Systematic Theology – The State

Epilogue Part 1

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 36

Dictation Name: 36 Epilogue Part 1

Year: 1970’s

Let us begin with prayer.

Almighty God our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that as we face the battle against the powers of humanistic statism, we face the enemy, not in our strength and power, but in thine. Give us grace so to walk in confidence in thee that we may be more than conquerors through Christ. Bless us in our study. Bless us in our daily walk. In Jesus name. Amen.

Tonight we bring to a close our long series of studies in the historical and theological relations of church and state. Our next meeting, next month, we shall begin studies in the biblical doctrine of the family.

As we bring matters to a conclusion tonight, one of the things we must remind ourselves of is the fact that history books have been written by the enemy, by humanists, because Christians have too often surrendered the field to the opposition. As a result, in our education, we are brought up with all kinds of myths. One myth is that, throughout the Middle Ages, the church dominated society and the state, and ruled them with an iron hand, and that there was a dictatorship over Europe by the church. This is nonsense. It has about as much truth as did Mondale’s statement in the presidential debates of 1984 that Jerry Falwell was going to pick the next Supreme Court Judges, or about as much truth as some of the statements by Normal Lear and others to the general effect that fundamentalists are running the country from behind the scenes. This is nonsense. Now, it is true that people in the Christian community are struggling to make themselves heard. This was true in the Middle Ages.

The church was fighting against the attempt by the monarchs and the Holy Roman Emperor to dominate and to control the church, which it usually did. It was a long struggle. It was sometimes complicated by the fact that some of the churchmen were not as courageous as others, and some of them were weak men. It was also complicated by the fact that, very often, the church was ruled from behind the scenes by the monarchs. You will remember that one of the key figures we studied, the philosopher of statism, was Marsiglio, or Marsilius, of Padua. He and John of John Dune{?} were two philosophers of statism who, in their thinking, as supposed churchmen, cut the ground out from under any freedom for the faith.

Now, they were protected by the emperor, Louis IV of Bavaria. Not only so, but they were promoted. Louis IV of Bavaria not only took over the papacy, he actually chose the pope, a puppet, whom he wanted to rule. This was Pope Nicholas V, whose dates were 1447-1455. He had Marsiglio made an archbishop, and he promoted in the church those who favored his policies. From that point on, with very minor exceptions, the church was in the hands fully of the emperor or a monarch, either the king of France, generally, or the German emperor.

Now, Nicholas V, when he was made pope, did one thing. He kept silent no matter what any monarch did to the church. He kept his mouth shut, as though his life depended on it, and it probably did. So he began something that marked the papacy from that time forward. He made Rome and the Vatican the center of the art world. He felt that if he could do nothing to keep the states of his day from controlling the churches within their domain and running the Vatican, he would at least make a name for himself as a great patron of the arts, and so began the long series of popes who, with one of two exceptions, were great patrons of the arts who collected vast sums across Europe from people for one purpose, to be patrons of the arts, and for this purpose, the monarch were very ready to be helpful, by and large. Sometimes not so, but by and large, as long as the church was not the church. As long as the church was not saying to the state, “You are under God and his word, and you do not have the right to try to control the church.” The monarchs were basically content.

So, the church took two directions. One, we’ve already indicated, to be the great patron of the arts, which is one reason why the Renaissance developed in Italy. Italy became the center of the arts, and for them, the arts meant revival of Greco-Roman arts and culture. The result was you had an emphasis on statism compounded. You had the tyrants of Italy, humanist rulers, and you had an age of brutality develop, the Renaissance. The Middle Ages were a quiet era, relatively, far more peaceable than our own time, certainly far more peaceable than the Renaissance. But, with the rise of the Renaissance, you had terrorism, torture, murder wholesale, and that sort of thing, proliferate. This was one great emphasis now, the church, the arts.

The other was bureaucracy. Since they could do nothing about the encroachment of the state, they stated to concentrate on dealing with problems within the church. Some of the bureaucracy worked beneficially. They did being to deal with some problems, organizing and developing the universities. They did clean up some of the problems of administration, and a great deal more, so that there were some beneficial side effects, but basically, what it means was that instead of dealing with the world, the church was now dealing with the church, and controlling the church. The popes didn’t dare do otherwise. It is interesting that a man who, in that era, and for generations after, was regarded as one of the greatest of all popes, was Pope Alexander, the Borge pope. Now, Alexander VI was certainly not a moral man, hardly a model of any kind of virtue, but he was a brilliant administrator, and he did a great deal of reorganizing in the Vatican. That was about all the civil governments of the day wanted from the church. No moral reform of society. No saying to rulers, “Thus saith the Lord.” Just stay in the church and take care of your knitting. So, at the Vatican, you had two things: bureaucracy and patronage of the arts. What happened on the popular level?

