Living by Faith - Romans

Natural Privilege and Cultural Death

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 37-64

Genre: Talk

Track: 037

Dictation Name: RR311T37

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Let us worship God. Thus saith the Lord: Ye shall seek for me and find me, when ye shall seek for me with all your heart. Jesus said, blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Let us pray.

Oh God our heavenly Father, we thank Thee that Thou hast made known Thy love for us in Jesus Christ, Thy presence by Thy Holy Spirit, and Thy grace and mercy by Thy daily providential care. We thank Thee our Father that Thou art on the throne, that Thy government extends to every detail of our lives, and we therefore come to cast our every care upon Thee, knowing Thou carest for us. We commit unto Thee our loved ones with their problems, their illnesses, their needs, and we pray for Thy providential care, governance, and healing. Guide us we beseech Thee into all truth in Jesus Christ, and bless us as we study Thy word, in Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture is from Romans 9:9-13; our subject: Natural Privilege and Cultural Death. Natural Privilege and Cultural Death, Romans 9:9-13.

“9 For this is the word of promise, At this time will I come, and Sarah shall have a son.

10 And not only this; but when Rebecca also had conceived by one, even by our father Isaac;

11 (For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth;)

12 It was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger.

13 As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.”

As we have seen, God through the doctrines of grace and predestination, makes clear that He works against natural privilege. This should be an obvious fact, scripture proclaims it throughout, Paul especially underlines it again and again in his letters. God works against natural privilege. Things stand in terms of His grace and His predestinating power. We saw at the conclusion of the last session that Hildebrand, the great Medieval Pope, in working against the married clergy was working against to a great degree, natural privilege; because the clergy were being absorbed into the feudal system, and offices of Abbot and of Bishop were becoming hereditary offices given to their family members by rulers.

The Eastern churches also faced a like crisis, but their solution was a bit different. The lower clergy, the parish clergy, were allowed to marry; but not those who were holders of higher offices, so that bishops in the Eastern churches to this day are celibate.

Now, Primogeniture, a form of natural privilege, is relevant to our text. In many cultures the first born takes the entire estate. This is true in England, has been over the centuries, and is to this day; and it creates problems. First of all, the eldest son knows that no matter what he does, he is the heir, and this immediately from his earliest years puts him at war with his parents, in independence from them, in contempt for them, so that there is a radical hostility between them.

The autobiography a few years ago of the Duke of Bedford, one of the top peers of England, was a very sad story as he described the situation between his grandfather and his father, and then his father and himself, and (Quint Miller?) told me the other day when I was in Seattle that this is true of the present duke who wrote the autobiography and his son. It creates a rift, because it puts things on natural privilege, and hence upon pride and arrogance, a radical independence and contempt for others.

In the Bible, the first born again and again is passed over if he is Godless, or if he is not competent, and natural privilege must give way every time to the primacy of grace. The chosen heir sometimes could be the fourth son as in the case of Judah. On the other hand, a godly son could not be set aside simply because a father disliked the mother.

Paul gives examples now of Gods subversion of natural privilege. In verse 9 he quote Genesis 18:10-14 to show that human conditions do not govern God, He governs human conditions. Isaac was not the first born, he was born miraculously. Ishmael was the first born and the product of planning by Sarah and Abraham. Natural privilege however could still have made a case for Isaac if Paul had stopped here, because Sarah, after all, was the wife; Ishmael was the son of a handmaiden and Keturah the second wife and her sons subordinate therefore. But in verse 10 Paul continues: “And not only this; but when Rebecca also had conceived by one, even by our father Isaac;” One mother, one father. ‘Conceived by one’ can be more literally rendered: ‘bedded down with one.’ One woman, one man. Paul is here striking even more forcefully against natural privilege, and she was carrying twins. And he goes on to say: “(For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth;) It was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger.”

Paul stresses the destruction of natural privilege with this example. Before their birth he says God determined the destinies of Esau and Isaac, and of the nations that came from them.

Now, it is interesting that the Edomites believed in natural privilege. Although they were not a God fearing people, they still believed in one thing connected with Old Testament faith; that great things, including a world ruler, were to come through Isaac, and therefore they concluded, through Esau’s line. They believed that. They didn’t believe in God, but they believed that they were the chosen people. They took this very literally, and we see how literally they took it in the New Testament in an episode that is too little noted. In Acts 12:20-23 we see after the resurrection and the persecution of the Christians had begun, the Edomite ruler Herod proclaiming himself publically to be the messiah, rather than that pretender, Jesus. He arrayed himself in silver and gold, and appeared before the populace while they shouted that he was a god. And we are told that he was stricken down by God and died of a painful and lingering ailment, that at that point he was stricken down.

