Biblical Doctrine of the Family

The Family as a Power Center

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 07

Dictation Name: 07 The Family as a Power Center

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

Let us begin with prayer.

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that in the midst of a troubled and sin-filled world, we have the assurance that thou art on the throne, and it is thy will that shall prevail and not the will of men, and so we come into thy presence to study the things that of our thee that we might be those who exercise dominion, that thy church and thy kingdom may command the future in thy name. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name. Amen.

We continue this evening our study of the biblical doctrine of the family, and our subject in the first session is The Family as the Power Center. It is perhaps singularly inappropriate in appearance only, that I should be talking about the family and marriage tonight when Dorothy is sporting a black eye, [laughter] and the terrible part is that everybody is such a lady and a gentleman, that nobody asked, “How did it happen?” so I am going to tell you. When we went to bed last night, she sat up to adjust her pillows just as I’d turned over, and her eye and my elbow collided. No damage was done to my elbow, but as to her eye you can see for yourself. One good thing about it, it has given her more fun than almost anything for quite awhile. She’s relished so much everything that happens when people pretend they haven’t seen it and don’t ask a question, so I’m telling you.

Well now, to The Family as a Power Center. It should be apparent by now after our previous studies that the biblical family is society’s great power center. It controls and is the center of key societal powers. We went into these, children, property, inheritance, welfare, and education. Because the family under God is so important and controls these key areas when it is faithful to scripture, it is the target of a great deal of hostility and attack. No non-Christian revolutionary social order can succeed unless it can undermine and destroy the biblical family.

Moreover, there are other societal powers that the family under God that we have not considered. It is a faith center. Hence, the family under God is a social dynamo, the source of social strength, of action, and of control. It is also a center of love and loyalty among other things. Because of God’s creation order, the non-biblical family, whatever its evils, failings and the like, is also a power center. As such, the family per se is a problem to all social revolutionaries.

As a result, over the centuries, going back to the earliest days wherever we see evidences of revolutionary movements, we see an attack upon the family and some of its key powers, such as the control of property. In this era, 451 A.D. and thereabouts, for about 70 years, Persia, which was once a great center of civilization, Iran (means Aryan), it was an outpost of Europe, fell before the Mazdekite rebels, who instituted total communism of women, property and money, of all wealth. Even though the royal family through one of its younger members born after the revolution, regained power, the vitality of ancient Persia was so drained that it subsequently fell when the Turks moved in from Central Asia. Age after age, the history of social orders that collapsed under this kind of thing can be recounted, always with an attack upon the family as the spearhead of the movement.

Of course, the great source of such thinking is Plato’s Republic, and Plato’s Republic is taught in our universities as though it were the true Bible. As a matter of fact, yesterday’s Washington’s Times had two long letters from people attacking John Lofton because he was critical of Plato’s thinking and had called attention to the evils of it. It was as though they had attacked something greater than God. They could not forgive John for being critical.

But in Plato’s Republic, you have the elitist socialist mentality seeking to control and destroy the family and private property, as well as inheritance, and to transfer the control of education and welfare to itself. Plato’s Republic says it is concerned with justice, and it is, but its definition of justice is a humanistic, man-made concept, and I’m going to cite Plato a few times so that it will be clear what he is saying. He says, of justice, “When we first began to establish our commonwealth, and several times since, we have laid down as a universal principle that everyone ought to perform the one function in the community for which his nature best suited him. Well, I believe that principle, or some form of it, is justice. Justice admittedly means that a man should possess and concern himself with what properly belongs to him.” Justice is being where you ought to be, but where is that? Well, it’s where the philosopher kings, the guardians, the intellectual elite tells you, you belong, so if they tell you you should be a garbage man, then it’s justice you should be a garbage man. Why so?

Well, Plato says, the elite rulers are the intellectuals. They are the voice of reason in society, and the consent of the governed means to be controlled by the voice of reason, their elitist rulers. So, you’re mentally disturbed if you don’t say “yes” to them, and you prove that you are sane if you say “Do what you want with me.”

