Systematic Theology – The State

Subordinationist Christology and the State

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 24

Dictation Name: 24 Subordinationist Christology and the State

Year: 1970’s

Now, to continue with our second subject this evening, we shall deal with Subordinationist Christology and the State.

In The Foundations of Social Order, a book which was published about fourteen or fifteen years ago, I touched on the implications of Christology for political life. A subordinationist Christology, that is, one which weakens the doctrine of Christ, makes Christ less than equal with God and one with God. The result is the church and all of life is made subordinate to the state. Of course, in paganism, the state is the supreme institution. Paganism requires that every area of life and thought be insubordination to the state, and no power is recognized as having any validity in challenging it.

Now, the term “God” covers a multitude of meanings and definitions. It can refer to a deified man, to the first cause as a limiting concept, to an intellikean{?} nature, and to much more. Only in its biblical meaning, understood in terms of Jesus Christ, can we have a true meaning for God and a freedom from the monolithic and divine state.

Now fallen man equates reality with the world he knows. The scientist does the same thing, because he is usually a fallen man. He says the world is that which I can know and measure. Anything my net doesn’t catch isn’t a fish, in other words. So he limits reality to what he knows. Now, many people with their superstitions believe that they know certain things more, but the interesting thing is that in all these faiths, whatever their belief concerning the afterlife, this world is the center. It is interesting to note the word “afterlife.” It speaks of the spirits as really after life, and the Greeks had that notion. They called the spirits shades, and these shades were ghosts who were barely alive. In fact, if you summoned up the shades from the dead, the realm of the dead, to speak to you, the only way they could communicate was if you sacrificed an animal and put the blood in a basin for the spirits to come and drink of it, and get enough vitality to talk for a few minutes, because this was the real world. Anything beyond it was the after-world, the afterlife.

As a result, the gods belonged to that half-world, and were subject to fate. The gods were simply deified men, and powerful spirits.

The central arena, in other words, for paganism, was this world, especially the political order, but the Bible tells us something very different. The incarnation tells us that the center of history is the triune God, and Jesus Christ is the visible Lord of all things, and all authorities are under him. For he shall reign till he has put all things under his feet.

Subordinationism diminishes Christ and hence, his authority, and then the high point is not Christ. The truly great world is not the throne of God and his realm, but it’s here and now, and therefore, the state. In the great Church of England theologian, Richard Hooker, writing in the time of the Tudors, we find this kind of thinking very definitely in evidence, a subordinationist doctrine of Christ. Hooker wrote, “Seeing therefore, the Father alone is originally that deity which Christ originally is not. For Christ is God by being of God like by issuing out of light. It followeth hereupon that whatsoever Christ hath common unto him with his heavenly Father, the same of necessity must be given him, but naturally and eternally given, not bestowed by way of benevolence and favor, as the other gifts both are.” In other words, he said Christ is not quite on the level of God the Father. He is very definitely below him.

He went on to say, “The union therefore, of the flesh with deity is to that flesh a gift of principle, grace, and favor. For by virtue of this grace, man is really made God. A creature is exalted above the dignity of all creatures, and hath all creatures else under it.” So, he says that the deification of Christ is, in a sense, the deification of all men.

Now, to demonstrate this, let me quote again. “Finally sith God hath deified our nature, though not by turning it into himself yet by making it his own inseparable habitation we cannot now conceive how God should without man either exercise divine power, or receive the glory of the divine praise, for man is in both an associate of deity.” Man is a partner of God, and God has deified our nature, and God no longer can do anything apart from human flesh. So what did this do? It made King Henry VIII and Elizabeth, and their successors the head of the church. So the church could not govern itself. The state governed the church. By lowering Christ, he exalted man. He made God’s government operative through the state and its monarchy.

