Systematic Theology – Work

Hierarchical Work

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 13 of 19

Track: #13

Year:

Dictation Name: 13 Hierarchical Work.

[Rushdoony] Let us begin with prayer.

Oh Lord our God we thank Thee that in Thy providence, Thy grace, mercy, and wisdom, Thou hast ordered all things from the beginning of the world. We thank Thee that Thou who art the Lord hast ordained that we should be Thy people, and grace and mercy has chosen us, has separated us unto Thyself, and given us such promises in Jesus Christ. Give us grace therefore with gratitude and Thanksgiving day by day to serve Thee with all our heart, mind, and being; to rejoice in Thy word and in Thy ways, to wait on Thee knowing that Thy wisdom governs all things, and Thy mercy. And so we come again to cast ourselves into Thy hands who carest for us. Bless us by Thy word and By Thy Spirit, and grant us Thy strength, Thy grace, Thy peace. In Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture is Exodus 20 verse 24-26 and our subject “hierarchical work”, hierarchical work, Exodus 20:24-26.

“24 An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt offerings, and thy peace offerings, thy sheep, and thine oxen: in all places where I record my name I will come unto thee, and I will bless thee.

25 And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.

26 Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon.”

This is a text with far-reaching and interesting implications. Among the other scripture verses related to it is Exodus 28:42 which says “And thou shalt make them (the priests) linen breeches to cover their nakedness, from the loins even to the thighs they shall reach.” Now the significance of these and similar verses is that God prescribes every approach by man to himself. Man is not permitted by God to formulate his own way to God, or to establish his own ideas of righteousness and justice, as all too many men are prone to do. Only God’s way is legitimate, only what God says is justice is just. The world is full of men who regard themselves, and are regarded by others, as good men; for they have their own standard of justice, of righteousness, and it is not God’s. Only God’s way is legitimate because the world is not man’s creation and man cannot impose his concepts of truth upon it. By Him, by the Lord, were all things made, and without was not anything made that was made. As a result all things serve Him, and they only serve us in so far as we are faithful to His word.

We are here told that the altar could have no handiwork of man upon it. The atonement is set forth in the altar, and the atonement is exclusively and entirely God’s work. Elsewhere the sanctuary was full of man’s controlled work, his controlled freedom to work. But because man makes no contribution to his own salvation he could not touch the altar. The priest approached the altar with prescribed garments; no contribution of his own could go into his garb. To cover a man means he does God’s work, not his own, and the priests were doing God’s work in its entirety.

Now this has a connection to us because we have the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers from the very time that God gave the law to Moses. We read in Exodus 19 verse 6, before the giving of the law “and ye shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” This sentence is cited again by Saint Peter to apply to all Christians. We are a priesthood, a holy priesthood, a kingdom of priests. This is the doctrine of vocation or calling because we function as priests, prophets, and kings in our calling. Every legitimate calling is an area wherein the triple office functions. The goal is, as Zachariah 14:20&21 declare, that all things will in time become holiness unto the Lord.

Now the priestly garment was in particular designed to cover the sexual organs, to emphasize the separation of Biblical faith from the fertility cults. The fertility cults stressed mans potency in relationship to the God’s and the universe. The pagan ritual in these cults presupposed, as Vanderloo {?} said, and I quote, “The potency of one’s own body to ward off evil powers and awaken fruitful ones.” In the fertility cults man is the source of creative power, he is the self-conscious catalyst of creation who creates, who makes things new, who not only works in the world to create but in the intellectual and the religious realm so that you have do-it-yourself ideas of justice, of law, philosophy, and of religion.

The Biblical doctrine of course is the antithesis of this. I refer to the triple office of all men in Christ, of priest, prophet, and king. As king we rule all things under God; as prophet we declare and apply the word of God to all things; and as priests we dedicate all things to God. The pagan perspective throughout history from the earliest times to the present has seen man as a magician, who by his own creative act transforms all things to suit his purposes. Alchemy was an example of this, but alchemy was a rather early and primitive example of this in Western culture. What we have today of course is the same kind of thing in genetic engineering; it’s the modern form of alchemy. You actually have groups that call themselves by a name, experimental groups in which the very word “alchemy” is now coming into usage. These people believe in magic, although they do not call it so; they believe it is a do-it-yourself universe in which man will be the creator, man will create the man of the future by genetic engineering. He will create a new world which will be a totally man-made creation in which God is eliminated, and man becomes his own creator.

