Biblical Doctrine of the Family

Significance of the Family as a Social Institution

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 04

Dictation Name: 04 Significance of the Family as a Social Institution

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

We have considered the significance, religiously, of the family. Now, we will touch on the social significance of the family, or the Significance of the Family as a Social Institution. Those of you who have heard me, on other occasions, speak about the family will find that much of what I say in this session will be familiar to you, but it is necessary ground to cover as a preparation for what we will deal with next month. Under God, the family does have a great social significance. This is one reason why there is so much hatred for the family in our day, because the biblical family pattern is a radical and total threat to the emerging world order as humanism envisions it. The family controls, under God, the family in terms of biblical law, controls.

Just to cite briefly, and to leave specifics for a later date, children. That means control of the future. It controls property, because in the Bible, property is not individual or privately owned, or state owned, but family owned. It is community property. We have relics of that in our law today.

Then third, the family controls inheritance, which the state is increasingly working to control. It controls also education, and the family is moving to reestablish its power in this field with homeschools and Christian schools, and finally, in scripture, the family is the basic welfare institution.

Now, these five areas are the basic areas in society. Under God, they belong to the family. Increasingly, the modern state is trying to wipe out the family and to take over each of these areas.

Then, there’s another aspect of the family in terms of scripture, against which the modern state is totally at war. To understand this, it is important for us to go back to Byzantium and the Empress Theodora, Justinian’s wife. I have spoken more than once about Justinian and Theodora, so most of you are familiar with the outlines of her life. Born to an animal trainer in the circus arena, she and her two sisters, when her father died, were sold when they were far from being teenagers, into houses of prostitution, and this is how Theodora grew up. She was abandoned on a business trip by a Roman businessman in North Africa, became very ill. A Christian presbyter took her in, nursed her, and taught her the faith. Subsequently, it led to her conversion after she had returned to the capitol. In time, she married a young lawyer who became Justinian, the great emperor of Byzantium.

Now, when the revision of the Roman legal code began, Theodora insisted in sitting with the lawyers and rewriting all Roman family law in terms of scripture, in terms of five basis premises, all of which were derived from scripture. First, her insistence that the only legal, sexual relationship is marital. Second, this law was applied to all classes, rich and poor, and there were criminal charges for violation. Third, all illicit, non-marital sexuality was punishable by corporal punishment, imprisonment, or banishment. Fourth, there could be no legal contract for non-family sex with regard to money or property, with mistresses, concubines, or prostitutes, and anyone taking part in such a contract was an accessory to a crime. It was routine in those days for a wife to find, on the death of her husband, that a mistress, or a concubine, or a prostitute, had persuaded her husband, or when he was drunk, had him sign a paper leaving her everything, and the legitimate wife and children would be out in the streets. It was commonplace. This was made totally impossible. Property could not be alienated from the family. If the son was not worthy, it had to go to someone in the family line.

Then fifth, the family was defined as the only legitimate and normal way of life. This was a revolution. It meant that what God declared in his word was now made basic to Western civilization, and this prevailed, this order, until after the French Revolution, efforts began to be more and more open to subvert everything that the Code of Justinian, in particular, Theodor’s work represented. In this century, especially, it has increasingly become very open and vocal, especially since World War 2.

As a result, we have a determined assault on the family and the legal inheritance we have from Theodora. It culminated in the late 1970’s under President Carter with a White House Conference on the Family, which defined the family in non-Christian terms. So that it could be two lesbians living together, or two homosexuals living together, and it was obvious that that the White House Conference on the Family gave priority to these anti-biblical forms of supposedly “family life.” There is no understanding of this power struggle in the modern world, apart from this fact of its militant hostility against the biblical doctrine of the family. This is central. It is assumed and quite rightly, that if the biblical doctrine of the family be undermined and destroyed, then the whole of Christianity will crumble. So, the doctrine now is that religion is a purely private matter. It’s what you believe and the opinions you hold, and you have full religious freedom for your faith, provided you keep it between your two ears. It cannot be a public matter, which is to say God has no relationship to society.

Then, similarly, to say that the biblical doctrine of the family is again a purely private matter, there is nothing inherently true or basic about it, nothing that says that if you depart from this, society begins to crumble, as we believe, under God, is the case.

Marx and Engels made it clear, understanding this correlation, understanding that the family is basic to the religious life of people, to their theological awareness, because it is God’s order, and God is best served, God is best known in the context of God’s order. Therefore, they held that the death of God and the death of the family had to go together. Engels in particular wrote extensively on this, the necessity for combining the death of the holy family, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, they said, and the death of the earthly family, father, mother, and child.

H.G. Wells called for the liberation of individual’s sexual conduct from social reproach and from legal controls and penalties. Those were his words. At the same time, he held, and he said it was to be absolute right of the state to intervene directly and fully in the life of the family. Now, this is what is happening in our time. We are seeing progressively the interference of the state in the life of the family. We are seeing its attempt to destroy the biblical pattern of sexuality. This is now a matter of instruction in the name of family education, literally sexual education, in the public schools. Public schools, state schools truly, are anti-familistic to the core. Their core is the destruction of the family and Christianity.

