8. Principle of Authority (Remastered)

The Principle of Authority

R.J. Rushdoony

Our Scripture is Exodus 22:28, and our subject, ‘The Principle of Authority.’

“Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people.”

This verse is one of central importance. It is a very neglected verse in our day, and yet there was a time when this verse was quite extensively preached. To understand the meaning of this verse we must analyze the significance of the word ‘gods.’ The word ‘gods’ here, Elohim in the Hebrew, means exactly that—gods. Literally, this is the translation. However, if you were to examine a number of different translations, you would find that some would translate it as god. Your marginal note, if you have a Bible with marginal readings, will give it as judges. Other versions will give it as authorities. And there will be similar translations. 

What is the significance of this variety of readings for the word ‘Elohim?’ Well, the reason for it is that in terms of the context, it has precisely the meaning of judges, authorities, and rulers. Our Lord Himself defined the word as He discussed it in John 10:35, commenting on the use of the same word in Psalm 82:1, 6, that gods, or ‘Elohim’ meant those to whom the Word of God came. That is, those who were entrusted with authority in the name of the Word of God. 

Now then in terms of this, how are we to read this verse? It means any person of authority. It means officials in civil government, it means teachers, it means authorities in the church, and it means, above all else, parents, parents. And this is why this particular law is classified under the head of the Fifth Commandment, “Honour thy father and thy mother.” 

“Thou shalt not revile the gods [or authorities], nor curse the ruler of thy people.”

But of course, this particular commandment is very much neglected today, and there is a reason. 

In our day and age, statist education and statist intervention into the family have led to the breakdown of the family. The reason for it, of course, is that the modern state is challenging the historic definition of authority. And authority, in terms of the Scripture, is vested primarily in the family. This does not mean there are not higher authorities, but it means that basic authority, the root authority, is the authority of the father and then of the mother; of the family. 

A little analysis will very quickly reveal to us that the child’s first school is the home, the child’s first state or government is the home, the child’s first church is the home, the child’s first vocation is the home, the responsibilities he is given in the home. So that, basically, all authority stems from the pattern of authority that is laid down in the home. And when there is a rebellion against the authority of the home, there is a rebellion across the boards; in church, state, school; in every area of life.

Thus it is that theologians through the centuries have taught obedience to civil magistrates and to all duly constituted authorities under the heading of the Fifth Commandment. And in terms of this law:

“Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people.”

The matter has been summed up by one writer, Meredith, in these words:

“In the eyes of a small child, a parent stands in the place of God Himself! For the parent is the child’s provider, protector… teacher and lawgiver.” ⁱ

This is rightly so. All authority is involved in parental authority. And the destruction of the family leads to anarchy in all society. It is no wonder that after a couple of generations of permissive education and permissive parental teaching, we have precisely what we have today in the schools and on the streets; growing anarchy. The root of all anarchy has been cut by undercutting the authority of the home. 

And one of the first and foremost facts we must realize about the present student revolution is that it is a revolution against parental authority. It takes a particular delight in assaulting, in despising, parental authority. And yet in the face of all this, John D. Rockefeller III can say, as he did about a week or two weeks ago, he is, incidentally, sixty-two years old:

“Instead of worrying about how to suppress the youth revolution; we of the older generation should be worrying about how to sustain it.” ⁱⁱ

Now, Rockefeller asks us to sustain and accept certain things. First, the premise that youth have the right to govern and control other people’s properties, because he was commenting about what’s going on in the colleges and universities and on the streets. Do the students have any right to govern the colleges and the universities? It’s not their property. They go there on a contract, their tuition is payment for delivery of certain teachings, they have no right to complain about what they’re getting. If they don’t like it, they can shop elsewhere, it is a legal transaction. They are on other people’s premises. If they don’t like the goods in that store, they can go to another store, and the school is selling something as surely as any other agency. The student is there on the school’s terms, whether as a student or an instructor. There is a property right in the school which he cannot violate. It is coercion to hold otherwise, but Rockefeller says this coercion is good.

Second, the goal of the student revolution is amoral power, it is anarchism. And over and over again, the student leaders have stated that what they want is a “clean sweep” (their words) and a “fresh start” (their words). 

And third, this anarchism is the result of modern education and the neglect of family law.

