Sermons

The Church; What Is It

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Sermons

Genre:

Lesson: 1

Track: 01

Dictation Name: RR186A1

Date:

Our scripture is from I Corinthians 4:1, 2. Our subject, “The Church; What Is It?”

“1Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God.

2 Moreover it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful.”

It was 1937 and I was a junior at the University of California when I was reading in one of the New England {?}. I encountered a sentence which I have never since forgotten. I knew the moment I read it, it was true, also that I did not like it. It spoke about mankind as we who by shipwreck only find the shores of divine wisdom. We who by shipwreck only find the shores of divine wisdom. We are slow learners. And God has to shipwreck us from time to time so that we learn. As a veteran of shipwrecks, I can witness to the fact that that was how He taught me. It was the only way sometimes that He could get my attention.

Well, this is how the Church has learned. Every advance in the Church’s knowledge of scripture has come when it has been challenged by the enemy and compelled to reassess a point. The great councils of the Early Church, the first seven ecumenical councils, all dealt with a matter of controversy, a point of challenge, a point where the world was bent on destroying the meaning of biblical faith. And we face that same problem today. We have various problems, and these problems are creating areas of weakness in the life of faith.

One of these problems is the definition of the Church. Let us begin by citing three verses that deal with this:

I Corinthians 12:27, “Now ye are the body of Christ and members in particular.”

Ephesians 1:22, “And God has put all things under his feet and gave him to be the head over all things to the church.”

Colossians 1:18, “And he is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the first born from the dead, that in all things he might have the pre-eminence.”

Now whenever we take the wrong road, we do not reach the right destination. If we begin with error, we go from bad to worse. If we begin with heresy, we end up with blasphemy and evil. Has this happened to Christianity with various doctrines of the Church? In the past two, three months, in fact I could say with in the past month I have been confronted with that question in talking with people or having people call me about a problem with a doctrine of the church, and the various serious errors that are related to that concept.

One of the high points of Church history occurred at Chalcedon when the Tome of Leo was read. Saint Leo sent forth the orthodox doctrine of Jesus Christ which Chalcedon adopted, 451 A.D. The definition (or formula) of Chalcedon declared that the sole and unique Incarnation of God in Jesus is in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. The definition or formula of Chalcedon made clear that no human being or institution, nor anything on earth could claim to incarnate God and represent His being on earth. The Incarnation is sole and unique in Christ.

Now this doctrine is unique to biblical faith. No other religion is in any way similar. Some religions deny the impossibility of an incarnation while other religions have such supposed manifestations of the godhead in age after age. Chalcedon set forth the Christian position clearly and very carefully, precisely; if the Church had remained faithful to Chalcedon, it would have been spared m any evils.

Pagan states have commonly divinized themselves, their rulers or high offices as god on earth. Very early, Holy Roman Emperors appear on their various inscriptions as extensions of the Incarnation. For example, Otto III, whose dates are 984-1002, appears on a sacramental vessel with a dove, symbolizing the Holy Spirit in his hand. He was a possessor of the dove of inspiration. He was therefore an extension of the Incarnation, the voice of God on earth. Emperor Otto saw himself as possessing apostolic inspiration and authority.

Now, this doctrine has a long history over the centuries. Medieval and modern kings have seen themselves as God’s supreme authority on earth, and very often His infallible authority. The Doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings is one aspect of this long history. In its more modern and nonChristian form, we have the many developments of Hagel’s theory that the State is God walking on earth. All factions in the modern political spectrum, Marxists, Fabian Socialists, Fascists, National Socialists, Republicans, Democrats and others, are heirs of Hagel and the belief that ultimate powers are incarnate in the State.

But the Church, sadly enough, has had its own like development. Within Roman Catholic circles, it has been held that the Church is the continuation or extension of the Incarnation, a direct contradiction of Chalcedon. It has led to the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility and other like concepts. The same doctrine has developed in Protestant Christians. One of the things that helped destroy Cromwell and his regime was the Presbyterian party which believed in the Divine Right of Presbytery and therefore felt it had the authority to tell Cromwell the way in which he should go.

But by and large, Protestants have been less candid than Catholics. They speak of the Church as the Body of Christ, which it is indeed, but they give to that concept an alien and anti-Chalcedonian and an anti-biblical meaning.

Christ, as the second and last Adam, creates through His atonement and by His regenerating power a new humanity, a new human race, to replace the fallen humanity of the first Adam. Paul tells us this in I Corinthians 15:47-50. The Church, therefore, as the body of Christ, is this new humanity, the new human race being recreated and sanctified by Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. The Church, as the body of Christ, represents this new humanity. The deity of Christ is not co-mingled or confused with His humanity either in Himself, or in us as its member, nor in the Church as His body.

