Systematic Theology – The Land

Debt And The Future

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: 10-19

Genre: Speech

Track: 10 of 19

Dictation Name: 10 Debt And The Future

Location/Venue:

Year:

All honor praise and glory be to Thee oh God. We come into Thy presence mindful how rich we are in Jesus Christ that we are in Him heirs of all creation. Send us forth oh Lord therefore in the power of Thy spirit and in the certainty of our heir-ship, to conquer all things for Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray, Amen.

Our scripture this morning is from Romans 13:7-10. Our subject is debt and the future. Our primary emphasis will be on verse eight. Romans 13:7-10. Debt and the Future.

“Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.

8 Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.

9 For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

10 Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”

Paul here speaks of the necessary debt required of every man, to love his neighbor. The norm financially is that we be debt free but if necessity drives us into debt the debt is to be for no more than six years. The seventh year as Deuteronomy 15:1-11 and many another text makes clear is to be the year of release but there is another continuing debt of love towards all men and Paul makes clear that we are to give all their dues and that we owe to every man without exception the duty of love. Now love is not defined by Paul as in emotional or sentimental terms, he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.

What does it mean? This: thou shalt not commit adultery, you respect every man’s home and the sanctity thereof, thou shalt not kill, you respect his life, you shall not steal, you respect his property, thou shalt not bear false witness, you respect his reputation and thou shalt not covet, you do not by any means legal or illegal attempt to seize what is rightfully his. Today of course the use of the law to covet and to expropriate is very commonplace and if there be any other commandment it is briefly comprehended in this saying: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Love worketh no will to his neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. This is how God defines love, in terms of His law. He also says that our duty towards ourselves and towards our fellow men and towards society is owe no man anything, save to love one another. We have seen in our study last week that God’s Sabbath requires a Sabbath of the land and of man from work and from debt. In a recent article Otto Scott referred to something that he has discussed with us personally. That the cathedral of Notre Dame was built when Paris had a population of a hundred and fifty thousand people. It was built in the heart of Paris, the first stone was laid in 1163. There was an ability in construction and in attention to intricacy of detail which is lacking in any kind of construction today. The building of Notre Dame was a fact very much related to the question of Sabbaths and debt. Debt both statist and personal is inflationary and destructive.

Solomon says in Proverbs 22:7:

“The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.”

Debt is bondage and debt is the premise always of ungodly rule. A non-Christian society will always be a society of debtors and an inflationary society. Debt and inflation involve always as we saw last week a consumption of the future and a burden on the present. We mentioned also last week the fact that a few years ago the tax burden on every person on the United States was forty five percent of their income. More recently the staggering figure of fifty nine percent has been given. As of 1983 local, county, state and federal taxes eat up fifty nine percent of our income directly and indirectly. This means if we say it is no more than fifty percent a man must work than half a year to pay his taxes so that if it is only fifty percent from January the first to July the first you are working to pay your taxes. Now if you pay God a double tithe you will be working at most two months. This means that if you are a tither you are and you give above and beyond your tithe you are supporting yourself on what you earn four months in a year. Now consider the implications of that. Eight months in a year a man is working for the government or for God, if he’s a tither and give gifts and offerings above a tithe, four towards his self-support. The amount of income required to support ourselves and to give a double tithe to the Lord amounts to less than six months in our contemporary society.

Obviously our statist debt economy is consuming the major part of every man’s income. If you add to that the burden of private debt you will realize how much a man is working every year just to pay off taxes and his personal debts. If the civil tax, the tax by the state, were reduced to the biblical proportions as stated in the law, in Exodus 30:11-16, the same amount for all men twenty years old and older, a tremendous flood of funds would be available for use by the individual and towards constructing a godly society. We know how little of what goes for taxes reaches its appointed purpose. Attention has been called by some statisticians to the fact that if all the money appropriated for welfare got to welfare families a welfare family of four would get forty thousand dollars a year. This tells you how little of what is appropriated accomplishes what it is appropriated for. But every dollar that goes for godly charity, godly welfare to create Christian schools and so on accomplishes the same at a fraction of the cost. Christian schools are operated for a fraction of what the public schools cost. Christian homes for delinquents, Christian welfare, a fraction of the cost. So that everything that is now done by the state can be better done by private or Christian agencies at a fraction of the cost that civil government imposes upon us.