Plato said, “Do you see that this state of things will exist in your commonwealth, where the desire of the inferior multitude will be controlled by the desires and wisdom of the superior few. Hence, if any society can be called master of itself and in control of pleasures and desires, it will be ours.” In other words, we are only masters of ourselves and free when we allow the elite intellectuals who are the voice of reason to control us. The guardians, or the philosopher kings, are the voice of reason, and Plato says they are obviously unselfish because reason is unselfish, and he says, in so many words, that their knowledge is infallible and must govern. Now, that’s not my conclusion, but one of the great translators of Plato, Dr. Cornford, who was at Cambridge, made that statement, and he wasn’t being critical. The guardians, being the voice of reason, are infallible and must govern.

Therefore, the family must give way for Plato to the rule of reason, to the communization of the family. IN the modern era the attack on the family takes a variety of forms. Abortion is an attack on the family. So is statist education, the homosexual legalization, the sexual revolution, and much, much more. This is not all. Revolutionary groups seek also to control economic order and economics is politicized by every humanistic socialist regime. Property in Christendom, is closely tied to the family and is an aspect of family power.

As Dr. Carl C. Zimmerman, retired from Harvard and Father Cervantes have said, in their study on marriage and the family, “Not only government but also economic life stems largely through the family cell. The three basic rights and duties of economic life, other than these immediately contractual and operational, are organized about the acts of ownership, inheritance, and support. All acts of ownership of property are themselves very much abridged by the obligations and duties of inheritance and support. This needs no great elaboration because it is self-evidence.” To take just one point they mentioned, support. There isn’t any socialist regime in the world that has ever supported as many people and as well as the family system routinely does, but this is resented by the modern state because the family creates responsibility, obligation, and motivation in the economic sphere. Married me are the best motivated men in a society. After all, they have a wife and children to support, and while you can say there are a handful men in every culture who maybe are more interested in gambling, or drinking, or something else than their family responsibilities, nothing even remotely creates the responsibility and the motivation to care for others as parenthood does. There is a sense of duty to support one’s family, but the modern state strikes at that increasingly. It seeks to control the family and the economic order, and to strip the family of responsibilities.

Moreover, it posits itself as the supreme authority in every sphere. Now I’m going to quote Mussolini now on the definition of fascism, and it is this, “There is nothing above, nothing contrary, nothing beyond the state.” Now that’s the theory of government of almost every modern state in the world today. In varying degrees, they are forms of fascism. Mussolini is very much abused by the liberal scholars so that no one can realize how much they’ve imitated him. All our cities and federal agencies should have statues of Mussolini on their steps because he really is their patron saint, even though they don’t acknowledge him, because his theory of government is theirs. The second point of Mussolini’s concept of the fascist state was, we’re socialists but we don’t talk about it. Instead, we preserve all the forms of freedom, but we control everything. Private property we maintain, but we tax it so that they’re really renters living in our property. We allow the newspapers to speak but we control them so that they are puppets no matter who owns them. We have the factories in the economic sphere under such tight control that in everything except name it is all ours. That’s fascism. Because the family is so powerful in its nature, it is the best ant strongest force for both social stability and social change.

Again, quoting from Zimmerman and Cervantes, “The family system plays a key role in the problem of social change. It brings the past into the present. The events of the present impinge upon it and try to alter it. Out of this past with its alterations, we get the pattern generator for the culture of the future.” There’s no more stable nor more powerful force for conserving that which is good and changing what needs to be changed, in other words, than the family.

Now, Gerardus Van der Leeuw has pointed out that marriage is both community and covenant simultaneously. It is both a law fact and a life fact. It involves the whole person and everything about him and concern him. How total marriage is we can realize from this fact. Not only in the Bible but in every day life. We take a rest from work. We take a rest from everything we do, but we never take a rest from marriage. We are married and that’s it. It is the fact which conditions our days. The stronger the marriage, the greater the community. In fact, where marriage is strong, it leads to permanent changes.

The most beautiful expression of it was by a woman, Ruth, and we read in the Bible that even when her husband died, she saw her tie now to her mother in law and her mother in law’s faith, her mother in law’s way of life, and scripture tells us, And Ruth said, “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.” Marriage often alters citizenship legally, because it creates a new relationship and allegiance.

