Education and Christian Faith

The Biblical Doctrine of Civil Government

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Education

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 5

Track: ?

Dictation Name: RR306C5- The Biblical Doctrine of Civil Government

Date:

Twice in recent weeks, I have had the same question asked of me during question and answer periods after speaking. And the question in both cases was virtually identical. It was this: are you an anarchist? Don’t you believe in government?

And my answer is that I am emphatically not an anarchist, I am a Christian, but I don’t believe in government. I believe in God the Almighty and in His government.

To believe in government is something different from having a government under God and our problem today is that too many people believe in government. As a result, they surrender to Caesar where they should bow the knee instead to the Lord God of Hosts. As a result, at the request of Mr. Grover, I’m speaking this day, or this evening, on “The Biblical Doctrine of Civil Government.”

Every time I talk about the government, I feel ashamed of myself because I know that I’m using the wrong kind of language. Now I don’t mean that I should use bad language with regard to Washington, D.C. or Columbus or Sacramento. But the Puritans would have been horrified by our use of the word government. When we talk about the government, we’re talking about Washington and the state governments and the city governments. And that’s wrong. After all, remember that the Puritans often spoke of God as the supreme governor. Government in essence was of God. Government, law, order, all things were from God. When they spoke about government on the human level, when they said government, they meant first of all, the self-government of the Christian man. That’s government. That’s the kind of government we are all called upon, in terms of scripture, to practice. When the Bible speaks, it does not address itself to the United States or to Governor Rhodes or to Governor Brown. It addresses itself to you and to me, to the seat of government. Someone has said, unfortunately, that most Christians, the seat of government for them is where their seat is! [Audience snickers] And it should be in their heart. Thus, for the Puritans, the basic government was the self-government of the Christian man, man having been redeemed by the grace of God through the atoning work of Jesus Christ, now turned to the infallible Word of God and found therein. God’s Word, God’s Law; every word of God is law, because every word of God is binding upon us. It never says, thus suggesteth the Lord, but ‘thus saith the Lord.’

Then second, when the Puritans talked about government, they meant the family. The family is a basic area of government; the most basic. The family is a government in which the father as the head of the household is under God, the ruler. His wife is his prime minister and the children are then governed. The family is the basic church, school and state of man. This is where individuals learn their basic religious, civil and educational matters.

A few years ago, the federal government, at the time of the integration crisis, ordered a study of integrated and segregated schools. The report was quite a dramatic one and was generally neglected and was an embarrassment to the people who did it. It was simply feeding all the available information into computers. What did they find? First, there was no correlation between the success of black and white children and the fact that the school was integrated or segregated. That had nothing to do with it. Second, there was no correlation between the amount of money a state spent and the results. In fact, the more money that was spent, there was a somewhat negative correlation. Third, there was essentially no difference in the aptitudes of the children, black and white, segregated and integrated. And so on down the line. Only one place did they find a correlation, and a dramatic one and that was with respect to the family. Where there was a stable family background, the child, irrespective of race, was stable and able in the school. Where that strong family background was absent, then in the overwhelming majority of cases, the child was a problem in school both in his behavior and in his ability to learn. Thus, the real correlation was with regard to family life. And the sad fact is that they found a very high degree of black homes unstable and an increasingly higher and higher number of white homes that were unstable. And this they found to be the determinative factor. The family is an extremely important government. It is basic in God’s plan.

I shall try later to return to the family again, but suffice it to say that first we have the self-government of the Christian man and then second, we have the government of the family and the third basic form of government is the church. The church is a government, or at least it should be. Nowadays, of course, they’re twisting your arm to get you in and it’s very hard even if you’re a flagrant known sinner to get kicked out. Of course I was perhaps a little extreme, but my attitude towards members when I was in the pastorate (or possible members) was that I didn’t ask them to join. I took them in only when they asked me, when they felt the Holy Spirit compelled them to come in, not me. But the church is an important government. Many of us can witness to how much our church upbringing governed us, instructed us, guided, fed us.

Then fourth, the school is a government, a very important government and the puritans were strong on education. They believed in it and they said in the old Deluder Act, lest that old deluder, Satan lead our children astray. Christians have always been, in past generations, leaders in education. But in the past century, they have fallen behind to their own destruction. Now it is an area of government that the Christians are recapturing. The school therefore functions not only to educate but to govern.

Then our work, our calling is an area of government. Your job governs you. If you’re a teacher, you’re governed. If you’re an administrator, you’re governed. If you’re a pastor you’re governed. Make no mistake about it. And a great many of the rules and regulations, the laws of our everyday life come right out of our job. It’s a government. This is why the Puritans wrote so many books about vocations and godly government therein. This is why scripture speaks to masters (employers we would say in modern language) and employees.