We have also the politics of magic. This is exactly what prevails in the world today. In the politics of magic man bypasses God, he bypasses the need for regeneration, for God’s law, for anything that is of God, and seeks to transform the world, time, and history on his own terms and in terms of his own planning. All that is required is men of good will and intelligence, the philosopher kings. This was the Renaissance hope as Dr. Ralph has pointed out in his book on the Renaissance. At that time a new political philosophy came into focus. Key figures in this were Erasmus, or Thomas Moore, and Machiavelli; what these men did was to give open expression to something that had been under the surface for some time, namely that the good society, or as Moore declared it, Utopia, can be attained by man apart from God without any need for man to be changed and to be a new creation. There can be a new creation simply in terms of man’s own will, man’s determination to change all things and create a new society.

From ancient times the key principal of magic has been “as my will is, so shall it be.” As my will is so shall it be, a sentence which we have of course embedded in Masonic ritual, and which of course is the premise of modern politics. All we need is the right combination, the right legislation, and it is also the basic premise of original sin; every man as his own God. But today we are ruled by magical politics, by magical science, education, economics, and religion. The religion of most of the churches is magical. Man’s naked will comes to focus in disbelief. And of course it is so much taken for granted that anyone who even ever so mildly challenges this belief in Magical thinking is immediately a leper, he has broken the front of modern humanism. The belief that man by his own efforts, political, economical, what have you, will create paradise on earth, utopia; man’s naked will is to achieve this.

Now it is interesting that this emphasis on man’s naked will was carried to a logical conclusion by the ancient witches covens. No less a scholar than Lynn T. White Junior, who recently retired as the great medievalist at the University of California at Los Angeles, has called attention to the fact that the witches covens of the late Middle ages and early modern era, were poisoners, they were blackmailers who were trying to shake down society as a kind of a Mafia, by threatening them with all kinds of dire things, and they were a clear-cut social evil and menace. And he said the fact that they were deluded in many of their beliefs makes them nonetheless evil, their function, their goal, was evil.

Now the emphasis in these covens was so great, and still is in the relics of them that survive in our culture, on man’s naked will. That man had to rid himself of the centuries of Christian teaching, and even of clothes, to give freedom to his own being and thereby exercise total human power. So in their magical rituals there was ritual nakedness. Well we see this kind of divesting of twenty centuries of Christianity in modern politics, they want to be naked of any moral influence. We see, by the way, the same psychology in the flashers or exhibitionists who haunt our city streets. But we’re told in our text that the man who serves God is covered because he knows that the source of power is not in himself but of God, and as he puts on God’s prescription in all his being, from his mind out, in his thinking and in his acting, he acknowledges that the source of power is not in himself, but the Lord. And it is the salvation of God which is power and strength, so that in his life he sees the truth of Saint Paul’s words “therefore my beloved brethren be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord; for as much as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”

Now with this in mind let’s glance for a moment or too at the ancient Greek hatred of work. The Greek thinkers, the philosophers, the would-be philosopher kings, believed that work belonged to slaves, not to free men. Lynn T. White says, and I quote: “Any free man (in ancient Greece) who dirtied his hands with it, even in the most casual way, demeaned himself.” Two friends of Plato built an apparatus to try to prove an abstruse problem of geometry and Plato rebuked them, he said they were contaminating thought. Archimedes was ashamed of the machinery which he had built. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, said that inventions are the work of slaves, and that is true by the way. As a matter of fact, most of the inventions that the Greek get credit for were done by slaves who were sometimes then given the status of free-men. It is an interesting fact that a lot of these slaves were Hebrew slaves who had no such prejudice against work. This is why, in antiquity, medicine was held in such low-esteem. After all in medicine you did work with your hands, to a degree. For this reason surgeons were regarded as the lowest kind of medical practitioners, and surgery was relegated to the barber. Anything that dealt with manual labor was despised.

Christendom came into the Western world with a different standard. Saint Benedict began all things on a new premise “to labor is to pray.” Later the puritans made labor in ones calling the prime moral necessity and the chief means of praising God. So that civilization now had a new foundation unique in history. One of the problems, by the way, in Asia and Africa is that revolution is indigenous to the culture because we’ve introduced Western-style education. Once you take those peoples and bring them to Europe or England or the United States and educate them, and they return, they are totally useless in the overwhelming majority of cases, for any actual physical work. They are intellectuals now, work is for slaves, work is for the lowest of the lower classes; and as a result they have only one concern, to become philosopher kings and to create revolutions which will put them in the ascendency.

