Biblical Doctrine of the Family

Family as Trustee

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 05

Dictation Name: 05 Family as Trustee

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

Let us begin with prayer.

All glory be to thee, O Lord God, in whom we were born rich when we are born again in Christ. We give thanks unto thee for thy government and thy grace. We rejoice that, day after day, thou hast surrounded us with thy mercies, thy blessings, thy protecting care and thy guidance. Make us ever joyful in thee and in thy government, and ever mindful of our duty to serve thee with all our heart, mind, and being. Bless us as we press forward in thy service. In Jesus name. Amen.

Our subject in this current series is the biblical doctrine of the family, and it is important to lay down some general premises. Much of what I have to say will be, in part, a repetition to those of you who have read some of my writings on the subject of the family, but I felt in view of what I’m going to be dealing with next time, I had to lay this groundwork again. So, if some of the material is familiar to you, bear with me.

In this first session, tonight, because we’ll break for a few minutes and then proceed with our second session after we conclude this one. In this first session, our subject is The Family as Trustee. Modern humanism has two basic drives. One is the will to kill God, to eliminate him from history, to make man the replacement for God, or the state as the replacement for god. This faith combines a fanatic surface adherence to democracy and equality with a subrosa{?} elitism, a belief that these chosen few, the philosopher kings as it were, are the ones who should guide and govern mankind. We have this kind of faith today as the governing philosophy of our public schools. Public schools think they can educate by leaving out the most basic fact in all of life: the triune God, the Lord Jesus Christ. There is no education that is anything but a perversion when that omission occurs. The omission is willful. It is based upon the humanistic faith that God must be eliminated from human life, eliminated from any consideration.

One of those who are here present tonight is Judge Paul Mitchell Wright, and he was discussing with me last night the code of ethics for judges, which is promulgated across the country, and judges are the target of much hostility if they violate it. In effect, they are not to have any commitment, and that, in practice, means a Christian commitment. They cannot speak before a church group. They cannot give expression to Christian opinions, and so on, because this somehow destroys their credibility as a judge.

We see this will to destroy, to root out faith in God in every area of life. In politics, in law, in education, and in religion. One book published in the past decade by a prominent liberal theologian is concerned with having people believe that they are going to be the gods of the future, that we are all gods in the making, and the only real problem left for these human gods, because all problems are being solved technologically and scientifically is, what to do with the old God? What is the new god’s relationship to the old God, whoever and whatever he may be?

The second drive of modern humanism is to destroy the family in its historic, biblical sense. About six or seven years ago when a presidential or White House Conference on the Family was held, one thing it worked to do above all else, and did do, was to redefine the family. So, the family today can mean, according to these people and in terms of increasingly the language of legislators and of some courts, two lesbians or two homosexuals, or a group participating in group sex and living together. In other words, the family, as a term, is being separated from the biblical doctrine of the family. There is a move, a very strong, a concerted move, to destroy the family in its historic, biblical sense. The reason for this is seen as this: the Bible is anti-democratic, and the biblical doctrine of the family is anti-democratic. The family is an aristocratic institution which undercuts democracy and equality.

Here, for example, what one of the most prominent American leaders of post-World War 2, James Brant Conant, had to say, “Wherever the institution of the family is still a powerful force, as it is in this country, surely inequality of opportunity is automatically and 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 perpetual compromise. Now, it seems to me important to recognize both the inevitable nature of the conflict and the continuing nature of the compromise.” Notice what Conant says. In the traditional family, as he terms it, the parents do a great deal for their children, things they don’t do for children in China, or in Africa, or elsewhere. They have an aristocratic attitude, and this, he says, is destructive of equality and democracy, and so he says there is a continuing compromise, but there is also an inevitable conflict, and guess who should lose, according to Conant?

Modern man seeks rootlessness and anonymity. This was one of the reasons why the modern city came into being. Earlier, there was a need for great urban centers, because there were very few means of transportation other than seaports. So that if you look at the cities prior to railroads, they were almost invariably ports, or else they were an artificial center created by a monarch. When railroads came into existence, they obviated the need for concentrating peoples at ports, or at certain key points, but precisely at that point, the greatest growth of urban populations began. Now, this is important to realize. When urban concentration was least necessary, because people could locate in a variety of places and have equal access to shipment, then the concentration came about, because at the same time, because they were abandoning Christian faith, people wanted anonymity. They wanted to live where their neighbor would not know them, or would know them, at best, only casually. So that there would be no ties of neighborliness. If people bought a place in the country, it was not out of a love of the old human ties, but out of a desire to worship nature, so that there was a totally different premise to society.

