Systematic Theology – The State

The State and Incarnation

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 09

Dictation Name: 09 The State and Incarnation

Year: 1970’s

Well then, we’ll go on to our second session this evening. We’ll have three, and we’ll have an intermission between the second and the third.

Our second session will deal with the State and Incarnation. Among the more moving stories of the New Testament, are the stories which tell us how our Lord healed the blind. Imagine yourself as sightless, and the Lord’s hands being laid upon you, and then seeing. But how much more fearful than the condition of the blind is the condition of those who are willfully blind, who will not see? There are so many men in the churches who are willfully blind. They fail to see what God requires of them in his word. They fail to see the problems of the world. In fact, I believe if some of them were to meet the Devil, they would demand his credentials before they would believe he was the Devil, and they would spend most of their life debating, if Christ were to appear before them, is this really he or not? Give us proof. They are irrelevant as a result, and as a result, they do not see what is happening all around us in the modern age, that the world has another doctrine of incarnation. Instead of believing in the incarnation of God in Christ, it believes in the incarnation of the world’s spirit, the evolving power in nature, in the state.

Now, this is the philosophy of humanism, which found its great expression in George Wilhelm Frederick Hegel, whose dates are 1770-1831. Virtually every philosophy of political thought in the modern world comes out of Hegel. Communism, fascism, democracies, all political thought is a product of Hegel. “Reason,” said Hegel, “is the sovereign of the world.” Reason is the substance by which all reality has its being and subsistence. It is the infinite energy of the universe in all of nature, and the essence of all things of reason is truth. Reason is Hegel’s god. The universe, for Hegel, was divided into mind and matter. Mind was autonomous or independent, but matter was not, and therefore, reason or mind, or spirit, because all of them for Hegel mean the same things, is freedom. Hegel said, “For if I am dependent, my being is referred to something else which I am not. I cannot exist independently of something external. I am free, on the contrary, when my existence depends upon myself. This self-contained existence of spirit is none other than self-consciousness of one’s own being.” What was Hegel saying?

Why, he was expressing in philosophical terms what the Tempter said in Genesis 3:5. “Ye shall be as God, knowing, determining for yourself what constitutes good and evil.” Even man as his own god is independent of the material world, independent of God, independent of others, and so the great word in Hegel’s thought is freedom, and also the concept of autonomy. Autonomy means auto -- self, nomos – law. The autonomous man of the modern age is his own law. That’s what freedom means to Hegel. Every man his own law. Hegel went on to say, “The absolute object truth is spirit, and as man himself as spirit, he is present is mirrored to himself in that object, and thus, in his absolute object, has found essential being in his own essential being, but in order that the objectivity of essential being may be done away with and spirit be no longer alien to itself, may be with itself self-harmonized. The naturalness of spirit that in virtue of which man is a special empirical existence must be removed so that the alien element must be destroyed and the reconciliation of spirit be accomplished.”

In other words, the goal is for man to separate himself from anything that will limit his freedom. This means separating yourself from God, of course, if God exists, and the Hegelians progressively were to say, “No, the Christian God is not real.” It means separating yourself from other people, being a free spirit, and hence, the word “alienation” came into being as a concept in the modern world, because if you are going to be your own independent self, autonomous, self-law, how can you have any relationship with other men? Even in a family, how can you have any relationship with those near to you? No, your cry becomes, “I want to be free,” and so you work to the destruction of the social order, to the destruction of the family, the destruction of the church, the destruction of any kind of community, because you now are your own god.

Incarnation, for Hegel, meant that “self-consciousness has reached the phase of development whose resultant constitutes the idea of spirit, and had come to feel the necessity of comprehending those phases absolutely.” In other words, all men are to become little incarnations, self-existent, free from all others. This, of course, led to Existentialism, because in Existentialism every man is his own god and is to be free from all others, and as Sartre said, “The man who is the town drunk was a truer Existentialist than a statesman who was ostensibly an Existentialist philosopher, because a statesman was still mindful of other people, to a degree, but the town drunk was not.” That is true Existentialism.