Well, either flagrant immoralism, or a retreat of people who wanted some faith into pietism. A faith that no longer related itself to the world, but just dealt with your inner experience. It led to a lot of gushy, sentimental religion. It led to a heavy emphasis on female worshipers, because the church, by leaving the basic problems was de-masculinizing itself. So you did have feminism within the church. You did have women beginning to usurp the role of a priest, never fully so, but moving in that direction. Hearing confessions, preaching, and doing that sort of thing in certain places.

As a result, the church was in a very sorry situation by the time of the Reformation. It was a church controlled by monarchs, and it is significant as we saw in one of our earlier studies that the areas where the Reformation broke out were areas where the monarchs did not have the same powers over the church that existed in Spain, in France, in Austria, and in Italy. So, the areas where the Reformation broke out were areas where they sought this power.

Now, the Reformation and the counter-Reformation, for a time, began to turn the tide against this, but by 1660, the Reformation and the counter-Reformation had been defeated, and the decline in the freedom of the church, Protestant and Catholic, continued. In Catholic circles in the 19th century, some freedom began to develop. When Napoleon destroyed the power of the Austrian Holy Roman Empire, he shattered the power of the Austrians over Italy. This freed the pope. Napoleon tried then to control the pope himself, but when Napoleon fell, it gave for the first time in centuries, some freedom to the Vatican, and so there began a slow process of reassessment of the Vatican’s position and of their rightful role.

By the end of the century, Leo XIII began to speak out on some issues with some theological discernment. He said, for example, “Man indeed may be king through Jesus Christ, but only on condition that he first of all obey God and diligently seek his rule of life in God’s law. By the law of Christ, we mean not only the natural precepts of morality in the ancient law of which Jesus Christ has perfected and crowned by his declaration, explanation, and sanction, but also the rest of his doctrine and in his own peculiar institutions, of these the chief is his church. Indeed, whatsoever things Christ has instituted are most fully contained in his church.”

Now, because of this, the church began to resist control by the state. One of the great popes, and one of the least known, was Benedict XV whose dates are 1914-1922. Some of his statements sound as though they came from the lips of a Calvin or a Luther, or a Protestant. Benedict XV not only spoke out against statism, but he also put the blame where it belonged, on the failure of the church to preach the whole word of God, and he said the revival of paganism, in the modern world, was due to the failure of preaching. He said, “The causes of these evils are varied and manifold. No one, however, will gainsay the deplorable fact that the ministers of the word do not apply thereto an adequate remedy. Has the word of God then ceased to be what it was described by the apostle, living and effectual, and more piercing than any two-edged sword? Has long continued use blunted the edge of that sword. If that weapon does not everywhere produce its effect, the blame certainly must be laid on those ministers of the Gospel who do not handle it as they should. For no one can maintain that the apostles were living in better times than ours, that they found Mayans more readily disposed toward the Gospel, or that they met with less opposition to the law of God?”

What Benedict XV said thus, so powerfully, was that the apostles faced a world far more evil and difficult than people were facing at the time of World War 1. They triumphed because they put their whole reliance on the whole word of God, and Benedict said we can have the same power if we rely similarly on the word. It’s a sad fact that when I talk to Catholics about Benedict XV, they’re ignorant of him. I sat next to two likeable and very devout Catholics just this past weekend, and I talked about the work of Benedict XV. His very name was unfamiliar to them, sad to say.

As a result, the church continued its decline. Pious XII, whose dates were from 39-the beginning of the 50’s, did see the issue, not as tellingly and sharply as Benedict XV, but he said, “To consider the state as something ultimate to which everything else should be subordinated and directly cannot fail to harm the true and lasting prosperity of nations. This can happen either when unrestricted dominion comes to be conferred on the state has having a mandate from the nation people, or even a social order, or when the state arrogates such dominion to itself as absolute master, despotically without any mandate whatsoever. If, in fact, the state lays claim to and direct private enterprises, these ruled as they are by delicate and complicated internal principles which guarantee and assure the realization of their special aims, may be damaged to the detriment of the public good by being wrenched from their natural surroundings, that is, from responsible, private actions.”

Moreover, he went on to say that we must not render to Caesar what belongs to God. “However, if Christians are bound in conscience to render to Caesar, that is, to human authority, what belongs to Caesar, then Caesar likewise, or those who control the state cannot exact obedience when they would be usurping God’s rights or forcing Christians either to act at variance with their religious duties, or to sever themselves from the unity of the church and its lawful hierarchy.”