Now the Biblical Law calls for obedience, true obedience; unquestioning and prompt, on the part of children. They are to obey their parents in the Lord. But the humanistic mind today challenges this kind of obedience as destructive of the mind of the child. And we are told over and over again, How can we have an intelligent youth if they are to obey their parents in this kind of prompt and unquestioning obedience? In fact, one writer, a churchman, Ross Snyder, writing on young people and their culture, says that:

“…young people of our time are quite convinced that they are meant to be right now. And in all the fullness possible for them at their period of development.” ⁱⁱⁱ

Now, to translate this into English, and to translate the rest of his statement, which is too long to give in English, what they are demanding is instant realization of all their utopian hopes; paradise now! 

Now, this demand for instant realization is the mark of a child, of an infant. A baby, the minute it is hungry, cries. It doesn’t say, “I’ll wait until morning so Mother and Dad can sleep in.” It cries. The minute it wants to void its bladder or its bowels, it voids them. And the process of maturity, of training, is to teach it that it eats at stated times, that it controls its natural functions, that it cannot have instant realization, instant gratification on demand. 

But, when youth is reared permissively, it will retain this demand for instant gratification. And it will retain this childish rage at not being gratified. Have you seen a young child, a baby, that wants to be fed and the bottle isn’t brought promptly and how it turns red with anger and rage as it cries; it’s not just crying, it’s raging. And this type of infantile rage characterizes the student revolution today. It demands instant realization; things must be right now! They demand paradise and the world must deliver it.

It is significant, and it’s indicative how far astray modern psychiatry is today, that no one has commented about this. But at these various student incidents on college campuses, and especially the march on Washington and on the Pentagon, people who are there have reported (and only a little bit of this has crept into the papers) that the vast amount of public urination and defecation by these students. And one man who works in the Pentagon told me, he said, “You would have to see it to believe it! The childish glee with which they did these things!” Is it any wonder that a permissive generation is brought up into this kind of thing so that they act like two-week old babies when they are twenty and twenty-four? But this is the essence of the revolutionary mind; it is childish, it demands instant utopia and it rages at the idea of obeying authorities, obeying parents, honoring parents and honoring authorities. 

The roots of this go deep. They go back to the Enlightenment in its early days and in John Locke who laid down the psychology of humanism. John Locke formulated the ‘clean tablet,’ the ‘clean slate’ concept of the mind. True education, he said, involves wiping the mind free of all preconceived notions, that is anything that the parents have taught, and the church has taught, anything that society has passed on to the child. So that education must be revolutionary, it must destroy everything in the child’s background, and having destroyed that, then begin to fill the mind afresh. In other words, there must be a studied rootlessness. The child must have his family and religious and social background blasted out of existence. 

Then add to this Rousseau’s concept of the ‘natural man.’ All forms of inheritance from the past were, by Rousseau, treated as chains which had to be broken. The essence of sin is the past, the inheritance that people foist onto the natural man. And so, the natural man must be like a savage, he must have no inheritance from the past. Then Darwin came along and said that which is a part of the past; the parents and their teaching, represents a lower stage of evolution and so each generation represents a link upward and therefore, the higher link must despise the lower link. Marx and Freud then drew the logical conclusions from Locke, Rousseau, and Darwin. 

As a result, the disciplines of the past must give way to the will of the moment, and in every area of life we have seen this movement. In education and in child-rearing, of course, it has been very rigorously fostered by educators and child psychologists and psychiatrists as the best way of educating children. In art, discipline in art has given way to the spontaneous and to the unconscious. In religion, experience is everything, and the Bible is despised. In politics, authority comes from below, from the spontaneous, from the unconscious, from the masses and their revolutionary rage. In music, undisciplined emotionalism has given way to a disciplined concept of music. 

But we must say as Christians that the best functioning mind is the disciplined, the obedient mind. The child who is disciplined becomes the free man. He is best in command of himself, best able to command. We have forgotten how mature children once were,  and how early maturity was once reached.

I’d like to read a couple of passages from Dr. Vandenberg of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, who has written some very stimulating things in the history of psychology. And in his book, The Changing Nature of Man, he has pointed out how the child is now no longer what he once was. In fact, our idea of the child is a modern idea. He quotes, for example, from Montaigne, who describes what education was in his day. And this is what Montaigne said. 

“A few years of life are reserved for education, not more than the first fifteen or sixteen; make good use of these years, adult, if you wish to educate the child to the right maturity. Leave out superfluous matters. If you want to do something constructive, confront the child with philosophical discourses, those that are not too complicated, of course, yet those that are worth explaining. Treat these discourses in detail; the child is capable of digesting this matter from the moment that it can more or less manage for itself [Montaigne actually wrote: “from the moment it is weaned,” but probably he did not mean that too literally]; the child will, in any case, be able to stand philosophical discourses much better than an attempt to teach it to write and to read; this had better wait a little.” ^iv

Now, that’s an amazing statement, it is not? You begin to instruct the child in philosophy and a little later you teach it to read and write. Well, we know from Puritan and Colonial America that children were taught to read and write between the ages of two and four, depending on how quick they were to learn.

