Total Rights of Christ the King

Over Church and State

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Science

Lesson: Over Church and State

Genre:

Track: 03

Dictation Name: RR191B3

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

[Narrative] I’m sure, to this attending audience to this national Sovereign Grace Bible Conference, Rousas John Rushdoony comes as no stranger, but in the event that you’re not acquainted with his background, he has served in the pastorate. He was a missionary to the Indians for ten years, he has lectured numerous times to college campuses. Of the greatest support that he now received for the work of Chalcedon, which was enlightening and interesting, comes from those young people in their twenties, which gives us some hope that there is a turning among the young to the principles of Christian reconstruction, and the sovereignty of God. He has written numerous books on various subject, analyzing those subjects from a Calvinistic and Reformed view. He is the director of the Chalcedon educational foundation. His tapes are available on a regularly subscribed basis, as well as the Chalcedon Report which I would encourage you to avail yourself of. He will be speaking this evening on the subject of the Crown Rights of Christ Over Church and State, tomorrow night, the Sovereign of Christ Over all Men, Wednesday evening, The Sovereignty of Christ Over all Areas of Men’s Lives, and on Thursday evening on the subject of Bringing Back the King.

So, it’s a great privilege to welcome Rousas John Rushdoony. My son said, “Dad, what is his name? John Rousas or Rousas John?” I said, “Whichever one comes out first, because around this church he’s just Rushdoony,” and it’s a privilege to welcome him to you this evening.

[Rushdoony] In the Gospel of John in the sixth chapter, verses 14 and 15, we encounter a most amazing passage. Our Lord had fed the multitude, and after that miraculous feeding, we read, “Then those men, when they had seen the miracle that Jesus did, said, This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the world. When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force, to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain himself alone.”

Do you understand the meaning of that? They said this is the Messiah, that prophet which should come into the world, the great prophet predicted by Moses, and they said, “Let us make him king, Messiah,” and our Lord eluded them, and our Lord, shortly before the cross, declared in a parable, that the spirit of the nation, of those very men, could be summed up in the words, “We will not have this man to rule over us.” Is there a contradiction? After all, the multitude, and it expressed the sentiment of the nation, I am certain, said, “This is that prophet. Let us make him king.” What was the problem? Why did our Lord elude them? Why did he condemn them? Why, at the very time as they hailed him as he marched into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, did he weep over them and declare that only judgment confronted them? Why did he feel they had rejected him?

The answer certainly is that they sought to affirm their sovereignty by choosing him. They were declaring that Christ was king, Christ was Messiah, Christ was Lord by their choice, by their recognition. They rejected in principle his declaration, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” and they wanted to retain choice in their hands. If they could make him king, they could unmake him king, and as a result, our Lord declared that they had rejected him. They had said, “We will not have this man to rule over us.” For even in their choosing of him, they said, “We shall rule over him.”

Israel wanted to be the king-maker, king over Christ, lord over Christ, to choose rather than to be chosen, to call rather than to be called, and for this presumption, they were condemned. We have again this same Christ denying, Christ crucifying spirit that approaches Christ, and says, “We decide that you are the Messiah. We will choose you. We will elect you king over us. We will be king over you.” In effect, “Be thou our servant while we retain sovereignty and kingship in our hands.”

This is humanism, and humanism is our problem today in every area of life. Humanism claims that man is sovereign. Humanism insists that the choice is in man’s hands, that man is going to decide about everything, that man makes his own law, chooses his own savior, establishes all things in terms of his sovereign word.

While we were driving her this evening, our discussion turned on an aspect of our contemporary scene, our money, our paper money. The technical word for what we have today is fiat money. Where does the word “fiat” come from? Why, from the Latin Vulgate, the Catholic Bible, Genesis 1, “fiat lux.” Let there be fiat. And God said let there be, and there was. God, by his sovereign decree, created all things by his fiat word in the space of six days, and so the modern state has created fiat money, fiat laws, fiat government, and we have fiat churches. That’s what Armenian churches are. That was a bad blunder for an Armenian to make. Fiat. Manmade. Manmade. And this is what surrounds us. The affirmation by man of his own sovereignty over all things, including God.

