A Black Theologian Identifies Me as a Member of an "Ideological Tribe"
Reality Check
These days, I don't write an entire article defending myself against an attack on my position, unless the person making the attack is important, or else the person making the attack represents a position that I regard as important. I used to. I sometimes would write a book in response. Not any more. I have grown mellow.
But when a black theologian goes into print saying that I am part of something he calls "ideological tribalism," I just can't resist. His name is Anthony Bradley.
I am 72 years old. Much of my mental imagery is the product of the years I spent in movie theaters in my youth. The movies did not shape my ideology, but they surely shaped my imagery. So, when I learned that I am part of an ideological tribe, the image that instantly popped into my head was from King Kong. Carl Denham has taken his camera crew to Skull Island, and they are secretly photographing the tribe's dancers, who are dancing in a circle, in preparation to offer a human sacrifice to Kong. "Uga, uga, uga -- Kong!"
[Note: I did not see it in 1933. I'm old, but I'm not that old. I saw it in a re-release in 1954.]
I can visualize myself in a straw kilt. "Uga, uga, uga -- Mises!" My vote for the appropriate sacrifice would be Paul Krugman. But I digress.
The theologian got his Ph.D. from Westminster Seminary. I also attended Westminster Seminary. He speaks the same dialect that I speak: Reformed Protestant, with a Dutch accent. We both learned this arcane language at seminary. He says things like "sphere sovereignty." Not many people speak this dialect, let alone with the accent.
His article was published in World Magazine, a magazine in the Reformed tradition.
[Note: the magazine exists because of me. It was started with the profits generated by the Christian school newspaper, God's World News, formerly called It's God's World. That venture was the result of an article by David Chilton in the newsletter my Institute for Christian Economics published in the 1980's, The Biblical Educator. Chilton in 1981 recommended starting a Christian version of the newspaper for public school elementary school kids, My Weekly Reader. The people who started World did what Chilton recommended. The 1982 issue summarizing the background of all this is here. I am not sure what World had in mind when publishing this article, but this much is clear: had I not been doing my homework in Christian economics, and raising the funds to publish The Biblical Educator, World would not exist.]
His article is prefaced by a glowing promotion by Marvin Olasky.
[Note: Dr. Olasky is the editor-in-chief of World in part because of me. He also hired Dr. Bradley to serve as a professor at King's College, where Dr. Olasky was once the provost. Dr. Olasky had a position in academia, also in part because of me. In 1980, he came to Tyler, Texas, to ask my advice. Should he take a position at the University of Texas, Austin, to teach journalism, or should he accept a job by a huge grant-issuing organization, which today is known as a neocon outfit, to hand out grants? I recommended the teaching position, where he could influence students. He took my advice.]
With this as background, consider the article, which is the magazine's lead story: "Anthony Bradley vs. evangelical tribalism."
YOUR TRIBE AND MINE
He begins with an encounter he had with a student at Duke Divinity School. The student was a Progressive in every sense: politically and theologically liberal to the core. He dismissed Dr. Bradley as follows: "His body of work is a textbook in blaming the victim and reducing problems to pathology." So far, Dr. Bradley sounds like my kind of guy.
It turns out that Dr. Bradley has been on the staff of the Acton Institute for 12 years. This organization is liberal in the sense that Lord Acton was liberal: a defender of liberty. It is committed to defending the free market, but from a natural law perspective. Traditional Catholic philosophy, following Aquinas, defends the natural law tradition.
I do not accept this tradition. I was taught philosophy by Cornelius Van Til at Westminster Seminary over half a century ago. He opposed the use of natural law in defending Christianity or anything else. He taught that natural law theory is a compromise with Greek humanism. In the history of Christian philosophy (apologetics -- the defense of the faith), he really was a radical. He broke with 1800 years of common-ground philosophical defenses of Christianity. He persuaded me. Actually, his book, The Defense of the Faith, persuaded me, so I went to Westminster to study under him.
Westminster's faculty has been divided ever since Van Til's death in 1987. In fact, it was divided at least two decades earlier. There are still a few followers of Van Til on the faculty, and there are some natural law defenders. I wrote a book on this in 1991: Westminster's Confession: The Abandonment of the Van Til Tradition. It was a response to the Seminary's book-long attack on me and my associates. You can download it here. I published two other volumes in response in 1991, just to make sure people got the point. The seminary's book is long out of print. The faculty never responded. This is the usual academic response to my responses.
Dr. Bradley has written a lot of articles for Acton. He is a kind of natural law version of Walter Williams. This is not a bad thing to be.
The problem is this: he dismisses my writings because I keep quoting the Bible, and because I never cite natural law theory to defend free market economics. He seems to think this is evidence of my ignorance regarding Western social theory. I have been studying Western social theory since 1960. I understand it. I just don't accept its humanistic underpinnings.
He writes:
For most evangelicals, principles in the Christian social thought tradition--like natural law, solidarity, subsidiarity, sphere sovereignty, personalism, and so on--do not provide the raw material for helpful discourse, because the only thing that matters is whether or not one's tribal understanding is supported, defended, and promoted. Evangelicals are left with an ethical framework derived from individualist biblicism. Most do not even use a confession of faith as a starting point. This is classic Christian postmodern tribalism, because the goal is to prove that God is on your tribe's side and not theirs.
