Dear Friends:
There is a disturbing phenomenon taking place in America today: the disappearance from the churches of young men between the ages of 20 and 25. It appears that as long as Christian boys stay at home with their parents – that means until the age of 18-20 – they go to church; when they leave home, they leave the church as well.
But then, why would a young man stay in the church? Is there a “male” message in our churches today? Is there a message that gives a young man a worthy cause to work for and to fight for? Why would he stay, to listen all his life to the same sermon over and over again, in many different versions of it? Come back every Sunday to learn – for the nth time, over and over again – that God loves us? Shed tears over the same emotional stuff every week? Or hear that we live in the “last times” and therefore evil will expand and he can’t do anything to turn the tide? Or that his gifts mean nothing in these “last times,” all he is supposed to do is to “witness” to save a few souls from hell?
On the other hand, some young men find their meaning in life in “spiritual ministries” in the church – youth pastors, worship leaders, missionaries. But what about the others whose gifts are not necessarily related directly to “church business”? What message do the churches have for those with the gift to be bankers? “Praise God you make money to pay tithes”? What about truck drivers? “God put you there to evangelize at the truck stops”? Do the churches have a message for banking itself as a legitimate part of the kingdom of God? Or truck driving? Or fitness? Or business management?
There is no message for them. The church’s message concerns only the church and the limited scope of activities that the pastors have declared to be “spiritual.” Any young man with gifts outside the scope of these activities is left to feel a “second class” citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven. And guess what: Men are born with the impulse to be first class. This impulse is in the Y-chromosome. They will look for a cause, they will look for meaning in life, they will look for ideas, worldviews, professions, that give them the opportunity to have that meaningful first-class life.
In the world outside the church there are many opportunities to find meaningful life. Jobs, careers, political and social causes, sports, adventures, business opportunities – they all give a man an opportunity to prove himself, to have a sense of accomplishment, to achieve goals. Not long after a young man leaves his family he is drawn to these opportunities – and predictably. He is a man, for crying out loud, he has the drive, the inner energy to do something! Why would he want to stay in a church, passive, listening to the same sermon every Sunday that tells him that there is nothing he can do to change the world except snatch a few souls from hell? He is eager to go out there and prove himself in all those fields, but then the church is silent about them, the preachers never preach about them and never explain the spiritual value of those jobs, sports, political and social causes, business, etc. in the Kingdom of God. There is no theology for political action, no theology for business action, no theology for social activity. What would a young man do then?
The silence and the refusal of the churches to preach and teach a comprehensive worldview creates a tension; and our young men resolve the tension by leaving the church and going to the world. It is not necessarily “backsliding,” it is not necessarily “apostasy.” It is a perfectly logical response to the deficiencies in our churches’ preaching and teaching.
This hasn’t always been the case. Two or three centuries ago our churches in this land had more young men than women. Some communities had to import French Huguenot or Swedish Lutheran brides for their sons. The churches had a relevant message that kept the young men in. America was postmillennial. The American church had a message of victory, a message that this country was a City on a Hill, and by its example God would change the world for Christ. Whether they were rafters and cowboys in the wilderness, or store clerks and builders in the cities of the East, Christian boys heard the same message from their preachers: “We are a nation created by God to be Christian and to exhibit God’s glory. We have a Manifest Destiny to create a godly society that will be admired and imitated by the nations of the world. Christ has established His Kingdom on this earth centuries ago, and everything you do – your job, your family, even your entertainment – is expanding the Kingdom of Christ on this earth.” Pastors preached the civil liberties of the Law of God and then donned the uniform to lead the boys in battle for those liberties. Men like Cotton Mather preached on political and economic issues (Fair Dealings Between Debtor and Creditor is one example); and the civil government was constantly under scrutiny and criticism from the pulpits. The churches did not wait for their boys to go out and find worthy causes. The churches led the boys in those worthy causes in their crusade to redeem the world for Christ. The choice for a young man in those days wasn’t “church vs. secular calling.” There was no “secular calling.” Everything was under the Lordship of Christ, and therefore every single aspect of the life of society was to be taught upon, preached upon, and discussed from the pulpits.
And young men stayed in the churches, and built Christian families, and expanded the Kingdom of God, and built the Christian culture that we today thank God for. And young Christian women did not stay single for a long time.
That should tell us how we can take our young men back. As long as we have a female church with a female message, our young men will prefer to stay away from it. You only get what you preach. The loss of our sons to the enemy is a curse, and it is our fault we have let our churches truncate the message to irrelevance. Today’s gender demographic in our churches is a product of today’s irrelevant message in the churches. You know a society by its men. If they are gone, then the society has ceased to be relevant to the real world. The demographics of irrelevance is God’s curse upon a generation that refused to hear the call of the victory of Christ’s Kingdom in history and on earth.
So next Sunday go to your church and look around. Do you see young unmarried women and no single young men? If you do, then you should be alarmed. You should go to your pastor and confront him about his message. A society with no young men is a dead society, no matter what activities it has every Sunday.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
In the Black: Some People Only See Race
Dear Friends:
There’s a scene in the film Malcolm X when Malcolm Little (later to take the name Malcolm X, X standing for his unknown African heritage1) is in prison and is introduced to the philosophy of the “Honorable Elijah Muhammad” and the Nation of Islam by a fellow prisoner named John Elton Bembry. (Bembry is a composite character who does not appear in the book The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm’s family members introduced him to the tenets of the Nation of Islam.) Malcolm was wasting his life outside of prison, and he was wasting his life in prison. Bembry saw something in Malcolm, but Malcolm was resistant to change and had no interest in the Nation of Islam until Bembry showed him a dictionary and the definitions of “black” and “white.” It was a strategic move that rattled the former street hustler.
