Professor: Rushdoony Dr. R.J.R.

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 12 of 19

Track: #12

Year:

Dictation Name: 12 The Source of Authority

[Rushdoony] Let us worship God. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. Seek Ye the Lord while He may be found, call Ye upon Him while He is near, let the wicked forsake His way and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord and He will have mercy upon Him, and to our God for He will abundantly pardon. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God unto whom all power, glory, and dominion belong. We beseech Thee to make us strong in Thee and effectual so that we may serve Thee with all our heart, mind, and being. Might be instrumental in the tearing down of the things which are so that those things which are of Thee may alone remain; and that we may do our work well and cheerfully bear our burden and the burdens of others. Increase our faith that we may trust in Thy word and in Thy promises, and may ever be faithful to Thine every word. Give us patience to wait on Thee, courage in Thy service, and knowledge that Thy word is truth and Thy word shall never return unto Thee void. Bless us ever in Thy service in Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture this morning is from the gospel according to Saint Matthew the Twenty-eighth chapter verse eighteen through twenty, the great commission.

In any society there is an ultimate source of authority. In a general way the source of authority is either supernatural or it is of this world, something within the human order or the natural order. Where we locate our ultimate authority has profound implications for man and society. Over and over again men and nations have gone astray because their source of authority has been a fallacious and an evil one. Very common in the modern world has been the opinion of Rousseau and the social contract. That men project their man-made laws onto the Gods to enhance their own authority. Men invent Gods and ascribe to them the laws, or the orders of society as a means of strengthening their own position. For Rousseau it was not the Gods or God but the general will of mankind which was sovereign law and the source of authority and truth. 

In previous generations before Rousseau men had looked first of all to God for authority and law, and then with the enlightenment to Reason spelled with a capital “R” as some kind of inherent semi-pantheistic force inherent in the world of nature. Now with Rousseau men began to look to man’s emotional responses for authority for truth and for law. Man in his innermost being not consciously but unconsciously, for Rousseau, knew the truth. And it was the function of true philosophy to unleash that subliminal and unconscious knowledge. God was eliminated therefore as the source of authority, truth, and law. Not only so but what previously had been considered the higher and civilized aspects of men were set aside in favor of what had, until then, been regarded as the lower and less civilized aspects of mans nature. Thus man created for himself a new authority, the primitive in himself. Not surprisingly this kind of thinking was in line with the doctrine of cultural evolution which was developing. Man was at his best when he was most natural, that is most primitive. One of the quickest responses to this new thinking was in the arts, and the arts are still under this impulse; in fact they are carrying it to its logical limits to their own self destruction. 

A very obvious example of this was Paul Gauguin, a savage in spite of all the civilization around him and in spite of his own upbringing and family background. He spoke extensively of his Peruvian blood as somehow giving him a title to being a savage. However while he did spend his formative years in Peru, he was not over Peruvian Incan blood, if there was any in him it was remote. He was reared in an aristocratic Spanish family with servants waiting on him at every turn. As a matter of fact once when he traded as child his rubber ball for some colored glass marbles and went home with them proudly, his mother was horrified and she exclaimed “What, you my son engaging in trade?” Someone in the aristocracy had no business engaging in trade, or doing anything to make money. We can understand why Gauguin hated much later being engaged in the banking business. 

In terms of this quest for the savage, for the primitive, Gauguin went to Tahiti and then to the Marquesan Islands. He fell in love with everything that was backward and crude there, in fact he located a couple of older people who had been cannibals and had been convicted by the French for their cannibalism and he rhapsodized over them as saints. In fact he could not get over what he called the infinite gentleness of their smile. Here was the true savage man and therefore the true wise man. Gauguin could exploit readily teenage, early teenage, and pre-teenage child prostitutes in Tahiti and believe that was wonderful, but on visiting Paris expressed great disgust over the presence of the prostitutes. They were the victims of Capitalism, but the child prostitutes in Tahiti were children of nature. 

Now, this type of thinking especially since World War two but beginning in the later part of the last century has increasingly gained in power and in scope. It has been a sustained attack on Christianity because Biblical faith leads to civilization, this is the occasion as they see it. The Supreme Court has joined in that attack with the rest of society and the Kinsey Report held that the natural is the normative. So that every kind of perversion and child molestation according to Kinsey and his institute constitute natural acts, and anyone opposing them is the problem. In France towards the last years of the century into 1907 Alfred Hunry{?} Jarry a French literary figure warred against every standard, and he used obscene language to characterize anything that even remotely resembled good taste. But this sort of thing went back to the enlightenment and its roots. Tergo {?} after all had declared the genius, raw untamed genius, was the new logos, the new presence of God in the world. This is what happens with naturalistic authority. If we do not have authority with God in eternity, and we locate it in this world, the direction is always downward whenever we have had a naturalistic authority civilization, culture, education, in favor of the primitive as ostensibly the most natural. This kind of thing means that authority is always located further and further downward. 

We see this very clearly developed in Freud. Freud said there were three aspects in the nature of man. One was the Id – the pleasure principle, the other was the Ego – the reality principle, and the third was the super ego – which is the accumulation of our education, religious ideas, family discipline, and so on, and he said the super ego is the weakest; the Id, the pleasure principle is the strongest and the most basic in man, and it constitutes the will to live, whereas the ego – the reality principle, and the super-ego are a will to death. So man to express the will to live had to express his every naked desire without any restraint. The modern world thus has been grounded on a dangerous doctrine of authority. One that is destructive of all civilization, of all culture, of all education. It should not surprise us that Henry Miller said there should be two hundred years of total destruction of all culture, of all religion, of all learning, reading, writing, all knowledge thereof so that man would forget there ever was religion and civilization. And he said then we can have a good life, there must first be he said the time of the assassins. When you locate authority in the natural order this is what happens, it goes downward. It locates itself further and further into the recesses of savagery. 

Now when we turn to Matthew 28 verses 18-20 we find something radically different. These words are known as the great commission or the missionary mandate, and indeed it is a missionary mandate. It is also known as the dominion mandate because it reinforces the dominion mandate of Genesis 1:26-28, it commands the teaching or literally the discipling of all nations. The word that is used and is translated “all power is given unto me in heaven and earth” is exousia, power or authority. This therefore is first of all a declaration of authority. It is the authority mandate. Our Lord tells us “all power all authority in heaven and on earth is given unto me, and therefore I send you forth under that authority to disciple all nations.” This authority is shared with the trinity and we are to disciple and baptize all nations and people in the name of the Father and of The Son and of the Holy Ghost. Access to all authority is on the human level through Christ who says “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man cometh unto the Father but by Me.” This is total authority and Christ tells us it is inclusive of all things in heaven and on earth. This state can claim no independent jurisdiction, nor can the arts, the sciences, or anything else. The missionary mandate and the dominion mandate rest on this fact of authority, hence the order “Teach all nations, baptizing them”. Well how do you baptize nations? The mandate is to baptize everyone, individuals and nations. Well the baptism of nations is to bring them under the law word of God. To bring them to acknowledge that there is only one true source of authority. 

Authority is an inescapable fact, mans perspective on himself, and on his world, and on everything he does is governed by mans doctrine of authority. Now in ever culture it is held to be essenti