Interview with Dr. Martin Erdmann

The State Didn't Remove God. It Became God.

Dr. Martin Erdmann is a church historian and theologian who has spent decades doing something most academics won’t touch. Across more than 3,000 pages of published work on mercantilism, progressivism, liberalism, world federation, and technocracy, he traces a single argument: that Western civilisation replaced the biblical covenant with a social contract, and that this substitution was not secular but religious. The state didn’t remove God. It became God. His most recent book, The Greed for Gold and Glory, is a 487-page, heavily footnoted examination of 16th-to-18th-century mercantilism, economic nationalism, and the financial machinery that still operates today. I reviewed it here.

The Greed for Gold and Glory — Dr. Martin Erdmann

The interview covers Venice as a pagan totalitarian state, the Glorious Revolution as oligarchic consolidation, John Locke as the architect of a civil religion that conservatives unknowingly propagate, fractional reserve banking as legalised counterfeiting, and the City of London as the inheritor of Venetian merchant practice. Erdmann does not offer comfortable positions. His central thesis, that classical liberalism and progressive liberalism are two sides of the same civil-religion coin, removes the escape hatch that conservative readers typically rely on. He is not attacking the left from the right. He is arguing that the entire framework is a replacement theology, and that both teams play on the same field. I’ve done a lot of interviews. This is one of the most important.

Erdmann holds credentials in the subjects he critiques. He wrote the entry on John Locke for the Zondervan Dictionary of Christianity and Science. He trained in intercultural studies at Columbia International University. He lectures on philosophy at North Greenville University. He publishes five days a week on Substack under Musings of the Court Jester. The answers below are detailed, some run long, because he chose to show the reasoning rather than just assert the conclusions. The claims he makes require it.

With thanks to Dr. Martin Erdmann.

Musings of the Court Jester | Dr. Martin Erdmann | Substack

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1. Many years ago, you’ve written, a Christian told you that apart from faith in Jesus Christ, nothing would affect your life more than understanding how modern finance works. Who was that person, when did that conversation happen, and what did you do with the advice?

The man in question was a well-educated Christian, now deceased, whose name no one would recognize except for his family, friends, and readers of his books. His identity is irrelevant, but his legacy of imparting biblical knowledge and wisdom to impressionable young Christians like me will endure. The conversation took place when I was in my mid-twenties. Over the years, I have read nearly as many books on the history of economics as I have on theology, and as a credentialed theologian, I have read many theological books.

2. You’re a theologian by training, yet you’ve spent four years researching 16th-to-18th-century mercantilism and writing a 487-page book with footnotes on every page. What made you decide that this particular historical rabbit hole was where a theologian needed to be?

Almost all of the topics in my books deal with some aspect of Christian apologetics, the theological discipline that defends the biblical faith against non-Christian religions, ideologies, and aberrant theological views and cultish movements. The topic that interested me the most was the different manifestations of civil religion in the Western world.

While a graduate student at Columbia International University in Columbia, South Carolina, I immersed myself in intercultural studies for three years to prepare for missionary work abroad. A significant part of the Master of Divinity program was learning about other world religions. Some of my friends were theology students preparing for pastoral vocations in the United States. When I asked if they had to take courses about other religious viewpoints prevalent in America, they only shook their heads in bewilderment. Why waste time and tuition on something superfluous? As Americans, they assumed they already knew what their non-Christian compatriots believed. Since I envisioned becoming a missionary in Europe, I was motivated to learn as much as possible about the beliefs of those who considered themselves heirs to the humanism propagated by 18^th-century Enlightenment philosophers. Thus, I began a detailed study of the history of philosophy. The topic of belief in progress became an important subject, motivating me to write the six-volume German treatise Siegeszug des Fortschrittsglaubens (English translation of the abridgement: The Triumph of Progressivism), consisting of nearly 1,800 pages.

While researching this book, I discovered the subsidiary topic of Mercantilism. After writing a subsection on Mercantilism in my book on Progressivism, I made a mental note to explore the topic further at a later date. It was clear to me that Mercantilism was a highly important topic, but I postponed writing about it to pursue a more pressing subject that had caught my attention. I needed to develop a better understanding of the relationship between classical and progressive Liberalism as the primary pillars of Western civil religion. Eventually, I wrote a two-volume, nearly 800-page treatise entitled The Metamorphosis of Liberalism. While researching the intricacies of Liberalism, I had the chance to read more books on Mercantilism. Over the years, I became increasingly focused on learning as much as possible about Mercantilism, a form of economic nationalism. The end result was my book, The Greed for Gold and Glory.

3. You argue that to read history correctly you need a method, and that the right method starts with the book of Daniel — specifically the four-empires vision given to Nebuchadnezzar. For a reader who has never thought of the Bible as a tool for interpreting current events, can you walk through how that actually works in practice?