The definition of “black,” as Bembry read from an edition of Webster’s Dictionary, is always negative: “destitute of light, devoid of color, enveloped in darkness, utterly dismal or gloomy, soiled with dirt, foul, sullen, hostile, forbidding, outrageously wicked.” White, on the other hand, is positive: “the color of pure snow, the opposite of black, free from spot or blemish, innocent, pure, without evil intent, harmless, square deal, honest.” Malcolm makes a connection: “This is written by White folks, right?” White is wrong, Black is right, just like the Nation of Islam teaches.2
Malcolm Little became Malcolm X and embraced the racist ideology of the Nation of Islam. To Malcolm, the White man is a “blue-eyed Devil.” This was the teaching of the Nation of Islam as articulated by its founder Wallace D. Fard Muhammad and his successor Elijah Muhammad. Race became Malcolm’s entry into the Black community, and he used it well to recruit fellow blacks. But after leaving the Nation of Islam, he began to change his view of White people. He began to see that not all Whites were devils. As his assassination at the hands of Black men proved, some Blacks are devils.
Malcolm’s break with the Nation of Islam did not set well with the organization’s leadership. This included Elijah Muhammad and Louis X, better known as Louis Farrakhan. While in Mecca on a pilgrimage, Malcolm wrote the following to his assistants at the Harlem Mosque:
Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races…. You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions….3
While Malcolm changed his views regarding race, it seems that there are people today who define everything by race. Farrakhan and Rev. Jeremiah Wright are extremist examples of keeping the issue of race front and center in American politics. There are others. But what’s most irritating is the way some people see race in everything and make a point of keeping the wound of racial conflict festering.
Let’s return to the dictionary scene in the film Malcolm X. The streetwise Malcolm naively accepts the illogical leap that the definitional meaning of black and its descriptive attributes are applicable to people with dark skin. A dictionary edited by Blacks would have to acknowledge that the definition of “black” is the absence of light. In fact, The Urban Dictionary offers these definitions:
1. A color widely defined as the absence of light.
2. The darkest shade possible.
3. The opposite of white … best described on the Yin & Yang symbol.
Bembry was poisoning the well by continually stating that these are the White man’s definitions. He had a vested interest in making all aspects of White society and culture, even the standard definition of black, to mean anti-Black person. It’s a common tactic. You can easily win a debate by making an issue “racial.” Conversation over.
Joy Behar, who co-hosts on “The View,” couldn’t help turning “Black Friday” into a racial issue. Whoopi Goldberg opened the show with the declaration that “Today is Black Friday, all day long.” Behar offers this rejoinder: “Isn’t it a little racist to call it Black Friday?... [T]here’s a negative connotation to it? Or does it mean something else?” Goldberg, for once, had better sense: “No, it’s like when you make all the money – you’re in the black.” Behar finally gets it: “So it’s positive?” Yes, Joy, it’s positive. Being “in the black” is better than being “in the red.” (It won’t be too long before some Native Americans protest that red should no longer be used to indicate a deficit.)
Blacks are not helped by the continued claim that all problems for them are racial. Some are, but many aren’t. Black on Black crime is not the fault of White people. Sky-high out-of-wedlock birth rates are not the fault of Whites. High dropout rates among Blacks are not the fault of Whites. The solution is not to cry “racism” and blame everything on Whites or hundreds of years of oppression. Blacks won’t find their problems solved by appealing to the State. Welfare programs have done a lot to keep Black families down by subsidizing family fragmentation and fostering multi-generational dependency. Black problems aren’t solved by naming streets after Martin Luther King, Jr. The same can be said for the King Holiday and Black History Month. These are liberal crumbs to appease the Black community, but have any of these actions helped Blacks? Guilt-ridden Whites vote for them, and anyone who does not will be labeled, you guessed it, a “racist.”
This is not to say that Blacks should imitate “White culture.” There is nothing inherently good in being White. Whites have similar pathologies. There is no inherently good Black culture. Black is not always beautiful, and, of course, the same can be said for White. There’s a great deal of good in both cultures.4 Malcolm Little came to his senses in prison. He decided that he was not going to play the victim any longer. The dictionary that put him on the road to racial hatred also liberated him. He studied that dictionary until it became a part of him. But it wasn’t until he abandoned the line that it’s all the White man’s fault that he was truly free.
Some Blacks will say that I don’t know what it’s like growing up Black. There is no doubt about it; I don’t know what it’s like, and I never will. But my lack of Black perspective doesn’t change what is going on in some areas of the Black community. I can’t change what I’m not, but I am responsible to change what I am. There is no one to blame but me. The sooner I realized this, the sooner I took responsibility for my failings.
SOURCES:
1 The “X” is not the Roman numeral 10. The “X” was a placeholder for a Black person’s unknown African name. His American surname was given to him by his slave master. Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, and Lew Alcindor became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
2 For a succinct study of the Nation of Islam history and philosophy, see Richard Abanes, Cults, New Religious Movements, and Your Family: A Guide to Ten Non-Christian Groups out to Convert Your Loved Ones (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1998), chap. 6.
3 The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (1965), 391.
4 There had been a vibrant Black culture in America, even before the end of segregation. See Mark Cauvreau Judge, If It Ain’t Got that Swing: The Rebirth of Grown-Up Culture (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing Co., 2000).
Respectfully,
Monday, January 11, 2010
Inflation and the Savior State
Dear Friends:
The debate over monetary theory begins with a debate over sovereignty. The central question is, “What is sovereign in this world?”
A few economists openly begin with the state. Even fewer begin with the free market. The vast majority try to avoid the issue altogether. But, when push comes to shove, they come down on the side of those who affirm the sovereignty of the state.
This inherently theological-philosophical issue comes to the forefront in the debate over money. Most economists believe that money is inherently outside the logic of economic cause and effect: the logic of individual human action. They argue that money is different. They insist that money must not be left to the free market to regulate. The state must have the final say over money: who issues it, in what quantity, and with whose pictures on the currency and coins.
Yet, even here, economists are divided. Almost all American economists affirm that the central bank should be independent from the government. It is created by the government through a grant of monopolistic power over banking. Yet they insist that it should be independent. To the extent that they teach this, they teach the sovereignty of central banking. The central bank, not the state or the free market, should be sovereign over money.