Now Vandenberg goes on to give illustrations of children of that time. And I shall read his description of two. And he cites the life of Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, Huguenot, friend of Henry IV, born in 1550. 

“Of d’Aubigné it is told that he read Greek, Latin, and Hebrew when he was six years old, and that he translated Plato into French when he was not yet eight.

Plato. Montaigne recommended the reading and explaining of philosophical discourses to children—well, if an eight-year-old child can translate Plato, what objections can there be to reading a translated version to him when he is four?

When d’Aubigné was still eight years old, he went through the town of Amboise, accompanied by his father, just after a group of Huguenots had been executed. He saw the decapitated bodies; and at the request of his father he swore an oath to avenge them. Two years later he was captured by Inquisiteurs; the ten-year-old boy’s reaction to the threat of death at the stake was a dance of joy before the fire. The horror of the Mass took away his fear of the fire, was his own later comment—as if a ten-year-old child could know what he meant by that. And yet a child who has translated Plato and who has been used to reading classics for four years, could not such a child know what he wants, and know what he is doing? But he can hardly be called a child. A person who observes the effects of an execution intelligently, who swears an oath to which he remains true through life, who realizes for himself the interpretation of the Holy Communion, and who fathoms the horror of death at the stake—he is not a child, he is a man.” ^v

Then Vandenberg cites another child: 

“…Blaise Pascal, born in 1623, wrote, when he was twelve years old, without assistance, a treatise on sound which was taken seriously by expert contemporaries. At about the same time he happened to hear the word mathematics; he asked his father what it meant, and he was given the following incomplete answer (incomplete, because his father was afraid that an interest in the mathematics might diminish his interest in other sciences): ‘Mathematics, about which I shall tell you more later on, is the science which occupies itself with the construction of perfect figures and with the discovery of the properties they contain.’ Young Pascal brooded over this answer during his hours of leisure, and unassisted, he constructed circles and triangles which led him to the discovery of the sort of properties his father must have meant—for instance, that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals two right angles.” ^vi

Now one might say these were child prodigies, and yet the interesting thing is how many of the great musicians of that period were child prodigies, and how many of the ordinary people matured at the same age. Consider the Constitutional Convention in this country. Go through and list the ages of those men at the time of the Constitutional Convention, and they were a surprisingly youthful group. Franklin was the old man of the group, and Washington was far older than most of them. The average person there was a generation or so younger than Washington. They were young men, not only were they young men in their thirties, but most of them had been military officers, judges, governors, for a number of years. They reached maturity in their teens because there was a different concept of discipline.

And we can see, many of us, from our own knowledge of people who are today in their seventies and eighties, or our parents, the greater discipline that was there. In other words, the best-functioning mind is the disciplined mind, and the child who is disciplined becomes the free man because he is best in command of himself and best able to command others. Thus, the commandment, “Thou shalt not revile the gods (the authorities) nor curse the ruler of thy people.” “Honour thy father and thy mother.” Honor all authorities, is thus a commandment that does most for the development for man.

We must further say that the Fifth Commandment, as it speaks of parents and their authority, is establishing, first and last, God’s authority. All rulers; parents, churchmen, politicians, teachers, masters, are sinners. God knows this, God is not interested in establishing sinners. Because He is not interested in establishing sinners, He expelled Adam and Eve from Eden, and throughout history has overturned all authorities that rule contrary to His Word. 

But God’s way of disestablishing sinners and establishing His law-order is to require that authorities be obeyed. 

“Vengeance [judgment - RJR] is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”  ^vii

This obedience that we must render to all duly constituted authorities under God is first of all to God and a part of the establishment of God’s order. Sin leads to revolutionary anarchy. Godly obedience to godly order. 

“Thou shalt not revile the [authorities - RJR]…” ^viii

Let us pray.

* * *

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that thy law-order governs all things. Thou hast called us to be obedient to thy law-order. Give us grace therefore day-by-day to walk in obedience to thee, obeying all authorities under thee, obeying, above all else, thee and thy Word. Make us strong in obedience, faithful in the exercise of authority, ever prompt and willing in thy service. Bless us to this purpose. in Jesus’ name. Amen.

