Systematic Theology – The State

Authority and Rule

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 22

Dictation Name: 22 Authority and Rule

Year: 1970’s

We shall now consider our third subject for the evening: Authority to Rule.

One of the problems in the modern world is that too many subjects are viewed from an academic orientation. An academic orientation will falsify a subject, or at least disorient you. For example, it is one thing to say, in a classroom that, “I believe in God, and this is the doctrine of God,” and so on. It is an entirely different thing when Job, in the midst of his grief and tragedy says, “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth, and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold and not another though my reins be consumed within me.” It’s an easy thing in a classroom to discuss the doctrine of God. It’s a very different thing to hear a woman who has been raped and brutally raped, say with tears that she does not understand why this has happened, but she believes in the Lord, and only the Lord is her comfort.

The classroom approach is abstract. The Bible is never abstract.

We saw some weeks or months ago, that the abstract view of Romans 13 falsified that scripture. What is does is to go to Romans 13 and say government is ordained of God and therefore, obey them, and so on and so forth, without realizing the context in which Paul said, obey. Paul was writing a letter in answer to questions. The great question in the mind of the early church was this. Jesus Christ is Lord. This is required of us as a confession of faith. Every believer had to stand before a congregation and say, “Jesus Christ is Lord, kurios, sovereign,” but Caesar claimed to be sovereign, and so the question in their minds was, “How can we worship two sovereigns? What is our relationship to Caesar? Should we have nothing to do with him? Should we refuse to give him any allegiance?” and of course, the logical conclusion to that would have been revolution, and Paul said, “No. The powers that be are ordained of God. They are ministers, servants of God,” so he established this. The state has a duty to be the servant of God. Then he went on to say they are to be a terror to evil-doers. So the state has a duty to be a terror to evil-doers, and if the state does not meet those criterion, there is something wrong with the state.

Romans 13 doesn’t say, without qualification, “Obey the state, whatever it does.” No. The Apostles much earlier had said we must obey God rather than man, but it establishes the conditions in terms of which the state exists. It is be the servant of the Lord and a terror to evil-doers, but the sad fact is that the church has too often misinterpreted that passage, and especially Protestantism and the modern church.

One of the problems was, at the time of the Reformation, the state was rising to great power, and everywhere, the state was pushing the church and working to destroy it. One can guess that possibly both reformation and counter-reformation saved Christianity from total destruction, because the state was working to destroy it.

Now, the states at the time of Luther and before, had been pushing to take powers away from the church, to control the church within their areas, and to be heads, in effect, of the church. The major powers of the day, most notably Spain and France, gained concordats from Vatican. Those that did not gain concordats became Protestant. In other words, they said, not because they believed in Protestantism, or Lutheranism, or what have you, but because, “Well, if you won’t give us what we want, we’ll take it. We’ll go Lutheran and control the church within our area.” Thus, both Catholic and Protestant countries worked for one goal: the control of the church. Both gained it, and we are still troubled by the consequences of this.

Now, the church and the concordat areas was under the control of the crown. The church in the Protestant areas, as in England and in the Lutheran states was again, under the control of the crown. Both Protestants and Catholics thus were controlled, state control of religion. The Anabaptists despaired of civil government and they withdrew from the world, or else, in a couple instances, they favored revolution.

Now, in this crisis, Calvin stressed civil obedience to avoid identification with the extreme Anabaptists and with revolutionaries, but at the same time, he laid grounds for disobedience to tyranny. We have a similar position in our time. I have, in my writings, stressed the necessity for godly obedience to civil government and of working through peaceful means, because the sad fact is a lot of Christians, or so-called Christians, or church people, or evangelicals, or fundamentalists, or reformed, what have you, are rattle-brained. Hair-brained. Their reaction when you tell them about the problems of the state, or you tell them about what has happened to Pastor Silivan{?}, or to Levi Wisner{?} in Ohio, or the late Lester Oloff in Texas: “Isn’t it time for us to go for our guns?” and the only thing to say to that kind of attitude is, “You’re idiots!” It is idiocy, because what you find is those people have not used a peaceful means. They have not, who voted because about half evangelical Christians are not registered to vote. It is rare to find anyone in any church who has contributed to political campaigns, and you can’t expect to win in politics without money. They’re not ready to go to court and fight, and I had a long letter this week telling me that I was anti-Christ. Why? Because I don’t believe in Christian means. I’m for Christians going to court and fighting, and I’m encouraging Christians to do that and taking part in trials, when I should be going into my closet and praying. Let the Lord do it all.