Significantly, that has been confirmed historically. But you don’t find anyone who is an unbeliever making much of it, just that Herod died after a very painful ailment.

Paul insists on the absolute freedom, the predestination of God. The twins, he said, had not yet been born or done anything, and Paul cites God’s statement to Rebekah in Genesis 25:23 in verse 12, and in that verse in Genesis God tells Rebekah: “Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of peoples shall be separated from thy bowls, and the one people shall be stronger than the other people, and the elder shall serve the younger.” The word translated as ‘manner’ is the word ‘Derrick’ which the English use as a name. Derrick. It means a mode, course, or journey. It says that the two had different destinations, so it is talking about them in history and in eternity. The source of selection is God Himself.

In verse 13 Paul cites Malachi 1:2-3, and the word, Esau have I ‘hated’ hated there meaning ‘reprobation’ reprobated, natural privilege is undermined.

Now natural privilege is asserted all around us, today in a more radical manner than the old monarchic principle, and the primogeniture of the English and many peoples all over the world. For example, this past week in the Stockton record, Dr. Howard Halpern P.H.D. in a column On Your Own dealt with a flood of letters protesting something he had written, something that militated against Biblical moral standards, and one of the letters he dealt with, the first one, was from a young Christian woman who made no bones about it, she was a virgin; and she was weary, she said, with the immoral animals who call themselves good men, who wanted to date and insisted on sex, and got very huffy if they were denied. And she made it clear she was to the point where she was unwilling to go out with almost 9/10ths of the people who were interested.

But Halpern was very offended by the letter. He said that in saying no, girls should make no moral judgement. They should say, and this was his suggested answer and I quote: “This is not a personal rejection, the girl should say, and I hope it doesn’t go so counter to your feelings and values that you will want to stop seeing me. But it is important to me to be true to what I believe.” And he told them to tell the young man: ‘You be true to what you believe, and I will be true to what I believe, and then we will both be operating on sound premises.’ And he concluded by saying and I quote again: “This is a much more acceptable, receptive, and likable message than communicating: “I am good and pure, and you are bad and indecent.” None of which the girl had said, any of the girls who wrote.

What Halpern was doing was to deny that there is any governing moral law, only man’s natural privilege to govern his life according to his tastes. I couldn’t have asked for a better example of natural privilege than Halpern was insisting on: ‘Let every man be free to act according to his nature, don’t judge them morally, that is a violation of their freedom and of their natural privilege to be what they want to be.”

Every man, he held, has the natural privilege to govern his life according to his tastes, whether in the sphere of personal conduct, state law, or man’s relationship to God, natural privilege asserts the autonomy of man from God. Man is seen as free to assert his own standards, and God must accept man on his own self-evaluation, and so must we all.

Natural privilege however, means cultural death. In two classic examples of cultures of natural privilege, old China with its rigid, inflexible family system, and India with its caste system, rivet chains upon man and forestall substantive change and progress. Man’s original sin, to be his own god and to be his own law, to assert natural privilege is very much with us.

One prominent writer of a few years ago, Dahlberg wrote, rightly: “Man is always seeking Eden.” And Dahlberg favored this in terms of natural privilege, and his counsel was: “Be primordial, or decay.” He went on to say and I quote: “All the errors concerning the human race come from not realizing that man is merely another animal.”

Yesterday at Seattle, Samuel Blumenfeld at length documented statements of that sort, that undergird the whole of the modern educational philosophy, undergird the perspective of men who work to produce illiteracy with their look/say method. Their statements that man was arrogant to think himself higher than rats, or higher than dogs, or chickens because I believe Thorndike, the great Columbia psychologist worked with laboratory chickens. Some would throw in: “Except for his verbal skills, he is inferior.” And apparently they are working to destroy the verbal skills.

If man is merely another animal, then his only valid standard is the biological demands of his being, some form of natural privilege. If, however, man is Gods creation, then man must be under God and His law, the totality of man and his word must be under God. The fall of course, was the rejection precisely of this. It was mans rejection of God and Gods government, in favor of mans supposed natural privilege.

Natural privilege is a myth, however well established the idea is among people. The medieval insistence that grace must govern nature was a radical attack on the world of natural man. But Rousseau held to the priority of Adam over Jesus, and for Rousseau, natural man, Adam, must replace Jesus, nature must replace grace. In the French Revolution, Adam was made a symbol of unity, as against Jesus Christ, and as Rosenstock Hussey said and I quote: “Adam became a great messianic figure, standing for the end of time, when all men will meet again.”

