Ep 279: Ludwig von Mises vs. A Christian Scholar, Round 4 (James Dunn and Alan Suggate)

In the long-awaited Round 4 of our "Ludwig von Mises vs. A Christian Scholar" series I examine one of the most important questions at the intersection of biblical theology and economics: what is the relationship between justification, righteousness, and social justice? In the first half of this episode, I review James D. G. Dunn's understanding of righteousness and justification as presented in The Justice of God: A Fresh Look at the Old Doctrine of Justification by Faith. In the second half, I critically evaluate and challenge Alan Suggate's chapter in the same volume, arguing that while he rightly recognizes that justification has profound social implications, he reaches mistaken economic conclusions that are inconsistent with both Scripture and sound economics. Beginning with the Old Testament and Paul's letter to the Romans, I argue that Dunn is right to emphasize that righteousness is both vertical and horizontal, encompassing our relationship with God and our relationships with others. Those who are justified by grace through faith are incorporated into God's covenant family and transformed by the Holy Spirit, meaning that justification necessarily has social consequences. I then argue that Suggate incorrectly concludes that these social implications justify coercive government redistribution, whereas the biblical vision of righteousness is better embodied through voluntary cooperation, peaceful exchange, and Christian charity. Drawing on the Austrian School of economics, particularly the work of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, I critique Suggate's analysis of markets, wealth, and social justice, contending that free markets foster social harmony, reward service to others, and provide the conditions for genuine charity without resorting to state coercion. Ultimately, I argue that Paul's vision of justification calls the church to embody the cruciform righteousness of Christ through lives of sacrificial love, demonstrating that biblical concern for the poor is not only compatible with economic liberty but is best realized through voluntary rather than coercive means.

Media Referenced:

Mises Round 1, Michael Gorman: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ludwig-von-mises-vs-christian-scholar-round-1-michael-gorman/

Mises Round 2, James K.A. Smith: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ludwig-von-mises-vs-christian-scholar-round-2-james-k-a-smith/

Mises Round 3, N.T. Wright: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-178-ludwig-von-mises-vs-a-christian-scholar-round-3-n-t-wright/

The Protestant Libertarian Podcast is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and a part of the Christians For Liberty Network. The Libertarian Christian Institute can be found at www.libertarianchristians.com.

Questions, comments, suggestions? Please reach out to me at theprotestantlibertarian@gmail.com.  You can also follow the podcast on Twitter: @prolibertypod, and YouTube, @ProLibertyPod, where you will get shorts and other exclusive video content. For more about the show, you can go to theprotestantlibertarianpodcast.com. If you like the show and want to support it, you can! Go to libertarianchristians.com, where you can donate to LCI and buy The Protestant Libertarian Podcast Merch! Also, please consider giving me a star rating and leaving me a review, it really helps expand the show’s profile! Thanks!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is the Protestant Libertarian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I really hope that you guys enjoy today's show. All right, guys, welcome to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. I am really excited to bring you round four in my Ludwig von Mises versus a Christian Scholar series. This is going to be a great episode. I call it a series. I've had like 250 episodes of this podcast, and this is only the fourth time I've done this, but I always say I want to do it more often. I feel like I get out one a year, uh, and that's about how this series works. But it's always exciting, always fun. Uh, and essentially the way that this series works, and I'll put links to my first three Ludwig von Mises versus episodes in the show notes, is that I take a look at the work of a Christian scholar and compare it to Ludwig von Mises. And so generally, this is when Christian scholars make claims about politics and economics, and I show how their assessment of political and economic categories are off base. Uh, by the way, just at the top of this show, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see right here over my right shoulder, uh, my brand new book, Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation, which will officially be released September 15th, 2026. So we are really excited about that, really excited to get it out to you. I don't know when this episode is going to air. I know it's gonna come out sometime in mid to late July. So hopefully by then we'll have a pre-order link and everything like that on Amazon so we can start getting the word out and start sharing it. But I'm very, very excited about this book, very happy with the way that it turned out. It's been proofed. So we got rid of and changed all of the minor errors in the book. And in it, I make the biblical case that authoritarian socialism is incompatible with the teachings of the New Testament. So not only do I define all of my political and economic terms, which many people operating in this space do not, I also go through every single work of the New Testament exploring all of these passages that are related to political and economic themes. So it's a long book because I cover the entire New Testament and I really break down methodology. Uh, you know, the part of the title of the book is New Testament interpretation. And so a lot of what I'm trying to do there is explain how to read the Bible. So this is a work of biblical scholarship, which is immersed and drenched and soaked in contemporary biblical scholarship and the concepts that are, that are popular in that discipline today. And I use that field of research to analyze the political and economic context in the New Testament. So I'm very excited about this one. Very guy, very excited for you guys to get a copy of it. And again, that is going to be September 15th, 2026. Buy a copy of the book. But today, we are going to be criticizing or analyzing the work uh that was done by two Christian scholars, James Dunn and Alan Suggate, which I think is how you pronounce his name. Now, James Dunn is one of the most famous and prolific New Testament scholars of the last generation. He unfortunately passed away, I think about five or six years ago. Alan Suggate is in English, which I hope I'm pronouncing his last name, right? I have honestly have no idea. I'm going to say Suggate or maybe Sugate. I don't know, whatever. Um, last I checked based on a very quick Google search. Alan Suggate is still alive. He's in his 90s, I think, right now, but good for him for um for making it this far. He is a theologian. So him and James Dunn wrote this book several years ago. I think this book is like 20 or maybe even 30 years old. It's old, and you can tell it's it's uh behind my left shoulder if you're watching on YouTube here. You can tell by the font on the cover of the book that it is an old book. Uh, but it's called The Justice of God. And it is an analysis of the doctrine of justification by faith and righteousness in the Bible, and then a comparison with how those concepts should be understood in the modern world today. All right, so that's essentially the premise of the book. So the way that it's broken down is that James Dunn, the New Testament scholar, spends the first three chapters outlining what justification and righteousness mean in the Bible. And then James Sugate applies this to three different case studies throughout history in the second half of the book, looking at the relationship between justice in the New Testament, righteousness, justification in the New Testament, and modern social justice today. So we're going to break down this book and we're going to compare it with the work of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, because Sugate is actually going to be in a conversation with some of Friedrich Hayek's ideas. Now, as with most New Testament scholars, well, he's not a New Testament scholar, but as with most New Testament scholars, which is James Dunn is and theologians like Sugate is, uh, they don't understand basic concepts and they consistently misread the Austrian tradition of economics if they read it at all. And generally, the only Austrian economist that I've ever seen any professional biblical scholar or theologian that's not that's not like a free market kind of guy appeal to is Friedrich Hayek. He's like the only one. They don't even know about Mises or Rothbard or God, uh, I mean, let alone Hoppe or people like that, right? So um, again, there is going to be some aspects of this book that I just want to challenge, and we're gonna talk about that today on the show. Ludwig von Mises taking on two Christian scholars, uh, James Dunn and Alan Silgay. I will say at the outset of this show, James Dunn, uh, even though I wouldn't consider myself to be a new perspective on Paul guy um anymore, um, although I think that the distinction between the new perspective on Paul, the Paul within Judaism and the apocalyptic Paul schools, I don't know, even some aspects of the traditional school of Pauline interpretation, I think that the distinctions between those schools are sometimes overblown. And so there's still a lot about James Dunn's analysis of the New Testament that I really appreciate and respect. I think he gets a lot right here, but I don't want anyone listening to this right now that has a very well-defined and well-articulated view of justification, particularly if you're a confessional Christian operating within a specific theological tradition, to think that James Dunn's views on these issues are necessarily exactly the same as mine. Uh that they aren't, although I do think he gets a lot right, especially when it comes to the Old Testament background of righteousness language in the Bible. So I want to put that caveat to uh on the table here before we begin. However, I do like and appreciate