The Bible is the foundation of truth in terms of theology and in addressing various subjects, including history. This provides a conceptual framework for interpreting facts, taking into account a divine perspective. When I began lecturing on philosophy at North Greenville University, I was asked by the dean to submit an extensive paper on my ideological outlook. I entitled the essay “The Superiority of a Biblical Theology of History Over Secular Approaches to the Philosophy of History.” While it would be the pertinent answer to your question, I cannot copy the entire text of the extensive paper. Instead, I will mention salient points:

Foundational to the Christian view of history is the doctrine of Scripture itself. If man cannot know God with some degree of assurance, cannot have knowledge of Him, of His actions and of His will for man in the form of propositional truths, then man can know neither himself as an individual nor the meaning of his own experience in its historical form. The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man. This concept of Scripture is no less necessary for a meaningful view of history than it is for the knowledge of redemption. God reveals Himself redemptively to man in the Bible, in the sense that only here does man learn about the person and work of Christ. From the Scriptures man also receives the necessary insights concerning God’s own evaluation and interpretation of human life. God, therefore, addresses man in terms of propositional truth which is therefore infallible and binding upon him.

A meaningful view of history, therefore, depends completely on the assurance that the Scriptures are God’s trustworthy revelation to man. If he cannot know God with certainty, then man can never really penetrate the mystery of his own existence here on earth; life must, and will remain for him an unfathomable enigma, forever beyond his apprehension. The true meaning both of individual events and of the composite stream of human history is found only in God’s interpretation thereof; clues to this meaning are found primarily in the Scriptures.

Man is not free to contradict or to challenge God’s interpretation of what has gone before. If he does so, he is guilty of sin. But this does not mean that we are to regard the Bible as a kind of textbook which gives some explicit interpretation for every event which comes under its scrutiny. Rather it means that the theistic presuppositions necessary for man’s insight into the proper meaning of history are found in the Scriptures alone and not in human reason or experience. Man is no less responsible for thinking God’s thoughts after Him in the interpretation of human life than he is in any other area of his activity. Any theology which denies the infallibility of the Scriptures is hard pressed, therefore, to present a meaningful and consistent explanation of the historical process.

The sovereign God confers meaning and purpose on history, not only by creating man for His own glory, but also by ordaining that man should realize and fulfill the purpose of his existence on earth in organized political communities, whatever their geographic extent or temporal duration might be.

The bankruptcy of historical scholarship in modern times is quite evident in the philosophies of R.G. Collingwood in England and Carl Becker in America. In order to understand irrational approaches to the study of the meaning of history of these two secular historians, we must turn to a brief exposition of their philosophies. Defending history as an autonomous branch of human knowledge, Collingwood argued for its acceptance and respectability in philosophical circles. But for this recognition he forced historical scholarship to pay a heavy price. The price was actually nothing less than the claim to intellectual respectability which he thought he had gained for it. In his essay, „The Historical Imagination,“ first published in 1935 and then later included in his The Idea of History, Collingwood repudiated not only the positivist approach to history, but all those schools of interpretation which insist that facts have an objectivity of their own apart from the mind of the historians, and that historians can recapture past events in some way by recourse to the scientific methodology. He discussed the common-sense approach to history, which bases the possibility of a knowledge of past events on memory and authority, declaring it to be bankrupt.

Collingwood insisted that the historian must come to the realization that he is his own authority and that his own thought is both autonomous and self-authorizing. The criterion of historical truth cannot be the fact that some statement is made by an authority, simply because it is the truthfulness and information of the so-called authority which are in question. The historian must answer the question for himself on his own authority. Even if the historian accepts what the authorities say, he does so not because they say it, but because what they say satisfies his own criterion of historical truth.

Like Collingwood, Carl Becker was very critical of the positivist insistence that the historian must let the facts speak for themselves, for he saw quite clearly that facts simply cannot speak for themselves. He denied the contention that the simple historical fact is a hard, cold something with a clear outline and measurable. Becker rightly contended that it is utterly impossible for the facts of history to speak through the historian, and this is because of the nature of historical facts. They do not lend themselves to this kind of treatment by the historian. Becker insisted that the historian does not and cannot deal with historical events themselves, but only with statements which affirm the fact that the event did occur. The historian can only deal with the affirmation of the fact that something is true. At this point Becker made what he felt was a very important distinction between the ephemeral events which disappear and the affirmation about the events which persist. Thus the historical fact is not the past event, but a symbol which enables the historian to recreate it imaginatively. It is dangerous to maintain that a symbol is either false or true. The most that a historian should claim for a symbol is that it is more or less appropriate. But appropriate for what? Becker fails to answer this important question.

The whole tenor of Becker’s philosophy of history militates against any possibility of an objective meaning and purpose being discernible, and yet for the greater part of his professional career Becker was somehow able to synthesize this relativism with a conviction that the triumph of democracy was the key to human history and the hope of the future. Not until the last few years of his life did he surrender his allegiance to the eventual triumph of democracy and yield to the pessimism inherent in his view of the nature of the historical process and his denial that history has objectivity. His frustration and even despair are quite obvious in his last major work on modern democracy.

Conclusion

To posit man as the product of evolutionary forces may seem, at first glance, to make him a noble creature and possessed of endless possibilities for a glorious future. Actually, however, it destroys his true role in the historical process and reduces him to a passive recipient of the effects of natural and environmental forces. Over these he has no control although they themselves are utterly impersonal and blind in their effects on human life. The outcome of such a view, namely, this evolutionary degradation of human personality, must inescapably render history meaningless and hardly worthy of study. If the human past is simply the product of the influence of blind and impersonal forces at work in humanity, then the past has little to say to the present. Such a perverted view of human personality would mean, however, that in exalting himself above God, man has lost the key to the riddle of even the purported evolutionary process. It is well known that the dominant force of the evolutionary philosophy in the political and social sciences has engendered increasing uncertainty among historians and the social scientists about the meaning of the human past and the promise of the future. In fact, some of these men such as R.G. Collingword and Carl Becker question whether the study of history can any longer be justified as a meaningful intellectual activity. The denial of propositional revelation in the Scriptures has resulted in a growing disposition to doubt the possibility of achieving truth in secular history. History thus becomes a witness without meaning.

