Systematic Theology – The State

Medieval Struggle

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 19

Dictation Name: 19 Medieval Struggle

Year: 1970’s

Our subject in this session is The Medieval Struggle. Just as historians have mistreated Constantine, and just as they mistreat the whole of Christian history, so they, too, have mistreated the medieval church. Now we do not have to be Catholics or favorable to the medieval church’s theology to appreciate the work of the medieval church. The sad fact is that the humanists have given us a very sorry picture and a one-sided picture.

The church did need reformation when the reformers began their work, but this does not justify going back and misrepresenting the whole of that history. The reformers themselves harked back to a great deal in the medieval church that they regarded great and good. We hear about the rapacious popes who sought arrogantly to rule church and state, but we are not told that there were not many popes like that, nor that the steps of some like Innocent III had some justification. The fact is, the medieval state and the Holy Roman Empire sought to control the church, and more often controlled the church than the church did the state.

Very, very early, the state borrowed some Christian doctrines to turn the state into a kind of church. One of the most important aspects of this is one we rarely think about. The church is a corporation. The whole idea of a corporation comes from the Christian church. Corpoae means body. The church is the body of Christ. Scripture is very plain-spoken on that.

Now, the church as a corporation is something which does not die, because you and I as members of the church die, but the church goes on living, and so the state began to speak of itself as a corporation. The saying became prominent when a king died. “The king is dead. Long live the king,” as though the state has a body or the monarchy is a body, did not depend on the life of a man. It was an ongoing corporate entity. In fact, very early, the Holy Roman Empire saw itself as the true Jerusalem, and as such, it sought to control the church. Otto I saw himself and the state as the representatives of Christ and his kingdom, in the coins of his realm. Otto I is pictures holding the Holy Ghost, the dove, in his hand. It is through him that the Spirit speaks. It is through him, as Christ’s voice on earth, that the church is to be governed. So that very definitely, the state saw itself as the kingdom of God, as the church, the corporae, and the church as simply an aspect of their realm.

Thus, they controlled the papacy and the local churches, lock, stock, and barrel. Very often, when it came time to appoint a pope or a bishop, the emperor or a king would move his troops in and say, “This is the man I appoint,” because they represented God on earth.

Dr. Kantorovitz, on discussing the political thought of Coke{?} as applied to law, wrote, “It is evident that the doctrine of theology and canon law, teaching that the church and Christian society in general was a corpus mysticum, a mystical body. The head of which is Christ has been transferred by the jurist from the theological sphere to that of the state, the head of which is the king.” This was so seriously taken that for centuries, when the king was crowned, he was given a ring at the same time to put on his finger whereby he took the church and the kingdom as his bride, he playing the role of Christ, and all his life he would wear a ring to indicate that he was married as Christ to the church and the state as his body. The marriage metaphor became very popular. The church was so subservient that the Carolingian emperor Charles II was praised by a pope, named by the state, Pope John VIII whose dates are 872 to 882, praised by him in an assembly of bishops as the savior of the world, salvator munde.

The language used was very extravagant. Pope John VIII said that Charles II was the one whom God had established as prince, an imitation of King Christ, so that what Christ owned by nature the emperor might attain by grace. Nicholas Saunders, in the days of Queen Elizabeth, called attention to the fact that the images of Christ were being broken in the churches, but he said no one would dare break an image of the Queen, because that would be sacrilege. She had taken the place of Christ. Frederick II, the Hohenstaufen emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, against whom Innocent III fought, compared his birth to the birth of Christ. His theologians held that the emperor was the image of God and the source of law and justice, that he was infallible, in some sense divine, and much more.

Now, the modern state no longer uses the same kind of language, but its claims to power are even greater, and the errors of Rome at their worst in the Middle Ages were modest as compared with the errors of the medieval states and the modern state. At least the Holy Roman emperors and the kings of France, England, and elsewhere recognized that there was a God in heaven, but the modern state recognizes no God, and as a result, it is more lawless. Basic to all paganism is the limitation of essential reality this world{?}, and therefore, whatever god paganism believes in is a god that is here and now. In the last day of the last century, in the early years of this 20th century, some of the primitive peoples within the British empire, like some of the tribes in New Guinea, worshipped Queen Victoria as a goddess and as their holy mother. Why? Because if you do not believe there is a God out there, this doesn’t keep you from believing in a God and a power and being, and it’s one who is here, and it is usually the state as the most focal point of power.

As a result, what began in the medieval state has since only become worse. Now, I mentioned in the last session that Constantine rendered personal aid to the church. He helped the church by giving it gifts. In the Middle Ages, many kings imitated Constantine in this, and this led to the problems which are read back into Constantine. What happened was that Pepin, Charlemagne, and many lords, local lords, and kings, over the generations, would give some land to an abbey, or to a bishop. They would give this land primarily because the land was usually worthless. It was uncleared forestland, it was swampland, it was desert land, and they would know that the monks or the bishop would bring in poor people from wherever they could find them, settle them there, work with them, develop that land, and make it highly productive, which they did. As a matter of fact, you cannot understand the face of Europe today without understanding what the Christians did. Even the dykes of Holland, vast portions that were reclaimed from the sea were reclaimed by monks, who worked day after day building the dykes, and extending the land outward more and more, reclaiming it, and then bringing in people to settle them there.

