan a year and a half ago.

I remember at the time Doctor Rushdoony told me, he said: “You should be very patient with Fred, you could do him a lot of good.” And again that’s another man who has meant a great deal to me as I made my career decisions. I got burned out completely on politics while in college, it was very difficult and a very rough time. I notice a couple people in the audience nodding their heads like they may have been through that. And I’ll tell you, a conservative without the law can just as easily become revolutionary as a reactionary or anyone else, because you see no answers. You see only the questions. And Rushdoony helped me find some of those answers, and that’s something I’ll always be thankful to him for, and I’ll always remember him for those things.

I got transferred out to the west coast by the company I went to work for; three months after we got out here he had done such a good job -it was the first year the company had ever showed a profit in eleven years- that is was sold, and a new management team was brought in from the parent company. And so, I was about to head back to a company in Iowa and while I was down in Southern California those three months, I looked up this old acquaintance Reverend Rushdoony and I called back and said: “Where do they- where is he out here? Where do they meet?” And he said: “Oh they meet in the morgue down there in Los Angeles somewhere, at Westwood.” So I went down to the morgue and I said: “Well, I’m about ready to go back now. I’m going back to Indiana or Iowa which is closer to Indiana where my wife’s from, she thinks that’s closer to California and we’ve been here three months long enough.”

And he said: “Nooo... I want you to meet a fellow by the name of H. L. Bill Richardson. He’s a state senator and you need to be in politics.” And I said: “Noooo...” But I did, and again, through that introduction I went to work for Bill Richardson and went to work for him for seven years. And ended up learning many of the things that he’s taught me, some of the things that we’d learned together, but I remember the time he told me, he said you know you should go up there and work with Bill Richardson, you could do him a lot of good. And I’ll tell you through the years I literally could go on a very long time about the many other occasions that I’ve called on Reverend Rushdoony for council and advice, where he has given me the benefit of his wisdom and has almost invariably been right. Even when I didn’t want him to be.

And so it’s a great honor even to -later in the day I’ll be speaking to you- it’s a great honor to even be in the same platform as him, the second time I’ve done so. I asked him coming up here I said, you know it’s mind boggling to be speaking from the same platform as this man I’ve had so much respect for, for these so many years. I said, I don’t understand it. And he says: “Well, you’ve been to the circus, right?” I said yes. He said: “Well you know how they’ve such a big act and they’ve gotta take all the equipment down cause they’ve got to bring on the next big act?” I said yeah. “So what do they do in the meantime?” They bring in the clowns, I said. And he said: “Uh huh!” [audience laughs]

I would introduce Reverend Rushdoony this morning by suggesting that you listen to him very carefully, I’m sure that you all could do him a lot of good. [more laughter, and applause from the audience]

[Rushdoony] Thank you, Wayne. It was good to recall that visit to Purdue when I first met Wayne. It was a remarkable evening. I spoke before a very crowded auditorium and the amazing thing was that I got out without being slugged! Another thing amazed me that evening, that the school tolerated Wayne Johnson on the premises, because he terrorized the faculty and I found out that’s why they never tossed him out, they were afraid of him! And sometime I want Wayne Johnson to write the story of his life at Purdue. It will be one of the most exciting and amusing stories that you have ever heard!

In our first session this morning we shall be covering somewhat familiar ground. Our subject is the loss of justice. I say this is familiar ground because it is the ground we are all living on. I spent a good deal of my time going from state to state for trials of Christian schools, churches, and parents. It’s very taxing on my patience. As a matter of fact, about two or three weeks ago in Georgia I did express myself rather bluntly at the end of my testimony.

There were two fine brothers and their wives on trial because they were education their children at home. There was no question that their children were ahead of public school children of their own age, all you had to do was to look at those families to realize: here is the strength, the backbone, the character of this country. They were very impressive, devout, godly Georgia farmers. And they were on trial and had been subjected to one indignity after another! A criminal trial, mind you!

And so I said, “It makes me angry and sick at heart to be on the stand defending these families when so many hoodlums are loose on your streets.” I said, “There is something wrong with this country.” I’m glad to say the judge ruled in the favor of the Padgett brothers and made a similar statement in his decisions. One of the plainest statements we’ve had in any case.

But the loss of justice is something you encounter all around you. You face it when you pick up your morning or afternoon newspaper. Moreover there are writers dealing with this which give us another perspective. For example, in 1971, a European scientist Roberto Vadka wrote a book entitled The Coming Dark Age. And Vadka dealt with the coming Dark Age from a scientific perspective. We have a highly technological world, but through a variety of controls and restrictions we are not enabling that technology to survive and to go forward! And the result, Vadka says, if that between 1984-5 he predicts that we will see a breakdown of major systems. Transit, garbage, telephones, the mails, and other like systems. Now that’s Vadka’s prediction. He doesn’t even raise the prospect of war and what they will do to contribute to this breakdown. He sees it as an internal factor.

