Axe to the Root with Bojidar Marinov | Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Network

Welcome to Episode 33 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 20 minutes we will be talking about war and fighting a war. More precisely, we will be talking about fighting a strategic, global war, a war that goes beyond physical and military resources, but involves the hearts of men. And even more precisely, we will talk about the smart and the stupid way to fight such a war. We will see how Christendom in the past fought its wars the smart way. And we will see how today the West is fighting them the stupid way; in fact, so stupid, that it may be one of the best and clearest examples in history of global, strategic snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory. Yes, you heard me well: snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory. Because this is exactly what the West – living in the shadow of Christendom – did in its war against Islam: We worked hard, and we fought hard, and we spent tons of resources and human life, only to turn a secure historical victory into something that today nearly approaches the defeat of the West. And Islam didn’t do it to us. We did it, the Christians in the West, it’s our fault, from beginning to end.

In the 1890s, a newspaper in Alexandria, Egypt, owned by a wealthy Muslim merchant, came up with a series of articles titled, “Can Islam Survive?” The newspaper was printed in both English and Arabic, so the articles were written not just for its European readership, which at the time was abundant in Egypt. It was also directed to its Arabic audience, many of whom were Muslims educated in Madrasah schools, where they were taught to master the Muslim religion and specifically the legal system of Islam. (What today is known as Shariah.) Unfortunately, I don’t have the full text of the articles; I only know about them from testimonies of American missionaries to Egypt and the time. From the optimistic tone of the missionaries’ testimonies, I come to the conclusion that the articles were quite pessimistic about the future of Islam. In fact, one of the testimonies I have read directly assumes that Islam would fall to Christianity within the next generation, which would mean in the first half of the twentieth century.

While I don’t know the content of the articles, I can imagine there were a number of good reasons for Muslims at the time to be pessimistic about the future of their religion. The main, as I would suppose, must have been political. In the 1890s, the political mainstay of Islam – the Ottoman Empire, was not the sick man anymore; it was the dying man. Islam has always been a political religion; there has never been an institutional division between church and state. The strongest political leader was the highest religious authority in the land; the Sultan was the Khalif, the religious leader of all Muslims. And his military victories and political expansion were synonymous with the victories and expansion of Islam. The Sultans, however, had been losing wars and territories for over two centuries now, since Lepanto in 1571 and Vienna in 1683. In 1882, the richest and most strategic province of the Ottoman Empire – Egypt – was occupied by the British military. Formally, it remained an autonomous province within the Caliphate; in practice, it was a colony of the British Empire, virtually personally owned by a Christian female ruler, Queen Victoria. Egypt wasn’t the only piece of the Caliphate taken by Christians, however. Between 1828 and 1878, the Empire lost almost all of its European territories to newly formed national states. (The process was finished in the First Balkan War of 1912.) Persia – the second largest Muslim polity at the time – was going through its own set of internecine struggles and weakness. Its government had given up on trying to ban Christian missionaries, and by 1900, Persian Muslims were converting to Christianity at an alarming rate. During the same period, Most of the Muslim principalities in what today is the most populous Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, had surrendered to the Dutch. The powerful Kingdom of Sarawak on Borneo was ruled by the White Rajahs, the Brooke family, after it was voluntarily given to them by the Sultan of Brunei. The Muslim Turkic nations of Central Asia were under the rule of the Russian Empire. North and West Africa were European colonies. The Indian Ocean which has been for centuries an inland sea for Muslim merchants and pirates, was now controlled by the English Navy. For a religion that worshiped power – like Islam – these political setbacks were certainly the signs of the last times.

But there was more than just the political and military defeats, and that more was even more disturbing. Islam was losing the war for the hearts and minds of its own people. You see, for centuries, the two religions had pretty much the same view of the nature of the war: it was a military or political conflict. The Crusades were such, the Reconquista in Spain was such, and the wars of the Ottoman Empire were such – all military conflicts concerned with taking territories. As long they were basically military conflicts over territories and resources, Islam had no problem. Yeah, there would be ebb and flows, but strategically, Islam held the upper hand, because it held both the better strategic position (right in the middle of the great continental mass) and the better resources (6 times the territory and 15 times the population of Christendom, approximately).

But some time in the 18th century the nature of the game suddenly changed. Two things changed the game. One was free trade. The other was what I call the Great Missionary Revolution.

Free trade, of course, was directly related to a technological miracle of which I have spoken before, in another episode of Axe to the Root Podcast: the caravel. Those who remember that episode, probably remember that the superiority of the caravel was expressed practically in the fact that it could be both a profitable merchant vessel, and at the same time, a self-sufficient fighting ship. These two qualities were developed even further in later ship designs based on the caravel. By the 18th century, Christendom had developed ship designs that could carry on global trade with high efficiency and regularity, and at the same time present a formidable show of military force anywhere on the planet. The result of this was that European industrial goods became easily available and affordable to an increasing portion of the world’s population. And, since new technologies always make life easier, this made the lives of many people much easier and more productive.

If we could make a time-active chart of the development of European trade in the world, we would see that within several decades in the early 18th century, between the years 1700 and 1750, European merchants dotted almost the whole known world – which at the time excluded only Australia, for the British government didn’t set out to explore and colonize Australia until it lost its American colonies – with what was known at the time as “factories”: merchant outposts providing defense, warehousing, repair, food supplies, and port facilities for European merchants. At the beginning, these were militarily weak, and therefore vulnerable to attacks and pillage from local rulers and warlords. Local rulers, however, seldom dared attack the factories: The threat of retaliation from European ships in the future was not to be ignored. More important, their own populations – and the rulers themselves – were becoming addicted to the improvements of life brought by European merchants. Sometimes, to our shame as Christians, the addiction was real – like in the opium trade with China, which will remain a dark spot on the history of Christendom. But most of the time, European goods solved economic problems which local cultures were unable to solve on their own. The merchants, thus, while making nice profits, were also serving the needs of the local communities. European free trade assured the leadership of European merchants, for the simple reason that they were capable of serving the nations in ways no one has done before.

Before the Muslim rulers knew it, Islam was surrounded – and besieged, indeed – by hundreds and then thousands of European trading outposts. They made money for Europe. But in this, they also served the Muslim world. Scrap that; they served the individual Muslims and their families. European products changed the way many of these cultures dressed themselves, the way they did farming, the local trades and industries, etc. The need for work force brought more education, which education affected the lowest strata of the local societies. This in turn weakened the power of the local warlords; after all, a poor person with skills and education had more significance in a world dominated by free trade than a local aristocrat whose only skill was to spend the money he stole from others. By serving the local people, this trade was gradually and stealthily shifting their allegiance to Christendom and the Christians. European merchants were taking leadership in the very lands of the enemy, and that without firing shots – and, to add insult to the injury, they were taking leadership while at the same time making profit.

