Systematic Theology – Work

The Work Ethic

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 14 of 19

Track: #14

Year:

Dictation Name: 14 The Work Ethic.

[Rushdoony] Now in prayer.

All glory be to Thee oh God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, we praise Thee for Thy so great salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord. WE thank Thee that the government is upon His shoulders and that He shall triumph, and that the heathen rage but in vain. For Thou shalt in Thy own time smash them and shatter them with a rod of iron. Do Thou oh Lord give us faith, strength, and holy boldness so that in these troubled days we may stand, we may wage holy war and may become more than conquerors through Christ our Lord. In His name we pray, amen.

Our subject this morning is the work ethic and our scripture is from Thessalonians first epistle, the fourth chapter verses 3-12, but our particular concern is a key verse in that passage, verse 11.We have been studying the theology of work, once a very important subject in the Christian community and now virtually a forgotten one. I Thessalonians four verses 3-12.

“3 For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication:

4 That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor;

5 Not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God:

6 That no man go beyond and defraud his brother in any matter: because that the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also have forewarned you and testified.

7 For God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness.

8 He therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man, but God, who hath also given unto us his holy Spirit.

9 But as touching brotherly love ye need not that I write unto you: for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another.

10 And indeed ye do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia: but we beseech you, brethren, that ye increase more and more;

11 And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you;

12 That ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing.”

Well before the twentieth century began the doctrine of work as scripture teaches it had begun to recede in its influence. The so-called puritan work ethic was in marked decline. Prior to the enlightenment and the Renaissance, man had a work ethic. As a matter of fact the greatness of the medieval era was due precisely to that. When we go back into the early centuries we find Saint Benedicts view summed up in five words, “to labor is to pray.” This was more than just a monkish doctrine. Historians have not done justice to it; according to them Saint Benedict required work as a means of avoiding idleness, he stipulated that work had to be necessary work, work which contributed to the welfare of the Christian community. But in analyzing Saint Benedict’s doctrine what they have done is to isolate Saint Benedict. They forget that Christian man in every century has had the background of the Bible, of centuries of Hebraic and Christian tradition. They forget that Benedict and others were governed by the recognition that God had ordained work before the fall.

Much later, saint Bernard of Clairvaux said, and I quote: “When we read that Adam was put into the paradise of pleasure to till it and keep it, who would reasonably maintain that as children have been put in this place of trial to rest from work?” In Saint Bernard’s day parent were very prone to try to protect their children from work. They tried to amass a sufficient fortune to give them an inheritance that would relieve them of the responsibility of work, as though work were a curse. But Saint Bernard called attention to the fact that prior to the fall man had been set in a sinless paradise, and ordered by God to work. So obviously work can be, and should be, a blessing. Saint John Chrysostom had made the same point centuries earlier. Saint Basil the great said work and prayer should be linked. “We should pray” he said, and I quote, “that the work of our hands may be directed to its goal, the good pleasure of God.”

Now the verse more often used than any other by the theologians of the early church and the {?} as well, and well into the middle ages was I Thessalonians 4:11; that ye study to be quiet and to do your own business and to work with your own hands as we commanded you. This was in particular stressed by the monasteries. Saint Bernard called the three marks of the monk separation from work, voluntary poverty, and work. The fact that Jesus was a carpenter’s son, and like all children of his day early trained, according to the Hebraic pattern, to know the law of God and to work with his hands was very often stressed throughout the medieval era.

Now I stress this medieval inheritance because we have it in the Puritan work ethic. The Puritan work ethic was a revival of something that had died before the Reformation, and was now revived by the Puritans self-consciously. It was a revival of that which scripture taught, which the early church practiced, and which the medieval era; at least to the thirteenth century, very strongly stressed. Work in terms of God’s calling, and in the words of Saint Basil the great, “with its goal the good pleasure of God.” This is why reclamation became so important very early in the life of medieval Europe. It was seen as an exercise of man’s calling under God, as the exercise of dominion. It was then, that for example, in the Netherlands the dykes first began to be built and land reclaimed from the sea. The desert areas were made into fertile lands throughout Europe; that rocky mountainous areas were made fertile, that canals were built by hand, and much, much more; all this in terms of a faithfulness to scripture. Thus when we look at Saint Benedicts sentence “To labor is to pray” we must realize that the few rules and the like that we have surviving of Saint Benedict; pre-suppose as their background the knowledge of scripture. In particular the stress on I Thessalonians 4:11; study to be quiet, do your own business, to work with your own hands as we commanded you.” Here was, Paul said, a practical test of the Christian life and this was emphatically stressed and carried on with the puritans in continuity with medieval monasticism.