Within the camp of the critics of central banking are defenders of the absolute sovereignty of the state. These are the greenbackers – defenders of Lincoln’s wartime issuing of unbacked paper money. There is not a trained economist among them, and there has not been for over a century. In fact, they have never had a trained economist in their camp. They are right-wing populists.
The other critics are almost all Austrian School economists. They follow the logic of Ludwig von Mises in his book, “The Theory of Money and Credit.” They see money as governed by the laws of the free market. They see it as an outcome of the legal right of private property, which includes the right of contract.
Most people do not think about the pictures on paper money. There is a reason for this. That which is the foundation of any culture or society – thoughts, words, and deeds – are taken for granted. People assume that nothing else could be assumed and still hold together the social order. They do not question these fundamental presuppositions, attitudes, and practices.
That which is considered to be beyond any public challenge constitutes the core of a civilization.
Pieces of paper with politicians’ pictures on them are part of this unnoticed but fundamental foundation.
Most people can easily see through the unchallenged domestic assumptions of rival cultures. Naked foreign emperors have no clothes. So, let us speak of long-dead emperors.
THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
One of the finest books ever written on the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is Ethelbert Stauffer’s “Christ and the Caesars.” It was published in English in 1955 – in Great Britain by the Protestant SCM Press and in the United States by Westminster Press, the publishing house of The Presbyterian Church U.S.A. By 1955, both of these publishing houses had gone theologically liberal.
This book was an indirect assault on the theology of the modern world: faith in the messianic state. The editors at SCM Press and Westminster Press did not understand this, for it undermined their liberal theology. R.J. Rushdoony did see it. The book was one of his favorites. He relied on it in his chapter, “Rome: The City of Man,” in his book, “The One and the Many” (1971). Stauffer was a professor of theology in Germany. He had lost his position under the Nazis, but had been restored to his former job in 1946. In addition to being a theologian and a church historian, he was a numismatist.
Stauffer’s thesis was unique. He argued that it is possible to see the battle for the minds of men in the late Roman Empire by tracing the history of the coinage. The coins in each era had images of the emperor. But it was not just his image; repeatedly, it was his image as a god. The emperor’s image, the religious symbols, and the inscriptions on the coins conveyed a message of the emperor as a divine-human savior.
In contrast to the declaration was the church’s insistence that the emperor was not divine. This confession of faith had implications for church members. They would not participate in ritual acts of adoration to the divinity of the emperor. In certain periods, the state persecuted Christians to the death for their refusal to confess and then participate ritually in emperor worship.
Stauffer traced the decline of the silver content in the coins. As the Empire grew weaker, its coins became progressively debased. Stauffer noted that the claims of divinity on the coins grew more explicit as the coins became more debased.
The book traces the history of the fall of the Roman Empire in terms of the decline in value of its coinage and the escalation of the claims of divinity of the emperors. As the state lost its ability to protect citizens of the Empire from barbarian invaders, its assertion of the divine authority of the emperor increased.
It began with Nero. After Rome burned in 64, he blamed Christians. The first Roman persecution of the church began. Prior to that, the church had been protected by the special arrangement the Empire had with the Jews.
In rebuilding the city, Nero destroyed the finances of the Empire. He got rid of his debts by inflating the currency. As Stauffer noted, “The State treasury made its payments in inferior new currency, but insisted on receiving taxes in the undepreciated currency of the Augustan epoch” (p. 141). He added the following:
The emperor’s creatures glorified their master in the court theatre as the imperial magician who conjured up the legendary treasures of the golden age.
This same outlook governs modern Keynesianism, although without any reference to a mythical age of gold – a barbarous relic, according to Keynes.
In 68, Nero was overthrown, committing suicide. A series of new emperors rose to power and were executed over the next year. General Vespasian, whom Nero had sent to Palestine to crush the Jewish rebellion that began in 66, returned to Rome to become emperor in 69, shortly before his son’s defeat of the final resistance movement at Massada. His son, Titus, became emperor at his father’s death in 79, the year of the eruption of Vesuvius.
A century later, the Empire visibly began its long decline. After the assassination of Commodus in 193, Pertinax came to power. He did so by promising the imperial guard a bribe. As soon as the guard spent the coins, they killed him. His reign lasted 87 days. The guards sold the position to the next emperor. His replacement lasted 75 days. Then came a century of inflation. By 270, the destruction of coinage was universal.
The emperor Quintillus, scarcely known today outside circles of numismatists, issued in the seventeen days of his reign, from the imperial mint alone, more than seventy-five thousand coin- types, each more boastful than the last (p. 226).
Some historians say his reign survived six months. So jumbled are the historical records, no one knows for sure. What historians know is that the currency had effectively died.
Then came Diocletian, in 284. “Diocletian called himself Jupiter, and was worshipped as Father of the gods in human form” (p. 255). It was under his term of office that universal price and wage controls destroyed the productivity of the economy. The controls produced widespread shortages (p. 256). He also began a comprehensive persecution of Christians in 303, two years after Armenia became the first officially Christian nation. He voluntarily resigned in 305.
Under Constantine, less than a decade later, the persecutions ended. There was a brief revival of discrimination under Julian “the Apostate,” 361-63, but after him the Empire remained officially Christian. Under Constantine, a new gold currency was issued. It survived intact for over a thousand years – the longest period of monetary stability ever recorded. No coins announced the divinity of the emperor.
For over two centuries, the church had served as the Roman state’s chief rival: the institution that provided social order – ethical, judicial, and economic. The church had issued no coins. It had announced as divine a God-man who was not sitting on any earthly throne. After 363, the Roman state made no further claims of divinity.
SALVATION AS HEALING
A salve is a healing ointment. The root word for “salve” is the same as the root word for “salvation.” The meaning is “deliverance.”
Men cry out for deliverance in times of distress. “There are no atheists in foxholes.” The trouble is, the state got them into foxholes. So, they believe in the state as their source of deliverance, up until the day the deliverance fails to arrive.
