Justice

Law and Justice

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre: Speech

Track: 02

Dictation Name: RR174A2

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1960’s-1970’s.

Before I begin speaking on the law and justice I’d like to say very briefly, if you have not yet picked up one of the brochures at the back on the Rutherford Foundation, please do so, read it carefully. Then do make it a matter of both prayer and support. If half of you here would begin giving ten dollars or more per month to Rutherford it will greatly expedite the battle. And don’t cut down on your giving to your church or Chalcedon or to anything else... if you want to defend Christian freedom in this country, do so. Let me say one thing; I’m a trustee of Rutherford, John’s paths and mine have crossed I think three times in the past week in different parts of the country. One of the trials that Rutherford is currently involved in, one of a number, is in North Carolina where a group picketing an abortion clinic are being sued for criminal liability. In other words the premise today increasingly is if abortion is legal to say that it is murder is liability.

Now we’ve lost a key case of that sort already. Rutherford did not have that case, but it was lost! If this kind of thing stands it means that you cannot criticize anything once it is legalized without being guilty of slander. 1984 will have come and you will have Orwell’s world. Now if that’s the world you want, go right on doing what you are, but if not, do help in the battle. DO take one of the leaflets and help support Rutherford.

Our subject now in this final morning session is the law and justice. An elementary fact about law is that all law is inescapably moral. Whether that morality that the law represents is good or bad is another question! But Law cannot escape being moral. The law condemns and it protects in terms of it’s moral premises. The idea that we cannot legislate morality is nonsense because all legislation involves a moral judgement. It condemns certain things because those doing the legislating believe those things to be bad. It protects other things as good. The key question about any kind of law is: does it represent sound morality? Or humanistic morality?

Moreover, not only is all law an aspect of morality, but all morality is an aspect of religion. Every legal system is an establishment of religion. You can separate, as I have stressed more than once, church and state; but you cannot separate religion and law, religion and the state. If you attempt to you abolish law and you abolish the state. A non-religious state cannot exist, the idea of a neutral state is a myth. Today unhappily the United States and virtually every country in the world is an aggressively humanistic power. We have a religious establishment in this country today and the public schools represent the established religion of this country. The courts represent the established religion of this country: humanism. Our legislature embody that religious faith in all their activities.

The sad fact is that this religious establishment has the enthusiastic support of all too many churches and synagogues! Justice is inseparable from true law, and if a law does not embody justice the state and the society are unstable and soon collapse. Moreover the law must embody God’s law, because if it does not it will embody fallen man’s will. Man is fallen, at his best man is not perfect. None of us are perfectly sanctified even if we are redeemed. Those antinomians who are content with humanistic laws and say we don’t need biblical law are saying that they can find a good society and protection for themselves and for their faith from fallen man’s will. Because all law enacted apart from the law of God is simply the will of fallen man enacted!

When man apart from Christ attempts to legislate he is not going to reach above his level, he cannot lift himself by his own bootstraps to a higher moral plane, everything he does will reflect what he is: a fallen creature. The laws he passes will reflect that. And the result is in a fallen world what you have is a law that reflects the will of man. One class of man or one race of man has against another, and that one group will seek to impose its will on another class or another race or another group or another religious group. Fallen man can only legislate sin and that is all that he has done from the beginning of time.

If fallen man could legislate righteousness or justice then he could save himself also. Because if he had the capacity in one area of his life to work righteousness, there is no reason why in every area of life he could not affect righteousness. The bible says that none are righteous, no not one. Or put it in modern English: there are none just! No not one! And to assume that sinful man can go to the state house or to congress or to parliament and on his own legislate justice or righteousness, is one of the grossest evils, one of the pernicious ideas that has ever influenced man! And it prevails today and it is destroying the world. Man’s laws have always been evil, oppressive, and tyrannical.

And the more man strives by his law to effect righteousness, the more the evil. Today we have because of the prevalence of this kind of doctrine, the world’s greatest tyrannies, the greatest mass murderers, affecting not only adults in the slave labor camps... but unborn children in their mothers’ wombs. Humanistic man always conjures up some type of entity to replace God and to say here is our source of justice. We have had the divine right of kings, we have had any number of doctrines assuming that a particular race of class could assume righteousness. And today, we have aside from the dictatorship of the proletariat, a belief in the people. And all over the world there is a cry: in the name of the people we want this and that!

Some years ago Louis Jay Hall in his study of men and nations said and I quote “Both the liberal and Jacobin procedures are based in the premise that among the forms of being in the existential world there is a personal entity called the people. Orthodox Marxist conceive of this entity as singular, a world wide social class that will act last when it’s enemies have been eliminated comprehend the entire population of mankind. Nationalists conceive of it as plural, as represented by many peoples or nations. In either case the existential realities fails in large measure to conform, it remains excessively imperfect in terms of the perfect idea.” Unquote.

No such thing as the people exists! No such thing as the people have a voice. Any time you hear a politician speak in the name of the people and talk about justice for the people, you can identify him as a quack! Because what we see today is substitution of this mythical entity the people for God. And when they talk about the people, and justice for the people what they are saying is justice in term sof my concept of justice. What I want is justice, and if you disagree with me you are an enemy of the people. Now that’s the equation that prevails today.

