An Introduction To Christian Economics

Description

Is there such a thing as a distinctively Christian economics? Yes. Are there explicitly Christian economic teachings that no secular economist has written about? So far, probably not. The uniqueness of Christian economics is that the Christian economist has specific, concrete biblical revelation concerning the limits of economic theory and practice. A secular economist may see the relationship between monetary inflation and fraud, but he does not stand with the authority of the Bible behind him, and he is, in the mid-twentieth century, utterly unable to convince ninety-nine percent of his academic colleagues (and no minister of finance) of the validity of his critique. Thus, the monetary theories of a Mises or a Rothbard lie unused in academic circles. The proponents of the economics of the full gold-coin standard are unaware that their theory rests on certain God-given external conditions. They simply accept these limitations of nature as “given,” and they do not bother to inquire as to the source of them. Such investigations, every secular economist would tell us, are not relevant, are not scientific, cannot be demonstrated by ethically neutral, rationalistic presuppositions. Of course, if we are to judge by the state of the economics profession, nothing can be demonstrated in this fashion, because none of them agrees with all the rest on any issue. But God, a priori, is irrelevant to economic reasoning, even among the a posteriorists.