Systematic Theology – The State

The Wave of the Past

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 29

Dictation Name: 29 The Wave of the Past

Year: 1970’s

Let us bow our heads in prayer.

O Lord our God, arm us by thy word and by thy Spirit, that as we face the powers of darkness, we may be more than conquerors. We beseech thee, O Lord, to be with thine embattled saints in Oklahoma, in Nebraska, in Maine, in Montana, and elsewhere, and give them a great victory against these oppressive, humanistic forces. Strengthen us by thy word and by thy Spirit that we may be faithful soldiers of Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.

In our first session, our subject is The Wave of the Past. The present is not only inseparable from the past, but is usually best understood in terms of it. As a result, to attempt to know the present and the future without a knowledge of the past is the course of folly.

Let us apply that to the present by going back to the past to the days after Constantine. When Constantine the Great began to favor Christianity, paganism was dying. It had an official status. It has imperial funding, but its existence was artificial. When Constantine ended the financial support to the pagan religions, they fell apart very dramatically and very rapidly. Most of the temples began to deteriorate, because the people were not supporting them, and the priests had no way to live. Some Christians at the time called upon Constantine to shut down all the pagan temples, but he refused. His words, in his edict, are very much like that of modern Libertarians. He said, “Once more, let none use that to the detriment of another which he may himself have received on conviction of its truth, but let everyone, if it be possible, apply what he has understood and known to the benefit of his neighbor. If otherwise, let him relinquish the attempt. For it is one thing voluntarily to undertake the conflict for immortality. Another to compel other to do so from the fear of punishment.” In other words, Constantine, contrary to the myth that people who have never read anything he wrote have propagated about him, was for religious liberty. He had essentially the perspective on the subject of a modern Libertarian. He believed that there should not be the state funding of religion. What funding he did give to Christians was out of his own pocket.

He did believe, however, that a civil government had to have a religious perspective. In other words, you can separate church and state, but you cannot separate religion and the state.

As a result, Constantine refused to shut down the temples. Only two were closed by Constantine and his reason for shutting down those two was that they were centers of the most flagrant kinds of immorality and public nuisance. So he did not shut them down for religious reasons, but because they were a public nuisance. Now, some bishops kept the issue alive by agitating against the pagan temples and demanding that they be shut down, and in fact, a few bishops actually incited mob action against pagan temples. The whole thing was useless, because there were much more practical and devastating forces at work. Only a few temples were still open and functioning, because in most places, the pagans, while they held some of the beliefs of paganism as superstitions, did not believe in the old pagan cults enough to support them or their priests.

As a result, the pagan temples, by and large, were abandoned. The pagans themselves were going to the temples and cannibalizing them. After all, they had been built with government funds. They were stone edifices, beautiful ones. They had all kinds of statuary, valuable brass work, and the like, and so people would walk into these decaying and collapsing temples, and cannibalize them for building materials and for furnishing. In fact, Constantine did so himself. Quite a large number of decaying temples were cannibalized by the Emperor for building materials to build his new capitol, Constantinople.

Moreover, the pagan priests were a public problem and they were the best argument against paganism. Because they were not receiving their hand-out from the Empire, they were beggars in the streets. They were caging drinks in all the bars. They were taking the hand-outs and heading for the houses of prostitution and wherever they were, they had quickly developed a reputation as being a bad lot. The Christians did not need to try to get repressive legislation against them. Paganism was dying. Its own priests were the best argument against it.

As a result, paganism was, to all practical intent, dead. Thus, when Julian the Apostate came to the throne of the Empire, determined to restore paganism, his efforts were futile. He was trying to revive paganism, not because he truly believed in it, but more because of his anti-Christianity, and a negative force does not create a social renewal. There was no way he could revitalize by hatred the old paganism. The only public support he could rouse was a negative force. The hatred of many for Christianity, and the longing of the seedy priests of the old cults, for public funds, and of course, there were always those who loved the old temples and their architecture, and wanted to see them restored, even though they would be museums. They would have no living function.

Julian imitated Constantine in that he required indemnification for the pagan temples, but this was ridicules. When Constantine required it, what he said was that churches, functioning churches, which had been seized by the state, had to be restored to the Christians, but here were decaying temples not built with private funds, but state funds, and Constantine had been the biggest de-spoiler of them.

Moreover, Julian was attempting to give public funds to something which not even pagans were interested in giving to. They had enough taxes without that temple tax being revived. Taxation is never popular. Moreover, Julian saw himself as a philosopher king who was going to create a beautiful pagan empire, but no one was interested in that dream, and he was lord, not of a group of elite intellectuals, but of informers, hoodlums, and parasites. He proceeded by legislation to seek to cripple Christianity.

First, he withdrew the tax exemption for all Christian institutions. He instituted snide regulations. For example, on the grounds the men and women being the same building together in a common meeting was a danger to public morality, something that was no concern normally of Julian’s. He forbad any meeting in which both men and women were present. This, to all practical intent, ended where it was enforced, public worship. What could you do? Hold a service for all the males and then another one for the females?

