Systematic Theology – Work

Work and Dominion

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 9 of 19

Track: #9

Year:

Dictation Name: 9 Work and Dominion

[Rushdoony] Now if there are no further comments let’s begin with prayer.

Almighty God our heavenly Father we thank Thee that Thou who art Lord of heaven and earth are ruler over men and nations, and that Thou in Thine own time shall bring forth judgment upon the works of iniquity. Raise up we beseech Thee oh Lord men who will stand with Thee and for Thee, against the powers of darkness, against humanistic statism in its every form. Be with Thy suffering saints in Nebraska, behind the Iron Curtain, and throughout the world, and strengthen them and give them victory. Bless us now as we study Thy word, and grant that we may be strengthened in Thy service, in Jesus name amen.

Our scripture this morning is Genesis 1:28 and again II Thessalonians 3:10; our subject “Work and Dominion.” First of all Genesis 1:28.

“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.”

And then II Thessalonians 3:10

“10 For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

The Biblical doctrine of work can be very briefly summarized in these two verses in Genesis 1:28 we have first of all a commandment to work, dominion and subjugation require work to subdue the earth, to turn a wilderness into fertile farms and ranches, gardens, requires work. Work was ordained before the fall and there was no curse upon it. Work was very clearly a part of the state of innocence; it is not a product of sin. Then second the English translation “Replenish the earth” creates problems. In the Hebrew it is very literally “to fill”. Man has a duty to fill the earth, to colonize, to bring every area under man’s dominion.

Environmentalist today are motivated by a hatred of God and man, they are hostile to dominion as though it is, of necessity, destruction. This of course is a myth, it is man the sinner who is destructive, but redeemed man has a calling to develop the resources and potentialities of the earth; not to destroy the earth, but to use it. I’ve heard it argues of late that most of the United States should be returned to national forests and no one be allowed to enter them for any purposes whatsoever; in other words, the earth to be turned back to trees and animals. This is the kind of absurdity that some people are into.

Then third the goal of work should be, we are told, Godly dominion. Work is not an end in itself, nor is this monetary income that may be forthcoming from work. It is true that the laborer is worthy of his hire, as we are emphatically told in scripture. Work and pay cannot be separated, but neither can they be equated as though there is nothing more to work than monetary return. Work is an economic fact, but it is as we saw last time, more than an economic fact; it is also moral and a theological fact. Where work is reduced to the economic factor alone productivity declines, the meaning of work then fades away. We saw last time that work is a moral and a religious fact, and the antithesis to work is theft, a point Paul makes emphatically in Ephesians. When man is given to a belief that work is a matter of economics, and Marxism is the epitome of it, then work loses its productivity. Men lose the incentive to work, and the desire to work, because it is now equated with the economic results pure and simple, the meaning goes out of it. The more a country reduces work to economics, the lower its productivity. This is why in Marxist countries productivity is at a historic low.

But when man is free of humanism he will work in terms of God’s calling and under God for his family, for personal realization, and for more. This is why when people ask me if they should go into a particular profession, I ask them why they are interested in going into that, and if they tell me they are interested in law, or medicine, or anything else because of the monetary, I tell them it’s an overcrowded field, stay out of it. But if they have a feeling that this is what they want to do, they have a calling, I tell them “forget about all the economic factors, if this is what your life is to be, then live it in terms of your calling.” And I’ve found those who have gone with such a motive never regretted it.

When men are governed purely by economic motives, when men are governed by purely economic motives they self-destruct. We are called to work for dominion in terms of the covenant, in terms of the kingdom of God, and only when our motivation is at the highest level, the religious level, are we most productive. The Ten Commandments says “six days shalt thou labor, the seventh is to be for rest.” The six days we labor are for work, not only at our place of employment, but around the house. We are commanded to work, both work and rest are required in the law.

Then fourth, God in giving the command to work, and to exercise dominion, blesses man in the process, and God blessed them and by blessing them ordained that they should work, so that work is given as a blessing. When men do not work, they begin to fall apart. Work is a blessing, not a curse. After the fall the total life of man was under the curse, not merely work, but work is blessed, it is pronounced happy and good, fulfilling for men. As we give ourselves to Godly work, we pass from the curse to blessings, and to dominion.