There are many such books comparable to Vadka’s study. They have a common premise, that the dark age may lie ahead of us. But I believe all these books have a common error. They’re looking forward rather unhappily to the prospect of a dark age when the fact is it is here. A liberal scholar, Elliott, wrote in the 60’s a book entitled The 20’th Century Book of the Dead. Some of you have heard me cite that book. What Elliott there documents, and it’s a statistical study, is simply this: that a higher percentage of mankind has been killed in the twentieth century than in any other century by means of war, revolution, slave labor camps, mass executions, and other instances of man’s inhumanity to man.

Now his statistics came the first sixty years of this century, and since then we’ve learned much more about what happened in red China. We know of the tremendous massacres by the hundreds of thousands of Christians in Africa, how in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge systematically killed off fifty percent of the population. The picture is much worse than Elliott saw it in the 60’s. And it’s ironic, too, that Elliott could gave no answers -of course it was just a statistical analyses- but the startling thing about his book is that having given this account he was compelled to face a fact that he would not admit, because he turned suddenly on the doctrine of original sin. What he as a liberal turned up in this study indicated there was something fundamentally wrong with man, and instead of saying man is a sinner he turns on the doctrine of man’s sin, man’s depravity.

And thus Elliott had no answer. He gave us the data, but he did not point to the religious cause. We can see that cause in a book that a Princeton philosopher wrote, published in 1973 entitled Without Guilt In Justice -again a book that I have referred to again and again- a book that tells us a great deal about our time, because Coffman’s thesis in that book is that our whole social structure today is obsolete. Our civil governments, our courts, our laws are obsolete because they are premised on the belief that there is such a thing as guilt, and such a thing as justice. But, Coffman says, since there is no God there is no law no standard above and over all men so that guilt and innocence are mythical terms. Justice and injustice are mythical terms, and we need to live in a society beyond guilt and justice.

On the closing page of his book he turns to the scriptures, and he there cites Genesis 3:1-5. “The serpent’s temptation. Ye shall be as gods, knowing, determining for yourself what is good and what is evil.” And he said,” the serpent is right. But mankind then was not yet ready for him.” Of course Coffman’s thesis was not new, Max Stirner early in the last century proposed the same thing. He turned on the atheists of his days and said they were closet Christians. Because they had abandoned God but not biblical morality, biblical law. Which of you who profess to be atheist are honest, which of you will sleep with your mother or daughter? Until you do, you are closet Christians. Nietzsche said the same thing. And today we are seeing the harvest of their thinking.

And we have a book about a prominent criminal lawyer written by Paul Hoffman, and the title of it gives the summation of that lawyers philosophy. The title is simply What the Hell is Justice?!. Because God is the only source of true justice the decay of justice is the decay of true religion. God is the only valid source of justice and unless justice is grounded in the very nature in the source of all being it is a peripheral and unnecessary concept at best. Coffman is right. If there is no God, if the universe is the product of chance, of variation, of evolution, then to talk about justice is to talk in terms of an obsolete religion. To deny justice is to deny God. And to deny God, as Coffman correctly saw, is to deny justice. And the sad fact is that Coffman’s work is being done for him now by so many churches. Simply because, they are antinomian. Because they are against God’s law.

Not too long ago when I was speaking at the other end of the country, I made the statement that there were two great purveyors in the modern world of Marxism, of revolution. One, was the soviet union. The other the Christian church. Because virtually all seminaries today are infiltrated by liberation of theology. And liberation theology is a sentimentalized form of Marxism. The Catholics, the reformed, and the Arminian seminaries alike teach it. The fundamentalists and the modernists alike teach it. It is all over the world on the mission field.

My son Mark was recently on a trip to the mission field in India, {?} in particular, and was horrified by the liberationist the missionaries -who profess to believe the bible from cover to cover- were spouting. He said it was of the grace of God that the converts were getting their faith from the word of God rather than from the missionaries.

The source of law is God, deny God and you deny justice, deny justice and you have implicitly denied God. Let us remember the word righteousness in the bible and the word righteousness are one and the same, they’re not different words! They are identical. So when we speak about the righteousness of God we are talking about the justice of the God, it is his nature. When we talk about the image of God in man as being knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion... we are talking about justice. And man was created in the image of God to exercise knowledge, holiness, dominion, and righteousness or justice. Having fallen in Adam he was unable to exercise this being redeemed in Christ. He is now commissioned to exercise knowledge, justice, holiness, and dominion. But God’s law today is neglected and therefore both justice and God are neglected.

And we need to recall our generation to the totality of God’s word. As Isaiah said in Isaiah 8:20 “To the law and to the testimony. If they speak not according to this word it is because there is no light in them.”

A book written by a liberal describing our times since 1960 speaks of the temper that has come into the people as a compulsive coolness. A compulsive coolness. An indifference and increasing inability to be on fire for anything. It’s no wonder that we live in a time that is without song. There’s not much singing in the heart of man now, because of this compulsive coolness. It is that aspect of cynicism, a preference for the things we can look down on rather than for the things that we can give our lives to!