Now, because of this problem, Calvin stressed civil obedience to avoid identification with the extremists of his day, and we have the same problem today. This is why a question that was raised throughout the Middle Ages needs to be raised again. What constitutes authority to rule? Who has the authority? The Middle Ages raised the question of legitimate authority very, very often and gave a variety of answers. We will look at a few of them now.

One of the things we need to face first is, that one of the things I dislike most in modern thought and in the modern era is the natural law concept, because I believe it undermines scripture, but when we go back into the Middle Ages, we find that natural law meant something else, something very different from what Dr. Strauss of the University of Chicago has meant by it, something very different from what men, for example, in 1776 means by it. Let us examine what the 12th century monk and scholar, Gratian{?} wrote about natural law.

“Mankind is ruled in two ways. Namely by natural law and by customs. The law of nature is that contained in the law and the Gospels by which each is ordered to do to another what he wishes to be done to himself, and is prohibited from inflicting on another what he does not wish done to himself. Wherefore, Christ said in the Gospel, ‘All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you do ye also to them, for this is the law and the prophets.’”

Now, natural law, of course, was something radically different, therefore, for many medieval thinkers than it is for men today. It meant biblical law. It meant the Gospel. It meant what God had set forth in this world through his word, and because God had declared it, it was natural to all creation. Rufinius, about the same time, said, “Nature law, which all but lost in the first man, has been restored in the Mosaic law, perfected in the Gospel, and adorned in customs.” Henry de Bracton wrote, “Now the author of justice is God and thus, justice is the creator, and accordingly, justice and law mean the same. They are the same because they are equally expressions of God.” He was not thinking therefore of state law. He was thinking of biblical law. Aquinas said that every tyrannical law by a state is a perversion of law and is not law.

About 1302, Aegidius Romanus said that lordship and the authority to rule is contingent upon grace. No one could rule with authority who ruled godlessly. He might have power, but he did not have authority. And so he said infidels and excommunicated people could hold property, but they had no valid title to it, because the only valid title was from obedience to God, because “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” The same thing, he said, applied to ungodly Christian rulers when they stepped out of line as far as the law of God was concerned. They had no authority to rule, although they might have power, and every Christian looking at an ungodly ruler would have to say, “You may have the power, but you have no authority.”

Archbishop Richard FitzRalph used the same doctrines and furthered them. Now, Aegidius Romanus meant by it to strengthen papal authority over princes, by Wycliffe took the same idea and said ungodly churchmen, like ungodly rulers, have no authority because all authority rests upon the word of God, and the grace of God, and if men are out of the grace of God, they are out of authority. Apply that to the countries of our day, and how many of them have authority to rule? This was the principle that was upheld. In fact, Wycliffe said, “No one is civil lord. No one is prelate, no one is bishop while he is in mortal sin. There is,” he said, “no dominion, no authority to rule without grace.”

Thus, by this they meant that authority to rule comes only from God and his word, and any departure from God’s word and law is dangerous to man and the state. This is why for centuries, heresy was regarded as civil disorder. Now, there were different attitudes towards it. Some felt that heresy had to be suppressed by coercion, and there were some very ugly chapters in the history of the Western world because of that. At other times, it was held that it had to be dealt with by evangelization. Of course, this is not our concern, although we would certainly say it must be dealt with by evangelization, but the point was valid. Heresy creates civil disorder. It is a form of civil disorder, because it undermines dominion. It undermines the authority to rule. Civil government, therefore, must be faithful to the Lord, because civil government is required to rule in terms of God’s word, or it is out of grace and out of authority.

Now, this is exactly what scripture had said, and therefore, we have to turn to scripture, which is where they got the doctrine. For example, in Deuteronomy 17:18-20, “And it shall be, when he (the king or the ruler) sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites: and it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them: that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel.”

In terms of this, the prophets held that all kings and nations are bound by God the Lord. Isaiah gives the roll call of the nations and their judgment, because they are faithless to the Lord. Hebrews 12:25-29 says that even though there was a great shaking of all the nations in the Old Testament times, from Christ’s first coming to the second coming, there shall be a great shaking, and all the nations that will not accept him, will not be ruled by him, will be destroyed and cast aside. Revelation gives us the feast of vultures, which consumes the ungodly nations. God tells us emphatically the nations are to serve him, and if not, he will rule them with a rod of iron. Psalm 2 gives a summons to the nations, all nations. “Kiss the Son, (bow down before him and kiss his feet), lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way.” Isaiah 40:15-17 says, “Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing. And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering. All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity.”

