Systematic Theology – Work

The Prophetic Nature of Work

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 18 of 19

Track: #18

Year:

Dictation Name: 18 The Prophetic Nature of Work.

[Rushdoony] Let us begin with prayer.

Oh Lord our God unto whom all glory belongeth, we rejoice in the magnificence and glory of Thy creation. Thou hast made us rich at birth. Lord God of hosts be merciful unto us who have laid waste our inheritance, who have forsaken so often Thy word and have turned the paradise Thou hast made into a wilderness. We thank Thee that in the face of all these things through Jesus Christ Thy Son our Savior Thou hast made us a new creation, and hast summoned us to make all things new in Jesus Christ. Empower us by Thy word and by Thy Spirit that we may serve Thee with all our heart, mind, and being to the end that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, in His name we pray, amen.

Our subject this morning is The Prophetic Nature of Work, and our scripture is from Proverbs 13 verse 11 and then 14:23, first of all Proverbs 13 verse 11.

“11 Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labor shall increase.” And 14:23 “23 In all labor there is profit: but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury. (or want)”

Our view of prophesy is to often exotic and lawless. Men very commonly will go to fortune tellers, something forbidden by God, or in one way or another seek to discern the future as though it were something strange and exotic and unrelated to the present, unrelated to themselves, they seek know about a future as some strange thing they never made. But the universe is God’s law order ideas and actions both have consequences as a result. We cannot say that man makes history as the Humanist do, but we must say that history is God’s creation and we follow a path that has consequences. Our lives are both totally natural and totally supernatural; there is a coincidence and a determination which is totally of man and yet at the same time totally of God. Whatever we do we do because we have chosen to do so, but whatever we do is also within the sovereign providence and ordination of God, there is a coincidence of determination, but this is true of work also. This is what our two verses are about.

Now such verses as these seem trite to modern man, when we say “wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished but he that gathereth by labor shall increase” modern man is inclined to yawn, the book of Proverbs seems to modern man to be banal. Deriding work today has more wisdom for the Humanist than anything else. It is interesting to look at this verse “wealth gotten by vanity” can be read also, and some prefer the reading “wealth gotten by haste.” Vanity means by futile ways, but it can also be read wealth gotten by haste.

Now gambling is wealth, if you win, that’s gotten by haste, not by labor, and this the contrast here. Wealth gotten by vanity is against wealth gathered by labor. Easy come, easy go, a modern Proverb has it, which is another way of saying what this text is saying. Moreover we are told that words are weak. Proverbs 14:23 declares that while in labor there is profit, the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury or want. Proverbs has a great deal to say, as does all the Bible, about the vanity of work, of the weakness of work, of words as a substitute for work. The futility of words in of themselves is stressed by scripture, words cannot work, they cannot alter facts, they cannot repel a response. Words are only efficacious when they are linked to God’s truth, but man’s word is vanity and futility.

Now our concern is more specifically with the prophetic nature of work. If I plant seeds I am involved in predictive work, that is if I plant them according to God’s plan and order. If I plant them at the right time of the year, and if I take care of them properly then I am trusting in the order of God’s universe to produce some kind of return on my seeds and work. All work which is Godly is future oriented, leisure is present oriented. Rest under God and according to his word is, as we have seen, also future oriented because it’s a form of trust, of preparation for God’s future. We may not know even a scintilla what it is going to bring, but if we work under God and rest under God our rest is prophetic. Work fulfills a predictive plan whether we are planting seeds or repairing plumbing we are working to further order and to strengthen our dominion under God over the present. As a result work is very, very important. Work tells us something about our future.

Leisure society, as I indicated, is present oriented its tomorrows are always thought of in terms of disconnection. This is why when men like Alvin Toffler write Future Shock they tend to deal on a intellectual level with what the future will bring. They see it in abstraction from man and man’s faith, and what man thinks life is about. As a result when you predict the future in this way, as do the Marxists, as do the democrats and the Republicans too very often, and as do fascists and other people, they are thinking of it in terms of an elitist plan, and this is why their predictions about the future are futility. This is why, by way of contrast, Naisbitt’s Megatrends was so important, because it looked not to fads but to trends, to what people are believing and doing right now in order to see what will happen tomorrow. This is looking at the working world instead of the elitist plans. There’s a world of difference between the two. True work is prophetic and it is also non-political and productive.