In other words, the modern state is the great roadblock to justice and to the future. It fosters debt and inflation. A consumption of the future and a demoralization of the present. Instead of doing its appointed task, to be the minister of justice, the ministry of justice, it tries to play God and to take over and govern every area apart from God’s ordained purposes, apart from the way that God wants these things to be done. This makes clear the far reaching implications of the Sabbath. As we have seen to keep God’s Sabbath you rest one day in seven, one year in seven is what we should also work for, so that every seventh year men have a Sabbath which today only your professors do. This would create men who are provident, it would require a society in which we don’t have the present kind of taxation. If you can support yourself now on the income of four or five months or let’s say you don’t tithe at all, six months or less, actually it’s closer to five months given the present tax situation, think of how much you could save. How much you could do to have a Sabbath year, how much you could provide for your children if you did not have the civil tax which is so destructive of society, which involves man playing God and trying to create a new world order apart from the fact of regeneration. What civil government is saying they can do with the taxes to remake men when we know only Jesus Christ can do that. The Sabbath thus has far reaching implications economically. It requires a provident inflation free society, a debt free people. Debt living is according to scripture abnormal, it is a form of slavery. The debtor is treated mercifully in the bible and debt living is discouraged except for emergency causes.

On the other hand when we look at the pagan world we find that debtors were treated mercilessly, whether in ancient Egypt or Greece or Rome. Roman law was very, very harsh towards debtors. One of the older historians of Rome, [unknown], said that the small land owners of Rome were destroyed by debt slavery and that’s his term. The result was that it created a revolutionary mob that had to be placated with bread and circuses. The foreigners were enslaved by wars, literally enslaved and the people at home with debt and taxes. As a result production was progressively hampered by debt and slavery became the order of things. The parallels between Rome and the present world order are very, very real. It is interesting that an older historian like [unknown] writing at the begging of this century could speak about debt slavery as so basic to Rome but today you never read about that in the contemporary histories of Rome that are written and are used in the schools and in the universities. After all, if they write honestly about Rome what will they have to say about today? The early church worked to fight debt slavery. We find in the letters of Gregory the Great whose dates are 590 to 603 A.D. that he as the head of the church spoke out against the continuing influence of the Roman kind of taxation. In his day the very common tax, one of many, was the [unknown]. It was a kind of land tax, one of a number, which was always payable before the harvest deliberately. This meant that the farmer had to go into debt before the harvest at a high rate of interest and he was continually the loser as a result.

And so Gregory the Great in a letter to Peter sub deacon of Sicily said and I quote:

“Further we have ascertained the first charge of [unknown] exceedingly cripples our peasants in that before they can sell the produce of their labor they are compelled to pay taxes and not having of their own to pay with they borrow from public pawn brokers and pay a heavy consideration for the accommodation. Once it results that they are crippled by heavy expenses wherefore we enjoin by this present admonition that thy experience advance to them from the public fund all that they might have borrowed from strangers and that it be repayed by the peasants of the church by degrees as they may have wherewith to pay, lest while for a time in narrow circumstances they should sell at too cheap a rate at what afterwards might have sufficed for the payment of the due even though, even so not have enough.” Unquote.

The medieval church worked hard to try to relieve that burden , it issued prohibitions against usury designed to further God’s law and to protect the people but the civil powers followed the Roman model. The modern state has stepped up the exemptions, we have not yet gone back to the torture chamber used by Rome to squeeze out taxes from people so that any hidden wealth might be coughed up nor the cruelties used by the medieval state to collect taxes. But give the IRS time they’re not doubt working on it. The modern state, however, is moving in the same direction as Rome. The modern view of debt of course is at war with the bible. In the bible debt is seen as a misfortune, borrowing seen as something that is a necessity but never an advantage, but today the advertising of lending agencies tries to play up your ability to borrow as a mark of some credit and credit today means debt, not as the word originally meant, a man of faith, a man of credit was a man of faith, credit comes from the word credo, I believe. Today it marks not a man of faith but a debtor. The bible never sees debt as an advantage, it speaks of loans and of interest as a means of enslaving peoples and this is exactly what it was in the ancient world, Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, all had means whereby they encouraged debt. As a matter of fact Noam 3:16 has a reference to the [unknown]. These were the merchants, the credit merchants of Assyria who like those of old, Babylon, of Egypt and so on would always go before the armies moved into an area, a few years before.

