Systematic Theology – The State

Immanence and Power

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 20

Dictation Name: 20 Immanence and Power

Year: 1970’s

Let us begin then with prayer.

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that, as we face the warfare of our time, the hostility of the humanists and statists, that we can do these things in the confidence that because thou art King of kings and Lord of lords, we are not alone, that it is our cause that shall prevail, that the gates of hell cannot hold out against Christ our King. Make us therefore, faithful and zealous in battle that we might be more than conquerors through Jesus Christ our Lord. In his name we pray. Amen.

The first of our three subjects this evening is Immanence and Power. It is important, first of all, to define what we mean by the term immanence. Immanence and transcendence are two terms that are used with respect to God. Transcendence has reference to that aspect of God which is beyond this world. God is a transcendent being. He is not connected with the being of this world or any part of it. His being and his life is totally beyond anything and everything in this universe. Immanence has to do with that which is present with us in this world, and so we speak of God as being not only transcendent, but immanent. He is very definitely, within this world and his providence, his government, his omnipresence, his grace, his law, his judgment, and more. Jesus Christ spoke of his immanence. He said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” We are told of the immanence of the Holy Spirit in John 16:13, 1 Corinthians 6:19, and elsewhere.

Thus, God is transcendent and he is also immanent, but there is an important point to remember with regard to God’s immanence. We can understand it by reference to the Council of Chalcedon. The council of Chalcedon said that Jesus Christ was very God of very God, and very man of very man, that in him, there was a perfect union of the two natures without any intermingling or confusion, but with perfect union.

Now, so, too, we must speak of the immanence of God. God is present in this world. The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, indwells within his saints, but without confusion. So that we can never say that the Holy Spirit who indwells within us is at the same time a part of our being. There is a difference. There is a union of the two natures in Christ without confusion.

Similarly, in the immanence of God, there is a presence without confusion. Now, this is very important and central to biblical thinking, because basic to the anti-biblical, to the pagan doctrines of immanence is precisely this confusion. The immanence of God in every form of paganism is an immanence in which God is mixed up in this world. So that everybody has a little bit of God in him. The Quakers speak of the inner light. That’s a thoroughly confused position. What it says is that everyone has a little bit of God inside him. In all forms of paganism, this kind of confusion is basic, so that a non-Christian doctrine of immanence is dangerous, because it makes this universe, it makes man, it makes anything in the created order a part of God, a part of God’s being, so that there’s a continuity between God and man. When you have this confusion of immanence and the created order, it means that a man can, if he works at it, become a god.

In fact, this was basic to Greek religion. All the Greek gods were men who had risen on the scale of being and become gods. The immanent power within them took them over. Zeus, for example, the greatest of the gods, was a man who had been deified. Various cities boasted that Zeus, at one time or another, had stayed in their midst. One had said, “This was his birthplace,” anther said, “He died here and here is his grave.” These were the gods of the Greeks. They were deified men. Their doctrine of immanence had made them prey to this belief. So that, when you have immanence with confusion, what you do is to make it possible for some aspect of the created order to become God.

Now, this is important for the doctrine of authority. All authority is religious, but not necessarily Christian. Authority is defined by the Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought as “a command which inheres in the recognition of some greater confidence lodged either in the person or in the office itself.” This definition is sanitized of all religion, but what it is saying is that there is some sense in which authority connotes a higher power. That is very obviously a religious fact. To have an authority above and beyond yourself, an authority that you must acknowledge and bow down to, an authority in terms of which you must act, means very definitely that it is a higher authority.