And yet, we have this strange belief abroad among many that God doesn’t require the nations to obey him, that God’s law doesn’t apply today, that the nations can make their own laws and go their own way. Indeed, it is better for them not to be Christian because the idea of a Christian state is not biblical. This is seriously declared. One very important group recently published a long study which said that the Ten Commandments are no longer binding upon us, nor upon nations, that we, as Christians, are under Christ and what does it mean to be under Christ but not under his law? Can you be under Christ and commit adultery, steal, kill, murder, bear false witness, dishonor God, dishonor parents?

Moreover, are these people mad that they believe that God will stand by idly while the nations play God? Moreover, do they believe that God will allow us to stand by idly while nations play God and call themselves sovereign and persecute his saints? We have Baalism all around us today, and the word “Baal” means lord. Simply lord, and Baalism was any doctrine which said that anything in this world is the Lord, other than God, and Moloch worship was king worship, Moloch meaning king. The authority to rule comes from God alone, and not only man must live by every word that comes from the mouth of God, but every family, every church, every school, every civil government must live by every word that cometh from the mouth of God. All things must derive their authority from God the Lord, and to restore the authority that alone can bring order to this world means that we place ourselves, our families, schools, and callings, and our civil governments under the every-word of God.

Are there any questions now about any of our three studies this evening? Yes?

[Audience] Who do you think, in your idea of a state, should everybody be a citizen, or who should be a citizen?

[Rushdoony] That’s a good question. That’s a question that’s been wrestled with more than once in the past. Citizenship, at times, has been grounded on property requirements, on other times, on the fact that you’re a human being and you were born in that country. At other times, it has had a Christian foundation, so that, for example, in the early years of this country, and it varied from state to state, you had to believe in scripture to be a citizen. That was required. Now, you could be a Jew, because you would then believe in the Old Testament and the law, or you could be a Christian, but you had to believe that the word of God formed the foundation for a civil government. In fact, cases were decided by juries out of this law.

Now today, we have said anyone can be a citizen, and we’ve had a move again and again in recent years to say that criminals should not have their citizen rights revoked, which means there is no moral basis whatsoever for citizenship. Now, we are grounding today, citizenship, in the mere fact of being a man or a woman of age, irrespective of character. We are also giving citizenship to people who are deriving something from the state, and there have been times when it has been said, no one who is deriving a benefit should have a right to vote, because there is a conflict of interest. We still retain that concept, if you become a member of the cabinet, or a high official in Washington, D.C. You have to resign from your corporation because there might be a conflict of interest, or from your law firm, or whatever, if that firm has any dealings with the United States government.

So, we’ve retained, to a slight degree, a concept of conflict of interests. We have not retained it where the average person is concerned, because people who get all kinds of welfare, who get government pensions, who are on the government payroll, or who work in one or another agency are all entitled to vote and have a vested interested, they have a conflict of interests. So, the whole subject of what constitutes the right of franchise is one which needs rethinking radically. We need to rethink the foundations.

Now we’re, I would say, generations away from coming to a solutions, because by and large, our Christians are not Christian in their voting, and until they become so, there is no way they can give an answer to the problem, because they themselves are a major part of the contemporary irresponsibility.

[Audience] How would you give an answer to the problem?

[Rushdoony] I would say our first task is not to deal with that question, but to reach out and evangelize everyone and work to make Christians effective in the duties in which they have, and in the powers they have, and somewhere down the line, to see the direction this country is taking, and we need, step by step, to set up some standards, beginning with the fact that there can be no conflicts of interests. So, it has to be a process that’s going to take generations before you get back to a religious standard of citizenship. Yes?

[Audience] As I recall, years ago an individual was a citizen of the state first. When the republic was first founded, and as the states were picked up, an individual was a citizen of the state, then he was a citizen of the United States. Am I right?

[Rushdoony] Exactly. You were a citizen of Maine, or the state of Pennsylvania, or Virginia, and by becoming a citizen of that state, you became a citizen of the United States and not the other way around. Citizenship was essentially local, and the local community had the power to govern the requirements for citizenship. That is, the state.

[Audience] As I recall also, I remember as a young fellow, the United States never is or was, it was the United States are, and that has gone by the board.

[Rushdoony] Yes, before 1860, the United States was a plural noun. It took the plural form of a verb. Yes?

