Libertarian Christianity is a designation that encompasses a variety of people, ideologies, philosophies, etc., the commonality of which is that each of these claims some commitment to both libertarianism and Christianity. Libertarianism and Christianity, as societal entities, are each composed of a variety of factions, each of which claims some distinguishing features that make such faction more libertarian, or more Christian, than other factions operating under the same libertarian or Christian banner. Libertarian Christians are yet another faction within each of these two internally diverse superstructures. What makes libertarian Christianity unique is that people who claim to be libertarian Christians are people who either implicitly or explicitly claim to have found some kind of ideological bridge that makes libertarianism and Christianity compatible. Whether people who claim to be libertarian Christians have discovered an ideological bridge that is genuinely faithful to the fundamental tenets of both libertarianism and Christianity is inevitably a question whose answer determines whether the libertarian Christian's bridge is ideologically sound or is based on pure presumption and wishful thinking.
Because both libertarianism and Christianity, as societal entities, are composed of contentious ideological factions, ascertaining the fundamental tenets of libertarianism and Christianity, and thereby showing the fundamental tenets that the two hold in common, and thereby discovering reliable fundamental tenets of any ideologically reliable bridge between libertarianism and Christianity, may appear on its face to be a nearly impossible task. People who are rigorous in their commitment to libertarian Christianity overcome such difficulties by insisting on rational approaches to defining libertarianism, rational approaches to defining Christianity, and rational approaches to defining the intersection of these two superstructures, then taking a methodical approach to pursuing construction of the bridge. This has led some libertarian Christian scholars to contend two things: a) that Reformed Protestant Christianity is the most rational approach to Bible-based Christianity; and b) that Murray Rothbard's libertarianism is the most rationally rigorous approach to libertarianism.Especially via . These scholars are even more specific. They contend that there is a specific kind of Reformed Protestantism that is simultaneously committed to the Reformed hermeneutics originally formulated by Luther, and to "classical apologetics".. These scholars have built the bridge of compatibility between Christianity and libertarianism by starting with a seemingly small modification to the Reformed hermeneutic,, Part I. and then by using that modestly modified hermeneutic to interpret the Bible in a way that yields jurisprudential principles that happen to be libertarian.
With this context established, it is evident that rigorously defined libertarian Christianity is a variant of Reformed Protestant political theology. Although some might claim this to be right-libertarianism, this rigorous approach to libertarian Christianity does not promote that characterization. This is because rigorous libertarian Christianity claims to defy this right-left paradigm by exposing left-libertarianism as not being libertarian at all. Rigorous libertarian Christians claim left-libertarianism is not libertarian because it lacks adequate commitment to the property rights of natural persons, such property rights being at the core of this rigorous approach to defining libertarianism. This rigorous form of libertarian Christianity is committed to the belief that all secular governments exist to protect the natural rights of individuals, and only to protect natural rights. It is also committed to the belief that natural rights are necessarily defined in terms of private property, at least in secular legal and political arenas.
This rigorous form of libertarian Christianity claims that there must be a rigorous distinction between what human laws apply to all people and what human laws do not. People with these commitments believe that human laws that do not apply to all people, but do lawfully apply to some people, are inherently contractual, where lawful contracts can only be lawfully entered voluntarily and consensually. They hold that the only human laws that apply to all people are those that, a) from a libertarian perspective, arise rationally out of the non-aggression principle, and b) from a biblical perspective, are rationally implicit in the bloodshed mandate in Genesis 9:6. By adhering to the validity of these principles, rigorous libertarian Christians believe that all people are called to voluntarily participate in organizations that prosecute those who damage other people through violation of the non-aggression principle. They also believe that such damage can arise exclusively either by violating contracts, or outside of any contract. They also believe that because the religion clauses (Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause) of the U.S. Constitution are theologically valid, there is a necessary distinction between what they call "secular social compacts" and "religious social compacts".
People who adhere to rigorously defined libertarian Christianity claim that their libertarianism is a formally voluntaryist legal and political philosophy that derives primarily from the text of the Bible. This does not mean that they are unwilling to interact with extra-biblical truth claims. It merely means that in their view, all truth is ultimately God's truth, and that all extra-biblical truth is ultimately consistent with biblical truth.