Authority is the right to rule, the right to exercise power, dominion, and jurisdiction. This right depends upon a religious sanction. Rights are grounded in a doctrine of right, of what is true, right, or moral. Now, if the sanctioning god or power behind authority is immanent in the pagan sense, that authority is all the more powerful. Thus, if you have a doctrine of immanence which holds to the possibility of confusing the human and the divine, then you are going to say wherever there is authority, there is the presence of the divine. So, throughout Antiquity, you had men who were rulers, who were therefore also gods. In some cultures, the office made you a god. It brought out the divine in you, the immanence. In other cases, the royal blood conferred a high degree of deity. There were a variety of forms, but all authority meant a confusion of God and man, so that you had man-gods ruling in every pagan society in some form. We know, of course, the fact of emperor worship within Rome. We have it, however, even in European history persisting into Christian times. After the nations, or peoples of Europe were converted, they still clung to some of their pagan doctrines. They still believed in a confusion of the divine and the human, so that immanence meant that men could possess divinity.

Thus, very often in time of battle, in order to win, the king was carried into battle even, when on occasion, as in France and Norway, early in the Christian era, the king was an infant in arms. He was carried into battle because his presence would ensure victory. The king’s touch in England, right up until modern times, was believed to have the power to heal people from scarpula. In Ancient Egypt, of course, where you had more open paganism, it was believed that the Pharaoh ruled the weather and the harvest, and he would declare, “I am the god, the beginning of being. Nothing fails that goes out of my mouth.” Now, even well into the Middle Ages, we have such incidents as when a Swedish king, Halfdan the Black, when he dies, his body was cut into four pieces and distributed into the four districts of Sweden. Why? To be buried there and fertilize the soil, and make the entire country, from end to end, more productive by having a portion of the body of a god-man in their soil. This is, in part, where the doctrine of the divine right of kings in the modern era came from.

Now, in our day, the language has changed but as Christianity has receded in its influence on the political order, this same doctrine has revived, but in more rationalistic language, so that it is disguised. Vox poplae vox dei, the ancient Roman proverb, the voice of the people is the voice of God, is basic to democracy. Why do you believe the voice of the people, or the majority, should triumph? Because that’s how God speaks. However, in the modern era, as I said, men are rationalistic and they do not like any direct reference to God, so they do not call the people god, nor do they call the government god. Instead, they use another word because people have been schooled not to see that it is simply another word for God. Sovereign.

Now, sovereignty is an attribute of God, and God is sovereign. The word sovereign is simply another word for lord, and according to scripture, God alone is the Lord, or sovereign, and so sovereignty is an attribute of the modern state. Every civil government in the world today claims to be sovereign, which means they are claiming to be God walking on earth. It is held to be a necessary attribute of civil government. Now, to claim sovereignty is to hold the Bible in contempt. It is to say, in effect, without being honest, we are at war against biblical faith. It is not the God of the Bible who is sovereign, but the United States, or the Soviet Union, or the British Empire, or whatever. Of course, Hegel, the philosopher of the modern state, said that spirit, the immanent power in the universe, has to be defined as that which has its center in itself, and is self-contained existence, which means he was defining it as God. It is, he said, reason and freedom, and it is divine, and he said the shape which the perfect embodiment of Spirit assumes is the state. It is the divine immanence which expresses itself totally and fully in the state.

Of course, Hegel was not alone. Rousseau said that the general will is incarnate in the state, and so he proposed that a civil profession replace the Christian profession, that a pledge of allegiance be required of every person in a civil government, to replace the Apostles Creed, and so he wrote in his book, The Social Contract, in the chapter, Of Civil Religion. “But there is a purely civil profession of faith. The articles of which it behooves a sovereign to fix, not with the precision of religious dogmas, but treating them as a body of social sentiments without which no man can be either a good citizen of a faithful subject. Though it has no power to compel anyone to believe them, it can banish from the state all who fail to do so. Not on grounds of impiety but as lacking in social sense and being incapable of sincerely loving the laws and justice, or of sacrificing, should the need arise, their lives to their duty. Any man who, after acknowledging these articles of faith, proceeds to act as though he did not believe them is deserving of the death penalty, for he has committed the greatest of all crimes, that of lying before the law.”