Then again, our community is a government. Where we live makes a difference as to how we act. Now I have lived in both Southern California and Northern California. I am now in the mountain areas of California. I can tell you that you’re governed by either place. You dress very, very informally in Southern California most of the time and very formally in San Francisco. You know it’s a peculiar thing; San Francisco is so extremely radical and liberal but so very proper about clothing. Why, up until a few years ago, there were some very prominent businessmen there who still (and they were the last ones in the United States to use them and they were made exclusively for them) had shoes that used button hooks, buttoned instead of laced. Some of you who are about as old as I am may remember that type of shoe. It was the last place in the United States where they were used. Now, you certainly were governed by that sort of thing in San Francisco. You couldn’t hope to function and be a prude. People would govern you by their disapproval if you didn’t conform to the rules and regulations. So a community governs you. And if you live in an ungodly environment, it’s going to influence you. If you work at a public school, it’s going to govern you. But if you live in a Christian community, it’s the government of that Christian community and the degree of its growth that will influence and govern you.

Now we’ve gone through six forms of government that the Puritans thought were basic to man’s life. A self-government of the Christian man, the family, the church, the school, the community, one’s calling and finally there was another form of government they spoke about, but only with this term: civil government. They never called it government. And why do we call it government now? The government? Because it is taking over the government of the individual, of the family, the church, the school, the job, the community. It’s the government as though it were God.

Now as I said, I often talk about the government and I feel ashamed every time I do. And it’s time we started correcting ourselves and one another and say, oh, you mean the state or the civil government, because it is not the government and its claims to be so are godless. They go against everything that the Word of God teaches. I do know that the Word of God speaks to the state, the civil government at times through the prophets, but as I recall it reading the prophets, and right through the New Testament, what they had to say to the civil government was not always very complimentary, because in those days, kings and governors were trying to take the government out of the Lord’s hands and to place it upon their shoulders. But the government shall be and must be upon the Lord’s shoulders. And when we believe that, we are going to govern ourselves by His Word in our personal lives, family, the school, the church, our calling, our community and the state because the state must be under the supreme governor, Almighty God.

And so as we approach the idea of government, we must remember that because no area of this world is outside of God, no area can chart its course apart from His Word. Now of course, this brings me to a point, and I know there are some of you who may differ very radically from me. I believe strongly in Biblical Law. Let me take about two minutes to explain my belief then go on to deal with what scripture teaches about civil government and government in the community.

I believe that when St. Paul speaks of the law and condemns it, because he uses the term ‘law’ I several senses in Romans, one sense is that of the Pharisaic use as a way of justification and by works of the law no man can be justified. That’s an impossibility. The Pharisees held to that and even then they took and twisted the law and made the Word of God of none effect through their traditions. Then St. Paul speaks of the law as a death penalty against us, an indictment and in Christ we are dead to the law in that sense—it’s not the law that’s dead, but we are. When a man pays the death penalty for a crime, he’s dead to the law—literally. And we are just as literally dead to the law as an indictment, as a death penalty. The sentence is passed. The old man is dead. And so the law has no claim upon me as a death penalty, as an indictment. What is my relationship to the law now? It’s written on the tables of my heart. It’s God’s way of holiness, way of righteousness. And so I must say with my Lord, lo I come to do Thy will, oh Lord. And so I look to the law as the way of life, as the healing of my life and of society, as a means of growth.

Now as we look to the law, and let me say the Hebrew word for law is Torah; torah. It is usually applied to the whole of the Old Testament and in the Early Church we find that it applied to the whole of the Bible. Now the word Torah means law, but at one and the same time it means instruction, teaching. This is why the psalmist in Psalm 119, in which every verse is about the law, speaks of it as a light and a lamp, as commandments, as instruction. It is all of those things.

What does the law say to us about government? Now it’s very interesting. One of the most important questions in the history of America was raised by Indian converts, the praying Indians of John Eliot. John Eliot converted whole tribes of Indians. They were formed into what people called praying villages, and so the leaders of the Indians came to John Eliot and they said, how shall we govern ourselves in terms of the Word of God? Marvelous question. You know, it takes grace to ask the right questions. And John Eliot went to the Word with the Indians and he wrote it up in a little book of about 30- , 35-pages, A Christian Commonwealth. And he said God when He calls His people and redeems them, then uses in scripture, His basic institution, the family. And so he said, we are told Jethro first brought it from the Lord, but then Moses says he, directly from the Lord had the same in Deuteronomy 1 he tells us this, that every family is a government. And then over ten families in both church and state, there is to be one elder, then over fifty families out of the leaders of the ten, there is to be one. Then out of the leaders of fifties, for every hundred there is a one, and so on up until they form a church council or a state council or a national council, depending on whether they are elders in church or in state. And so the Indians set about to reorganize their life in terms of that. But the minute Charles II learned of what they were doing, he ordered all of that work destroyed and the book burned by the public hangman. A very rare book now, very difficult to read in the surviving copies. If the Lord provides the funds, we hope to reprint it with a note about John Eliot’s work.