We have seen that elitism and leisure go together and that the elitist separates himself from the world of work. This was especially true in 19th century Europe; if a man through trade, or commerce, or manufacturing, became very wealthy in England or on the continent, there was no way, in spite of his great wealth, that he could have any association with the elite in society. His only hope was to endow his sons and daughters so richly that they would not have to work, and to marry them into the elite so that they could join the world of the leisure element. Then he would have the vicarious satisfaction of belonging to the elite and to the world of leisure through his children. The sad fact is that so many men of wealth did that, the sad fact too is that between 1860 and the 1930’s a great many Americans felt that the ultimate goal was to marry their daughters, or their sons, into nobility in Europe. The result was deadly for our culture, even as it had been for the European civilization.

At the same time too it is interesting that the very meaning of the word “spirit” began to change. Before the Renaissance and the enlightenment the word spirit referred to the third person of the trinity, the Holy Spirit. Then it began to change, and the kind of expression we have “esprit de corp”, the spirit of loyalty within a group, group dynamics, began to take over the word Spirit. In his dictionary Voltaire identified spirit as meaning “ingenious reason”, others defined it as being “in” with the group, being “in the spirit of things” so that you caught the spirit if you moved with the culture of the times, and of course to be “with it” was termed coined in the late 60’s to express the same thing, what spirit had become, not the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit of the mob.

It is interesting too as we view the past our perspective is governed by a leisure mentality all to often. For example, Henry Bamford Parkes some years ago dealt with what modern man finds to like in the medieval period and he wrote: “the world of chivalry so sordid and destructive in many of its manifestations has continued to be favorably regarded in popular speech. Words especially associated with feudal society have mostly retained favorable connotations; a crusade for example, is generally regarded as a noble enterprise to such an extent that political movements often present themselves to the electorate as “crusades”. As a weapon customarily used by medieval warriors, a sword generally have eulogistic connotations, and is often referred to by political speakers as a weapon for the defense of right. Thos pro-feudal propaganda continues to be reflected in popular speech with astonishing success.”

Much can be added to what Parkes said, for example we speak of a “knight in shining armor” as though this constituted an ideal figure. But the plain fact is that knights were very much given to ransacking and looting and raping, that was the joy of life for them. By contrast the monk who changed Europe for the good, and who was an intelligent worker, does not have in the modern mind any such favorable image. The modern age is elitist and therefore it idealizes the elitists, or seeming elitists, of the past. Elitist therefore plan from above for the future politically, but substitute words and haste, or vanity, for work. Remember the Proverb says that “whoso gather by vanity, by futility, by haste, shall be diminished, but he that gathered (by contrast) by labor shall increase.” The wealth of the world is to be gained by vanity, by haste, by politics according to modern man. Inflationary politics underscores these verses in Proverbs. Godly work, however, is hierarchical and under God, it is a plan in action, it is a form of trust in predestination.

It is a baffling fact to scholars that Calvinist’s produced so much and were the strong-willed people, when ostensibly the doctrine of predestination should lead people to be quietists, to do nothing because God was going to do everything. They simply dismiss it as a paradox, but it is precisely the belief that God has a plan that gives power to men to work in the confidence because God is at work in all things. With this faith we work in the context of the certainty of God’s victory, and with confidence and power. Then too instead of esprite de corp or ingenious reason we work under and in the Holy Spirit.

Proverbs 14:23 says the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury or want. The plan of the elitist falls into this category, whether that plan be in the Soviet Union or the United States, planning is the talk of the lips, it is the substitution of the elitist dream and is fiat word for work; and God tells us that this is doomed, the profit is in Godly labor. Let us pray.

Thy word is truth oh Lord, Thou hast spoken and Thou hast declared that Thy kingdom shall be established. The ends of the earth shall serve Thee and all nations that shall disobey Thee shall perish. Teach us to work therefore in faith, in Thy word, knowing that Thy word is truth and only in work under Thee is there profit. Bless us to this end we beseech Thee, in Jesus name, Amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all with regard to our lesson?

