Loss and Restoration of Justice

The Loss of Justice

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre:

Lesson: 1

Track: 11

Dictation Name: RR265A1

Date: 1980s

[Introduction] We stand together.

[Audience stands]

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 on 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 our looking to you, as we begin this day in prayer to say that we’re dependent on you. We need you desperately in today’s 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 you ways, your purposes in a greater measure. We trust that today, Lord, there may be the spirit of revelation, 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, and corporately in your church. Deal today with any strongholds that are in us, of Humanism, the strongholds 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.

[Audience as group] Amen.

[Introductory speaker] You may be seated.

[Speaker 2] Our first speaker will be introduced by Mr. Wayne Johnson of Sacramento, California; if I can call on Wayne at this time.

[Mr. Wayne Johnson] Good Morning.

[Audience as group] Good Morning.

[Mr. Wayne Johnson] Isn’t that nice? Well, I think to introduce Dr. Rushdoony, who probably does not need an introduction to this audience, the best way I could do that would probably tell you how I, he was introduced to me. It’s been 1970, so it’s been 13 years ago that I first met Reverend Rushdoony.

I was a sophomore at Purdue University (sophomore is another word for ‘know-it-all,’ [Laughter] and that’s what I was), and I recall that I was very, very active in political activities on the campus, of a very conservative nature, active in all the conservative youth groups. It was a very hot time in 1970 on a major college campus and we were looking for speakers that would just tweak the other side’s nose. And I happened to run into a fellow by the name of Larry Pratt, who at the time was the Midwest Director of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Indianapolis. And I told him that, and he said boy, have I got the speaker for you. [Laughter]

He’s written a book called The Myth of Overpopulation. Now if your remember 1970 and the wave of the population control. All those things were going at that time, I said, “Great!” I said send him up. And so that was my first occasion to run into Reverend Rushdoony.

My introduction at that time, he arrived about 10 minutes before he was to talk. I went down and I said, now you’ve written this book Myth of Overpopulation, have you written anything else? I was jotting it down on the back of an envelope, because I was going to introduce him. [Laughter] He looked at me, he said, “Yes!” [Laughter] And for the next 10 minutes, until I said that’s enough, [Laughter] I realized perhaps I had been a little bit 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 through the years to introduce this man who’s meant so much in my life, and I know so much in many of yours as well. Doesn’t get easier; it gets more difficult, because you begin to realize through the years, all 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 Pratt, who now is a legislative advocate in Washington, D.C., represents some of the large conservative organizations back there, and he told me about Larry Pratt, he said, you know, you should stay in touch with Larry. You could do him a lot of good. That’s how you talk to a sophomore! [Laughter] And later, I got several of his books from another fellow whose name was Fred Andre, who at that time was Deputy Commissioner of Motor Vehicles and he gave me The One and the Many, and Politics of Guilt and Pity, which I put on my shelf, and a year later, and out of desperation for something to read one night I read them. Fred Andre today is the Commissioner of the Interstate Commerce Commission in Washington, D.C., appointed by President Reagan a year and a half ago. And I remember at the time, Dr. Rushdoony told me, he said, you should be very patient with Fred, you could do him a lot of good. And again, there’s another man who’s meant a great deal to me as I made my career decisions.

I got burned out completely on politics in college. It was a very difficult, and a very rough time. I noticed some people are nodding their heads, like they may have through this. And I’ll tell you, a conservative, without the law, can just as easily become revolutionary, as a reactionary, or anything else, you know, 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, the company I went to work for, three months after I got out here, we had done such a good job, it was the first year the company had every showed a profit in 11 years, that it 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 said, called back and said, “Where do they, where is he out here—where do they meet?” Oh, they meet in a 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 close to Indiana where my wife’s from. She thinks that’s closer than California, and we’ve been here three months; that’s long enough, and he said, “No…” He said 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, “No…” [Laughter]

But I did, and again, through that introduction, I went to work for Bill Richardson and worked for him for seven years, and ended up learning many of the things that he taught me, some of the things that we learned together, but I remember at the time, he told me, he said you should go up there and work with Bill Richardson. You could do him a lot of good. [Laughter] 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 counsel 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 a friend coming up here, I said, you know it’s mindboggling to be speaking from the same platform as this man that I’ve had so much respect for, for these so many years. And I said I don’t understand it. and he said, well, you know, you’ve been to the circus, right? I said, “Yes.” He said well you know how they have a big act, you know, and then when they take all the equipment down, they’re going to bring on the next big act? I said, “Yeah.” I said what do they do in the meantime? I said, they bring in the clowns. He said, “Uh, huh!” [Laughter]