For the Christian, history has perspective only in the light of revealed theology. For him there is no man-made philosophy of history; he interprets his entire earthly life „sub specie aeternitatis”. This biblical frame must rest upon a theology that fully incorporates every aspect of biblical truth perceived by the enlightened mind through the power of the Holy Spirit. Only such a theology provides the necessary ingredients for a view of history which can adequately meet the challenge and dilemmas of history.

4. Most of us were taught that Venice was a picturesque trading republic famous for glass and gondolas. You describe it as a pagan, totalitarian state whose oligarchs deliberately transplanted themselves to England and Holland to build a new Roman Empire. What does the ordinary history book miss, and where would a skeptical reader go to verify the part you’re telling?

It is correct to observe that conventional textbooks on general history devote little space to Venice’s significant history. One reason may be that much of its history is marked by one sordid event after another. Yet, as a center of commerce and political power, Venice prevailed economically and militarily for more than 1,200 years. During the early modern era, Venice was also the nexus of the book trade, with over a hundred publishers located within its borders.

A few notable facts are that Venice was at the center of efforts to destroy the advanced European civilization of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and it bears a crushing burden of guilt for the Black Guelphs’ ascendancy and the arrival of the Black Death. Venetians were informants for the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan and his heirs, playing a role in guiding them to sack Baghdad and destroy its renaissance in the thirteenth century.

During the years of the Venetian overseas empire, islands such as Crete, Cyprus, Corfu, and Naxos, as well as smaller holdings in the Aegean, were routinely worked by slave labor, either directly under the Venetian regime or under the private administration of Venetian oligarchical clans, such as the Corner family, who owed their wealth to slavery. In later centuries, the harems of the entire Ottoman Empire, from the Balkans to Morocco, were filled with Venetian slaves. The Ottoman Turkish armies’ shock troops, the Janissaries, were largely recruited by Venetian merchants as well.

Piracy and buccaneering, the other pillars of the Venetian economy, were indistinguishable from slave-gathering operations. Wars with Genoa or other powers were eagerly sought-after opportunities to plunder the enemy’s ships with fleets of corsairs. Victory or defeat usually depended more on the success of privateering than on direct combat between galleys, cogs, and soldiers.

Piracy imperceptibly shades into routine commerce. Despite decades of treachery and mayhem, the Venetians established themselves as the Mediterranean world’s leading entrepôt port, where, as in London until 1914, most of the world’s strategic commodities were brought for sale, warehousing, and transshipment. The most significant of these were spices and silks from India and China, destined for markets in Central and Western Europe. In turn, Europe produced textiles and metals, especially precious metals, for export to the East.

The Venetians were the mortal enemies of the Paleologue dynasty, the humanists who ruled Byzantium. They were the implacable foes of Gemisthos Plethon, Cosimo de’ Medici, Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, and the entirety of the Florentine Renaissance. They conspired—successfully—to destroy it. Venetian influence was decisive in bringing an end to the Elizabethan era in England and opening the door to the dismal Jacobean era.

The crux of their strategic doctrine of military supremacy was an abstruse concept, occasionally characterized as the “collapse of empires” scenario. Venice exploited the decline of much larger states, a decline that Venice itself strove to orchestrate, sometimes gradually and sometimes abruptly through looting.

In “Musings of the Court Jester“ and The Greed for Gold and Glory, I provide more information on Venice’s unsavory history.

Books describing the unscrupulous methods of Venetian merchants are easy to find. The following titles are on my bookshelf:

§ M. OConnell, Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venices Maritime State (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

§ W.H. McNeill, Venice The Hinge of Europe, 1081-1797 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

§ T.F. Madden, Venice: A New History (Viking, 2012).

§ John Julian Norwich, A History of Venice (New York City, NY: Vintage Books, 1989).

§ Roger Crowley, City of Fortune: How Venice won and lost a naval empire (London: Faber, 2012).

§ M. Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England, 1450-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

§ Frederic C. Lane & Reinhold C. Mueller, Money and Banking in medieval and renaissance Venice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) vol. 1 (Coins and money of account).

§ Simeon Luzzatto, Discourse On The State Of The Jews And In Particular Those Dwelling In The Illustrious City Of Venice (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019).

5. You quote Pope Pius II calling the Venetians people for whom “something is just if it serves the state’s interests, and something is pious if it expands the empire.” How much of that 15th-century mindset do you see operating in the institutions that run Western policy today, and where is it most visible?

The short answer is that the “Venetian” mindset is prevalent in Western institutions of all kinds and levels today. This may seem like an exaggeration, but I assure you, it is not. Nearly all of my books, totaling over 3,000 pages, depict important events that support this assertion.