But, the modern era is not only anti-family, but it has worked to replace the family as the focal point of personal happiness and fulfillment with permissive sexuality, and it has said the power center of life is pre-permissive sexuality, whatever your taste. This goes back to an early idea of Freud’s which he later discarded, but which others did not. He said that undischarged libido is converted into anxiety, and it creates socially destructive energy. Wilhelm Reich built upon this concept, a doctrine of salvation through sex. Dr. Eustace Chester, in a book of that title, Salvation Through Sex, The Life and Work of Wilhelm Reich, says, “Reich emphasized that organism is man’s only salvation, leading us to the kingdom of heaven on earth.” Reich held that, without orgasmic relief, people are in anxiety, are driven to sado-masochism, to anti-social behavior, and it creates social havoc and destruction, but he said organism brings salvation and freedom. Reich also saw the key to man’s mental health and redemption not in man’s relation to Christ, but in his relationship to his body and in giving his sexuality free expression. He was, together with Margaret Mead, one of the greatest influences on public education. Together with Margaret Mead, he and she parented our permissive society and the sexual revolution.

The result was that because of their influence, social and personal health were seen as a physical fact, as a sexual fact. They held, their followers did, that freedom must be given to lesbian, homosexual, non-marital heterosexual activities because social salvation requires it. They held that restrictions lead to social damage. In other words, they declared that the power center in society is permissive sexuality, not the Christian family. Now, that’s the revolution that’s taken place in this century, from the family as the power center to unrestricted permissive sexuality as the power center. It has not been just a case of people sinning because they feel like it. It’s been sinning because this is salvation. This is the theory behind it, and the books delineating this theory are far reaching in their circulation, their influence, and in what they espouse.

In 1974, Edwin Miller, writing in Seventeen magazine said, “Before World War 2, the concept of the teenager did not exist. If you survived childhood, you briefly became an adolescent, then you were an adult. In Hollywood’s silent days, young people were rarely featured except in classics like Tom Sawyer, and when they were, it was always a moral lesson to be delivered.” The de-emphasis on the family, the heavy emphasis on permissiveness and on the sexual revolution, which now is in almost all the public schools as a required bit of teaching, their plan of social salvation, has resulted in dramatic social decay. It has demanded and created a remarkable social fact, under-parenting, as it is called.

A great many cases, to cite one which I’ve often used in illustration, as seminarian’s wife went to the bank to borrow, I believe $600 because some money they had coming was tied up temporarily, and they needed it to register for the new semester. She had her two small children there, a babe in arms and a four year old boy who kept reaching for things on the loan officer’s desk. She warned him several times and then reached out, slapped his hand. Someone immediately telephoned the authorities, reporting a case of child abuse, and she was arrested, the child, both children removed from her control, and it took a great deal of expense hiring the attorneys and the like to fight the case.

In another case, a minister was a year before he got his daughter back, for something less than that. Under-parenting is required by law. It’s child abuse if you function as a traditional parent. On this matter of under-parenting, Victoria Secunda has written, “The fact of under-parenting, for whatever reason, and the growing number of young people involved in this, the criminal justice system, ten million, cannot be a coincidence. Half of all reported violent crimes are committed by males between the ages of 15 and 24, and increasingly teenage offenders are being tried as adults in court.” Under-parenting, and crime, and as Victoria Secunda says, it cannot be a coincidence. The two are related. The Bible said they are related, and we’re seeing it demonstrated today. This fact, the social decay, the under-parenting and the consequences in juvenile crime, has demonstrated all the more clearly the fact that the biblical family is the strongest power center in any social order. Anything else leads to degeneration and disorder. Christians thus, have the key to social power in their hands, and the means for the determination of the future.

As we take seriously our family responsibilities, we take seriously that we are the determiners of the future under God, but it is not money. It is not political office. It is not any one of 101 things that one could name that will be the key to the future. It is creating a generation out of the power center, the family, capable of responsibility, of asserting its claims on family power and rebuilding society in terms of it. Are there any questions now on our first session, before we take a brief break? Yes?

[Audience] You mentioned in the beginning that the family was a source of strong loyalty. What would be a biblical definition of loyalty?