[Audience] I had a question. But I forget what state you said, where they’re having a trial, and you were saying that if Christian schools lose the state could take the children. Well, what if the parents were to take their children and leave the state? Would they have power to still?

[Rushdoony] No, they would be outside of the State of Nebraska. What is already happening, the Mennonites are selling their farms in Nebraska and moving out of Nebraska. The Baptists are staying and fighting. Yes?

[Audience] Can you clear up a point? I know where we stand as far as accreditation and so on, but where do we stand in fighting zoning, and codes, and you know, building codes, and so on? Do we let them come in and say you’re going to build a peaked church rather than a flat-roofed church, and so on? Do you let them come in and tell us what to do?

[Rushdoony] Well, where health and safety regulations are involved and it’s not an action directed against the church, and we’ve seen instances where fire regulations and safety regulations are framed to attack the church, but where it’s honestly a concern for safety, then it’s valid.

[Audience] I see]

[Rushdoony] If it’s something otherwise, then it’s not. For example, there was one church in Ohio that the state tried to close down because their meeting room was, I think, a sixteenth of an inch below the required height, in their meeting room. Now, that is injustice. Yes, was there a question over here? Yes, John?

[Audience] Just a commentary on Romans 13. I always thought it was rather strange that people tried to get out from under the implications of Romans 13, because it’s evident that Christ, the apostles, didn’t obey some of the authority, or they never would have been crucified, and it also seems to me that we miss a fundamental point in that when we fail to realize that there isn’t a magistrate to obey or disobey, and I believe magistrate is the implication of the word “authority” there in the original. There isn’t a magistrate to obey or disobey. You don’t come before a magistrate until after you’ve broken somebody’s law, and I think that’s the implication. One of the things that Paul was trying to make later on in the same chapter, because to disobey the magistrate, in other words, disobey the decree, constitutes rebellion, but one doesn’t comer before the magistrate until after somebody has broken the law, which is exactly what happened to, supposedly to Christ, etc., and the Apostles, and what have you. They broke somebody’s law, and they’ve not obeyed the authorities as most people today would like to interpret Romans 13.

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience] {?} 199B, I believe that’s the number of the form that churches must fill out in California. There are a number of questions there relating to the content of sermons, the political nature of sermons, and so on. Can you comment about that? How do you feel about churches filling out those forms?

[Rushdoony] Yes, Form 199B of the State of California has now been dropped, as far as any annual filing is concerned. We were able to get a bill passed, Senator Nicholas Petras’ bill, and that bill no longer requires an annual filing. Moreover, a church need only, at its first inception, indicate its incorporated nature and the fact that it is a property owner. No longer an annual filing to maintain tax exemption. So, that has been a real victory here in the state. I hope we do not lose it now, because with a governor that we’ve had problems with as attorney general, and with Nicholson having lost as attorney general, we have an unhappy situation there at the top.

[Audience] Was that recent that that was dropped?

[Rushdoony] It was passed about a year ago, the repeal of 199B, an annual filing, and a change of the form as well. Yes?

[Audience] When Chalcedon came out with their doctrine of person of Christ, how did their culture differ from the eastern Christians, like the Nestorians and the Jacobites, who held to different views on the person of Christ? What were the practical implications in their culture?

[Rushdoony] Yes. That’s a question about Christology, and culture, and statism, and I shall be dealing with this next month on the third, first Friday. Now, if you have subordinationism in your Christology, you will then put the church in a subordinate place in society, and because subordinationism prevailed in the eastern churches, they were unable to develop a strong church that could stand up to the state. This was the fatal flaw of the eastern churches that destroyed them. They all went under, in varying degrees, and in many areas, the churches disappeared.

Now, their Christology was of two kinds: Nestorian and Monophysite. The Nestorians tended to downplay the deity of Christ and make his humanity almost everything. He was a man who became God at the time of his baptism. As a result, they destroyed Christology. They came very close to the pagan view of men becoming gods as a certain point in their lives. On the other hand, most of the eastern churches were, and still are, Monophysite. Monophysite comes from “mono,” one, single. They virtually stressed the divine nature of Christ to the exclusion of the human. His humanity was swallowed up in his divinity, and therefore, Christ was not close to mankind. He just played at being a man, and as a result, he really wasn’t truly incarnate, and therefore, those churches again had no answer to this world. There was no one who was truly the second Adam, and who was what the first Adam was supposed to be; king, priest, and prophet over creation. He was a divine being who had come into this world and had something like the form of a man, and had gone, not a present power to govern and rule this world.