The perennial endeavor to establish a one-world state as detailed in my book, World Federation: The Ecumenical Agenda, is an obvious example of the enduring influence of those who ruled the former Venetian Empire and their mode of operation in our time.

6. The standard story of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 is that it was a victory for constitutional liberty — Parliament reining in an overreaching king. You describe it as something close to the opposite: an oligarchic consolidation, with seats in Parliament openly for sale within a few years. What’s the evidence most readers have never been shown?

This is a broad topic that would require many pages to explain fully. In my book, The Greed for Gold and Glory, I devote nearly an entire chapter, filled with numerous footnotes, to the topic. The abridged edition of this book summarizes the salient facts:

Until 1688, the City of London refused to lend money to the Crown except at exorbitant interest rates, which James II (1633-1701) rejected. To put an end to the “arrogance” of the Stuarts, the wealthy Whig upper class sought a new ruler. Lord Shaftesbury (1652-1699), who was probably a Freemason, was the driving force behind the political intrigue. Although the Stuarts were the rightful heirs to the throne, the Whigs, as well as the merchants and financiers of the City of London, believed that the Stuarts had numerous shortcomings, in addition to their Catholic faith. In particular, they lacked commitment to the new capitalist form of government sought by the de facto ruling Whig oligarchy in England. They finally turned to the Dutch king, Willem of Orange (1650-1702), later William III, who was familiar with Dutch trading practices. When one’s religion is threatened by oppression from another religion and the ruling regents attempt to take away the population’s freedom, the invasion of a foreign army seems like divine providence for a better future. This is why many English people were thrilled when King William III overthrew his father-in-law, King James II, in 1688 with a fleet of 463 warships and 20,000 soldiers. At the moment of his military triumph over the English nation, which he would rule as an absolute monarch until his death, he promised to bring political freedom and protect the Protestant religion of many of his subjects. English Whig Party propagandists, including Daniel Defoe, John Locke, and Jonathan Swift, called this monumental event the Glorious Revolution. They were well paid for their services.

Subsequently, the population realized they had been lied to and deceived. Although the English regent, William III, had a reputation for being a Calvinist, he was actually a devoted Freemason who secretly fought against the Protestant faith. He soon revealed himself to be one of the worst tyrants in English history. The Glorious Revolution of 1688/89 invigorated the Protestant faith movement in England, which otherwise leaned toward peaceful coexistence. The victorious Whig oligarchy united Anglican Puritans and Protestant nonconformists who rejected the Anglican state church by electing William III, the leading representative of continental Calvinism, as their leader. This event also initiated the long struggle against Louis XIV, which ultimately broke the power of the French monarch and overthrew the House of Bourbon in France. For the first time in European history, the balance of power shifted in favor of Protestantism. However, the new regime was only nominally committed to Protestantism. It had sworn allegiance to Freemasonry. The Tory Party lost its position of power and was replaced by the Whig Party, composed of aristocratic landowners and monopolistic trading entrepreneurs.

After the Glorious Revolution, the English people were transferred from what was called the papal tyranny of James II to the care of the Whig oligarchy. The Whig Parliament passed the Hunting Bill in 1692. This bill was enacted to restrict the independent livelihoods of working-class individuals. It also initiated a sweeping “land reform” that effectively denied the rural peasant population access to land. The granting of Crown lands to large landowners ushered in a new era. State-owned land, which had previously been administered with great caution, was transferred to private ownership at prices that were ridiculously low or through direct confiscation. The Crown estates seized in this way, together with the church estates originally stolen by Henry VIII and sold mainly to his favorites, formed the basis of today’s domains of the English ruling class. Overall, it was a plundering of colossal proportions. The Whigs were seen as the future aristocracy, introducing a new social order in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. The influence of class interests and selfish greed on political life became apparent. The oligarchy and the privileged won over the monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. The new regime was a class state, with the government controlled by the great Whig families and local administration in the hands of landowners. This new social order was stable largely because of an alliance between landowners and businessmen, which was strengthened through intermarriage and the acquisition of land by merchants and bankers. Thus, the new regime acquired a distinctly bourgeois character that gradually altered the traditional structure of English society. During the Stuart monarchy, the government attempted to maintain the class system in industry, keep the various classes within their boundaries, regulate wages and prices, protect farmers from eviction, and prevent enclosure. Property rights became absolute, and the principle of laissez-faire – an economy free from state intervention – replaced the former ideals of state regulation and class organization. Wages and prices were now to regulate themselves.

7. John Locke shows up in your writing not as the father of liberal freedoms we were taught to admire in school, but as the prophet of what you call the spirit of antichrist. That’s a jarring claim for most readers. What is it about the social contract idea specifically that you think does the spiritual damage?

You may be interested to know that I wrote the essay on John Locke in the Zondervan Dictionary of Christianity and Science. Thus, I am actually a published authority on this English philosopher of Liberalism whose ideas I repeatedly cite and explicate in several of my books.

The two centuries after 1690 saw the first of two major stages in the transformation of the Western worldview. The idea of a covenant authenticated before God gave way to the idea of a social contract (1690-1890). Finally, this new conception itself gave way to the broad instrumentalization of collectivist despotism (1890 to the present).

