Bojidar Marinov, the founder of Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, provides us with a unique perspective on the current woes in Europe. He writes, “The socialist political establishment of Europe is in trouble. After several decades of uncontested reign of socialist ideas and policies after the end of WWII, a hand has appeared, writing on the wall. They don’t know what it is writing, but it doesn’t look good.”
Marinov continues, “In an article this last week Antti Alaja of The Social Europe Journal expresses his concerns about what he calls the arrival of the “Age of Distrust” in Europe. In his native Finland he sees he signs of the Age of Distrust in the rise of a non-Establishment, fringe political party, the True Finns. After almost three decades of “stable” political rule by the three main parties – all socialist to one degree or another, note that – the voters in Finland now distrust the political establishment, and express their distrust through the voting booth. Alaja also comments that this “Age of Distrust” is in fact not limited to Finland; he says that it is “gaining ground” in the European Union in general. Indeed, Finland is not the only nation in Europe where the establishment feels threatened. I mentioned before The Netherlands and Geert Wilders. Distrust is the prevalent mood today in Germany, France, and even in the new members from the former Communist block – especially after the compulsory measures taken to save Greece and Ireland from bankruptcy using the money of the more solvent members of the Union.”
Read more at The Age of Distrust in Europe
A Reformed missionary to his native Bulgaria for over 10 years, Bojidar preaches and teaches doctrines of the Reformation and a comprehensive Biblical worldview. Having founded Bulgarian Reformation Ministries in 2001, he and his team have translated over 30,000 pages of Christian literature about the application of the Law of God in every area of man’s life and society, and published those translations online for free. He has been active in the formation of the Libertarian movement in Bulgaria, a co-founder of the Bulgarian Society for Individual Liberty and its first chairman. If you would like Bojidar to speak to your church, homeschool group or other organization, contact him through his website.
Why is libertarianism thought to be consistent with Christianity? It isn’t.
Indeed, if the central message of Christ is return blessings for curses, give up your money and follow Christ, and help the least well off, what on earth do the “True Finns” or any of the other “distrusting” parties have to do with Christianity? To the politician of Europe, the spoiled rotten European middle classes, and NOT the Turks, are in part responsible for their immiseration.
“Render unto Caesar”. “Let this cup pass” [prevent the Romans from taking me, or, give me a sword like the one Peter will use, in about half an hour after I finish praying and he finishes sleeping] but THY will (and not my libertarian will) be done.
“Libertarianism” is paganism (look to your left and right at your next libertarian meeting and check out those hot girls they are pagan). It isn’t “Biblical” in the slightest. And as regards political thought in the West, “libertarianism” is AT BEST only an over-reaction to socialism, an overemphasis by Hayek and Nozick in hopes of getting attention, and at worst “libertarianism” is lunatic fringe.
“Justice is the end of government.” – “Publius” (James Madison), Federalist Papers #51
Madison does not write or imply the Nozickian/libertarian axiom, that LIBERTY is the end of government for elsewhere he makes it clear that the peoples of a free state with justice must give up liberty…especially Shakespeare’s “hoy-day freedom”.
Oh, perhaps Madison says that justice=liberty in the sense that one cannot exist without the other. But this would imply that for Madison, the ONLY form of “liberty” is a “liberty” that is just another label for “justice”. I do not believe that this is the case for elsewhere he uses the L-word as a synonym for the passions of the mob. And in his writings on majoritarian tyranny he does NOT mean ONLY what was meant, in Britain or France, by “King Mob” as seen in the (Protestant) Gordon Riots of the 1790s or the Paris mob of 1790, he meant also mobs of cultivated property owners of the upper classes, or for that matter mobs of the middle classes like you: any group of imperfect men (in your Christianity, “fallen” men and women) using imperfections in the political system to bully the poor, to bully the middle classes, or even in socialism to bully the upper classes.
[I am gonna deck the next goombah who uses ugly phrases such as "homeless jagoffs", and if he essays to hit back, I will say nyah ha ha cancer patient. I am sick to death of the bullying of the poor.]
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“Justice” for Madison was Plato’s justice, and Madison read Plato at Princeton. Unlike “liberty”, “justice” can never be “bad justice” for then, for Madison as for Plato, it would be unjust: one can see Socrates as Plato’s Mister Bones, as his interlocutor, saying to one of his straight men in the Republic such as Thrasymachus, “but that which is not Justice is unjust, and therefore evil is it not?”
Contrast, now, liberty (and for pity’s sake cudgel thy brains for this is important). There is no such thing as unliberty in the sense that for “justice” there is injustice. This is because there’s only one flavor of “justice”, the kind Dr King referred to in his speech, “I have a dream” but different kinds of liberty.
We employ different strategies to being about the liberty-result but only one to secure justice (it’s called the rule of law).
Therefore Madison’s *primum mobile* wasn’t “liberty” it was “justice”. To secure it we give up a (nozickian-minimal) amount of liberty. And…if “justice” means anything, when the aggregate of men don’t own any property, have never seen say five thousand dollars all at once, and live as just and God-fearing men from paycheck to paycheck…justice means economic justice which means the sacrifice, by the rich, of a quanta of economic liberty. It didn’t mean this in the 18th century in a country of effectively free land which had never (and hopefully will never) seen famine. It does now.
I don’t know what your teachers, whether in public schools, private schools, or university, have been teaching you, but, you guys seem to me like Visigoths, men so confused and dazzled by the conflicting messages of the ancient world and Constantine’s demonic Christianity that to them anything was right, and anything could be proved: all that mattered as at the Council of Nicaea was “who is to be master, that’s all”. But I say that philosophy teaches us that words, or more properly the ideas we express by words, cannot be stretched beyond all breakage. “Justice” and “liberty” mean different things in different ways.