Th History of Christian Political Economy

Erik W. Matson and Jordan Ballor have done a great service to the church with their book, A History of Christian Political Economy: From the Patristics to the Present. Some Christians place greater weight on the theologies of church fathers because they assume that being closer in time to Christ, they held to a more pure theology. So, it's important to know what they thought. 

Ballor and Matson show that church fathers required that Christians be concerned for the poor, as Christ was. But that wasn't a call for socialism as modern socialists claim. Jesus and the church fathers called for Christians to give their own money to the poor, not to have the government tax someone else to give to the poor. 

The first great advance in economic theology came from Catholic theologians during the Reformation at the University of Salamanca. Until then, economic theology had been a slave to Aristotle, whom church fathers considered infallible. But his star began to dim when theologian astronomers proved his cosmology wrong. As a result, theologians began to investigate commerce, markets, a just price, and other economic issues on their own. 

They sanctified private property with "Thou shalt not steal," and free markets as the closest estimation of a just price. Also, property is more than a paper title. Property requires that the owner control its buying and selling, another justification for free markets. Property doesn't exist without free markets.

The Salamancan theologians wrote that Godly government is very limited, restricted to punishing criminals (Romans 13) and national defense. The state has the authority to collect taxes for those tasks, but it commits theft if it collects more in taxes fort other tasks.

Adam Smith inherited those principles of economic theology and called them the system of natural liberty. Marxists labeled them capitalism in the late 19th century. Capitalism was Protestant economic theology from the Reformation until the rise of socialism in the 20th century. The most popular economics texts of the 19th century in the U.S. were written by clergymen, the best of which came from Francis Wayland, a Baptist pastor and president of Brown University. I highly recommend his book, The Elements of Political Economy Very little in it needs correcting for later advances in the science of economics.

The first theologians to promote socialism were modernists who denied the deity of Christ, such as Walter Rauschenbusch. He saw Marx as savior of mankind in place of Christ. His heresy was popular among the hordes of German immigrants who poured into the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who also denied Christ's deity and were rabid socialists. 

A History of Christian Political Economy drives one more nail in the coffin of the heresy that socialism is Christian economics.