But, the great incarnation for Hegel was in the state. All people with their little bits of autonomy and godhood, uniting in the state, create a super-god, and the state becomes the incarnation of the evolving spirit, or mind, or god of the universe, and so he said, “Science alone is the theodicy.” What does theodicy mean? It means the thinking whereby we justify the ways of gods to men, and man is a god who finds super godly status in the state. Man is limited in the extent to which he can be a god, but the state has no such limitation. Of man, Hegel said, “Man, on the contrary, is God, only insofar as he annuls the merely natural unlimited in his spirit and elevates himself to God. That is to say it is obligatory on him who is a partaker of the truth, and knows that he himself is a constituent moment of the divine idea, to give up his merely natural being, for the natural is the unspiritual.” So, Hegel says, it is obligatory for us to realize our own godhood, our own divinity. But he says man is only a moment in the divine idea. We’re a little speck of godhood, but the shape in which there is the perfect embodiment of spirit, or mind, or the evolving god of the universe, he said, is the state. The state is the incarnation of the divine idea, spirit, or freedom.

As a result, you are, according to Hegel, truly free when you are truly obedient to the state. Remember that the next time you pay your income tax. According to Hegel, that is when you are truly free. He said, “For truth is the unity of the universal and subjective will, and the universal is to be found in the state, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The state is the divine idea as it exists on earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of history in a more definite shape than before. That in which freedom obtains objectivity, and lives in the enjoyment of its objectivity. For law is the objectivity of spirit, volition in its true form.”

Let me stop for a moment there. You see, he is saying the state is the incarnation. It is the objectivity. It is the word of nature becoming flesh. But to continue now with what Hegel says about this incarnation.

“Only that will which obeys law is free. The law of the state. Only when we obey the will of the state are we free, for it obeys itself, and is independent and so free. When the state, or our country constitutes a community of existence, when the subjective will of man submits to laws, the contradiction between liberty and necessity vanishes.” Let me stop there. We, as Christians, believe that, because God is the Lord, all things are reconciled in him. Therefore, when God decrees all things by his sovereign decree of predestination, we are both determined by God and yet, we have a freedom, because God reconciles all things in himself, and what is Hegel saying? Why, the state determines us absolutely and we find our freedom in that. So he is saying the state is like the God of scripture. But to continue.

“The rational has a necessary existence as being the reality and substance of things, and we are free in recognizing it as law, and following it as the substance of our own being. The object and the subjective will are then reconciled and present one identical homogeneous whole, for the morality of the state is not of that ethical, reflective kind in which one’s own convictions bear sway. This latter is rather the peculiarity of the modern time, while the true antique morality is based on the principle of abiding by one’s duty to the state at large. An Athenian citizen did what was required of him as it were from instinct, but if I reflect on the objectivity of my activity, I must have consciousness that my will has been called into exercise, but morality is duty, substantial right, a second nature as it has been justly called. For the first nature of man is his primarily merely animal existence.”

Now, did you catch the implications of that? Hegel had a way of hiding what he said behind a lot of pompous language, so that people wouldn’t catch on to what he was teaching the students, but he said anybody who, in his own heart and conscious, says, “This is what God requires,” is following a peculiar form of morality, because a true morality, a great morality, is like that of Greece. When right and wrong are determined by the state, and as long as you do what the state says you’re doing right. So, remember that when the IRS tell you you owe them $9,000. It means that the state is right, and you are wrong if you object. You have no right, according to Hegel, to a conscience apart from the state.

Now, very obviously, his model is Greece and Athens. It is paganism, not Christ, because he says so. Moreover, he sees the state as the divine idea on earth, the incarnation of the naturalistic god or spirit evolving in nature.

Moreover, he says the state is infallible. He says it objectivies the spirit. That is, it incarnates the spirit, and therefore, it cannot be wrong. It is infallible. Men cannot be free, therefore, apart from this infallible state, and personal and biblical morality is anathema to him. Hegel says only that will which obeys law is free.