Now fifth we must saw that the dominion mandate, to multiply, to replenish the earth and subdue it, to exercise dominion, separates work from necessity. This is a very important point, for most of the world work is a necessity, they work to eat, and that’s it. For them deliverance from work is a privilege and a blessing, they regard work as a curse, and freedom from work as a privilege, and they say with envy of others “he doesn’t have to work.” Any society with such a goal is in serious trouble. The goal of life is then non-productivity and play, and ultimately death. When a society begins to get such an ideal as ours and the whole world today have, disintegration sets in, production in every area goes down, and you begin to have an elite. An elite is a leisure class, or as some would say a leisure [Rushdoony pronounces “leisure” differently here] class, and when you have a leisure in decay, a culture in decline because its leading element, its ruling element, its pace-setting element is parasitic; and where a parasitic element is ruled as the elite and is envied, the goal of the whole of society is parasitism. Only those elements in the society which reject that ideal can perpetuate social order, when that element is destroyed by the forces that govern the society, as under Marxism, the whole of the society begins to collapse. Moreover, when you have the rise of the leisure class as the elite it means also the rise of Statism. Priority is then given to money and power over faith and work.

Today we can see what’s happened because on films and in television series we see the elite class, the non-working element as the envied ones, and those who are the producers as the despised element. The business man, the capitalist, is almost invariably the villain. The worker, in modern thinking, is often idealized and presented as a great figure, but when you analyze what they mean by worker they do not mean what you and I think of as a worker, but a revolutionist in the ranks, which is not a producer, so that the term “worker” for them is a synonym for revolutionist, not a producer. Thus to reduce work to a necessity is to have a false view of society, one which creates and elite, a dangerous, a parasitic elite.

This ideal was presented very baldly and loudly in the 1960’s, a work-free world was called for. The student revolutionaries insisted that science was capable of eliminating work, and therefore educate should be for play, for leisure, and it was a capitalistic plot the students said, to educate for work. That ideal has not disappeared. The revolutionary ferment has gone out of it, but it is still very present as any penetration of the world of the media quickly reveals. Work and self-discipline are despised because they are alien to the world of leisure. It is interesting to me that the music produced in recent years that I find, on the average, of a higher quality, is some of the film score music. Because writing for a film score imposes upon a musician a discipline, and that discipline brings out better work than he performs on his own apart from the film score, in all to many cases. Elitism is anti-work, its goal is a superior status, power, and money, and the role of Elitism has been a deadly one throughout history. Its classic is Plato’s Republic. Elitism has had an ugly history from ancient times to the present. Its force in this country has been destructive. We saw Elitism rise in both the North and the South prior to 1860; as a matter of fact the appeal of slavery was essentially to the elitist’s, and the result of Northern and Southern elitism was one of the great disasters of our history.

Elitism is an abdication of responsibility in favor of power and control, and there is a difference, and man can control his family with no sense of responsibility. Many men do, they insist on ruling their children and their wives with an iron hand, and its control only for the sake of control, for the sake of throwing their weight around, without any sense of responsibility, and what they mean by control is power and self-exultation.

Elitism also means exclusivism because Elitism has no legitimate ground for claiming superiority. It is interesting that when New York began to formulate its concept, very self-consciously, of an elite, it came out with the four hundred. Most of them were upstarts; they were not a true aristocracy in any sense of the word. They were a self-styled elite and they gained status in that list of the four hundred in terms of the amount of money they spent, in terms of leisure, in terms of display. If an elitist travels he wants untouched places whereby he can separate himself from other men, because there is no way the elite can ever separate themselves from others, except in terms of snobbishness. They have no real caliber. The goal of elitism is power, control, money, and status. It may pay lip-service to equalitarianism but it is destructive of it.

What elitism hates most is work and a hierarchy, a hierarchy of power. Why? The essence of a true hierarchy is power, religious power. The word “hierarch” comes from two Greek words meaning “sacred” and “rule.” A hierarchy means a leadership that has authority on religious grounds, and rules in terms of the word of God. A hierarchy therefore is something that we as Christians must believe in. Now we can differ as to what a true hierarchy is, but a Christian must affirm a belief in a hierarchy as a against an elite, because the one is anti-God, its emphasis is one freedom from work, and the other places its emphasis on the authority of God, and upon exercising authority subject entirely to the word of God. An elite order is therefore a man-made order, an anti-productive order, a status order. But a hierarchy works to create a free order, when it is faithful to its premises in which man is under God’s rule, not mans.

