Systematic Theology - Authority

Authority - Primary and Secondary.

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 13 of 19

Track: #13

Year:

Dictation Name: 13 Authority - Primary and Secondary

[Rushdoony] Let us worship God. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. Oh come let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our maker; for He is our God and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee, for the freedom with which Thou hast blessed us in the years past. Give us grace and mercy and strength that we might pass on to those to come a like heritage. That we might cleanse this land of ungodliness, that we might again be a free people in Jesus Christ. Bless us through Thy word and by Thy Spirit. Make us strong in Thee to the destroying of the things that are against Thee and the establishing of Thy kingdom from pole to pole. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture is from the gospel according to Matthew, the fifteenth chapter verse one through nine. Our subject, authority primary and secondary, authority primary and secondary Matthew 15: 1- 9

“1Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees, which were of Jerusalem, saying,

2 Why do Thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they wash not their hands when they eat bread.

3 But he answered and said unto them, why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?

4 For God commanded, saying, honor thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death.

5 But ye say, whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me;

6 And honor not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition.

7 Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying,

8 This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoreth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.

9 But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

The word authority has been in disrepute for many, many generations. This should not surprise us. Man having rebelled against God’s authority is certainly going to rebel authority in any human sphere. He will not be inclined to respect man’s, having rejected God’s authority. A couple of centuries the liberal Anglican Bishop Hoadly said, and I quote “Authority is the greatest and the most irreconcilable enemy to truth and argument that this world ever furnished. All the sophistry, all the color of plausibility, all the artifice and cunning of the subtlest disputer of the world may be laid open and turned to the advantage of that very truth which they are designed to hide. But against authority there is no defense.” What we must say is that Hoadly had reference not to true authority but to man’s authoritarianism. Men have authoritarian pretensions that is a part of man’s sin to be as God.

Now in the history of the church the question of authority has never been a simple one. Two extremes have plagued the church, and we have touched on these before. First, there has been the insistence on the authentication of God’s word and authority by the church. The church says “we are the authenticating institution.” The danger in this is the tendency to exalt the church into a central position. Our Lord refers to the problem of humanistic authoritarianism in the Sermon on the Mount when He speaks concerning false swearing and says that they are not to swear by heaven or earth, the temple, or anything else. This he says is false swearing “Thou shalt not foreswear thyself” you shall not swear falsely. But he does not condemn legitimate oaths; he says “perform unto the Lord thine oaths.” What He is saying is when men swear by the temple or by anything other than God they are placing a man evaluated authority above God; so that if we swear by any other thing than God, we have given something on the human scene greater authority. But God is greater than Jerusalem, the temple, and heaven and earth. Nothing can be above God to validate His self-authenticating word.

Then second as we have also seen we have had an instance on authentication by religious experience. This is similar to authentication by the church in that there is an implicit humanism in both. But authentication is not in man, nor in an institution but from God himself. We can say that both these positions have a measure of truth, but not as authentication or verification but as acts of submission. Paul in Romans 1 verses 18-23 speaks about God’s authority when he says that the things of God visible and invisible are known to all men, they don’t need any authentication. But what is the problem? Men hold the truth, or literally hold back, hold down, suppress the truth in unrighteousness, in injustice. The truth is inescapable and man the sinner spends all his time, according to Paul in Romans 1:18-23, trying to sit on the truth and keep it from welling up in his being and witnessing to God.

Now secondary authorities are very real, they are God ordained and they are important. But when secondary authorities whether it be in the form of the church, the state, the family, or anything else, gain too much authority then you have a false center in society which begins to warp man in society. Then too authority begins to break down because the ultimate source is not given priority. There is no lack of authoritarianism in our world today of a humanistic sort, whether in this country or in the Soviet Union, but it is destroying true authority.

Now our Lord dealt with this problem very, very realistically. And in our text Matthew 15 verses 1-9 he deals with the traditions of the elders which had become governing and binding. And our Lord calls this transgression, it is a transgression he says of commandment of God, it goes hand in hand with vain worship. It puts man at a distance from God, and its purpose is to nullify God’s law, not to support it. This concept of tradition is a very old one. In Israel you had the rabbi’s declaring that tradition was the oral teaching from Moses given to Israel when he came down from the mount so that you had the written word and the oral word. In the Catholic Church you also have a doctrine of tradition, the oral teachings of Christ and the apostles with the magisterium, the teaching authority of the church as the custodian.

