"The Biblical Doctrine of
Government"
By Rev. R. J. Rushdoony
(adapted from Politics
of Guilt and Pity
,
The Craig Press, 1970)
One of the most revealing and deadly linguistic errors of our time is
the equation of the word "government" with "state."
When the average person, and indeed almost every man, hears references
to "government," he immediately thinks of the state. This
usage is a relatively modern one. There was a time when, in common
usage, especially among the Puritans, the term for the state was
"civil government." Government in itself was a much broader
concept.
Government meant, first of all, the self-government of the
Christian man. The basic government is self-government, and only the
Christian man is truly free and, hence, able properly to exercise
self-government. A free social order rests on the premise that
self-government is the basic government in the human order, and that any
weakening of or decline in self-government means a decline in
responsibility and the rise of tyranny and slavery.
Second, next to self-government is another basic form of government, the
family. The family is man's first state, church, and school. It is
the institution which provides the basic structure of his existence and
most governs his activities. Man is reared in a family and then
establishes a family, passing from the governed to the governing in a
framework which extensively and profoundly shapes his concept of himself
and of life in general.
Third, the church is a government and an important one, not
only in its exercise of discipline but in its religious and moral
influence on the minds of men. Even men outside the church are
extensively governed in each era, even if only in a negative sense, by
the stand of the church. The failure of the church to provide Biblical
government has deadly repercussions on a culture.
Fourth, the school is a government, and a very important one.
The desire of statists to control education rests on the knowledge of
the school's significant part in the government of man. For formal
education to be surrendered to the state is thus a basic surrender of
man's self-government.
Fifth, a man's vocation, his business, work, profession, or
calling, is an important government. A man is governed by the
conditions of his vocation or work. In terms of it, he will educate
himself, uproot his family and travel to another community, spend most
of his waking hours in its service, and continually work therein to
attain greater mastery and advancement. Vocations are both areas of
government over man and, at the same time, a central area of
self-government.
Sixth, private associations are important forms of government.
These can include a man's neighborhood, his friends, voluntary
organizations, strangers he must meet daily, and other like
associations. A man dresses, speaks, thinks, and acts in an awareness of
these associations, with a desire to be congenial, to further a given
faith or cause, or to enhance his social status. These associations have
a major governing influence on man, but they can also be means and areas
whereby he exercises his government over others, influencing or
directing them.
Seventh, another area of government is civil government, or the
state. The state is thus one government among many, and to make the
state equivalent to government per se is destructive of liberty and of
life. The governmental area of the state must be strictly limited lest
all government be destroyed by the tyranny of one realm. The issue in
the persecution of the early church was the resistance of the Christians
to the totalitarian claims of the state. The Christians were asked to
sacrifice to the genius of the emperor, i.e., to offer incense to him.
This, in its earlier forms, was not a recognition of the deity of the
emperor, because only the dead emperor was deified upon approval of the
senate. It was a recognition that the state, in the person of the
emperor, was the mediating and governing institution between the gods
and men, and that all life and government was under the jurisdiction of
the state. Religious liberty was available to the church upon the
recognition of that premise. The Roman Empire, in other words, like the
modern state, assumed that it had the right to deny or to grant
religious liberty because religion, like every other sphere of human
activity, was a department under the state. The church denied this.
Christians defended themselves as the most law-abiding citizens and
subjects of the Empire, ever faithful in prayer for those in authority,
but they denied the right of the state to govern the church. The church,
directly under God, cannot submit itself to any government other than
that of Jesus Christ. This was the issue.
Abuses of order within the church are no more under the government of
the state than abuses within the state are under the government of the
church, and the same is true of every other realm of government-family,
church, school, business, and the like. Reformed theologians restricted
the right of rebellion against an unjust order within the state to a
legitimate order within that state, i.e., to other civil magistrates,
who in the name of the law moved to correct the abuses of civil order.
The various spheres are interlocking and interdependent and yet
independent. Thus, Deuteronomy 21:18-21 deals with the death penalty for
a juvenile delinquent. The parents do not have the power of the sword,
i.e., of capital punishment. Upon reporting the incorrigible nature of
their son to the city elders, the parents carried their governmental
authority to its limits. The elders, upon confirmation of the charges,
then assumed their jurisdiction, capital punishment for what was now,
upon report, a civil offense. Clearly, the various spheres do not exist
in a vacuum; they are interlocking, but the integrity of each is
nonetheless real.
Rev. R. J. Rushdoony was chairman
of the board of Chalcedon and a leading theologian, church/state expert,
and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical Law to
society.
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Taken from Publisher's
Foreword: "The Biblical Doctrine of Government"
http://web.archive.org/web/20011222140532/http://www.chalcedon.edu/report/2000mar/rushdoony_doctrine_government.htm