In other words, Rousseau said, you swear allegiance to the state and to the articles of faith which it requires, or you die, and of course, we have this in Marxism, and we are having it progressively in the democracies as witness these Christian school trials, and the jailing of ministers who will not subscribe to the articles of the state which say, we will control you, and of course, the issue for example, in Nebraska, has not been that the children in the Christian schools that are being persecuted as getting a substandard education. They are not. It has not been that the children are troublemakers. They are not. The issue is, and it’s the greatest of evils to the modern state, the schools will not acknowledge the authority of the State Board of Education, of the state, and that is a fearful offense, and for that, the parents are going to lose their children if the state wins in the courts. They will be taken from them and placed in foster homes.

Now, this is civil religion. It is a new inquisition. It rests on coercion and compulsion. In a humanistic doctrine of immanence, because there is a confusion between God and man, and because men can become god-man, and the state, especially becomes the incarnation of God, there is no breathing space for men. For us as Christians, God is in heaven, and even though he is immanent here on earth, he is not mingled with creation. So, as we deal with men, as we deal with church, state, school, and so on, we can say to all of them, “You are not God,” and we can use the word of God to judge all of them. We have a freedom, therefore, and God himself does not step in every moment and chop off our heads or imprison us if we are out of line. Now, his law has within it judgment, but God says, “I will wait until the end to judge, but in the meantime, you have freedom. You can go astray and you pay the price for it. You can have your own way if you want, but you pay the price for it, but you create the kind of social order you want and you live with it. I give you freedom.”

But not so the state as god. The state as god stands over man and says, “Thus shall you do and no other, and if you step out of line, we’ll clobber you.” Now, God says the tithe is required of all, believer and non-believer, but does he step in and punishes us? No, he doesn’t even give the church the power to punish non-tithers. But, can you say to the state when it requires of you four and a half tithes a year, “Thank you, I’ll pass this one up.” Not at all. When you have a god sitting right on top of you as these humanistic gods do, you have no freedom from them, and tyranny results. Who can turn his back on the state? Who can say, “I will not serve you.” Who can secede from the state and its laws? We can from God. We pay a price eternally, but we can. He gives us the freedom to do so, but when the state becomes god, it gives no man freedom. The state, when it is sovereign, or god, has no supernatural life. It cannot be independent of man. It depends on man, and therefore, it seeks to control and harness man totally, and it ends up claiming, as the Soviet Union does, inerrancy and infallibility. The infallible dictatorship of the proletariat.

Now, at times the church has erred in this direction through doctrines of immanence derived from Platonism and Aristotelianism, and the church has, too often, identified itself with God. On the other hand, Karl Barth separated God so totally from the world that there was no immanence in his thinking, and therefore, his world was empty of God, and the only power he could turn to was socialism, and Barth’s memorial is a church in shambles wherever he had any influence.

A true doctrine of a transcendent God establishes the framework of laws for all things, and that framework is given in the Bible, and these provide the structures for freedom and for prosperity. Men, in terms of God, the Lord, the King of creation, are not coerced to be good, but their attempts to play God in the long run cannot prosper. Man is created in the image of God in knowledge, righteousness, and dominion, and he can pervert every aspect of the image of God, and God gives him that freedom, but there is a final day of reckoning. The modern state, on the other hand, says every day is a judgment day if we step out of line where the state is concerned, and so when the modern state plays god, freedom disappears, but God leaves time and room for us. The freedom to sin, or the freedom to be godly.

In terms of the humanistic theology of the state, the true church is the great apostate, and therefore, the modern state must wage war on the true church. The modern state cannot tolerate apostasy from itself. Thus, we are at war, and there is no resolution of this war except the victory of Christ and his people, and this requires the conversion of every area of life and thought, and all peoples, tribes, tongues, and nations to Christ the Lord.

We will reserve time after the three talks for questions, but for the present, we will postpone questions, and proceed on to our next subject.

End of tape