Systematic Theology – Covenant

The Civil Covenant

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: 11-22

Genre: Speech

Track: 11 of 22

Dictation Name: 11 The Civil Covenant

Location/Venue:

Year:

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we come into Thy presence again rejoicing in the privilege of being Thy people, of being the recipients of Thy grace and of Thy word. Make us strong by Thy word and by Thy spirit that we might be a force in these troubled times for the shaking of the things that are and the establishing of those things that are of Thee and are unshakable. Bless us in our study in Jesus ‘ name, Amen.

We have been dealing with the doctrine of the covenant and our subject in our first session tonight is the civil covenant. Now as we come to the doctrine of the covenant just to review briefly there are two kinds of covenant, a covenant is a treaty of law. It is a treaty between two parties, it can be a treaty between equals but God’s covenant with man is that type of covenant which only can be classed as a treaty between a sovereign and a subject, between radical unequals. Now, in such a covenant the treaty is entirely of grace but a treaty, a covenant, is always a bond of law between two groups. When it is between a superior and an inferior the superior gives the law so that in the bible what we have is an act of grace whereby God as the sovereign gives His creatures His law. Thus, the biblical covenant is unescapably a matter of law and a matter of grace. The two are inseparable. Now, our concern this evening as I indicated is with the civil covenant. Before we can deal with the subject it is important to look at one of the great aberrations in the history of mankind, the social contract doctrine. The social contract doctrine of course is basic to the modern world, its origins go back to the renaissance but they come to focus in the popularization given by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

According to the social contract doctrine society originally did not exist, only anarchistic peoples. Every man was his own law. We have in fact here something of a parody of Genesis. Genesis 3:5, every man his own god knowing or determining good and evil for himself. However, according to the social contract doctrine all men were their own gods, their own laws, and this was the state of nature and it was essentially a beneficent, a good state. However this state of nature proved rather limiting and so men came together to form a social contract for mutual protection. Every man surrendered some freedom to gain more of a different sort, civil freedom. Now, the doctrine of the social contract was developed to replace the doctrine of the covenant. It has radically undercut in the modern world the doctrine of the covenant. We can see as the doctrine of the social contract rises and as it begins to capture the minds of men the doctrine of the covenant recedes and with it biblical law which is essential to the covenant, also recedes in its force, in its sway. Now, we need to understand some of the implications of the social contract doctrine. First of all, the original state of nature as one of anarchy. Out of this came the idea of the noble savage which has played so great a part in the modern world, the idea of original innocence, as anarchism was also born out of this idea. This concept of the noble savage has so possessed the minds of men that to this day we have countless numbers of anthropologists and social scientists who believe that so called primitive man wherever he is encountered must be allowed to remain in his native state unspoiled by civilization and in particular by Christian missions.

As a matter of fact a major war is now underway against any evangelization of these native peoples. A few months ago John Quad had an article in the Chalcedon Report about what had happened to Chester Bitterman in Bolivia, how anthropologists funded by the United States Federal Government working among these natives wanted to keep them untouched, unspoiled by Christianity, and so they had taken all kinds of films of the natives around the Wycliffe translators little shack. What they had done was to ask the natives to make it an action shot, pick up a rake and act as though you’re raking or you are hoeing or pick up a broom as though you’re sweeping the front of the Wycliffe translator’s steps. Then these shots were put together to give a film on the exploitation of these primitives by the missionaries. This film that was put together ran for months adjacent to campuses so that radical students could be inflamed by them with the net result that radical students kidnapped and murdered Chester Bitterman, one of the Wycliffe Translators. The idea of the noble savage is very deep in the modern world. Scientists and writers have encountered cannibals and all kinds of depraved practices among various peoples the world over and yet have vindicated them because these people were free of Christianity and therefore somehow represented virtue. We owe to the social contract doctrine this concept of the original state of nature and the idea of the noble savage.

Then second, we owe the contract idea, from the contract idea rather, we have humanism in civil government. At first monarchy saw themselves as a social contract, the king with the people. Then the revolutions created new doctrines of a social contract, a contract among men which creates a form of civil government and wherein men create laws. Earlier it was the king creating the laws, now the people create the laws. The law of God is set aside in every form of the social contract whether it is monarchism, republicanism, democracy, Nazism, socialism, you name it. All of them are at war with God’s law. The social contract insists on humanism in civil government and in the process it redefines man. For Marx the true man is the proletariat, he alone can express himself and create laws and he does this of course through the elite who are his voice. For the Nazis it was racial man, every group of revolutionists in the modern world presents itself always as the true people. By definition no one else is the people, no one else has the right to express themselves, only they constitute the voice of the people. The social contract doctrine replaces God’s law with man’s law and so the social contract doctrine has been one of the most powerful anti-Christian forces in the history of the world. It is an uphill battle to reestablish covenantalism. Covenantalism begins with the presupposition of God’s sovereignty and therefore of God’s law. Not the law of man, but God’s law, covenant law, must prevail. In Exodus 20 we have the giving of the Ten Commandments, the terms of the covenant and then we have in Exodus 24 the cutting of the covenant and we have the blood sprinkled on both the people and the altar and the people declaring: all the words that the Lord hath spoken will we do.