the work of James Dunn. I think that he's a lot more careful than, say, like an NT right and a lot more specific than an NT right. And when it comes to justification, my perspective is much closer to Dunn's than it is to his contemporary and his sparring partner, uh Tom Wright, who I criticized on the last Ludwig von Mises First Christian Scholar episode. You can go back and check that out. So um, yeah, James Dunn had a big impact on my life. I really uh admire him and respect him as a scholar. I think he's careful, I think he's brilliant. Um, but we're gonna see whether or not his partner, Alan Sugate, who does most of the work comparing the biblical vision of justiceness or just justice, of righteousness and justice and justification uh in the with the modern world, he's really the one that's going to look at those connections. So most of this critique will be aimed at Sugate. So again, round four, if you're watching on YouTube, I got my my beautiful black and white slideshow up here. But Ludwig von Mises verse James Dunn and Alan Suggate, and also we're going to give honorable mention to Friedrich Hayek here because he will come up a lot. And of course, the topic is justification, righteousness, and society and how all of this works. So the key question in the book, The Justice of God, is this Is there a relationship between the biblical vision of righteousness and justification and social justice in the modern world? And on the first two pages of the book, they outline this key question that they are going to address throughout the book. What is the relationship between justification and righteousness on the one hand in the Bible and then social justice in the modern world today? And of course, by phrasing the question this way, is there a relationship? We know that that's a loaded question. Of course, they are both going to say yes, because they would not have written a book about it had the answer been no. So they are going to argue that there is a relationship between justification and righteousness language and the Bible and modern social justice. Now, I'm going to say at the outset of the show that I don't necessarily disagree with the premise here. I do actually think that there is an overlap between righteousness and justification and the way that Christians operate in society today. I think that asking this question is appropriate and that there is a positive and affirmative answer to this question. Now, the problem that we have to address, of course, is whether or not they are consistent. Are they going to correctly follow through with the biblical vision of justification and righteousness and make the modern political and economic applications that are actually based on biblical principles? Uh, spoiler alert, like most modern Christian scholars, they do not. But there's still a lot of good stuff here. So let's go ahead and take a look at this. So Dunn explains uh the language of righteousness and justification. And one of the things that I really appreciate about Dunn's approach, and he's following the work of scholars like Stendhal and others who have tried to disaggregate the Hebrew conception of righteousness from the Greek and Roman conception of righteousness, even though I think in Paul's mind he's able to kind of float between those two categories. One of the problems that James Dunn identifies is that righteousness and then, of course, its corollary, justification, are both understood primarily in individualistic terms in the modern world. And this way of conceptualizing righteousness or justification has roots in antiquity going all the way back to Augustine, but then also in the works of the Protestant reformers. Now, before we even begin, uh, we have to make the case that the dick the the Greek root um is dicayo, which is to justify or to make right, or dica, which is righteousness or justice. Um, righteousness and justice, or uh, you know, righteousness and justification, they share the exact same Greek root word, right? So when we're talking about righteousness and justification, even though they are two separate English words with slightly different meanings, they share the same Greek and Hebrew roots. So we're trying to analyze what these terms mean in their context. Now we have, as I said before, and as Dumb makes the point in this book, correctly makes the point, when we think about justification or righteousness, we tend to think of it in purely individualistic terms, right? The it's it's justification is about how the individual is declared to be or made to be in the right before God. And this is a big distinction between various schools of Christian theology. Some people think that justification uh is just like a declarative righteousness, that at our justification, God as judge declares us to be in the right before him. So it's it's a legal standing. Whereas in many traditions, like the Catholic tradition, justification is something that happens to you, that we are made right, that it act that righteousness uh or justification itself actually affects a moral change on part of the individual. And as we will see, I think that both of these concepts are present in Paul, although I think that he would tend to use the language of sanctification or holiness to denote the moral transformation, that justification is not exclusively in the New Testament, but primarily a declarative act. God says that we are in the right before him based on the sacrifice of Christ. However, when we are declared to be in the right, we're given the gift of the Holy Spirit, which regenerates us through the process of sanctification. So all of these things are related, even though they are, even though the language behind them is conceptually distinct. But, anyways, it's really important to understand that the Hebrew and Jewish concept of righteousness is primarily relational, and it's bound up with one's relationships as social beings. So when we think about righteousness, righteousness generally denotes in the Hebrew Bible the meeting of obligations which arise out of a relationship. So let's say that there's a husband and wife that gets married and they are faithful to each other throughout their entire marriage, thus fulfilling the obligations that they had to one another by declaration of their marriage vows. That would be a form of righteousness. They are in the right with one another because they have met the obligations which arise out of that relationship. Now, there are plenty of places in the Old Testament where we see this language of righteousness being used in relational terms. And one excellent example that James Dunn gives is 1 Samuel 24, 7. And this is where Saul, who obviously treated David very horribly in the Old Testament, says to David, um Saul says to David, and he said to David, You are more righteous than I, for you have dwelt dealt well with me while I have dealt maliciously with you. So note here that righteousness is relational in the sense that David was very respectful in his relationship to Saul, who was technically his king at that time, while Saul was not righteous to David, because Saul continued, uh continually tried to hunt David down and have him killed. So in the relationship between David and Saul, David was declared righteous uh because David met the obligations that arose from the relationship that those two men have. So you can see that that relationship is what makes somebody in the right. Like unrighteousness would be a failure to keep the relationship or to uphold the obligations that come with that relationship, whereas righteousness denotes the exact opposite, is the fulfillment of the obligations that come through a relationship. And in the Old Testament, God's righteousness is primarily manifested in his relationship to Israel and to all creation. God made this world and he created human beings in his image and likeness, and he is faithful or righteous in his dealings with humanity. And this is especially true in his relationship to Israel, which is like a microcosm of his relationship with all of humanity. And you can look at like the very famous passages in Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 27 through 32, the climax of the covenant where God says, if Israel is faithful to God, if they are righteous, then God will bless them. And if they are not, God will curse them. But God's punishment upon Israel is a manifestation of his righteousness, precisely because he has a relationship with Israel in the form of the Mosaic covenant, a contract with Israel, and his meeting of the obligation requires that Israel respond. And if Israel does not respond, God will punish them, which will reveal his righteousness. And you see this in the prophets over and over again, that they constantly say God's righteousness is manifested in his wrath against Israel because Israel broke the covenant. They did not keep the relationship with God, and Israel is unrighteous. Uh, yeah, because they're evil, obviously, but uh their their wicked ways had to do with them being unfaithful to their God. Now, another point that Dunn uh talks about with respect to righteousness or justification, uh righteousness language in the Hebrew Bible, um, is that righteousness is both vertical and horizontal. And we saw this in the passage with David and Saul in the last slide. So not only does righteousness denote the kind of right relationship between God and human beings, it denotes the right relationship between other human beings, from human to human. And so justice and righteousness are not only understood in vertical terms, God to man, man to God, but also in horizontal term, man to man, that a person is righteous when they meet the obligations that they are supposed to have towards other human beings, which are rooted in creation and covenant. And a great example of this that Dumb brings up in the book is Ezekiel 18, 5 through 9. And this is what Ezekiel says. But if a man is righteous and practices justice and righteousness, if he does not eat at the mountain shrines or raise his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, or defile his neighbor's wives, or approach a woman during her menstrual period, and if a man does not oppress anyone, but restores to the debtor his pledge, does not commit robbery, but gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with clothing, and if he does not lend money at interest