Not that the Muslim world didn’t have trade and didn’t understand trade. Muslims have done trade before and have had developed trade routes. But in the Muslim world, trade was a political activity; it always served the needs of rulers. The Muslim world was a world of closed borders, both for goods and for people. Trade was subject to licenses and permits, serving the agendas, and sometimes the whims, of rulers. Unless it benefited the state, trade was considered out of bounds. It was heavily mercantilist: the purpose of trade was not connecting producers and consumers; it was monetary revenues for the state. Trade for private profit or for serving distant communities with new products made no sense to the Muslim mind. Trade had meaning only as a machine for revenues.

This, of course, limited the scope of Muslim trade. Even if at times some Muslim communities were capable of producing more than they could consume, the process of exchanging it with other communities was too onerous to make it worth. Even as late as 1910, Western missionaries spoke of the system of immigration and travel restrictions, trade regulations, and bureaucratic rules in the Muslim lands as a sign of the barbarity of the Islamic civilization. None of this was helping Muslim trade. And therefore, when Western merchants traded, they always had the upper hand. And took leadership.

But serving through making money wasn’t the only change in the way the West expanded. While such global free trade was something new, there was something even newer: The new type of mission. The merchants served the material needs of the individuals and their families and made money in the process. But the new kind of missionaries the West started sending in the 18th century was an entirely new ballgame altogether.

Christian missionaries had defended justice and righteousness against evil and tyranny before the 18th century. Most notable were the efforts of Roman Catholic missionaries in America to protect the local populations from exploitation and slavery to European adventurers. A few protestant missionaries among the Indians in North America did attempt to affect to their societies and change the culture of death to a culture of justice and righteousness. But the 18th century saw a completely new kind of missionary: A missionary who would work to change the local cultures from the bottom, by working among the poorest members of the society, showing kindness and care, and also working to change their very worldview so that the culture is healed from the bottom, until it affects the top. William Carey, of course, was the father of this new kind of mission; his work in India was the template for many other missionaries. Not that he ignored the task of changing the culture; but he decided that the culture is changed not by converting the ruler, but those ruled. In Africa, David Livingstone gave a similar example: He was more concerned about saving poor individuals from the slave traders or from the widespread diseases than about earning the favor of one or another local king or warlord. Carey, Livingstone, and many others like them could be often seen caring for the least in the local societies, people whom no one else cared about. The merchants served the little people for cash. The missionaries added more to it: they served for free. All, however, served the little ones, the ones of whom Jesus spoke in Matt. 25:31-46.

This work continued well into the 19th and the 20th century. In the 1890s, there were several Christian schools along the Nile in Egypt, run by Presbyterian or Baptist missions, free of charge, serving the local communities. Half of them were for girls – something unheard of in the Muslim world. Missionaries of the time report that almost all the parents of these girls confessed to the missionaries to be secret converts to Christ. In Istanbul, the capital of the Empire, Presbyterian and Congregationalist missionaries founded the Robert College – an institution of higher education which provided the best training available in the Empire, at affordable cost, or even free for the most talented students. So successful the college was, that in the 1880s, the majority of the highest rank officials of the Empire were Christians trained in that college. In Persia, Christian schools were setting the stage for a mission explosion in the country. In the first decade of the 20th century, missionaries reported that Persia had many churches of thousands of new converts each who needed volunteer preachers to teach them and train them in the Christian faith. In Indonesia, in Java, whole provinces were converted to Christ by Dutch Reformed missionaries during that same period, all because of the self-sacrificial work of these missionaries in serving the local communities. And such examples were not few, they were replicated in many places, earning the hearts and minds of a whole generation

To this, the Muslim world had nothing to offer. Trade, may be. Unconditional love: now, that was something unheard of. True, one of the five rules of the Muslim faith was giving alms. But the European missionaries were not simply giving handouts; they were actively teaching the poor to break out of their culture of darkness, dependence, and stagnation. And they were doing it by personal example. By the 19th century, it was obvious that true love was shown only by the Christians. And that was not simply love to important people in the society; Christians loved them all. Even those whom no one else loved.

In both free trade and missions, Christendom was applying in practice the Biblical principle laid out in Matt. 23:11; a principle that Dennis Peacocke summarizes as “Whoever serves, leads.” Christians – whether as merchants or as missionaries – served the least of these people out there. And thus, were taking dominion over the Muslim world.

And in 1900, Islam was on its death bed. Not only Christian missionaries expected it to be defeated with in a generation. Muslims themselves – educated, intelligent, active, wealthy, prosperous Muslims – saw no future for Islam. An Egyptian consul at the time confided to his British colleague: “The future age will be an age of love; and I don’t think Islam can reform itself enough to find its place in it.” This was only a little over 100 years ago.

The West abandoned its commitment to freedom of trade and movement in the first two decades of the 20th century. World War I, of course, was the watershed between the civilization that valued individualism and private initiative and freedom, and the new world in which now the state was the only legitimate authority, and all individuals were supposed to serve the needs of the state.

Of course, there had been isolated examples of closed borders for goods and people before in Europe. Germany was such an example, divided into multiple small principalities, where every small ruler was trying to raise his revenues by tariffs and toll taxes on merchants who passed through his territory. Germany’s unification started with a customs union, to remove all these obstacles. Ideologically, in the 19th century, the only proponents of closed borders were the Marxists and the trade unions. Marx believed that open borders and free trade were a capitalist conspiracy against the worker; in many places, trade union leaders advocated for government licensing and permit regimes on commerce and production. They believed that such restrictions would weaken the power of the employers and would diminish competition from non-union workers. By 1920, the West started becoming what Germany was in 1820: burdened by a system of passport control and immigration restrictions, commerce licenses and permits, and crony capitalism. The new mercantilism in the first half of the 20th century saw commerce only as an extension of government policy, not as an independent activity of individuals or companies. Thus, only that trade was permitted which served the needs of the state. Such restrictions may or may not have served the governments, but they certainly hurt the populations of Europe, and especially Germany which was struggling to get back on its economic feet while also paying reparations. Adam Tooze, in his book, The Wages of Destruction, shows how trade restrictions imposed by the Western countries contributed much more to the rise of Hitler than anything else. Had the West remained faithful to its legacy of open borders, Germany would have recovered quickly through mutual trade, and WWII may have not happened.