Well, as a result, to give land to the church was a tremendous asset. It was a way of getting rid of worthless land and making it productive, and in return, they would require something. They would say, “Well, we’ll give you this land if in so many years when this land is developed you provide us with so many soldiers, out of the people who live here.” Or, “These people pay us taxes after so many years up to such and such an amount. As individuals, we won’t tax the church itself.”

As a result, they attached obligations to the land, but worse. These lords and kings then, as this land became valuable, and very often the most valuable land in the realm. Worthless swampland, desert land, forest land that was now leveled and cleared and made highly productive, began to feel it’s important to control that land. There’s a great deal of money there, and so the pattern ensued of controlling the election of the abbot or the bishop, and what the lords and kings usually did was to say, “Well, I’ve got several younger sons. I will take them and make them abbots or bishops,” and so he would bring in his men and say, “We’re appointing the next abbot, and the next bishop,” and boy bishops and boy abbots, some of them were just four, five, six years old began to appear on the scene of Europe.

The whole idea was to control these valuable lands, and they began to entangle the church and the state. Land represented wealth, it repressed power, it represented potential military service, and so you began to have abbots and bishops who were really princes, the sons of a king, or young lords, the son of a local lord, who were going to war, using the peasants as their troops, and very often married, and some very peculiar arguments began to develop. As a matter of fact, one French bishop maintained that he practiced very strict celibacy as a bishop, although he was married as a baron.

Odo of Bayeux was tried by William the Conqueror as an earl, not as a bishop, and it was Lam Frank{?}, another bishop who suggested that it be done that way. He said, “You can’t lay hands on his as a bishop, but as an earl you can hang him.” There was a great deal of this king of thing. What happened was that, whereas earlier the church as the missionaries would come in and settled an area, and converted the people, had been champions of the people against their lords and kings, now they were ruled by the state, because the state controlled the appointment, the election of abbots and bishops and pastors. Every church office was controlled by the local lord or the king.

When a bishop took office, for example, there was investiture, which was into the temporarilities of his office. That is, controlling the land. Then there was consecration into his ecclesiastical office, and so these lords and kings, by controlling the election and investiture, controlled the church, and the result was moral decay and degeneracy. This is why Sacerdotal celibacy came in. Hildebrand, or Gregory VII realized that the only way to separate church and state was to prevent these bishops and abbots and these pastors from having children who would then inherit their office, so that the people could not call a pastor, because the pastor’s son was entitled to it, and because he was a relative of the local lord, you couldn’t oust him, and the same was true of the abbot and of the bishop, and so Hildebrand worked to end that and to impose Sacerdotal celibacy.

Now it’s an interesting fact that at precisely this time, the aesthetic impulse in the church was beginning to wane. So it was not essentially an aesthetic impulse, but primarily to separate the church from the world, as a practical step of saying, “These offices are not for sale. They do not belong to families, and men are going to be called, and the church is going to call them. Not the local king or lord, and a bitter struggle ensued as a result. It is interesting that Hildebrand, Gregory VII may have been of Jewish descent. This has not been demonstrated, but one scholar has written about the subject and feels there is evidence of it. Hildebrand said the mark of the kingdom of God on earth was that it had to be separate from the world, and separate from the state, and that it should be marked on earth by peace, by justice, and by obedience to its Lord. That the mark of the kingdom of Satan was mutiny against God and discord, pride, and disobedience to the law of God, and this is why he saw Henry IV at Canosa{?} and before Canosa[?], as guilty of pride, and fought against him.

Now, there was another fact in this, in asserting his independence from the state and from the Holy Roman Emperor. What Hildebrand, the pope, did was to say there is a supreme court for justice. Now consider. Supposing you were living in that era before Hildebrand, and you were in France, and the pastor of the church was a cousin of the local lords, and the bishop was a son of the local lord, and the abbot was a son of the local lord, and the pastor was defrauding you, or he was molesting your wife, or in one way or another he was unworthy of his office, what were you going to do? To whom could you appeal? To the bishop? No, they were related. To the lord? No, they were related. You had no appeal. There was no justice as a result, but when the papacy fought under Hildebrand, for freedom, and said, “We will not be controlled by the kings or the emperors, and the local church has to be free of such rule,” it was a great victory for all Christians of all times, and what it meant was that suddenly, the Vatican, the papacy, became the great champion and source of law and justice, and people walked, sometimes for 1,000 miles to go from wherever they were in Europe to Rome, to go to the pope and say, “I want justice and they’re not giving it to me back in England, or Germany, or France,” but, this is why it is important for us to appreciate what happened in the Middle Ages, because we have not solved the problem.

