Systematic Theology - Sin

Sin as a Privilege and Right

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 15

Dictation Name: 15 – Sin as a Privilege and Right

Year: 1980

Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee that as we face an evil world, we have the confidence of victory, for this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. We pray for the beleaguered churches and Christian schools. We pray, our Father, that Thou wouldst give them a mighty victory and Thou wouldst confound the humanistic Statists and destroy them. Bless us now as we give ourselves to the study of Thy Word. Strengthen us in Thy service, in Jesus’ name, amen.

Our subject in this first session this even in is “Sin as Privilege and Right.” “Sin as a Privilege and Right,” and our scripture is from Genesis 3:1-5.

“1Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2 And the woman said unto the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4 And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die:

5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

The movement of all history is to epistemological self-consciousness. Now epistemological self-consciousness means epistemology knowledge, self-conscious, to know what we are and where we are. Men do not want epistemological self-consciousness. They do not want to admit that they are sinners. They fight the self-knowledge that they are what they are.

I was very interested the first time I encountered it, and I’ve encountered it many times since, when in the 40s I took a man from a state penitentiary in Salem, Oregon clear across two states. And he talked at great length about life in the penitentiary. And the thing that interested me was the gradation into castes. There were certain people who looked down on others in the prison, and would not associate with them. The safe crackers, who were a small handful, regarded themselves an elite and they wouldn’t dirty themselves with contact with some others. And so the prison was highly class-conscious, and different types of criminals regarded themselves as really good men and they were doing something, well, they had a justification for it, so that everybody had a class line. Everybody had a class line. Everybody regarded somebody as the lowest in the scale, but those who were in the lowest had very reason to justify themselves according to their perspective, and they were looking down on somebody else. And all of them saw themselves as, well, I got into trouble, but, ah… they saw themselves as basically all right. Not that they did everything right, but they were reasonably convinced that they were all right.

Man is seldom willing to admit what sin is and what it means and what he is—a sinner, a reprobate. It requires the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart of man to bring that self-knowledge to him. Man fights self-knowledge, epistemological self-consciousness.

But Genesis 3:5 in particular gives us the meaning of sin and its appeal to men. The tempter presents sin as a privilege. God is keeping man from this great privilege, which is a part of the privilege of being a god. And so he says to man, do this and you too shall be a god. You too will have this great privilege which should be open to all. God is trying to keep this privilege to himself, the right to determine good and evil for oneself. God is a jealous God, according to the tempter, but in a different sense than God declares it, and so He will not allow man to have that privilege which is properly His. The doctrine of sin as privilege and right means that man has a divine freedom from law and from moral responsibility. He has the privilege of doing as he pleases. This privilege makes him sovereign over the world around him.

Now for covenant man, our privilege is to be created in the image of God. It is this which sets us apart from the rest of creation, from the animals around us, but for covenant-denying man, it is sin, attempting to be as god which sets him apart and above the rest of creation, so that the Fall has lead man to see sin in his heart as his privilege, as that which sets him above the animals.

Now when we study the history of sin as privilege, we find it has a very, very long history (I’ll do no more than sketch it very briefly, touching on a few high points). Very early in history, we see that sin was the privilege of power, of royalty; eminent domain for example. The king could take what he pleases (this was the theory) from whomever he pleases. And this theory has descended to us today in the powers that every civil government claims, that it can expropriate whatever it chooses for its own purposes. This was exercised in a variety of ways, although some scholars question whether this existed in Medieval Europe, we know that it existed in antiquity and into modern times throughout the world outside of Europe. Ius primae noctis, primae noctis, the right of the Lord to the first night with every girl when she got married. The idea was, of course, that if you had power, you had privilege, and you were an exemption to the law. When Otto Scott, one of our own Chalcedon scholars, wrote James I, he for the first time brought out openly a fact that is in the records, namely that James I was a homosexual. One scholar criticized him, one prominent historian very savagely, for referring to that fact because, he said, homosexuality was a royal privilege. In other words, it should not be condemned in a man or even discussed, lest it demean him. Sin is a royal privilege.

Of course, the nobility and the aristocracy came to share this kind of privilege, the privilege of sin, to a considerable degree. One of the most interesting episodes of course, is that of Voltaire and his friends who were discussing their Atheism and showing their total contempt of morality. But when Voltaire’s servant came in to wait on them, Voltaire silenced all of them. He did not want his servant to be a skeptic of an Atheist, lest he rob him or even murder him in is bed to seize what belonged to Voltaire. It was well and good for the intellectuals and the aristocracy to have such ideas, but not for the common man. Sin was the privilege of the upper class.

However, the concept of sin as privilege was democratized with the French Revolution. Very definitely, very openly, it was a privilege now of the middle classes, of artists in particular, so that to be an artist was to be one who had contempt for the law—the concept of the Bohemian, which artists of course still very flagrantly maintain. They must be lawless, it is held, because this is their privilege. It went so far as to make the middle of the last century what some have called the age of the courtesan, or the mistress, who is regarded as something of a goddess. One scholar, Joanna Richardson has said, “Sexual license had always been a privilege of the aristocracy, an element in their education, but now it was claimed by the middle classes who had risen to wealth and power.” She speaks of the apotheosis of the courtesan; that is the divinization, making her into a goddess. And she says, “A famous mistress, a wild way of life became status symbols. The duc de Gramont Cadarousse, it was reported, lit a cigar on a race course, with an English £1,000 note, which he had won because the crackling paper got on his nerves.” (A £1,000 note in those days was worth about 5,000 of hard money at a time when a man’s income was about a gentleman’s income was about £60 a year.) But by the end of the last century, the privilege was extended even further downward. Now, sin had always been popular with all classes, but people had known they were doing wrong. Now sin came to be seen as a privilege, a right. And all classes held the idea.

It marked also the rise of Neomercantilism, the idea that you were entitled to a subsidy from the State. The free market was too confined and so capitalists saw themselves as entitled to privileges as their right—subsidies—from their governments. Then unions and farmers also began to seek subsidies. And the 20th century has seen the democratization of sin. And of course now the State exists to make sure that the privilege of sin is available to all classes.

Justice has been replaced by human rights, that is, the law of man. And we have had the sexual revolution which is the idea that sin is everybody’s privilege and right. Thus, the doctrine of sin as privilege and right is basic to modern man. For people in our day, liberation means freedom from God’s Law, freedom to sin. In the early 1970s, I heard a radical student say to a group of middle aged people, that they could not really be free unless they indulged in a variety of perversions and adultery, not as sin, but as assertions of freedom. Now, all of this is implicit in Genesis 3:1-5. The tempter says sin is your privilege. It is your right. And God is putting a bad label on it to keep you from realizing your potentiality.

Now for covenant man, for the believer, it is righteousness which is man’s privilege. God in His grace and mercy has established a covenant with man. For God to establish a covenant to bind Himself to man is an act of grace. A covenant is also a law relationship. It sets forth the righteousness or the justice of God. And so for us, it is not sin which is privilege, but for us as Christians, it is righteousness, justice which is our covenant privilege.

Are there any questions now? [Dead air]

Any comments? Any questions? [Dead air]

Well if not, then we’ll have a recess for a few minutes and then continue with our second session.