Despite their claim to be methodologically distinct from secular libertarians, non-rigorous libertarian Christians, and Christian libertarians, rigorous libertarian Christians readily acknowledge large areas of basic agreement with other types of libertarians in regard to legal and political concerns, and they readily work in concert with people from these other schools. More specifically, they make common cause with libertarians and market anarchists who generally espouse private property and natural rights. These include Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists, Nozickian minarchists, Hoppean paleolibertarians, and more mainstream libertarian Christians and Christian libertarians. Because rigorously defined libertarian Christianity is so different from these other factions with which it readily makes common cause, and because the ideologies supporting these other groups are generally defined elsewhere, the remainder of this article refers to rigorously defined libertarian Christianity merely as "libertarian Christianity".
Hermeneutics The core of the biblical hermeneutic used by libertarian Christians is essentially the same as the biblical hermeneutic established by Luther, and followed by Reformed Protestants up to the present.A description of this hermeneutic, for a lay audience, is available in . The first rule of this hermeneutic is that the Bible interprets itself. They base this belief on their beliefs that God is rational and does not contradict himself, that the Bible is God's word, and that the Bible is therefore internally consistent and non-contradictory. This first rule of this hermeneutic is generally known as the "analogy of faith", but this use of that expression should not be confused with the definitions of analogy of faith used by other Christian sects.
The second rule of this hermeneutic is what Luther called the sensus literalis. This simply means that the Bible should be interpreted in its literal sense. In the past, critics have sometimes used this rule as evidence that the Bible is not the rational book that that rule claims it is. They have done this, for example, by insisting on taking metaphors literally to censure the Bible as absurd. In John 10:9, Jesus says, "I am the door" (King James Version). The critics claim that is absurd because Jesus cannot be human and a door at the same time. Defenders of the Reformed hermeneutic respond by saying that such critics are the ones who are absurd, because they have failed to do genre analysis of the text before leaping to their conclusion. Genre analysis leads to the conclusion that Jesus’ statement in John 10:9 is metaphorical, and that the sensus literalis demands that it be understood to be metaphorical before one makes any judgments about what it means. So genre analysis is an extremely important precursor to understanding what the text actually means.
The third and last of the primary principles of interpretation of the Reformed hermeneutic is what is called the "grammatico-historical method". This "method focuses attention . . . upon grammatical constructions and historical contexts out of which the Scriptures were written.", p. 56.
Libertarian Christians do not quibble with any of these three primary rules of interpretation. The point at which they insist on tweaking the Reformed hermeneutic is in one of the ten heuristics (rules of thumb) that R.C. Sproul posits in his book, Knowing Scripture. The rule of thumb that they insist on tweaking is the heuristic that "Historical Narratives Are to Be Interpreted by the Didactic"., p. 68. The Apostle Paul's letters are generally understood to be in the didactic (teaching) genre of literature. This rule of thumb indicates that interpretation of the historical narratives in the four gospels and in the historical narratives in the Torah (the Pentateuch) should be controlled by what is clearly taught in Paul's epistles. Libertarian Christians believe that this rule of thumb is generally true, but that it is not true about one particular genre of literature that appears embedded in historical narratives in the gospels and the Torah. The exceptional genre is the jurisprudential genre of literature that exists at a covenantal level of abstraction, as distinguished from merely being at a less encompassing level of abstraction.
Libertarian Christians believe that by tweaking the Reformed hermeneutic in this manner, two historically debilitating problems in Reformed theology can be overcome. One of the problems pertains to how to interpret Romans 13:1-7. The other problem pertains to how to define the "covenant of works", the "covenant of grace", and the relationship between these two.These two covenants are posited as existing by the Westminster Confession of Faith, , Chapter 7, "Of God’s Covenant with Man". The problem in defining these covenants revolves primarily around conflation of the covenant of grace as it appears in Genesis 3 with the way that this covenant appears in the New Testament. By recognizing that the covenant of grace is shaped by major covenants that appear in the Bible, what calls the Edenic covenant, the Adamic covenant, the Noachian covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, and the Messianic covenant, this conflation is eliminated, and the propensity to conflate common grace and special grace is eliminated.
Jurisprudential implications