Non-Western populations were hurt even more. Once the focus of economic activity shifted from the private business and the individual to the needs of the state, the non-Western cultures were now seen not as trading partners but as cows to be milked. Profits through service – the motto of capitalism – was replaced by “revenues through exploitation.” We only now begin to understand the genocides committed by some Western governments in places like Africa and Asia, all for state revenues – a good example is the Belgian genocide in Kongo under the rule of King Leopold II. Throughout the 20th century, such policies only increased in intensity. European colonists in the 19th century were fighting local tyrannies and piracy to protect their trade. Thus, they served the local populations. European states in the 20th century became tyrannies and pirates. And they continue being such today as well. And to this, add the tyrannical practices they introduce at home as an excuse.

They wouldn’t be such if they weren’t supported by their populations. And such support, predictably enough, came from the churches. The change in government policies from freedom to statism came with the change in the worldview of the churches in the West. In the first two decades of the 20th century, the postmillennial optimism of Western Christianity was replaced by the historical pessimism of the amillennial and – especially – premillennial eschatologies. The expectations of victory were replaced with a focus on resisting the growing evil in the world – not that evil was growing or becoming stronger, it’s just Christians retreated from conquering.

This shift to pessimism affected the Western cultures themselves, but it affected missions even more. And this can be clearly seen in the testimonies and vision statements by missionaries themselves. In 1910, missionaries testified of the retreat of pagan religions and the growth of Christianity; the expectations were that the world would be evangelized within a generation or two. Just 50 years later, in 1960, most of the mission statements by missionary organizations now spoke of the last days and the inevitable coming destruction. And their focus had shifted from conquering cultures for the Gospel to snatching a few souls out of the fire.

But there’s a worse. Not only Christians gave up on evangelizing the world with the Gospel; they also actively supported the unjust policies of their governments – especially concerning the Muslim world. With the expectations now being of growing evil in the world, the courage of conquering Islam with the Gospel was now replaced by fear of its growth. Now, that growth may be real, or may be fictitious; numbers rather show that Islam’s growth is moderate, compared to the demographic growth of the world’s population; and also, that Islam fails in terms of proselytizing compared to Christianity. As Phillip Jenkins showed in his book, The Next Christendom, the factual numbers speak rather in favor of Christianity around the world. But fear always sees all dangers – real or imaginary – as bigger than they really are. So in their fear, Western churches now wholeheartedly support the murderous wars and exploitation of their governments in Muslim lands, as well as socialist and tyrannical practices at home. A perfect example of such turnabout in modern Christianity is the recent political activism of Franklin Graham. The man has control of over $120 million a year. Only a portion of it was enough for missionaries in the 19th century to bring Islam to its knees. And yet, what Graham calls for is more unjust wars in the Middle East by the US government, more tyrannical policies at home by the US government – while he claims that his main concern is the Gospel. And Graham is only one of a multitude. Very few of the churchian celebrities in the US oppose the policies of the US government, and even fewer call for a return of the old policies of service through free trade and evangelism.

In the final account, within the last 100 years, the West has become its own worst enemy. It used to oppose its freedom of trade and movement to Islam’s tyranny, immigration restrictions, and commerce licensing; it has now surpassed it in such restrictions and licensing. It used to oppose its love and care for the least of the people to Islam’s lack of love and compassion and to its indiscriminate murder of innocents; it has surpassed Islam in indifference, hatred, and indiscriminate murder. Exchanging optimism for pessimism, the West exchanged courage for fear, and in the final account, became a worse enemy to itself than all of its enemies together. It quit serving the world and the little ones of the world; and therefore it lost their hearts and minds. And it is this failure that made Islam strong and vibrant again.

The book I will assign for reading this week was written long time ago, but it must be revived today, and replace our modern reliance on the secular state to fight our enemies. The author is William Carey. I don’t have to – or I hope I don’t – tell you who William Carey is. Every Reformed Christian is under obligation to learn about the life of this giant of the Christian faith and what he did for the Kingdom of God. The book is not easy to read, it was written in an 18th century English, but you have to read it. The title is, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians.

This is also the philosophy of missions I have been following in Bulgaria, whether among the general population or among the minorities, like the Gypsies. The instincts of the ethnic majority are pretty much the same as the instincts of American church-goers about Islam: Let the government deal with it, send the troops. Our mission in Bulgaria has had the opposite approach: the government is the worst solution of all. Service through the Gospel only can do the work. And the books we have been translating have played a major part of it. Help mne continue this work. Visit Bulgarian Reformation.com. Subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. God bless you all.

Hegellianism and the Modern State

Welcome to Episode 32 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 20 minutes we will be talking about deep philosophy. I mean, really deep philosophy, which, in the world of modern academia, means the opinions of dead Germans – or, rather, not all dead Germans but only a few Germans who died in the 19th century. And we are going to be talking about the deadest of them all – in a spiritual and covenantal sense, I mean – who, being the deadest of them all, has affected the modern philosophical, intellectual, political, and religious discourse more than any other German who died in the 19th century. Funny how it happens, the deader a thinker is spiritually and covenantally, the more eager the secular world is to find in him their intellectual and spiritual leader; and in this case, this is very expressly true. We will be talking about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (or we can anglicize the name to George William Frederick Hegel): a verifiable giant in non-Christian philosophy, whose legacy – acknowledged and unacknowledged – is still with us today. And it is with us today not only in our modern secular philosophy, but worse, in our modern political philosophy and discourse. And, take this: Some of Hegel’s most devout followers when it comes to the political and social applications of his thought are modern Christians – although, most of them don’t realize they are following him. What I want to do in this episode is give a short and simple overview of Hegel’s philosophy: starting presuppositions, logical development, philosophical conclusions, and practical, that is, political and social, conclusions. And later, in a future episode, see how we as Christians need to think about the modern society, and also where our focus and emphasis need to be, in order to develop a Biblical worldview, and also restore the civilization of Christendom in all its aspects.