We often forget that the United States is a protestant, feudal restoration in its structure, the decentralization of its basic governmental units, it is a protestant, feudal restoration. It is planned decentralization. Of course we have had since Woodrow Wilson a major move to destroy that character, but it is still there. Moreover we have to recognize that evangelical Protestantism, even though it does not know it, is in very strong continuity with the monastic spirit. For example one great figure, General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, self-consciously revived a great deal that monasticism had once practiced, and one of the things that he revived from the preaching fires of the medieval era was street preaching. Our contemporary fundamentalist street preachers don’t know that they go back to the preaching friars through General Booth.

The work ethic is a Biblical fact. We have no example in history, save one, where the work ethic has occurred in a society. When men have worked it has been because they are slaved, they are ordered to it, or they need work to eat to survive. The only exception of course is contemporary Japan, for a variety of complex historical reasons I will not go into. Jared Taylor has commented that the single most important ingredient in Japanese success is the Japanese attitude toward work. But the foundation of the Japanese work ethic is the group, not God; and it is showing signs of waning as Westernization begins to affect them. Thus the work ethic as we know, which is God centered, dominion centered, is a necessity. It is a basic part of the Christian life. Saint Jerome said that not only was it necessary for the good pleasure of God, but for the salvation of the soul. He did not mean thereby that we were saved by work, but that the man who did not work could not understand the meaning of salvation. His whole life was geared to something else, to a different kind of universe, to a different kind of expectation with regard to reality.

Now, this work ethic that marked monasticism and Puritianism, tells us why the world has been so hostile as it has become Humanistic to Monasticism and to the Puritan temper. An interesting fact is that in 1788 into early 1789 central and western Europe had a thousand monasteries of Benedictine monks, and five hundred for nuns; fifteen hundred. Fifty years after only five percent of these survived. Why? Because the movement that began with the French Revolution led to their destruction in France and their suppression elsewhere. At the end of the 50 years the five percent that survived were greatly reduced in their numbers, their libraries had been despoiled and destroyed, and the accumulation of centuries taken away or destroyed. At the same time you had the beginnings also of a spirit of savage hostility to Puritanism which broke out in this country with the Unitarian movement and its ridicule of everything that marked the puritan temper and the puritan work ethic. So that monasticism and its work ethic and Puritanism and its work ethic, the two related, the two going back to scripture, have been in the modern world been the target of unremitting hostility.

They have seen in the process a change from Christianity to Humanism. It is interesting to look up work or labor in encyclopedias, almost in every case there isn’t a hint of the Biblical perspective. Even such a work as Hastings encyclopedia of religion and ethics published in 1912 and one of the monuments of scholarship of this century has an incredibly obtuse and long study of labor. Under labor it reads rather “see employment and economics” and then you were referred to socialism when under employment we have an article that begins with primitive slavery because employment, work, is associated with slavery; a good neo-Platonic perspective. Then from slavery we go onto Capitalism as another form of slavery, and then to the state as the answer and unemployment, unemployment compensation, and so on, nothing in an encyclopedia of religion and ethics, the major encyclopedia of its kind, on the Biblical perspective.

About the only work that has anything that smacks of a Biblical perspective is in the more recent encyclopedia Judaica which does state on its article on labor that the Bible regards work as, quote, “Man’s destiny and an aspect of the cosmic order.” This article also refers to the fact that Proverbs stresses the religious and moral character of work, which is very true; and it’s significant that in our day the book of Proverb’s is a relatively neglected one. There was a time not too many years ago that you could buy the Psalm’s and the Proverbs in separate volumes, and it was commonplace for the average Christian to know hundreds of the Proverbs by heart. There would be vest pocket editions of it for business men who had memorized them because it was so full of Godly council about the conduct of one’s affairs.