The modern state of course is elitist. All over the world we have civil governments which are in varying degree’s elitist in some form. They may call themselves democracies, or republics, fascist states, or dictatorships, or Marxist governments, but they are elitists; they deny the premises of a hierarchy, rule under God. Both elitism and hierarchy have to do with dominion, but both seek dominion on varying grounds. Elitism denies work, the elite make others work; in hierarchy the greater the authority, the greater the responsibility, the greater the work. The one is a way of life, and the other fulfills the premises of Proverbs 8:36 “but all they that hate Me love death.”

We live in a world of elitism, we must work to establish a world under God’s law, a world of hierarchies; only therein is our freedom. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God make us faithful workers in Thy vineyard, servants of Thy kingdom, ever zealous to be obedient to Thy rule. Our Lord and our God Thou seest how the ungodly seek dominion over Thy church, over Thy people. Confound them in their iniquity, raise up men, raise up faithful soldiers for Thy kingdom. Bless those that are on the front lines, and give victory unto them; to the end that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. In Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes?

[Audience member] {?} Thing that you didn’t exhaust was the scripture that seems to suggest that there’s somehow a curse on work, was the one where Adam was cast out of the Garden. Would you respond?

[Rushdoony] Yes. We did deal with that last week I believe, or the week before, but the curse was on man, and upon the ground, and upon everything he was and did; it was not merely upon work, it was upon the totality of man’s life. So that it’s a serious mistake to limit it to work. He was told now work, which was a blessing, was going to be frustrating; because work which is to be a joy, to give man a sense of dominion, was now going to have frustration. But as we move out from under the curse into Christ, then our work becomes progressively more and more blessed, more and more happy. Now in a sin-filled world it’s going to have problems, but by and large we are the people who enjoy our work, and to the other’s it’s drudgery, that’s because we’ve moved from the realm of the curse to the realm of the blessing.

So it begins and ends with us. Are we ourselves under the curse, or are we under God’s blessing? And we’ll take that blessing into work, into play, into everything.

Yes?

[Audience member] Well I agree with your comments; however I think it’s ironic that in corporations for instance, the higher up you go to authority {?} you have to work. Most people think of it in terms of the perks, and in art there’s a tendency to confuse art with play, so we have a lot of {?} rush into art figuring that it’s very easy and a historic, a popular historian once said that most artists come from the working class because they are workers, and aristocrats on the other hand seek to make an art of their lives.

But beyond that, on the whole question of the elite, I think you’re talking about a false elite and an artificial elite in the sense that the hereditary aristocracies became a {?} when they ceased to be responsible for the people in their areas the Baron had became a burden. But on the other hand I think that the natural aristocracy of man is about all that can keep the despot from completely suppressing everybody unless we had intermediate levels of power, there’s nothing between despotism and the proletariat.

[Rushdoony] I would agree emphatically, I would say that first of all the corporation is hated because there’s a natural hierarchy there, a hierarchy of power, of responsibility, and the work increases as you go up. I would say also that in the world of art we have had a great deal of corruption by the idea that art is play, and the result has been a world of pseudo-art. I believe that a natural aristocracy, to use the Jeffersonian term, represents a natural Hierarchy because the word “elite” has always been associated with a leisure class by blood, separated from work. Or by having attained riches through what their father or grandfather did, they are separated from work. So when you trace the idea of the elite it’s different from a natural aristocracy or hierarchy, it has always associated itself with leisure, and with irresponsibility.

So that when you’ve had an elite that doesn’t have blood behind it, you had things like lighting a cigar with a hundred dollar bill, which was done once or twice in the latter half of the last century, by show-off. Those were the days when a hundred dollar bill went a long way to support a working man, a better part of a year almost. So I would never regard a natural aristocracy as an elite, an elite has always been associated with a non-working class. But a natural aristocracy, with those who have proven themselves by going forth into the world of ideas, or art, or any area, and manifesting a quality. So you have a natural hierarchy that arises in these fields.