Creation became mans prerogative. Goethe said, and he used the word Allah so that his anti-Christianity which was tremendous would not be obvious, he said and I quote: “Allah need create no longer. We instead create His world.”

The world was now seen as the world of Adam, of natural privilege, and the new cultural emphasis was on natural privilege. Prior to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the world of grace commanded men’s minds. For centuries during the Middle Ages, Reformation and the counter Reformation, the liturgy of the church was the liturgy of society; and now it changed. The liturgy of the natural mans life, in particular the man of natural privilege, became the liturgy of society. Dinner became a liturgy among the nobility, among gentlemen and the royalty. Dressing for dinner everywhere became a liturgy.

The American painter, Whistler in the last century, described with amazement and humor being on shipboard during a savage storm while it was dinner time, and he was the only American; and he said: The men and the women all dressed for dinner, and the men sat there in their dinner jackets with waiters behind every chair in their dinner jackets, all looking more than a little green, and periodically making their mumbled apologies and heading for the rail, and then coming back very blearily to continue the liturgy, when they would have all felt better had they stayed in their state room. But dressing for dinner and appearing for dinner was a religious liturgy, they could not miss. They were ladies and gentlemen. And Whistler regarded it, he had a strong stomach, as one of the most amazing things he ever witnessed, and with good reason.

But of course in Marxist countries, even more than anything the 19th century saw, we have the greatest emphasis on natural privilege in history, the greatest gap between high and low then we have ever seen, rivaled only by a few pagan cultures of antiquity, and rapidly surpassing them.

What Paul is talking about is this, the rejection of natural privilege, the supremacy of grace and predestination. But if course this was not new, it was the teaching of scripture from the beginning, the Old Testament festivals celebrated the rejection of natural privilege, the Day of Atonement and the Sabbatical years in particular did this. They wiped out past sins, they cancelled debt; they said that man could not with any kind of advantage or natural privilege he had, bind history beyond six years. Man was stripped of all his plans and obligations that might interfere with Gods will, natural privilege was blocked by the whole of the Old Testament system.

It is especially sad, therefore, that Israel rejected Christ and Christianity in terms of natural privilege. The world of nature is fallen, and its privileges are mythical. The world of revelation is the redemptive order which undermines the world of natural privilege and its pretensions.

Last week I referred to Christopher Hills instance of natural privilege taking over the church after the restoration of Charles the Second, and insisting that the gentlemen and nobility have communion one Sunday, and the common people and the poor on another. What blasphemy, to bring natural privilege into the church, which men have done again and again.

Even the natural realm, the world of nature, is the product of Gods creation, and historically a religious product. But man wants to separate everything from the fact that God created it, and there is no natural world, no natural privilege, nothing apart from God. Ortega y Gasset in 1932 in the Revolt of the Masses called attention to this monstrous effort to consider everything that God has given as natural privilege, and he spoke of the new barbarism that was arising among scholars and scientists, the belief, he said and I quote: “That civilization is there, in just the same way that the earth’s crust and the forest primeval.”

Assuming that all the product of Christianity, the cultural results, the moral, civil results, are just a natural product which will not go away, which will be there like water and air. But history is a product of supernatural forces. The failure to see nature as the product of religious forces leads to barbarism, because it treats history as a continuing, natural fact like the air we breathe.

To a degree, Rosenstock Hussey who would not agree with our position, reacted against the idea of natural privilege when he wrote and I quote: “Illiteracy and literacy are not opposites. We shall perish if this is not heeded. In the Christmas message of Queen Elizabeth on December 25 1958 I had to listen to the horrid sentence: ‘let us enjoy our accumulated civilization.’ That is the end of the living word indeed. For what I resented all my life, even for our memory that it should be treated as a sum and a mere rubbish heap, this now is proclaimed from on high as constituting the universe of the word. Let us defend the harmony of the spheres against any accumulation of civilizations.”

Christianity is a rejection of the world of Adam, and an affirmation of the world of Christ. As such it is a denial of natural privilege, in favor of sovereign grace. The world of Adam is the world of death. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, we thank Thee for Thy word, and we thank Thee that we stand in Thy grace and in Thy mercy, and that we have been saved from the world of natural privilege with the death and the destruction that it means. Make us strong therefore in Thy grace, that we may serve Thee with gladness all the days of our life; in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes.

