Most arguments for capitalism hinge on the consequences: capitalism enriches people while socialism impoverishes. But few Christians will take a class in economics so they will not care about consequentialist arguments. They consider morality more important than consequences and capitalism to be inherently immoral. Yet, almost half of the country is evangelical or Catholic. We lovers of liberty can’t afford to ignore them. How do we address their moral concerns without succumbing to theonomy? One way is to connect Jesus with capitalist principles.
Modernist theologians from Germany who denied the deity of Christ, fabricated the idea that Jesus was a socialist over a century ago. Both Protestants and Catholics promote that nonsense today. What were Jesus’ real views on politics and economics?
Unfortunately, Jesus didn’t say much about either. The closest he came was to say, “Pay to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” (Mark 12:17). Some theologians try to build a political theology around the Sermon on the Mount and sayings such as, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and “Blessed are the poor,” always twisting them to promote socialism. But according to principles of hermeneutics, we should consider Jesus’ audience, which was the common people and not the government. It’s dishonest to turn commands to individuals into political philosophy. Jesus was not a policy wonk. Families, churches and government have different responsibilities it is wrong to confuse them.
Conservative Christians believe that Jesus is God and that opens more of the Bible for political discussion because as God Jesus would have written the first five books of the Bible, the Torah. There we find Jesus’ ideas on government because God created the nation of Israel.
Talking about the Mosaic law resurrects the ghost of theonomy. But many principles cherished by libertarians came from it. “Thou shalt not murder” and “Thou shalt not steal” are two of the Ten Commandments. Theologians during the Reformation distilled the rights to life, liberty and property from those two commandments and prohibitions of man stealing (kidnapping) according to Larry Siedentop in his book Inventing the Individual. Equality before the law never existed until theologians determined that the government is a minister of God so it must treat citizens equally as God does. The concept of limited government came from theologians who saw the Biblical role of government as merely punishing criminals and taxation above that needed for its limited role is theft.
Jesus gave Israel a government with no human executive, legislature, taxes or standing army. He gave them only courts as government institutions. The people selected their judges and enforced their rulings.
Most theologians claim Israel before the monarchy was a theocracy, but in a theocracy, priests rule. In Israel, the courts ruled, and the priests only administered the temple. Yes, God was their king, but he was no more king under the judges than during the monarchy. He didn’t run the kingdom day-to-day as human kings do. God was like a human king only in that he gave Israel its laws. And we learn from later prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah that God is king of every nation.
God gave Israel 613 laws, but the courts adjudicated only the civil part, such as “Thou shalt not steal,” or “Thou shalt not kill.” They let priests enforce temple laws and God the moral laws. Most of the civil laws protect life, liberty and property. Some seem obscure, such as “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,” (Deuteronomy 25:4), or “You shall not wear cloth of wool and linen mixed together,” (Deuteronomy 22:11). But these civil laws merely prohibit fraud. Linen made the most valuable cloth. Mixing cheap wool thread with linen was a fraud. Not muzzling the ox forced landowners to pay day laborers their wages.
Most theologians believe God created a socialist government because of the Jubilee and sabbath year debt forgiveness laws. But they haven’t read the passages. Leviticus 25 describes Jubilee. A landowner might sell his land and the price was determined by the sum of the market value of the produce of the land for the years between the sale and the year of Jubilee, which took place every 50th year. For example, if the land produced $1,000 worth of olives annually and Jubilee was 12 years away, the owner could sell the land for no more than $12,000. The buyer got his money back by working the land and selling the olives. When Jubilee had arrived, he had earned back his investment without interest and the original owner took over the land again. Rather than land reform, the “sale” of the land was a loan that the land paid back each year. Jubilee was roughly like a modern mortgage burning.
As Deuteronomy 15 shows, every seventh year all debts were forgiven. But its effect was the opposite of what socialists claim because debt forgiveness punishes the lender only if it surprises him. Such debt forgiveness was popular in the ancient world and rulers announced them spontaneously so that lenders had no chance to prepare for them by calling in loans or reducing loan amounts.
By fixing the date of future debt forgiveness, the Mosaic law protected lenders, not borrowers. Lenders would loan only what the borrower could repay in the years remaining to forgiveness. If they loaned more than that, they understood they were providing charity. Jews preferred giving loans to the poor rather than charity because loans allowed the poor to retain their dignity.
As pharaoh’s step-grandson, Moses was educated in the school that trained him and others in Egyptian government administration and religion. The people would have expected him to imitate the most powerful nation of its day and declare himself to be the pharaoh of Israel. Instead, he presented them with a government unique in history. No king or nobility existed to steal from the people until Israel rebelled and demanded a king.
Moses, Joshua and the judges were never kings but generals during war and judges during peace. God warned Israel in I Samuel 8 of the many ways the king they demanded would steal from them and kill their young men in war. But Israel chose to be like Egypt.
In 1949, Murray Rothbard coined the term “anarcho-capitalist” to describe a similar system of government. Rothbard was a student of the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. An anarcho-capitalist society would have no human executive, legislature or taxes. Law enforcement, courts, and all other security services would be privately funded. Insurance companies and private security forces would compete to capture criminals and bring them to trial. Judges would decide cases following natural law. In its structure, ancient Israel was an anarcho-capitalist society, making Jesus an anarcho-capitalist.
Still, Christians shouldn’t try to push Mosaic laws through Congress. Many applied to a particular place and time. We should work to restore the anarcho-capitalist principles distilled from it by theologians during the Reformation.
No comments:
Post a Comment