* * *

Are there any questions now?

Yes…

[Audience member] Tape skipped - inaudible question.

[Rushdoony] Well, there are so many things in your question that I’ll try to answer them. I don’t know whether I can remember to cover them all.

First of all, the Fifth Commandment does include all authorities, but here is a point of error on the part of many theologians over the years. The essence of the relationship between parents and other authorities is not that these other authorities exercise a parental role, but that they share, with parents, authority. 

Now, the state has made the mistake, and Ingram is right in disagreeing with this interpretation, of assuming that it has a parental role. The state and the state schools are, “In loco parentis,” to cite the Latin phrase. They are there in the place and in the authority of parents, and that they have this kind of authority over people. 

This is a misinterpretation of the commandment. What parents share with teachers and with authorities in civil government and authorities in the church is not that they share a parenthood with these people, but authority with them, you see, so that they are not “In loco parentis,” but they are in authority. And their authority can never be interpreted as parental. Parental authority is exclusively the authority of the parent. The authority of the state is that of authority in the realm of justice, to enforce justice. 

[Audience member] Indiscernible question. 

[Rushdoony] Well, what our Lord meant there literally is a parent who will not give to a hungry child a stone instead of bread, actual food. It meant that the father is concerned about the child. Now, when the state tries to feed the child, as well as the adult, it is trying to play the role of the family, to move into the family realm. 

Now certainly, our Lord elsewhere instructs concerning the teaching of the child the Word of Life. But in that case it literally refers to food, and it is an invasion of the family’s province when the state takes over this function. 

Yes…

[Audience member] Question about authority and government. 

[Rushdoony] A very good question. It is the deterioration of a concept of authority. First of all, the authority of God that leads to the deterioration of money. I don’t want to go into this at too great length because my next newsletter will deal with this. But, the deterioration of money is a part of the ‘death of God movement,’ which has deep roots in our culture. When you have a money that is not based on an objective law, or an education that leaves out God, you have a ‘death of God education’ and a ‘death of God money;’ it denies an objective law. So it has been this practical atheism on the part of society that is leading to the actual atheism in each of these realms, economic, educational and the like.

Yes.

[Audience member] Some of the people I talk to say, “Of what value is the Word of God in education, or in economics?” ^ix

[Rushdoony] Yes. It’s like saying, “Of what value is a spinal column in a man as long as he’s got a job?” Without a spinal column, a man cannot stand. Without an objective standard, the monetary system cannot stand, it collapses. So an objective standard which does not depend upon man and the state, it is necessary to the economic system. And to deny that an objective standard is necessary is to say that God is dead in economics and that there is no economic law. But as long as man can keep the wheels moving, somehow there will be a perpetual motion and the ability to sustain, without any objective law.

[Audience member] Surely an atheist can hold to objective truth in economics?  ^x

[Rushdoony] I don’t know of a single person who denies the objectivity of economic law and objective monetary standard such as gold who is not an atheist. Now, some individuals may hold otherwise. But the economists, the writing economists all write in terms of an implicit denial that there is an absolute law, they are relativists to the core.

[Audience member] But there are people who are atheists, who hold to objective truth in economics; there have to be! ^xi

[Rushdoony] Well, who are these people? I mean, is there anyone in the way of a scholar you can name?

[Audience member] No.

[Rushdoony] No. Well, these people are schizophrenic. You see, they’re trying to hold onto God, and at the same time adopt a system of absolute relativism. It’s like the people who are going to make the public schools work for free enterprise. How can they? The public school is a socialist organization, and the longer it continues, the more it will become totally socialistic in its implications and its teaching. It’s like asking a thief to be a policeman. 

So, these people who deny the objective law, whether it’s in education or in economics or in politics are either atheists or they are schizophrenic. And no man can serve two masters ultimately they will forsake the one or the other. 

Yes.

[Audience member] Boys can become men under the right circumstances.  ^xii

[Rushdoony] And this is not as remote as we may believe. There are instances of this on the Western frontier of boys who at a very early age assumed responsibilities when their father died. I went to school with a boy whose father died when he was about eight or nine, and he took over the plowing and the management of that farm and managed to continue school until, I think, his sophomore year in high school, and then he dropped out. But at a very early age he took over, worked hard, and he knew how, because it was common for boys to start plowing when they were at that age, and learn how to do everything in those days. 