Yes?

[Audience member] Well our whole educational system is geared to abstractionism and not work and we have this problem of {?} and lawyers and so forth who have their entire background, work background, in preparation school. They have {?} the students with what the call interning now, sundries jobs at various companies it just givens the students a set of ascending clerical positions, they don’t really do much. Yet when they come out of these places they’re placed in a managerial position over the workers, and the army is the same thing.

The army commission people on the basis of having gone through school, not on whether they displayed an qualities of leadership. So we have an entire managerial rules, doesn’t know what to manage or how to manage, but knows a lot about what to talk about.

[Rushdoony] Yes, and we have this in every field including the church. The modern seminary prepares people, because the professors are scholars, to be scholars. The student who is not headed for scholarship, and is not going to teach in a college, seminary, or university, is not liked. He, if he shows any intelligence, is told that he ought to work towards his doctorate and become a professor; that constitutes the area of excellence, although in reality the academic community by and large is made of second to fifth raters, not first-rate minds. But this is what the church gears itself for, the result is men go out into the church without any real awareness of the realities of church life, and we’re paying a price for it.

Actually there was a more scholarly clergy in the colonial and early American era when men trained under a prominent pastor, and by prominent not pastor of a huge congregation, they didn’t have them in those days, they were all churches of a couple hundred, but under one who had distinguished himself for his theological ability and his pastoral ability. So that some actually had forty or fifty students, and they trained men who made this country; and today the church is peripheral to the life of the nation, the seminary bears a great deal of that responsibility.

Yes?

[Audience member] An interesting exception to what Otto said is the area of microelectronics and those that comprise the workforce in that area are some remarkable individuals who indeed do not have the academic credentials and it’s extremely interesting that that area of progress is one of the most burgeoning areas in industry in the world, it’s an interesting contrast.

[Rushdoony] Yes, it’s very true. Every time you develop a new technology it is done by those who are not a part of the establishment. But then as soon as that particular area, whether it was automotive, or railroading before that, or microelectronics and the like, becomes powerful they want academic prestige behind them.

Yes?

[Audience member] Well when I investigated the Black and Decker Corporation, which was small power tool manufacturers, started by amateurs and built by amateurs, but everyone of these amateurs insisted that the people they hire have a degree. [laughter]

[Rushdoony] Yes. John?

[Audience member] Something that supports what Otto was saying in the area law, just a shorthand way really of saying the same thing, when I was in Law school they used to say, and I’m sure they still do, that the “A” students became law professors, the “B” students became judges and the “C” students became the attorneys that made the money and helped people. [laughter]

[Rushdoony] Big John?

[“Big” John] Well one of the consequences of this whole system that comes out of public schools and the universities is the fact that the elitist groups that comes in, the MBA’s Otto was talking about, and the other groups, they come into the system with an innate hostility towards labor and those who graduation only from the public school system, and never go on to the “higher”, quote unquote disciplines come out of the public school system with an innate hostility towards management.

[Rushdoony] Mmm hmm, yes.

[Big John] And it creates a system of potential conflict form the very first day and breeds unionism. It’s a major contributing factor to unionism because the manager people don’t understand the labor and the labor doesn’t want to understand management because it’s already got its {?} solutions, and that whole situation breeds nothing but conflict and frustration.

[Rushdoony] Yes. To give you an example of the irrelevance of the seminary. In a seminary training, let us say the Old Testament, you begin with a lengthy study of the five books of Moses, only they would not say Moses, they would say the five books ascribed to Moses. The modernist seminary would tell you that these documents were written from about 900-1000 B.C. to 400 B.C. in other words long after Moses, centuries after, and there were five strands, major documents that were brought together and pieced together and these five strands involved many minor documents that were brought together and knit together, and in the modernist seminaries you might have to get a Bible and go to these experts and put a different color for each strand so that one sentence might be made up of three strands, or even four.

How they know this when they cannot distinguish, when they know that, say, Shakespeare had a collaborator in some of his plays, who wrote which sentence. Did Shakespeare, or did his collaborator? They don’t know. But they can go back and tell you whether it was the Yahwistic, the priestly, or whatever, JEDP strands, which one wrote which; and then divide each of these into many subsections, and they do the same with Isaiah.