Over time, many perceived that a secular worldview was emerging in the Christian West of the early modern period, in two main versions. John Locke’s Whiggism, as conceived in the Second Treatise of Government (1690), spread in England and America. Locke’s worldview in the political sphere provided a fertile ground for the acceptance of the free-market economy advocated by Adam Smith in his greatest work, The Wealth of Nations (1776).

An almost opposite mutation of Whiggism took shape on the European continent, beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social ou Principes du droit (On the Social Contract or Principles of the Law of the State, 1762). Since 1790, the social contract has been enshrined in law at the national level in France, England, and the United States in different ideological forms.

At first glance, contract theory seems to have similarities with covenant theology, which is based on the concept of divine providence. However, at its core, contract theory corresponds to the teachings of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Contract theory is based on the idea that people enter into a mutually valid but revocable “social contract” and simultaneously establish a state authority to ensure peaceful coexistence. While covenant theology presupposes an oath to a supernatural God and emphasizes God’s covenants with his people, contract theory refers only to the lawfulness of nature without relationship to a personal God.

The revolutionary colonists were fully aware that each step they took toward independence was a more radical break from the past based on Christian principles. They pressed on with the establishment of a new social order, even at the cost of the deaths of many soldiers. However, they failed to consider the inherent contradiction in Locke’s philosophy that would prove fatal in time. Locke’s doctrine of the rights of man provided an inadequate basis for restraining the growing power of the American president. Human rights would ultimately lose their validity through the very weapons forged to defend them. Although the American patriots were able to escape the direct governing power of the English Parliament after the victorious Revolution, they established a new political system that, in the long run would amount to a totalitarianism that, in its disastrous effects, would make the alleged tyranny of Great Britain seem almost like paradise on earth.

In his book Constitutional Dictatorship, political scientist Clinton I. Rossiter, who taught at Cornell University, devoted an entire chapter to Lincoln, calling him a “great dictator.” Rossiter wrote, “The simple fact that one man was the government of the United States in the most critical period in all its 165 years, and that he acted on no precedent and under no restraint, makes this the paragon of all democratic, constitutional dictatorships.” Clinton I. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government In The Modern Democracies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 1948; New York City, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963) 224.

8. You make the unusual argument that many professing Christians today are, without realizing it, propagating Whig ideology under the name “conservatism.” What should a conservative Christian reader actually be listening for in their own assumptions?

Conceptually, “civil religion” appeared for the first time in 1762. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book The Social Contract popularized the term. It was put into practice during the French Revolution, beginning in July 1793 with Robespierre’s appointment to the Committee of Public Safety.

Modern American conservatives sympathize with classical Liberalism. Consequently, they believe they are opposed to socialism, which is actually “progressive Liberalism.” This is only partially true, though. I wrote two volumes of the book on Liberalism (nearly 800 pages combined) to prove the point that both manifestations of Liberalism, the classical (individualism) and the progressive (equalitarianism), are not opposing viewpoints in an absolute sense, but the two sides of the same coin of civil religion.

I will copy Beate Gsell’s foreword to the two-volume book Liberalism: The Metamorphosis of Liberalism.

Foreword

Man longs for peace and prosperity in a world of aggression, exploitation, and poverty. Although the Bible presents the best solution to solve man’s problem, it has been distorted and eventually discarded by leaders and opinion makers. This book shows how two other answers to the problems of our world have emerged over the course of 200 years. The Western world of today is being shaped less and less by one of these answers and more and more by the other one. What they share in common is a complete opposition to the Christian faith. What are these answers?

Church historian and theologian Dr. Martin Erdmann analyzes classical and progressive Liberalism in the case of the United States and contrasts them with the Christian faith. The author draws on a vast storehouse of academic disciplines: politics, economics, history, biology, theology, philosophy, psychology and sociology in Europe and the United States. He makes a compelling demonstration how the ideology of the newer progressive Liberalism has hijacked even the older concepts of “freedom” in classical Liberalism. The purpose of this book is to expose this deliberate obfuscation through history:

§ The Western world was able to develop rapidly because it replaced pagan thinking of historical cycles with the Christian understanding of beginning and end.

§ Then the unimaginable happened: under the influence of the Enlightenment, church institutions altered and finally rejected the Christian message: It was no longer sinful man who needed redemption through the atoning sacrifice of Christ; rather, man was good, and evil could be mitigated, if not eliminated, through changing his environment. A key role was played by the shift in understanding of the millennial kingdom. No longer would the perfect Christ be the One to establish a kingdom of peace in the distant future. Replacing Him would be the ideal man who could transform society for good on this earth.

§ This revolutionary thought took hold in politics and economics. Despite its official platform touting individual freedom, the dark side of classical Liberalism revealed itself as unscrupulous, sinful entrepreneurs exploited and enslaved the poor.

§ Due to industrialization and mass immigration, the US fell into dire social conditions. Inspired by the philosophy of German Idealism, opinion leaders saw the solution lay in a strong state. The state’s absolute powers would solve everything: to direct the economy in a socialist direction with strict guidelines, to turn republican democracy into an administrative state run by managers – the experts – would reduce politicians to mere spectators, to indoctrinate children from an early age to become obedient, productive citizens under the tutelage of the state, and to make people increasingly dependent on state services.

