Towards a Biblical Economics
By R.J. Rushdoony
On his visit here in November, 1991, Ian Hodge, the leader of Australian Christian Reconstruction, raised a fundamental question about economics. Himself a practicing economist, he asked if economics had any right to exist as an autonomous realm? Of course, socialists have an answer to that: they subordinate economics to politics. But what is the Christian solution?
The Christian must begin by separating himself from the world of John Locke. In Locke's thinking, property took priority over everything else. To a very real degree, it can be said that for Locke the state is a social contract whose fundamental purpose is to protect property for the individual. In his Second Treatise on Civil Government, Locke said,
Now God's law not only controls property (not taxable by the state because under God), it also controls money and debt. The law against false weights and measures had essential reference to money: gold and silver were not coined but were used by weight (Lev. 19:35-37,- Deut. 25:13-16). American coinage began by weight, a $20 gold piece being ounce of gold, 90% fine, and so on. Debts could not be contracted by believers beyond six years (Deut. 15:1-11); they were cancelled in the seventh or Sabbatical year. When Rome fell, the land tax disappeared, although William Carroll Bark, in The Origins of the Medieval World, 1958 (pp. 14ff.), could not understand why.
As Christianity began to penetrate the European mind, men's views began to change. "A man's affairs were everybody's business." A debt was seen as a promise, a commitment which had community-wide ramifications. In England, Magna Carta forbad the seizure of any man's land or person for debt: every man was king in his own place under God. "Neither the debtor's person nor his land could be seized. . . . The sheriff could go on receiving rent and other income from the land until the debt was paid, but he could not take the land." (The United States reverted to this for a time after the War of Independence. Talk of Magna Carta was not hyperbole but an insistence on Christian freedom.) Moreover, "As religion was a state matter, so was business." The idea of a just price did not mean taking a loss; it meant that a man could not take advantage of a crisis to charge a price far in excess of his cost. While the gilds had a monopoly, they also had a responsibility to make good the dishonesty or debt of a member. (Hugh Barty-King: The Worst Poverty, A History of Debt and Debtors, 1991, pp. 1-16).
Roman law, in its fundamental Twelve Tables, gave a creditor the right to seize and dismember the debtor and to sell his wife and children into perpetual slavery. This premise in part came into English law, although Cromwell sought to alleviate it. (Another evil borrowing was the essential Roman legal premise: "The welfare of the state is the highest law." This now governs all countries.)
After Locke, the debtor's prison became an increasing force in English life. A man sent to debtor's prison was not discharged until his debt was paid. Unlike other prisoners, he was not fed, so he routinely starved to death. Many of these debtors were men who lost everything in some natural disaster. From 1750 to 1950, 10,000 or so debtors were sent to prison each year. "Imprisonment for ordinary civil debt was abolished by a statute in 1970" (p. 173). Contemporary culture, being consumption rather than production oriented, has seen a startling increase in debt, unprecedented in all of history. The result is a debt ridden world, currencies with only debt behind them, and a coming world-wide economic collapse. Economics separated from religion, from a Biblical theology, are leading to history's greatest disaster.
If economics be separated from Biblical faith, it becomes a form of totalitarianism. The marketplace becomes the new god, and all things are governed by the premises of Lockean economics. I am regularly told by some that they cannot support me because they do not believe in non-profit activities. This would eliminate all churches and charities, and good music, and replace God with the marketplace. Not surprisingly, it leads, as Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard have often said, to libertinism. I have been told by such economic totalitarians that prostitution is good because it operates in terms of a free market, whereas marriage does not. Totalitarianism bears more labels than simply Marxism and fascism.
If all life is a stewardship under God, and all property and economic activity are stewardships, then our contemporary economic theories of the right and the left are alike immoral. Republican George Bush and Marxist Gorbachev are indeed bed-fellows of an anti-Christian order. (Howard Phillips has rightly termed some members of Congress "Gorbachev Republicans.") It means too that Ian Hodge is right: all our economic theory needs re-thinking in terms of Biblical faith.
Solomon was right: "Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?" (Proverbs 6:27). We have taken fire into our bosoms, and more than our clothes will be burned. It is time to renounce the evil heritage of John Locke. May God have mercy on us, but some Christian schools have in effect canonized him!
We cannot begin our economic theories with property, nor anything other than the triune God and His law word. In every sphere of life and thought, this must be our starting point. But the church has become antinomian with respect to God's Law, and devout nomians with respect to man's law. There is no fear of God before their eyes (Psalm 36:1). To them we can say, when we believe and obey God, "Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul" (Psalm 16.16).
On his visit here in November, 1991, Ian Hodge, the leader of Australian Christian Reconstruction, raised a fundamental question about economics. Himself a practicing economist, he asked if economics had any right to exist as an autonomous realm? Of course, socialists have an answer to that: they subordinate economics to politics. But what is the Christian solution?