[Rushdoony] Well, for one thing, the husband and wife and their loyalty to each other, and in their loyalty to their children, exemplify a kind of loyalty, a readiness to work together, and to take care of one another that is never done when you destroy the family. To give a couple of very homely examples, you can’t hire the kind of help that goes into caring, for example, for a sick husband or a sick wife by a spouse, and it’s done routinely by millions of people, day in and day out, or take another. A husband and wife have a loyalty that is greater than all their differences. Now, if you talked at times to your friends and neighbors that sometimes a wife and a husband will talk to each other, would end the relationship permanently, but a loving couple can say things and get angry and do things, which would destroy any other relationship, but they come back and they go on, stronger than ever. Why? Because there’s a loyalty there under God. Now, those are very homely illustrations, but they should illustrate this fact, that this creates, as our Bible tells us, “The twain shall be one flesh.” It creates a community of life, and it’s one that is not easily damaged, and so it has an ability to stand things which other relationships cannot take. Where other relationships are broken, the marital relationship comes back, reasserts itself, and goes on. Yes?

[Audience] Well, then, the same kind of a relationship is then demonstrated to the children within the family, between the children and the mother and the father in that regard.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The loyalty that is there produces a patience and an understanding that you don’t get anywhere else. Don’t push your luck though. Yes?

[Audience] Could you repeat Mussolini’s definition of the state?

[Rushdoony] Mussolini’s definition of the state? First, “There is nothing above, nothing contrary, nothing beyond the state.” The state is ultimate. It’s the final authority. It controls everything, and the second aspect of it is you maintain all the forms of freedom, of a free country, but you control everything. You retain the form of private property. You retain the form of the family. You retain the form of freedom of speech and freedom of press, but you control everything to the point that none of that really exists, only the façade. Mussolini was very astute. He was a Marxist. He saw Marxism could not work, because it broke people’s loyalties to the family and to their place and property, and so on, so he thought, “Alright, we’ll have socialism in the name of freedom.” Yes?

[Audience] Why is it that the liberals, when they attack the conservatives and the Christians call them fascists?

[Rushdoony] Because it’s name-calling, and that’s what they are, but they want to call us that, because they have conveyed the idea that fascism is insane rubbish. Anyone who disagrees with them is obviously insane and his ideas are rubbish. Therefore, Christians and conservatives, anyone who disagrees with them is insane. He’s a fascist. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] How far along the line would you say America is compared to how far Mussolini got Italy?

[Rushdoony] That’s a hard question to answer. We’re not as far along, of course, as he took Italy. Incidentally, one of the first things he did when he gained power was to institute state schools throughout the length and breadth of Italy, because if he was going to change the minds of the people, he had to replace parochial schools, which is what Italy had, with state schools. Then he could change their thinking. Also, in some of the poorer areas, there was a great deal of illiteracy, and very astutely he recognized, illiterate people are harder to propagandize. So teach them how to read and write so they can read the propaganda we put out. That was it. So, we have been moving into fascism beginning with Roosevelt. Now, I’m old enough to remember that in England and in this country, people thought Mussolini was great, until he started lining up with Hitler. So, we had, in the New Deal, an imitation of Mussolini, and those ideas have been progressively advocated. So far, we’re not totally down the road, but there’s certainly every effort to take us there. Yes?

[Audience] As with Mussolini’s educating the illiterate so they could read his propaganda, maybe the state schools in the United States will backfire because the illiterates they’re producing cannot read their propaganda.

[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s increasingly true, but perhaps they figure TV will give it to them. They’ve got ears, and you can’t educate them into non-hearing very well. Yes?

[Audience] You mentioned the family as a means of social change for Christians in a major {?} society. How’s the local church fit into that and how do they interlock?

[Rushdoony] Well, the local church has the function of teaching. It is a teaching center, and therefore, out of that teaching center, it’s a worshiping center, but even in its worship it is teaching. It is to teach the families who are the constituents of the church, and at one time, the membership of the church was reckoned in terms of so many families, and still is in some churches. It teaches the families their responsibilities under God. Well, we’ll take a break now for about five or ten minutes, and then resume with our second subject of the evening.

End of tape