§ Not only have many theologians merely supported the intervention of the state, but they have actively promoted it. Liberal theology and the Social Gospel rejected the Reformation understanding of the Bible: God was no longer the Almighty, but man with the help of a strong state. For instance, liberal theologians personally benefited from the state in financing their social projects.

The philosophers and theologians of the Enlightenment erred in rejecting the authority of God and placing man instead on the throne. Neither Liberalism, which promises “individual freedom as the highest goal,” nor Progressivism, which promises “freedom through a strong state,” can ever lead to prosperity and peace. Both systems are based on the erroneous belief that man is good and therefore can create his own benign utopia apart from God.

Dr. Erdmann shows how classical Liberalism evolved into progressive Liberalism, which later became known as “Progressivism.” Some reject Progressivism because they do not want to live in a socialist system, which tends toward absolute control, and instead put their hopes in classical Liberalism. What they fail to recognize is that the words “freedom” and “prosperity” offered by Liberalism do not mean what they appear; in fact, because Progressivism has redefined their meaning, they actually mean the opposite.

The most shocking finding is this: Both Liberalism and Progressivism are not diametrically opposed. Instead, they are merely two sides of the same civil religion. In fact, the history in this book warns us to stop pursuing the godless path of classical and progressive Liberalism, no matter if official church leaders promote it. American history clearly shows that these solutions offer empty promises of prosperity and peace, but, in reality, lead to poverty, deprivation of freedom, and war. Christians in particular should reject these worldly philosophies that oppose Christ. Rather, our hope lies in man’s submission to the God of the Bible and the practice of Christian ethics. Only then will it be possible for major improvements in society to be achieved. History bears witness to this as well.

9. In your piece on central banking, you explain that a bank with a 2% reserve requirement can lend out fifty times the money actually deposited, and that this process quietly transfers purchasing power away from ordinary people. Most of us were never taught this in school or church. Why do you think it stays hidden, and what changed for you once you understood it?

To answer your question, I would point to Murray N. Rothbard’s book The Mystery of Banking (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), which is the best resource available. I will quote from the foreword written by Joseph T. Salerno, professor of economics at Pace University. Although reading this book greatly improved my understanding of the modern central banking system, I do not sympathize with Rothbard’s ideology of classical Liberalism, also known as Libertarianism. As stated above, it is the primary manifestation of civil religion, which is diametrically opposed to biblical Christianity. When I discovered the mechanism of fractional reserve banking, I began exposing the malpractice of “legal counterfeiting” in my published articles and books. I also denounce it in my university lectures and public presentations. I use some of the strategies mentioned in Rothbard’s book to manage my personal finances:

Foreword

Rothbard’s presentation of the basic principles of money-and banking theory in the first eleven chapters of the book guides the reader in unraveling the mystery of how the central bank operates to create money through the fractional-reserve banking system and how this leads to inflation of the money supply and a rise in overall prices in the economy. But he does not stop there. In the subsequent five chapters he resolves the historical mystery of how an inherently inflationary institution like central banking, which is destructive of the value of money and, in the extreme case of hyperinflation, of money itself, came into being and was accepted as essential to the operation of the market economy.

As in the case of his exposition of the theory, Rothbard’s treatment of the history of the Fed is fundamentally at odds with that found in standard textbooks. In the latter, the history is shallow and episodic. It is taken for granted that the Fed, like all central banks, was originally designed as an institution whose goal was to promote the public interest by operating as a “lender of last resort,” providing “liquidity” to troubled banks during times of financial turbulence to prevent a collapse of the financial system. Later the Fed was given a second mandate, to maintain “stability of the price level,” a policy which was supposed to rid the economy of business cycles and therefore to preclude prolonged periods of recession and unemployment. Thus strewn throughout a typical textbook one will find accounts of how the Fed handled— usually, although not always, in an enlightened manner— various “shocks” to the monetary and financial system. Culpability for such shocks is almost invariably attributed to the unruly propensities or irrational expectations of business investors, consumers, or wage-earners. Even in the exceptional instances, such as the Great Depression, when inept Fed policy is blamed for making matters worse, the Fed’s errors are ascribed to not yet having learned how to properly wield the “tools of monetary policy,” the euphemism used to describe the various techniques the Fed uses in exercising its legal monopoly of counterfeiting money. Each new crisis, however, stimulates the public-spirited policymakers at the Fed by a trial-and-error process to eventually converge on the optimal monetary policy, which was supposedly hit upon in the heyday of the Greenspan Fed during 1990s. Rothbard rejects such a superficial and naïve account of the Fed’s origins and bolstering of the banking system development. Instead, he deftly uses sound monetary theory to beam a penetrating light through the thick fog of carefully cultivated myths that surround the operation of the Fed. Rather than recounting the Fed’s response to isolated crises, he blends economic theory with historical insight to reveal the pecuniary and ideological motives of the specific individuals who played key roles in establishing, molding, and operating the Fed. Needless to say, Rothbard does not blithely accept the almost universal view that the Fed is the outcome of a public-spirited response to shocks and failures caused by unruly market forces. Rather he asks, and then answers, the incisive, and always disturbing, question, “Cui bono?” (“To whose benefit?”). In other words, which particular individuals and groups stood to benefit from the Fed’s creation and its specific policies? In answering this question, Rothbard fearlessly names names and delves into the covert motives and goals of those named.

