Loss and Restoration of Justice

The Law and Justice

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre:

Lesson: 2

Track: 12

Dictation Name: RR265A2

Date:

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 in 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 $10 or more a month to Rutherford, it will greatly expedite the battle. And don’t cut down on your giving to your church, or to 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 few weeks 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 libel. In other words, the premise today increasingly is if abortion is legal, to say that it is murder is libelous. 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 and 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 which 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 its moral premises. The idea that we cannot legislate morality is nonsense because all legislation involves a moral judgment. 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 (and I believe you should), but you cannot separate religion and law, religion and the state. If you attempt to, you abolish law and you abolish the state. A nonreligious 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 legislatures embody that religious faith in all their activities. And 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 men or one race of men as 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 other area he could not effect 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 statehouse or congress or to a parliament and on his own, legislate justice or righteousness is one of the grossest evils, one of the most 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 murders affecting hot only adults in the slave labor camps but unborn children in their mother’s wombs. Humanistic man always conjures up some kind 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 or class could affect righteousness and today we have besides the idea of 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 or that.

Some years ago, Louis J. Halle, in his Study of Men and Nations, said, “Both the liberal and Jacobin procedures are based on the premise that among the forms of being in the existential world, there is a personal entity called “The People.” Orthodox Marxists conceive of this entity as singular, a world-wide social class which will at last, when its 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 reality fails in large measure to conform. It remains accessibly imperfect in terms of the perfect idea.” 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 the 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 terms of 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 very country of the world, we hear talk about ‘the people.’ And those who disagree, isolated as enemies of the people. We have 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 than 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 interest. Today, we see increasingly on the part of State and Federal authorities, their identification of what they are doing with the public interest. More than once lately in trials, I have spoken about this subject. I wrote a position paper on it also, because increasingly, I have noticed, 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, all of us, have a private interest, our interest may be good or bad, sound or unsound, but it is there, it is a real factor. Now what is to prevail in the law? The public interest, the private interest or the state interest? The plain fact is that any one of those three can dominate the law 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 interest, the public interest, and the private interest. 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 with these various interests, the law is evil—inescapably evil. The law then reflects the sin of man. It reflects the Fall. 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 that 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, theft and false witness. Can that heart give us law? Can that heart give us justice? Man needs protection from man and from the state and God’s Law alone transcends the public, the private and the state interest.

Halle declared in his study of Men and Nations that each community may be defined by its ruling idea and the distinction between communities is their basic idea. Now what Halle should have said was that each community may be defined by its ruling faith. And the distinction between communities is their basic faith. It’s what he was talking about, but you know faith and God are the dirty words amongst scholars today, the four-letter words that cannot be used. The conflict between communities, and Halle is right, is 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 dishonesty, of perjury, of blasphemy because there is no community. A concept of community is a religious one. And Humanism as a religion cannot give community because it says every man is his own god, or else the state is god. But if every man is his own god, then, as Jean the Humanist philosopher [Jean-Paul Sartre] 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’ve delegated to me the power to be god. And as a result, how can community exist? If each of us are gods, we cannot be in communion with others who are challenging our claim. And if the slave is god, it would 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 function because that would be setting up a government apart from the state.

The Apostle’s Creed speaks of 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 Apostle’s Creed, we are affirming there is only one basis of salvation, Jesus Christ.

[Tape interruption, prompt to turn over cassette]

[Tape resumes]

…affirming there is only one basis of salvation, Jesus Christ. and we are affirming there is only one basis of community, the communion of the saints, that apart from that there is hell on earth, that men are than 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 as 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 apart from Christ therefore are in vain because Genesis 3:5 prevails. Christ alone is the way, the truth, and the life. His Law is the way of holiness, of sanctification. His creation mandate, his dominion mandate, tells us that we have a duty to make the communion that is ours world-wide, to bring all things into communion to 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. 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 from the Word of God, apart from the Law-Word of God because the opposite of sin, we must remember, is obedience, for 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. 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 that build it. Which house are you building? The Lord’s or the Humanist’s? Your life depends upon it.

Thank You.

[Applause]

[Recorded Chalcedon message] This message was originally taped 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:

Chalcedon

P.O. box 158

Vallecito, California 95251

Permission for the reproduction of this tape for distribution purpose should be obtained from the Mt. Olive Tape Library.

[Mt. Olive Voice] The Mt. Olive Tape Library corrected address is:

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