When Stalin was warned in 1935 by Pierre Laval that the Pope would disapprove of the Soviet Union’s persecution of Catholics, he famously replied: “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” In 1988, the premier of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, journeyed to the Vatican to meet with John Paul II on the millennial anniversary of the founding of the Russian Orthodox Church. Three years later, the Soviet Union’s leaders killed it. It had many army divisions. Those divisions did not save it, any more than the Roman Empire’s legions saved Rome.
When men look to the state to supply them with safety nets for life’s expensive problems, they rest on a weak reed. The state must come up with the money to provide and maintain an ever-more complex web of safety nets. There is strong demand for safety nets. The first law of scarcity is this: “At zero price, there is greater demand than supply.” The state supplies the safety nets. It then must pay for them.
The Roman state supplied safety nets, the famous bread of bread and circuses. This was a mark of its asserted power to save. As the highest court of appeal, the state was the agency of healing.
The church supplied bread in the sacramental ritual of spiritual healing: the Lord’s Supper. This is a mark of God’s power to heal. The church also has a ritual of healing. “Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord” (James 5:14).
The state is a coercive institution, asserting sovereignty over those within its geographical jurisdiction. The church is a voluntary institution, asserting sovereignty within its confessional jurisdiction.
The church in the Roman Empire did not claim sovereignty over the money supply. The state did. The result was the destruction of money. There was no higher agency of healing in the theology of Roman politics. The city-state of Rome was the final jurisdiction.
The institutional means of healing in history is control over economic resources. The greater the degree and extension of the promised healing, the greater the level of resource allocation. The state consumes resources and distributes resources. It does not create resources. The savior state is a messianic state. It requires an ever-increasing percentage of its citizens’ output in order to fulfill its promises of universal healing.
When citizens resist paying higher taxes, the state must find lenders outside its jurisdiction. When these lenders refuse to lend without payment of higher rates of interest, the state turns to the central bank.
The messianic state of the Roman Empire funded its claims with taxes first, then debased coins. So has every empire in history, save one: Byzantium. The memory of Christians of what the messianic state had cost them was retained, generation after generation. The Christians of Byzantium recognized the connections: a messianic savior state, persecution, taxation, and inflation.
COURT PROPHETS
Every regime has court prophets. These are paid hirelings who praise the state as the source of deliverance in history.
The difference between court prophets in the ancient world and those of today is simple to understand. The older court prophets ritually sanctioned the state and its rulers in the name of a god, who stood above the state, yet was somehow incarnate in the state. Today’s court prophets are more like a Greek chorus than a school of the prophets. They affirm the autonomy of the state from anything outside the creation. They deny that any higher court of appeal exists. Four centuries ago, this was called the divine right of kings. Today, it is the right of the state to divinity by default.
Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, thereby avoiding Charlemagne’s perceived error eight centuries earlier: allowing the Pope to crown him. But his emperorship ended at Waterloo in 1815. He did not have enough divisions.
Today’s court has many prophets. They come from every academic discipline. They are employed by tax-funded universities. They are also hired directly through government grants. The state buys its prophets, as it always has. Ahab had lots of them. He wanted them to persuade the king of Judah of the success of his recommended war against his enemies.
Then the king of Israel gathered the prophets together, about four hundred men, and said unto them, Shall I go against Ramoth-gilead to battle, or shall I forbear? And they said, Go up; for the Lord shall deliver it into the hand of the king. And Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the LORD besides, that we might enquire of him? And the king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, There is yet one man, Micaiah the son of Imlah, by whom we may enquire of the LORD: but I hate him; for he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil. And Jehoshaphat said, Let not the king say so. Then the king of Israel called an officer, and said, Hasten hither Micaiah the son of Imlah (I Kings 22:6-9).
Micaiah told them that the war would end in their defeat. Ahab would be killed. The two rulers paid no attention. They went to war, which turned out as prophesied.
The world needs more Micaiahs. Sadly, they are always in short supply. The problem is, the Micaiahs of the world are not for sale.
Most economists are.
CONCLUSION
The savior state always becomes the inflating state. It promises more healing than it can deliver. It taxes. Then it inflates. Then it defaults. Its default creates hard times for court prophets.
Respectfully, Mark
The debate over monetary theory begins with a debate over sovereignty. The central question is, “What is sovereign in this world?”
A few economists openly begin with the state. Even fewer begin with the free market. The vast majority try to avoid the issue altogether. But, when push comes to shove, they come down on the side of those who affirm the sovereignty of the state.
This inherently theological-philosophical issue comes to the forefront in the debate over money. Most economists believe that money is inherently outside the logic of economic cause and effect: the logic of individual human action. They argue that money is different. They insist that money must not be left to the free market to regulate. The state must have the final say over money: who issues it, in what quantity, and with whose pictures on the currency and coins.
Yet, even here, economists are divided. Almost all American economists affirm that the central bank should be independent from the government. It is created by the government through a grant of monopolistic power over banking. Yet they insist that it should be independent. To the extent that they teach this, they teach the sovereignty of central banking. The central bank, not the state or the free market, should be sovereign over money.
Within the camp of the critics of central banking are defenders of the absolute sovereignty of the state. These are the greenbackers – defenders of Lincoln’s wartime issuing of unbacked paper money. There is not a trained economist among them, and there has not been for over a century. In fact, they have never had a trained economist in their camp. They are right-wing populists.
The other critics are almost all Austrian School economists. They follow the logic of Ludwig von Mises in his book, “The Theory of Money and Credit.” They see money as governed by the laws of the free market. They see it as an outcome of the legal right of private property, which includes the right of contract.
Most people do not think about the pictures on paper money. There is a reason for this. That which is the foundation of any culture or society – thoughts, words, and deeds – are taken for granted. People assume that nothing else could be assumed and still hold together the social order. They do not question these fundamental presuppositions, attitudes, and practices.
That which is considered to be beyond any public challenge constitutes the core of a civilization.
Pieces of paper with politicians’ pictures on them are part of this unnoticed but fundamental foundation.