Does he include me in that classification? Yes.
Put differently: "Uga, uga, uga -- Calvin!" (I don't mean the soft-core Calvin of The Institutes, with its natural law bias. I mean the hard-core Calvin of Sermons on Deuteronomy -- all 200 of them.)
He explained:
Again, both conservative and progressive evangelicals can live tribally. For example, from the conservative world, someone like Gary North will proof text free-market economics as the Bible's economic system, and progressives like Jim Wallis will proof text the Bible to support the Democratic Party's ideological platform invoking his concern for "the least of these."
Dr. Bradley offers another example of this universal rule: "All nouns can be verbed." He has a verb: "to proof-text." What is this? It means providing biblical texts to support the position you take regarding what the Bible says.
Later in his essay, he invokes the Westminster Confession of Faith. Ironically, this is the classic proof-text document in the history of Christianity. The English Parliament, located at Westminster, called the assembly of theologians into being in 1643 to sort out theology, so that Parliament could enforce it. This was during the English Civil War (1642-49). The assembly turned in the confession and two catechisms in 1646. Parliament promptly told them to provide proof-texts. That took another two years. The 1648 version, to which Presbyterian elders must swear allegiance, has lots and lots of proof texts.
Dr. Bradley links to a page on my website: //www.garynorth.com/public/1033.cfm. Here, we read:
I began my series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible, at almost the exact time that An Introduction to Christian Economics appeared in print: the spring of 1973. I finished the exegetical work in late 2010. It is being typeset. This 31-volume project should be in print in late 2012. There are about 700 chapters.
The set was finished on time. The entire set is available free for downloading here: //www.garynorth.com/public/department57.cfm.
So, he accuses me of proof-texting. I stand convicted. There are 8,550 pages of proof-texting in this series, covering over 700 passages. No one had ever attempted this task before: a text-by-text exposition of the entire Bible in terms of economic theory. To anyone who wants to refute me by writing his own 31 volumes, I say: "Lots of providence!"
Here is what he says I did.
Step 2: Read your preferred political ideology into the Bible in such a way that it becomes a tool for interpreting and applying the Bible to social issues. That is, your political ideology becomes your hermeneutic for "biblical" views on justice.Step 3: Cherry-pick Bible verses (often taken out of context) and repackage them to make the case that your preferred, tribal, political ideology is indeed "biblical," "follows the teaching of Jesus," is "Christian," and so on. Here the goal is to prove that God must obviously be on your tribe's side.
Step 4: Now that you have baptized your political ideology by pouring on a random assortment of Bible verses, you are ready to declare your ideological tribe and those who agree with you "right." As a result, any other tribe that does not read the Bible through your ideological lens is not only wrong, they also are the enemy and a threat to the church and the world.
I spent 39 years doing the exegetical work: at first a passage a month, and then 10 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, beginning in September 1977. I had taken a vow to do this, with the vow ending on February 11, 2012: my 70th birthday. I finished the manuscript drafts of all 31 volumes about a month before this deadline. ("Work expands so as to fill the time allotted for its completion." -- Parkinson's law.)
Sadly, I remain an ignorant fellow, not addressing Western social theory. All those years studying social theory under Robert Nisbet -- wasted! I just never caught on. So, I have resorted to proof-texting. So implies Dr. Bradley.
CONCLUSION
A good rule that others have found reliable over the years is this: it is not a good idea to dismiss me in print as having only recently fallen off the epistemological turnip truck.
If Dr. Bradley had been more familiar with the writings of Dr. Van Til, he might have understood my position better. But you don't have read Van Til to get a Ph.D. from Westminster Seminary these days.
There is nothing uniquely Christian about natural law theory, according to natural law theory. So, Dr. Bradley's epistemological position leads to this conclusion: in the name of Christ, there is nothing uniquely Christian or biblical to say about any aspect of social theory.
I rejected this idea in 1962, having begun reading Van Til. Two years earlier, I had begun my life's calling: to do the exegetical work to find out what the Bible has to say about economics. Van Til provided my framework for rejecting natural law theory. But I still had to do the exegesis. So, I did.
I am still writing. I recently sent this book to the typesetter: The Covenantal Structure of Christian Economics. I plan to begin my magnum opus in early 2016: my version of Human Action -- lots of Bible verses, but no invocation of Kant.
Dr. Bradley dismisses this effort as proof-texting. But there is always proof-texting for Christians. The question is: How relevant are the texts for the issue at hand?
For Dr. Bradley, I cite North's Epistle to the Academicians 1:1: "You can't beat something with nothing." If all you have to defend Christian economics is natural law theory, you do not have Christian economics.
Also, there are many differing views of natural law, its coherence, its first principles, and its applications in history. There is nothing monolithic about natural law theory. Any similarity between Murray Rothbard's natural law-based social theory and the social theory of Thomas Molnar is not merely coincidental. It is more like winning the lottery -- a very large lottery. Twice.
Finally, I ask: Why get a Ph.D. in Calvinist theology in order to do natural law economics for a Catholic think tank? The cost of the input does not add to value of the output. The labor theory of value is wrong.