Biblical Doctrine of the Family

An Introduction to the Christian Family

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 01

Dictation Name: 01 An Introduction to the Christian Family

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

Let us begin with prayer. O Lord, our God, bless us in thy service and make us strong in our family life, that we might serve thee acceptably, might do thy will here upon earth, and might be more than conquerors through Christ our Lord. In his name we pray. Amen.

Our studies that we begin tonight will be on the biblical doctrine of the family. As usual, we will have two sessions with a break in between, and our first will be an introduction to the Christian Family. One of our problems culturally is that the past, because of the rapid changes in the world, is easily forgotten, and because the media controls our minds to the extent it does, because of the heavy exposure, we forget even the recent past. This is especially true in our age because more people are now living than have ever died in all of history, from day one until now. Most of the people living have been born since World War 2. Those of us who go back before World War 2 represent a part of history that is very rapidly disappearing, and it is amazing how much is being forgotten, how much the world has changed since 1940, and especially since 1914.

Perhaps to illustrate how dramatically the world has changed, I can begin with an illustration that goes back to World War 2, the declaration of war, and then the draft, which followed. The draft had begun before, but it was stepped up and it became a grim and very real thing with the outbreak of war. Most of you know, I believe, that my background is Armenian. One of the things that created shockwaves of horror in the Armenian community was the draft, one aspect of the draft. The older generation had come here out of the Armenian massacres in Turkey, and regarded the United States as a kind of modified Garden of Eden, a paradise, a marvelous place to be, and their love and loyalty to this country was very great. My oldest aunt, a widow, had only one surviving son, and he was drafted. That created shockwaves up and down the state and like acts created shockwaves from one end of the country to the other among the Armenian community, because this was a violation of family life to take an only son. It was the destruction of the family and that’s how it was viewed. Of course it happened in a number of instances. Some of you may recall, in one family, Irish, all the Kelly sons were on one ship and all died when that ship was sunk, but the older generation kept saying over and over again, not even in Turkey, the most evil of powers did they ever take an only son until they decided to exterminate all Greeks and Armenians. Then they drafted every last one, and then we knew it was genocide, and it was time to take up arms and fight, and now, the United States is doing the same.

What disturbed no one else, disturbed a number of foreign-born groups, because they saw it in a way that Americans did not, as an attack on the family, as an assault on the basic institution as God ordained it to be. The family in scripture is central to life. It is God’s basic institution. It is the locale of serving God, of growing in his grace and in his service.

Our modern view of the family and of marriage is very warped, because the modern world is statist, and it sees the state as the central institution. It is not the church nor the state, nor the school. It is, in terms of scripture, the family.

Moreover, as we approach marriage, our modern view is again a very warped one. In fact, this very warped perspective is routinely taught, not only in the so-called family education classes, but through books and popular literature, and even through churches. According to this modern view of marriage, marriage is a natural act. It involves sexual mating. It is common to the world of animals in some form or another, and as students are told in classes in high school and college today, some forms of animal life mate for life. Others mate annually. All of this is a false perspective. To view marriage as a naturalistic institution is to lose the central point. Marriage is more than a natural act. It is a moral and religious act. It is a religious commitment to live together in terms of God’s law-word, in the service of God, and to rear children, as scripture says, “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Marriage is, in terms of the Bible, the first and basic religious vocation.

We are inclined to think of religious vocation as going into the ministry, or becoming a nun or monk, but in terms of biblical law, the basic religious vocation is marriage, life in a family. It is a religious vocation because in family life, the priorities are not our own. Our life in marriage, our priorities therein cannot be dictated without disaster, by our wants and wishes, our natural desires. They have to be governed by God’s law. If they are not, we are in for trouble. In marriage, if we are going to make it succeed on God’s terms, we must serve something bigger than ourselves. Marriage is a religious act, and therefore, it requires us to conform ourselves to something other than ourselves.

Sometimes, we have problems with words, and one of those problems has to do with the conflict between Catholics and Protestants over what is marriage. Is it a sacrament or is it not? I think it is very, very healthy in a case like that not to involve yourself in the conflict, but to back off and say, “Now, maybe we’re having a problem with what we call a sacrament or with words. Is it a religious vocation?” That’s the key. If we put it in those terms, we find that whether the theologians and thinkers are Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and one or two other groups, they are agreed. It is a religious vocation, and therefore, when we view it as a religious vocation, we are not involving ourselves in ecclesiastical conflicts, in problems that churches have. We are separating it from the technical terminology which divides one church from another and we are seeing it in a biblical term. It is a religious vocation.

Now, how this church and that wants to define that religious vocation is not important, unless we’re discussing the doctrine of the church, but for our purposes, let it suffice to say this, we miss the whole point of the meaning of marriage if we fail to see it as a religious vocation, a moral fact.