or take interest, if he keeps his hand from injustice and executes true justice between one person and another, if he walks in my statutes and keeps my ordinances so as to deal faithfully, he is righteous and will certainly live, declares the Lord God. So the beautiful thing about this passage in Ezekiel 18 is that righteousness and justice are explicitly defined in both horizontal and vertical terms, right? Horizontally meaning that a man is righteous if they don't oppress their neighbor, if they don't covet another man's wife, if they give bread to those who are in need and clothes to those who are naked, if he walks in justice, if he walks in a manner that respects the image-bearing status of other human beings, he is in the right or righteous or justified in his relationships with these other people. And we also see the vertical aspect of this where he's not going to eat at a mountain shrine or worship idols of other nations. So Ezekiel 18, 5 through 9 brings together both the vertical and the horizontal aspects of righteousness and justification language. And you can see that this is an example of justice in the Old Testament, that justice is when people relate to one another in a way that is appropriate for beings that are created in the image and likeness of God. When human beings fulfill their vocation to cooperatively rule over all of creation, then they are practicing justice between one another. And we see this exactly in Paul. So if you take a look at the right, at the way that righteousness and justification language is used in the New Testament, we only have, you know, a couple of minutes to get through this, what is such a huge concept here, but we can see that this same horizontal and vertical, yet social and relational aspect of righteousness slash justification language is on full display in Romans. So this is what uh God's righteousness in Romans is revealed both in the gospel of his son Jesus and in the dispensation of his wrath. This is exactly what we see in the Old Testament. So I'm gonna read Romans 1, 16 through 18. Remember that Romans 116 and 17 is the thesis statement for the entire letter of Paul to Rome, and very, very important because it talks about the righteousness of God. And um, this is what it says for I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith or believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, but the righteous one, the righteous one, those of us, will live by faith. Uh, quote from Habakkuk 2, 4. And then verse 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth and unrighteousness. So again, notice this use of righteousness language in this passage. So God's righteousness is revealed both through the gospel, which is the His power for salvation. The gospel is the way that God saves people, the gospel is proclaimed. People put their faith or their belief in the gospel, and then God justifies them on the basis of that faith. And then the righteous one, those who are in the right before God, those who are justified, can easily be translated that way, but the justified ones will live by faith. Meaning that those who are in the right before God live by faith. And in this particular instance, it's faith in the gospel, the announcement that Jesus, God's Son, is the Messiah over all creation. And that is God's power for saving people. So God's righteousness, his upholding of his relationship to both his covenants and the Old Testament and to his creation is revealed through the gospel. And then, as we have said, as we you you see time and time again in the prophets, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness. So God's righteousness is also known through the revelation of his wrath. And what is God's, who is God's wrath dispensed against? It is against those who are unrighteous, those who suppress the truth, those who do not walk in the way of the Lord. And there's a long, um, there's a long chain of thought following this in Romans 1 that talks about all of these injustices that the unrighteous have towards other people and towards God, both in idolatry and then in wickedness towards other people. So the kind of the same kind of concepts we saw in Ezekiel 18. So we see Paul playing with the relational and both the vertical and horizontal aspects of righteousness and justification language. And that leads us to one of the most famous passages where the language of righteousness and justification are used. That passage is really it's uh Romans 3, 21 through 26, but there's a uh a verse, I want to read verse 28 because I think this is an important part of this concept too. Now, again, there have been, there's, there's been nothing but a firestorm of interpretation around this passage from the dawn of Christian history. We've been arguing about this at least since the time of Augustine. Romans 3, 21 through 28 is one of the most contentious passages in the New Testament. And I do not intend to solve all of its exegetical and hermeneutical questions today. However, I just want a big picture, stepping back, and I think that what we're saying here about the relational aspect of righteousness justification language and its four vertical and horizontal components are apropos here. I think stepping back, we can take a look at the way that the language is working in this passage without trying to transgress any individuals' uh any individual traditions, specific interpretation of this passage. So again, don't think that I'm attacking your position just by trying to show how the horizontal and vertical aspects of righteousness and justification work. So here's what Paul says, and this is a beautiful passage for so many reasons. But he says, now apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, but it is the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe or have faith, for there is no distinction, for all Jew and Gentile have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by his grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in his blood through faith. This was to demonstrate his righteousness, God's righteousness, because in God's merciful restraint, he let the sins previously committed go unpunished. I thought this was from the NASB, but it is clearly not. I gotta stop just thinking that what I what I copy and paste from Bible Gateway is the right translation. Okay. But, anyways, verse 26 for the demonstration that is of his righteousness at the present time, so that he would be just in the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Where then is boasting? It has been excluded, but by what kind of law of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law. So we see both God's righteousness and our justification being evidenced in this passage is probably the most famous passage on justification in the entire New Testament. And the big picture is that God's righteousness is revealed specifically through Jesus Christ and the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made on our behalf publicly as propitiation and offering to uh satisfy the wrath of God. And turn away his judgment through Jesus' blood. This was a demonstration of the righteousness of God because of his mercy. He did not punish our sins so that his righteousness can be manifested at the present time through the one who has faith in Jesus. God is both just, righteous, and the justifier of the one who has faith in Christ. And a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. So again, whatever you make of the specifics of righteousness and justification language here, and there is room to debate the nuances of Paul's concepts of those terms here, we can see that the relational aspect of righteousness and justification is ever present, right? God is has done the right thing vis-a-vis human beings, right? That God has all of sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but through the grace that he offers us in Jesus Christ, God demonstrates himself to be righteous, um, to be a God who has fulfilled his uh the obligations that came from him having a relationship with humanity and with Israel through the work of Christ, so that he might declare us justified at the present time on the basis of our faith in Jesus the Messiah. So this death of the Messiah, this propitious death of the Messiah, a part of what's going on there, and we don't want to succumb to the one thing problem in theology, which I've been thinking about that a lot lately. We love to reduce everything that we think about in theology to like one thing, like the cross has one meaning. That's not the case. There are many aspects of this, and one aspect of Jesus's propitiation for our sins is the restoration of a right relationship with God and a right relationship with one another. So we are righteous by virtue of God's declaration because Jesus has died in our place for our sins. And so God can still be just because he has distributed a punishment for sin. He's exercised his wrath over sin through the propitiation of Christ's death on the cross. All right, so the relational aspect is ever present as we look at these passages. So I want to kind of put this in in context too, here, real quick, as we start to wrap this section up and transition to what Suggate says about how this is going to uh play out in the modern world. Now, I'm I'm going beyond, I know that the heading, if you're watching on YouTube, says Dunn explains righteousness and justification. Uh Dunn doesn't actually have this in his book. I'm kind of drawing out some of the theological consequences of this here, but it's compatible with the way that Dunn understands the relational nature and the vertical and horizontal nature of righteousness language. So uh it's both legal and relational. So again, I'm I'm not denying the idea of propitiation, and I'm not even denying the idea of penal substitution, which I think is firmly embedded in Romans three. I do think that even though this is a relational concept, Paul is clearly using a law court metaphor here to describe justification. So for my Lutheran and Reformed listeners, I'm with you on that part. I don't think that's the only way that Paul uses justification or righteousness language in the New Testament, but I think that's certainly in view in Romans chapter three. It's both legal and relational in the sense that uh with a view to the justification of individuals, but that necessitates and presupposes incorporation into God's family. And this is a major part of Paul's argument in Romans, and particularly Romans 4 and 9 through 11, and then also in Galatians, is Galatians 2 through 4, Ephesians 2 through 4, Acts 10 through 15, we see this happening over and over again, that justification, the declaring right of people on the basis of their faith in Israel's Messiah, means incorporation into God's family. It's no surprise that immediately after Paul delivers his remarks about justification and righteousness in Romans 3, he goes into a long explanation in Romans chapter 4 about how those who are justified through the faith of the Messiah are incorporated into Abraham's family. This is incorporative, this is relational, it means that we are brought in on the basis of our justification into the family of God. So it's restoring that familiar relationship. And in the sense of Gentiles, who, as Paul says in Ephesians, were once not a part of God's people, they are now brought in through the blood of Jesus Christ, that we are put in a right relationship with God, as well as, and this is what Paul gets at in Romans 5 through 8, spirit-driven moral transformation. So our righteousness and justification don't denote in and of themselves morality, uh like objective morality. They result through the power of the Holy Spirit in moral transformation. Those two things have to go hand in hand. And what is the direction of moral transformation all throughout the Bible? Well, it's what both Jesus and Paul say. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul. It's vertical, and then love your neighbor as yourself. That's horizontal. And so this is the goal of moral transformation. Uh, it's not about isolated individuals standing out in the moral cold and trying to be stoic and do it all by themselves. It's about being justification is about being brought in, partly about being brought into God's family, given the gift of the Holy Spirit, and then being transformed to love other people. Now, with that, those who are justified, i.e., declared righteous, will live oriented towards both God and man, following, and this is huge, the cruciform pattern of the righteous Messiah, Jesus, through the regenerative power of the Spirit, oriented towards all of creation. So our justification restores the relationship that we have between God and other human beings. So, to get back to the fundamental question that Bodun and Sugate were asking in this book, righteousness does absolutely necessarily result in social consequences, that a righteous person, somebody who has been declared to be in the right through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ and the grace of God, is incorporated into the family of Abraham, given the spirit, which bonds us all together. That's a very, very common theme in the New Testament, and morally transformed to love God and love neighbors through the regeneration of the spirit. That is necessarily social. You cannot be a righteous person without having a set of social obligations placed upon you that you then must fulfill. So righteousness does absolutely lead to the obligations that we have towards God and towards other human beings. So, so far, so good. Uh, the fundamental premise of the book is sound. Yes, righteousness, justification, these concepts, justice, these are all social-oriented. But we got to return again to the question that Dun and Segate proposed at the beginning of their book. What is then the relationship between righteousness, justification language and the New Testament and social justice? We know that that relationship exists because there is, because righteousness language is inherently social, right? It's inherently oriented towards relationships, so it's inherently social. So we know that there has to be a relationship between righteousness, justification, and social justice. The question is whether Sugate gets it right. And we are going to find out in due time, and by due time I mean 10 seconds that he is incorrect. Now, here's what he says. Now, I want I want to read one of the things that he says about the relationship between justification, righteousness, and then social justice in the book. Uh, and this is on page 46 of his book. And I, for those of you guys watching on YouTube, I have a screenshot up there. Again, if you're not following me on YouTube at Pro LibertyPod, please go and follow me. I just hit over 500 subscribers. Um, I need as much help as I can get because I'm shadow banned. And you get cool slideshows like this where I take literal pictures of books and then have black and white text to the side. Beautiful. All right, so here's what he says. All right, so this is what Suggate says for moving to his part of the book, out of what Dunn says about the biblical concept of righteousness and justification and into its application in the modern world. Suggate says this we must be concerned with the weak and the disadvantaged, those who tend to be neglected in our societies. Sounds a lot like Ezekiel 18. We must be concerned to include even our enemies. Sure. The whole of life of society comes under the scrutiny of God, yes. We must show our love of God and neighbor not only in our dealings with this neighbor or that, but in the very structures of communities, both national and international, which have such a powerful effect on the well-being of all their members? It is woefully inadequate to suppose that justification is a private affair, only granting peace in the heart of the individual and having nothing to do with society, justification is inseparable from justice. I agree with every word of what he says. This is a true statement. Now, the question that we are going to be asking, though, is does the author consistently apply these principles in his analysis of justification in the modern world? Uh, does his conception of social justice actually square with the biblical vision of justice? And we're gonna say that that's gonna be a resounding no. And in fact, when you read my book, which comes out on September 15th, in the final chapter, I break down the work of four New Testament scholars and show how many of them have made, they make statements that are exactly like the one Suggate here makes here, where I agree with every single word that they say. But because they operate with a very inconsistent set of political and economic concepts, and their understanding of political and economic terms are almost never adequately defined, they wind up making all of the wrong modern applications of their ideas. So I want to, I want to say wholeheartedly, I agree with everything that Suggate says in this quote that I just read to you. However, he's going to apply it in all of the wrong ways in the modern world. I want to take a look at some of this. Now, here are here's the first problem with his work. So what Suggate does is he takes a look at three case studies from different parts of the world. The one that's the most relevant to us is the situation in Britain. And again, like I said, I think this book was written in the 1990s or the early 2000s at the latest, right? So this is not a recent book. Uh, this is a book that's dealing very much within the context of the late 80s, early 90s, kind of political, uh, political con just the political context of that time, what people were saying about political and economic structures then. Now, we're going to be taking a lot of our critiques from his section on the British government. And what he's going to suggest out of the gate is that the whole of British government believed in social welfare system, that is centralized state welfare, until the Thatcher reforms of the 1980s. We get the exact same kind of analysis by center-left and center-right political commentators in the United States, where they would say, you know, we had all these social programs in the United States, um, but then Ronald Reagan came around and we lost sight of all these great social programs. So there's there's this narrative that up until the 1970s, the governments of the United States and England had these social welfare programs. And then it's Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan that dismantled them. And if you're a conservative, I don't know why, because conservatives don't actually believe in any of this stuff today, but if you're if you're a conservative, uh, you celebrate the fact that they dismantled these welfare programs. And if you are a liberal or a progressive, you bemoan the fact that they undermine the welfare programs. Of course, the question is, is this observation actually true? And of course, the answer to that question is no. So Hayek, along with Mises, but but especially in the Road to Serfdom, Hayek talks about this, I think, in the introduction of The Road to Serfdom. And Mises has a large section on this in Human Action and in some of his other work on his analysis of socialism from, I think, the 1920s. He they both talk about how in the period after the Progressive Era in the United States, leading up to World War II and in the in the time after World War II, both of them observed the fact that Western governments began to make social and economic and political decisions that look like their communist counterparts that they were supposedly fighting in the East. So the implementation of socialist or communist policies in Western government became so prevalent to the point where everyone just accepted that we needed to have all of these large-scale centralized social programs. This was something that the Western world just adopted and embraced and believed in. And both Hayek and Mises were concerned that there was no walking back from that ledge, that once the Western world had given itself over to the dictates of 19th century authoritarian socialism and the idea that the state should manage charity and welfare through all of these transfer entitlement programs, we weren't going to be able to ever undo that. And even though people tend to think that what happened during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations was a revolution, that is a dramatic overstatement. And David Stockman, and I talk about this in my book, David Stockman has a book called The Great Deformation. David Stockman was in the Reagan government, and he was very much, he's he's very much within the Austrian tradition of economics. He wants limited government, he wants