Now Protestants normally do not use the word tradition but they have developed their own concept of it. It is called depending upon the communion Presbyterian law, The Baptist way, Lutheranism, Congregationalism, or what have you. Every doctrine of tradition technically is subordinate to scripture. But in practice it is often the governing day by day power, and the result is that you have throughout the history of the faith a conflict between the primary word of God, the authority of God, and secondary words or authorities of men. This is what Phariseeism was about, and this is why our Lord so thoroughly condemned Phariseeism. We would have to say that the Pharisees really were a superior group of people, intellectually and morally there was probably no one in the world of their day, whether in Judea or outside of Judea on a level with the Pharisees.

As a matter of fact some years ago a definitive study was made by Finkelstein, a prominent Jewish scholar of the Pharisee’s two volume study. It was intended to defend the Pharisee’s against our Lord’s comments about them, and Finkelstein very definitely demonstrates the moral and intellectual superiority of the Pharisees. But he also does say very clearly that the Pharisees held that the oral law, or tradition was, in his own words “equally authoritative with the written word.” Equally authoritative, and when you recognize that with their oral tradition as they developed it they often replace the very word of God; held the word to be comparable to water but their tradition like wine, superior, you realize why our Lord condemned them. Perka Abot {?} the sayings of the Fathers is one of the sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah. There is an edition of it by Rabbi Joseph A. Churritz {?} who was then chief Rabbi of the British Empire. And He says very frankly in commenting on the sayings of the fathers, and I quote “Tradition is the key word in the Jewish religious system.” Now there is no question that the sayings of the fathers often embody very sound insights into the faith; but there is no question also that they very often alter the faith and give you an interpretation which is made more binding than the very word of God. The crippling fact about tradition is that it makes appeal to authority much more difficult. The appeal to God’s is to what is written. The rise and appeal of modernism, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant has been in part, in part not entirely, due to the revolt against oppressive tradition that stifles a faith.

Now the reliance of secondary authorities on tradition is very serious. This is why our Lord had to attack it. He attacked the tradition of the elders in the name of the very word of God. He said you have made the word of God, the commandments of God, of none effect by your tradition. You have overturned the very intent of the law by your interpretation of the law. So that where the law says honor thy father and thy mother as you interpret it you use it to dishonor your parents and gain religious credit for doing so. So he says Isaiah did prophesy of you saying “this people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth and honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is very far from me. In vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.”

The essence of a Biblical faith is a continual reformation in terms of God’s word, in terms of Christ’s commission. And so those areas of Christendom that have been most vital are those areas where people have regularly challenged on Biblical grounds the authority of men. The traditions of the church, and have worked to create and ongoing developing faith in terms of God’s authority and word. One of the very interesting aspects of this fact in the history of the church and to the best of my knowledge no-one has ever made a study of it. In fact I don’t think a single study could be made, it would have to be first of all extensive research into primary sources and books written about one period after another until the data is brought it light. But the truth of it I think was well summarized by one historian, Charles T. Wood in his book The Quest for Eternity, Medieval Manners and Moral and this is what he wrote “diverse in there origins as these movement for reform may have been, they displayed striking similarities all of which shed light both on the problems and mentality of the age. Nearly every monastery, note that, nearly every monastery for example owed its foundation or reformation not to the zeal of monks, but rather to the interest and encouragement of some lay patron, such as Duke William the 6th of Aquitaine who granted Cluny’s original charter. “From the universalities of this phenomenon the extent to which the laity have succeeded in seizing control of the church apparent”. Notice his comment, the universality of this phenomenon. No church history speaks of this, either with regard to the medieval church or the church since then. But it is a fact, reform has usually come because people in the pew have gotten fed up with the authoritarianism of the church.

Moreover the interesting thing is that whenever this has taken place the laymen have not sought to retain control. I submit that if this were studied the indications are, this is equally been true, in the history of the university. The reform and the progress whenever it is occurred in the life of the university has come from outside pressures and demands. The same has been true of professional schools so that the reforms there too have usually come from the outside. We could say with little fear of contradiction that the same has been true of civil government. Reforms in civil government have not come from those in power in the bureaucracy but only from pressures as people grow weary and indignant of the status quo. In fact one could say that we are in every area in a worse state now than in the past because the lay element until of late has been quiet. Why? Because of the tyranny of experts, because of the widespread belief that specialists know it all and therefore the thing to do is to leave it to the specialists whether in church or state or school or elsewhere. The arrogance of the specialists has been so great that in recent years we have had educators, for example, saying that no parent should ever attempt to help the child because this would tamper with the educational process. Well since they sold people that bill of goods these experts, these specialists, have produced the highest rate of illiteracy in the history of the United States; and they are doing the same thing elsewhere.