The Christian must begin by separating himself from the world of John Locke. In Locke's thinking, property took priority over everything else. To a very real degree, it can be said that for Locke the state is a social contract whose fundamental purpose is to protect property for the individual. In his Second Treatise on Civil Government, Locke said,
Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others. (Chapter IV, para. 27)We have here the foundation for non-Biblical capitalism, as well as socialism in every form. We have the essential ingredient for the labor theory of value, and labor's "right" to property. Although John Locke paid lip service to Christianity, he did not recognize God's sovereignty over man and the earth, nor man's status as a steward or trustee under God. Neither did Locke recognize the fallen nature of man, because his belief, after Aristotle and Aquinas, in the mind of man as an innocent and blank tablet undercut the basic premise of Christian faith, man's fallen estate and his need of a Savior. Having separated property from a theological to a natural origin, he became thereby the father also of Marxism. If property is not under God (The earth is the LORD'S, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein" [Psalm 24:1]), why should it be under the individual's rather than the community's control? The world of Locke leads straight to Karl Marx.
Now God's law not only controls property (not taxable by the state because under God), it also controls money and debt. The law against false weights and measures had essential reference to money: gold and silver were not coined but were used by weight (Lev. 19:35-37,- Deut. 25:13-16). American coinage began by weight, a $20 gold piece being ounce of gold, 90% fine, and so on. Debts could not be contracted by believers beyond six years (Deut. 15:1-11); they were cancelled in the seventh or Sabbatical year. When Rome fell, the land tax disappeared, although William Carroll Bark, in The Origins of the Medieval World, 1958 (pp. 14ff.), could not understand why.
As Christianity began to penetrate the European mind, men's views began to change. "A man's affairs were everybody's business." A debt was seen as a promise, a commitment which had community-wide ramifications. In England, Magna Carta forbad the seizure of any man's land or person for debt: every man was king in his own place under God. "Neither the debtor's person nor his land could be seized. . . . The sheriff could go on receiving rent and other income from the land until the debt was paid, but he could not take the land." (The United States reverted to this for a time after the War of Independence. Talk of Magna Carta was not hyperbole but an insistence on Christian freedom.) Moreover, "As religion was a state matter, so was business." The idea of a just price did not mean taking a loss; it meant that a man could not take advantage of a crisis to charge a price far in excess of his cost. While the gilds had a monopoly, they also had a responsibility to make good the dishonesty or debt of a member. (Hugh Barty-King: The Worst Poverty, A History of Debt and Debtors, 1991, pp. 1-16).
Roman law, in its fundamental Twelve Tables, gave a creditor the right to seize and dismember the debtor and to sell his wife and children into perpetual slavery. This premise in part came into English law, although Cromwell sought to alleviate it. (Another evil borrowing was the essential Roman legal premise: "The welfare of the state is the highest law." This now governs all countries.)
After Locke, the debtor's prison became an increasing force in English life. A man sent to debtor's prison was not discharged until his debt was paid. Unlike other prisoners, he was not fed, so he routinely starved to death. Many of these debtors were men who lost everything in some natural disaster. From 1750 to 1950, 10,000 or so debtors were sent to prison each year. "Imprisonment for ordinary civil debt was abolished by a statute in 1970" (p. 173). Contemporary culture, being consumption rather than production oriented, has seen a startling increase in debt, unprecedented in all of history. The result is a debt ridden world, currencies with only debt behind them, and a coming world-wide economic collapse. Economics separated from religion, from a Biblical theology, are leading to history's greatest disaster.
If economics be separated from Biblical faith, it becomes a form of totalitarianism. The marketplace becomes the new god, and all things are governed by the premises of Lockean economics. I am regularly told by some that they cannot support me because they do not believe in non-profit activities. This would eliminate all churches and charities, and good music, and replace God with the marketplace. Not surprisingly, it leads, as Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard have often said, to libertinism. I have been told by such economic totalitarians that prostitution is good because it operates in terms of a free market, whereas marriage does not. Totalitarianism bears more labels than simply Marxism and fascism.
If all life is a stewardship under God, and all property and economic activity are stewardships, then our contemporary economic theories of the right and the left are alike immoral. Republican George Bush and Marxist Gorbachev are indeed bed-fellows of an anti-Christian order. (Howard Phillips has rightly termed some members of Congress "Gorbachev Republicans.") It means too that Ian Hodge is right: all our economic theory needs re-thinking in terms of Biblical faith.
Solomon was right: "Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?" (Proverbs 6:27). We have taken fire into our bosoms, and more than our clothes will be burned. It is time to renounce the evil heritage of John Locke. May God have mercy on us, but some Christian schools have in effect canonized him!
We cannot begin our economic theories with property, nor anything other than the triune God and His law word. In every sphere of life and thought, this must be our starting point. But the church has become antinomian with respect to God's Law, and devout nomians with respect to man's law. There is no fear of God before their eyes (Psalm 36:1). To them we can say, when we believe and obey God, "Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul" (Psalm 16.16).