low taxes, but he actually quit his position in the Reagan government because the Reagan government, not they, yes, it's true that they implemented tax cuts during Reagan's first term, but all just kind of just like the Doge cuts, all of those were quietly codified back into law by the end of his, by the end of Reagan's second term. And Reagan dramatically increased spending on the military-industrial complex to fight the war against the Soviets that we had more or less already won at that point. So you actually got an increase in overall aggregate government spending during the Reagan administration, and the exact same thing happens in the Thatcherite government in England. So Segate's already, he's already starting with a flawed set of premises that Thatcher and Reagan actually represent a return to limited government and decentralized welfare and charity. That's not the case. They're a crystallation and instantiation of that. At best, Reagan and Thatcher plateaued. At worst, we can see, especially with the rise of the military-industrial complex under the rapid growth of the military-industrial complex under Reagan, they actually set the stage for an even more expansive welfare program, more state spending, more debt, and more deficits than their predecessors did. So the Reagan and Thatcher revolution is dramatically overstated. And Sugge gets that wrong, right? Like Thatcher and Reagan do not represent a return to a classical liberal form of government. He's going to suggest that it was Thatcher's reading of Friedrich Hayek that pushed her in this direction. But again, as we know, they did not consistently implement Austrian policies. And if they had, we would not be living in the world that we have today. So we have to remember that Suggate is starting before we get to his analysis of Friedrich Hayek with a flawed set of premises about what actually took place in the 1980s in the United States and in Britain. Now, again, a lot of our engagement's going to be with Hayek today, but remember Hayek is a friend and I believe a student of Ludwig von Mises, and we're going to talk about how the Mesesian, Hayekian, Austrian tradition deals with a lot of the criticisms that Suggate leverages at them. So here's what he has to say, Suggate, about Friedrich Hayek. I'm going to read from the book again here. He says, for Hayek, the individual and his ones are sovereign. The individual deserves respect qua man, and as such must be given the right to free development, power over his destiny, choice, and responsibility. Liberty is defined by Hayek as the state in which a person is not subject to coercion by the arbitrary will of another or others. Modern society has no concrete goals, nor should anyone prescribe such goals, for that would infringe human freedom and thus be a form of coercion. All that is needed are the abstract rules of social cooperation, which do not interfere with the liberty of the individual. Now, this is already where Suggate has misread both Hayek and Mises to that extent in the entire Austrian school. When he says that modern society has no concrete goals, nor should anyone prescribe such goals, that is not at all what the Austrian school argues. What the Austrian school argues, including Friedrich Hayek and the Road to Serfdom, is that goals should not be imposed upon all of society by the centralized state from on high. The Austrian school believes that human beings all have goals. In fact, human goals are the objective of praxeology, human action. Humans would not act if it was not to satisfy a particular need. So all human action is, in essence, goal-oriented. The critique of the Austrian school of centralized planning is that it's essentially one set of individuals that impose their subjective assumptions about humanity and about social relationships and about the direction of history upon all of society by force. So Suggate is wrong about Hayek out the gate, which makes me question whether or not he actually understands Hayek's arguments here. Right. And he says, he goes on to say in kind of a mocking way, all that is needed are the abstract rules of social cooperation, which do not interfere with the liberty of the individual. And again, that's not the case. Friedrich Hayek and Louis von Mises both, and this is kind of Rothbard's great insight in a lot of his works, is that in the kind of in the kind of economic system that Hayek and Mises and Rothbard and the Austrians envision, there are plenty of rules. There are tons of rules. In fact, more rules than we have today. It's just that those rules are decentralized and people can voluntarily and enter, voluntarily enter and exit contracts when they find that the rules are either irrational or don't suit their personal needs. So the Austrian school is not rejecting goals. It's not rejecting rules. It's not rejecting any of these things. It's simply saying that the state should not be given carte blanche power to implement their vision of society by force upon all people. All right. So again, Suggets off the off the um, he's already off the reservation from the start. Here's what he goes on to say, though. Hayek asks what mechanism will respect the character of the open society and of the free individuals living within it, giving them the best chance of satisfying their wants. The answer is the market. The market copes with our inescapable ignorance of people's wants, it's true, whereas a central economic planner could not. The price system signals to individuals in the marketplace what range of wants others have and the extent to which they desire them to be satisfied. It allows producers to compare various scarcities and demands and work and demands and work out the most efficient and least costly way to produce goods. Efficiency depends on an open and competitive market so that experimentation and innovation will flourish. Moreover, the mechanism of the market is entirely individualistic. It is no single aim or purpose, nor is it the creation of any conscious design or planning. It is spontaneous like society itself. It is structured and orderly, not by design, but through the emergence of general rules like property and contract. Within it, individuals once are sovereign. Individuals can frame and pursue their own ends and purposes. The value of things in the market is therefore entirely subjective. So that's actually not a bad reading of the Austrian school. Of course, you get the sense that Suggate is critical of that idea, but again, these are just kind of economic and moral laws that we have to grapple with. And so if we deny what Suggate has explained, Hayek believes in this passage, the only alternative is central authoritarian statism and the idea that a handful of politicians and bureaucrats get to impose their wills, their whims upon society using the threat of violence, which I don't think that's a good Christian alternative to this. Suggate, last uh his last quote or last thought on Hayek here. So the accent goes on the freedom of the market and the freedom of the individual. It is important to notice that the market is not subject to any inquiry about its justice. Hayek was scornful about the pursuit of social justice, calling it a mirage. For him, the justice of the market is located only in the rules for the operation. Right. So yes, it's it's it's a something of an okay, at least the second part is something of an okay analysis of Hayek. But again, Hayek is not concerned. Well, what I think the implication that Suggate is making here is that Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian school behind him are not concerned about justice. That's not the case. The argument is that justice cannot properly be achieved when a small number of people are given the ability to rule over other people without their consent. And that the market does respond to the demands of the consumers, as we're going to see in uh a minute. The price system is the most effective way of determining production and which goods are actually satisfying consumer demands. And efficient efficiency in competition leads to innovation and greater human flourishing. And there's just no way to explain the proliferation of consumer goods that we have available to us today, along with the medical innovations, the technological innovations. There's no way to analyze the last 250 years of Western history and not think that it's markets that did not give these to us. Like the reason why we have the high material standard of living that we have today is because of the market and in spite of the nation state, which seeks to, which seeks to, like a parasite, take those resources and those choices away from the hands of individual people. So we've got to frame it like that. So the way that Suggate is framing this is inherently incorrect. However, his description um is prescient, I think, here. But again, he's making it sound as if Hayek doesn't care about justice in general. Hayek does, he just has a different conception of justice than Suggate. And to put a marker down, I do too. Now, here's what Suggett says about society and freedom and all of these things. He says it is perfectly true that the concept of community is widely used in a nostalgic way, which has little relation to the pluralistic character of the modern world. Yet the public arena must rest on more than contractual relationships. Yeah, we all agree that. It must rest on deeper bonds, bonds which include the notion of altruism. So again, this is he's framing this as a criticism of Friedrich Hayek, but this is not incompatible with Hayek's conception of market autonomy. Freedom from coercion, says Sugget, can never be enough. Freedom must carry with it the concept of freedom for responsible action. And that must include meeting the basic needs of the poor, both physical and social. So again, he's rejecting Hayek's concept of freedom here and sneaking in the idea that authoritarian violence is acceptable for meeting Sugget's subjective social preferences by saying, okay, well, we have to have responsible action and we have to be free. To have responsible action. And by doing so, we will meet the basic needs of the poor, both physical and social. And contractual relationships are not enough. The lack of coercion is not enough. Freedom from coercion can never be enough. That is a very, very powerful statement, considering what Dunn has articulated about