[Audience] They talked about it in terms of the union of Christ’s nature, right?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] And that was the implications of how they talked about it?

[Rushdoony] Well, the formula of Chalcedon specifies that there is a perfect union of two natures: human and divine in Jesus Christ, but without confusion. When you confuse the two, you get right into paganism, and this is what many of the eastern churches actually did do. I have a record of the Coptic liturgy, after they took this direction, and having made Christ so remote, he no longer could be the savior. He was not the second Adam. He was not the new man and we were made new men in him. So, works took over, and the liturgy sings, the monks are singing, “Worthy, worthy, worthy are thy saints, O Lord.” You see, this is what it led them to, and this is why they went downhill progressively. Well, let’s go on to another question now. Yes?

[Audience] Not a question, but quite a historical interest. The Berkeley City Council voted, without any public hearings, to tax the churches in the city limit for their properties, so they could carry no their social program.

[Rushdoony] Well, I’m not surprised. I’ve been waiting to see some group do this. They are to push, they are out to destroy the church, and if the churches there don’t fight, they deserve what they get. They’re dead.

[Audience] Well, I think we need to pray that they do fight, because a dangerous precedent will be set if they don’t?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] Yes, the civil authorities that don’t obey God, then are they criminals?

[Rushdoony] What about them?

[Audience] The civil authorities that don’t obey God, and can lose their authority though they still have their power, then are they criminals?

[Rushdoony] That’s a good question. The church has not dealt with it properly. Now, in the Middle Ages, the church did. It would excommunicate a ruler who was attacking and seizing control of the church, as Henry, the Holy Roman Emperor at Canossa, and the pope dissolved all authority and all obedience, and said no one should obey Henry the Emperor, and of course, he had to come and stand outside the door, and knock, asking to be admitted and forgiven, although he was being hypocritical when he did so, but no one was going to obey him. Today, if any churchmen, Protestant of Catholic, said, “Mayor So and So, or Governor So and So is not to be obeyed, because he has sinned against God, and he is transgressing on God’s property, the church,” people would just look at him and think he was crazy. This is how far gone we are, but you see, it’s because we believe more in the state than we do in God, and we are not afraid of God, but we’re afraid of the state. That’s our problem today. Yes?

[Audience] Then, as citizens of a state, if they disobey God, then are they criminals?

[Rushdoony] They are before God, but not necessarily before the state because the state may not be godly.

[Audience] But shouldn’t they be criminals. I mean, if the state is godly?

[Rushdoony] Yes. If they disobey God’s law insofar as it affects social order, but God doesn’t give the state the right, or the church the right over every area of God’s law. I refer to the fact of tithing. There is no penalty that either the church or the state can exercise if you don’t tithe. There are many law of God where neither church, nor state, nor human authority has the right to say, “You do this or else we’ll do this or that to you.” God reserves the right to himself, because he doesn’t allow us to have undue power.

[Audience] But if the state is to be, you know, to obey God and the authority obey God or else they’re illegitimate, and a citizen who doesn’t obey God is illegitimate, then he should be a criminal.

[Rushdoony] Yes, but you see, this is the point at which Catholics and Protestants alike have gotten into trouble. God doesn’t allow us to play God. He says he will judge in many areas. Now, certain kinds of offenses, he says, “This you cannot tolerate. This you must punish,” but if you go through biblical law, you find a great many things where he does not specify any human punishment. Well, what does modern statism or totalitarianism do? It says, “We’re going to control you in everything.” So you have total coercion, and God leaves a vast area where you can be sinned, and you’re not going to be judged until you come face-to-face with God. They are crimes before God, but man isn’t given the right to punish them, for the simple reason that God does now allow man to have too much authority over his fellow man. So there are many kinds of things which are fearful sins before God, where human authorities are to keep hands off.

Does that clarify that point?

[Audience] So, in Romans 12, it says to be a terror to evil-doers and to, the state has a duty to obey God. I think {?} just that in Romans 12, does it say the state has a duty to obey God?

[Rushdoony] Oh yes. The state is ordained by God to be a terror to evil-doers and to be the servant to God, but if the state doesn’t do that, the only one that can punish the state is God, and he will, in his own time. Well, our time really is up, so let’s bow our heads now in prayer.

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that the government is upon thy shoulders. Give us grace to cast our every care upon thee who carest for us, and to leave the government into thy hands. Now give us all traveling mercies as we journey homeward, a blessed night’s rest, and joy in thy service all the days of thy life. In Jesus name. Amen.

End of tape