James Bryant Conant, back in 1949, in a study commissioned by the NEA, declared, “Wherever the institution of the family is still a powerful force as it is in this country, surely inequality of opportunity is automatically and often unconsciously a basic principle of the nation. The more favored parents endeavor to obtain even greater favors for their children. Therefore, when we Americans proclaim an adherence to the doctrine of equality of opportunity, we face the necessity for a perpetual compromise. Now, it seems to me important to recognize both the inevitable conflict and the continuing nature of the compromise.” What Conant said is that we cannot have democracy and have the biblical doctrine of the family, because the family is aristocratic. The parents want the best for their children, which is anti-democratic. Why should their children have something better than the children in Central Asia or Africa, or anywhere else?

As a result, he spoke of the inevitable conflict, and he was right. There is a conflict. It’s being wages in the courts, and in the lives of people. Either the concept of democracy as these people hold to it is going to prevail, and the family is going to be destroyed and Christianity is going to be destroyed, or else this concept of radical equality and democracy will be destroyed. John Dewey, of course, made the same point earlier, in about 1933 or 34, in his book A Common Faith, in which he said that the biblical doctrines of heaven and hell, the saved and the lost, the sheep and the goats, were anti-democratic, hopelessly aristocratic, that they were incompatible with democracy, and therefore, everything he did was aimed at destroying that faith. It is because the family is so important under God that it is being attacked. In Sweden, by the way, Dr. Alvar Nelson{?} has said, “Our aim is to remove all traces of church morality from legislation.”

The sad fact is by response, the church does too little to strengthen family life, and church schools and colleges are not aware of the importance of the family and the war being waged against the family. The powers of the family under God are recognized by the enemy, but not the people on our side. Every attempt by any culture to undermine the biblical doctrine of the family and life in terms of it is suicidal. The society that does so destroys itself, and we are seeing today the collapse of the humanistic culture. The only question is, will the churches collapse with it? Because they have forgotten the wealth that is theirs in terms of God’s law-word. The state is facing a growing number of problems, and the state is unable to cope with them. Every time it enters into an area, it aggravates the problem.

I was talking a few days ago with a black intellectual, an outstanding leader, who was describing the destruction that had taken place with the entrance of the federal government into civil rights, that a great deal of freedom was being won by the blacks on their own before that happened, and now you have, with a minimum wage law and a number of other things that are supposed to protect black youth, the most massive unemployment in history, nothing like it during the depression. Youth unemployed and being destroyed with drugs and crime, but the family is able to cope with all emergencies with it is under God and his law.

We thus face a major crisis. This is why I chose this particular subject for this series which began last month on the biblical doctrine of the family, what the family is under God, because in order to have Christian reconstruction, we have to begin with a stress on the family under God. Are there any questions now? Yes, David?

[Audience] I’d like to ask you about your observation {?} Psalm 127 in our first session, when you didn’t come out and say you’d translate this verse different, but you put a different meaning to the verse that he gives his beloved sleep than people usually give. I wish you’d just elaborate on that a little more.

[Rushdoony] Yes, a good many translators and paraphrasers will give that, “He gives to his beloved as they sleep,” so that is a reading that is legitimate, and is probably the correct meaning. “He gives to his beloved as they sleep.” So what the Psalmist is saying, It isn’t your worrying, your fretting, your endless activity, your feeling, “I’m going to do something about my problems,” that brings a solution, but the Lord building the house, and when we make him basic to our family life and our national life, he gives to his beloved as they sleep. Yes?

[Audience] I was talking to somebody the other day that’s working on Roman family law and the changeover to Christian family law, and she maintains that in Roman family law (she’s a feminist herself), the woman had a much better situation than after the introduction of Christianity, got us into {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, under Roman law, I imagine she means before the Empire and the Republic, and before the breakdown of Roman family law. The father was the property owner who could sell his children into slavery or execute them at will, or dispose of his wife at will, and unless her family was so powerful that he did not offend them, he could and he did so. Now, I don’t see anything good about that, and I don’t see how we, as Christians, can believe that the pagans ever had a good family system. To believe that is to say that sin didn’t work in their family life, and we’re denying the word of God when we say that. I can’t believe that this person who’s doing this research is a Christian.

[Audience] Oh no, I wouldn’t say she’s a Christian, no. I had always understood the Roman family law like you’re presenting it, but she said, No, it was the opposite.

[Rushdoony] Well, it is a part of the anti-Christian {?}

[Audience] property themselves, and they could have their own businesses and that was {?}

[Rushdoony] During the Empire, as the family broke down and homosexuality and adultery became routine, you had a feminist movement in Rome, and what she is describing is in terms of probably feminist presuppositions and saying, “This was the ideal order.” Yes, Otto?