the nature of righteousness and justification in his section on the way that that language is used in the Bible. Freedom from coercion can never be enough. So essentially what Suggate is saying here or suggesting here is that we actually need coercion because we don't have coercion. We can't have a just society. So it's perfectly okay to give a small number of handful and bureaucrats the freedom to use and exercise violence against people that don't agree with them to meet his perceived social ends as long as he can tangentially relate it to meeting the basic needs of the poor, both physical and social. So we can see that Suggate has already opened the door wide for authoritarianism without any sort of stopgap measure for its end. At what point does coercion meet its logical goal? What restraints we put on government coercion? Uh Suggate never, never, he never delimited, he never delineates that. He never gives us any indication that there is a natural or a rational or a non-arbitrary stopping point from the amount of coercion that needs to be given over to the centralized state in order to execute his particular subjective, I might add, conception of social justice. So we're going to take this quote that we just read here, and this is going to frame a couple of questions that we are going to be working through in the last 15 minutes or so of this podcast. So I want to make a couple of extra points about this passage too, some of which are already made, but I think it's important for us to really break this down and be as charitable as possible with what Suggate is saying here. So I do think that he is correct that society is often a romantic abstraction, right? And this is something that we see in the work of Ludwig von Mises and the other Austrians, that there really is no such thing as an imposed society. And I'm glad that Suggate is able to at least tack on to that idea. The Austrian school sees society as a result of human action and a consequence of choice. Society, it does exist, but society is a collection of individuals. Society is not something that exists metaphysically that's then imposed on individuals. Human beings freely act and form society as a result. Society is a consequence of human action, not the driver behind human action, right? The society is a consequence of human choice. And in society, people can freely choose to engage in relationships with others or abstain from engaging in relationships with others. So Suggate is at least right on that one minor point that we don't want to reduce society to an abstraction and use that abstract and arbitrary conception of society as a mechanism for analyzing human relationships. We have to start, as the Austrian school does, from the bottom up, looking at human choices and the incentives that impact human choices and how human choices lead to the formation of society. Another point that Suggate makes here that I think we need to make sure we understand is that freedom is not the goal of Austrian economics. And it's not the goal of the libertarian tradition. Freedom is a consequence of libertarianism and of Austrian economics, but it's not the starting point. Right? So the way that Suggate makes it seem is that for Friedrich Hayek, the number one value or virtue is freedom. And that's not the case. The number one value or virtue is a non-conversive, non-arbitrary, um, non-arbitrary social arrangement in which individuals are free to make choices about production and consumption and relationship that result in an ordered society that meets the needs of the majority of people in society. So freedom is not the goal. Freedom is a consequence of these ideas, it's a starting point. So people have to be free in order to pursue their self-interest. And the way that Suggate and other leftists make this always appear as if freedom is somehow inconsistent with altruism, but it's not at all. People should be free to be altruistic. And if we believe, as the New Testament consistently proclaims, that it's the church and not the world who are given the responsibility of providing for those that are in need, then we actually have to begin with freedom. And the Austrians are right. Freedom is a starting point. Um, freedom is not the goal, right? It's something that we have to have is intrinsic to what we do, but freedom is not kind of the ultimate goal. It's just one part of this process, and it's not inconsistent with the idea of altruism. As we said before, Suggate leaves the door wide open in his analysis for violent intrusion and coercion, which is contrary to God's cruciform righteousness. Again, going back to even just Romans 3, right? That one passage in Romans 3, what is the mechanism for our justification? How can God be both just, righteous, and then the justifier of those who have sinned? What's through their propitious death of Jesus on a cross? And all throughout the New Crest Testament, not only is the cross the source of our righteousness, right? The source of our justification, without the sacrificial atoning death of Christ, there could be no justification for believers because God would be unjust by not punishing sin. So not only is it the basis of our justification, but it's also the shape of our salvation, that we are called, and this is where Philippians 2 and other related passages come in, to live like Christ. If you want to know what it means to righteously love other people, to live in a righteous relationship with others, the only way that we can embody that is through cruciformity. And so if Suggate says that a small number of secular politicians need to be given the absolute power of violence, a monopoly on violence, to implement his subjective ends, his subjective will on all of society, that is completely contradictory to the cruciform righteousness that God demands of those whom he has justified. There's no way to say, on the one hand, that God has justified the family of Abraham so that they can be a blessing to the nations and so that they can live out this righteousness socially, relationally, in both a horizontal and vertical manner, with the idea that we should therefore give a bunch of pedophiles, which they mostly are, right? That we should give a bunch of pedophiles the a monopoly power over all of the citizens living in a particular society that implements subjective wills. That's not going to solve the problem, and that doesn't correspond to the biblical vision of righteousness or justification. Also, final point here, too, which leftists always get wrong. Capitalism is not at all inconsistent with a concern for the poor. And capitalism also alleviates the very poverty that people like Suggate are concerned about. Going back to the last 250 years, I was at Acton Institute last week as I'm recording this. I was in a number of sessions with economists that broke this down. With the rise of the industrial market economy in the late 18th century and early 19th century, global poverty all around the world, including in the third world, has dramatically declined to levels that are lower than we've ever seen before in human history. Do we still have a ton of work to do? Absolutely. But capitalism does alleviate poverty. And one of the beautiful things about capitalism is that it allows people, it gives people, it gives Christians, people who have been justified in Christ, the ability to wisely steward their resources and help those that are truly in need, which is what Paul is doing in 1 Timothy 5. Paul recognizes in 1 Timothy 5, where he's talking about the distribution of charity to widows, that we should only give money to people who are widows indeed. By that he means the principle that we should take away from 1 Timothy 5 is that there are some people that don't deserve charity. And in fact, they need to be told, like Paul tells the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 2 Thessalonians 3, that instead of living off of the hard work and productivity of other people, they just need to get a job. And the beautiful thing about decentralized uh systems of charity is that they can be administered by God's churches to meet the needs of people without subsidizing degeneracy and increasing laziness. Uh it humanizes people when they can receive the charity that they need to get back up on their feet and then start contributing. So capitalism is not inconsistent with this. Capitalism is just free markets. That's all we mean by that. Capitalism is just an economic system in which the factors of production are privately owned and economic dis uh and economic decision-making is decentralized. That is it. Suggate does not know that. He does not understand that. He's not, he does not fully understand um Hayek or the Austrian tradition, which is why he makes so many mistakes here. Now, he's gonna make three economic claims, uh, Suggate is three direct economic claims that we're gonna break down and critique. And this is gonna get us to the end of the episode here. And you can even see I only have a couple slides left, um, and we're all done here. But here's what Suggate says. So he makes three mistaken economic claims. His first claim is that market neutrality is not subject to moral critique, and therefore, market neutrality is incompatible with a biblical understanding of corporate righteousness. So this is what is really insane to me, and it shows that he has not read Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich Hayek in any meaningful way. He's saying essentially that if you believe in free markets, markets therefore can't be subjected to moral critique. Now, the idea of free markets is, I think, supramoral in the sense that free markets are just human beings naturally producing and exchanging with one another free of coercion, which I think is like morally viable. But this doesn't mean that we believe that all industries are ethnically neutral. It doesn't mean that we don't believe that there are businessmen who make unethical decisions. Uh, the Austrian critique is that generally, when businessmen find themselves in bed with politicians and government officials, they wind up becoming even more ridiculously corrupt and they wind up amassing and accumulating more and more wealth at the expense of the rest of the population. And so market neutrality uh includes, like free market capitalism includes a critique of immoral economic arrangements. So he's he's wrong about