Now, to understand what happened, let’s look at a lawyer and his evaluation of what was done by Hooker, by Henry VIII, by Elizabeth, by James, by the Tudor and Steward monarchs, and by the theologians who worked out their doctrinal basis. A German attorney of the last century, a barrister, Felix McCower, wrote, in the Constitutional History and Constitution of the Church of England, “In the 16th century, the Reformation robbed the church almost wholly of its independence. The king was now free in filling Episcopal sees, to ignore the wishes, both of the chapters and the pope. Moreover, the preferment at the disposal of the crown was otherwise considerably increased by the confiscation of monastic estates with the rights of patronage attached thereto, and by the reservation of such rights upon the new foundation of secular chapters. The dissolution of the monasteries was the destruction of those centers of ecclesiastical power which, until then, had been least accessible to royal influence. It operated at the same time to sweep away the ecclesiastical majority in the upper house of Parliament. The convocations could henceforth issue binding laws only with the consent of the crown, whereas, the crown exercised an uncontrolled right to settle by ordinance the affairs of the church. Appeal lay from the decisions of the ecclesiastical courts to a civil tribunal, whilst in the high commission court, the crown set up a judicial body, dependant on its instructions with punitory{?} powers in matters ecclesiastic. To all this was added lastly that general authority to govern the church involved in the idea of supremacy, an authority which was manifested especially in the visitations carried out under the royal name.”

Now, this has very far-reaching implications, which you do not get in any of your English history textbooks, or European history textbooks. Let’s see what they are, to analyze what McCower{?} said. First, we are told in the textbooks that Henry VIII confiscated the monasteries and convents because of immorality. It was a part of his reform. Well, here and there, there were instances of immorality, and I am sure that if a commission from Sacramento went up and down California, it could find evidences of some scandalous living by some ministers, carrying on with some church women, or misappropriating funds. Would that provide the ground to seize every church in the State of California, all its assets and properties? Well, that’s what Henry VIII did. He confiscated them all.

Now, these were the religious foundations of the day. This is where the wealth of England, to a great extent was, the foundation, wealth, and these monasteries were providing the relief and the welfare for all of England. Immediately after, there were tremendous social repercussions, because the whole of the welfare system was destroyed, a Christian welfare system. The monastic lands and properties, and you read such horrors about these lands in your college textbooks, the tremendous wealth of the church in these lands. Those lands provided work for the poor. They provided meat and grain for the poor. They provided an income which cared for the poor. The monasteries provided a lodging place for anyone who was traveling and needed a place to stay. There was free food, free lodging. All that was destroyed. The social dislocation in England, and throughout Europe, because it was done all over Europe, was enormous, but consider another fact. All these abbots sat in the House of Lords, and the minute their power was broken and they were the most independent churchmen in England, it meant that there was no roadblock to the crown. The crown could control the lords. It could not control the abbots.

On top of that, by creating new peers by bribing the old and new peers wherever he could with some of the wealth seized from these church lands, he made them partners in his crime, so it was not likely that Parliament was going to provide any problem to Henry VIII. So, the confiscation of the monasteries broke the back of the freedom of the church, and today you have all kinds of objections to the church having too much property that’s untaxed, or any income from church properties, even though that income may be all used for Christian work. That’s denied now. There’s one church in the Bay area which had a real problem. They had a lovely sanctuary, they had some beautiful landscaping around it, and they had the required number of parking space by the ordinance, and they had a patch of ground about the size of this room left over, which they were also going to landscape, but they were told it would be taxed, because according to the city ordinance, only so much land could be used for landscaping, and only so much parking space, a required amount, and anything over that would be taxed. You can see how the church is being whittled down, and now they are challenging the right of the church to be tax exempt. In other words, to control it. This is what Henry did.

Then second, the church was governed by the crown, and the crown had an uncontrolled right, according to McCower{?}. The church became a department of the state and had no freedom.

And third, the appointments to Episcopal sees were now political appointments, and bishops became a sort of civil service. Moreover, since the livings{?} under them were controlled, it meant that fewer and fewer of these were filled so the bishop could have a living, and the bishop therefore, have an increased income and he could pay off the crown, and so on, a very evil system resulted.

This is what subordinationism does. When you demote Christ, you demote his power, you demote the power of the church, and you make it a slave of the state, but subordinationism comes in other ways. Pietism produced dramatic subordinationism. Because pietism did not stress doctrine, it did not stress the lordship. In fact, it abandoned the lordship of Christ over every area, and it said, “We are concerned religiously with the inner life only,” and even then, not with doctrines such as atonement and justification, and sanctification, but with the emotional state of the soul, with pious gush.