We should therefore glance at some of things that Proverbs has to say about work. Well Proverbs 18 verse 9 in the Berkley version reads “he who is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys.” Now the full force of this verse doesn’t hit us immediately. But let us consider its implications. Scripture speaks of the devil as the destroyer, so when proverbs says “he who is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys” we have an implicit reference to the devil. In other words the lazy man, the sluggard, is related to the devil. Implicit also is the fact that the worker is under God and is akin to Him, is manifesting the image of God in what he does. Now this is in line with what monasticism and Puritanism held. They stressed the fact that the idler is related to the devil, and that the devil uses idle hands. Proverbs speaks of the sluggard as a sad and comical figure, but also as a dangerous one. He is spoken of as being in his heart so lazy that his life is hinged to his bed. “As the door turneth upon his hinges so doth the slothful man upon his bed”, so reads Proverbs 26:14, We are told that the lazy man will use any excuse to avoid work, thus Proverbs 26:13 reads “the slothful man saith there is a lion in the way, a lion is in the streets.” Any excuse to avoid responsibility, and of course there is not a job in the universe, this side of heaven, that doesn’t have problems associated with it; and to run away from problems is to run away from God-given responsibility.

We are told further that the lazy man is unwilling to start anything. For example in Proverbs 6 verses 9-11 we read “9 How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? When wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? 10 Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: 11 So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.” As a matter of fact Proverbs 12:27 tells us that the lazy man is so bad that even when he goes hunting for food, when he comes home he’s too lazy to get around to cleaning it and cooking it, so he will let it spoil. He is wasteful of food we are told in Proverbs 19:24 and 26:45 because of his laziness. He is brilliant and very hard at work to find excuses to avoid responsibility, to avoid working where there’s any unpleasantness, to run-away from responsibility. And Proverbs 26:16 tells us “the sluggard is wider in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason.” In other words, when it comes to avoiding responsibility he is wiser than seven wise men.” At that point he shines; I’ve known men who worked very hard to get out of work. They would have expended less energy if they had worked, but they would not.

Therefore, says Proverbs 24, “the sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold, therefore shall he beg in the harvest and have nothing.” It’s either to hot, or to cold. Nothing is right for working, there’s always something wrong with the conditions of work. There is a perversity, the way of the slothful man is as a hedge of thorns, but the way of the righteous is made plain. The sluggard is a restless man, a malcontent. “The soul of the sluggard desireth and hath nothing, but the soul of the diligent shall be made fat” says Proverbs 13:4. But such a man makes a contribution to society Proverbs says with great irony, it is greed and envy; and Proverbs 21:25&26 we read “25 The desire of the slothful killeth him; for his hands refuse to labor. 26 He coveteth greedily all the day long: but the righteous giveth and spareth not.” In other words, says Proverbs 18:9, the sluggard is socially useless; according to Proverbs 10:26 he is unpleasant, he is a drain on society, he is not an asset, like the devil he is a destroyer, not a creator.

Well there are only a few sluggards around they are comical figures. But when their number increases we have a destructive force at work in any society. In Revelation 9:11 Satan is called the destroyer, Apollyon. In John 8:44 he says he is a liar and a murderer so that the man who does not work, who hates work, who prefers leisure, is associated by scripture with the devil, a liar, a murderer, a destroyer, he is destructive of society. And we should recognize this fact, wherever the work ethic declines, that society becomes progressively demonic. It also becomes progressively political in its orientation; all the answers are seen as coming through legislation, political legislation. Such a society, because it is demonic, associated with destruction, prefers lies and death to God and life. It should not surprise us therefore in our culture that we have abortion and indolence, suicide and drugs, and a preference for a life of leisure to a life of work. These things are the natural concomitance of a society dedicated to the ethics of leisure.

Any evasion of life and its responsibilities tells us that there we have a love of death, and the culture of death. To expect a good society without the work ethic is absurd. The kingdom of God cometh not by votes nor appropriations, therefore says Paul to the Thessalonians “study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands as we commanded you.” He was talking to a society that was caught up in rapture fever. They were living in an empire that was degenerate. Things were not going smoothly and easily in Rome. They were still in the midst, as Paul wrote, an inflationary prosperity. Within a generation or two there would begin a long decline economically, a depression that lasted until Rome fell, the longest depression in history. But already the cracks in the economy were appearing, and the Thessalonians found “oh this is wonderful, we’ve learned about Jesus Christ from this marvelous apostle Paul, so we’re going to be raptured out of the world.” And Paul tells them “no, God requires something of you, you are saved. Now work out the implications of your salvation, study to be quiet, to do your own business and to work with your own hands as we commanded you.”