that, and we'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute. But you can already see how he's he's off the mark on that. Market neutrality is not subject to moral critique. Of course it is. And a biblical understanding of corporate righteousness, I think, will lead to a critique of the exact economic system that Suggate is supposing the West needs to embrace. His second mistaken economic claim is that the market is characterized by power imbalances, therefore, private charity is not enough and redistribution is necessary. So, because there are some people that have been given the gift of production that have great business ideas and make a lot of money, we can't rely on private charity to meet the gaps. And so we have to redistribute. So essentially what he's arguing for is that working people will have to have politicians and bureaucrats take money from them at the point of a gun and give it to people that Suggate believe deserve the, that deserves those money or that money and those resources, right? So the market's characterized by power imbalances, private charity is not enough. We need redistribution. That's his his claim. And again, behind all of these claims, this is not, this is not good-natured altruism. All right, the Austrian knows this. Behind all of this claim that we need redistribution is the claim that men with guns need to take money from working people and give it to people that do not work. That is what he is advocating for here. That is what this means. Okay. Third, markets create the commercialization of relationships, and that because of free markets, people approach all social interactions as purely commercial relationships. This is a wild claim because I believe in free markets. And when I'm hanging out with my friends, I don't think that I'm doing so because it's a commercial relationship. When I go to church or when I'm helping those that are in need in my community, I don't do it on the basis of a commercial relationship. But he's saying that because of free markets, we commercialize and commodify, as a good Marxist term, all of our relationships and we make people products. Okay. So these are just wild, wild economic claims from the standpoint of the Msesian School of Austrian economics and also incompatible with pretty much everything that Hayek says in his written works. So we're going to break them down here, uh, real quick here. So we're going to give an Austrian critique of each of these three points. So my counterpoint to his his first, his first point here is that markets actually facilitate peaceful exchange. Again, his first point was that market neutrality is not subject to moral critique, and therefore market neutrality or free markets are incompatible with corporate righteousness. Uh, that's just not true. Markets, free markets, facilitate peaceful exchange. Um, and this is one insight that Mises has in his written works at several different places. In a market, you have the only pure example of a democratic system available anywhere in through anywhere throughout human history. And the reason for that is that every single consumer votes with their dollar. So in a nominal democracy like we have in the United States today, if you vote for a Republican and your Republican candidate doesn't win, you're straddled with a Democrat and vice versa. So even though we have a democracy, non-nominal democracy in the United States, there's no way of leaving. And if you are like me and you don't like any of the people that are in charge, there's no way out of the system. We're stuck. We're forced to be a part of the system. But in a free market system, if society decides that a producer is acting unethically or if a producer is not uh producing a product that satisfies consumer demand, then they can just stop paying them. And short of government backstops and bailouts, that producer will go out of business. So the public, sorry, in a market economy can actually hold people accountable for their bad decisions. With centralized economic systems, the monopoly always wins. And this is a major problem with Suggate's suggestion that free markets are um are morally suspect. We already have a centralized um economic system, and we're not allowed to not participate. We have to pay for these welfare programs that are funding degeneracy. We have to pay for all of these industries that are heavily subsidized by the government, including the defense industry, which is literally an industry that is built on the murder of innocent people overseas, the medical industrial complex, which only keeps us sick and unhealthy and unable to take responsibility and ownership of our own personal health, we're forced to subsidize all of this stuff in the system that in the system that Suggate presupposes. Whereas in a free market, we could say no. Like Raytheon, Lockheed, and Boeing would not exist. At least they wouldn't produce the military hardware that they do now in a free market system. So as Suggate says that we can't rely on free markets, he's essentially saying that we need to have the death industry, we need to have the medical industrial complex, and we need to just subsidize that because that's what we're going to get every time we have the kind of economic system, the socialist economic system that Suggate presupposes. The brilliant thing about free markets is that the church, the church, those who are justified in Christ Jesus, the cruciform ones who are supposed to represent God's wisdom to the world, we're free to critique market actors. And the church could, as a block in a free market, say, we are not going to buy from this producer anymore, or we are not going to fund your wars, we're not going to fund your irrational welfare programs. We could just say no. But because we live in a socialist system like the one that Suggate wants, we don't have the ability to walk away. So which system is more moral and compatible with the idea that the family of Abraham are those who have been justified through Christ Jesus? It's obviously free market capitalism and not the socialist nonsense that Suggate or Suggate suggests. Mises is also going to make the point, and this is really, really important because again, uh Suggate makes the claim, number two, that the market is characterized by power imbalances. Mises notes simply that the free market rewards those who best meet the needs of their customers. It's true that markets have brought millions and millions of people out of poverty, despite the fact the government has always kind of parasitically taken a lot of the innovation and the resources out of the market. But we see that there is less and less poverty. And even people that live in America today, like people that live in abject poverty in the United States today, most of them still have air conditioning, most of them still have refrigerators, most of them still have flat screen TVs. So even the poor in the United States, because of the market, are living at a higher living standard than 99.999999999% of all human beings that have ever lived throughout human history. So the free market rewards those who meet the needs of their customer. And as good libertarians know, people, if they get rich based on market transactions, based purely upon providing a good or a service that people want to purchase that makes their lives better, we have no problem with them getting rich. Our politicians are all millionaires and they do nothing. They literally do not, they produce nothing. They only take. And we have no problem with politicians being millionaires. Suggate, I'm sure he has problems with, I'm sure he would have problems with right-wing politicians being millionaires, but not left-wing politicians being millionaires. We don't mind, as libertarians, that people become millionaires if they do through, if they do through via moral mechanisms. They produce something that people want to buy and they produce uh goods or services that satisfy consumer needs. We also realize that these centralized welfare states that are being advocated for by people like Sugget only enable degeneracy and poverty. So the cycle of poverty that he seems to see and want to critique is enshrined in our society by these welfare programs. We've been fighting the war on poverty since the 1960s, and we've only created in our society a permanent underclass. We've given people this mentality that if they are poor or come from a low-income background, that they are victims and that they're entitled to other people's money, which disincentivizes work. Instead, as members of God's family, we should help people reach their full human potential as image-bearing creatures of God by getting them back to work and by creating opportunities for them to work. And in the free market where we don't have fiat currency and where the value of our currency isn't being eaten away day by day by the Federal Reserve, and where people are free to go out and start businesses and hire employees and where there's actually a competitive job market, we would see these poverty numbers basically disappear. But we live in a socialist system, which is why we're always going to have the poor, and why the gap between the rich and the poor is only going to continue to get wider. This is an consequence of Suggett's socialism, not Mesesian or Hayekian Austrian capitalism. Um, his third and final point, and this is the one that I thought was really terrible, is that uh, I mean, I think they're all pretty terrible, but this is one I thought was particularly terrible. Um, Suggett says that free markets create the commercialization of relationships, and that's just not true. Murray Rothbard has an excellent essay that I would highly uh that I would highly recommend everyone listening to this read. And this is uh called Egalitarianism, a revolt against nature, where Murray Rothbard just makes the case that people are fundamentally dis unequal, right? People are not equal because they don't have the same capacities, they don't have the same desires, and they don't have the same wants. Now, theologically, I would differentiate between quantitative and qualitative equality. We believe as Christians, because every single human being is created in the image and likeness of God, that we are all qualitatively equal. We all have equal quality with one another, right? We all share the same quality, but we are quantitatively different. God