Systematic Theology - Sin

Sin as Personal Fulfillment

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 06

Dictation Name: 06 Sin as Personal Fulfillment

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

“Sin as Personal Fulfillment” is our subject in this session.

In the past generation, a great deal has been written about being a real person. A variety of psychological cults have devoted themselves to this supposed problem. We have a quest of personhood, of finding oneself, of finding oneself, let us add, out of the morass of religion, morality, superstition, and the like. Now, all of this is of course, very radically anti-Christian.

What these people are calling for is the development of a free personality, that is, one who is freed from God, one who makes his own decisions as an autonomous creative and ultimate individual. Ego-building is basic to all such cults.

We have gone so far that it has become routine to defend delinquents and criminals and to explain their actions as a cry for help from a wounded ego. In terms of this, we are asked to view the delinquent, the homosexual, the murderer and other offenders as first of all, social victims whose egos need self-confidence and greater freedom. Their offenses are held to be an attempt to strike back at barriers. All of this converts sin into sickness and the criminal offender into a victim. Now oddly enough, at the same time, the Humanist talks about the ultimacy of man. And yet, man who in Humanism claims to be a god, talks about himself as a victim.

The Bible, of course, denounces this attempt by man to be a real person—an independent being and declares that man is totally dependent upon God. In Him we live and move and have our being and at every point in our life and being, and at every action, in every moment, we are totally dependent upon God. No declaration of independence by man can ever resolve his dependence upon God. Man’s sin and unbelief do not remove for an instant man’s dependence upon God. Rather, man’s sin merely changes his relationship to god from grace to judgment. The uniqueness of man is not in himself. It is in his relationship to God as His image-bearer and covenant creature.

Man’s sin is to pretend to be a god; his own god, determining good and evil for himself, according to Genesis 3:5. This claim to be God means also the claim to infallibility. This is rarely openly stated, but it is true. Berger has noted, “The broad tradition of liberal ideology, all the way back to the Enlightenment has an especially close relationship to the process of modernization. Indeed the argument can be made that this tradition embodies the myth of modernity more than any other. It is not surprising then that it has been singularly blind to the importance and at times even the very existence of mediating structures. Liberalism is above all a faith in rationality. Its designs for society are highly rational, abstract universalistic.” For Liberalism, the ultimate test of all things is this ultimate reason. And so reason is given a place of implicit infallibility. We are told that reason may, in process, often prove fallible, but the ultimate judge over all things is held to be reason. Thus there is a deferred infallibility modestly maintained but all the same, reason replaces God.

With others, however, it is the scientific method which becomes man’s potentially infallible tool, so that depending on the variety of humanists, the doctrine of infallibility is maintained in differing ways. Freud, of course, denied the validity of reason; he saw it as a façade of the unconscious. He transferred infallibility to man’s unconscious and man’s unconscious for Freud became a wellspring of infallible knowledge of man as an individual. I deal with this in my book on Freud. Of course, the modern state has similar doctrine: vox populi, vox Dei, “The voice of the people is the voice of God.”

However, today we are seeing the disintegration of Humanism. Drucker has seen present events as possibly foreshadowing “The end of the age of the infallible society.” However, the presumption and the fact of sin is still very much a part of our world. The modern quest for personhood is a quest for sin. It is an attempt to replace God with man. However, sometimes in the process, God is retained to some degree. And so you have doctrines which use God as a kind of back-up. Instead of being the Lord and Creator of all things, some doctrines hold that God is an actual experience. The power in the experience leads to endowment with form, so speaks Van der Loos. However, in such a perspective, God is a research for man, and not Lord. And to regard God as a resource is sin, for it treats ourselves as sovereign and God as something to be used.

Too often, too, men sin in their supposed Christianity. They assume that they are sovereign and that they can go to God and ask God to fill a personal need. Like food and water, God becomes a resource for them to meet. God is to meet the resources and serve human wants. The key is personal fulfillment. But this is all unscriptural. We do not approach God to be fulfilled, but to be commanded and used for His kingdom and glory. Paul says of God, for of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever, amen. (Romans 11:36).

The cult of personality, however, reduces God from Lord to an experience and a resource. Those who have such a faith may call themselves Christians, but they are humanists. And God then merely helps man realize himself and take care of him and look after him, so that man has no problems and can have that which he desires.

We have today a great proliferation of crime and discontent. It is related to the cult of being a real person. Because this cult requires the practice of sin, that is, to play at being God, and it requires this sin has a religious act. Modern man puts the emphasis on the individual and his welfare, his salvation, his fulfillment. We are told that a marriage is expendable if it is in conflict with personal fulfillment. As Stern has noted, Aaron Stern, in Me: the Narcissistic American, marriage which was once the foundation of society has been sacrificed by many in favor of new definitions of personal pleasure. The goal is “intimacy without vulnerability, love without commitment or responsibility.” Men want rebirth without cost. And in some cults, which call themselves Christian, adults crawl into big cribs to play at being reborn. The cult of personality creates a people who are the takers of the world, not the doers. This is why their defeat is sure.

Our Lord tells us that the meek shall inherit the earth. The meek are the blessed ones. The word meek means gentled, tamed, broken to harness and humbled. And we cannot read that word humanistically. Meekness is in relationship to God as Lord. The blessed meek are faithful and obedient to God and His Word. Therefore they are the heirs of the earth in and under Him.

The lot of the sinner, on the other hand, is disinheritance. Matthew 13:12 says what they have shall be taken from them. The cult of personality, thus, leads to the destruction of man. Its Adamism isolates man from God and society. It works to dissolve marriage and every relationship. It exalts man as his own religious goal. The consequence of sin, the scripture assures us, is always death.

Men today therefore seek sin as personal fulfillment. In all the psychological and religious cults of our time, the goal is, however nobly it may be phrased, really sin and therefore it is radically destructive of man.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, keep us from sin and keep us from trying to dignify our sin as virtue, as self-realization or self-fulfillment, or any other like thing. Give us grace to know wherein we are sinners and how we have sinned, that day-by-day we may grow, we might serve Thee better, we might mortify that aspect of us which is not in conformity to Thee. We thank Thee for Thy Word, that Thy Word is truth. Thy Word corrects and instructs us and guides the reins of our hearts. And we thank Thee. In Jesus’ name, amen.