The work ethic is a command from almighty God. Man’s calling is work, it is not leisure. The destructive force of a leisure oriented society is not appreciated today, but its deadliness is not diminished by man’s ignorance of its evil. Therefore the command of our Lord applies to our generation also, to study to be quiet, to do our business, and to work with our own hands as God through His holy apostle has commanded us. Let us pray.

Thy word is truth oh Lord, and Thy word speaks plainly to our every condition. Give us grace to hear and to obey, and to work to the end that Thy kingdom may shine forth in all its glory, that the ends of the earth might know that Thou art God, that we might be faithful in things little and in things great, and that Thy name may be glorified in our lives. Grant us this we beseech Thee, in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes?

[Audience member] You gave three attributes of a monk, separation, poverty, and work, I didn’t get what you said the separation was from.

[Rushdoony] Separation from the world.

[Audience member] From the world, ok. And of those two, it would seem that those are not types for us to follow, and why were their monasteries then?

[Rushdoony] Well there are long and complex reasons for the rise of monasteries. There’s no question that there was an element of neo-Platonic asceticism in the monasteries. This was even more true of the desert monks who proceeded them. On the other hand, very important in the whole monastic movement was the fact that the world was collapsing around them, and these were people who were, some of them retreating from that collapsing world, but many of them concerned about “what can we do in such a world?” It was in its own way a program of Christian reconstruction. When we consider what these monasteries became it tells us what they did. For example they would, as they developed in time, have an infirmary or a hospital. They would have guest facilities so that they could house large numbers of travelers, rich and poor. They had orchards and they had poultry and fish that they raised to feed themselves and others. They took care of the poor who came, and provided the relief of their day. They drained swamps, they built irrigation canals, they cleared the land of stones and other things. They built dykes in the Netherlands, and much more. So in their own way they had a program of Christian reconstruction, a very important one. So there were many reasons why different monks went into a monastery, but steadily the monasteries aimed at doing precisely these sorts of things.

This is why they were called the regular clergy because they were giving full time to God. The parish clergy were called the secular clergy, in a sense they were doing what the average pastor does to much of today, he’s holding hands with a lot of people who have no business being so worried about things. Their whole life is caught up with trifles. Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Smith have a fight, and the pastor has to go around a smooth ruffled feathers. Endless things like that, trifles, take up most of the time of a secular clergy or a parish clergy so that very little of the essential is now being accomplished by most pastors. They put in a few hours a week in a teaching ministry, and most of the time with brush fires; people who have nothing else to do but fight with each other, and make life hell on earth for the pastor.

[Audience member] It seems as though they’ve adopted the first two attributes, separation from the world and poverty, and ignored the work part.

[Rushdoony] Yes I think there was a very close connection there.

Yes?

[Audience member] Is it safe to assume then that some of the monastic orders were more heavily influenced by asceticism than others?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Some of the monastic orders were more ascetic than others. The Benedictines in particular were very practical in their orientation. This is one reason why they were such a particular target of attack.

Yes?

[Audience member] It’s a paradoxical {?}which originally I would imagine to develop skills, work skills, has turned into the greatness enemy of work in modern times.

[Rushdoony] Very good point, I hope you all caught that. Education which began within the church in order to develop skills is now become the enemy of labor, it has become an ivory tower concept.

Yes?

[Audience member] That ties in with that essay that Dorothy Sayers wrote because she said that education in the Medieval era was geared more towards teaching people the tools of learning than it was in educating them in the classical sense of the word and subjects didn’t come until later in the curriculum, and then only as grist’s for the mill, as material to use the tools on in order to polish the skills. And she points out that’s one of the reasons why we had so many child prodigies and so-called geniuses during the medieval and after periods where we had 15 and 16 year old children writing major works of incredible importance. And whereas the modern educational system is exactly reversed, it just teaches a lot of subjects from beginning to end and it’s only in the later grades do we get any idea of how to use the tools of learning, doing research and what have you. And that would tie in with what Otto said in terms of education starting out as teaching a person how to do work, skills, etc. and then reversing itself later.