has given us all different abilities, He's given us all different skills, He's given us all different gifts, different desires. And as Paul articulates beautifully in places like 1 Corinthians 12, it's the quantitative differences between people, this quality or the quantitative inequality in the church, which is the basis for a fully functioning body, right? If every single Christian was an ear, or if every single Christian was a hand, in Paul's analysis of the body, then the body of Christ, the church, couldn't function. The fact that people are different and have different preferences and different abilities is a good thing. And in a market equal and in a market economy, there is a place for everyone to find their position in this equal, the ecosystem. And so what markets do is they create social harmony between qualitatively or quantitatively rather, not qualitatively, we're all qualitatively equal, but between quantitatively unequal people. Some people are born to be entrepreneurs and some people are born to take on the risk and invest and save. And some people just want to work and live their life. Some people are really good at technology, some people are really good at working with people. In a free market economy, everyone can pursue their own interest and find employment utilizing the skills that God has given them. And not only are they able to reach their full potential as image-bearing creatures, but we all wind up becoming partners in production instead of enemies, right? That we all work together to produce and consume and to make the world a better place. The entrepreneur who creates jobs can work with the person who just wants a job, a nine to five, and then they can go home on the weekend and not have to worry about running a business. We can do that. And the beautiful thing about the social harmony that's created by markets is that we can all be partners when we trade with one another. People that are different will produce different goods and services, and we can all come together to provide those goods and services towards one another. Again, a great and simple example of this is that no matter how much propaganda the United States government tells us about China, and I'm not saying China's great, I know that they obviously are not, right? But no matter how much we're propagandized into wanting to fight a war or a Cold War against China, that's not going to stop the average American from going down to the local Chinese owned Chinese restaurant and getting food. That is social cooperation that is created by markets. And that's a great example of the fact that it is government that generally sows division, and it is markets that bring different people together. So not only has Suggate misunderstood the Austrian tradition, basic political and economic concepts, um, Mises and Hayek, he's just wrong about all of these things. So let's bring this all together, okay? Because we've been going for a little longer than an hour, but you only get one of these installments of Ludwig von Mises versus Christian Scholar every year. So we're gonna make this good. Okay, so to wrap this all up, okay, to bring the question back, does justification and righteousness necessitate social justice? Yes, it does. But it's not the social justice of authoritarian socialism, as Suggate suggests. It's the social justice of Austrian libertarianism, which is a society built on non-aggression and peace. That's the kind of social justice that we are called to, and the kind of social justice which corresponds with the mission that God gave the church. So we're justified through the righteousness of God and the righteousness of his Messiah. Our justification is based on God's righteousness and justification language. Yes, it's legal, yes, there's an individualistic aspect to it, but it is relational, and that relationship presupposes both a horizontal and a vertical dimension. The vertical dimension is that we are uh we're we're in the right before God. We can turn away from idols and worship Him alone through Jesus' sacrificial propitiatory death, on propitious death on the cross. Allah Romans chapter three. Then we get to Romans chapter four. We're incorporated into Abraham's family, called to be a blessing to the world. This is the horizontal aspect of righteousness, that we are called to be in a family with uh we are we are called into Abraham's family by virtue of faith in the Messiah and the gift of the Holy Spirit. We are given Abraham's task of being a blessing to the world, and we do that by lovingly, sacrificially serving other people. Our righteousness must include a proper response both to God and other people, and our justification is justification into the family of Abraham. We cannot play off the individual and the corporate elements of Paul's concept of justification. Again, there's a reason why Romans 4 necessarily and logically precedes Romans chapter 3. We're also called morally, and this is Romans 5 through 8, Philippians 2, and other places like that, to be conformed to Christ. We must embrace the way of the cross. So how do we enact righteousness, right? How does the Spirit work in us to affect the righteous status that God gives us at our justification? It's by being conformed to the image. This is what Paul says in Romans 8. This is being conformed to the image of his son that we embrace and embody the cross. And here's the big point embody vertical and horizontal righteousness necessitates a rejection of violence. So Suggate's suggestion that some coercion is necessary, that is off the table for Christians, or at least when it comes to political and economic concepts. The idea that we could, on the one hand, be a part of the redeemed, justified, righteous family of God called to emulate and embody the cross and all of our social relationships on the one hand, but then advocate for the violence of authoritarian socialism on the other, is a logical contradiction. Suggate's articulation of social justice is inherently unchristian and unrighteous. Like it has nothing to do with the relational righteousness that Dunn articulates in the first part of his book. The only way that we embrace a society that is free of violence and coercion, is if we embrace the Mesesian conception and the Hayekian-Austrian conception of peaceful free market capitalism, which is completely compatible with Christian ethics. And in fact, it is the modern instantiation of the principles of cruciformity, that we live in a society where violence and coercion, the initiation of violence and coercion is always unpermissible because the righteous family of Abraham is conformed to the cross of Christ. We rather sacrifice for other people voluntarily than be the ones that are making the sacrifice. We are not the ones as a church who are going to advocate that men with guns confiscate wealth from people that we don't agree with. We're going to try to convince them, we're going to proclaim the gospel, and because we believe that the gospel is the power of salvation, God's power of salvation, and God's righteousness is revealed in the gospel, we know that the church is going to win if it is actually faithful to its job. So we see at the end of this long episode that Mises wins once again against the Christian scholar. So Ludwig von Mises versus a Christian scholar, round four, ends exactly the way the last three did with the victorious Ludwig von Mises helping us to refine and rethink and reconceptualize our understanding of political and economic concepts and the way that those political and economic concepts must manifest themselves in the modern world. Suggate, and I guess even done to a certain extent, because he would have had to have signed off on this too. They're just wrong about the consequences of righteousness and justification for modern political and economic engagement. And we have taken a very long time on the show today to demonstrate that. But again, I really appreciate you guys hanging with me to the end there. I had a lot to say, and that was a that was a blast. I really do need to do this again. These Ludwig von Mises first Christian Scholar episodes take a lot of research. So it's a lot of work. It's not like an interview where I just kind of read a book, I write down some questions. I got to read a book, think about it, get the slides together and all that. So they take a lot of work, but I do need to try to do these more than once a year. Um, here's what I'll say: just like my Theology Thursday episodes, which again, I've I've had a couple people reach out to me and offer some suggestions for Theology Thursday. So I got some stuff that's brewing up my brain for the fall, which will be really good. But if you have some suggestions for biblical scholars or theologians, I'll do any Christian scholars, um and I guess they could be Christian political scientists or whatever. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of Ludwig von Mises Verse, a Christian Scholar, send them my way along with a text or some quotations that you would, or a video or whatever it is that you would like me to analyze. And I will do my best to address it on the show. I want uh as many ideas as possible for this show. So just let me know. Let me know what's good for the show. Okay, so with that, uh, I've kept you guys for almost an hour and 15 minutes. Thank you guys so much for listening to today's episode of the show. Loved having y'all along for the ride, and I am very, very excited for you to pick up a new copy of my book, which is over here, Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation, September 15th. Be ready for it. We're gonna be promoting it. We're gonna be talking about it more and more and more. Uh and I'll let you guys know as soon as we have a pre-order link. So I love you guys as always, and I will see you next Tuesday. Have a great day. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me at theprotestantlibertarian at gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter. You can follow me at the handle at Pro Liberty Pod. Again, that is at Pro Liberty Pod. And you can also visit me at the Protestant Libertarian Podcast.com. At the Protestant Libertarian Podcast.com, you can also support the Christians for Liberty Network and the Libertarian Christian Institute. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode, and we will see you next Tuesday.