The modern university of course embodies this Greek ideal. In any university any courses which have to do with preparation for a vocation will be despised because it is practical knowledge. The departments of mathematics hate above all any courses they must give in mathematics for engineers, because that’s practical. They prefer purely theoretical mathematics which has no relationship to reality; mathematics which involves creating dream worlds in which totally imaginary mathematics prevails. The problem of course is when they try to take their dream worlds and force them onto reality. This is the Greek ideal, it is the perspective of the witches on power, it is magic.

The covens, as White indicated, dealt in drugs and potions, and poisons, to extort protection money from the people. And of course the Biblical world that is used that says “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” means “poisoner”. We’re not told this very often by those who rant and rave about the attitude of Christendom in the past towards witches. But Jeffrey Burton Russell, a scholar who set out to debunk the whole of Christian history on this score wound up overwhelmed by the evidence to concede that these cults were made up of people who were poisoners, who practiced cannibalism, human sacrifice, and every other kind of evil.

We have gone into the subject of hierarchies versus elites. The word hierarchy, as we have seen, means sacred rule, rule in terms of God’s law and God’s order, and elite is a self-styled superior group that separates itself from others and from responsibility to anyone except themselves, and feels that it has been self-appointed to rule the world. The witches of old, the politicians of Humanism, and man the sinner in all of his days seeks to be an elite, separate and above all other men. A hierarchy rules under God, and only in terms of His law-word, His cannon or His rule, His yardstick, which is what cannon means. Now a clergymen too can be elitist if in their ministry they call attention to and glorify themselves, and any man can be an elitist if he works apart from God, and for his own glory.

It is ironic for me in the limited contact I have had with prisons and prison visitation, that there is an elitist premise at work in a prison. Because of the type of crime they commit certain prisoners are looked down on, where-as others regard themselves as the elite, and surprisingly most the prisoners buy this. They see this elitism at work and they accept the elitist rule. The Old Testament priest were covered and under God, they were a hierarchy, they recognized that only God’s rule must prevail. Elitism is a premise all over the world, outside of Christ it prevails.

When I was working among the American Indians it was very obvious that elitism prevailed there. The medicine men were elitist, they separated themselves from all others and imposed their sense of importance on the rest. And the term “medicine men” according to Vanderloo {?}, and I quote here, “The term medicine is to be understood as power-stuff in general.” These men held to a private, secret knowledge shared only with certain chosen ones. It was elitism.

A Godly doctor is not a medicine man, a Godly doctor has a hierarchical sense, he feels that what he is doing is a ministry under God, and all work that is done under God and in terms of God’s law-order is sacred rule, it is hierarchical. What the world needs today so desperately is men with the sense of the hierarchical nature of work, work as sacred rule. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee that Thou hast called us to work in Jesus Christ, to bring all things into captivity to Him, and Thou hast declared that our labor in Christ is never in vain. Make us joyful therefore in our calling, and what we have been appointed to do, that we may serve Thee all the days of our life in faithfulness, in joy, and in obedience. Grant us this we beseech Thee in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

[Audience member] I think it explains the witch trials of the seventeenth century very easily now because, I mean I’d never heard the background information that you gave and it seems to me now like the witch trials all make sense because the laws, most of the witch trials were all conducted by virtue of existing law, but I think most of the people may have been reacting to a long history of subversion and intimidation and harassment.

[Rushdoony] Yes. While there were cases of injustices in the trials, the prevailing fact as Dr. Burton and other scholars have determined, is that these groups were exercising a very evil influence in a community. If you have them practicing extortion on the threat of death, then certainly you’re going to have a great deal of community sentiment against them.

We don’t get to much knowledge about this sort of thing and the medievalist who have done studies here are not publicized in their works, because after all it breaks with our image of the past, and as Napoleon said “history is a lie agreed upon.”

And by the way, neither Burton nor White were Christians, they were agnostics to the best of my knowledge, so their research was not colored by a Christian concern.

Yes?

[Audience member] Rush you said that it was the usual policy and nature of the elite to set themselves up in rule over others, and I think I’ve mentioned a couple of times the concept of denying them the wherewithal to do that, in other words maybe even in the tax resistance area, and I think you’ve talked to me about that and suggested that they don’t need the money to be able to rule others, that they can do it I guess, out of strict force. Could you comment a little bit more on that? How to resist these people given that they…

[Rushdoony]…Yes. Well every attempt to overthrow an elite only produces another elite. The French Revolution is a classic example of that, an even worse elite, because you don’t destroy elitism by killing off the elite, but only by changing the premise in terms of which they operate, and this can only be done by Christianizing a people and a culture, by converting them. Any other method creates a new and a hungrier elite, a more vicious one, so that every time an elite has been overthrown in the last couple of centuries, or every time I can think of off-hand, we’ve had a far worse situation develop. The French revolution, the Russian revolution, the German revolution, the Italian revolution; all of these have led from one disaster to another.