Now as you go on from that to what God requires in society and in the state, we find that the scripture deals with crime. Its basic principle is restitution and restoration. So that when a man steals $100, he must restore that $100 and be fined another $100 and for some offenses it can be four-fold and five-fold. Remember Zaccheus. He said he would restore if he had defrauded any man four-fold and five-fold and our Lord said, “This day is salvation come to this house.” If the man could not restore it, he was sold as a bondservant until he had worked it off and made restitution. If he were an incorrigible criminal or an incorrigible juvenile delinquent, as Deuteronomy 21:18-21 makes clear, he was executed. “So shall ye put iniquity out of the land.” There was no prison system. The only references we find to prisons in the Old Testament are to places where you were held in custody until trial. Then you were executed or you were compelled to make restitution. And when you made restitution, you resumed your place in society. God’s order had to be restored. In fact, if a murder took place between two communities and they could not find the murderer, the city to which the body was closest had to make restitution to the family. God’s order had to be restored.

I’ve taught that over the years and when I was in the pastorate I taught it and I used a very simple illustration to bring it home to a very everyday level. And I used it out of a very real experience. I brought it down to this level, and I said, now if you women are having a meeting and you bring some cakes and cookies and what-not and during the clean-up period, some other woman while washing the dishes, breaks your plate, or if you break the plate, and the other woman says, ‘oh never mind. It was an old dish. Forget about it.’ I said don’t you forget about it. you go out and buy a plate that’s twice as good and take it and give it to her. Because, I said, I’ve known people that when I’ve come to a church, ten years after something like that has happened and you ask them about Mrs. So-and-so, oh, well, she’s all right, but she broke a good plate of mine once! [Audience snicker] They won’t forget!

But when you make restitution, restoration, then there is forgiveness. You see, we are built according to God’s specifications, which means we were built to conform to His Word. And when we don’t, we’re out of joint. It’s that simple.

Now to continue, the family is a basic area of God’s government so a great deal of scripture gives us family law. The basic powers in society are in the hands of the family. The most important power in any society is control of children. When you control children, you control the future. And scripture very clearly gives that power to the family alone—to the family! The family under God is to control the future, and I believe therefore parents are judged by God when they abuse that high calling and put their children in government, civil government schools and do not instruct them in the home nor pray with them. It’s the basic power in any society; the basic power and no parent dare treat it carelessly.

Then second, scripture places control of property in the hands of the family; and not just the immediate family, but the family before and after us. Remember Naboth? Naboth felt very strongly that he didn’t have the power to sell that property. It had been given to him by his forefathers as a trust to be passed down to the generation to come.

I know my father felt very strongly about that, because he came from an old country background and in fact he could trace my first and last name back to the 8th century B.C. and he could rattle off the grandfathers back into the Middle ages and name a good many of them going back to 800 B.C.; lived in the same place all that time where they’d passed on a family inheritance always. And he was a poor preacher and he grieved when he was on his deathbed that he had no material inheritance to give me. And I told him, you’ve given me the richest inheritance any American has had because you’ve given me an inheritance of faith. And you’ve given me an inheritance of a lifetime of being surrounded every day, wherever I’ve been, by his prayers. So I was born rich. It was born into a Christian home.

The third great power is inheritance; property, inheritance. The control of inheritance is given by God to the family. The eldest son was to get a double portion (if her were godly. If not, he was to be disinherited) because he had the responsibility for the care of the parent. I believe that. My mother is a widow. She is living with us. She’s 87. It’s our privilege. I’m not under any pension plans> I have no security monetarily in terms of the future. I haven’t a savings account even. I have six children, six godly children. I have my pension plan. So inheritance, a tremendous power, is given by God to the family. But what does the state now say? It claims to be the first-born. It takes the first and the double portion before anyone else can lay a finger on it. And this is another evil that we must contend with.

Then of course, education is another basic power given to the family. Do you see how important the family is as a government? Education; even today with all the state schools, more money is put into education from kindergarten up through the university by the family, Christian and nonChristian than by civil government. And every year, the strength of the family in this basic area of government is growing by leaps and bounds.

But to pass on quickly, finally, another great and central power of the Christian family is welfare. Again, more people are cared for by families than by government, civil government welfare—and better care. I was very deeply moved a couple of years ago when I was in Alabama to read a survey conducted by someone at one of the black colleges there of two counties in that state. There was not a single black child in those counties receiving government aid, civil government aid—not a single one, nor a single delinquent. Why? Because those people still believed the old time religion and they took care of their own. But of course, in the cities, we’ve become too civilized, black and white, to do that sort of thing.