It’s rather funny, a couple of years ago a friend sent to me a scanned copy of a page from a book by R.C. Sproul in which he speaks about Christian philosophy. My friend had underlined a sentence on that page. In that sentence, R.C. Sproul declared that when it comes to philosophy, Christians are forced to choose between Kant (Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher from the 18th century) and Aquinas (Thomas Aquinas, the most influential Roman Catholic theologian and the brightest star of the tradition of scholasticism of the 13th century). I laughed and responded, “Well, I guess R.C. wants to make us all Hegelians.” That’s what Hegel did in his whole career as a philosopher: he oscillated between Aquinas and Kant, trying to eventually bring the two together in a system supposed to combine the best of the two. He admired Kant and explicitly said that in his dialectical method, he was trying to bring Kant’s two ends of his dualism together. Despite being himself a Lutheran, he also took the principles of Aquinas’s theology and transformed them into tenets of his philosophy of “absolute idealism.” Karl Barth, of all people, called Hegel “the Protestant Aquinas,” and that monicker has been affirmed by other philosophers and theologians as well. Anyway, my purpose here is not to pick on R.C. Sproul – his contribution to the popularization of Calvinism is above any doubt – but this small deviation from his Reformed presuppositions only shows how pervasive the influence of Hegel is today, even among those who should know better. In this case, R.C. Sproul didn’t even realize that he was following a path drawn originally by Hegel himself. If I could reply to R.C. Sproul, my answer would be, “No, in philosophy today, Reformed Christians have only one possible choice: Cornelius Van Til and his presuppositionalism; because it is the only philosophy today consistent with the theology and soteriology and the doctrine of knowledge of Calvinism. Or perhaps, in a lesser degree, Gordon Clark, although, Clark was much closer to Hegel in his view of logic and reason. So, to be safe, go with Van Til.” Of course, I know that R.C. didn’t have the intent to make us all Hegelians; but his statement was dictated by his preferred system of philosophy, and I think that in that preference, he is inconsistent with his Reformed faith. But this discussion I will leave for another episode in the future. If I ever tackle it; for there is a multitude of other issues, ethical/judicial, that have a priority.

Here, now, we are facing a serious challenge, though; the challenge is to explain the philosophy of Hegel simply and in a short time, from a Biblical perspective, then show the logical conclusions of it in the political thought, and then show how the modern political discourse and practices have been affected by it. We may need to leave something out, for this format may not allow us to cover it all. So let’s get to the task at hand.

Hegel is perhaps the brightest philosopher in the tradition of German idealism: a tradition which we may call the German Enlightenment. It lagged behind the Scottish and the French Enlightenment by a generation or two – Germany in the 18th century wasn’t very capable of producing a strong intellectual class. But despite coming somewhat late to the scene, German idealism provided the secularism of the Enlightenment with systematic theories in several fields of philosophy: theory of knowledge, the nature of conscience and reason, logic, ethics, etc. The Enlightenment philosophers, in their eagerness to escape the worldview of Christianity, had a serious problem: Every departure from the trinitarian God of the Bible as the foundation for knowledge, logic, ethics, and philosophy, led to some form of dualistic paradox and self-contradiction, making it impossible to give any justification for their knowledge and systems of thought, and also making it impossible for them to develop systematic, comprehensive, coherent thought on anything. They ridiculed Christianity, but no matter how they tried, they couldn’t develop any kind of system without it. Most of the French and Scottish philosophers preferred to retain some form of belief in God, as a sort of insurance policy against their own inconsistencies. Others, like David Hume and Denis Diderot, despaired and resorted to philosophical skepticism, deciding that systematic thought and rational knowledge are impossible in practice, and therefore can’t be achieved. It fell to a German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, to systematize the inherent dualism and self-contradictions of secular thought, and to point a possible way out of it.

Systematize he did, perfectly well. But finding a way out of the dualism proved to be a rather tough task. If anything, Kant made it worse. In order to define human thought, knowledge, and reality without God, he postulated tow different, and in a sense opposed worlds of knowledge and perception. Or, as a matter of fact, two realities. One was the realm of the phenomenal, that is, the things as they are perceived by our senses, and then interpreted by our reason. The other was the realm of the noumenal, that is, the things-in-themselves, independent of our perception of them. Kant thought that he had found the answer to skepticism, the belief that there is no possible way of validating any knowledge; he wanted to preserve the belief in secure knowledge, but without God. He acknowledged that things-in-themselves are not the same as our sensory perception and our rational interpretation of them. That dualism he took for granted and systematized it in his Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason. The only thing that remained now is to find a logical connection between the two worlds that would somehow make the things-in-themselves knowable, and human reasoning validated by reality. That proved a task beyond his abilities. He never really found a philosophical way to reconcile hard reality with human perception. Yes, yes, people take it for granted that their mind and reality are correlated. But why should it be true? Why not accept the total disconnect between reality and the mind? Kant could find no answer. He ended just as skeptical as the skepticism he detested.

That’s where Hegel came to the rescue. Or, at least, tried to. Hegel called his system of philosophy “dialectics.” Dialectics comes from the same word as “dialogue,” and when used as a philosophical term, denotes a system which tries to bring the two ends of dualism together. To make it easy, dualism is a system of two irreconcilable entities or opposites. Dialectics is a system that reconciles them. Prior to Hegel, all philosophies without God were dualistic. By describing his system as “dialectics,” Hegel’s claim was, in simple language, “I found the solution to all these dualisms.” No need of postulating a transcendent God anymore in order to keep a system of thought afloat. Hegels’ system – as he claimed – found a way to be both without transcendence and still consistent. Remember, the Enlightenment philosophers had to either reluctantly acknowledge some God (like Voltaire and Rousseau) or deny the validity of all knowledge (like Diderot and Hume). Hegel thought he found the solution: He knew why and how man could have reliable knowledge of reality without starting from the Trinitarian god of the Bible. His dialectics supposedly brought together the two ends of Kant’s dilemma.

So what did he do? How did he reconcile the thing perceived and the thing-in-itself?

He just eliminated one of them, the thing-in-itself, from the equation. Yes, seriously. He called his system “absolute idealism.” The reason he called it so is because in it, the reality of things separate from the perception of them was completely eliminated – or at least ignored. Hegel took for granted that for the mind to be able to know the object of knowledge, there must exist some connection. Why should such connection be there? He didn’t say. He just eliminated the necessity of answering that question by postulating an “identity of thought and being.” That is, whatever the mind thinks of the object, must be the object itself. There is no reality outside of the perception the mind has of the object. Everything is one unified great big idea, including both the mind and the object, and everything is perfectly rational and knowable, and thus the self-conscious side of the equation, the mind, can be trusted to know the not-so-conscious side, the object. That’s how easy it is to overcome Kant’s dualism: destroy one of the sides of that dualism, and make everything one unified whole. Ah, yes, and never really explain why you did it, and why your conclusions should be trusted and how they are validated. Just do it in as many words as possible, so that others are misled to think that you have offered anything of value.