Today the church has no zeal for God’s righteousness because it has no zeal for anything. We have failed to require that the state be a ministry of justice because the churches have failed to be ministers of grace or of righteousness. The state is created by God to be a ministry of justice, but it cannot be the soul ministry of justice. If the ministry of justice is restricted to the state then justice soon disappears. There has to be righteousness in our lives as individuals, in our families, in our churches, in our schools, in our jobs, in our communities at large, or we are in trouble.

One of our forthcoming issues of the journal of Christian reconstruction, edited by doctor Kelly, will deal with business. And a businessman has been assisting us in collecting the articles for that: Dan Maxwell, a friend of Wayne Johnson’s and one of the Purdue men, by the way. And Dan Maxwell called me and he said, you know, I’m having trouble getting many Christian men in business to consider the issue seriously. Their attitude is: what has Christianity to do with business? and this is an attitude that prevails in one field after another. Education, the arts, the sciences, every area. Is it any wonder that we have a loss of justice?

Justice must be the life of man and of all society, in everything we do. Let me say in passing; tithing is a form of justice. If we do not tithe we are robbing God and he does not take kindly to being robbed. Abortion is injustice, homosexuality is injustice, and today we have massive injustice, unrighteousness all around us. Is it any wonder that this age is attacking the church and the Christian school? And Christian morality? Is it any wonder that it is turning the first amendment upside down!

Two or three weeks ago John Whitehead and I were in Port Waterdale, Florida, meeting with Doctor James Kennedy. And Doctor Kennedy kept saying over and over again the courts are interpreting the first amendment altogether backwards! It imposes restraints not on Christianity but upon the federal government. Congress shall make no laws, and what are the courts now saying? The first amendment tells the churches what they cannot do. And there’s not a hint of that in the first amendment! And today on all sides we see the concept of justice subjected to cynical attack. We have legal positivism which has separated justice from law.

You know it’s ironic that in the 20’s a very influential book was published with the title The Sanctity of Law. The Sanctity of Law by John W. Berges. regarded as one of the great conservatives of his day. And certainly on constitutional and legal matters he was both a lawyer and a professor of political science at Columbia. He was in his day very conservative on issues, on principles he was a radical. Because Berges thesis was as he dealt with the sanctity of law was that law has nothing to do with morality! Nothing to do with religion! It simply expresses the will of the state. Is it any wonder when you had the liberals of the day like Holmes and the conservatives of the day like Berges separating religion and morality from the law and saying the law is expressive of the will of the state, that today we have such a loss of justice.

What else do men cry about when they say I want justice?! Why else are they offended with injustice if it is not on moral grounds! But the whole of our legal education today, our courts, and our legislatures separates morality and religion from the law. As a result the state cannot give justice any longer, neither the united states nor any other the only difference is in the degree of their departure. In the soviet union and red China and other countries you have injustice enthroned, and the rest of the world is drifting in the same direction because it will not acknowledge the biblical foundations of our doctrine of justice.

The state can only administer justice when it is under God, the state which has denied God has denied justice. And the modern state says: we are the lawmaker, we will legislate independently of God and a thing is right and wrong in terms of our will because good and evil are relative concepts in terms of the will of the state.

In the second volume of Institutes of Biblical Law I cite a conversation held by some pro-life people with then-senator John Tunney. They challenged him on the question of abortion and he defended it as legal. On what ground do you defend it as legal, he was asked? On the ground that it is moral. How do you defend it as moral? Because it is legal. And they said, if theft were tomorrow legalized, would it be moral? And he said yes. Now this is the doctrine of legal positivism. It now prevails throughout the length and breadth of this country, and it is guaranteeing us injustice. As a result we have autonomous reason, man’s mind remaking the world in terms of its own law. And the result is that in some countries as in the soviet union terrorism and masked murderers are statist justice.

Everywhere we see steps towards the destruction of the family and the church. Biological engineering and much more, everything designed to remake man in the image of these evil planners. All called justice, massive injustice in the name of justice. For us as Christians God is the source of meaning, of law, of all things, of all standards. But the state now defines. The IRS tells you what words mean. Have you ever tried to argue with an IRS official about the plain meaning of their regulations? You tell them, but this is what the dictionary says! And they’ll say, it means what we say. Redefinition is the order of the day.

When Johnson referred to Bill Richardson, our California state senator; Bill Richardson recently remarked that increasingly lawmaking is redefining things to eliminate problems, and he said, one of these days we will redefine homosexuality and rape and eliminate them as offenses totally by calling them unilateral sex. Is it any wonder that we have problems? Proverbs 12:28 says “The way of righteousness or justice is life, and in the pathway thereof there is no death.” But death is now the destiny of men and nations who forsake Christ and his law.

We know that the order around us is doomed. We have a duty to reorder, reconstruct, all things in terms of the sovereign word of God. The loss of justice is a key fact of our time because justice rests on a faith in the triune God, whereas today we have men seeking to be their own Gods. The penalty for their efforts is death. But Christ our redeemer has called us to holiness, to righteousness or justice, to knowledge and dominion. This is our task. To set forth the saving power of Christ and his reordering law word for all men and nations. This is our calling, and in this calling God himself shall bless us and prosper us. Thank you.

[audience applauds] [audio ends]