Professor: Rushdoony Dr. R.J.R.

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 13 of 19

Track: #13

Year:

Dictation Name: 13 Authority – Primary and Secondary

[Rushdoony] Let us worship God. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. Oh come let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our maker; for He is our God and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee, for the freedom with which Thou hast blessed us in the years past. Give us grace and mercy and strength that we might pass on to those to come a like heritage. That we might cleanse this land of ungodliness, that we might again be a free people in Jesus Christ. Bless us through Thy word and by Thy Spirit. Make us strong in Thee to the destroying of the things that are against Thee and the establishing of Thy kingdom from pole to pole. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture is from the gospel according to Matthew, the fifteenth chapter verse one through nine. Our subject, authority primary and secondary, authority primary and secondary Matthew 15: 1- 9

“1Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees, which were of Jerusalem, saying,

2 Why do Thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they wash not their hands when they eat bread.

3 But he answered and said unto them, why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?

4 For God commanded, saying, honor thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death.

5 But ye say, whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me;

6 And honor not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition.

7 Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying,

8 This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoreth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.

9 But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. 

The word authority has been in disrepute for many, many generations. This should not surprise us. Man having rebelled against God’s authority is certainly going to rebel authority in any human sphere. He will not be inclined to respect man’s, having rejected God’s authority. A couple of centuries the liberal Anglican Bishop Hoadly said, and I quote “Authority is the greatest and the most irreconcilable enemy to truth and argument that this world ever furnished. All the sophistry, all the color of plausibility, all the artifice and cunning of the subtlest disputer of the world may be laid open and turned to the advantage of that very truth which they are designed to hide. But against authority there is no defense.” What we must say is that Hoadly had reference not to true authority but to man’s authoritarianism. Men have authoritarian pretensions that is a part of man’s sin to be as God.

Now in the history of the church the question of authority has never been a simple one. Two extremes have plagued the church, and we have touched on these before. First, there has been the insistence on the authentication of God’s word and authority by the church. The church says “we are the authenticating institution.” The danger in this is the tendency to exalt the church into a central position. Our Lord refers to the problem of humanistic authoritarianism in the Sermon on the Mount when He speaks concerning false swearing and says that they are not to swear by heaven or earth, the temple, or anything else. This he says is false swearing “Thou shalt not foreswear thyself” you shall not swear falsely. But he does not condemn legitimate oaths; he says “perform unto the Lord thine oaths.” What He is saying is when men swear by the temple or by anything other than God they are placing a man evaluated authority above God; so that if we swear by any other thing than God, we have given something on the human scene greater authority. But God is greater than Jerusalem, the temple, and heaven and earth. Nothing can be above God to validate His self-authenticating word. 

Then second as we have also seen we have had an instance on authentication by religious experience. This is similar to authentication by the church in that there is an implicit humanism in both. But authentication is not in man, nor in an institution but from God himself. We can say that both these positions have a measure of truth, but not as authentication or verification but as acts of submission. Paul in Romans 1 verses 18-23 speaks about God’s authority when he says that the things of God visible and invisible are known to all men, they don’t need any authentication. But what is the problem? Men hold the truth, or literally hold back, hold down, suppress the truth in unrighteousness, in injustice. The truth is inescapable and man the sinner spends all his time, according to Paul in Romans 1:18-23, trying to sit on the truth and keep it from welling up in his being and witnessing to God.

Now secondary authorities are very real, they are God ordained and they are important. But when secondary authorities whether it be in the form of the church, the state, the family, or anything else, gain too much authority then you have a false center in society which begins to warp man in society. Then too authority begins to break down because the ultimate source is not given priority. There is no lack of authoritarianism in our world today of a humanistic sort, whether in this country or in the Soviet Union, but it is destroying true authority.

Now our Lord dealt with this problem very, very realistically. And in our text Matthew 15 verses 1-9 he deals with the traditions of the elders which had become governing and binding. And our Lord calls this transgression, it is a transgression he says of commandment of God, it goes hand in hand with vain worship. It puts man at a distance from God, and its purpose is to nullify God’s law, not to support it. This concept of tradition is a very old one. In Israel you had the rabbi’s declaring that tradition was the oral teaching from Moses given to Israel when he came down from the mount so that you had the written word and the oral word. In the Catholic Church you also have a doctrine of tradition, the oral teachings of Christ and the apostles with the magisterium, the teaching authority of the church as the custodian. 

Now Protestants normally do not use the word tradition but they have developed their own concept of it. It is called depending upon the communion Presbyterian law, The Baptist way, Lutheranism, Congregationalism, or what have you. Every doctrine of tradition technically is subordinate to scripture. But in practice it is often the governing day by day power, and the result is that you have throughout the history of the faith a conflict between the primary word of God, the authority of God, and secondary words or authorities of men. This is what Phariseeism was about, and this is why our Lord so thoroughly condemned Phariseeism. We would have to say that the Pharisees really were a superior group of people, intellectually and morally there was probably no one in the world of their day, whether in Judea or outside of Judea on a level with the Pharisees. 

As a matter of fact some years ago a definitive study was made by Finkelstein, a prominent Jewish scholar of the Pharisee’s two volume study. It was intended to defend the Pharisee’s against our Lord’s comments about them, and Finkelstein very definitely demonstrates the moral and intellectual superiority of the Pharisees. But he also does say very clearly that the Pharisees held that the oral law, or tradition was, in his own words “equally authoritative with the written word.” Equally authoritative, and when you recognize that with their oral tradition as they developed it they often replace the very word of God; held the word to be comparable to water but their tradition like wine, superior, you realize why our Lord condemned them. Perka Abot {?} the sayings of the Fathers is one of the sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah. There is an edition of it by Rabbi Joseph A. Churritz {?} who was then chief Rabbi of the British Empire. And He says very frankly in commenting on the sayings of the fathers, and I quote “Tradition is the key word in the Jewish religious system.” Now there is no question that the sayings of the fathers often embody very sound insights into the faith; but there is no question also that they very often alter the faith and give you an interpretation which is made more binding than the very word of God. The crippling fact about tradition is that it makes appeal to authority much more difficult. The appeal to God’s is to what is written. The rise and appeal of modernism, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant has been in part, in part not entirely, due to the revolt against oppressive tradition that stifles a faith. 

Now the reliance of secondary authorities on tradition is very serious. This is why our Lord had to attack it. He attacked the tradition of the elders in the name of the very word of God. He said you have made the word of God, the commandments of God, of none effect by your tradition. You have overturned the very intent of the law by your interpretation of the law. So that where the law says honor thy father and thy mother as you interpret it you use it to dishonor your parents and gain religious credit for doing so. So he says Isaiah did prophesy of you saying “this people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth and honoreth me