I would introduce Reverend Rushdoony this morning by suggesting that you listen to him very carefully. I’m sure that you all can do him a lot of good. [Laughter]

[Applause]

[Rushdoony] Thank you, Wayne. It was good to recall that visit to Purdue, where 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! [Laughter]

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. [Laughter]

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 educating 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 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 decision, 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 Vacca wrote a book entitled, The Coming Dark Age. And Vacca 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, Vacca says, is that between 1985 and 1994, he predicts that we will see a breakdown of major systems: transit, garbage, telephone, the mails, and other like systems. Now that’s Vacca’s prediction. He doesn’t even raise the prospect of war and what that will do to contribute to this breakdown. He sees it as an internal factor.

There are many such books comparable to Vacca’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 are looking forward rather unhappily to the prospect of a dark age, when the fact is, it is here. A liberal scholar, Elliot, wrote in the 60s, a book entitled The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead. Some of you have heard me cite that book. What Elliot there documents, and it’s a statistical study, is simply this. That a higher percentage of mankind has been killed in the 20th 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 from the first 60 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 50% of the population. The picture is much worse than Elliot saw it in the 60s.

And it’s ironic, too, that Eliot could give no answers. Of course, it was simply a statistical analysis, but the startling thing about his book is 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. Instead of saying man is a sinner, he turns on the doctrine of man’s sin, man’s depravity, and thus Elliot 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 rote, published in 1973 entitled Without Guilt and Justice, again, a book I’ve referred to again and again, a book that tells us a great deal about our time because Kaufmann’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 a justice. But, Kaufmann 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 God, knowing, determining for yourself what is good and evil. And he says, the serpent was right, but mankind then was not yet ready for him.

Of course Kaufmann’s thesis was not new. Max Stirner early in the last century proposed the same thing. He turned on the atheists of his day and said they were closet Christians because they had abandoned God but had not abandoned biblical morality, Biblical Law because, he said, which of you who profess to be atheists are honest? Which of you will sleep with your mother or daughter? And he said, 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 lawyer’s philosophy. The title is 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 and the source of all being, it is a peripheral and unnecessary concept at best. Kaufmann is right. If there is no God, if the universe is the product of chance, of variations, 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 Kaufmann correctly saw it, is to deny justice. The sad fact is that Kaufmann’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 Theology. And Liberation Theology is a sentimentalized form of Marxism. The Catholic and the Protestant seminaries alike teach it. 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 Bangladesh in particular and was horrified by the Liberationism the missionaries who profess to believe the Bible from cover to cover were spouting. And 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 justice 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 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 dominion, holiness, knowledge, righteousness or justice. Having fallen in Adam, he was unable to exercise this, being redeemed in Christ, he is now commissioned to exercise knowledge, holiness, dominion and justice.

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….

[Tape interruption]

[Lecture resumes]

…as a compulsive coolness, a compulsive coolness, and indifference an 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 an aspect of cynicism, a preference for the things we can despise and look down on rather than for the things we can give our lives to. And 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 ministries of grace or of righteousness. The state is created by God to be a ministry of justice. But it cannot be the sole ministry of justice. If ministry, 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 Dr. Kelley, 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, because 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 Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, meeting with Dr. James Kennedy. And Dr. Kennedy kept saying over and over again, the courts are interpreting the First Amendment altogether backwards. It imposes restraints not on Christianity, but on 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 20s, a very influential book was published with the title The Sanctity of Law. The Sanctity of Law by John W. Burgess, 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 Burgess’s thesis was as he dealt with the sanctity of law, 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 Burgess, separating religion and morality from the law and issues of right and wrong 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 in 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 law-maker. 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, is moral.”

“How do you defend it as moral?”

He [Tunney] said, “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 mass murders are Statist justice.

Everywhere we see steps toward the destruction of the family and of 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? And you tell them that this is what the dictionary says! And they’ll say, it means what we say. Redefinition is the order of the day.

Wayne Johnson referred to Bill Richardson, our California State Senator. Bill Richardson recently remarked that increasingly, law-making 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, “In 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 re-order, 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.

[Applause]

[Recording availability information] This message was originally tape by the Chalcedon Foundation. The Chalcedon Foundation is a group of scholars committed to Christian reconstruction in our day. They have published a number of books as well as The Journal of Christian Reconstruction. The Chalcedon Foundation believes that Christians should press the Lordship of Christ in every area of life and should be working toward a Christian society. A free newsletter and more information can be obtained by writing to:

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