[Audience Member] There seems to be a parallel situation here, I am not quite sure how it is to be explained, what doctrine it reflects other than sovereignty, but if man is humbled, nan has to be humbled in one way or another, and whether that humbling comes before God or before man, the consequences are two entirely different phenomena. If man is humbled before God man becomes truly man, but if man is humbled before man, then man becomes an animal. Do you see what I am saying, there seems to be… I am not quite certain, there is obviously some doctrinal implications there but I am not quite certain how it all connects together.

[Rushdoony] Well, let me tell you of a little item I read by a Christian Science believer, a man who is rising in power in the church, and hoped to go very high indeed. But he encountered some friends and neighbors who were Christians and began to show him the truth of scripture, and little by little he came to understand that there was a difference, a dramatic one, between Christianity and Christian Science so called; and he said that as a Christian Scientist he believed that men are divine, they are aspects of divine mind, but he said that suddenly as a result of all the study that his neighbors were putting him through came through to him, and I believe he said he was in the car, and suddenly the recognition came: “I am a sinner! That is my problem, I am a sinner.” And he said that was the most marvelous and joyful fact when it broke through on his mind, because he said: “I realized I am a sinner before God and I need God, I need Christ.” And with that the whole thing opened up with a burst of joy, because he knew now the answer to everything, Jesus Christ.

So, being a sinner before God also meant the solution before God, Jesus Christ, that before men, well, the Marxist purges required all the people purged to confess that they were traitors against the revolution, it was a totally anthropomorphic concept of sin. Yes?

[Otto Scott] Listening to your report on Blumenfeld brings to mind the fact that this process didn’t stop with the elementary grades, they have what they now have, a multiple track system, into which they put children at a very early age. In some cases, as in the case of Liz for instance, they deliberately put her on a track where she would fail by pressing her into the direction of mathematics, chemistry, and things for which she was not fit, and putting her on a low track in English and Art, where she had an inclination. In other words they loaded the dice, against the possibility of her advancing scholastically; and the same method is used to load the dice in favor of selected minorities, so the intent is to create an elite which has the composition that has been predetermined. Now this is not really educational, this comes under the heading of natural privilege.

[Rushdoony] Yes, in my two talks I dealt with this as it deals with the mature people of our culture, and one of the points I called attention to borrowed from a California Psychologist who analyzed the curriculum today in our state schools, and he said: “The goal is therapeutic, not educational,” and he said: “Education means imparting something; therapy means taking something away from people, cleansing them of what you believe is bad in them, taking away their faith, their wrong mental constructs.” And he said: “Education today as it exists in state schools is therapeutic.” So he said there is something dramatically wrong with it.

Then I went into all the things that mark art after Rousseau, the Avant Garde, its love of immaturity and the childish, its love of ambiguity, its love of the absurd because life is meaningless, and so on; and how this has also been utilized in education because it comes from Rousseau.

There is no meaning in the world, therefore everything must be imprecise and ambiguity, and I used National Review as an example: a book review will go all around the barn with ambiguities, giving you something about the mind of the reviewer, none of which has any relationship to the book, and you don’t know what the book is about; and the articles will often be written the same way.

Now, this is a part of the new education. If there is no precision in the world because there is no meaning, the world is absurd, to write with an old-fashioned precision presupposes that you believe or are still a product of a world of meaning, because meaning is precise. And I called attention to the fact that ‘definition’ now means ‘description,’ so that the dictionary of sociology describes culture, not as the motivating force, religion externalized, of a society; but if you put a fence around, let us say, Calaveras County, and catalog everything in Calaveras County, or let us say New York City, when you have a total catalog, then you have the culture. Which doesn’t tell you anything about the governing force, but a governing force or faith is meaning, and that is what has to be rejected, therefore definition is replaced by description.

Yes?

[Audience Member] To what extent does natural privilege lead to anarchy, and how could this benefit the ruling elite?

[Rushdoony] The theory is that there can only be self-created meaning, we saw that in Hepburn, only an elite group can give meaning to society, the rest have to be like members of an ant hill, and we must remember that many a Marxist have said that the ant hill or the beehive represent the ideal society; and most of us are to be the unthinking members of the ant hill.

[Audience Member] If you don’t think then you cannot indulge in natural privilege, right?

[Rushdoony] Then you are totally absorbed into the world of natural privilege, and your privilege is to be a slave.

Well our time is up, let us bow our heads now in prayer. Our Lord and our God we thank Thee that though indeed the ungodly rage and take counsel against Thee and against Thy kingdom and Son, Thou who sittest on the circle of the heavens dost laugh, Thou dost hold them in derision, for it is Thy kingdom that shall prevail, and Thy will that shall be done on earth as it is in heaven. Make us ever joyful in Thy government.

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.