[Audience member] So the key is to use education to fight them rather than other forms of resistance?

[Rushdoony] Christian education. You have the same problem, by the way, in Britain. You had a revolution at the ballot boxes there, the old elite has been savagely penalized. For a time you had income taxes that went well over 100% to wipe out the nobility and the wealthy. But the new elite has been no better, your labor party has been just as destructive, and perhaps more so. This is what happens when any work that we do to change society is negation. We fall then into the political trap, we become heirs of Machiavelli and Sir Thomas Moore, and Erasmus, we believe by changing things at the top in civil government, or in economics, we’re going to make a new man.

Yes?

[Audience member] I continue to have trouble with the word “elite”, is that a word that has two meanings which would be contra…

[Rushdoony] Well, the word “elite” has been used in recent years as though it represented the best, the cream. But the concept of the elite is a humanistic concept of people, who in terms of humanistic standards, set themselves above all others. For example the social elite in New York was for, a couple of generations, the four hundred. Only if you qualified to get into that book were you the elite in New York. But what was the standard whereby you got into that book? It was a purely humanistic one. Now that’s what an elite means, whether it’s in politics or in education, or anywhere else, it’s in terms of humanistic standards. And no-one would call, for example someone like let’s say Lester Roloff or Everett Sylavin {?} or Mother Teresa, an elite. But they have been trying to rule in terms of God’s word, they represent a hierarchical principal.

[Same audience member] That’s why I have trouble because I would call them the elite, you see, so I’m…my Webster, I even looked it in his dictionary and it just seems to me that the word elite implies something completely different to me. There ought to be definitionally a better word for this pretender than the word elite.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well you mentioned dictionaries and that’s a very interesting point, if you take Noah Webster’s dictionary of 1828, and the current Webster’s dictionary you see how Humanism has radically altered the meaning of words so that we have given a humanistic content to a great many words. We’ve transferred words that once belonged to God to man, and other words we’ve turned upside down.

[Same audience member] Right, because elite means very special, {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, but in terms of what?

[Audience member] I understand what you’re saying. I wish we would have had a different word though. [Laughter.]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well we have to go back to what was once a proper usage rather than trying to create a new one.

Yes? Bob, first of all.

[Bob] {?} if the elite and the upper class today are the same thing, and the upper class being truly, is the upper class being future oriented and God’s law?

[Rushdoony] Very good point, the concept of an upper class has shifted from those who rule well, and ably, to those who are the leisure class, so that we have a totally different concept of the upper class. When doctor Banfield, who I believe teaches sociology at Harvard, dealt with future oriented versus present-oriented or past-oriented peoples, it was very obvious that most of our welfare recipients were, in terms of his analysis, present-oriented, and they were where they belonged. But it was also obvious in terms of his analysis, and he made it clear too, that what we call the upper class is present oriented, not work and future oriented, and is a lower-class in the making, so that we have given a falsified perspective on society by a very humanistic perspective.

Yes John?

[John] Well I was going to say as all heresies in the theology begin with a redefinition of the person and work of Christ, so do all heresies in the concrete realm, in the various disciplines beginning with a redefinition of words and terms in reality, and one of the deceptions in the whole elitist thing in politics is that a man can go out and mix with the common people and he’s therefore going to understand their problems and go back to the legislator and pass the kinds of bills that will meet the needs of the common people when in reality the elitist mentality does what he thinks is best for the people, whether they like it or not, and it wouldn’t certainly do any good to inform them of this truth because they might not like to hear that kind of thing.

[Rushdoony] Well, the very premise that politics should do things for the people is dangerous. It should do things in terms of what is just and righteous, and this is the difference. Today politics is people-oriented instead of justice oriented.

[John] Well they don’t write law anymore they write purchase orders for blocks of votes. [Amusement expressed in audience]

[Rushdoony] Any other questions or comments?

[Audience member] What John just said reminded me of the command that’s sometimes given in the marine corp. “your people will be happy.” [General laughter]

[Rushdoony] Or like the sign in an office where there were a lot of lay-offs recently that examples of anyone with poor moral was going to be fired. [More laughter]

Well, let us bow our heads now in prayer as we conclude.

Now Father grant us Thy peace and the power of Thy Spirit as we grow forth, that we may be more than conquerors in Jesus Christ, in His name we pray, amen.