But this is a great power. And you can see why the family is regarded as an enemy by the state. John Dewey said the Christian faith was an enemy. Conant, the high commissioner of Germany, professor of chemistry, I believe, at Harvard and president of Harvard, and then doing endless report for the National Educational Association, had said the family has to go, if we have democracy. And of course, he’s right. The family is the great roadblock. And family apart from Christian faith is nothing. It collapses. The family has the basic powers given to it by God. And it must assert those powers and do battle for them.

Then because our time is short, I want to deal with another area of the biblical doctrine of government. Now as far as a civil tax is concerned, the Bible gives it very little. We read in Exodus 30:11-16 of the atonement tax, or covering tax which was really a tax for the maintenance of the courts, of civil government. It was called an atonement tax (or covering tax, literally) because it was for the civil covering and protection of society. That was the same amount for all males over 20, and no more, no less.

The basic government was not in the hands of the civil government but the people of God. And the basic tax was and is the tithe; the tithe. If you’re not tithing you’re sinning. You’re defrauding the supreme governor, Almighty God. You’re robbing Him. He says so. That tax or tithe (because the word tithe means tax also) went for the support of the priests, the church, the Levites. They got 9/10 of it; 1/10 went to the priests. The other 9/10 went to the Levites who took care of health, education and welfare. Isn’t that something? They had to help with the welfare, another tithe every third year the poor tithe, a second tithe. But they took care of instruction. In Deuteronomy 33:10 we’re told that this is the function of the Levites, to instruct Israel, to instruct the people of God.

At one time we Christians still took seriously enough the health aspect of it, that all hospitals until about a hundred years ago or less were Christian. And they should be again. We need Christian hospitals which will receive no federal funds and no federal control so that instead of making them a place of murder, or for abortion, a place of healing. Where instead of mercy killing (What a horrible expression! Mercy killing.), they’re a place of healing under God.

George Washington felt very strongly about the tithe. He recognized that when people stopped tithing, then the government would start (the civil government; I’m a sinner in that respect, like all of you) would start taxing. And that’s what has happened. Instead of paying 10% a year, with another 10% every third year, we’re now paying about 45% aren’t we? And that 45% of our income in the form of federal, state and local taxes is being used to destroy us, is it not? Because it begins with a godless premise.

Well, the real way to do battle against it is not to complain about the federal government or the state or the county government. I know Christians who are Conservatives all over the country. The problem is they don’t bring their Christianity and their Conservatism together biblically. So they complain endlessly about the government and they want to do this, and they want to do that, and I tell them it’s useless. God has given you the power to do something, very simply. And if you do it, and a few million Christians across the United States do it, you’re going to gut the state, federal, and local branches of civil government. What is that? The tithe. What do you do when you tithe? You give the government back to the Lord. You create missions, schools, hospitals, all kinds of agencies. You take care of your own sick and needy. You take the government back under God, where it belongs.

You see, God’s way is very simple if we but follow it. Nobody is going to prevent you from tithing. You’ve got the power in your hands there and you’d better start tithing. The enemy knows the power of the family, knows also the power of the tithe. You have legal decisions coming from every front and they’re going to increase. I believe we’re going to win the battle if we can stay the course. And that takes money. The CLA need money. The people in Kentucky and elsewhere need money. They can’t fight those battles in the courts without money. And more money than we can begin to use would be available if the people of God put their money where their mouth is [Audience ‘Amen.’] if they started tithing. There’s no excuse for not tithing.

When God promises a curse for disobedience and a blessing for obedience, it takes a pretty ungodly disposition to go in the face of that. Moreover, what God says is bring your tithes and your offerings. In other words, you’re not giving a gift to the Lord unless it’s above and over your tithe. Have you thought about that? In other words, we just don’t sit there and get the showers of blessing. We get them when we stand in terms of God’s Word.

I’ve told you what the biblical doctrine of government in its broad outlines is. Very briefly, you can see two areas of power: the family, the tithe. In both areas, you can act. In both areas, you can if you obey the Lord, exercise vast powers. Will you do it?

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, Thy Word is truth, and Thy Word speaks plainly to our needs, to our problems, and to our hopes. Give us hearing ears, oh Lord and obedient hearts that we may render Thee Thy due, full measure and heaped up and pouring over, that in like manner, we may receive Thy blessings. Teach us to look at our homes, our families in terms of Thy Word so that we might know how rich we are, what great power, authority and responsibility Thou hast given to us in Jesus Christ. We thank Thee oh Lord for these, Thy saints, for their stand and for their service, for their willingness to stand up before the kings and governors of the Philistines today to fight for Thy namesake. Bless them, we beseech Thee, strengthen and prosper them, cause Thy face to shine upon them and make them a mighty witness unto the ends of the earth so that men and nations may rally to that standard reared here by this group in this state. This we ask Thee in Jesus’ name, amen.