Systematic Theology – The Land

The Dominion Mandate

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: 2-19

Genre: Speech

Track: 02 of 19

Dictation Name: 02 The Dominion Mandate

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let me remind you again Tuesday evening…[tape breaks off]

All glory be to Thee oh God the Father, God the Son, And God the Holy Ghost, we praise Thee with all our heart, mind and being that our times are in Thy hands who doest all things well. We thank Thee that though the heathen rage and take council against Thy son, Thy kingdom and Thy people Thou from the throne dost rule all things and shalt in Thy own good time destroy the ungodly. We pray our Father that until then Thou wouldst use us as Thy instrument of conquest, that all things may be brought into captivity of Jesus Christ, beginning with ourselves. And now Father speak to us by Thy word and by Thy spirit and make us strong in Thee, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Our scripture is from Genesis 1:26-28. The familiar passage dealing with the creation mandate and our subject is The Dominion Mandate.

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

We began last Sunday a study of the theology of the earth, of the land. And our subject last time was the Atonement for the Land. We saw that biblical law requires that there be atonement for all things. Man’s atonement is through Jesus Christ but the atonement of the earth is by man as he makes restitution in terms of God’s law. So that very early in Genesis we see God declares that the blood of Abel cries out from the ground requiring atonement; that the land is cursed because of man’s sin and therefore without man’s atonement in Christ and without man’s restitution to man, making atonement to man for the sins of men, the land remains accursed. And so there must be by obedience to the law of God as it relates to man, atonement made for the earth. This is once very clearly recognized by Christendom but under the influence of Neo-Platonism pietism arose to undermine this entire perspective. Pietism is a school of theology which has a Greco-Roman framework, particularly roman, and it discounts everything except the submission to authority, human authority as a matter of course and hence pietism has led to quietism. Over and over again in the modern age you have had the quietistic mood dominating the church so that the church has withdrawn from the world and has led others to believe that no matter how evil the tyranny there must be an abject submission to it. Again, pietism has led to an emphasis on an emotional experience as more basic than the written word of God, the material world and a doctrinal understanding of the faith. It has led to a spiritualizing of religion. The result is that alien religious categories of thought have captured the church and have rendered the church ineffectual as it faces the world. A man, modern man thus, does not have a proper sense of the meaning of the earth in his experience, in his life. Not even the environmentalists as we saw because they have an abstract conception of the earth, a platonic conception, it is an idea and they are dealing with their idea of a pristine purity of the earth which man has somehow polluted and destroyed.

Moreover, one of the most significant advertisements of the past couple of decades appeared with the first moon shot as one of the aerospace firms which had a close connection with the moonshot carried a pride advertisement of its role therein. It showed a scientist, a spaceman, holding a spaceman like a new born baby. Instead of an umbilical cord attached to the mother it was attached to the earth and the scientist was cutting the cord and in large letters it read ‘we have cut the cord’. Man was no longer earthbound. He was free to range over the universe which of course is nonsense. Man cannot range indefinitely in space, he is still earthbound. But man wants to escape this world. So much so that some scientists have said that in time man will overcome the physical being, will be able to transform himself through genetic engineering and become disembodied, capable of existing anywhere without any need for anything material. But, Adam’s name indicates what man is, of the earth, because it has reference to the earth. Man is an earthbound creature and man’s greatness is only possible under God and in a proper relationship to the earth. Our feet cannot be planted on air, it must be planted on hard ground. A great deal in the way of problems was created and led to the inflationary situation in Brazil some economists have said, when they began to build their new capitol, Brasilia. Their architects were trying to create buildings that were floating in space as it were. They were trying to erect monstrous government buildings which somehow would give the illusion of floating in air, of not being earth bound.