[Rushdoony] That’s so important a point Otto I think you ought to write on it. It is something we urgently need to have stressed in order to restore a proper perspective to education. So if you would do that it would be most important.

Yes John?

[Audience member] Interesting about the last 40-50 years I think we’ve gone from roughly 4% of the high school student seniors going on to college to something like 40-50% going on to college. And what we had is mass of well-educated people who couldn’t do anything, and now we have a mass of not well-educated people who can’t do anything. But then this has led in the last 10-15 years to the growth of a community college systems, and I think they’ve come on to respond to the point that Dylan and Otto were making. That people were saying “well, ok I’ve got a college degree, but what can I do with it?”

[Rushdoony] Yes, one of the disasters of our time has been your graduate of a college who is an African or an Asiatic who was sent to Europe or to the United States to get a degree. He goes back and he will not work with his hands, he is now an intellectual. And what is left for him to do? There isn’t enough a bureaucracy to absorb him, so he becomes a revolutionist, the world has to be made safe for eggheads, and they have become a major problem the world over and they’re a problem here.

[Audience member] Exactly on that point it’s interesting that when I took courses at the University of Maryland, late fifties early sixties, on the Middle East and the Far East area studies about development and once their developed countries and so forth. That point was made at that time, that these people went back and basically what they did was got jobs in government because in a bureaucracy it’s basically make work. And we used to laugh at that because we didn’t think of it as applying to our country, but I think that’s exactly what’s happened in our country now. Most of the surplus labor that can’t do anything useful goes into government or into revolutionary activity right here in this country

[Rushdoony] Up until about 1970 around the world one of the best-known educational institutions was one here in California which most Californians rarely think about, Cal-poly in San Lois Obispo. The reason was that it was a place where they could be trained in practical things. They could go back, and whether it was in agricultural, or in engineering, or in any other subject they were highly competent and could get in and work because they knew how to work with their hands and appreciate the value of that kind of work.

None of the countries in Africa or Asia had any problems with their students from Cal-poly. When the president retired there then they began to allow men in the humanities to have tenures as professors, and they began to have a different emphasis there. But it is significant that it was the one school hat was regarded without exception as being a major asset by foreign countries.

Yes?

[Audience member] Would you say from I Thessalonians 4 that the apostle Paul bases his ethics of work on a creation ordinance or from, something from the wisdom of the Old Testament, or is there some tie-up with what follows, the imminence of the return of the Lord and particularly verse 17 where the apostle says “then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up etc.” and that the Thessalonians might have expected the coming in their time and then they didn’t work anymore, and they just left it, and it became a chaotic disorderliness?

[Rushdoony] Yes I called it rapture-fever which is an American term.

[Same audience member] Ya, I didn’t quit get that.

[Rushdoony] Yes [laughter]. You don’t have that problem in South Africa but rapture fever is what we call the expectation of the imminent return and being rapture and then the world going on and so on. So that there’s no question in my mind that Paul was dealing with people who were caught up in that, it’s very clear here, and he summons them to get on with the work that God ordained from the beginning of creation.

[Same audience member] So it’s part also of the creation order?

[Rushdoony] Yes. They have to recognize that they have to leave that to God, but they have a duty here and now as the whole of scripture stresses, and it’s a very practical duty. They must get about it.

Yes?

[Audience member] This question is just kind of related Rush. The power of the university, I’m under the impression from somewhere, I don’t know where I found it, or where I got it. I’m under the impression that Galileo for example was tried by the university and not by the church, is that correct?

[Rushdoony] No. The university has an unusual history. It was created originally by the church to serve the church, to serve God and the kingdom of God. Then it fell from that in the modern era with the enlightenment, and it became a place for the sons of the nobility to go to learn how to be a gentleman, and the modern university with its program is geared to having classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, getting a little tidbit of various subjects, no solid concentration. Why? Because you could not press the gentleman’s son with too much work in a classroom or outside of the classroom; he had to have a great deal of time free for gaming and wenching. SO the modern university still has the contact of being abstracted from a practical working world, and I don’t think it can change apart from a Christian context.

Well our time is up so let’s conclude now with prayer.

Lord it has been good for us to be here, Thy word is truth and Thy word is a joy and a light and a lamp unto our feet. Strengthen us by Thy word and grant us Thy peace. And now go in peace God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, amen.