Systematic Theology - Sin

Sin and Society

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 05

Dictation Name: 05 Sin and Society

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

[Rushdoony, mumbling] Alright, just give me a signal and….

[begin lecture]

Our subject during our first session this evening is “Sin and Society.” “Sin and Society.”

One of the most common myths of our time is the myth of the neutrality of our society to religion. We are told that religion is the concern of the church and of private man and the broad world of the arts and sciences, economics and commerce in the state and elsewhere; the claim is that man moves in a supposedly neutral realm. This neutral realm, depending on the person’s particular viewpoint is the sphere of reason or of common grace or of natural law or of some other supposed common and neutral ground. We need to beware of doctrines that speak of neutrality and a commonality.

The world has been separated by God in such thinking and become a common ground where God and man can interact or meet, but which God dare not take over and say, “This is my territory.” Now such a perspective is a form of unbelief. It does deny emphatically the sovereignty of God and it reduces our faith to a very limited sphere.

Now let me illustrate. Let us suppose that a man is an adulterer, a very small supposition, given the present moral climate. Let us suppose further that he has defrauded his wife of her inheritance and that he is now planning to divorce her and to marry a younger woman. This is not an uncommon situation. In a supposedly neutral world, his sin against his wife is purely a matter of internal relationship within a marriage. Whatever he is in his marriage, he is still, as a citizen, employer or an employee or a neighbor, a good man, supposedly. However, from a biblical point of view, this is impossible. There are no separations of areas before God and now area of neutrality. At every point in time and in eternity, in heaven or in hell, in waking or in sleeping, man stands before the Lord who is his maker and judge. He is one man, God’s creature, and wherever he is, he is under one law—God’s Law. Man gains no diplomatic immunity nor sanctuary before God by moving from one sphere to another. Wherever we are, whatever we do, we stand before God. We are accountable to Him and we shall be judged by Him.

Just as sin is total in the life of man and it effects his total being, and we have the Doctrine of Total Depravity, so sin is total in the life of society. Total depravity means that every aspect of a man’s life and society is tainted by sin so that death haunts every son of Adam and every creature and every culture. Nothing ever created in the way of culture by the sons of Adam can escape the taint of sin.

Technology does not eliminate this death-bound nature of society. Rather, technology increases the scope of sin. Wherever a people lack a sound doctrine of sin, they will also lack a sound doctrine of social order and freedom.

Historian Stephen E. Berk, in Calvinism versus Democracy: Timothy Dwight and The Origins of American Evangelical Orthodoxy, wrote, “While New England Puritans often wrote and spoke of liberty, they certainly intended no democratic or equalitarian meaning of the term. They referred to the liberty of godly societies to follow divine commandments. John Winthrop distinguished this civil or federal liberty with the liberty which was inconsistent or incompatible with authority, condemning the latter as mere license. In the 1760s, the liberal Puritan, Jonathan Mayhew justified resistance to the crown in terms of the Puritan concept of liberty. Disobedience to authority which violated the strictures of God was both lawful and glorious. Even the American Revolution could be supported as a cause in keeping with Puritan liberty. If England’s rulers had failed to keep their covenant with God, if they were interfering with regular divinely-constituted government in Massachusetts, then resistance was a God-given right. Puritan patriots did not, therefore, embrace the Revolution as a democratic movement; they merely regarded it as scrupulous resistance to unlawful authority.” Berk is right, of course, Puritans had a deep aversion to democracy. In time, they also came to distrust Federalism because it developed the authority of the State. It was the Unitarians who were largely Federalists, because they were Statists. True, earlier the Puritans had favored Federalism because of their emphasis on authority.

Now because of the Puritan view of sin, they did not see freedom in humanistic terms. They saw freedom as under God, the covenant freedom “of godly societies to follow divine commandments.” For them, freedom meant the rule of God’s Law. Let me restate that. For the Puritans, freedom meant the rule of God’s Law. Order was thus a matter of faith and obedience and to the degree that men believed and obeyed, they pushed back and nullified the sin and the fall and they established God’s Kingdom.

Now Humanism denies the biblical doctrine of sin. It sees man as autonomous, needing freedom from God to be himself. Freedom for the Humanist is anti-God and anti-Christ. For the Humanist, social order requires not a godly society, but either a statist or an anarchistic order, because freedom and order require the destruction of all constraints upon man except those imposed by man himself. Humanism sees the question of morality, of right and wrong, of human judgment and decision. The Dictionary of Ideas, titled simply Ideas and edited by Gregson and Gibb Smith, insists that all questions, whether they are of morality or ideas about God, behavior in relationship to the state or one’s neighbor or the rules of a parlor game, are matters of human judgment and decision.

But the scripture does not agree. Morality is not a matter for man to decided, but obedience to the Word of God. Humanism limits morality to first our relationship to the state and second, or relationship to other men. It is now adding a third area, our relationship to the environment. But the Bible says that all sin has to do with God because it is God’s Law we violate. David, in Psalm 51:4 says against Thee, Thee only have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight. God’s Law covers all our relationships: personal, civil, commercial, educational, environmental and much, much more. All morality has to do with God and all sin is against God.

Now if Humanism sees man’s freedom as from God, we must see that they look on sin as obedience to God, and virtue is our declaration of independence from God. Berger has said (Peter L. Berger), Facing up to Modernity, that the sexual revolution sees its sexual acts as sacred because they break with God’s Law and sin is then regarded as a religious celebration. Lawless sexuality becomes the key component in being human, and refusing to sin is called ‘being afraid of our bodies’. To get in touch with one’s body in such a way is an imperative of regained health. Sexual liberation is thus a means of independence from God and of creating a freer humanity for the Humanists.

In politics and economics, the same kind of thinking prevails. Freedom from God is morality and sin is obedience to God. Wherever we turn in the world, we have Humanistic politics and economics seeking independence from God as a virtue.

This of course was described long ago in Psalm 2:2, 3. “2The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying,3 Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.” Sin can be described as the affirmation of a sovereignty in contradiction to God’s sovereignty.

When the State claims to be sovereign, it is waging war against the Lord. It is claiming His law-making powers. It is claiming God’s total jurisdiction. We must see the modern state as a war against God. There’s no neutrality in any area of life. All areas are equally under God and His Law and whenever anyone attempts to limit God’s jurisdiction or to withdraw any sphere of life and thought into a supposedly neutral area, he is sinning and he is at war against God.

Very obviously, the modern world is at war against God. The antinomian church is no less at war against the Lord because it limits His sovereign prerogatives of law-making and jurisdiction. But the greatest folly of all is to assume that this war against God is a one-way street. No man is at war with God without paying the price thereof. History is littered with the wreckages of men, of states and of cultures which warred against God. The modern church and state therefore had better take warning.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee that Thy Word is truth and Thy Word plainly sets forth the sin of man. Give us eyes that see and ears that hear as we study Thy Word, that we may know the totality of Thy government and jurisdiction, that Thy Word is truth and Thy Word speaks to every area of life and thought and that all things must be brought into captivity to Jesus Christ as Lord. Make us valiant for truth, strong in grace, and bold by Thy Spirit, in Jesus’ name, amen.

In our next session, we shall deal with sin as personal fulfillment.