So, it is the Fourth of July. Eat your burgers and set off your squibs. Remember that we are not allowed to turn this into a lamentation commemoration until the president has us neck deep in five year plans and new deals, wrapped in golden chains, and they have to be at least as onerous as those which would have been imposed by George XIV. Do what you can to resist the implication that the War for Independence was because we didn’t want tyranny from the Brits, believing that tyranny was okay so long as it was implemented by people born in America, or perhaps Kenya.
When talking about civic liberty, the subject cannot be separated from economic liberty. To the extent that we are economically free, we are a free society. To the extent that we are not economically free, we are not. If a nation of economic slaves comes to Christ, and He sets them free from their sins, and they all become Christ’s freemen, the external chains may remain for a time. But they will not remain for a long time, because the gospel always works its way out. If an economically free society uses that freedom to indulge in cocaine, porn, pagan tattoo artistry, and homosex, then that nation will shortly be enslaved. In God’s providence, the outside always comes to match the inside.
And this leads to the next important issue. Astute readers will recognize how much I appreciate the sturdy horse sense of economic writers like Hayek or Hazlitt, DiLorenzo or Rothbard. But there is a glaring blind spot in these writers that has to be addressed, and coincidentally it is the same blind spot that is present in all the Christian socialists. We are talking about the economics of sin.
The Austrian and Chicago free market guys are great teachers. They explain with clarity and forcefulness why we cannot lift ourselves up by getting a better grip on our own shirt collars. They are such good explainers because they think the problem is lack of education. This is the humanist error, going back at least as far as Socrates. If man is basically good, then why does he do evil? The answer must be ignorance. A basically good person would only act like a destructive imbecile if he were unaware of the effects of what he is actually doing. And since he is in fact acting that way, we need to fund another slick foundation to explain — one more time — that water does not rise above its own level.
But people act the way they do because of sin. And if sin made sense, it wouldn’t be sin. This is the mystery of lawlessness. A man can engage in behavior that is self-destructive, knowing full well that it is self-destructive, and do it anyway, with his eyes wide open. Wisdom says in Proverbs that all who hate her love death (Prov. 8:36). When you are trying to set the paths of life before a man who loves death, and you are assuming that he is doing what he does because he actually doesn’t love death, this is going to result in a very clear, cogent, and impotent teacher. The law can’t save.
All this to say that the economic writers I cited are great at descriptive diagnosis, but they will be no good at all in actually solving the problem that afflicts us. This is because they have no one who is able to give a convincing come-to-Jesus talk, and their pianist doesn’t know the chords for “Just As I Am.”
But the Christian socialists have the same problem — they don’t recognize the presence and reality of sin in all this. They say they do — the sin they are aware of is all that greed and profit-taking over there — but that is not the sin that is actually causing all the problems. The Christian socialists are painfully unaware of the sin of hypocrisy that informs and drives virtually everything they do. Their mouths are full of words like justice, poverty, equity, affordable, and compassion, but the policies they advocate and insist upon (in the name of Jesus) are calculated to make everything worse.
So we have the spectacle of non-believers pointing to virtue, believing that we are missing it because of a lack of education. And we have believers denouncing virtue as though it were vice, and saying that we really need Jesus in order to satisfy our vices. It reminds me of a counseling case I had one time where the non-Christian wife kicked the Christian husband out because she was tired of his pot-smoking.
The latter are right; we do need Jesus, but not in order to justify any more envious stealing. The former are right; we ought to quit stealing, but if Jesus is not the Lord of heaven and earth, if He did not rise from the dead, then what’s the problem with stealing? There is of course (from a certain perspective) a problem with being stolen from, but in this Darwinian hardscrabble world, things are tough all over.
In order to sort all this out, we need to remember two things. First, the law of God, and only the law of God, gets to define what sin is. Sin is lawlessness (1 Jn. 3:4). Sin is not defined by feelings deep within the ribcages of Ron Sider or Tony Campolo. And second, the Word of God, and only the Word of God, gets to define what salvation is. Salvation is given through the name of Jesus, and there is no other name under heaven through which we may be saved. The gospel is the key to culture. The gospel is not defined by the Austrian School, or irrational haters like Ayn Rand.