Tag: Gary North

Newsflash: They’re godless commies!

Bingeing these days on YouTube lectures by Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin, I had a flashback when I heard his answer to Uncommon Knowledge host, Peter Robinson:

. . . it occurred to me that you have probably spent more time reading Soviet archives than any other person. And I said to you, Stephen, what’s the one central finding? And you replied immediately, “They were communists.” The leaders of the Soviet Union really believed that stuff and they really wanted to achieve the communist goal of worldwide revolution.[1]

This reminded me not only of Kotkin’s documented evaluation of the Bolsheviks in general and Stalin in particular—they were not cynics, but convinced Marxists who expressed themselves behind closed doors as they did in their propaganda—but also of the opening paragraph of Murray Rothbard’s, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist.”

The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist. A seemingly trite and banal statement set alongside Marxism’s myriad of jargon-ridden concepts in philosophy, economics, and culture, yet Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial focus, far more central than the class struggle, the dialectic, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest. Communism was the great goal, the vision, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, will put an end to history and establish a new heaven and a new earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history. And just as for post-millennial Christians, man, led by God’s prophets and saints, will establish a Kingdom of God on Earth (for pre-millennials, Jesus will have many human assistants in setting up such a kingdom), so, for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, will establish a secularized Kingdom of Heaven on earth.[2]

They weren’t cynics, but dreamers. The real-world nightmare that claimed hundred million lives and enslaved billions in the 20th century began as a 19th-century Christian apostate’s dream. As Gary North summarized Marx’s legacy:

Karl Heinrich Marx, the bourgeois son of a bourgeois father, was born in Trier, in what is now Rhineland Germany, on May 5, 1818. He was a Jew by birth, but in 1816 or 1817, his father joined the state’s official Christian church, and he saw to it that his children were baptized into his new faith in 1824. After a brief fling with a liberal, pietistic form of Christianity, young Karl became a dedicated humanist. He took his humanism to revolutionary conclusions. Karl Marx, the grandson of rabbis, would become the rabbi of Europe’s most important religious movement: revolutionary humanism.[3]

He inspired generations of murderous missionaries, counter-evangelists—dysangelists, if you will—proselytizers of the bad news of this world’s God (2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 2:2; John 12:31). Remember that the next time of “social justice warriors” nonchalantly claim to be “trained Marxists.”[4] Their corrupt plans do not stop at exploiting “white guilt” for pecuniary gain, but extend to society’s every nook and cranny.

Notes

[1] Uncommon Knowledge, 5 Questions for Stephen Kotkin, February 5, 2022. See Robinson’s other interviews of Kotkin, “Hoover Fellow Stephen Kotkin Discusses Stalin’s Rise To And Consolidation Of Power,” October 6, 2015.

[2] Murray N. Rothbard, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist,” in Rothbard and Walter Block, eds., The Review of Austrian Economics. 1990, Springer. Republished as Chapter 22 of Rothbard, The Logic of Action Two: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School, Edward Elgar, 1997. Free pdf.

[3] Gary North, Marx’s Religion of Revolution: Regeneration through Chaos, Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989, 7-8. Free pdf. On North, however, see my “Dominion Theology: Salvation or Snare for Liberty?,” April 20, 2020.

[4] Jason Morgan, “Black Lives Matters Goes Full Marxist,” Crisis Magazine, April 19, 2021

 

Dominion Theology: Salvation or Snare for Liberty?

The following review of Robert Grözinger, Why Libertarianism Needs Christianity to Succeed (Kindle eBook, April 7, 2020) was published on Amazon today.—AGF

Only in this post, not in the Amazon review or anywhere else it was published, I clarified my statement of Scripture’s status as divinely inspired (θεόπνευστος, theopneustos). The writings, not the human authors as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit, are “God-breathed.” —AGF, February 19, 2024

This provocative essay derives from a talk given to the Libertarian Alliance in London late last summer. German economist and translator Robert Grözinger (Jesus, der Kapitalist: Das christliche Herz der Marktwirtschaft, Munich, 2012) argues that libertarianism, which traditionally prides itself on its alleged independence from philosophical frameworks, cannot succeed without one that gives meaning to liberty-seeking itself. Arguments for, say, the superiority of free to hampered markets don’t compensate libertarianism for its lack of an adequate framework of meaning or worldview. Libertarians should identify theirs and persuade others on its terms if they want libertarianism to be more than an intellectual hobby. For if libertarianism’s attitude toward ultimate-meaning frameworks remains as laissez-faire as its politics, its attractiveness will remain limited. Grözinger believes Christianity best meets that need.

Robert Grözinger

Grözinger believes that most people—regular folks, not nerds who read themselves into and out of ideologies—are not libertarian for this reason: they seek meaning as much as (if not more than) economic well-being. Intellectual conviction that in a libertarian society everyone will be, on the whole, materially better off than in any alternative arrangement is not enough to seal the deal. For the masses, liberty may be a great good, especially when they’re deprived of it, but not necessarily life’s chief good around which all others revolve. If one wishes to attain and retain other great goods, the libertarian argues, one cannot neglect liberty. Liberty doesn’t defend itself, so people must learn to make it an object of thought and protection. Grözinger amplifies this insight: theoretically self-conscious defenders of liberty must, no less self-consciously, ground their defense in a worldview that embraces many values, not just one.

In his short book Grözinger packs in enough topics to fill an interdisciplinary graduate seminar in politics and religion; I’ll have to pass over how he draws upon Jordan Peterson, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Friedrich Hayek and focus on the writer who answers Grözinger’s question to his satisfaction: Reformed historian and theonomist Gary North. Of the several scholars whose work Grözinger draws upon, North is the only one who’s also a professing Christian—and one with whom many (if not most) other Christians disagree. Continue reading “Dominion Theology: Salvation or Snare for Liberty?”