The human mind – or consciousness – thus became the central agent of knowledge and interpretation in Hegel’s system. More than that; it became the central agent of all reality. If all is one, reality and mind, and the mind is what defines reality and gives it meaning and purpose, then reality really doesn’t exist outside the mind. The mind becomes its central standard. Hegel didn’t only center everything on the human mind, he also re-formulated knowledge and logic to cement the place of the mind as the center of reality. Since everything was supposed to be one integral ideal spiritual unity, the old laws of logic and reasoning – which presupposed some separation between the mind and reality – were scrapped, and a new logic had to be created.

But this is just the plain old subjectivism: if only the mind matters, and reality is created by the mind, then nothing really exists except for the individual mind. Hegel didn’t plan on creating a subjectivist system. So now the next question is: How can we assign any objectivity to any kind of knowledge we have? With no firm reality outside our senses, no objective knowledge is possible. It doesn’t matter if the world is only material or only spiritual, or both; there has to be some firm ground of reality for knowledge to be reliable and objective. Hegel’s system, by excluding the independent reality of things, destroyed that firm ground. Hegel’s “absolute idealism” was nothing else but “absolute void.” If one is to explain Hegel’s “absolute idealism” in simple terms, it would be man, in a boat, in an ocean without shores and without a bottom. Things appear on the horizon, but there is no way to decide whether they are real or man is just hallucinating. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter if they are real or man is hallucinating; all that matters is that man sees them. In this setting, man is charged with the task to find his place in the world and somehow make his own existence an objective fact – and thus make the existence of those objects on the horizon an objective fact as well.

So the issue comes to the question: how does the individual conscience, the mind of the individual man, define itself? This question is tricky, for philosophical definitions came from Christianity. Pagan philosophy did not use rational definitions; it had no foundation for them. Concepts were not defined rationally; they were only intuitively assumed, or told as myths or stories. Plato’s dialogues are full of such pagan substitutes for definitions where a thing is not really defined but vaguely described in the form of a dialogue. It was Christianity that gave to the world the practice of rational definitions: Christianity is a creedal faith – not an occult religion – and a faith is not a real self-conscious faith unless it has definitions, that is, boundaries on the meaning of concepts. Definitions, that is, boundaries on meaning, were instrumental in its war against heresies, because the main characteristic of all heresies was taking the meaning of words and concepts beyond the limits of Scripture. But Christianity could afford to work through definitions, because a thing can be defined clearly only against the firm background of two things: either its origin or its purpose. When we define something, all we ask for is this: Where does it come from, or, what is it made of? And then, What is the purpose of it? Christianity has both: It speaks of the origin of things, and it speaks of the end of things, the telos, the purpose of all things. It has a firm ground on both ends of the journey, the beginning and the end. Man knows who he is and what he is, because he defines himself in terms of the Creation and of the Final Judgment. Paganism has no such firm ground, and therefore paganism can’t use definitions; it has to use vague shadows, myths, and intuition for meanings of things.

How would Hegel’s man define his own consciousness then, and how would he have an objective validity to it? How would his man in a boat, in an ocean with no shores and no bottom, figure out where he is? Hang on to your chairs, folks, you are about to hear the most ingenious answer by Hegel. Ready? Here it is: He meets another man in another boat, lost in the ocean. Both engage in an interaction, exchange thoughts and perceptions – or, hallucinations, who cares – and in the end, the two, having achieved a synthesis of their perceptions – or hallucinations, who cares – come out with a much better idea where they are, in the ocean with shores and without a bottom. You might be tempted to decide that it certainly can’t be that simple and stupid, but it is. Hegel, as all non-Christian philosophers, was a fool. But he was an educated fool, and like all educated fools we have today in our colleges and seminaries, he was proficient at dressing up his folly in philosophical lingo. But at the very bottom, this was the philosophical idea of his objectivity of conscience, or, as he called it, the “phenomenology of reason.”

It is from there that we get the simplest description of his dialectics: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. An individual conscience (thesis) lost in the void meets another, different conscience (antithesis). The two interact, and from this interaction comes out a united conscience, which is a step closer to the self-definition of the two consciences. Somehow the two lost minds become a little less lost – not because they have found a firm ground but because they have found each other. Or, if you want a more accurate picture, imagine two drunks in a bus, standing and hanging on to each other to avoid falling. From this, also, comes Engels’s answer to the question, “What is you motto?” He replied, “Everything is relative.” As is commonly interpreted today, he meant moral relativism, that is, there are no absolute moral values. He certainly didn’t believe in absolute moral values, but he was a deeper thinker, and his answer was much deeper. As a good Hegelian, he meant: No individual has a meaning and purpose as an independent moral agent; we are all defined only by our relations to others. And from this also comes the modern objection against Christianity that it is a “dogmatic religion,” it never changes. Hegel made it fashionable to believe that only that system is true which never remains fixed on the same moral and intellectual truths forever. Change is truth.

As stupid as this sounds, and as foolish as Hegel and his followers are to fall for such excuse for a philosophy, this is not the end of the story. It continues. The obvious objection then is this: the synthesis of two consciences can’t be enough for either of them to achieve the objectivity of knowledge, value, and self-awareness. There must be more. And Hegel agreed: Of course there is more. There are more individual consciences out there. The more they meet, the more they achieve that synthesis, that unity of spirit and mind, the more they achieve objectivity and assurance of knowledge. And, keep this in mind: since reality is defined by conscience, the more they achieve that synthesis of consciences, the more reality comes into existence. Or, at least, reality that matters. Objectivity is not in a transcendent truth which is immovable and immutable compared to the world of reality; objectivity is a process in time, achieved more and more by more and more thesis, antithesis, and synthesis between interacting consciences. Until. . . .

Until all these minds merge together in a gigantic conscience, which, in itself, combines the self-awareness, the identity, and the conscience of all of them. One conscience to rule them all, one conscience to bind them. That final great conscience would be the end of the process, and it would be the that final objective spirit, in which all individuals find both their freedom and their moral duty. That final objective spirit, or objective conscience, would be the only one capable of providing real knowledge to all these lost men in the ocean – not by taking them to firm ground, of course, for in Hegel’s absolute idealism no such firm ground exists – but by defining reality for them, and even creating and postulating reality for them. The mirages they have seen as individual antithetic consciences, will now, in their synthetic condition, be replaced with a common mirage, a collective hallucination for all, and this collective hallucination will be their knowledge of their true place in the universe.