Thus, as we approach the crown rights of King Jesus over church and state, it is important for us to redefine church and state, because we must see them, not in terms of humanist man sees them, but in terms of the word of God. First of all, we must stop talking about government when we mean the state, or civil government. Our Puritan forbearers never called the state “government.” By the word government, they had a variety of meanings, and first of all, they meant the self-government of the Christian man. Then they meant the family, which is man’s basic government. It is man’s first church, first school, first government. It is the basic government in society. When you destroy that, all other government goes. The school is a government. The church is a government. Vocations are governments. They govern us. Society, the community we live in is a government in its customs, in its manners, in its traditions, and then we have civil government, one government among many, according to scripture, ordained to be a ministry of justice, and it cannot be a ministry of justice in terms of its fiat word. It can only be a ministry of justice in terms of the word of God. The idea that there can be a separation of Christianity, or of religion and the state is nonsense. You can separate church and state, but you cannot separate Christianity and the state without surrendering the crown rights of King Jesus over the state. Just as the church has an obligation to be Christian, just as the family has an obligation to be Christian. Just so the school has an obligation to be Christian, and the state, and your calling, and the school. Every area of life must recognize Christ as Lord and Savior. If Christ is Lord, if the triune God be the maker of all things in heaven and on earth, there can be no area of life divorced from the kingship of Christ, and to talk about a state which has no obligation to be Christian is to talk blasphemy. It is to deny Christ’s rights to govern the state. You can and should have separation of church and state, but never a separation of Christianity and the state, for to do so is to deny the crown rights of the King.

Or when we come to the church. Since by background is Presbyterian, although I am now Independent, that’s the best place to start. Now, the Presbyterians feel very self-righteous and they can, believe me, feel very self-righteous, when they look at the church and they say the marks of a true church are the faithful ministry of the word, and the faithful administration of the sacraments, and the faithful discipline. True, those statements are all valid, but when they wind up, all they have created is a church of very, very pious and orthodox Pharisees. Why? They have defined the church in terms of what man is doing in an institution. They have seen only one aspect of the church: the institutional side. Now, the institutional side of the church is important, and when the reformers spoke of those marks of the institutional church they were right, but they never reduced the church to an institution. We are told by scripture the church is the body of Christ, and that says a lot more than those three marks our Presbyterian brethren talk about.

1 Timothy 3: 15 says it is the house of God, and that says great deal more. 1 Timothy 3:15 also says it is the pillar and the ground of truth. You’re getting way beyond those three marks, aren’t you now? And I could spend a week talking about what scripture tells about the church and not exhaust it, but let me deal with one very important aspect on the human side that we overlook. When we go to the Old Testament church, we find that the basic church was the family. After all, the two sacraments of the Old Testament are circumcision and the Passover, and where did those rites take place? Why, in the family. In fact, the Old Testament communion was directed to the youngest male child capable of understanding and speaking, because he raised the question, “Father (and the father functions as the priest), what is the meaning of this?” and then the father explained the meaning of the atonement to that child, and no service was complete, no Passover service, unless it were explained to the child.

We’ve cut the family out of the church. In fact, I know churches that boast of the fact that they issue a calendar to be pinned up on the wall of the kitchen every month, listing all the activities in the church for father, mother, and children, so that they can keep the family in the church all week long and destroy family life. To understand what scripture has to say about the church, we must go to scripture, and we cannot neglect the place of the family as an important part of the church. You see, one reason why the family has suffered at the hands of the church is that the church has felt that unless “we have these three marks, and unless we have a tight control of people, we’re not going to have a true church.” They’ve seen it in terms of what man can do instead of what God has done, what Christ has done, and as a result, they have progressively restricted the church, and sometimes you have them outwardly faithful, but inwardly only the supposedly frozen chosen.