And they would offer all kinds of goods on easy credit terms so that long before Babylon or Assyria sent their armies into an area the whole area was burdened with debt and so the independent spirit of the people was broken and then their armies could march and they could be sure that they did not face a free and independent people. I remember after all Assyria which perfected this was a country with a very small population, very meager population. It would be comparable to Rhode Island taking over the United States almost, but they had a very simple method. Send out the credit merchants, get every area subjugated and you will break their spirit when they are a debtor people and then our armies can go through them like a knife through hot butter. The bible speaks of debt as slavery. Noam says that these merchant bankers, these credit peddlers were the advance guards of slavery. Today everything by law is done to favor the man who goes into debt. You get a tax break if you’re paying interest. They are not ignorant of what they are doing. A free people cannot be free long if they are debt slaves.

What we have seen is with World War II the amount of debt public and private has skyrocketed and now we are seeing the consequence of debt slavery as it has appeared over and over again in history. The loss of hope concerning the future. People have no hope. People see the picture is grim and ugly. And the sad fact is that here where the bible speaks so plainly the church has been silent. Many churches which profess to be sabbitarian are deeply involved in debt. I frequently hear from people who call to say we’re having a problem in our church because the church board and the pastor are going to put us into debt for five hundred thousand or two million for a huge building project and they tell those of us who oppose it that we lack faith. That if we really had enough faith we’d launch out in faith. And of course there’s one Christian organization which is on television now which has a debt of over two hundred million dollars and is beginning to get a little hysterical. Of course I’ve had telephone calls from others who say that their church board or pastor or both are saying don’t worry about this big debt we’re going into because we’re not going to have to pay it, the rapture is coming very soon. Blasphemy in the name of God. And we see the great change in every area. I grew upon a farm here in California, I’ve seen farming change. Why? Because when people are debt ridden they have to become more exploitative in the type of farming they do because you’re continually behind. And you have oppressive payments of principle and interest.

Debt in every area means the consumption of the future to pay for the past. This is why there are no cathedrals like Notre Dame being built today by people who have the time to build, who are not debt slaves however poor they might be and they were not rich, the builders of Notre Dame. This is why so many of the really worthwhile things to see abroad and in the United States were built by people of generations ago when people took the word of God seriously and did not live in terms of debt. They were not slaves. They had been made free men by the regenerating power of Jesus Christ and they knew they could only stay free if they lived by the every word of God. And so we live surrounded by the monuments of a godly past and our age sees no hope in the future, it is a hopeless generation and of course it should be. A slave has no future except slavery. If the son of man make us free then we are free indeed and if we are free we live in terms of the laws of freedom and the laws of freedom are the every word of God. Let us pray.