This constitutes yet another, and possibly the most important, reason why Rothbard’s book had been ignored: for it is forbidden to even pose the question of “who benefits” with respect to the Fed and its legal monopoly of the money supply, lest one be smeared and marginalized as a “conspiracy theorist.”

10. You quote Keynes saying that debasing a currency is the most subtle and certain way to overturn the existing social order, and that perhaps one person in a million could diagnose what’s happening. If that’s accurate, what does the period from Nixon closing the gold window in 1971 to today actually look like through that lens?

The answer to your question can be given in two words: On 15^th of August 1971 President Nixon declared national bankruptcy. The consequences of this declaration are spelled out by Murray N. Rothbard.

Murray N. Rothbard, The Mystery of Banking (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008) 251-252:

The two-tier system only succeeded in buying a little time for the Bretton Woods system. American inflation and gold outflow proceeded apace, despite the pleas of the U.S. that foreign central banks abstain from redeeming their dollars in gold. Pressure to redeem by European central banks led President Nixon, on August 15, 1971, to end Bretton Woods completely and to go off the gold standard internationally and adopt a pure fiat standard. The short-lived and futile Smithsonian Agreement of December 1971 tried to retain fixed exchange rates but without any gold standard—an effort doomed to inevitable failure, which came in March 1973. Thus, President Nixon in effect declared national bankruptcy and completed the failure to honor commitments to redeem in gold initiated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. In the meanwhile, Congress had progressively removed every statutory restriction on the Fed’s expansion of reserves and printing of money. Since 1971, therefore, the U.S. government and the Fed have had unlimited and unchecked power to inflate; is it any wonder that these years have seen the greatest sustained inflationary surge in U.S. history?

11. Your new book, The Greed for Gold and Glory, ends with a chapter on how the British Empire gave way to the Commonwealth while the City of London quietly became something more powerful than the empire ever was. What is the City of London actually doing today that the average newspaper reader has no idea about?

In the section “Synopsis” of the abridged edition of the book The Greed for Gold and Glory, you can find the following information on the second part of chapter 7:

7.2 The City of London Dominates the Global Financial System

Key point:

The City of London is one of the most influential players in global financial regulation yet remains virtually invisible.

Overview:

The City of London Corporation is a lobbying organization for the financial sector that has close ties to the British government and advocates for financial deregulation worldwide.

The Bank of England is the United Kingdom’s central bank and is legally independent. In 1931, the Bank abandoned the gold exchange standard, contributing significantly to the onset of the Great Depression.

The British Empire, which ruled over 700 million people by the end of World War II, shrank significantly between 1947 and 1956. The pound sterling began to lose value, threatening the entire financial system of the empire.

The British Midland Bank chose not to prevent a devaluation of the pound in order to force the government to approve loans in US dollars. As a result, other banks in the City also changed their international loans from pounds to US dollars. This led to the emergence of a new type of financial market that was not regulated by the Bank of England. In 1957, the world entered a new offshore market that has been centered in the City of London ever since.

This market, also known as the “Eurodollar market,” is a stateless, unregulated market where all major currencies are traded.

In 1986, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered the Bank of England to stop regulating the City of London’s financial markets. This historic event marked the beginning of a radical restructuring of the global financial system.

Assessment:

The City of London is imposing resurgent mercantilism on the global economy. The City’s special privileges stem from its control over financial capital.

Profits are maximized through insider information and secret agreements, which lead to the formation of cartels. These practices contradict the public interest and restrict competition.

Offshore markets centered on the City of London allow bank accounts to be opened and maintained in other countries for reasons of data protection, tax evasion, and asset protection. These financial centers operate outside of standard legal norms.

This new market elevated the City and offered Wall Street a new field of activity, reviving the historic partnership between the two. This allowed them to escape the control of their respective governments. Unregulated financial activities in London led to the 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers.

Large Wall Street firms based in the City of London transfer significant sums of dollars to England, thereby withdrawing them from the American economy and tax liability.

Despite Chinese control, the City of London remains closely linked to Hong Kong. Due to its geographical location, Hong Kong offers drug traffickers from Thailand, Laos, and Burma an ideal transshipment point.

Recurring financial crises can be attributed to a combination of insatiable greed and monopolistic mercantilism, often euphemistically referred to as “neoliberalism.”

Quintessence:

The City of London operates in the tradition of Venetian merchants.

12. You’ve written that the political theater of recent years — leaders paraded as incompetent, systems presented as ungovernable — may be a deliberate softening-up for technocracy, with the population eventually demanding a strong hand to restore order. That’s a heavy claim. What made you see the pattern, and what would disconfirm it for you?

To explore the philosophical and political background of technocracy, I wrote the book Spiritualization of Technology. Several sections in different chapters discuss the totalitarian nature of technocracy. I will quote a brief passage, which is representative of considerably more information found on subsequent pages of the book. Current political developments only confirm the validity of these statements:

In Brave New World Revisited (1958), Huxley elaborated on his earlier predictions of a dictatorial society in which the ruling elite used highly effective methods of brainwashing. The correct way of thinking was drilled into the population through courses they were forced to listen to at night while they slept. The intention was to nip any rebellious instincts in the bud. Helpless victims of a scientific caste system, they were methodically conditioned to accept willingly the narrow confines of a fully organized society. The processes that manipulatively control the mental grasp of reality were augmented by the regular administration of artificially induced bliss. The need to use brute force was then discarded as an obsolete aspect of past tyrannies. Aldous Huxley wrote:

Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; and quaint old forms – elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest – will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial – but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

13. In one of your sharpest essays you confront John MacArthur’s public embrace of what John Piper calls “Christian hedonism,” and you treat it as something much more serious than an in-house theological disagreement. For a reader outside that world, why does this matter beyond church politics?