The results were horrible. I’m going to read to you a couple of hymns from the era. They are far from the worst, because some of them indulged in erotic talk about “precious Jesus.” This is one hymn, Moravian communion hymn about Christ’s wounds. That was a very popular topic in both Catholic and Protestant pietism. Let me quote now.

“My soul feeds on roses sweet when she smells wounds flavor,

And reviews her safe retreat and in thy grace, my savior.

Draws to thee and we will come into thy wound’s deep places,

Where hidden is the honeycomb of thy sweet love’s embraces.

My dear bleeding savior, O let me embrace thee,

While thousand drops cover, hang on thee and grace thee

And catch the juice thy wounds produce.

O {?} can’t thy sweetness be expressing

Because thou art all thoughts and words surpassing

Now strikes by hour, now runs my spring

The blood stream now does roll its rushing sound

To sleep does sing my body and my soul.”

Or here is another, also about the wounds of Jesus.

“My dearest most beloved lamb

I who in tenderest union am to all thy cross er birds bound

Smell too and kiss each corpse’s wound

Yes at the side holds part

There pants and throbs my heart

I see still how the soldier fierce

Did thy most lovely plure{?} a piece

That dearest side hole{?}

Be praised, O God, for this spear slipped

I thank thee, soldier, too for it

I’ve licked this rock salt round and round.

Where can such relish else be found?”

Not only so, as Dr. Sessler{?} commented a generation ago on his study of some of these hymns, “In time there came into use a whole list of meaningless words and phrases which were on all lips.” Now, every parent is familiar with baby talk, and how mothers will indulge in baby talk with their children, and coin little words and expressions to express just a kind of baby talk answer to the child. The church went in for this, and you were a true Christian if you could babble this baby talk, and gush with it constantly.

In our own day, this is not altogether dead. I know in the thirties, there were groups in the Bay area where you were very quickly regarded with suspicion in those churches if you did not lard every third or fourth word with some emotional word, and one particular one that was very heavily used was “precious.” My precious Jesus, precious Lord, his precious work, his precious this, precious that. I’ve rarely ever used that word since those days because it turned my stomach so. These same people knew very little doctrine, very little about the Bible, but they were full of this talk, this emotional gush, and if you did not indulge in it, they could not believe you were a Christian. In fact, if you proved then that you knew the Bible well, their response was, “Well, you have a head knowledge and not a heart knowledge.”

Now, this is the kind of thing that destroyed the church, and gave rise to the kind of statism we have today, because Christ was subordinated. He was not sovereign. Sovereignty was left to the state, and yet sovereignty was once only a theological term.

There’s another area where subordinationism has come in. Where the doctrine of predestination is denied. Warfield said, “Our difficulties with predestination arise from no doubt unnatural unwillingness to acknowledge ourselves to be wholly at the disposal of another. We wish to be at our disposal. We wish to belong to ourselves, and we resent belonging, especially belonging absolutely to anybody else, even if that anybody else be God. We are in the mood of the singer of the hymn beginning, ‘I was a wandering sheep when he declares of himself I will not be controlled. We will not be controlled, or rather, to speak more accurately, we will not admit that we are controlled. I say that it is more accurate to say that we will not admit that we are controlled, for we are controlled whether we admit it or not. To imagine that we are not controlled is to imagine that there is no God, for when we say God, we say control. If a single creature which God has made has escaped beyond his control, at the moment he has done so, he has abolished God, a God who could or wouldn’t make a creature when he could not or would not control, is no God. The moment he should make such a creature whom he cannot control, he would, of course, abandon his throne. The universe he has created would have ceased to have been his universe, or rather, it would cease to exist. For the universe is held together only by the control of God.”

When the church denies that control to the triune God, it surrenders it to the state. It says total planning and control is then in the hands of the state rather than of God, and the state recognizes this. This is why the state has always been hostile when it is humanistic, to the Reformed faith, and to predestination. Every denial of predestination leads to subordinationism.

End of tape