Most people can easily see through the unchallenged domestic assumptions of rival cultures. Naked foreign emperors have no clothes. So, let us speak of long-dead emperors.
THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
One of the finest books ever written on the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is Ethelbert Stauffer’s “Christ and the Caesars.” It was published in English in 1955 – in Great Britain by the Protestant SCM Press and in the United States by Westminster Press, the publishing house of The Presbyterian Church U.S.A. By 1955, both of these publishing houses had gone theologically liberal.
This book was an indirect assault on the theology of the modern world: faith in the messianic state. The editors at SCM Press and Westminster Press did not understand this, for it undermined their liberal theology. R.J. Rushdoony did see it. The book was one of his favorites. He relied on it in his chapter, “Rome: The City of Man,” in his book, “The One and the Many” (1971). Stauffer was a professor of theology in Germany. He had lost his position under the Nazis, but had been restored to his former job in 1946. In addition to being a theologian and a church historian, he was a numismatist.
Stauffer’s thesis was unique. He argued that it is possible to see the battle for the minds of men in the late Roman Empire by tracing the history of the coinage. The coins in each era had images of the emperor. But it was not just his image; repeatedly, it was his image as a god. The emperor’s image, the religious symbols, and the inscriptions on the coins conveyed a message of the emperor as a divine-human savior.
In contrast to the declaration was the church’s insistence that the emperor was not divine. This confession of faith had implications for church members. They would not participate in ritual acts of adoration to the divinity of the emperor. In certain periods, the state persecuted Christians to the death for their refusal to confess and then participate ritually in emperor worship.
Stauffer traced the decline of the silver content in the coins. As the Empire grew weaker, its coins became progressively debased. Stauffer noted that the claims of divinity on the coins grew more explicit as the coins became more debased.
The book traces the history of the fall of the Roman Empire in terms of the decline in value of its coinage and the escalation of the claims of divinity of the emperors. As the state lost its ability to protect citizens of the Empire from barbarian invaders, its assertion of the divine authority of the emperor increased.
It began with Nero. After Rome burned in 64, he blamed Christians. The first Roman persecution of the church began. Prior to that, the church had been protected by the special arrangement the Empire had with the Jews.
In rebuilding the city, Nero destroyed the finances of the Empire. He got rid of his debts by inflating the currency. As Stauffer noted, “The State treasury made its payments in inferior new currency, but insisted on receiving taxes in the undepreciated currency of the Augustan epoch” (p. 141). He added the following:
The emperor’s creatures glorified their master in the court theatre as the imperial magician who conjured up the legendary treasures of the golden age.
This same outlook governs modern Keynesianism, although without any reference to a mythical age of gold – a barbarous relic, according to Keynes.
In 68, Nero was overthrown, committing suicide. A series of new emperors rose to power and were executed over the next year. General Vespasian, whom Nero had sent to Palestine to crush the Jewish rebellion that began in 66, returned to Rome to become emperor in 69, shortly before his son’s defeat of the final resistance movement at Massada. His son, Titus, became emperor at his father’s death in 79, the year of the eruption of Vesuvius.
A century later, the Empire visibly began its long decline. After the assassination of Commodus in 193, Pertinax came to power. He did so by promising the imperial guard a bribe. As soon as the guard spent the coins, they killed him. His reign lasted 87 days. The guards sold the position to the next emperor. His replacement lasted 75 days. Then came a century of inflation. By 270, the destruction of coinage was universal.
The emperor Quintillus, scarcely known today outside circles of numismatists, issued in the seventeen days of his reign, from the imperial mint alone, more than seventy-five thousand coin- types, each more boastful than the last (p. 226).
Some historians say his reign survived six months. So jumbled are the historical records, no one knows for sure. What historians know is that the currency had effectively died.
Then came Diocletian, in 284. “Diocletian called himself Jupiter, and was worshipped as Father of the gods in human form” (p. 255). It was under his term of office that universal price and wage controls destroyed the productivity of the economy. The controls produced widespread shortages (p. 256). He also began a comprehensive persecution of Christians in 303, two years after Armenia became the first officially Christian nation. He voluntarily resigned in 305.
Under Constantine, less than a decade later, the persecutions ended. There was a brief revival of discrimination under Julian “the Apostate,” 361-63, but after him the Empire remained officially Christian. Under Constantine, a new gold currency was issued. It survived intact for over a thousand years – the longest period of monetary stability ever recorded. No coins announced the divinity of the emperor.
For over two centuries, the church had served as the Roman state’s chief rival: the institution that provided social order – ethical, judicial, and economic. The church had issued no coins. It had announced as divine a God-man who was not sitting on any earthly throne. After 363, the Roman state made no further claims of divinity.
SALVATION AS HEALING
A salve is a healing ointment. The root word for “salve” is the same as the root word for “salvation.” The meaning is “deliverance.”
Men cry out for deliverance in times of distress. “There are no atheists in foxholes.” The trouble is, the state got them into foxholes. So, they believe in the state as their source of deliverance, up until the day the deliverance fails to arrive.
When Stalin was warned in 1935 by Pierre Laval that the Pope would disapprove of the Soviet Union’s persecution of Catholics, he famously replied: “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” In 1988, the premier of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, journeyed to the Vatican to meet with John Paul II on the millennial anniversary of the founding of the Russian Orthodox Church. Three years later, the Soviet Union’s leaders killed it. It had many army divisions. Those divisions did not save it, any more than the Roman Empire’s legions saved Rome.
When men look to the state to supply them with safety nets for life’s expensive problems, they rest on a weak reed. The state must come up with the money to provide and maintain an ever-more complex web of safety nets. There is strong demand for safety nets. The first law of scarcity is this: “At zero price, there is greater demand than supply.” The state supplies the safety nets. It then must pay for them.
The Roman state supplied safety nets, the famous bread of bread and circuses. This was a mark of its asserted power to save. As the highest court of appeal, the state was the agency of healing.
The church supplied bread in the sacramental ritual of spiritual healing: the Lord’s Supper. This is a mark of God’s power to heal. The church also has a ritual of healing. “Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord” (James 5:14).