The result was disastrous, it required all kinds of corrections, but the corrections themselves were designed to cover the earthbound orientation of the buildings. When the earth is unatoned for it means judgment as we saw upon the earth. The nations of the Old Testament were judged, Judea was judged, our modern world is again and again judged, because when men do not enforce God’s law God enforces it upon them and upon the earth around them so that the earth is cursed for man’s sake. And the earth can only be blessed as man places himself under the blessings of God. Now as men have left this sense of the earth and its place under God and in theology they have become ineffectual. The best example of that of course is Calvinism. Calvinism at one time was the most revolutionary faith in Europe but it suddenly collapsed and why? Because with only four percent of the population of England it captured England, and then it sinned because the Presbyterian party of the Calvinists decided that their interests were ecclesiastical, it was to control the nation by becoming the established church and they became irrelevant. And the others because Cambridge University, their stronghold, fell under the influence of Platonism and became so spiritual they were irrelevant. Charles II did not enter England as a conqueror, it was a puritan parliament that surrendered and invited him back. The people did not want Charles II. It was simply that the reformed faith had become neo-platonic, pietistic and irrelevant and it surrendered power. Ever since then it has existed as a deformation and this is why with our emphasis on a reformed faith that is relevant although we here are a handful we are beginning to have a worldwide influence.

The bible begins with the creation of the heavens and the earth, with a material fact. The bible concludes with an account of the recreation of heaven and earth, so it begins and ends in the framework of the earth, of a material universe. The focus is not on man alone but on all creation in relationship to God’s covenant purpose. Moreover the bible is emphatic about speaking of God’s joy in His whole creation. God tells Job, for example, in Job 38:4-7:

“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.

5 Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?

6 Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;

7 When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

There is nothing esthetic here about God’s attitude towards the material creation. His is the joy of creation. As God goes on in His answer to Job He revels in the peacock and the ostrich, in the wild goats, the wild ass, and in all His creatures and God goes on specifically to speak of His joy in these things, His delight in having made them. Job and His friends had viewed the world with a man centered frame of reference but God expressed His joy in the totality of His creation. Man is the climax of creation but He is not the exclusive feature thereof. We cannot in other words be man centered or nature centered, we must be God centered. Now man’s relationship to nature is set forth in our text, Genesis 21:26-28. This tells us first very obviously that man is created in the image of God. The Westminster Shorter Catechism says how did God create man and then goes on to declare God created man male and female after His own image in knowledge, righteousness and holiness with dominion over the creatures.

Man’s position is exulted but it is totally earth related. Then second, we are told that this creation is sexual in nature. We are created male and female. This is not an irrelevant nor it is a minor fact. Attempts to overlook this distinction between male and female or to exaggerate it are very, very seriously in error and they distort God’s creation. Now as male and female mankind is commanded to replenish or literally, to fill the earth. The Garden of Eden as we have seen previously was a pilot project. There man was to learn dominion and then to apply it to all the earth. Now there’s a very significant fact here in that the text speaks in Genesis 1 of the fact that the whole earth was filled with animals, with fish, with birds, with every kind of creature except man. We are told that the waters were to teem, the earth to be filled by God’s creative word. So that in the first week we have an earth that was full of all kinds of animals, many of which no longer exist, but it was teeming, it was filled with animals. The one aspect of creation that was restricted in the creation week was man. At first man, the male only, and subsequently Eve, the woman. This is a remarkable discrepancy. On the one hand, a full creation, on the other, a very limited one. Why? Because while animals may run in packs they have no federal head but Adam was the head of the old humanity even as the last Adam, Jesus Christ, is the head of the new humanity.

All men have a relationship, a basic relationship to Adam and all men who are made a new creation have an essential relationship to Christ. It is covenantal. Man is a covenantal creature, He has a corporate as well as a personal life, which is beyond his physical or his spiritual being, it is totally a part of him, man is inescapably a corporate as well as an individual being. And as a result, the whole of mankind was created in Adam so that we may always have a relationship to him as our federal head even as men cannot be a part of the new humanity unless they are recreated in Jesus Christ, the last Adam. Then third we are told that man was created to exercise dominion, to subdue the earth. This is not peripheral to man’s being but essential. Man will exercise dominion, He will either exercise it in a godly form or an ungodly form. The Tower of Babal was the first expression of ungodly dominion in an organized form. When we look at every civil order in the world today we have to say these are aspects of ungodly dominion. They are not Christian. What I faced this past week in the superior court of Lansing, MI was a form of ungodly dominion seeking to gain authority over the very church of Jesus Christ. Now, that kind of ungodly dominion prevails in this country and around the world today because Christians have abdicated. How is it possible when four percent of England being puritan in the 17th century took over England and when you have fifty five million adults, one out of four approximately, who profess to be born again Christians and they’re being persecuted in the courts and put into prison on occasion? Very definitely something is wrong.