Then second, he instituted educational controls. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? He said that the classics could only be taught by pagans, so that all courses dealing with Greek and Latin literature had to be taught exclusively by pagans. On top of that, he instituted required programs and courses with textbooks prescribed. One of them was a textbook of the anti-Christian forged supposed acts of Pilate, a highly vicious and dishonest work purporting to be the memoirs of Pilate being an anti-Christian forgery, and he said, “This must be mandatory reading in all schools. It has to be taught.” Now, that’s the kind of thing he required of the Christian schools.

Then third, he created pagan churches, in imitation of the Christian church, with arch priests in all towns with state subsidies.

Then fourth, Julian recalled all the Aryan heretical bishops and leaders, and told them they were now the leaders of the Christian church. So, he forced the enemies of the church onto the church as leaders. Of course, we know that Julian was a member of the anti-Christian secret society of Mithra, and so he had an axe to grind in trying to destroy the churches. Professor M.A. Smith, in commenting on Julian’s strategy, wrote, “In fact, Julian’s attack on Christianity is the model for many a tax by modern dictators. Crippling the machinery of the churches, a crusade against corruption, and a determined anti-Christian educational program are the main planks in the policy of most present-day anti-Christian governments. The Nazi initiation ceremony for youth consciously aped the Lutheran confirmation service. The communists have frequently seized power in reaction to a corrupt and inefficient regime. Many modern African dictators like Niruma{?} have insisted on the cult of the head of state being enforced in the schools with quasi-religious songs. It is a formidable method of attack.” Now, apart from going easy on the communist aspect of this type of imitation of Julian, what Smith has to say is very true.

Julian went further. He favored the Jews dramatically and opening, in order to create anti-Jewish sentiments among the Christians, hoping thereby to create conflict between Jews and Christians. After the Jewish-Roman war and the Fall of Jerusalem, Jews had been forbidden to rebuild Jerusalem or the temple. Now he ordered the rebuilding of both Jerusalem and the temple. It’s an interesting fact that when they began the work in 362 A.D., all the work they did was immediately shattered by one of the most devastating earthquakes ever to hit that area. Then, when they began to dig anew around the old temple site to lay a foundation, subterranean fires burst out and killed some of the workmen. They could not put the fires out. We know this is true. We have the evidences from contemporary records, and no one has ever been able to explain how that happened. What Julian had in mind was to make Christ to be a liar, because in terms of Matthew 24:2, where our Lord says, “Do you see the temple? Not one stone shall be left standing upon another,” and Julian, three centuries or more later, said, “While there’s still the stone standing, we’ll make Jesus to be a liar. We’ll take the stones, and have them standing one upon another and rebuild the temple.”

No historian gives any reason why that happened. They have not been able to come up with any naturalistic explanation of those subterranean fires. Some have developed the thesis that perhaps there might have been some petroleum product underneath that ignited, but there is no oil in Israel as far as anyone knows. As a matter of fact, I forget which of the leaders of Israel remarked a few years ago that he didn’t think much of Moses, because in all the areas of that peninsula, and with all the oil there, he picked the one spot where there was no oil, and left the Arab countries in the future very rich in Israel, by comparison, very poor. So, we cannot say it was underground oil deposits that ignited. They cannot account for it.

Now, Julian’s hope in all of this was to prevent the collapse of Roman civilization and to fight Christianity. When you talk about preserving a civilization, you’re already conceding that it is collapsing. You’re also saying that what you are doing is a negative effort. You’re trying to preserve something that is to all practical intent, dead, and nobody except God can resurrect the dead, and today what we are seeing on all sides on the part of the humanist in these church and state battles, and in their political efforts, in Washington and all over the world, is to resurrect the dead humanistic statism, but they are bankrupt. More than bankrupt, they are dead, and they are not any good at the resurrection business, and we’ve seen one failure after another, whether by Carter, or by Reagan, or by anyone who follows them. They cannot resurrect the dead.

The sad fact is too many people today are involved in the resurrection business, trying to preserve something that’s gone. The conservatives are doing it. The liberals are doing it. They’re trying to preserve something from the past, instead of building in terms of the future. The New Englanders are doing it. The Southerners are doing it. The Texans are doing it. The Californians are doing it, and we have everywhere people trying to resurrect the past, but it’s dead, and our duty as Christians is to build the future, and the past is only alive when we build on it and in terms of it. There can be never a return to the past status quo.

As a matter of fact, far wiser than Julian the Apostate, and far wiser than the bishops who kept telling Constantine a few years before Julian to do something about those pagans, or those Romans, without any thought pro or con about Christianity or paganism, were going and cannibalizing the temples. They knew that the past was dead, that the temples were crumbling and there was only one thing to do. Take that good material and put it to use. Take the good furnishings, put them to use. Take the statuary you liked and put it in your garden or in your living room, and that’s what they did. They were sensible. They were dealing with reality. Only the Christians who apply the word of God to every area of life and thought, who know the past, respect it, and build on it with their eyes to the future, can shape the future, and that is precisely what our calling today and in every age, under God, is to do. To build the future in terms of his word.

End of tape