Hegel didn’t have to look too far to far the obvious institutional expression for this “objective spirit.” He directly pointed to it: The state. He called the state an “objective spirit.” He assigned to it the role of postulating reality. In his new ethics, consistent with his philosophy, he declared that the only freedom and moral duty of individuals is to be incorporated in the state and subservient to the state. The state was so central to his philosophy that he even made God dependent on it: God, after all, is a conscience Himself, and as a conscience, He needs other consciences to develop Himself to objectivity. So Hegel has his god enter history and develop his identity through the state, through its expression of political power and legislating activity. God needs man to become really God, but not just any man: he needs man’s most powerful institution, which, by default, becomes God’s expression on earth. Or, for all practical purposes, God walking on earth.

But which of the many kinds of states? There are democratic states, there are monarchies, there are republics, there are decentralized local governments.

Hegel’s answer was: The most powerful ones. In the very beginning of his career, he saw the rise of Napoleon and his European empire; in October 1806, Hegel was a teacher at the University of Jena, and he personally saw Napoleon enter the city. So excited he was that in a letter, he called Napoleon “this world-spirit.” The next day, in the Battle of Jena, Napoleon crushed the armies of Prussia, considered invincible to that point, and subjugated the Kingdom of Prussia to his empire. Hegel was ecstatic: he saw in Napoleon this divine perfection and objectivity that his system expected of a political leader. The defeat of Napoleon several years later, and the restoration of Prussia, made him change his mind, and now he believed that the perfect expression of objective spirit, the state through which God has completed His own journey to self-consciousness, was the Prussian state, in its almost perfect subjugation of the individual to the interests of the state. Hegel’s absolute idealism eventually brought him to believe that might makes right – or, rather, that raw power is the visible representation of spiritual growth and objectivity of reason. Rational was only that entity that was powerful. Maximum power on earth meant maximum rationality and objectivity to him.

This is Hegel’s philosophy in a nutshell. His followers split into two factions; one faction, the Old Hegelians, retained his system of absolute idealism and built on it to create a form of pseudo-religious conservatism. Another faction – the Young Hegelians – picked up his dialectic and the relativism of being and built on it a number of revolutionary ideologies, of which Marxism has been the most successful one. Both factions, though, retained Hegel’s worship of the state as god walking on earth. By the end of the 19th century, most philosophers, economists, and social scientists considered the state as the ultimate institution of social significance and progress. By the time of WWI, these thinkers were already in position of power, or advising the powerful of the day, in all of the West, including the United States. By the mid-20th century, Hegel’s worship of the state had taken over the West. A philosophy that self-consciously started with a departure from God as the objective transcendent standard, ended up creating a system of statist domination that the West hadn’t seen since the times of the late Roman Empire. As Rushdoony said in his Foundations of Social Order, all paganism inevitably leads to statism. Hegel’s neo-paganism was not an exception.

The book I will assign for this week is Psychology of Religion, by Cornelius Van Til. The issue of the objectivity of our faith is an important one; once we lose it, we can easily go down the road of Hegelianism. Van Til gives the Biblical case for objectivity in this little book.

And again, my appeal is, help me continue the work of Christian Reconstruction in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe. Visit BulgarianReformation.com. Subscribe to the newsletter. And donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 31 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 20 minutes we will be talking about an issue that recently caused a lot of tumult and controversy and indignation in different groups in our society: The so called DAPL controversy, that is, the Dakota Access Pipeline Controversy, or also known as the Standing Rock controversy, by the name of the Standing Rock Native American Reservation, currently the largest remaining separate territory of the Large Sioux Nation and a home of some of the ancient sacred sites of of the nation.

For those listeners who are not familiar with the situation, here’s a short overview:

The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is a crude oil pipeline designed and built by the Texas-based oil company Energy Transfer Partners, designed to connect the recently developed Bakken oil fields in northwest North Dakota with the company’s storage facilities in central Illinois. The project costs $3.7 billion and, if finished, will significantly lower the costs of transportation from the new fields in North Dakota, thus also lowering the cost of crude oil delivered to the Northeast. The route goes in an almost straight line from the Bakken fields to Sioux Falls in South Dakota, and then in another straight line to Patoka, Illinois. The controversial section of the pipeline is about 25 mi south of Bismark, North Dakota, on the west bank of Missouri River, just ½ mile north of Cannonball River before it joins the Missouri. The construction site is outside the borders of the present day reservation, which is south of the Cannonball river, but it is between the Heart River and the Cannonball River, a territory which belongs to the Lakota nation under the 1851 Fort Laramie treaty, was never ceded officially to the US government, but was de facto occupied by US troops and white settlers in violation of the treaty.

In the spring of 2016, protesters from the Sioux nation, joined by members of about 300 other Native American nations, established a protest site north of the Cannonball River to block the construction of the pipeline. They have two expressed concerns: first, crossing the Missouri only a mile upstream from the town of Cannonball within the territory, the DAPL constitutes an environmental threat to the water sources for all of the Standing Rock Reservation. Second, the triangle of the two rivers, on the north bank of the Cannonball River, is a historic and sacred site to the Sioux nation, with many burial grounds which will be destroyed by the work on the pipeline.

The protest camp tried to block the construction of the pipeline, and at the beginning, it clashed with the private security guards of the company. The security guards unleashed dogs on the protesters, and the protesters responded with wounding some of the guards. The work was stopped temporarily, until the state of North Dakota brought in heavily armed SWAT teams and other police who used military equipment to scatter the protesters and to start dismantling the camps. The US government asked the company to halt construction until the issue is resolved, but Energy Transfer Partners rejected the request, and continued the construction. The Governor of North Dakota took the side of the oil company. An appeal was filed with a Federal court to put a halt on the construction, but it was denied. In a public statement the company declared that stopping the construction will mean millions of dollars in unrecoverable losses, and besides, no archeological remains were discovered in the excavations through the disputed lands; in addition, the lands through which the pipeline goes are private lands, and therefore have nothing to do with the Sioux nation. A certain role in the controversy was played by the US Army Corps of Engineers, but of this role I will talk a bit later.