OH Lord our God Thou hast summoned us to freedom in Christ and now the world is in slavery because it has forsaken Thy son. Despise Thy word and gone awhoring after the Balaam’s of our day, the modern states. Lived by man’s law and by man’s law and become prodigal and a slave people. Oh Lord our God by Thy spirit raise up men who seek freedom in Christ who find their way of freedom to be Thy word and to again make of us a people of righteousness, of justice, a free people and a beacon of light and grace to all this world. Grant us this we beseech Thee in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Are there any questions concerning our lesson?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well, what the scripture requires of us is that we give a tithe every year to the Lord. Every other year, every year also there is to be another tithe: a poor tithe twice in a six year period and then the tithe of rejoicing before the Lord when you simply rejoice before the Lord in resting with your family. Now when you add that to the other Sabbaths you see that in biblical times men had a lot of Sabbaths, a lot of resting. In the rejoicing tithe you were to remember the widow, the orphan, the Levite, the poor generally, the stranger and share with them. Thus, you had not only a tithe fifty two years in a year, the weekly tithe, the tithe the seventh year but with the rejoicing tithe you had a few weeks of tithes as well, of Sabbaths. So there was a great deal of rest in a biblical society and in an earlier America there was a great deal of rest despite the lack of modern technology with all the labor saving devices. Now consider what would happen with our modern technology and the ability to limit the amount of time spent at work if we had a different kind of social order. If we eliminated the heavy burden of taxation and created a godly state and a godly society. Then God’s Sabbaths would have a markedly different meaning and impact. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes…Yes. In verse seven what Paul says is render therefore to all their dues, man and God alike. Tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor. Then he goes on to say what this means what this means if we render it to God. First he is generalized, now he is specific. First, he says, God requires us to owe no man anything. We fulfill our debt to them how, by keeping God’s law in relationship to them. So what he has said before begins by in effect saying all right, pay your taxes and all but if you do this what you’re going to do is eliminate a good many of your taxes. If you render to every man their due and to God what is His due you’re going to remake society.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] What was that?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Uhh…[interruption]…well the word in the Greek is [unknown] which we have in the English as deacon. Now a deacon in the bible, a deaconos, was a household servant. If you had a maid, the biblical word would be the feminine form of deaconos. Now, God is saying the state is not an independent power, it’s my household servant. Its duty is to provide justice. Just to say a household servant might be assigned to cleaning windows God says the state is my servant to provide justice. If they’re not doing it, God is going to deal with them and bring justice upon them. So God is saying the state cannot see itself as an independent power. So when God speaks of authorities we have to see all authority in the sense of a servant. Our Lord says he who would be greatest among you let him be the servant of all.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] No because it must use its authority, its position, to be the servant of all.

For example, Paul speaks of this with regard to marriage in Ephesians 5 and he says husbands love your wives and serve them as Christ served the church, gave His life for it. Now that’s a dramatic imagery of service, Christ died to redeem His church, His people and the husband is to serve in the same way. Now the humanistic concept of authority and our Lord says it is not so among the Gentiles, let it not be so among you, that you imitate the Gentiles, where authority means lording it over others as our Lord says. But for us He says it must be a ministry, a deaconry.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes, exactly.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Exactly.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well when the state borrows without security they are borrowing against your and my properties and our future of course, that’s their security.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] But first Hodge a century ago made clear when he was commentating on husband and wives he said all authority is conditional upon the word of God so that all authority is under God and when it goes beyond the word of God it has no authority. So the modern state has forfeited its legitimate authority. I want to deal with that for just a moment before we go on. What do we do, well revolution doesn’t change anything, it produces upheavals and an even worse group takes over usually. Revolutions have always failed. Regeneration is the only answer so that we have to work to change men so we can change the society. Now, the bible says that debt can be and normally is secured unless the form of security is one which deprives the man of the ability to make his living, taking the tools of his trade as security.

So unsecured debt is something that only the state does. By the way the major form of state debts today is through the semi-independent corporations the state creates like the Tennessee valley authority and coastal commission and so on which have bonding and borrowing and taxing powers but are beyond the reach of the voters. The national debt on budget debt is two trillion, off budget comes to thirteen trillion. So you can see how irresponsible the federal government is and how unrelated it is to the façade of a republican form of government. Yes, Jack?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] That’s an investing in inflation and in the most shaky and dishonest organization going today. Yes, Otto?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Write on that sometime Otto, you have a good point. Very good. John?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Very good point John, why don’t we get together and write a little paper on that [laughter] because I think it needs doing.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The very word compel, in that passage, if any man compel thee to go a mile, goes back to the compulsory draft of ancient Persia so the passage as a whole has deep roots. Well, our time is up now let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Lord and our God it has been good for us to be here. Thy word is truth and Thy word is a light unto our way. We pray our Father that Thy word may light the way to this country and that even as Scotland was made a new people by John Knox and his fellow pastors so the United States may be set ablaze in the days ahead that we might see thy regenerating power make us again a free people in Christ. In His name we pray, Amen.