Systematic Theology – The State

Anthropology of the State

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 04

Dictation Name: 04 Anthropology of the State

Year: 1970’s

Our concern in this second session is with the Anthropology of the State. Anthropology means the doctrine of man, and this is an important subject when we deal with church and state problems, because what we find today is that the Christian church, the faithful church, and the civil government have a different doctrine of man. If you believe man is fallen and needs salvation, you are at odds with the civil government that says man is naturally good, or at the worst, neutral, and all he needs is training or education, and all will be well with the world. Our public schools are built on that thesis, and we see the results, but of course, as far as they are concerned, the problem is that we are polluting the picture.

The doctrine of man that we have today, the humanistic one, goes back to ancient paganism, and most notably to Ancient Greece. The classical view of man was a dualistic one, that man is made up of matter and mind, a lower and a higher element, and that between the two, there was a dialectical tension. Now, as Christians, we cannot believe this because we believe that man is a unity, that whatever constituent parts we have in our being, God created them, they are a unity, but not so the Greeks. They were two different alien substances that came together in man.

Thus, according to Kathleen Freeman’s summary, Socrates’ view was this, “Socrates came to two chief conclusions: that virtue is knowledge and that no man sins willingly. He assumes that every man is seeking what he believes to be for his advantage and welfare, but he is often mistaken in his choice of action and does wrong in the belief that he is getting something for himself. If he knew the truth, he would realize that in making a wrong choice, committing a sin for the sake of some immediately apparent advantage like pleasure of power, he is really doing himself not good but harm. If he could see further, he would reject the immediate with because of the harmful consequences to himself. Thus, all virtue consists in recognizing what is truly for our good. All sin is mistaking something harmful for something good. If we have the necessary knowledge, we are bound to choose correctly, for no one but a lunatic would willingly choose what is to his hurt. The wrong choice, or sin, is always to our hurt. The right choice or virtue is always to our advantage. Socrates thus eliminated the will, making it automatically dependant on the reasoning faculty. Man, to him, is a creature with intelligence which can be developed by inquiry and searched until it recognized the good. His goal is happiness, and this is achieved when his intelligence, by recognizing the good, enables him to choose it. Therefore, he will do well to let nothing interfere with his study of the good. Bodily desires must be controlled, the pursuit of wisdom must be set before any worldly advantage, and he must devote his life in company with his friends to the elimination of ignorance about the nature of the virtues and the virtue as a whole.”

Now, this statement is an excellent summary of Socrates’ belief. No man, he says, sins willingly. Why? Because men are naturally good, or at least their reason is, and because their reason is good, knowledge is virtue, and virtue is knowledge. Moreover, the will is completely dependent upon the reason.

Now, Paul tells us in Romans that a man, as he begins to come to a knowledge of the truth sees the good, and he wills to do it, but his nature is geared to sin. So even though he may know, because it is written in his being by God Almighty, he will sin against that knowledge, because he has fallen, but for Socrates, man is not fallen.

Now, such a perspective leads to a pessimism concerning man and concerning virtue, or knowledge, because basic to Socrates’ position was this: the only reason a man does not follow reason absolutely is because he is not pure mind. He is also a body, and the body gets in the way. The body interferes because it is lower. It impedes our ability to reason. The more you have a reasoning man, the more you will have virtue, and so who is going to be the most virtuous man? Why, the philosopher. Who then should be king? Why, the philosopher king, because he represents reason. This is why we have, from the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, brain trusts. We call them by a different name now, but these are experts who have the knowledge, and that ostensibly makes them sufficiently virtuous to govern us, and to legislate for us, and we supposedly are too stupid to know because we are not pure reason like these men. Of course, Socrates went so far as to say that no one could have pure knowledge unless he were dead, unless his body were separated from his mind, but the philosopher kings, by rising above the body, will be fit to rule. They and they alone, and of course, we remember that as recently as John F. Kennedy, we had a president saying that all our problems are purely technical ones for these elite scholars. They were not moral problems. They were technical problems which, these men, representing reason, being good, were going to be able to solve.