The state is a coercive institution, asserting sovereignty over those within its geographical jurisdiction. The church is a voluntary institution, asserting sovereignty within its confessional jurisdiction.
The church in the Roman Empire did not claim sovereignty over the money supply. The state did. The result was the destruction of money. There was no higher agency of healing in the theology of Roman politics. The city-state of Rome was the final jurisdiction.
The institutional means of healing in history is control over economic resources. The greater the degree and extension of the promised healing, the greater the level of resource allocation. The state consumes resources and distributes resources. It does not create resources. The savior state is a messianic state. It requires an ever-increasing percentage of its citizens’ output in order to fulfill its promises of universal healing.
When citizens resist paying higher taxes, the state must find lenders outside its jurisdiction. When these lenders refuse to lend without payment of higher rates of interest, the state turns to the central bank.
The messianic state of the Roman Empire funded its claims with taxes first, then debased coins. So has every empire in history, save one: Byzantium. The memory of Christians of what the messianic state had cost them was retained, generation after generation. The Christians of Byzantium recognized the connections: a messianic savior state, persecution, taxation, and inflation.
COURT PROPHETS
Every regime has court prophets. These are paid hirelings who praise the state as the source of deliverance in history.
The difference between court prophets in the ancient world and those of today is simple to understand. The older court prophets ritually sanctioned the state and its rulers in the name of a god, who stood above the state, yet was somehow incarnate in the state. Today’s court prophets are more like a Greek chorus than a school of the prophets. They affirm the autonomy of the state from anything outside the creation. They deny that any higher court of appeal exists. Four centuries ago, this was called the divine right of kings. Today, it is the right of the state to divinity by default.
Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, thereby avoiding Charlemagne’s perceived error eight centuries earlier: allowing the Pope to crown him. But his emperorship ended at Waterloo in 1815. He did not have enough divisions.
Today’s court has many prophets. They come from every academic discipline. They are employed by tax-funded universities. They are also hired directly through government grants. The state buys its prophets, as it always has. Ahab had lots of them. He wanted them to persuade the king of Judah of the success of his recommended war against his enemies.
Then the king of Israel gathered the prophets together, about four hundred men, and said unto them, Shall I go against Ramoth-gilead to battle, or shall I forbear? And they said, Go up; for the Lord shall deliver it into the hand of the king. And Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the LORD besides, that we might enquire of him? And the king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, There is yet one man, Micaiah the son of Imlah, by whom we may enquire of the LORD: but I hate him; for he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil. And Jehoshaphat said, Let not the king say so. Then the king of Israel called an officer, and said, Hasten hither Micaiah the son of Imlah (I Kings 22:6-9).
Micaiah told them that the war would end in their defeat. Ahab would be killed. The two rulers paid no attention. They went to war, which turned out as prophesied.
The world needs more Micaiahs. Sadly, they are always in short supply. The problem is, the Micaiahs of the world are not for sale.
Most economists are.
CONCLUSION
The savior state always becomes the inflating state. It promises more healing than it can deliver. It taxes. Then it inflates. Then it defaults. Its default creates hard times for court prophets.
Respectfully, Mark
Monday, January 4, 2010
It's Not Just Obama, It's the System
Dear Friends:
Let us assume for the moment that it became revealed that Barak Obama was not a natural born citizen of the United States, proving that he was ineligible to be President of the United States. Ok, now what? Would Obama be removed from office? Perhaps. Then what? Joseph Biden would be our next President. Ok, then what? Would the United States be freer? Would the States and the people regain their sovereignty stolen by the federal government? Would America’s form of government revert back to its original nature and character of 1787? Would self-government, the consent of the governed, limited government and federalism once again become the guiding principles throughout these states united? Would the ideals and principles of freedom once again become popular, accepted and advanced by the people and their agents in government?
Since the Confederate States of America lost the war in 1865 against the union-destroying aggressions of Abraham Lincoln and his military, the federal government has egregiously encroached upon the powers and sovereignty of the people and the states respectively. Regulations, controls, taxation, deception, falsehoods, subterfuge, “bait and switch” have all been the norm. Thievery under “color of law” has been their modus operandi. Through myriad usurpations, all three branches of the federal government have suppressed and oppressed true freedom throughout these states. It has, through masquerade and fraud, turned our original federal form of government into a national, seemingly-all-powerful empire. It has overtaken virtually every major element of society. It has bribed (and in some cases, forced) corporations, churches, states and citizens into giving the federal government our own powers and resources, with the promise of giving them back, of course, at our expense and with their demands. The federal government has unjustifiably entangled itself in the affairs of foreign nations, corporate elites and bankster mobs. It owns major media, education institutions and religious minds across America. In essence, it has created a seemingly impenetrable matrix of fraud, deceit and corruption, Republic or Democrat in the White House notwithstanding.
Despite the well-intentioned efforts and thoughts of many in America who feel that removing Obama from the Presidency, based upon constitutional grounds (i.e. Article 2, Section 1, Clause 4), will somehow restore freedom to America, this simply is not the case and entirely misses the true crux of the problem. Do not misunderstand what I am saying: most certainly the constitution should be followed, and we the people of the states and the state governments should insist on it. No one believes that more than I. However, this fact must be realized before freedom will ever show its face again in America: the federal government (and those who control it) is not salvageable; its usurpations and encroachments are treasonous; its blatant unconstitutional actions have put the people of these states in a state of war; and without true revolution, freedom will never be restored in America.
The federal government – and by current default, the states – operates under a system and form contrary to freedom as expressed in America’s Declaration of Independence. It operates under the form of government which history proves is the enemy of a free republic. It operates under the very form of government that our founders rejected in September 1787 and that the ratifiers of the constitution rejected thereafter. It operates under a top-down structure, whereby the states and the people are mere subjects and corporations of the centralized head – the very form our founding generation seceded from in 1776. Freedom’s current plight in America has little to do with Obama being illegitimate as the President and has everything to do with the people of the states being controlled by a governmental system we never created or approved.
