I am listening to Ken Myers’ interview of William Cavanaugh on Mars Hill Audio. I get lots of book purchase ideas from listening to Ken’s stuff, and so I commend it to you.
This interview with Cavanaugh was concerning his book Being Consumed, a book I have already read and reviewed here. But listening to that interview made me realize that I needed to say something else. And I probably need to say it a hundred times.
I have said many times that free markets (genuinely free markets) are not possible without free men. And free men are not possible apart from the saving power of the gospel. But this does not mean that the definitions of freedom in these two phrases are identical — it is not like having a brick, and then putting a pile of them together to result in a brick wall. Freedom means different things at different levels.
Cavanaugh returns to Augustine for a definition of freedom, which is great, but then makes a very basic mistake when he fails to make the necessary adjustments between levels.
First, the agreement. Freedom for the Christian individual does not mean “absence of restraint.” As Dylan said in one of his better moments, you gotta serve somebody. True freedom before God is the freedom to do what is right as God defines what is right. Augustine is exactly right here, and is running on all Pauline cylinders.
“For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace. What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid. Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? But God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you. Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness. I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh: for as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity; even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness. For when ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness” (Rom. 6:14-20).
Freedom from sin, the basic and foundational human freedom, is freedom to do what is right. Not only so, but that “doing right” is defined by God, and not by us. Freedom is defined by the perfect law of liberty, which is to say, the law of God.
But a free market is one in which there is an absence of restraint. If a man walks up to me in the produce section of Safeway, puts the muzzle of his gun behind my left ear, and makes me buy the oranges, I am not conducting a free transaction, Augustine or no Augustine. And the fact that I am forgiven, justified, and free from sin does not transform the coerced orange purchase into something else. A man who is free from sin can still be coerced in the marketplace — this should be obvious. Christians, freed from sin, can still be murdered, arrested, raped, or robbed. The fact that I have been forgiven does not make my wallet inviolable.
Christians, freed from sin, can still be robbed by the state. Naboth was a faithful Israelite who knew his responsibilities under the law of God. He was a free man. This did not prevent Jezebel from doing what she did, and Naboth’s freedom from sin did not make it impossible for Ahab to sin against him. And Ahab, incidentally, would have been sinning against Naboth regardless of what he called this theft by the state. There are lots of swell things he could have called it — land reform, zoning readjustments, eminent domain, or perhaps communitarianism.
Now flip this around. A bunch of slaves can set up a free market (for a time) in which they sell chains to one another at market rates. If the price of cocaine is not rigged, then the market will set the price according to demand, just like it does with bread and butter. Here the market is free and the consumers aren’t. In the previous scenario, the consumer is free, but his transaction is not. So what gives?
What Cavanaugh misses, in a spectacular way, is the difference between meum and tuum. When God saves me, and releases me from servitude, and I begin serving Him freely and happily, God has done something that only God can do. But if I turn to my brother and say, “Here, let me require of you what only God could give to me,” I am not expanding Pauline liberty. I am distorting it and misapplying it, and giving it an obnoxious smell. I am not exporting liberty, I am becoming a petty tyrant.
So what do I mean when I say that only free men can produce free markets? I mean that one of the sins that God deals with in our hearts in the process of our sanctification is the sin of being an officious busybody. This is difficult, because it is a besetting sin for religious types — the conviction that something is a sin transitions seamlessly into the serene confidence that the same “something” ought to be a crime. Is it a sin to be a Donatist? Clearly, and so the magistrate should start hitting Donatists on the head with a knobbed stick.
The slaves to sin who sell chains to one another at market prices are not going to be able to do that for very long. This is because they are foundationally selfish, and some of them will figure out how they could use these circumstances to rip off the others. Rigging the markets is one of the best ways to do that. But in the meantime, when someone buys cocaine, or child porn, or a gun to shoot his grandmother, that transaction, considered in isolation, could be considered a free transaction. But that is a temporary anomaly — the market will not be free for long. Give it fifteen more minutes.
But the religiously officious are not much better, and frequently are far worse. C.S. Lewis says somewhere that he would rather live under robber barons who are in it for themselves alone (for their avarice will sometimes sleep) than under moral reformers who believe they are spreading sweetness and light with all their regulations. Take a look at the global warming zealots who will brook no discussion and no opposition, for they are engaged in the high and lofty calling of saving the world.
Learning from the great Augustine does not have to include repeating his mistakes. More on this to come.