As a result, the world is best off from the standpoint of Greek humanism if everything is united under the state. Socrates said, “The greater the unity of the state, the better.” Now, Aristotle did not entirely agree. In fact, he disagreed with this, and Aristotle wanted to place a little more emphasis on the individual, and he said, and this is a summary by someone quoting from his politics. “I am speaking of the premise from which the argument of Socrates proceeds, that the greater the unity of the state, the better. Is it not obvious that a state may at length attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state, since the nature of a state is to be a plurality, and intending to greater unity from being a state it becomes a family, and from being a family, an individual. For the family may be said to be more than the state and the individual than the family, so that we ought not to attain that this greatest unity even if we could, for it would be the destruction of the state.” Now, I quoted Aristotle’s own words.

However, in spite of his attempt to resurrect the individual, whom he did not see as fallen, Aristotle still fell into the same statism as Socrates, because he said, “Man is a political animal.” Man is a creature of the state. So what Aristotle was, in effect, saying is that while man is a creature of the state, the state must not be all powerful over him. We believe that man is the creature of God, a religious creature, not a political animal, nor rational creature after Socrates. He is God’s creation.

However, at the same time, Aristotle could not avoid anarchism. On the one hand, in his politics, he virtually makes the state man’s creator. On the other hand, because he is afraid of the power of the state, he insists on man as an anarchist, on an extreme individualism. So that he halts between two opinions. He says, for example, “For even if the good of the community coincides with that of the individual, the good of the community is clearly a greater and more perfect good, both to get and to keep. This is not to deny that the good of the individual is worthwhile, but what is good for a nation or a city, has a higher, a diviner quality.” So there, he says, the highest good is the state, but then he turns around and defines the highest good as self-sufficiency, and he says the individual who is most self-sufficient, and here you have the essential premise of what came to be very powerful in Greek thought a little later, the Stoics and Stoicism. Aristotle says, “It is a generally accepted view that the final view is self-sufficient. By self-sufficient is meant not what is sufficient for one’s self living the life of a solitary, but includes parents, wife and children, friends, and fellow citizens in general, for man is a social animal. A self-sufficient thing then, we take to be one which, on its own footing, tends to make life desirable and lacking in nothing, and we regard happiness as such a thing. Add to this that we regard it as the most desirable of all things without having it counted in with some other desirable things, for if such an addition were possible, clearly we should desire it as more desirable, when even the smallest advantage were added to it, for the result would be an increase in the matter of advantages, and the larger sum of advantages is preferable to the smaller. Happiness then, the end to which all our conscious acts are directed, is found to something final and self-sufficient.”

Now, I have quoted at some length from Aristotle to illustrate the problem of humanistic man. He falls between making the state a god walking on earth, or the individual, the anarchistic individual, a god. He refused to see that man is a sinner, and hence, he cannot see man in the collective form as a society, a state, as sinful and evil. Plato and Aristotle wind up with a state that is good. It’s an accident of the state is bad. It’s not essential to the life of the state. It’s not essential to the life of man to be bad. Both man and the state are essentially good. We have a great deal of this view with us to day in humanism. We have it in our economics, because the goal of the Greek city-state was, after Aristotle, to be self-sufficient, to sell to others but not to be dependant on others. That became a philosophy after the Enlightenment, an economic faith known as mercantilism. We have it today in our neo-merchantilist economics. The idea is that you try to sell to every other country but avoid buying from every other country, which is an economic impossibility. How can the other country have any money to buy from you if you do not sell to them? Or rather vice verse? How can they have any money to buy from you if they cannot sell to you? If they sell, they have your currency with which to buy your goods, but modern economic theory is based on the idea of self-sufficiency, of each nation state, and the result is we have a growing economic crisis.

Moreover, in terms of this kind of thinking, the old pagan Greek thinking, man was seen as a product of chaos. Man evolved out of chaos, out of an accident, and so man, in the classical humanist view, has no constant, unchanging God-given nature. The Bible tells us that man is created in the image of God, with knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion. Man is fallen, and therefore, those aspects of the image of man are perverted in man today, and he seeks an ungodly knowledge, and ungodly dominion, and ungodly justice, and an ungodly separation or holiness, but if you hold to the view of the Greeks, you have plastic man, evolving man who can be molded, and Darwin greatly reinforced that humanism with his doctrine, because if man is a product of the void, a product of chance variations and the struggle for survival, the essence of man is his plasticity. He can be molded, and hence, we have gone back to precisely the fundamentals of ancient pagan totalitarianism, that man can be molded, that man has no given nature, that all that is needed is total power to effect total change.