Marriage requires moral decisions continually. It is not governed by nature in the sense that modern man defines nature. It is not governed by our sexual urges. It is governed by our moral perspective, and it is our moral perspective, whether good or bad, that governs our sexual behavior and our total behavior. Once we see marriage as, above all, a religious and a moral fact, then we can look at it as a natural fact, but having said that, we have to recognize there are two kinds of nature. Historically, there are two: the fallen and the redeemed. The unregenerate man and the regenerate man. The man outside of Christ and the man in Christ, and it makes all the difference in the world how you define nature, therefore. As a matter of fact, to be theologically correct, we have to speak of the fourfold nature of man. Man in the state of innocence in the Garden of Eden. Man in the state of the Fall as a sinner, man in the state of grace redeemed by Christ, and man in the state of glory in eternity. All are natural.

So, when we speak about marriage as a natural fact, we have to be careful because then we have to define it in terms of the kind of nature we’re talking about. We’ll deal with that in the second section, but it is important to see that Christian marriage is one which takes our fallen nature, brings it under God’s dominion so that godly marriage is an aspect of the world of the new creation. Paul says, “If any man be in Christ he is a new creation.” We are, according to scripture, different from those outside of Christ. This means that everything we are, and have, and do has to be different. Therefore, our marriage has to be an aspect of God’s work, of God’s expression of dominion, and of a new creation. It is an aspect of God’s plan of dominion, of redemption, of sanctification.

The Cynics of Ancient Greece were those who took Greek philosophy to its logical conclusion. Their perspective led them to say that because there is no God, for men to pretend to be something more than animals, is an affectation, and is destructive of life. Therefore, they called their school The Cynics, which comes from the Greek word which we have in English as canine, meaning dogs, and their perspective was that to demonstrate the validity of their philosophy, that man was another animal, no different from other animals, no different from the dogs that walked the streets of Athens, therefore, it was necessary philosophically to demonstrate the truth of this by copulating publicly, wherever one felt like indulging his sexual appetite, and these philosophers actually did so. It is interesting that, when the free speech movement began in Berkeley in the early sixties, the same requirement that the Cynics expressed, the same slogans were used by the rebels. They demanded the right to copulate publicly like the dogs, on campus.

Now, here are two different views of human nature, two different views of man and his sexuality. The Cynics works out the logic of unregenerate man, of ungodly man, and this is being worked out in one way or another all the time. This is why we have law enforcement people, because the logic of unregenerate man leads to lawlessness in every sphere, including the marital and the sexual. It creates disorders in society.

Thus, godly marriage works against the revolution that Adam began when he submitted to the tempter’s summons, “Listen to me. You will all be as gods, knowing, determining good and evil for yourself, being your own law-maker.” Marriage in terms of scripture is a revolution against the world of Adam. It recognizes that the way of life must be ordained by the God who created us and created life. Hence, sex and marriage cannot be on our terms, but God’s terms. There is, in all creation, a God-given order.

Just before I left the house, I was looking at the new issue of Reason, and there was a letter there from Hayek, the prominent economist, in which, of course, he implicitly attacked the whole biblical perspective, but he also attacked any kind of evolutionary thinking which presupposed an order in the universe, and he said there is no given order in any sphere, and his libertarian position is premised on the fact that man must be free in every area to do what he pleases, because there is no given order, no law, nothing that says, “This is the way. Walk ye in it.” Nothing that says, “The wages of sin are death,” but we believe that there is a God-given order in all of creation.

To cite a natural fact, which points to order, every child is inescapably and irrevocably the child of one mother and one father, very obvious fact, and yet, it is significant that there have been efforts by sexual revolutionaries to wage war on that fact. They do not like a world that imposes an order on them. They have proposed that there be group marriages, and there have been experiments in the sixties and seventies in this direction, in order to try to obscure the fact that, no matter what they do, there is inescapably one father and one mother. Colonies were established in Israel, again to wage war against this God-given order, a very elementary kind of order, but fallen man is perpetually at war against the God-given order.

On the other hand, the biblical doctrine of marriage is an insistence that only God’s order can give us life. As a matter of fact, when Peter talks about marriage, he speaks of the couple as “heirs together of the grace of life.” If you want to inherit life, live in godly marriage. Again, the fact of order is pointed to in the Ten Commandments when we are told we are to honor our father and our mother, “that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” So, we are told that life and long life come with this kind of thinking, with this kind of living. Biblical marriage is an insistence that only God’s order can give us life and everything else spells death. It tells us that God’s way of life is an orderly one, that we either live within that order, or we face death, and it is the family which, more than any other institution, orders life. It gives stability to children and to adults. It is the basic, the God-given, form of order.

The state has a place. The church has a place. The school has a place. All the various spheres of life have their place in providing their particular sphere of order, but nothing is more basic in providing order for man than family life. It’s the one institution we have from paradise, the Garden of Eden.

So, as we begin our study of the biblical doctrine of the family, we must remember first, that the world today is at war with the family. The simple illustration I cited from a familistic culture, what happened to my cousin. He did live through the war, providentially, but the shock that created. It disillusioned people concerning this country, just as it disillusioned other such people from a familistic culture, in Britain, in Germany, in France, and elsewhere. It served notice that the modern world was at war with the family.

Marriage, as we’ve seen, is a moral and a religious fact, that in its natural aspect, we must define the kind of nature that marriage deals with, unregenerate or regenerate, and the family is the basis institution in providing God’s order.

Are there any questions now? Well, if not, we’ll take a break for about ten minutes and then continue with our second session.

End of tape