A great Rushdoony quote...

R. J. Rushdoony wrote the "Institutes of Biblical Law" back in the late 70's, and it was and is a monumental achievement. He did a fine job explaining the enduring relevance of God's law and how it should be understood and applied today. I highly recommend it. Yesterday, as I was reading Rush's exposition of the 7th Commandment, the following quote leapt off the page, and I just had to share it. I think you'll understand why after you read it.

"The Biblical view of property will be discussed later, but, for the present, the case of Naboth can be cited (1 Kings 21:1-14). For Naboth, the land was not his to sell. Everything he had, land and vineyard, was an inheritance from the past as a trust for the future. Naboth as a good steward had no doubt increased the value of that inheritance, but this did not make any of it his own. As head of the family, he had an inheritance as a trust, not as a means of self-indulgence, and therefore his basic obligation was to the future. In China, by means of ancestor worship, the trustee family was bound to the past. In Biblical faith, because of the creation mandate, the trustee family was geared to the future. The modern family, because of its atomistic humanism, is geared to the present and is thus destructive of both the past and the future."

- the Institutes of Biblical Law, pgs. 418 - 419

This gem occurs in Rush's discussion of the family as a trustee of the creation under God. Please note the pronounced anti-capitalist AND anti-socialist sentiment implied by this understanding. Naboth didn't plunder his heritage for his own pleasure, as many CEO's do today. Neither did he regard his trust as something not to be used and improved, or as something held and preserved for 'society'. His society was his children and his children's children. Biblical law, which supports an agrarian understanding of family, property, God and creation, strikes the perfect balance between preservation and conservation, between the needs of the present and the need to improve property for the future.

As Rush correctly points out, the family today is a collection of soveriegn individuals living under one roof, but pursuing their own separate interests. This is perhaps the inevitable consequence of the family being rootless; of family being disconnected from real property. When God made man, he placed him in a garden and told him to dress and keep it. Adam was responsible under God for property even before he recieved his wife as a helpmeet. The lesson here ought to be obvious. We are as much created for property, as property was created for us. The land languishes and is plundered when there are no men and women to steward it as God intended. And we are diminished and lose some of ourselves when we have no land to keep and dress and pass down to our children.

And this is why only agrarianism will produce long-term health for familys, the land and ultimately our nation. Capitalism views land and people as 'resources' to be mined and consumed for the benefit of the haves. Socialism views land and people as a trust, but not under God's covenant and not to benefit the family but a soveriegn centralized authority. Agrarianism gives authority over property to familys who hold it and keep it under God.

R.G.