Consider the implications of that. When the Church says it is the body of Christ, it does not represent anything more than the new humanity He has created for Himself as the last Adam. It is not thereby an extension of the deity of the second person of the godhead. When this confusion of the two natures occurs, the Canon Law or (canon means ‘rule.’) the rule of the Church then ceases to be the Law of God and becomes its own legislation. The Church then feels it can legislate apart from the Word of God. It becomes an independent divine human entity, another {?}, an extension of the Incarnation. But the calling and function of the Church is ministerial, not legislative.

The Church cannot make law. Only God can legitimately do so. It must however, faithfully administer God’s Law as His servant. Legislation in any sphere of life in independence of God’s inscriptured word is blasphemy and usurpation of the crown rights of Christ the King. Now consider the implications of that. When the Church, throws aside God’s Law, when it becomes an independent law-making body and creates rules and regulations to strangle and chain down people, it is saying that it is an extension of the Incarnation, that it is God walking on earth. Is it any wonder that the ungodly have such a notion with regard to the State and other agencies, when the Church holds it with regards to itself?

Because God’s Law-Word is neglected, because most churchmen are ignorant of the Council of Chalcedon, for not a seminary in the United States ever teaches the meaning of the council. The Church therefore has too often replaced Jesus Christ with itself. The Early Church saw its Canon or rules, as the whole Word of God. It saw itself as found by that word, so that Canon Law in the Early Church was simply the Bible. It was the rule, the rule book, the rule law. Our Lord has said very clearly man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

The Church today does not see itself as so bound. I hear very regularly from people of church judgment that go contrary to scripture. The world today is lawless. As Psalm 36:1 says, and Paul in Romans 3:18 repeats, the transgression of the wicked says within my heart that there is not fear of God before his eyes. Where there is no law, there is no valid ground for judgment, nor justice. Remove God’s Law from a society and you remove justice also.

What is man’s original sin? Was it submit to the temptation ‘ye shall be as god, knowing, determining good and evil, law and morality, right and wrong for yourself.’ No more than Adam had the right to do that does the Church have that right. And yet it is routinely done by the Church. The Church today does not see itself as so bound, so today the world is lawless. Without God’s Law, men make their own wills; ultimately, each man as his own god, knows or determines what is good and evil for himself.

If the Church indeed is a continuation on earth of the divine human Christ, then the Church can claim vast powers over men and nations. It is then what Hagel said the State is, god or at least his extension, walking on earth. If, on the other hand, the body of Christ is its own new humanity, this new human race, which he has created for himself, then we have a vastly different situation. The Church then has a duty in Christ to bring all men to a saving knowledge of Him and to obedience to His Law. It has a duty to reorder and reconstruct all things in terms of His Law-Word. Our Lord declares, behold I make all things new, and we as His new creation, His new human race, are His instruments through whom all things on earth are to be remade.

Our calling is not to control others but to serve Jesus Christ’s regenerating purpose. He occupies the throne of creation and we are required as His people to do His will, not our own, to obey His laws, not our own, to glorify Him, not ourselves, nor our churches. St. Paul says, in the scripture I read, I Corinthians 4:2, moreover, it is required of stewards that a man be found faithful. Can we be faithful to the person of our Lord without being faithful to His entire Word? Can we pick and choose where we will be faithful? When men and churches substitute their words, laws and judgments for the whole Word of God, are they not joining the enemies of Christ? Are they not then becoming substitutes for Jesus Christ? I submit that one of the greatest needs of our time is a radical revision of our various doctrines of the Church. Catholics and Protestants have both gone astray.

They go against Scripture and they bypass Chalcedon. The Church must become Christ’s steward, not another Jesus. The Church has too often made itself an impediment to our Lord because it has replaced Jesus Christ and its inscriptured Law Word with itself. This is blasphemy.

Let us pray.

Our Father, we give thanks unto Thee that in Christ Jesus, Thou hast made us a new creation, a new humanity. Be merciful, oh Lord unto us, for all we like sheep have gone astray, we have each of us gone our own way, and we have created churches and institutions as though they represented Thee and were extensions of the Incarnation. Lord, have mercy upon us. Forgive us our sins and trespasses, make us joyful in our {?}, as human beings, regenerated human beings in Jesus Christ. Teach us to walk in humility and enjoy in the fact of our creaturliness in Christ. And make us in all things faithful stewards of Thy Word and of Thy kingdom. In Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] When the Church equates Jesus Christ with itself, it passes rules and regulations which it makes more binding really, than scripture. Let me give you a very practical example.