Well if you go to a seminary that claims to believe the Bible from cover to cover, what do they do? They spend the entire time going over the same ground and what they are bent on telling you is how to answer these higher critics who divide the Pentateuch into JEDP strands and many sub-strands. Now none of these modernist critics are ever going to listen to the professor who’s teaching this course no matter how many books he may write answering them, and certainly no student whose ever taken this long course in how to answer the JEDP Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis is ever going to encounter anyone who listens to it. But this is the kind of teaching they give so that in both seminaries you go through and you never once get five minute on what is the Pentateuch about, what is the law teaching. So you can go to a modernist seminary, and you can go to a fundamentalist or a Calvinist seminary and never know, you never know what it’s about and the whole Bible is studied that way so all it does is to produce mental constipation in the students because they no longer know how to come out with a clear-cut word of God.

Yes?

[Audience member] Two thoughts come to mind. One was from high school in Saint Amsans {?} in Washington where I attended {?} on this question of the authorship of the plays of Shakespeare that dealt with that whole question by saying “well the plays of Shakespeare were written either by Shakespeare or someone else by the same name.” [Laughter.]

The other point though was that, as I understand it I think it was even in Newsweek or Time, didn’t a couple of Jewish scholars over in Israel do a computer run on the Pentateuch and found out that it was perfectly consistent with the idea that it was written by one man, to wit Moses? Just recently…

[Rushdoony] There was something like that done but while it confirmed it ostensibly I don’t put much stalk in it because you get out of a computer what you put into it.

Big John?

[Big John] The whole key in this, I think in everything we’ve discussed since the lecture was over, is that in the school system people are taught subjects, but they’re not taught how to learn and understand the tools of learning to investigate for themselves.

Example, in the seminary they teach courses on Biblical Criticism but it’s nothing more than a subject, it doesn’t teach anyone in the seminary how to think in order to be your own critic, you see. So what you’re dependent upon in the final analysis is the latest information on Biblical Criticism. In management and what have you, you’re dependent upon the latest theory of management, you’re not taught how to think for yourself, to think through a problem and manage the solution for yourself. The result is you have dependent seminarians and dependent MBA’s and dependent teachers and dependent politicians, but you don’t have anyone who’s an independent self-sufficient thinker who can work through a problem on his own.

[Rushdoony] Yes, how to be independent learners, that’s the thing and the point you made that you’re taught subjects is very true. This is why an Old Testament professor will never relate the Old Testament to the New nor the New Testament professor to the Old, “that’s not my field” and “I don’t want to go infringing upon another professors field” as though the Old Testament belonged, or the New Testament belonged, to the professor who teaches it, as though it were not the word of God and a unity. The whole thing is very, very destructive and the church is committing suicide through its seminaries.

[Audience member] In connection with what John was just saying about, it was seminaries years ago a professor at Harvard graduate business school writing, in of all places, the Harvard Graduate Business review publication, made the point that most of the MBA’s, most, more than 50%, graduating from Harvard turned out within 2-3 years to be total failures in business and his analysis was just exactly the same thing, that they hadn’t been taught to think. They had been taught how to apply the schools solution to a pre-packaged problem and they had no ability to discern or anticipate the development of a problem and to respond to it in an intelligent, common sense manner.

[Rushdoony] Mmm hmm.

[Audience member] Couldn’t read the implications of an idea in of itself.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience member] Well one of the real problems in management today with MBA’s is the idea that a manager can be manufactured through a university. It totally ignores the very real condition that applies to everybody else in any other field that you got to have the talent for that, if you don’t have the talent to be a manager you’re not going to be educated to be one. And there I see with associates I used to work with, those that had the long stream of letters after their name they were very proud of that of course, but a good number of them weren’t worthy of it and couldn’t do the work.

[Rushdoony] Well I think our time is about up, let us bow our heads now in prayer.

Oh Lord our God give us grace day by day to re-order our lives and our world in terms of Thy word and grant that by Thy Spirit we may realize that we are more than conquerors, that we are rich in Jesus Christ. Bless us and bless our work here. Grant that it may flourish to the strengthening of the things which are of Thee. In Jesus name, amen.