Christians recognize only ungodly dominion and many an ostensible Christian exercises ungodly dominion. When a man who is a director of child welfare facilities in a state claims to be a born again Christian and goes to court to put a minister in jail for having a child care facility it means that he doesn’t know what Godly dominion is about and he is exercising ungodly dominion. That his life is not in conformity with his profession and that his profession might be seen as a false one. We must exercise dominion over the earth. The earth was created a mature creation, no concept of origin can escape the idea of a mature creation. God created Adam a mature man. He created him and set him in the Garden of Eden where there were fruit trees bearing fruit, vegetables ready to be picked. Now a Darwinian must believe in a mature creation also because he must assume to begin with that all the potentiality of the entire universe was in the original Adam. That at the beginning of creation there was one little spark of life or one little spark of matter that had inherent in it all the potentiality of this universe, a remarkably mature Adam. You cannot escape the concept of the mature creation, there’s no other way for accounting for the whole universe without presupposing something mature at the beginning. Adam was mature on the day of his birth. He was born a mature man, physically and mentally but there was one area where Adam was not mature: culturally. Didn’t have a tool, he had no background of experience, he had no backlog of data, of information. Thus, in a mature creation Adam began as a beginner, a total beginner, and what was necessary then was the accumulation of experience and data and the ability to grow.

And as he grew to exercise dominion so God gave to man a mature creation in which he, a mature creature, still began with no cultural maturity and so there has had to be a growth in that. And much as we have grown since Adam’s day I believe the major growth culturally is ahead of us. I trust we will have a part to play in that growth. We have not yet begun to realize the potentialities of dominion. Now that's an area of maturity. Knowledge, righteousness or justice, holiness, these are aspects of the image of God, areas for growth and maturity. In cultural development so the potentialities are enormous. The sad fact is that the Christian community has not seen this, the only kind of cultural maturation has visualized has been the humanistic one, it has left all of this to the humanistic community to develop. Then fourth we must say that this growth potential, this development is of course as I already indicated is an aspect of the image of God in man. The humanist has his [unknown] too, of controlling evolution, of a planned revolution against God, of creating a world afresh so it can be a man-made product. The author of a book on the great new revolution through DNA, man remaking himself rejoices in the fact that in the future because of DNA research and genetic engineering supposedly man is going to be able to tamper with the genes and create man so man will hence forth be his own creature. That’s the entire goal of this engineering. We will remake the genes; we will have a recombination of them. Of course they will be playing with the materials God gave them and they’re assuming they will be able to alter them successfully, and we will then be the gods of the new creation.

So that men and animals and plants will exist as we say they should, we will say let there be and there shall be. Men, plants, animals, precisely as we ordain it. There is no way that they can conceal their glee, their delight at that kind of experimentation, in fact they openly state it. But for us we must seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness or justice. We must conform ourselves to Jesus Christ rather than to seek to transform ourselves into a superman or into a new god. Colossians 2:10 tells us that Jesus Christ is the head of all principality and power or this can be translated, the head of all princedom and authority. And because Christ is the head of all principality and power, all princedom, all rule, all authority, we must in Christ claim every domain for Him and as His, exercise the authority of His law word in every sphere and affirm the crown rights of Christ the king over the whole of His creation. One such sphere is the natural world around us, the earth beneath our feet. All things must be developed in terms of the creation mandate, the call, the summons to dominion. This includes agriculture and technology, mining all things and we hope in the next year to see some dominion exercised in the area of mining by John Saunders [unknown] and some others. This is our religious duty. Our work is not to be destructive but constructive. We are to be God’s workmen. The artisans in the wilderness who are summoned to build the sanctuary of God, we’re described as men being filled with the spirit of God, in wisdom and in understanding and in knowledge and in all manner of workmanship according to Exodus 31:3.

