Deuteronomy

Justice and Responsibility

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 86-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 86

Dictation Name: RR187AU86

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return unto the Lord and He will have mercy upon him and to our God for he will abundantly pardon. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father we give thanks unto Thee that Thou who art maker of heaven and earth and all things therein art also our God. We thank Thee our Father that Thy mercies are new every morning. Teach us therefore to take our minds off ourselves and our problems and to know Thy mercies and Thy truth. To know Thy providential care and to praise Thee as we ought. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 24:16. Deuteronomy 24:16 and our subject: Justice and Responsibility.

“ The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.”

We’re about two thirds of the way through Deuteronomy and as always in dealing with something or writing a book I feel about the time I’m going to finish it that I’d like to start over again and do it right. Certainly I think many a writer feels that way, I’ve known one man who did start over again when he finished and sometimes started again. And his books were dry as dust [laughs]. Now, a good deal of Deuteronomy could be the subject, one verse, here and there, a great many single verses or passages of an entire book. Our text for today, Deuteronomy 24:16, could be the subject of a large sized volume, it has been very important to the history of Christendom, but it is still a text without an adequate history.

It was once commonplace to kill an entire family for a father’s crime or to punish a clan or tribe for the offense of one man. This was the premise of clan warfare and of feuding. We meet with this law in Second Kings 14:5-6 where we are told of King Amaziah of Judah:

“And it came to pass, as soon as the kingdom was confirmed in his hand, that he slew his servants which had slain the king his father.

6 But the children of the murderers he slew not: according unto that which is written in the book of the law of Moses, wherein the Lord commanded, saying, The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, nor the children be put to death for the fathers; but every man shall be put to death for his own sin.”

This same incident is cited in Second Chronicles 25:4 and this law is referred to also in Jeremiah 31:29-30, Ezekiel 18:19-20 as a strong statement of this same law. We are told:

“Yet say ye, Why? doth not the son bear the iniquity of the father? When the son hath done that which is lawful and right, and hath kept all my statutes, and hath done them, he shall surely live.

20 The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.”

The law is also stressed by Jeremiah 29:930 and Ezekiel 18:2-4. This is a basic premise of biblical justice, personal responsibility. There can be no justice without it. Over the centuries it has been common to punish and execute an entire family or village for the sin of one member, such an incident preceded World War Two, as some of you may remember. It was routine with many a European monarch to push men to confessing their crimes, real or fancied, to avoid having their families property confiscated. They would be told ‘if you will back up the king in his charges and confess you will be executed but your family will probably be allowed to keep your estates’. There was no certainty this would follow but if they confessed the king might allow the property to remain with the family and this is why the confessions of many a person charged by a king were so full of crimes mentioned or not mentioned and praising the king as they did so. They were trying to save their families. Henry the 8th and it made him morally right that his victims pleaded guilty as charged. We see now in the later years of the twentieth century the rigorous use of this evil practice. Various U.S. agencies use it routinely. For example when some parents reported that their son sill living at home used drugs the federal agents seized and confiscated his parent’s home. The parents paid a higher price than did their son. Now the ignorance, the hideous ignorance of the church is so great that there were no sermons coast to coast upon this text.

Antinomianism leads to the death of freedom because it leads to the neglect of God’s justice. It is this kind of practice and more this law legislates against. Two kinds of problems are involved, firs the state can seize the property because they are confiscating private wealth and this is very common, and second, the state can seize properties in order to undermine and destroy its critics. Once you eliminate this law it is easy to manufacture grounds to go after people. Oddly enough most commentators instead of praising this law or at least a number of them try to undermine it by saying this law contradicts Deuteronomy 5:9. Well, what does Deuteronomy 5:9 say? Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, graven image, this is part of the Ten Commandments, or serve them, for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third or fourth generation of them that hate me. But the difference between the two texts is an important one. First our text, Deuteronomy 24:16 forbids man, the state, or any human agency to punish innocent persons for some family member’s sin. Second Deuteronomy 5:9 says that God can punish a society for its sins for some generations. Deuteronomy 24:16 bars man from transferring guilt from the guilty to the innocent whereas Deuteronomy 5:9 tells us that the social consequences of sin can endure for generations. There is no contradiction between the two laws. Sin is a personal act. God’s judgments can affect all of us or generations of men. In Hammurabi’s laws, so highly praised in our time, we see the kind of evil which God’s law corrects. We read in statutes 2:29 and 2:30:

“If a builder constructed a house for a Senor but did not make his work strong with a result that the house which he built collapsed and so has caused the death of the owner of the house that builder shall be put to death. If it has caused the death of a son of the owner of the house they shall also put the son of that builder to death. “

