Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2168

Short article by Heath as published in Christian Economics Vol. 4, No. 6 (March 19, 1957). Original title: “Had God Ordained Caesar, He Had Not Sent Christ.” Edited and retitled by Christian Economics.

 

 

Wider Area of Free Contract

 

It seems that the only people in the world who get three meals a day and live to an average age of seventy years are the Christian people of the world. If we draw a line around all the people who eat well and live long, we will find that we have drawn a line around people who believe for the most part a personal and subjective Christianity, while practicing another kind, impersonal and objective, through their technologyof the golden rule — doing unto many others in the same manner as they themselves would be done unto. There is but one place in the world where this is the only rule, and that is in the field of free enterprise apart from government. Here the only relationship in which men are organized one with another is the free relationship of voluntary contract.

     In the pagan world, as in the ancient, no such rule is widely practiced. In general, the people are under submission to political authority, for which, in the ancient world as among governments today, treaties and covenants are the only instruments of association. But because they are wholly negative, none of these can be performed. They differ from the positive rule of Jesus Christ in that they are little more than agreements to desist from mutual harm. In the Christian nations, it has been possible to enjoy a wider area of free contract and thereby more of the blessings and abundance of life.

     Among non-Christian populations, without the contractual freedom of objective Christianity, men live only about one third as long, hence must live but meagerly, and their lives, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, must be “mean, nasty and short.”

 

“Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority over them. …but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.”

Matt. 20:25

 

     The Christian gospels proclaimed the positive alternative to seizure and force. This is free enterprise. Had God ordained Caesar, He would not have sent Christ.

 

Spencer Heath