My instincts are libertarian. I hate telling people what to do. I’ll take charge when it appears necessary, and I’m frankly good at it, but I don’t look forward to it. Still, I have to confess leadership is what God has called me to do.
What I prefer by a wide margin is merely telling people what I know to be in their best interests. Not in the sense of giving advice, but answering questions when someone asks. Aside from very hard personal experience, I seldom speak what I think about things, and tell what I know from God’s revelation. Again, the last thing I want to do is steer someone, even by subtle manipulation, to a decision they don’t make for themselves.
This is how I tend to act in the world as it is today. That is not the same thing as a general theory; it’s an accommodation of circumstances. It is probably a mistake to regard me as a Christian Libertarian by most definitions, because theology gets in way of the typical theory.
Yes, that’s mild sarcasm. Theology rules all in my world.
My theology-theory does not allow for genuine libertarian philosophy. The primary disconnect is in the utter necessity in Scripture of enforcing social order. God says you’ve got to have government, and it has to carry a real sword. I tend to think true libertarian “paradise” is what we had before the Flood. It didn’t work then, and it won’t ever work this side of Eternity. To obey God we have to have government, and it has to carry a moral mandate.
The issue then is what such a government would look like. In theology, that returns us to the Tribal ANE culture. That is, I radically reject Aristotelian epistemology as the summum bonum on anything already covered by revelation. I consciously reject Aristotelian approaches to theology, because it’s simply incapable of handling the truth. It’s only good for mere facts. You see, the fundamental failure in the Fall was putting the human intellect on the throne, which meant Adam and Eve were tempted to think and evaluate logically what God had already said was settled. The mind is good only for deciding how to implement, not deciding what is right and wrong.
If you walk that path, you realize the only government God likes is the one within the family. To simplify, no one has any business governing you who isn’t related by blood or covenant. Again, we have to be sure we define covenant properly, but that’s another article. We are talking ANE Tribal culture here, the one intellectual framework chosen and built by God for His revelation, and the only proper approach to understanding Him.
Yeah, calling me a “Christian Libertarian” is alright, but it might be misleading when you start digging into the details. I am all for that Tribal government, including control over a lot of things libertarians hate to see governed. Sorry, but they are wrong. God said things like Jubilee and not charging interest, and He wasn’t kidding. But because I realize we are very, very far away from any approach to God’s ideal for human government in this fallen world, I tend to react much the same as most libertarians to what I see before me today.
Update: I deleted a spammy comment from someone advertising his own blog. I regard it as a breach of protocol to advertise your own stuff in the third person. Worse, it was truly awful theology. I am not interested in goofy personal theories which are carefully constructed to shock rather than inform, or show off some novel approach. The only approach we need is the one taken by the folks who wrote it.
We don’t know exactly what Adam and Eve actually did in the Garden, because the story is more symbolic than literal. You can call that liberalism if you like, because I really don’t care. That’s reading it the way God’s people read it. What matters most is they chose to place human reason on the throne of the heart, and displaced God from His rightful place. That is precisely the sin of literalists, demanding the Bible be read with an Aristotelian objectivism, the same sin of which Jesus accused the Pharisees.