All of this had deep roots. In fact, if we want to understand the French Revolution, for example, we have to go back to the court of Louis XV. The Revolution took place under Louis XVI, but under Louis XV, marital fidelity was ridiculed and treated as a joke. If a man were in love with his wife, he certainly didn’t talk about it because he would be ridiculed. If he felt there should be any kind of loyalty between them, he was a joke. Rootlessness was studiously and systematically sought. The intellectuals, the leaders of the people, the writers and thinkers of the era of Louis XV laid down all the premises of revolution, because they said all the established patterns of historic Christianity are invalid. They didn’t say it openly, but they turned everything into a joke. They ridiculed it. They laid down, therefore, the basic premises of revolution, of an anti-family, anti-religion culture.

Since then, this has been worked out systematically in one country after another. Back of the Russian Revolution, we have going back to peter the Great, and Catherine the Great, the same worship of this kind of rootlessness, the same work to destroy the historic Christian patterns, and of course, at the same time, a high regard for the French philosos{?}. The result was, of course, with the French Revolution, an effort was made systematically to destroy the family, and one of the consequences of this was that because by law every woman became public property between the ages of 15 and 60, and because, by law, everything was done to destroy the Christian doctrine of the family, and because it was believed that nurseries, state-operated nurseries were the best means of rearing children, the results were devastating. Parents and children scarcely knew each other.

The story is told of one Russian working mother who went to this state-operated nursery at the end of the day, after working in the factory, to pick up her baby, and when she did, she took a second look at it, and said, “But this isn’t my baby. Give me my baby,” and the woman in charge waved her aside, and said, “You’re only going to see it overnight anyway. What’s it to do? It’s a baby. Take it home.”

Some of you may recall that in the twenties, one of the most characteristic facts of the Soviet Union were the wolf children. How many of you recall anything about the wolf children? Just two or three of us are old enough to remember, or to have heard about them. The wolf children were products of this type of training. They had no loyalty to anyone or to anything, and they were called wolf children because they ran in packs, being totally lawless, seeking to prey on society, and turning the whole of the Soviet Union into a nightmare because of their degradations. They had to be treated, finally, as enemies of the state, and eliminated, and it is interesting that not too long after, Dr. Lebedeva, Soviet head of the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy, admitted that the attempt to abolish the home was a failure, and she said, “Under present conditions, there is no doubt that the home offers a more stimulating environment for the development of the infant than the asylum. Not only have we decreased the death rate in this way by placing institutional children in private homes, but we have ensured normal development to a much larger proportion of babies. Since, in almost every case, our asylum trained babies were both mentally and physically backward.”

In other words, with their asylums, or child card facilities, they produced children which were, in almost every case by their admission, both mentally and physically backward, but note, at the same time, that Dr. Lebedeva concedes that they’re going back to the family, there is the qualification, “under present conditions,” we don’t see anything better, so we will utilize the family,” but the family, strictly controlled.

In Israel, we have seen the same kind of experimentation, the kibbutzim, experiments in communal living which, by the end of the 1960’s, involved about 93,000 persons. For a time, this was widely hailed as the answer, but since then, there has been a steady retreat in an attempt to promote the kibbutzim. The experiment has really been a failure. Moreover, it has been a fraud in that the people who live in these communal, socialistic colonies do not do the work. They hire Arabs to do it, poor Arabs, at sweatshop wages.

As a result, we see the collapse of one after another of these experiments. They are clear-cut failures. They are dramatic failures in that they produce warped children, defective mentally and physically.

Now, the enemies of the family are still busy, however. They are hard at work throughout the Western world as though the Soviet experiment had never occurred. Of course, they believe that they will come up with the answer, and so we are told that the historic family is dying, and one of the pieces of data to verify this, is the high percentage of working mothers. Now, this is not because of any problem in the family, and a change in the nature of the family. It is simply because inflation has made it impossible for the middle class man to provide enough in most cases. The overwhelming percentage of working mothers are middle class mothers who work because they have to, because the income is no longer sufficient, the man’s income, to provide for the family. There is no problem within the family that creates this. It is a problem outside the family in the sphere of the political control of economics.

Now, Carl C. Zimmerman, the greatest student of the family in this century and probably of all time, a Harvard sociologist who retired a few years back, studied the history of the family throughout civilization, and what he found was that there were and are three kinds of families, and the kind of family you have will tell you the kind of society you have.

First, you have the trustee family. IN the trustee family, most of the basic governmental features of society, and we’ll deal with this in the next session, are in the hands of the family. The family is the basic law. Take away the family and society collapses because most of the law is family law. Now there are different types of trustee families, and some very different from others. The biblical pattern, of course, is what we believe in, however, old China with its ancestor worship and family system was a trustee family, and in ancient Rome, the trustee family also prevailed as it did also in other cultures. Very different, we couldn’t agree with many of the things that marked trustee families in non-biblical cultures, but the basic fact with respect to the trustee family, was that most of the law came from the family.