Now the rationale behind the execution of entire families was that it would eliminate a group who would seek vengeance. The hanging of Haman’s sons in Esther 9:13-14 by [unknown] of the Persian Empire may have been an example of this. It is possible however that the sons were active with their father in his offenses, we simply we don’t know in that instance. There is another important aspect to this law which ancient Hebraic scholars set forth. This law insists on personal as against corporate responsibility. No relative of a guilty man can be punished for his sins. On the other hand the family cannot be used to testify against the person on trial. Yet on the other hand there is an ostensible exception to this law in Deuteronomy 21:18-21, which requires parents to join in on the trial of an incorrigible son. In this case however the crime is known and demonstrable, the family’s role is to side with justice rather than blood. Our contemporary laws which bar testimony by a family member as for example, a wife against her husband, come from Deuteronomy24:16 from Old Testament times, families may and do have internal dissensions and divisions but the state can never legitimately compel the members thereof to testify one against another. I have heard of irenic consequences of this law against testimony by a family member. At times marriages have remained outwardly intact because the man cannot afford to have his wife divorced and free to testify against him. She is in effect bribed to remain in the marriage. There was on the news recently a case, I believe in Texas, where the man was gritting his teeth in effect and avoiding a divorce with his wife because she as a witness could finger him for a murder.

The comment of P.C. Craigie on this verse is a telling one. He wrote:

“This short piece of legislation makes clear a principle underlying all the laws in Deuteronomy, namely, that the presence of law and the requirement that it be obeyed placed upon every man a responsibility for his actions, both within the covenant community and before God.” Unquote.

Responsibility is a moral and a religious fact. Wherever Christianity is undermined so too responsibility is undermined. The return to paganism is a return to injustice because paganism does not stand on personal responsibility. There is another aspect to this law. The family is not only a biological entity but a moral and religious one as well. Even in our time with all the assault on the family it remains very much a unity. In spite of this fact God requires that we see responsibility as personal. If more than one family member is involved in a crime each must be tried in terms of his or hers personal complicity. This law imposes a limit on the power of the judges and the state. Guilt and virtue are personal facts and the duty of the court is to ascertain personal responsibility, personal guilt and no more. To hold family members guilty of the offense of one is to dilute and in effect deny the validity of responsibility. Think what it would mean if we applied the community property law to the I.R.S. and to say to them ‘this man filled out the returns so he did try to defraud you, but why do you seize the entire estate when it is community property?’ Both in antiquity and in our time people have preferred to believe in collective guilt, thus it is commonly assumed by many that war guilt can be ascribed to all of Germans and Japanese, that the European major powers were evil colonial exploiters, that the white race or the black is evil and demonic and so on and on. This law requires us to be specific about offenses and specific about guilt.

Precisely because criminal offenses are so serious we cannot be other than specific in the charges. The concept of victimhood means that the family, society, the environment, heredity, or anything else can be blamed as is the case today. This dilutes responsibility and trivializes offenses because the guilt is so widespread that it is meaningless. The whole of your past becomes guilty and you are a victim. Responsibility is replaced with victimhood and justice is undermined. This law has been important in the development of freedom in Christendom. By making guilt personal it frees us from paying a grim price for what we did not do. Our departure from this law means that people not involved in an offense can be blamed for it. It means racism and class warfare because it transfers from sins to persons to peoples and to classes unconnected with the crimes. It surprises our time that racism is a new thing largely beginning with Darwin. Previously it did not count; every man was seen as an individual, a person responsible for himself. His evil could not be transferred to others of his race or nationality, but now we are far gone in our departure from this law. The churches must proclaim it so that we can again be a free people. The basic component of freedom is that you pay for your own offenses, not another mans. Let us pray.

Our Father, we confess that indeed we have gone astray. We have forgotten Thy word, we have abandoned Thy law and we have acted as though our freedoms were a condition of nature rather than grace, law, faith and character. Teach us to study Thy word, to give ourselves to the study of Thy justice and to grow in grace and understanding. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes and in every instance as socialism in one form or another takes hold of a society guilt becomes collective and the innocent are punished and we are not going to change that until there is a religious change. Then there will be a political change, then we will recognize what we have thrown overboard by abandoning the law of God. Some of the horror stories today about the punishment of an entire family, the seizure of their properties, that sort of thing, are terrifying and we fail to see that when you begin to think in terms of class warfare and race warfare and stereotype these groups then we have abandoned the doctrine of personal responsibility and if we do it, for example, to Germany or Japan or to blacks or whites it is sooner or later, whatever group we do it to, it comes to us! Because we have destroyed the doctrine which is fundamental to scripture of personal responsibility.