That expression is used more than once in the bible. We are very definitely told therefore that the spirit of God is not restricted to religious activities in the traditional sense, in the pietistic neo-platonic sense. The spirit of God works wherever man is doing the work of God, whether it is in technology, or construction, or anything else, that’s the very plain meaning of the text there. The spirit of God as expressed in wisdom and in understanding and in knowledge and in all manner of workmanship. The same thus must be said that the spirit of God is present in every man who works to exercise dominion under God. Whether in technology, agriculture or any other sphere the man who advances the development of man’s life and service under God is exercising the power of the Holy Spirit. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God Thou hast called us to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth. Thou hast called us in every area of culture, technology, science, the development of the earth to be Thy servants, to set forth the crown rights of Christ our Lord and to subdue all things unto Thee. Give us joy in this calling and make us triumphant therein in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Are there any questions now first of all on our lesson?

I’d like to call your attention in the meantime to a very superior book, The Case for Gold by Representative Ron Paul and Lewis [unknown]. Now an interesting aspect of this book is that in passing they do have a section on religion and politics and it concerns itself with the harm done in the political sphere by the rise of pietism in this country. So the subject we are discussing has something to do even with an economic discussion of the case for gold.

Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Those who oppose Secretary Watts are very commonly those who want the earth to be the subject of idolatry. Nature must be untouched and like an idol kept separated so that you can bow down before it, whereas Secretary Watt wants a utilization of those facilities of the earth which can serve to establish man’s life on a better basis on this earth. We have had for some years an increase of federal holdings in the name of environmentalism and the result is you have the biggest land grab in all of history in the past decade or so. Now it’s interesting that the federal government owns over ninety percent of some states, nothing is said about this, that the medieval church had a dramatically lower percentage of land, much of the land they were given was marginal at the time it was given, they cleared it, they developed it, they were the ones who built the dikes first in the Netherlands and reclaimed wasteland and out of that they took care of health, education and welfare through the medieval era. Now, that’s treated as though it was some enormous evil but what the federal government is doing as some tremendous good. What I’m saying is that both perspectives are religious. It was a religious concern that led the medieval church to increase its holdings and to bless people with them; the federal government is increasing its holdings and cursing us. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. What the…[interruption]

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well, the constitution no longer exists, the Supreme Court has made that clear, we have a Supreme Court instead of a constitution. The Bob Jones case is a classic example of that because there they rendered the first amendment null and void, public policy will prevail rather than religious freedom. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Of course. Of course. But you see the idea that government regulations are going to create that is nonsense.

[Short interruption]

[Rushdoony] For example, long before any such idea was born in the minds of men that the state should protect natural resources, Lutheranism in Germany developed the idea of forests as a necessity and a moral obligation. The black forest in Germany is a man made, man remade product. Now we’ve had nothing but horror stories for a century about the nature of the ecological crisis. You can go back more than a hundred years and read accounts that within ten years the forests of this country would be depleted, that we would from coast to coast have no trees left standing, that kind of story. It’s a very old thing. Well, who develops these resources? Who has done most of the replanting? Some of your major lumber companies because they are in business for generations are involved in the reforestation of tremendous areas as a matter of principle. Maine, for example, which is the main lumber state in the United States in terms of the number of acres, I believe, that are timbered has about the same acreage of timber now as it did when the first white man came. So we have not been depleting our resources. In one of the easy chairs I cited data on what supposedly was the nature of the prairies before the white man came, actually we can prove to them since the days of the buffalo, so we’re subjected to a lot of myth.

Well our time is about up, let us bow our heads now for the benediction.

Now go in peace, Go d the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.