As a result Israel was ruled by Moses, then by judges raised up of God and the seventy elders who are the heads of the respective tribes coming out of a system of eldership, every man trained to be an elder, an elder over every ten men, elders over fifties, hundreds, thousands and so on up to the seventy at the top. Moreover, all rule was to be in terms of God’s law. This is very definitely stated of the king, if they shall have a king, and therefore in terms of case law of all those who are lesser than kings. According to Deuteronomy 17:18 following:

“And it shall be, when he 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:

19 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:

20 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 other words, the civil magistrate of any and every rank must study God’s word. This is righteousness. Righteousness is another term for what we today more commonly speak of as justice. Hence, all rule, the scripture declares, is to be covenantal, not merely in the church but in the state, in the family, in every sphere of life. Now as we go through the centuries we indeed find that Christendom was often very unfaithful to the premise of covenantalism but it at least paid lip service to the doctrine of the covenant and the covenant and its law was always there to judge rulers. It would be easy to chronicle the sins, for example, of rulers in the middle ages, but the fact that is clear then and subsequently to the present then regarded more seriously than now, the coronation service always stressed the covenantal aspect of rule.

That rulers were under God, to this day in the coronation service in England a bible is formally presented to the king or queen who is crowned to indicate that it is in terms of this that they are to rule and that this is God’s covenant law. Now, even though the form today has greatly lowered the significance of all of this it is still there. The background of civil government in Christendom has been covenantal but since the time of the French Revolution covenantalism has been steadily undermined. It survives as a relic, primarily, as in the coronation service or in the fact that the constitution still requires an oath of office, an oath being a solemn vow to abide by God’s covenant so that the oath of office was taken on a bible open to Deuteronomy 28, affirming the blessings for obedience and the curses for disobedience. The modern world has forsaken the covenant for the social contract. For God’s law they have substituted man’s law and the result is this: all modern political systems are in crisis without exception. Humanism is erosive of society, authority is gone and we are in a time comparable to that of the judges, in those days we are told there was no king in Israel, God was not seen as their king and every man did that which was right in his own eyes. Because authority is denied men are lawless and where there is no authority there is no freedom. There is no concept of truth in our time because like [unknown] modern man says in effect what is truth. Pragmatism prevails, what works for me, can I get by with it. Modern man does not think in terms of truth nor in terms of authority.

And so we have a dramatic social erosion all around us. More and more anarchy is becoming a problem in urban life and in rural life. The newest issue of the California Farmer has an article of considerable significance on the amount of theft now that farmers in the valley are experiencing. Theft of tractors and the like, of trucks and theft of crops. One man who went away for a day found when he came back that his grapes had been picked, this type of thing is becoming more and more commonplace. Lawlessness, anarchy, is prevailing and all over the country. In some parts of the Midwest where school athletics are especially prominent it has become dangerous to go to the local high school’s football game or basketball game because at that time houses in town and on the farms are ransacked wholesale. We have a crisis of authority, of legitimacy in the modern world. Man’s authority always leads to tyranny. As Paul said in 2 Corinthians 3:17:

“Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”

And we can say there alone. Very obviously the modern world is suffering because it is denied the doctrine of the covenant and the sad fact is, among those people who still talk about covenantalism the doctrine of the covenant is limited to the church. As though God were lord only of the church, as though God in His word when He gave the law gave only church law, but you know I’ve read through the law and very little of it is church law. It is civil law, it is family law, it is law for business relationships for every area of life, for weights and measures, for sanitation, for all things.