The question now is – and I have been asked this question several times since the beginning of the controversy – what is the Biblical analysis of this problem, and what is the Biblical solution? I first had no answer to it, because I was not familiar with all the facts. Then, when North Dakota – and two other states – sent in militarized police to brutally deal with unarmed protesters, my moral instinct was on the side of the Sioux Nation: Based on the obvious Biblical truth that no righteous cause needs the murderous intervention of a standing army against unarmed civilians. A little bit further down the road in my investigations a friend of mine – himself partially of Native American origin, but highly critical of the culture and the ideology behind some of the tribal mentality – pointed to me that the pipeline was not actually on Sioux land but on private land, and the protest camp was itself on private land. While the protesters were careful to not cause damages to the private owner of the land through which the pipeline was built, they were causing damages to the tenant, namely, the oil company. Granted that, my moral opinion was then divided: On one hand, the protesters were wrong to cause damages to a private owner – or tenant – and the government was wrong to use excessive power against them. My friend asked me, “How should the government protect private property, then?” (As a side note, the question is a bit loaded: Biblically, the government is not supposed to protect private property but only to dispense justice.) The analysis of the situation still eluded me: I couldn’t find the ethical/judicial principle that would help me analyze it Biblically, and therefore propose the Biblical solution.

The positions of the two ends of the political spectrum were, as usual, deeply schizophrenic. Leftist writers were in opposition to the very same government of which they expected to fix all the problems in our modern world. (The White House refused to accept a petition of 100,000 signatures brought to Obama by young Native Americans, even as Obama was making cautious attempts to convince the oil company to halt construction.) The right took the side of the police state and approved the brutality and violence in suppressing the protest, claiming support for the “rule of law.” For some reason, however, the only relevant law in this case, the Fort Laramie Treaty, was ignored by those same supposed “conservatives”; apparently, any injustice which survives uncorrected for a long time, becomes a law in the eyes of those “conservatives,” and its violation may be fixed by the police state. Neither of these ends of the spectrum were any good to help me establish the covenantal nature of the case.

However, perhaps the most baffling schizophrenia, though, was that of a good number of secular libertarians, who also took the side of the police state – YES, REALLY! – and that in the name of private property rights. The problem is: There is not a single tenet in any of the secular libertarian ideologies which would support the notion of private property rights. I have written several articles about this, both on American Vision and on Christendom Restored. In the ideology of classical liberalism, private property is not sacred and its importance is only secondary and pragmatic, never foundational. Yes, von Mises’s view of private property doesn’t differ from that of Friedrich Engels; the two men only disagree on its pragmatic usefulness. And Hoppe’s and Dietze’s defenses of the “ethics” (as they call it) of private property are strictly based on pragmatic considerations. That secular libertarians continue using private property rights as an argument only shows the depth of their cognitive disorder. Rothbard and Rockwell are not free of it either, in using private property rights – a notion impossible under the presuppositions of Classical Liberalism – as an excuse for their anti-immigration bias and defense of closed borders. Schizophrenia is deeply embedded in modern secular libertarian thinking. The same problem exists among objectivists, who also ignore the tenets of their own ideology to argue for private property rights . . . while their own icon, Ayn Rand, has her character Howard Roark destroy other people’s private property in the name of the expression of his personality, and has him justified in court. All these secular libertarians contradict their own ideologies, but accept as given a concept that can only come from the one ideology they reject, namely, Biblical Christianity. For the very notion of “rights” is impossible under any system but that which involves an objective, transcendent, immutable system of ethics and justice – namely, the Law of God.

Anyway, with all these positions and opinions being schizophrenic and self-destructive, the question still is: from the perspective of the Bible, who is the villain in this controversy, and what is the Biblical solution?

Now, first of all, we need to lay a foundation about the nature and limits of private property in the Bible, and see how they apply to the controversy and the protest. And let me make the following claim about private property rights: The Law of God establishes private property as a God-ordained right, which means, it is divinely protected, and God has established earthly sanctions in His Law against violations. Pragmatic considerations have absolutely no value when private property is concerned. If a private owner decides to use his property in a completely wasteful way, it is his right, and no one has the right to tell him otherwise. Unless, of course, his actions on his property harm his neighbors. We’ll get back to this in a few minutes.

On the other hand, the Biblical system of private property is a system of open borders. I have explained it in my article, “Lew Rockwell on Immigration: The Mild Statism of Secular Libertarianism,” found on ChristendomRestored.com. In short, as long as there are no fences, and as long as traveling or being on private property doesn’t destroy economic (that is, scarce) value, crossing the border of a private property doesn’t constitute crime in itself. Deut. 23:24-25 establishes the right of a person to enter private property, as long as he doesn’t destroy or take economic advantage of it. Satisfying one’s hunger is allowed, though, according to these verses. There is a reason for the open borders policy of the Bible, and it is more than just satisfying one’s hunger; prevention of crime and destruction of property is also included, as well as saving human life. A man using the nearest house to save his family from a storm – even if the owner is not present – or a man entering another man’s field to put out a fire are not violation of property rights. More can be said about this issue, but I will leave it to another podcast. What is important here is that the mere presence of the protestors on private property to try to stop the construction of the pipeline is not necessarily a crime, under the Law of God. As long as they are not destroying property but only trying to prevent something that they perceive as danger to their homes, Biblically they are innocent of a civil crime. Thus, the use of a government standing army to scatter them is immoral. It is immoral in that public resources are used to serve private interests. The existence of a standing army for suppressing unarmed individuals is immoral. If there was a destruction of private property – not simply standing on it – the Biblical solution would have been through the courts, which would lead to restitution.

This establishes the Biblical right for the protestors to be on another person’s property, and the immorality of using a standing army against them. Once this is established, the question now is: Do the tribes have the right to try to stop the construction? And in the answer of this question we will see a direct application of the evil of the modern state of executive power, as opposed to the Biblical state of judiciary authority. Remember how I said in previous episodes, and in my lectures from the Freedom Conference earlier this year, that the Biblical civil government is only judiciary, that is, the courts, and pagan governments are executive and legislative? Well, here, in the Standing Rock controversy, the evil of the executive state is clearly seen. And in this case, the representative of that executive government, the institution that created the injustice, was the US Army Corps of Engineers. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing personal against the institution itself – after all, their work in West Houston where I live, and their maintenance of the Addicks Reservoir, has saved my part of town from many floodings. But in the Standing Rock controversy they were an agent of injustice, not because of the institution itself, but because of the very nature of the modern executive state. So let’s see how it happened.