Even a brief look at recent history will reveal the numerous examples where the people have attempted to hold the federal government accountable to the constitution. Yet, that same government is more powerful and corrupt than ever, and the people and states are weaker and more oppressed than ever. It would not matter in the slightest if Obama were removed and replaced with Biden, Pelosi, McCain, Bush, Clinton, Gingrich, Palin, Scarborough, or any other eligible President. A new President would no more change the form and system of the federal government than would pumping trillions of dollars of tax payer monies create a stable and sound economic system in America. Just as America’s paper currency (the dollar) is not backed by a solid foundation (e.g. gold-silver standard), so too the executive branch of the federal government is not backed by substantive principles of freedom.
Make no mistake about this: there has not been a United States President elected since 1861 that has advocated for the true principles of federalism and freedom, and both major political parties have only cemented and built upon the previous President’s legacy of federal power at the expense of the states and people. If you think that freedom will be restored because a Republican who claims to be pro-life, pro-family, or pro-business sits in the White House, you are mistaken. If you think that Obama’s true birth place being revealed will restore all that we have lost for over 100 years and will somehow decapitate the head of the beast (thereby granting victory to “conservative America”), think again.
Those who have controlled the federal system have shown their intent of ignoring, demeaning and contradicting the United States Constitution. They care nothing of it, and only lead us to believe they do just to get elected. As Nancy Pelosi laughed when recently being asked the question, “Does the constitution grant Congress the power to pass the national health care bill?”, she only illustrated both the latent and patent practice and philosophy the federal government has possessed for generations. Do we need any more evidence at this point to conclude that our federal government is unconstitutional in its actions, powers and intentions? I think not. The only question is, what do we do about it?
In 1776, the delegates from the colonies met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in attempts to rectify the unconstitutional political actions of their national government. Like many of us today, they knew the designs of their government to reduce them to submissive slaves; they knew their government overstepped the authority given them by the consent of the governed; they knew that their government had committed acts of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” So, what did they decide to do? Replace their king with a new king? Use the court system to invalidate the illegal actions of the king? Use parliament to address their grievances to the king? Try to establish that the king was not of the hereditary lineage legally capable of being king? Wait until a new king would assume the throne to accomplish freedom? None of the above.
Instead, our founding generation secured the blessings of liberty by doing what all free peoples decided to do throughout history when confronted with the evident intents of tyrannical government: they became independent from the source of tyranny. They declared their natural right to govern themselves. They formed and constituted government by and on the consent of the governed. They ridded themselves of the entire system of the “long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object [which evinced] a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” They became independent and sovereign states!
You claim to love freedom: you do well. But freedom will never be restored by replacing Obama with Biden, nor will it be restored by establishing that Obama is not legally eligible to hold the executive office. You claim to love the constitution: you do well. But the constitution will never be restored until the principles, form and system it created are restored. You claim that Obama’s birth certificate is crucial in restoring freedom? Your thoughts are likely pure, but your focus is misplaced. There have been open and notorious unconstitutional actions forced upon us by the federal government over the past 140 years. What makes this particular issue the winning contestant in restoring freedom?
Moreover, where are those in the federal government also demanding what you claim is so crucial to restoring the constitution? Where are those in the federal government demanding that the federal government give the states and the people back their money and power? Where are those in the federal government demanding that the tenth amendment be adhered to? Where are those even considering running for a federal position who preach and practice concepts of federalism? Where is the federal judicial system that even understands what federalism is and is willing to contradict ninety years of court opinions and rulings that have virtually stripped states of their retained rights under the tenth amendment? Where are the federal political statesmen who proclaim that the federal government be resisted by the voice and the arm of the states, as Alexander Hamilton explained? The answer is, no where!
The questions that should be asked are the ones whose answers provide real solutions to restoring our Confederate Republic. The solutions sought should not be ones whose only end simply replaces one quarterback for another; yet all the while, their team continues to control us by insisting that we play their game by their rules in their (home) stadium with their referees, all of which are controlled by those sitting in the glass boxes overhead who smoke their cigars, drink their wine, play with their whores and laugh at us as we drudge through the game thinking that we are gaining ground when we lose only ten yards instead of twenty. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”
Our methods of change are proven ineffectual, the expressed terms of the constitution notwithstanding. It is time for a different course of action – a course that has already been given to us by principle and practice. It is time that we the people of the states think in the pure political and philosophical terms that formed our country and secured our freedom in 1776. It is time that the states of this country reclaim what has been taken from us and to reignite the flames of independence and federalism which will cause freedom to burn brightly for us and our posterity for years to come.
Respectfully,
Mark
Let us assume for the moment that it became revealed that Barak Obama was not a natural born citizen of the United States, proving that he was ineligible to be President of the United States. Ok, now what? Would Obama be removed from office? Perhaps. Then what? Joseph Biden would be our next President. Ok, then what? Would the United States be freer? Would the States and the people regain their sovereignty stolen by the federal government? Would America’s form of government revert back to its original nature and character of 1787? Would self-government, the consent of the governed, limited government and federalism once again become the guiding principles throughout these states united? Would the ideals and principles of freedom once again become popular, accepted and advanced by the people and their agents in government?
Since the Confederate States of America lost the war in 1865 against the union-destroying aggressions of Abraham Lincoln and his military, the federal government has egregiously encroached upon the powers and sovereignty of the people and the states respectively. Regulations, controls, taxation, deception, falsehoods, subterfuge, “bait and switch” have all been the norm. Thievery under “color of law” has been their modus operandi. Through myriad usurpations, all three branches of the federal government have suppressed and oppressed true freedom throughout these states. It has, through masquerade and fraud, turned our original federal form of government into a national, seemingly-all-powerful empire. It has overtaken virtually every major element of society. It has bribed (and in some cases, forced) corporations, churches, states and citizens into giving the federal government our own powers and resources, with the promise of giving them back, of course, at our expense and with their demands. The federal government has unjustifiably entangled itself in the affairs of foreign nations, corporate elites and bankster mobs. It owns major media, education institutions and religious minds across America. In essence, it has created a seemingly impenetrable matrix of fraud, deceit and corruption, Republic or Democrat in the White House notwithstanding.