Now this is what our Lord is talking about, the traditions of men, the traditions of an ongoing element which is in control; the specialists who feel that wisdom was born with them, as Job said, and no one else has a pipe-line to God or the truth except themselves. The simple fact is that human authorities tend to make of themselves idols. Pharisees then and now are very prone to an idolatry which makes man his own God. Man is a sinner, and the redeemed are not free from sin and we cannot overweight the human factor. Human authoritarianism is an enemy to God’s authority. God says in the Ten Commandments “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” and this very definitely includes us and our institutions. Our age is an age which is very much enamored of man and of his authority.

On television the other evening I heard a snatch of a program on educational T.V. which is an excellent medium for miseducation, and the whole point of this was you were dealing with delinquents. As you were dealing with unwed mothers and unwed fathers the thing you had to do was to build up their self-esteem. And of course I have on other occasions heard that as you deal with criminals you do the same thing, you try to build up their self-esteem. Well the essence of sin is that it has a root in idolatry. My will be done. And so our experts are going to cure delinquents by furthering this idolatry.

Paul says of the ministers of Christ “let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover it is required of stewards that a man be found faithful.” Wherever there is a human authority there is accountability, and when human authorities forget the fact of accountability to God for every idle word they go astray. I’m not particularly fond of Dante but I think he had a sound insight when he peopled hell with authorities in church and state who had made their words, their will, ultimate. At that point his insight was sound. It is required in stewards that a man be found faithful. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God Thy word is truth and Thy word speaks to our every condition. Give us grace day by day to be faithful stewards in our calling; recognizing the absoluteness of Thy authority, Thy demands of us, and the necessity that we be found faithful. Bless us in Thy service, in Jesus name amen.

Are there any questions now on our lesson? Yes?

[Audience member] I don’t understand the connection here, but you say whosoever says to his father and mother it is a gift by whatsoever thou mightest be profited… I don’t understand the meaning what, the connection there…

[Rushdoony] Yes. It is a gift means “I’m dedicating this to the Lord’s work. I’m giving this to God so that you’re being bounced in favor of something more important.” In other words, my parents are nuisance so I’m going to get rid of my responsibility to them and I can give it to the temple and that way I have no problem because nobody’s going to bother me and I don’t have to worry about their illnesses and their needs and so on. And I don’t have to take care of them in their home or worse bring them into my own home. So by dedicating it to God you were supposedly gaining greater merit doing something that was far more worthwhile, and you were riding yourself of a personal burden.

[Audience member] And creating a welfare state.

[Rushdoony] Yes, right. So our Lord was striking hard at this. On another occasion He said if you go to the temple with a gift and you remember that you ought against any man go take care of that, don’t come to God until you’ve taken care of your day by day responsibilities that His word imposes upon you. Don’t feel that you’re going to be acceptable when you’re deliberately evading your responsibilities. That’s the point.

Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience member] Well I think De Tocqueville talked about this in a way when he talked about a governing authority that seeks to assume all decisions for all individuals. A gentle authority he said which nevertheless is firm and which prevents individuals from making decisions for themselves, and in the end prevents men from becoming what they should be. And it seems to me that fits with the growth of authority on the part of the government today and the abandonment of personal responsibility and authority by individuals.

[Rushdoony] Yes, very definitely. There’s going to be authority in the world and if we don’t recognize God’s authority to us and our responsibility to God we’re going to let experts and tyrants take over authority; and I believe this is being done and we seem to be very, very content with it.

[Audience member] Well there’s a lot of misery around really, I don’t think that much contentment, there seems to be a sort of permanent state of poorly suppressed rage. You see it in the way people drive and the alacrity with which they get insulting and angry at the slightest thing.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Any other questions or comments? It is interesting just by the way observation, that the point that the Historian Wood made with regard to lay reform throughout the middle ages is a scarcely known fact; which indicates our historians by and large are not interested in anything which overthrows the experts and the authorities.

[Audience member] Well Historians worship winners. [Laughter]

[Rushdoony] But the fact that he used such strong language was what interested me in the text because as one reads it becomes clear that this kind of thing did exist. But Wood says it was nearly universal, so that throws a totally different light on Western history and on church history.

[Audience member] The establishment couldn’t do it.

[Rushdoony] The establishment has rarely done it. Reform has been pushed on establishments in church, state, education, and elsewhere.

Yes?

[Audience member] Somebody made the comment, I don’t know who, that there was never a single legal reform in the history of England that came from the judges.

[Rushdoony] We can say the same is true in the United States probably. There’s been deterioration rather than reform for the most part. Well if there is no further questions or comments let us bow our heads in prayer.

Oh Lord our God give us grace day by day to submit to Thy full and absolute authority, and to rejoice there-in, and to work under Thy word and government, and to bring all things into captivity to Jesus Christ. 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.