Now one of the things that the pseudo-artists you spoke of have done, is to destroy the idea of work. They waged war against the academy in art. Well in some respects that was, up to a point, necessary. Because we know, and the battle took place especially in France, the academy had become stuffy, and it had become politicized so it was an academy that represented a kind of an established order and wanted to keep others in line. But what happened finally when the academies were overthrown was that work was overthrown, about twenty years or more ago one artist of the old school, a very successful and able painter, called attention to the fact that the discipline of working with paints, of mixing them, of knowing what stood the test of time, of what faded and what didn’t and so on, all the technical skills were disappearing simply because there was this rebellion against discipline in the arts. So he felt that we were creating a generation of primitives who would sometime down the line have to re-capture what artists a hundred years ago knew. So the new idea is of the artist as primitive profit, who simply expresses himself.

Now that’s elitism of the newer sort, as against the elitism of blood. I do believe we’re talking about the same thing, it’s just that I feel the word “elite” has to be reserved to that, an aristocracy, of a true sort, a natural aristocracy associated with hierarchy, because it represents work.

Yes John?

[John] Well just two quick observations, it’s almost like, the first one, social welfare is a member of a kind of inverse elite to a certain extent; then the other thing, in keeping what you said about artists becoming lazy. Men have later on when they justified that laziness by giving it very specialized names. For example when an actor can’t find, doesn’t have the ability or the training to figure a way out of trying to resolve some difficulty in his singing, he does an improvisation. An improvisation then becomes a thing in itself, when in reality improvisation is nothing more, for the actor anyway, than a way of justifying his incompetence. He can’t figure out why the character should do one thing and not another, so he does an improvisation and hopes that something magical and accidental will come out of that. You see an awful lot of bills have been made that way, I just saw one the other night “Freebie and the Bean” which James Caan and Al Arkin, and about half that picture was one improvisation after another and as a result that picture is totally disjointed, but improvisation is a substitute most of the time for not knowing, not doing the homework, and things of that nature.

And then they justify it by developing improvisation itself into a new art form, and then for almost twenty-five years we’ve seen now how the improvisational theaters have been the “in” theater in both the west and east coast, and Midwest as well; and many of the actors we have now grew out of improvisational kinds of theaters. But that’s just one example how not knowing through lack of work and lack of commitment and what have you, what to do, you didn’t justify it in the art community anyway by inventing something which is then later justified as a new form of expression.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well the triumph of the undisciplined is what we’ve seen. And several rock stars have produced books in which they string phrases, mostly obscene, one after another, and call it poetry; and are insistent that these are going to be classics simply because they’ve produced them on the instantaneous improvising basis. Supposedly you tap inspiration by being totally undisciplined.

Yes?

[Audience member] What John said about when they improvise they hope that something magical will happen, it seems that the general public kind of glorifies this because they hope this would happen in their own lives, as far as they don’t work and they hope something magical will happen and they’ll at sixteen “why don’t I own a house and everything else?” And they sit back and hope something magical will happen and I guess they glorify this in actors and the arts, in their desire for it to happen to themselves.

[Rushdoony] Yes, and at the same time you have the rise of gambling. Because when you believe in something other than work, you’re going to believe that chance will produce something, and therefore you will have an increase in gambling.

[Audience member] and I don’t believe that that’s alien to many Christians attitudes.

[Rushdoony] No, it isn’t.

[Audience member] that is to say, “if I pray for it hard enough and long enough it will come, without my having to render to the duties required.”

[Rushdoony] Yes that’s right; because a lot of so-called Christians are really in the church but not of it. They are there to get things, their attitude is not as Paul when he was converted he said “Lord what wouldst Thou have me to do?” Their attitude is “Lord, what are you going to give me?” Now that’s not Christianity. They go to God to get things, not to take orders from God to go out and serve Him.

[Audience member] So the service then becomes the greatest getting because, I think that this message here this morning was so meaningful in light of the fact that suggestion contains, that really is a very significant essence of our lives.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience member] The {?} That we not only exhibit and produce, but gain within through that service or work, whichever, that makes life meaningful and people are so slavish when they have to work just for money or assistance.