The defense of the company, Energy Transfer Partners, against critics, is that their steel pipes are perfectly reliable, and they specifically use pipes of double thickness, which makes them perfectly safe. Therefore, there is no danger of leaking, and no danger to the water supply of the Standing Rock reservation. That claim is supported by the US Army Corps of Engineers; they have come out with a statement that “there is no danger to the public.” But when reading about the history of the project, one interesting fact comes to light: in the early stages of planning the project, in May 2014, the proposed route of the pipeline ran farther north, and crossed the Missouri 15 miles upstream from Bismarck, the state capital of North Dakota, or a good 50 or 60 miles upstream from the Standing Rock Reservation. The original route didn’t cross any tribal lands, and there was no controversy about it; apparently, either there really was no danger, or there was no group of people who perceived it as danger.

The oil company, however, rejected that first proposed line. The reasons? The first reason was that the terrain was harder and would require more investments. The second reason is crucial here: The pipe would pass dangerously close to the water sources of Bismarck. Hear this well: The same company which told the Sioux Nation that their pipes are perfectly safe to the water supply of the reservation, passing about a mile upstream from the nearest town on the reservation, Cannonball, rejected, two years earlier, the more expensive route because the pipeline would be a danger for the water supply of the state capital, passing a whole 15 miles upstream from it. Only this double standard would be enough for the inhabitants of Standing Rock to distrust Energy Transfer Partners. And they did. And protested.

Here came then the executive state in the face of the US Army Corps of Engineers. They were asked to assess the possible environmental dangers and resolve the issue. Now, stop here before we continue. This is important.

The question here is this: When an executive agency is involved, who does it serve, and in whose interest will it make its decision? It is clear that no man is neutral, and therefore no human agency is neutral. It will always serve its masters, the ones who write the check. The US Army Corps of Engineers is an agency of the Federal government, it gets its checks from the Federal government, and it will make its decisions in favor of the Federal Government. From the perspective of all Federal agencies, individuals or companies don’t exist as moral or judicial entities; they exist only as economic entities, that is, as dairy cows to be milked and sheep to be sheared. And when the Federal Government assesses the value of the two sides to the argument, the oil company and the tribal nation, which of the two will have more weight on the scales in terms of expected tax revenue? It should be obvious.

The US Army Corps of Engineers gave the expected verdict: “There is no danger to the public.” Asked again by other agencies, due to public pressure, it repeated the verdict: “No public interest is violated.” Notice the language in both decisions: The interests and the fears of the those directly affected were not taken as a valid concern; the concern is an amorphous, non-definable entity called “the public.” Or the “public interest.” and if you wonder where that concept came from, remember Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his concept of the “general will.” Yes, the same “general will” which may possibly will to break the individual will of some individuals or groups, why not? Welcome to the reality of the executive state: The entity that always has the upper hand in all disputes is the “public.” The public, of course, defined by the political masters. Against the concerns of the individuals who have no power. And if something happens, and the worst fears of the tribal nations happen to be proven valid, there will be no personal responsibility: there is no one in particular within the Corps of Engineers who will bear personal responsibility for the tragedy. The Corps has been proven wrong before and has a history of mistakes. No one in it has paid for their wrong assessments. And there is no mechanism for the tribe to take a person to court and make them pay for any damages that may come from a possible leak. Welcome to the beauty of the executive state.

Risk – and fear of risk – is an economic cost, and it weighs on people’s decisions just as much as all other costs – time, money, labor, etc. The difference between the rejected first route and the second route show it clearly: The company could pay more money for a lower risk and no protests. It chose to pay less money. The difference went into risk – or perception of risk – for third parties. The Sioux Nation was left to bear the difference in the social cost of the project. The population of the Northeast would get cheaper oil because the Native Americans will bear the cost in the form greater danger for them and their land. Or at least, a perception of danger: but then, psychological cost is still a real cost, and in this case, it can be measured directly in the cost difference between the first and the second route. A private company transferred that cost to the local population. The executive state supported the company, for the obvious reasons: the company will bring more money into the coffers of the executive state. When the local population protested, the executive state sent in its standing army to force them to accept the cost.

How would this dispute be resolved in a society based on the Biblical Law? Easy. First of all, in a truly Biblical society, there would be no executive state, so there would be no such entity as a “public interest.” The only government institution to which the two parties can go is the courts – and the courts in the Bible were manned by men from the community, and controlled from the bottom up. There will be no public interest, there will be the two parties – the tribe and the company – and an assessment of the costs for both parties. When the tribe protests against the construction – because while it passes through private lands, it still endangers the reservation – the courts will take the tribe’s fear and perception of risk as a true social cost of the project. The company, then, will be asked to make an offer to pay for the costs of the tribe. In a free Biblical market, there would be a limitless number of opportunities for such settlement. The company can simply pay the tribe a sum of money upfront, which would make them withdraw their complaints. Or it can create an insurance fund where regular deposits will be made from the sales, to meet any possible losses in the future from a possible leak. Or it can draw a different route; perhaps more expensive, but one that wouldn’t meet opposition. It can offer employment opportunities to the tribe. Etc., etc. No matter what the company offers, the dispute is not over until the affected parties agree to it. When the value of the offer is greater than the cost of the perceived risk, the tribal nations will say, “we’ll take it,” and a solution is found. Whatever comes out of it, the cost for the company will be greater, but it will be the true market cost, a cost that doesn’t include a violation of the Eighth Commandment, that is, no theft, that is, no immoral transfer of cost to third parties. The consumers of fuel will pay a slightly higher price; but it will be the honest price.

And no general will, and no public, and no public interest. The code words for a Biblical society are liberty and justice: No one is forced to bear cost for something from which he gets no benefit; and no one is prevented from making a deal with anyone.

The solution that is pushed today on the Native nations is the pagan solution: might makes right. The Biblical solution is justice and responsibility: acknowledge the real cost of the project, and make the owner of the project pay for it. Until we continue trusting in the executive state and its institutions, we won’t have liberty and justice for all, and finally, we will have liberty and justice for none. A return to liberty and justice is a return to the Biblical mandate of civil government that is strictly judicial, and acknowledges no independent will or existence of “the public,” or of the state.

The book I will assign for reading this week is Man, Economy, and State, by Murray Rothbard. I know, I know, just a few minutes ago I declared the inability of Classical Liberals to come up with a coherent theory of private property. But they have their moments of insight, and this book has many of these moments.

And again, my request to you is, help me continue the work of Christian Reconstruction in Bulgaria. We need your help to continue creating the intellectual foundation for the future Biblical society in Bulgaria. Visit BulgarianReformation.com. Subscribe to the newsletter. And donate. God bless you all.