However, this kind of statement began to wane, and even in John Paul II, the present pope, we find a very different note, even though he is more conservative than some of his recent predecessors. What he said, for example, in one encyclical, not too long ago, “Man in the full truth of his existence, of his personal being, in the sphere of his own family, in the sphere of society, in very diverse context, in the sphere of his own nation or people, perhaps still only that of his clan or tribe, and in the sphere of the whole of mankind, this man is the primary route that the church must travel in fulfilling her mission. He is the primary and fundamental way for the church, the way traced out by Christ himself, the way that lead invariably through the mystery of the incarnation and the redemption.” In other words, we have now a new definition of the way, not Christ, but man. The Existentialism of John Paul II, again and again creeps through his statements, so that what we have in his and in his position is an uncertain trumpet{?}, a failure to present the whole of the Gospel clearly and tellingly.

At the same time, within the circle of Protestantism there has been a like decline. Modernism has taken over the mainline Protestant churches. Instead of being opposed to the state, they are ready to exalt the state, and to see salvation through socialism, and the result is that instead of a battle, very large percentage of the church is heralding statism as though it were the messiah.

We do have, therefore, a serious problem. The battle increasingly is outside the old channels, no longer a part of the mainline churches, Catholic and Protestant. They are unwilling to see the issues. They are more intent on building up the institution of the church than doing Christ’s work. The church has a calling under God to be a training center, a barracks room, where people are trained to go out as Christian soldiers to wage the Lord’s battles, to bring one area of life and thought into captivity to Christ, and under the dominion of his law-word.

This now, is the task that newer churches and newer groups are concerned with. So that we have very definitely a change in direction, new groups arising, remnants in the old circles standing forth against their authorities to set forth the crown rights of Christ the king, so that while the conflict seems to have ended and the state to be triumphant, the battle is just beginning. The indications are that the struggle is more intense than ever before the Iron Curtain. This is true also of Red China. Very definitely, the resistance here in this country is growing. Resistance is developing in Australia and other places, so that the battle between church and state is entering a new phase, and in many circles, a growing awareness of what is at stake.

Are there any questions now, before we take a break and then return for our closing session? Yes, John?

[Audience] Can you speak briefly on the Inquisition? Who really started it and who really controlled it?

[Rushdoony] I did do one entire talk on the Inquisition. Very briefly, the Inquisition was started by the Empire. Its primary purpose was to create a uniformity in the state, because if there is a uniformity, then you can control everyone, just as during World War 2, the dictatorships tried to force church unity on all Christians, because if they are all unified, they could be controlled, and recent studies have made it clear that while here and there some churchmen did favor the Inquisition, by and large the church was against it. As a matter of fact, a recent study indicates the German bishops fought it, and in Spain, it was against the law for anyone to appeal to the Vatican against the inquisitor. So, we have been given a falsified picture of the Inquisition, among many other things. It was primarily a civil agency. It was not interested in the faith. The man who first started it, Frederick II, was probably a secret Muslim, and had a harem, by the way. Any other questions or comments? Yes, Lou?

[Audience] On the Existentialism of John Paul, do you have any other examples? I was wondering how it comes out, the one you read?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, one of the marks of an Existentialist is that he talks about the need for people to be truly human, not to be saved, not to be born again, but to be truly human, and this is a note that you find in Existentialist philosophers and you find it also in John Paul II. Now, we’re all born truly human. There may be a variety of qualities in our humanity. We may be intelligent, or stupid. We may be good or we may be bad, but we’re all truly human. So, when anyone talks about the need to make our culture, or people, truly human, you know that you’re listening to an Existentialist. The Christian talks about the need to be born again. Yes?

[Audience] What does he mean by truly human? I mean, the Existentialist is kind of sufficient unto himself, really, and did he tell you about a Golden Rule, or something like that?

[Rushdoony] No. The Christian humanists have very poor definitions of that. Mainly, it means realizing himself in a just social order by which they mean, usually a socialist order. The consistent non-humanist says that to be truly human, you drop the baggage of the past, the teachings of the past, whether of society, or your parents, or religion, and you are governed only by the biology of your own being. Then, you are truly alive and you’re truly human, because you are governed only by your own urges, your own biology.

[Audience] Is that body talk?

[Rushdoony] Yes. That’s Existentialist thinking.

[Audience] Would this tie in with so-called human rights?

[Rushdoony] Yes, it does, quite extensively. A good deal of the human rights movement has, although not exclusively is it motivated by that, an Existentialist framework. Yes, David?

[Audience] Would this Existentialism statism apply also to the other contemporary popes, to Pope John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul I?

[Rushdoony] To some degree, yes. Not as clearly as in John Paul II. You’d have to say that Pope John and Pope Paul VI were more liberal than the present pope by far, but the present pope is more intelligently and systematically Existential. He has moved away to a degree, from his earlier Existentialism and become more conservative. However, if you read the volume of poems which he wrote some years ago, it’s appalling how existential they are. John Paul I was apparently not like any of them. Any other questions or comments?

Well, if not, we’ll take a ten minute break.

End of tape