I recall some years ago a missionary who had gone to China in the 1890’s, at the beginning of the 1890’s, telling me that, although occasionally a warlord and his army might come through the area where he was, the law was the family. The family and its elders, the heads, and he said one of the things that the family did was it did not recognize any unattached person. So that if a man moved into the village or into the community, or the small city, and no one knew what family he belonged to, he was an outlaw. He was totally untrustworthy. There was no one who could vouch for him, or guarantee that his acts would not be lawless, and if they were, they would make restitution for it. So, he said if anyone came in, he had to belong to a family or a tong that had some roots in the area, and people would vouch for him, so that if he ever transgressed, and he or his immediate family did not make restitution, the family association would do it and then go after the local unit.

After the early days in San Francisco’s Chinatown, this was the system that developed. When I was in Chinatown working as a missionary in the late thirties and beginning of the forties, if any juvenile were out of line, neighbors didn’t go to him. They simply went to their tong leader who went to the tong leader of the boy’s family, who immediately called the boy’s father, and said, “Get him in line,” and they did. This was the law.

Now, during most of history, this has been the source of basic law, the family system in some form or another. In the Bible, it was the system of elders. Both the church and the civil government were governed by elders. One elder over every ten families, over fifties, over hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, fifty thousands, and so on, until a council of seventy elders governed all things civil, all things family, all things religious. In every sphere of life, there were particular elders appointed to provide the basic government, and when they worked, they provided very good government. The basic family type in much of history has thus been the trustee family.

The second type is the domestic family, still fairly powerful, but in the domestic family, to a degree, the family is sharing power with civil government. Moreover, the position of the man is now more powerful as against the woman. In the trustee family, the woman is like a prime minister. Her power is very great, but in the domestic family, it’s limited to the children, and caring for her husband. The domestic family is what we have today in conservative Christian circles. Outside the Christian community, of course, we don’t have that. We have very little of the trustee family. In the trustee family there is a control over all the basic powers in society as we shall see in the next period.

The third type of family is the atomistic family, in which the family is more a housing unit. It’s a place for marital relations, to eat and sleep, and where the children grow up after a fashion, but the basic influence is outside the family. The children grow up permissively. There is no sense of the family as a governing unit. In fact, very often, the children govern the parents, and you have then a crisis. As Zimmerman said, whenever you have this breakdown from a trustee family to a domestic family to an atomistic family, civilization collapses, unless there is some kind of religious revival, a renewal of the society, and today, we are, according to Zimmerman and Cervantes, who collaborated on a work in the late 1950’s, in the midst of a revival of family life. In that book, they predicted a great deal of the troubles that were going to beset the family and give the appearance of a total collapse, but they also said that, at the same time, the family was returning in strength such as the country had not seen for generations, that there was a revival of a sense of stewardship, all the basic impulses that created the trustee family. So that they felt that, although the appearance would increasingly be ugly and devastating, behind that appearance would be a steady growth of the power of the trustee family.

I pointed out more than once that we do see the growth of family strength in such things as Christian schools and other activities which mark the Christian community now, so that we have, on the one hand, a concerted effort to revive a trustee family, a powerful governmental unit, in which husband and wife are together stewards under God, and have great powers, and if you want an example of that, look at Proverbs 31, the picture of the virtuous, or strong, woman. While her husband sits in the gates as town elder, she takes care of managing the farms, managing the business, handling everything, huge estates. This was the trustee picture of a wife, as a superb manager capable of handling, together with her husband, or if anything happened to him, a tremendous estate, and knowing how to do so.

Now, this did not mean, as with the atomistic family, the wife going out to work. It meant that these enterprises were enterprises of the family, a very different concept. We see, therefore, a revival of the trustee family beginning to take place. It is being reborn in our society, in the basic drive to create a strong family unit.

Now, this also creates problems, and many people try to use the data here against this reawakening of the Christian family, because there will be rebellion when you try to create strength, and it means tensions and the breakdown of marriages in Christian circles today, unlike that of a generation or two ago. Why? Simply because the husband or the wife will not accept the responsibility that stewardship under God requires. They want their freedom, an atomistic freedom, rather than freedom under God, and the result we see all around us. Now, we should not take this of evidence that there is something seriously amiss in Christian circles, but rather that there is a renewing of strength, and as a result, there are problems. Many a church that has been seemingly very, very evangelical and has been thriving suddenly, when they have leadership that substitutes for the form of godliness, the power thereof, there are explosions, and the same is true, as men or women begin to realize what the family should be, under God. It does create problems, but these are the problems of health, the signs of life, not of disintegration, and therefore, we should recognize the importance of the fact that there are problems and that the problems indicate a tremendous reformation now underway within the circle of the family.

Are there any questions now on our lesson before we take a recess? Yes?

[Audience] You mentioned Carl Zimmerman as an authority on the family?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Is he the one who categorized these different, trustee?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] What’s the name of the book?

[Rushdoony] The Family in Civilization. It’s out of print, but you should be able to get it in a university library.

If there are no other questions, we will take a ten minute break.

End of tape