Because God being creator of heaven and earth and Lord of all things requires by His covenant that the whole of His creation be under His covenant and therefore His covenant law speaks to every area of life, the idea that is so prevalent among many Christians who do hold to the covenant that it is something limited to the church is really a denial of the Lord and His sovereignty. It reduces Him to polytheism, to being no more than a little god like the gods of the city states whose jurisdiction did not extend beyond the city limits. And all too many so called covenantal believers see God’s covenant and His sphere as limited to the walls of the church. This is not biblical covenantalism, hence the civil covenant is extremely important for us to be mindful of and to live in terms of. Are there any questions now concerning the civil covenant? Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well all of them in the modern world, I emphasize that, in the modern world, have their basis in the social contract doctrine and therefore all of them feel that man is the lawmaker. All of them produce a humanistic law. In some forms it is more pleasing to us because there will be relics of a biblical morality in it but it’s on a I like it and therefore will include it basis. I’ve often referred to a classmate of mine who now dead was a very distinguished scientist and he was all in favor of the second half of the Ten Commandments but he wanted it without the first. The sad part was, he couldn’t justify the second part to his own children.

Take away God and what authority do you have to say Thou shalt not kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness nor covet? Any other questions, yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes a good question, what is the proper form of civil government. I believe that the system of elders devised in the bible is something we need to return to in church and state alike. Every man needs to be trained to be ruler in his own household and to develop his capacity to rule generally. Then out of every ten one is chosen to be an elder over ten, in fact, originally the synagogue and then the church could not be constituted without ten men who are heads of households. Then a system of elders going on up until you have a national council and this was the pattern originally applied by the church and we have a survival of it in the College of Cardinals, it was originally seventy cardinals with the high priest being the bishop of Rome and all of the seventy cardinals were elders, laymen, exclusively. It has only been in relatively recent times that they have been priests or bishops. Now, in terms of this government then whether church or state rests on the family, the basic unit. It rests on the strength of the family. Moreover, in such a form of government you do not have a legislative power given to man. It is an interesting fact that originally in this country the courts decided all issues out of the bible and congress did not see its power as one of lawmaking but as a procedures of the implications of certain things. As a result all the laws of congress for the first couple of generations are practically nothing, very few and far between, it was only as humanism began to take over that congress saw itself as having the power to make laws.

And of course the courts began to take on a similar outlook and today we have the usurpation by the courts of the rights of the legislation and the executive branches of the federal government. Does that help answer that question?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] This is why I believe the best way to organize a church is to go back to the biblical pattern. Train the men, everyone to be an elder, and then one elder over every ten so that they have the affective government of the church. They are the ones that are to be first consulted by the families, if there be a problem. Now, this, excuse me, this was to a great extent the procedure in the Scottish kirk and the elders would make a regular visitation of those families under their jurisdiction in the early days. In fact they would hear all the children in the recitation of their catechism. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. In…yes, in the second volume of the Institutes which we hope will be out by the end of the year I give a list from scripture of the various texts that refer to the different types of elders and their jurisdiction. So that there were several forms of courts, ruled by elders, and the eldership really covered every area of life so that even in the time of the kings the force and power of the eldership still was considerable. Yes?

[Question] Apart from what we’re seeing in some of the legal areas, Christian lawyers, do you see any other areas that are being occupied if you will by Christians in this direction of eldership?

[Rushdoony] I think we are definitely going back to an eldership although people have not given it a name. What we are seeing is a return to government on the grassroots in terms of the biblical pattern.

Now Dr. [unknown] referred earlier before we began to the courts of reconciliation, to give them a title, which have been set up by lawyers. This kind of thing of course goes right back to the Old Testament, now that’s a dramatic example of biblical law. And this type of thing was specialized, when you go to the middle ages, you find just as in the Old Testament you had specialized courts which were frozen relics to a great degree but they represented the early church’s cities of the elders, cities of the fields, I mean elders of the city, elders of the field, elders who handled the family cases and so on. So there was specialized jurisdiction and a great deal of decentralization. I see everywhere signs of this kind of thing arising, for example, in the kind of thing done at the Chalcedon Presbyterian Church in Dunwoody, Georgia where they have a very strong program of assisting the needy members of the congregation with loans without interest or the Panorama City Church under John MacArthur with its program among the poor. In one area after another Christians are taking back the government from the state, of course the Christian schools are the most dramatic example of this. So these represent a restoration of the biblical pattern. Men are working their way inspired I believe of the Holy Spirit back to such a pattern.

Well if there are...yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes well we’re facing the same thing here and we’re to blame for it because we have allowed the state to take over government. The root of Christian government is the tithe and as we get back to tithing we will create a Christian order. Now Dr. [unknown] as editor of the journal is going to devote the second issue under his editorship to precisely this kind of thing. So it will be an issue to look forward to because it will develop this thesis of what Christians can do to take back the government, to do what God ordained that they shall do and have godly reconstruction in terms of scripture. Well, we’ll take a ten minute break and then continue with Blood and Life.