This is why, today, the modern state is seeking total power. What total power means is that then we can create heaven on earth, because with total power, we can effect total change in society. This is why we have the trials of Christian schools, to destroy anything that interferes with their total power. This is why the church is being persecuted. Because it is introducing an alien element, and how can you change men without total power? Only then can you have total change.

Moreover, at the same time, you have other factors that enter into the scene. We have the anarchism of Sartre and the Existentialists, which says that the pure act is the unmotivated act, and the unmotivated act, which is a pure act, is the purely evil act, because it is then not affected by any consideration from God and man, and you see the destructiveness of modern society. Every man’s hand is lifted against every other man. There is total social war, conflict. The theme of the book of Judges is, “In those days there was no king in Israel,” God was no longer recognized as king, “and every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Pythagoras said, “Man is the measure of all things,” and in practice, this means elitist man, statist man, the planners, and so today we have efforts to destroy the church and to destroy the family, because the church represents a view of man which is alien to the modern world, alien to humanism, and hence, it is seen as the enemy.

The church declares the true, the faithful church, that man cannot be changed by the legislation of the state, man cannot be changed by evolution. Man can only be changed by the miracle-working power of God, by the grace of God unto salvation. What does that doctrine say? It says that the modern state, lock, stock, and barrel, is barking up the wrong tree, has embarked on an evil path, and is going to be judged by God. It tells us that every program of Washington conducted today by Republicans and Democrats is evil, because it leaves out the key factor. Man is created in the image of God. Man is a fallen creature, and man can only be saved by the power of God unto salvation, and also that the state at the school, and every area of life, must be equally under God, under Christ the Lord as much as the church. This is an indictment of the state. We should not be surprised that the state, the civil government today, is waging a war against us. Why not? Believing what they do, they would be crazy if they didn’t. The important thing for us is to recognize there is a war on, and God requires us to go out there and to win that battle, to bring all nations, all men, all institutions, every area of life and thought and life into captivity to Jesus Christ.

Modern politics is based on a false doctrine of man. It is based on an evolutionary concept, and because it is, it believes in a universe that is a realm of accident in which there is a struggle for survival, and a constant battle, the survival of the fittest, universal conflict. Every man’s hand raised against every other. Under the old biblical position that prevailed prior to Darwin, men believed in the harmony of interests, because God, having created all things, all things work together for good in him.

William Colin Bryant, who was not an evangelical believer, nonetheless was still under the influence of the Bible and brought up in terms of biblical faith, so he spoke very eloquently about the harmony of interests under God, and he said, “There is a great law imposed upon us by the necessities of our condition as members of human society. The law of mutual {?}, the interchange of benefits and advantages, the law of God and nature commanding us to be useful to each other. It is the law of the household. It is the law of the neighborhood. It is the law of different providences included under the same government, and well would it be for mankind if it were in an equal degree recognized as the law to be sacredly regarded by the great community of nations and their intercourse with each other. Were that law to be repealed, the social state would lose its cohesion, and fall in pieces. There is not a pathway across the fields nor a high road, nor a guidepost at a turn of the way, nor a railway from city to city, or from state to state, nor a sail upon the ocean which is not an illustration of this {?}. It is proclaimed in the shriek of the locomotive. It is murmured in the ripple of waters divided by the prow of the steamer. The nation by which it is disregarded or which endeavors to obstruct it by artificial barriers against the free intercourse of its citizens with those of other countries, revolts against the order of nature and strikes at its own prosperity.”

Now, that belief in the harmony of interests, is not possible in the world of Darwin. Evolution means conflict, struggle for survival, chance, accident, not harmony, and so we can call the modern state not only an anti-Christian state, but a warfaring state. War is built into the doctrine of the modern state, and it is not an accident that since Darwin, wars have increased so dramatically and have been total wars, and they will continue until men change in their faith, because what is the means now that is seen as basic to progress? Why, conflict.

It began in this country as one of our men, Otto Scott, has pointed out so powerfully in his book, The Secret Six, with the abolitionists. The abolitionists were against slavery. Very good, but they did not want a peaceable solution. They worked to create war. Why? Because in the order of nature for them, the only means to progress was a conflict of interest. This is the premise of terrorism, and John Brown of Harper’s Ferry was a terrorist, a professional, hired killer by the abolitionist leaders behind him. What did we see in the sixties, in our own lifetime? People who wanted something, taking to the streets with violence, burning down cities, tearing campuses apart. Why? In terms of the modern anthropology, this is the way to progress. Conflict. You see, because we are Christians, this seems strange and even insane to us, but we cannot understand what is going on around us unless we recognize the modern state is a warfaring state, and modern man, outside of Christ, is a warfaring man. He loves to break the law. He loves conflict. He wants to do violence to a situation.