About 20 years ago (I think perhaps it’s a little longer), I was brought up on charges by one particular denomination because I was teaching the Word of God outside the church on the Lord’s Day. I had relocation where I was Sunday morning, afternoon and evening, having study groups. One was in Orange Country, across the road from the University Campus. Another was near the UCLA campus and a third in Pasadena. And that was illegitimate because I was doing it without the church’s authority, you see.

Now that’s not unusual. Within the past few weeks, I have had any number of people call me with very serious problems where the church was legislating with no ground in the Word of God—no ground—and threatening people with excommunication.

Let me cite one. It’s gross, but it’s very true. This young mother who’d been molested by her father over and over again and who fled the family in order to escape from that situation, and her husband, for his own reasons fled, and they barely knew each other, but married. By the grace of God within eight weeks, they both became Christians. Now, some years later, they’re in their latter 30s, have four children, I think ages about 3 or 4 to 10. And the father of the girl, the bride, or wife, had joined the church where she is a member. He has never confessed to sin, nor admitted to it, although there is a lot of evidence for it. and he is demanding that the church instruct his daughter to allow the four children to come and spend time with him overnight on weekends, and the church has told her she must, that love covers a multitude of sins, and she has said he has never repented, he has not even admitted to his sin, although there is evidence on the police blotter. Why, she is being threatened with excommunication!

Now what’s the church doing there? It is legislating as though it were Christ and having independent powers and it has made itself into a false messiah. Now, I could spend an hour giving you case after case like that and they’re not unusual. This is what happens when a church declares itself to be an extension of the Incarnation, or the body of Christ in both the divine and the human sense.

Any other questions? There was another one back there.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, you can see what it means. The Church is called to be a ministry to administer what God has given in His Word. When the Church ceases to be an administration, or ministry, it then legislates; it creates laws out of whole cloth.

You all heard what Steve Schlitzel said yesterday about hearing aids and all rules [tape blip!] also in the churches, and the rules that they are creating, because when you replace the Word of God, you have to say it is my will that must be done. And you begin to create a body of rules and regulations which become more and more refined and there is a single word that sums it all up: Phariseeism.

Now, the Pharisees were perhaps the most moral people in Israel, but our Lord singled them out for the most unwavering, unsparing attack ever launched against any group. Why? There are scholars ever since who’ve written books, and one Jewish scholar has written two fat volumes in defense of the Pharisees against Christ, and many Christian scholars (so-called) have done the same. And their point is, they were the best people of their day. Why was He attacking them? Somehow this is inappropriate, it was some kind of personal conflict, it couldn’t have been real. But it was. And it was precisely because they were taking and making the law, as our Lord said, of none effect through their vain traditions. It’s interesting that our Lord did attack the Sadducees, but only mildly.

What was the difference between the Sadducees and the Pharisees? Well, this isn’t altogether an exact way, but it’s reasonably close. You could say the Pharisees were the Bible-believers (so-called) of their time and the Sadducees were the Modernists. The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection, they did not believe in a life after death, and they took a lot of scripture with a grain of salt. They accommodated themselves to the culture of their day. They were a minority. But the Pharisees claimed to be as against the Sadducees, the defenders of the true faith. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But by denying the Law Word of God in favor of their own rules and regulations, the Pharisees were radically unfaithful. They went so far as to compare the Bible, which to them was the Old Testament, to water and their extensions of its meanings to wine. And naturally, one would prefer good wine to ordinary water. That was their arrogance.

And it’s the same thing that marks the modern Church. So, this is why the issue, the Church, what is it is so urgent a question in our time because both Rome and Protestantism have gone astray on this point.

Yes.

[Audience] In more than one place in God’s Word, He declares vehemently that false weights and measures are an abomination in His sight.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] And throughout much of Church History, particularly the last 150 years, in our country, and in other Western countries, the Church has aided and abetted false weights and measures by {?} the value. Do you have any, or would you care to make any comments or suggestions what the Church must do to restore true weights and measures, of value?

[Rushdoony] I’m glad you cited that verse because it is most appropriate. God forbid false weights and measures in any area, beginning with money, and going into every field. He forbids adding or subtracting from His Law Word. And that’s what the Church has done. It’s been playing God.

And the crying need of course, of our day, is a restoration of God’s Word to a position of absolute and sole pre-eminence in the minds of believers and of the Church, because when you have false weights and measures, you go with the {?}. Everything then is falsified. The whole world is. And if you have a false law, laws legislated by the State and the Church, which have no relationship to God’s truth, then the whole of society goes astray.