The crown rights of King Jesus means that Christ rules over the church, that we never overestimate what it is we do in the institutional life of the church, and underestimate the power of God and of the Holy Spirit, and the fact that the church is more than we are, and is always totally subject to the word. The crown rights of King Jesus means, moreover, that in church and state, the ministry of justice and the ministry of the word, we recognize that Christ has a purpose that transcends church and state, as important as both are. That Christ’s purpose extends to every sphere of life, and it’s because men have restricted the crown rights of Christ, that they have surrendered one part of the world after another to the enemy.

I was very interested, when I was flying here, to see some statistics on church membership. Unbelief in infallibility, unbelief in basic doctrines, nominally there has not been much change over the years in those things, which is a surprising fact. Where has the change been? The sociologist really, who wrote the study said the change has been this: that Christians have surrendered one area after another to secularism, to humanism, big government, big labor, education. One area after another of the major factors in the world, and they have withdrawn into the church, and they are dying there because you cannot deny Christ’s kingship and expect his blessing.

When Israel said, “This is that prophet. Let us make him king,” they rejected him. Outwardly, they were sound. I pointed out last night that Israel, at our Lord’s day, had a minority of Sadducees. They were important only because they were collaborators with Rome and had power as a result, but they were a small handful. The Sadducees were the modernists of the day. They subtracted from God’s word. The Pharisees were a minority, too. They added to God’s word their tradition. The great majority was Bible-believing, but dead. They were ready to hear but not to obey, and our Lord blasted them when he blasted the fig tree, beautiful in leaves but lacking in fruit, and this is our problem today. Bible believers, in the majority of cases, deny the crown rights of King Jesus, and therefore, they deny Christ. They have joined the chorus of those down the centuries who have said, “We will not have this man to reign over us. We will have him if we can choose him. We will have him on our terms. We will have him if we can reign over him,” but both church and state are bound to recognize the Kingship of Christ. Both have an obligation to obey the word of God as it applies to their sphere, and to apply it wherever, in terms of their calling and function, they can apply it. Both must recognize Christ’s crown rights, and recognize that their duty is not legislative, but ministerial. There is a difference.

You see, when we see our function in church or state as ministerial, we take the already-given word of God and we apply it. When we say we have legislative powers, we say we have the right to create fiat laws, to create a new word for our area, a new word for the church, a new word for the state, and today, both church and state all too often act legislatively.

This Spring, when I was in Virginia, a friend of mine called attention to the situation there in Fairfax County as a classic example of godlessness. He said, “Do you know that abortion is legal here in Virginia, as it is, of course, tragically, across country? But, it is a serious offense to cut down a tree of any kind, even on your own property without a permit.” Now, that is not ministerial government. It is fiat government. It is legislative government. So many of the things that are illegal today are illegal only because of the fiat word of the state, whereas, the law of God is neglected. This is a serious matter, and every day the inroads become greater, and we see more and more things that the word of God condemns being openly permitted. It’s a matter of free choice, we are told, between consenting adults, or a part of private liberty, and in one area after another, God’s word is clearly set aside, sin legalized, and where God has not spoken, the state speaks and too often, the church.

When Israel wanted to choose Christ rather than to be chosen, our Lord pronounced sentence upon them for having rejected him as Lord and Savior, as Redeemer and King, and he said of Jerusalem that not one stone would be left standing upon another. What will he say of this generation, which also says “We will not have this man to reign over us?”

We have a calling. If Christ is our Savior, he must be our Lord, and we must proclaim his crown rights in every area. The battle cry of the Puritans whereby they conquered in their day was, the crown rights of King Jesus. Will it be ours? Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that thou, we art maker of heaven and earth, and of all things art mindful of us, that there is nothing too great nor too small for thee. We thank thee that the government is upon thy shoulders, not in the hands of men, not in our hands, but in thine, O Lord. O Lord, our God, give us joy in thy kingship. Make us triumphant in its proclamation. Make us bold and confident, knowing that thou art King of kings and Lord of lords, and that there is nothing that can prevail before thy conquering march. O Lord, our God, make us joyful in thy service, ever instant in thy praise, and triumphant in the proclamation of the kingship of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. In his name we pray.

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