[Audience] Well, I recall that Cato the Elder debated {?} when the proposal came from the Roman Senate to grant women the equal legal rights, and he said, “If we had their natural superiority and equality in law, we will be undone and the Empire will be destroyed.”

[Rushdoony] Yes, I recall that statement by him in Plutarch. No, you see, we do have today the idealization of pagan culture as though Christianity came in as the destroyer. Yes?

[Audience] They had another so-called feminist scholar that spoke at the graduate theological union on witchcraft a little while ago, and said the Christian witch trials killed three million women, which is of course, absurd. At the height they only killed about three thousand and that was in the continent, but that was picked up by the Daily Californian and quoted as factual.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, of course, the classic study of about ten years ago by Jeffrey Burton Russell on Medieval Witchcraft is a very interesting work. It’s now available in paperback, and the point he makes is that to his horror, when he made a careful study of the facts, he found that the witchcraft movement was a revival of every kind of evil; cannibalism, human sacrifice, homosexuality, incest, and a great deal more, and it made him, he admitted in the closing pages of this research, fearful of our future as he saw reviving paganism, and he said, “We will certainly go back to a like-thing,” and it’s interesting because Burton does not believe in the Lord, does not believe in a vague God, but he has come to believe in the Devil. He’s written two books about the Devil, trying to come to terms with some evil force or forces in the universe. Yes?

[Audience] I was wondering when you said that one aspect of the family was welfare, would you talk about that welfare as compared with the welfare in the church that we understand?

[Rushdoony] Yes, I will be dealing with this more at a later date, but the church is the replacement under Christ, of the tribe outside of Christ, the extended family, and it is called the household, or family, of faith. So the particular family and the larger family of the church together work as families in Christ, to alleviate human need. Yes?

[Audience] What has the industrial revolution done to alter family life. You know, the husband goes off and the wife is at home with the children, and the second part is, what can be done today to overcome the barriers that that presents?

[Rushdoony] There’s a myth that the Industrial Revolution was very damaging to family life. Supposedly, before that, the family worked under one roof, and so one. This is an idealized picture. It’s not true. The pre-Industrial family was on the ragged edge of starvation all the time, and starvation was a very significant factor. What the Industrial Revolution did was to enable the poor now to live better, and to have a stronger family life. The Industrial Revolution, for example, in England has been smeared by the aristocracy who hated the fact that ordinary people were becoming wealthier than they were as a result of industry, so they dug up every piece of dirt they could to vilify it, and you hear a great deal about the cheap housing tracts that proliferated with the Industrial Revolution. Before that, the poor were living in hovels and shanties that, if you leaned hard against them would collapse. They were living almost on an animal level. Now, they had cheap housing. Well, what was wrong with that? They very quickly advanced to better housing, and they were able to do this because they were able to make money. Before that, they couldn’t. If you want a picture of what London was like before the Industrial Revolution, get the pictures of Hogarth, especially his “Gin Alley,” and that was a very literal drawing of an actual scene in London which was routine in London life. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] You mentioned that the family is more basic, in some sense, than the church. That is, the church structure. So what is the, if the family in, let’s say, a local church come in conflict, which takes priority?

[Rushdoony] Why does the family what?

[Audience] If the local church and a family come in conflict, the family wants to do certain things, the church wants to do the other, how is the conflict resolved?

[Rushdoony] Well, first of all, if the family and church are both under Christ, they will not be in conflict. Second, very often the church today seems to think it is the only Christian institution, and that’s wrong. I have, over the years, seen churches that had a calendar, they passed out before the beginning of each month that you were to put on your refrigerator, with activities for every day of the week, for the father, the mother, and the children, and you were expected to be at the church and involved, or you really weren’t “with it.” It was very destructive of family life. I know some years ago, one couple told me they were leaving the church because they could not take the endless nagging, to be at the church for one thing or another all the time. It was destroying their family life. Now, that kind of church life is not godly. It is saying you can’t be a Christian unless you’re inside the church. That was the late medieval doctrine which led to having the church doors open all the time, because if you couldn’t get inside the doors of the church when you needed God’s grace, you didn’t have it. You were a lost soul. That was the implication. So, 24 hours the church had to be open because that was the only way you could reach God, according to some, and many Protestants seem to have that impression. “You’re not in contact with the Lord unless you’re there in the church.” Well, that’s a denial of the priesthood of all believers. It’s the denial of the biblical doctrine of the family. Every time the church begins to depart from Christ, it stresses not the Lord but the institution of the church, and that is an evil. It isn’t the church we are to believe in and be members of, but Jesus Christ, and the church as an institution is to be a member of Jesus Christ, and a lot of churches are not. They seem to think membership is in the church, essentially.

Well, our time is up. Let us bow our heads in prayer.

O Lord our God, thy word is truth, and thou hast given us a great responsibility and the power to change the future as fathers and mothers, as sons and daughters, and as members of the family of Jesus Christ. Bless us in our service and make us strong by thy word that we might be more than conquerors through him that loves us. And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this night and always. Amen.

End of tape