Now, this is where Marxism gets its idea of the dictatorship of the Proletariat. This is where Johnson got his idea of the Great Society, and the Great Community of John Dewey. We live and move and have our being in the state, says Hegel. “The state is the universal spiritual life, to which individuals by birth sustain a relation of confidence and habit, and in which they have their existence and reality.” We have our existence, a reality, in the state. We’re not real if we’re not obedient to the state, which means, therefore, for the state to dispose of us is to dispose of nothing.

Moreover, personal freedom, he says, is a subjective matter. He writes, “In view of this substantial, objective freedom must be distinguished from subjective freedom. Substantial freedom is the abstract undeveloped reason implicit in volition, proceeding to develop itself in the state, but in this phase of reason, they are still wanting personal insight and will. That is, subjective freedom which is realized only in the individual in his conscience.” In other words, your idea of wanting to be free is subjective. It’s not real. Objective freedom is to be bound by the state.

As a result, we see, in the trials today, the definition of the First Amendment and religious freedom reduced so much that religious freedom now means only that which exists between your two ears. It comes out of your mouth. If it takes the form of a building, or a group, or a community, then it must be controlled and governed, and Hegel was at war against everything scripture. He said, “Among the Greeks, we feel ourselves immediately at home, for we are in the region of spirit,” but he finds the Bible very carnal.

Well, the doctrines of Hegel have, since Oliver Wendell Holmes, been a part of the Supreme Court of the United States. They are increasingly a part of our laws, our courts, and our politics. So that we see increasingly the fact that as James McClelland has said, “An ally of utilitarianism, legal positivism, this kind of belief applied to law, first took root in Germany, Hans Kelsen who, with Rudolf Stammler founded the neo-Kantian school jurisprudence represented every tenant of the traditional conception of law as a metaphysical superstition.” In other words, any idea that law comes from God and that there is a truth beyond men was called a superstition. A state, he insisted, could not act illegally, because, “Every expression of the life of a state, every act of state, is a legal act.”

Well, how can you ever criticize the state in such a society? It’s like criticizing God, and that’s exactly what it is, because in modern politics, the state is God walking on earth.

Now, the sad fact is that over twenty years ago, I wrote about the significance of Kelsen’s thinking, and I do believe Kelsen finished his teaching here in California at Berkeley. I spoke several times about it in the late 50’s and early 60’s. What I said was published in The Politics of Guilt and Pity. Interesting thing is I was only criticized by so-called Christians and ministers for wasting my time criticizing a fine scholar like Kelsen. He had never said anything against God. Why did he have to, of course? For him, God does not exist, the God of scripture, only the state as God, and he was a prophet of that state.

We have a problem today because Christians have, for so long, been silent about the new incarnation that man worships, the state, and we will either hold aloft Jesus Christ as the very incarnation of God and as King of kings, and Lord of lords, which means lord over the state, or the state will rule us and destroy us. Our freedom depends on having a theology of the state which is Christian. Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] You said that Hegel believed in autonomy, and that your freedom lay in self-dependence rather than depending on somebody else. Well then, why would he say that you have to obey the state, which would imply dependence upon the state? How could you be free by obeying the state? It seems like you should advocate anarchy rather than totalitarianism?

[Rushdoony] The logic led Max Sterner, a later Hegelian, to espouse total anarchism. Karl Marx wrote two very passionate volumes against Sterner, because he recognized the logic of Sterner’s thought and of Hegel’s premise, but he thought that would lead to the collapse of any hope for humanism in the future. Moreover, they felt that the state, as the natural institution, would bring together the general will of men into an incarnation in the state. In other words, besides the personal, the private will, there is the general will as it incarnates itself in the state. This, of course, is the idea that Hegel got from Rousseau. Yes. Well, our time really is over now, so if you have more questions, we’ll take them up in the next session. We’ll have a break now, and we’ll reconvene in about ten, fifteen minutes.

End of tape