What happened was that indeed, the papacy became the center of justice, and it was one of the great revolutions in the history of the West when Hildebrand did what he did, but in time, as the popes became strong, and rich, they often became unjust, never to the same degree as the kings, but it meant, where then did you go? Where then did you have a supreme court? You can see the problem, can you not? We have it now, don’t’ we? Because we have a humanistic Supreme Court, and what are you going to do if the Supreme Court take away the freedom of the Christian and says, as there is a good danger they may this month, in the Bob Jones case. It is scheduled for October 12, 1982, and it may be the beginning of a series of ugly decisions. We need to pray that it be not so. Where then can you go? This is a problem, a key one. It destroyed the Middle Ages when there was no appeal to anyone. It’s destroying us now because the Supreme Court, one way or another, is overthrowing what we believe to be right. Homosexuality is now legal. Abortion is now legal. Throwing the Bible out of the schools is now legal, and much more.

You see the problem? This is the problem that Christians need to address themselves to, and they need to realize that this was a battle in the Middle Ages. They came up with an answer for awhile, but the answer didn’t work. We have to come up with an answer to this. Now, I believe we had an answer for awhile when God’s law ruled in the courts of this land, and we need to develop that answer, because it said, not any particular court, not any Senate or Congress, or any president, or any group of men, but the word of God shall rule. This is why it is important for us to come fact to face with these issues that created problems in the Middle Ages and have created the same problem in our time.

Paul could say I appeal to Caesar, although he knew the limitations of Caesar, but Caesar has become corrupt again, and Caesar was in Paul’s day. Where do you appeal then? Man needs an appeal. We have a constant appeal in the form of prayer, but we also need an appeal day by day, so that righteousness, justice can be done. This is the problem for our generation that we must solve.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] Could you explain a little bit more on what you mean by, in the first talk, the pagan religions being {?} with worshiping the state?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, let’s leave that till next time because I’m going to be dealing with that in our next meeting, the first Friday of next month. I’m going to be giving a great deal of time to that. It’s a very important and basic question. Yes?

[Audience] In the absence of a secular court to make your appeal, or a headship in the church, isn’t there some precedent in history that various type of bishop ranks and so forth have come together to provide that sense of a final place of appeal?

[Rushdoony] Yes, that is true. You had conferences of pastors. You had synods. You had presbyteries, general assemblies, a variety of things like that, but these two have all, in time, gone astray, you see. So, what is necessary is to have the recognition that it is the word of God above all assemblies or groups of men. The law-word of God, so that you can always appeal to the infallible word of God.

[Audience] Are you suggesting then that in the early ages when we saw the common law being based fundamentally in the Bible, that that was an interim solution that we departed from?

[Rushdoony] Yes. You see, when, for example, as in this country, the Bible was the common law, Christianity was the common law, it was very simple for juries to decide cases. Then, the saying was true that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Then, too, you see, you had the Bible taught to everyone also. So, you had a justice that all men knew. You had something that you could appeal to. Now, everybody says, “Well, I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think,” which means they are every man doing that which is right in their own eyes, because there is no king. God is not their king, and they are submitting to the basic temptation of the tempter, our original sin, “ye shall be as God,” every man his own god, knowing, that is, determining for himself, what constitutes good and evil. Yes?

[Audience] {?} say one of the problems, maybe you pointed it out in other places, {?} the Bible, one of the good points in the Bible is fairly simple and limited whereas now, the various bureaucratic agencies in Washington are churning out so many thousands of laws, and undoubtedly all have broken the law, today I suppose, some way or another. Like you mentioned the new thing the IRS has done, and all, every conceivable organization has all these laws and no human mind can assimilate it, there’s so much that we’ve got {?}

[Rushdoony] This is a sizable room, but the new laws put out by Washington and the regulations put out by Washington each year would fill up this room to more than capacity. Now, how can you know the law? Where is there to appeal to when you have so much, and none of it really righteous?

[Audience] I have a cousin who practices in San Francisco, and she said that lawyers, more and more now, are just, from all persuasions, are just pulling their hair out at the roots because of this rapidly growing mountain of legislation that they just can’t keep up with, but as a result of that, malpractice suits are now beginning to come home to roost in the lawyer’s own yard.

[Rushdoony] Well, as far back as Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the great perverter of this country, we find a statement by Holmes that the law has nothing to do with justice. It’s just a game that lawyers play, and he was in favor of that.

[Audience] Which justice was it that made the statement that the law had nothing to do with morality? Was that Holmes also?

[Rushdoony] I don’t recall. Certainly that was Holmes’ position. Neither morality nor logic. Just experience, what people want. Well, if there are no further questions, let us adjourn with prayer and we’ll meet again on the first Friday of next month.

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee for the abundance of thy blessings, thy sure mercies, and thine unfailing government. We thank thee that ours is the victory in Jesus Christ who is King of kings and Lord of lords. Of the increase of his government there shall be no end. Our Lord and our God, make us a part of that great increase and instruments thereof, and give us joy in thy service, and victory through Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.

End of tape