One of the most common problems today in marital counseling is the fact that, before a couple get married, they’re very passionate in their sexual relations. Once they get married, it’s totally dull. Why? Because it’s legal, and what is exciting to them is to do that which is forbidden, which involves conflict. So what happens? They continue conflict. The fight with each other constantly. Life, for them, is warfare.

Now, we live in a warfaring society. Man is at war, fallen man against God, and his neighbor, and against himself, and therefore, of necessity, against the church, and it is important for us, in any understanding of the theology of the state to recognize what we are dealing with. The modern state, like modern man, is given to warfare. It is its gospel, and thus, we face, indeed, fearful conditions in the days ahead, unless we take over and reconstruct all things in terms of God’s holy word. This is our calling. Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] Well, it seems like the state is seen as a god then, and its salvation is through the state, like in the public schools. Well, if they see man as basically god, what is their idea of salvation when? If they don’t understand sin in terms of God’s law, and they don’t have any absolute sin, how do they define sin?

[Rushdoony] Sin is environmental for them. It is outside man. So, by gaining total control, you strip the society of those outside factors, which are evil, and the church, the Bible, the Christian family, these are some of those environmental evils which must be separated from man and society.

[Audience] And yet our country was founded upon these things.

[Rushdoony] Of course.

[Audience] And they just throw history out the door?

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes. Of course, history is not important to them. It is reason and science, working to remake man. A good book that deals with this dream is George Orwell’s 1984. Are you familiar with it?

[Audience] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Well, Orwell saw it because he knew the men who were planning it, and he saw it beginning all around him. Yes?

[Audience] After what you said, my question is why are not more ministers who are servants and prophets of the living God and leaders of their flock, why aren’t they more willing to enter into the battle?

[Rushdoony] Because they are neo-Platonists bent on being monks, separating themselves from the world and the problems of the world, and they are bent on converting the church into a kind of convent or monastery which refuses to look at the world outside the walls of the church. Yes?

[Audience] Wouldn’t you say that your point of the state, the modern state, ruling by means of warfare, that a very good illustration would be how our government is consistently misinterpreting the problem that Bob Jones University has with the IRS as a racial problem when, in reality, it’s a matter of not a religious but also a civil liberty. It does seem that the government perceives that, in order to maintain power, it must do all it can, not only to utilize bad feelings among different groups in the country, but actually to create them if it’s not there so they can divide different groups, races, classes, sections, and in terms that division that they have either {?} or devised, then take the rule, it does seem that their {?} people are coming together. They help create artificial barriers and misinterpret the {?}

[Rushdoony] All we have to do is to look at the groups that the country has declared war against. It’s declared war against the South for some time now. It’s declared war against the West, and the middle west, in various ways. It’s declared war against the Christian community, against business, against agriculture, against the workers and unions. One way or another, it’s thrown sops{?} at all of these groups and subsidies, and then declared war against them to confuse the issue, but there’s scarcely a profession or a group in our society that the modern state is not at war against. It’s at war with the doctors. It’s at war with everybody, because its nature is conflict. It’s the concept that some have called creative conflict.

[Audience] It’s at war against itself, or within itself, too?

[Rushdoony] Yes, it’s a war within itself, too, because the various agencies are at war against each other. It involved contradictions. We have a war against, for example, the use of tobacco, and the requirement that every carton have a warning from the Surgeons General on it, and at the same time, subsidies to tobacco growers. So, that’s a very simple illustration, but it’s typical of Washington and of our states, this inter-contradiction. They cannot be consistent. Only the Christian man can be consistent, and the more he grows in grace, the more consistent he is.

Well, if there are no further questions, let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Lord and our God, it is good for us to be here, and we thank thee that thou art on the throne, and it is thy counsel, they government, that shall prevail. Dismiss us now with thy blessing. Grant unto all traveling mercies on their homeward way, a blessed night’s rest, and ever-increasing joy in thy services. In Jesus name. Amen.

End of tape