All around us, in every country in the world we hear talk about the people, and those who disagree isolated as the enemies of the people. We’ve created a myth and this myth is governing us and destroying us. Justice is equated with what the people want, but what the people want is no more justice, and what criminals, capitalists, communists, aliens, the middle classes, the upper classes, the lower classes, the blacks, the whites, the reds, the yellows want! Their will! MY will be done. Only they clothe it in the name of the people and insist it must be beyond criticism.

At the same time we have identified with the state and the will of the people the public interests. Today we see increasingly on the part of state and federal authorities their identification of what they are doing with the public interests. More than in trials I have spoken about this subject, I wrote a position paper on it also, because increasingly I have noticed that state and federal attorneys insist on identifying what they are doing with the public interest. As though anything that the state decides to do is in your interest! OR in my interest! But the state interest is not identical with the public interest. And we have to distinguish between the state interest, the public interest, and then the private interest. You and I, and all of us, have a private interest. Our interests may be good or bad, sound or unsound, but it is there it’s a real factor. Now what is to prevail in the law? The public interests, the private interests, or the state interests? The plain fact is that any one of those three can dominate and usually has done so.

To the dishonor of law and the idea of law. The law as God ordained it is to protect us from the state interests, the public interest, and the private interests. The law must represent God’s interest in the social order, it must speak for God and the righteousness of God because Genesis 3 is true and it is the desire of every man to be his own God knowing or determining what is good and evil, and because when men organize they do not bypass Genesis 3:5, they only give it more power. So that instead of an individual trying to play God, you have an entire institution. An entire civil government, or an entire United Nations saying we are God. Bow down and worship us.

When the law becomes identified in these various interests the law is evil, inescapably evil... the law then reflects the sin of evil, it reflects the sin of all. And hence it is that the law must reflect God’s interest or there is no justice for any one of us. The law must say to men and to nations: Thou art the man. It is you, Washington, Sacramento, Carson city, the capitals of this country and the capitals of the world who have sinned and done that which is evil in my sight. The law must speak to all of them as it speaks to us, to indict us to show us the way that we might walk therein. Precisely because Genesis 3:5 IS the reality of man we need God’s law inescapably.

As our Lord said: “Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, blasphemies, adulteries, fornications, thefts, and false witness.” And that heart givest law? and that heart giveth justice? Man needs protection from man and from the state, and God’s law alone transcends the public the private and the state interests. Hall declared in his study of men and nations that each community may be defined by it’s ruling idea dn the distinction between the ruling communities is their basic idea. Now what Hall should have said was that each community may be defined by its ruling faith. And the distinction between communities in their basic faith.

But he was talking about -but you know faith and God are the dirty words among scholars today. The four letter words that cannot be used. The conflict between communities and Hall is right, it’s a question of faith. But now we have conflict within communities. The idea of community is collapsing all around us, we see the rise of criminality and the rise of lawlessness by the ordinary man who is not a criminal. Of dishonestly, of perjury, of blasphemy. Because there is no community, the concept of community is a religious one and humanism as a religion cannot give community because it says that every man is his own God.

Or else the state is God. But if if every man is his own God, then as John the humanist philosopher -satyr- said, if I am God then for me my neighbor is the devil! And if the state is God it will not allow us to play God. It will tell us, you delegated the power to me to play God, and as a result, how can community exist? If each of us are gods we cannot be in communion with other, we’re challenging our plane. And if the slave is God it will not allow us to assert that, and it will hold us in line, it will obliterate community because community is a threat. There cannot be community in the soviet union. You cannot organize with your neighbors for the most harmless of functions because that would be setting out a government apart from the state.

The apostles creed on the communion of the saints, we believe this, we affirm it when we repeat the creed. In the older English versions it read: The society of the saints. In other words, what we are saying is, there can be no community apart from our holiness in the Lord. So that every time we are repeating the apostles creed we are affirming there is only one basis of salvation, Jesus Christ, and we are affirming there is only one basis on community, the community of the saints. That apart from that there is hell on earth, that men are then at war one with another because it is the will of man that replaces the law of God and claims to be law. And so if we believe in the communion of the saints and the community of the saints, we must stand in terms of the word of God. The law word of God! And make it the law of men and nations because only in terms of Christ the savior as our law giver as the center of our community can there be a society- can there be justice.

All efforts to find communion and community therefore are in vain because Genesis 3:5 prevails. Christ alone is the way the truth and the light. His law is the way of holiness, or sanctification; his creation mandate, his dominion mandate tells us that we have a duty to make the communion that is ours worldwide. To bring all things into communion with God the Lord, through Jesus Christ and to subdue all things under him in terms of his law word. But what prevails today is the tower of Babel concept. Make no mistake about it, the tower of Babel is very much with us though it bears a number of names. It is called the soviet union, it is called the united states, it is called Mexico, and France, it is called Libya, and Egypt, and Israel. It is wherever men attempt to build apart for the word of God. Apart from the law word of God.

Because the opposite of sin we must remember is obedience, the bible defines sin as any transgression of the law of God. It’s the apostle John, not Moses, who says that. Sin is any transgression of the law of God! And the opposite of sin is the obedience of faith. Thus there can be no community, no justice apart from God and his law. All non-biblical law is in contradiction to God and his word and is a form of unrighteousness. We are very plainly told in scripture, except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it. And today there is a great deal of vain construction from pole to pole, doomed construction. We shall see its destruction in the near future. Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build it.

Which house are you building? The Lords, or the humanists? Your life depends upon it. Thank you. [audience applauds]

[recording ends.