[Rushdoony] We have a great many church people who go to church morning and evening and in the mid-week, and regard themselves as the very precious saints of Christ, who have only one purpose in life and that’s to get something from God, and they believe they are super holy. I wrote about that attitude two or three times in my California Farmer column, and I had a series of hysterical letters from a woman who was convinced I was of the devil because I said those things, and she kept writing that she was going to pray that I’d be saved and stop attacking Christians.

Well it was obvious that I’d hit her because her letters indicated that God existed for one thing, to give her what she wanted, and she was super-sanctimonious, and an un-believer in my book because there was no sense of the sovereignty of God and the fact that we are called to serve Him, not He to serve us.

And that’s what they believe, that God is there it serve me. You have a sizable group in the church who opposes the idea that Jesus Christ is Lord, although the term Lord is applied to Him more than any other. He’s just our Savior, he’s not our Lord. Now that’s insanity in my book, and it’s certainly unbelief.

Yes?

[Audience member] Sometime ago I came across a book on Buddhist economics [laughter in audience] the title itself aroused my curiosity enough to thumb threw it, I didn’t look at it in any length, but it was interesting to see that there was a lot of borrowing going on in that book in so far as the number of issues that were covered, including work, were clearly Christian in their context. My question is, do other religions, well let me ask it this way. On several occasions you have mentioned that IQ tests, where they can be trusted, have indicated that the man is dominate over the women in at least one area but probably not the rest, and that is what they referred to as “aggression” what we would refer to as “dominion”, if I understood you correctly, and in that dominion it would seem that the Christian form of dominion would be as you explained this morning in your sermon, to exercise his or her talent in terms of subduing the earth and for God’s glory. Now in Humanism, if I understand it correctly, it switches that dominion around from work to a position of power, to power over others, and my question is in religions such as Hinduism, and Buddhism, and the other world-religions and cults and what have you, do they have a concept or a doctrine of dominion? And if they do, how do they express that, and is it any different than humanism actually?

[Rushdoony] Well I couldn’t go into all the religions, I’ll just deal with Buddhism because that’s what you began by mentioning, and by the way borrowings by all religions are very extensive, it’s sad that Christians don’t feel the Bible is worth taking anything from you know, except the idea that somehow they’re saved, but these other groups are. The Buddhists by the way have adopted one song for children, “Buddha loves me, this I know”, it’s very popular now in Buddhism. [Much laugher].

[Audience member] Because the Bible tells them so? [More laughter]

[Rushdoony] I’ve forgotten the second line, I used to know it. But for them dominion is something you renounce. Buddha was a king, Gautama Buddha, was a king who renounced power because everything is meaningless, and you seek to be uninvolved, you recognize that to be involved in the world, or to be to much separated from it, is to give to much meaning to everything so that the one goal of life really is to mark time until the end, and you enter into nothingness, ultimate nothingness.

Meanwhile you let nothing mean anything to you. Well there’s a great deal of that in Hinduism as well. And hence in Buddhist countries, and Hindu countries, there is an unconcern about the conditions of peoples. You’re only concerned about your own deliverance from the misery of existence or re-incarnation. Dominion is a Biblical concept.

Yes?

[Audience member] In light of what you just said, in my own studies of Buddhism, particularly in Drummond’s book on Gautama the Buddha, he points out a number of things that Buddha said, which are supposed to be very, very authoritative, which the majority of Buddhist nowadays don’t talk about, ok. And one of those is right in line with what you just got through saying.

Buddha said on many occasions that Buddhism was not for everyone, it was only for a certain few who were capable of seeing and arriving and Nirvana, you know “{?}, but what Buddha did say I felt was very, very interesting, he said “some of you are going to have to continue to work to support us who can achieve Nirvana” so in a sense Buddhism has a kind of a spiritual elitist that gave Buddha the leisure to pursue his own spiritual development but everyone else had of course to sacrifice for Buddha’s betterment. Now that was a point that Drummond made in his book on Buddha that I thought was extremely interesting.

[Rushdoony] Very good point. Well our time is point so let’s conclude now with prayer.

Our Lord and our God it is good for us to be here, we thank Thee that Thy word is truth, that Thy word speaks plainly to our every condition, and gives us marching orders in terms of which we can bring all things into captivity to Jesus Christ. Make us ever obedient and faithful, and ever victorious in Christ, in his name we pray, amen.