Despite the well-intentioned efforts and thoughts of many in America who feel that removing Obama from the Presidency, based upon constitutional grounds (i.e. Article 2, Section 1, Clause 4), will somehow restore freedom to America, this simply is not the case and entirely misses the true crux of the problem. Do not misunderstand what I am saying: most certainly the constitution should be followed, and we the people of the states and the state governments should insist on it. No one believes that more than I. However, this fact must be realized before freedom will ever show its face again in America: the federal government (and those who control it) is not salvageable; its usurpations and encroachments are treasonous; its blatant unconstitutional actions have put the people of these states in a state of war; and without true revolution, freedom will never be restored in America.
The federal government – and by current default, the states – operates under a system and form contrary to freedom as expressed in America’s Declaration of Independence. It operates under the form of government which history proves is the enemy of a free republic. It operates under the very form of government that our founders rejected in September 1787 and that the ratifiers of the constitution rejected thereafter. It operates under a top-down structure, whereby the states and the people are mere subjects and corporations of the centralized head – the very form our founding generation seceded from in 1776. Freedom’s current plight in America has little to do with Obama being illegitimate as the President and has everything to do with the people of the states being controlled by a governmental system we never created or approved.
Even a brief look at recent history will reveal the numerous examples where the people have attempted to hold the federal government accountable to the constitution. Yet, that same government is more powerful and corrupt than ever, and the people and states are weaker and more oppressed than ever. It would not matter in the slightest if Obama were removed and replaced with Biden, Pelosi, McCain, Bush, Clinton, Gingrich, Palin, Scarborough, or any other eligible President. A new President would no more change the form and system of the federal government than would pumping trillions of dollars of tax payer monies create a stable and sound economic system in America. Just as America’s paper currency (the dollar) is not backed by a solid foundation (e.g. gold-silver standard), so too the executive branch of the federal government is not backed by substantive principles of freedom.
Make no mistake about this: there has not been a United States President elected since 1861 that has advocated for the true principles of federalism and freedom, and both major political parties have only cemented and built upon the previous President’s legacy of federal power at the expense of the states and people. If you think that freedom will be restored because a Republican who claims to be pro-life, pro-family, or pro-business sits in the White House, you are mistaken. If you think that Obama’s true birth place being revealed will restore all that we have lost for over 100 years and will somehow decapitate the head of the beast (thereby granting victory to “conservative America”), think again.
Those who have controlled the federal system have shown their intent of ignoring, demeaning and contradicting the United States Constitution. They care nothing of it, and only lead us to believe they do just to get elected. As Nancy Pelosi laughed when recently being asked the question, “Does the constitution grant Congress the power to pass the national health care bill?”, she only illustrated both the latent and patent practice and philosophy the federal government has possessed for generations. Do we need any more evidence at this point to conclude that our federal government is unconstitutional in its actions, powers and intentions? I think not. The only question is, what do we do about it?
In 1776, the delegates from the colonies met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in attempts to rectify the unconstitutional political actions of their national government. Like many of us today, they knew the designs of their government to reduce them to submissive slaves; they knew their government overstepped the authority given them by the consent of the governed; they knew that their government had committed acts of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” So, what did they decide to do? Replace their king with a new king? Use the court system to invalidate the illegal actions of the king? Use parliament to address their grievances to the king? Try to establish that the king was not of the hereditary lineage legally capable of being king? Wait until a new king would assume the throne to accomplish freedom? None of the above.
Instead, our founding generation secured the blessings of liberty by doing what all free peoples decided to do throughout history when confronted with the evident intents of tyrannical government: they became independent from the source of tyranny. They declared their natural right to govern themselves. They formed and constituted government by and on the consent of the governed. They ridded themselves of the entire system of the “long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object [which evinced] a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” They became independent and sovereign states!
You claim to love freedom: you do well. But freedom will never be restored by replacing Obama with Biden, nor will it be restored by establishing that Obama is not legally eligible to hold the executive office. You claim to love the constitution: you do well. But the constitution will never be restored until the principles, form and system it created are restored. You claim that Obama’s birth certificate is crucial in restoring freedom? Your thoughts are likely pure, but your focus is misplaced. There have been open and notorious unconstitutional actions forced upon us by the federal government over the past 140 years. What makes this particular issue the winning contestant in restoring freedom?
Moreover, where are those in the federal government also demanding what you claim is so crucial to restoring the constitution? Where are those in the federal government demanding that the federal government give the states and the people back their money and power? Where are those in the federal government demanding that the tenth amendment be adhered to? Where are those even considering running for a federal position who preach and practice concepts of federalism? Where is the federal judicial system that even understands what federalism is and is willing to contradict ninety years of court opinions and rulings that have virtually stripped states of their retained rights under the tenth amendment? Where are the federal political statesmen who proclaim that the federal government be resisted by the voice and the arm of the states, as Alexander Hamilton explained? The answer is, no where!
The questions that should be asked are the ones whose answers provide real solutions to restoring our Confederate Republic. The solutions sought should not be ones whose only end simply replaces one quarterback for another; yet all the while, their team continues to control us by insisting that we play their game by their rules in their (home) stadium with their referees, all of which are controlled by those sitting in the glass boxes overhead who smoke their cigars, drink their wine, play with their whores and laugh at us as we drudge through the game thinking that we are gaining ground when we lose only ten yards instead of twenty. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”
Our methods of change are proven ineffectual, the expressed terms of the constitution notwithstanding. It is time for a different course of action – a course that has already been given to us by principle and practice. It is time that we the people of the states think in the pure political and philosophical terms that formed our country and secured our freedom in 1776. It is time that the states of this country reclaim what has been taken from us and to reignite the flames of independence and federalism which will cause freedom to burn brightly for us and our posterity for years to come.
Respectfully,
Mark
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