Even yet I know of boys in California who at eight and nine are running tractors and taking over responsibilities in the farm so that by the time they finish grade school, they are thoroughly proficient in all the farm responsibilities. Now there’s nothing remarkable about that. You find that where you have still an older concept of life, where the child isn’t a freeloader until thirty!

Yes..

[Audience member] Question relating to Verna Hall’s, The Christian History of the Constitution of the United States of America.

[Rushdoony] At this point some of us, Mr. Ingram and myself, disagree with Verna Hall and the emphasis she gives to John Locke in that first volume. I do not believe that John Locke had a major influence in America, I think he had practically no influence. But Locke was thoroughly an Enlightenment figure, and yet he was one of these transitional figures. He was still trying to retain Christianity and some of its concepts. But when he approached Christianity his approach was, as he wrote, The Reasonableness of Christianity. In other words, he had brought it to the bar of his reason and there judged it to be acceptable. So that he established his reason over everything. And in terms of his reason, he also was ready to accept the necessity of parental authority. He had an elitist concept so that the elite were going to rule and authority had its place for most. 

When he designed a constitution for the Southern colonies, it was a strange combination. It was never used; it was an impractical thing, a very Medieval feudalism, with Enlightenment figures ruling at the top. So you have that element in Locke.

Locke, as I said, is a transitional figure. He still reflects some of the older, but he also dynamited some of those things he said by his concept of psychology which has undergirded all modern education.  In other words, Locke came at a period when, as a child of a Puritan heritage, he reflected that Puritanism to a great extent. And he personally looked with disfavor on many of the licentious practices of the day. But, in his basic premises, philosophically, he was dynamiting his entire background. 

There are many fine things in Locke, but the basic thrust, and this is why he’s been so important, of such great importance to modern education, is his psychology. 

Yes…

[Audience member] Question about manual labor and skilled labor.

[Rushdoony] Yes, but there is less of that now than ever before in history because there is less unskilled labor now than ever before in history. In other words, we have never reached a point in civilization when it was more necessary for men to have skills, and when men were less able to produce them because of this immaturity. This is the problem today in area after area, and there are engineering firms, for example, today, that do a tremendous volume of business from January through December and wind up with a net loss for one reason. The turnover is so great that they cannot cope with the labor problem, and they lose money. And this is because of the studied immaturity of so many of the people they hire. And I heard some of them describe what the young engineers are like as they come out of school, and how they must bear with them for a couple of years of real loss trying to civilize them so that they are at least capable of producing and then training them slowly to produce. This is our problem today, and these young men who come in will talk about any kind of responsibility or work as drudgery. 

The point is to the generation we have around us today, any kind of work is drudgery. Now, to me, driving a tractor (and I’ve done it on a very minor basis) is drudgery, it isn’t my calling. But the point is people who are immature are incapable of exercising their calling and therefore any kind of responsibility is to them drudgery

[Audience member] It’s not their fault, though, they are maleducated and miseducated and never given the chance to mature.  ^xiii

[Rushdoony] Your answer is that of Adam and Eve. “The woman did give me,” and “the serpent did give me,” it’s somebody else’s fault. Nobody did it to them, they’ve done it to themselves. They wanted it that way and they are guilty.

Yes, one more.

[Audience member] I remember a family of a fourteen year-old boy who was on a ship, and in Hong Kong an epidemic wiped out about half the ship. He was the only one who knew how to [navigate]. He [guided] the crew around the world, about half way around the world, and he was fourteen. 

[Rushdoony] Now, that is, that’s the kind of maturity that was once more or less normal, a fourteen year-old taking a ship from Hong Kong to Boston.

Well, our time is really past due, so we are adjourned now.

i. Meredith, Roderick C. The Ten Commandments. Pasadena, Calif.: Worldwide Church of God, 1972, 75.

ii. “The Student Rebels,” in This Week Magazine (December 1, 1968), pp. 1, 10.

iii. Cited in a review in the Religious Book Club Bulletin, vol. 41, no. 15 (December, 1968), p. 2^.

iv. J.H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man (New York: Dell [1961], 1964), p. 21.

v. J.H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man (New York: Dell [1961], 1964), pp. 26–28. The author, Jan Hendrick van den Berg, is professor of psychology at the University of Leyden.

vi. J.H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man (New York: Dell [1961], 1964), pp. 26–28. The author, Jan Hendrick van den Berg, is professor of psychology at the University of Leyden.

vii. The Holy Bible: King James Version, Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version. (Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 2009), Ro 12:19.

viii.  The Holy Bible: King James Version, Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version. (Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 2009), Ex 22:28.

ix.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

x.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xi.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xiii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.