It was a matter of horror to the world when the Bolsheviks began their slave labor camps and their mass execution of all the aristocrats and all the middle class. Now we have something similar and one of the things most common place, for example, on television is that capitalists are villains and this is routinely presented. The villain in one drama after another is usually a capitalist and now very commonly also from the clergy. This kind of thinking is evil. During the Rodney-King trials there was one black pastor in Chicago who spoke out against the trial of the police and against the kind of talk that was going on from coast to coast which was so anti-police. And he said that he believed that about ten percent in any line of work, whether intellectual, industrial, capitol, labor, clergy, whatever, was probably no good. We don’t live in a perfect world. But he said: there is a desire to take that and run away with it and blame everyone. And we can add to that, if eighty percent are not good that still doesn’t give any validity to condemning them as a class or a people or a race. Yes?

[Question] They had in the paper that Michael Jackson’s mother showed up at Grand Jury hearing to give evidence that she doesn’t believe that her son is guilty of his crimes. That could open up a whole lot of miscarrying of justice.

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, according to this law that kind of thing is not permissible.

[Question] That’s not what Grand Juries are for.

[Rushdoony]No…yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] But testimony before or after marriage is…

[Question] Is there a sin, is there an ultimate sin, an unforgivable sin that a man can commit and cannot be forgiven even though he has now accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as His savior…[becomes unintelligible].

[Rushdoony] We have references in the New Testament to the unpardonable sin. It does not say whether or not the person is a believer, a professing believer or an unbeliever. What it simply says is is that there is a sin which cannot be forgiven. When a person makes good his evil and evil his good and systematically reverses the whole moral order of the universe no matter what they call themselves they have gone to the enth degree of apostasy. They have said evil be thou my good.

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] No, it says who ha sinned in his heart by thinking of murder or of adultery has, is guilty of that crime, spiritually.

[Question] I understand that Rush, what I’m saying the man who actually murders or the man who desires in his heart to murder, and he has that within him, will not see eternal life.

[Rushdoony] I cannot think of the text, if you can locate it...[Man interrupts] Yes, any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Question] Can I ask one that’s off the subject at hand?

[Rushdoony] Sure.

[Question] As presuppositionalists we take the bible as our starting point and reason out from there, and thus, when God’s word says its primary for us and reason is derivative, when you start arguing presuppositionally with someone a question may come up, well then how did you decide which books were canonical to come up with and I’m wondering how that question is addressed in a presuppositionalist frame work such that as in the process of determining which books are canonical one does not elevate one’s reason about scripture.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, that question of course is an old one, the canonicity of the books of the Bible that we have according to the Catholic Church is established by the church so that the church validates the text. This means then the church is more important than the text. The Protestant position has been that the canonical books were self-validating, that there was no problem, very early the Old Testament was known to be what it was as far back as we know it was regarded as such and the apostolic books were known to be apostolic. Very early the text of the New Testament was also self-validated, now you can especially with the New Testament, find those who disagreed with this or that book, felt that it should not be in the canon or wanted something else in. But when you study these groups you find that they were almost always gnostic or some heretical group that was trying to infiltrate the faith with something else. It would be comparable, although it may seem far-fetched, for someone today writing an apocryphal part of the constitution and insisting that it was always there. It wouldn’t stand, it would be ridiculous and the church by and large, the Christian people knew this was it.

[Question] Well although we cannot, based on our reason, judge which is canonical, they self-attest, but we can judge which ones are not canonical because they are not consistent with the remainder.

[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s right. And we have to recognize that one of the absurdities of critics is that they insist that we are not given to using reason, we’re an irrational people, and so on. But there’s a difference in the use of reason. And a great many scholars go after Luther in particular because he attacked rationalism and spoke of the great whore Reason. What he was doing was to criticize the scholastic exultation of reason as a way of knowing God without faith. So that you could reason your way to God, reason was therefore a kind of god-like thing in man. But reason as reason, an aspect of our being given by God whereby we are to understand things, think God’s thoughts after Him, that’s a totally different thing, reason as god and reason simply as a God-given attribute. Two totally separate concepts. Well if there are no further comments or questions, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank Thee that we have Thy word, Thy spirit and that Thou wouldst empower us to bring Thy kingdom into power in this world. For Thou hast declared the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. Make us strong therefore in Thy service and joyful in Thy word. 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.