Lux Lucet

LewRockwell.com was at it again this weekend, publishing another hit piece on the Reformation.

Now some readers may be asking themselves, just what on earth is LewRockwell.com and why should I care what they publish or whether they attack the Reformation.

Fair questions, those. So before talking about their latest attack on the Reformation, a little explanation is in order.

By number of unique monthly visitors, LewRockwell.com (LRC) is one of the largest, perhaps the largest, Libertarian website in the world. Now by percentage of the population, Libertarians are a fairly small group, so it may be tempting to dismiss LRC as a big fish in a small pond and move on.

The LRC website describes itself thus, “The daily news and opinion site LewRockwell.com was founded in 1999 by anarcho-capitalists Lew Rockwell and Burt Blumert to help carry on the anti-war, anti-state, pro-market work of Murray N. Rothbard.”

From this description, we see that LRC, in addition to being Libertarian also calls itself “anarcho-capitalist, anti-war, anti-state, and pro-market,” and indicates that Murray N. Rothbard is its primary intellectual influence.

So why should you care about any of this? For one, in spite of their relatively small numbers Libertarians are a vigorous intellectual force in the fields of economics and politics. Unlike most schools of thought in our decadent age, Libertarians actually take logic seriously. Further, they defend individualism and private property against the statist big-government philosophies that dominate our age.

A second related reason is that although Libertarianism ultimately fails the test of Scripture – central to Libertarian thought is the ethical doctrine known as the Non-Aggression Principle; Christians, on the other hand, locate their ethics in the Law of God, and these two systems are incompatible – its respect for logical consistency and individual liberty make it attractive to Christians.

And it is because Libertarianism in general and LRC specifically take ideas and liberty seriously, that I have read the website for years, and know of other Christians who do so as well.

LRC and the Influence of the Roman Church-State

As a Roman Catholic himself, it should come as no surprise that Lew Rockwell’s eponymously named website has long featured an undercurrent of Romanist thought running beneath its Libertarian superstructure.

What is interesting about this Romanist intellectual undercurrent is how it attempts to persuade the reader that Romanism, far from being the enemy of limited government and private property, what John Robbins called “constitutional-capitalism” in his 1999 book Ecclesiastical Megalomania, the principles of liberty were developed and nourished by the scholars of the Roman Church-State and it is the Protestants who are responsible for the growth of the contemporary statism.

But while touting the fantasy that the tyrants of the Roman Church-State actually were proponents of private property and political liberty has been a consistent theme on LRC, that theme was somewhat muted.

In recent months, though, what was once a fairly low-key attack on Protestantism appears to have become more aggressive.

Murray Rothbard’s (and LRC’s) Hatred of Protestantism

As evidence of the LRC’s hostility toward Protestantism, on October 21, 2017, the 500th anniversary of Reformation Day, LRC ran an article titled “Messianic Communism in the Protestant Reformation” by Murray Rothbard, in which Rothbard attempted to hang the blame for Marxist thought around the neck of the Reformation.

Rothbard did this despite the fact that a far more likely source of Marxism is the writings of the Scholastics themselves. Unlike the whitewashed accounts of the Scholastics given to us by their apologists such Rothbard, the medieval Schoolmen, influenced as they were by Thomas Aquinas, resisted with all their might the ideas free market economics.

Quoting a prominent Scholastic, economic historian Richard Tawney noted,

He who has enough to satisfy his wants…and nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance – all such are incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality, or pride (Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 36).

In other words, the Scholastics opposed the idea that a man had the right to use his talents as he saw fit, an idea basic to human economic and political liberty.

Tawney concluded this section by writing, “The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.”

So Tawney, whom Rothbard cites in his book from which his article “Messianic Communism” is excerpted, put the blame for Marxism on Aquinas and the Scholastics, not the Protestants.

Protestant Economics

The Reformation created the conditions for economic progress in at least four ways. First, was the reformers’ rejection of Aristotle as the reigning intellectual influence. If Aquinas ruled the minds of the Scholastics, it was Aristotle who ruled the mind of Aquinas.

In his Politics, the pagan Aristotle posited four economic fallacies that have beguiled the minds of men ever since:

1. Intrinsic value
   
2. Equality in exchange
   
3. The barrenness of money
   
4. The immorality of interest taking
   

By rejecting Aristotle and Aquinas in favor of Scripture alone, the Reformers laid the intellectual groundwork for the development of modern capitalism. This is so, even if the Reformers themselves were not always consistent in their application of Scripture to their understanding of politics and economics.

Second, was Reformation’s the emphasis on the individual which led, among other things, to universal literacy. John Robbins notes that in the Protestant system of thought,

Each man would answer directly to God at the Last Judgment – no priest or pope would be there to intercede for him; each man was responsible for the salvation or perdition of his own soul; each man would be required to give an account of the deeds he had done on Earth; and therefore each man had the right to read the Bible for himself. So was born the individualism that transformed the communal ancient and medieval worlds (Ecclesiastical Megalomania, 18).

Third was the idea of vocation advanced by Luther. According to the Church, only the “religious,” men and women who had committed their lives to the church, did work that was pleasing to God. If you were a butcher, baker or candlestick maker, well, God didn’t think much of your labors.

But Luther emphasized the value of all honest work, and taught that a Christian who applied himself to his job in faith performed a good work, one that was pleasing in the sight of God.

Freed from the need to please God through empty religious ritual, men could apply themselves to their professions.

Fourth, in those parts of Europe where the Protestant Reformation put an end to the pagan, medieval superstition of the Roman Church-State, resources used on empty rituals which saved no one could be used for actual productive purposes. Men no longer had to go on long, expensive pilgrimages to gain God’s favor. They were accepted by God on the basis of their faith in Christ alone. Time and energy once put toward useless rituals was now available for productive labor.

But while Protestantism, rooted as it is in the Word of God, has historically advocated private property and individual liberty, LRC continues to push the fiction that it is Rome that is responsible for the liberties that build Western Civilization.

One might think that the flourishing of economic activity that occurred in the wake of the Reformation, or the continuing economic out performance of historically Protestant nations over against historically Roman Catholic ones would serve as clues to these men that their assessment of the Reformation is mistaken, but such is not the case.

It would seem that in economics, as in salvation itself, the old adage “seeing is believing” is false. In truth, believing is seeing. And until the Romanists and wanna-be Romanists at LRC believe the Gospel of Justification by Faith Alone, they will fail to see that it is the Protestants, grounded as they are in Sola Scriptura, who are responsible for the economic prosperity and political liberty that have blossomed over the past 500 years.

Further, it is the rejections of Justification by Faith Alone, the very heart of the Reformation’s teaching, that ultimately is responsible for the ongoing collapse of liberty and prosperity in the West.

In closing, it strikes at least one observer as strange that a website that prides itself on its commitment capitalism and individualism would reject the Biblical Christianity, the only system of thought capable of creating and sustaining a free society.  But their pro-Romanist, anti-Protestant mindset causes them to miss the irony.