I think one of the most astute observation this score is a man who has been turned into something of a joke by the Western media, and I’m certainly not in agreement with this man on any other point, but at this point, in his work entitled The Green Book, Gaddafi is absolutely right. Gaddafi has said the trouble with the world today is that the foundations of law have been destroyed by Western Civilization. They have converted law from meaning the Word of God to meaning no more than the word of the State and the word of man. And he said this is having an eroding effect on the entire world and on other cultures so that lawlessness is increasing because the measure is gone. The standard whereby good and evil can be judged is gone. So about 14 years ago, he issued a New Year’s message which he sent to all the heads of state in the Western world, and they treated him instead as though he were a clown and a joke. And he said you must go back to your Jesus because until you do, you will be an erosive force in all the world. You are having an evil effect on the world of Islam and on the world of Buddhism and of other faiths because your unbelief is destroying the foundations of law and society. I think he was right! I’m not saying I agree with him on anything else, but I believe he was right. He recognized that there had to be a theological foundation to law.

Yes

[Audience] ... {?} One problem, you go back to the Reformation, of the very day, when the Reformation began, {?} the Church, {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. The Canon Law, as I originally said, was the Bible. It became such a massive thing that you had libraries wherein the Canon Law was placed, shelf upon shelf, rulings of Church councils and groups which step-by-step, like the hearing aid bit, like Steve Schlitzel talked about, started from something that pretended to be biblical, but forgot it as they built a mountain or rules and regulations whereby man’s every act and feeling was strangled by human rules.

Yes.

[Audience] {?} testimony on the part of the … {?}

And they asked him to explain to them the {?}, the traditions of man and the {?} Catholic traditions of {?} because it might {?} And after 10 minutes or so, I asked myself, what are you doing here? {?}

{?} sitting there, and {?} they must tell it to the Catholic what you brought up, you see, because they did not mention you and Catholics, but they said, {?} and you cannot do this and this, but I can do this and this, {?}

And it was a whole evening of just counting, because of all the chains of {?} that we had, what did we tell you people? {?} Didn’t we explain the Law of God to them and tell them according to the Law, this and this is right? So {?} people will come and we will tell them what they should do. No {?} of the Bible we’re talking about such and such, and the, the idea of {?}, and people tell {?} and do you know the way you come from, but they won’t go. In most cases, he {?} the Law of God, {?} And if I did not have an idea, I want to {?} I would have made the law… {?} Why they don’t tell you, I would have made the law, and you have to {?}.

Did you know that {?} 10 years ago, I would say I never thought about it. See? {?}come to me, {?}now and say, this is what you must do… {?}will become very angry, you will {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes…

[Audience] What will it take to bring the body of Christ in the real body of Christ, {?} realization of God’s Law Word and the Chalcedon position? Is it a massive shipwreck of humanistic society, and possibly even hearing that they’re {?}, after consider, avoid that and step in? Are there even enough people aware of this problem within evangelical, fundamentalist or whatever circles?

[Rushdoony] They know something is wrong but they don’t know what is wrong, and it will take, as you observed, a shipwreck, and we are in the beginning stages of that shipwreck right now and when people are hungry and desperate, they will not be satisfied with a stone. They will want the bread, and that’s what will bring it about.

Yes… last question…

[Audience] You hit maybe already in the New Testament example of the church discipline properly used where St. Paul said, this is the one guilty of incest. That’s that is contrary to the Law of God, and the Church Council in Jerusalem said the true walk was fundamentally in accordance with God’s Law where you have been {?} Is that maybe a prototype of what needs to be done?

[Rushdoony] Yes. One of the things that marks our day is this. It used to be that Congress met for about two weeks, every other year. And the same was true of all the state legislatures, and it was still true in my lifetime of many of them. Now they meet all year long, every year, and pass more and more laws and the various agencies are better able to propagandize them every day to get more taxes and more money.

Well, the same thing has happened in the church. Church bodies used to meet infrequently. Now they meet monthly, or bi-monthly. There would be a presbytery meeting every month or a conference meeting every month, all day and into the wee hours of the night, passing rules and regulations endlessly, so that some years ago (this was some years ago, it was back in the 50s), at that time Dorothy and I knew someone who had been a Deputy Attorney General of the U.S. under Truman and he was involved in a case where a minister (this was within a denomination in their church court), a minister who had stolen thousands of dollars from the church. He said church law is such a jungle, and he had thought federal law was bad enough! But he spent the rest of his life trying to prosecute that man and on one technicality after another, it was overturned because the man was a good church lawyer. And finally the man retired and they dropped the case. He retired of old age.

Now, that is what has happened. State and Church have become legislators. We have forgotten that originally, whether it was on the colonial level, the state level, or later the federal level, the legislative body as we call it now was not regarded as a legislative body. Some of the early names were The General Court, or the House of Burgesses, and so on. Their purpose was to act as watchdogs to make sure that the administrator administered the law honestly and fairly. Then subsequently, they entered into lawmaking.

[tape abruptly stops]