I have started writing a book on this subject. As of now, I have finished the research, collected numerous resources, and completed first drafts of half of the chapters. How can I summarize my findings? It is not possible. Nevertheless, I will state my thesis, which I will try to substantiate in the book. John Piper’s version of Christianity, in which he elevates the concept of “Christian hedonism” to center stage, is actually an entirely different religion from true biblical faith. R.J. Reilly, an emeritus professor of English literature, wrote an illuminating book on that religion. He titled it Romantic Religion. In one of the chapters, he analyzes the esoteric views of Charles Williams. To get an idea of who Williams was, I will point you to Gavin Ashenden’s biography.

Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration

An examination of the tumultuous inner life of this poet and writer. He was a close friend of T. S. Eliot, deeply admired by C. S. Lewis, inspirational for W. H. Auden in his journey to faith, and a literary sparring partner for J. R. R. Tolkien. Yet half a century after his death, much of Charles Williams’s life and work remains an enigma. The questions that arose from his immersion in Rosicrucian and hermetic culture and ideology—central to understanding Williams’s thought and art remain provocatively unexplored. For a decade of his early adulthood, Williams was a member of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, a form of neo-Rosicrucianism. There is widespread confusion about its nature, which is to be expected given that this was a semisecret society. Though Williams left his formal association with it behind, it enriched and informed his imaginative world with a hermetic myth that expressed itself in an underlying ideology and metaphysics. In Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration, Gavin Ashenden explores both the history behind the myths and metaphysics Williams was to make his own and the hermetic culture that influenced him. …

Why is the information on Charles Williams important?

On p. 16 of the 2003 edition of John Piper’s bestseller, Desiring God, appears the following quotation:

As a student of English literature, John Piper spent four years studying the writings of the foremost English proponents of Romantic Religion at the Marion E. Wade Center of Wheaton College.

14. You’ve written that Christians are called to leave the evil world system completely — not to pick a political side, not to become partisan warriors, but to be recognizably different. In a moment when almost every pressure pushes people toward tribes, what does that actually look like day to day for someone who takes your argument seriously?

In answer to your question I will quote a passage from the English translation of the abridged version of my book The Triumph of Progressivism:

The book Tragedy and Hope was published in 1966 by Carroll Quigley, a prominent historian at the School of Foreign Service, part of the renowned Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.). Quigley described the technocratic vision for the administrative state. The expert would replace the industrial manager in controlling the economic system, just as he would replace the democratic voter in governing the state. Economic Liberalism would be replaced by planning. In general, the citizen’s independence and freedom of decision would be controlled within tightly limited alternatives: he would be given a number at birth which would be used to monitor his education, compulsory military or civil service, tax payments, healthcare and medical needs, and finally retirement and payment of death benefits. The direct relationship of the average citizen to the government would cease, and the breach would be filled with intermediaries with private rather than public power. This situation would equate to a form of Neo-Feudalism.

The form and practice of the administrative state are the result of the practical implementation of Progressivism. In all its political, economic, and cultural aspects, the administrative state represents the most pronounced form of a social order and government opposed to Reformation Christianity. Whether or not Christians actually realize that they are living under the dictates of a political system that almost entirely rejects their creed is of secondary importance. They are given no choice but to submit to the norm of a democratic understanding of reality – in the sense of Rousseau’s Romantic Democracy – while being constantly persuaded that they live in a free state that guarantees the privilege of living out their faith as they see fit.

To give but one example, it is constantly maintained that the periodic, standardized ritual of going to the polls is a Christian and civic duty. Simply voting for a particular party, political candidate, or popular initiative is perhaps the most characteristic operation of the religion of progress. In contemporary Western society, it is impossible for most people to conceive of the state-granted right to vote as anything but an absolute right, even if they choose not to exercise it or do so only occasionally. They do not understand that the religion of progress, in the form of modern Democracy, requires periodic legitimization by citizens in order to assert the all-pervasive influence of administrative government in society. This is no democratic process in the true sense of the word, if based on the historical definition of Republican Democracy as a matter of which political candidate gains the favor of the majority of voters. With the inequality between rich and poor becoming ever greater, this form of government will ultimately head toward total chaos, even if it affords a higher standard of living for some in the meantime. In its most basic sense, to cast a vote in an administrative state is to perform a religious act of enormous consequence. This ingeniously allows only one of two or three dominant parties to come to power, even though there are only negligible differences between the parties’ political agendas.

Such a system makes a great pretense of being religiously neutral. It thus convinces all religious adherents within the system that they can freely follow their various religions under protection of the state. In order to preserve this right, they are called on to defend the authority of modern Democracy against all extremist positions, which are often collectively termed “Fundamentalism.” Many Christians are convinced by this argument, having been indoctrinated with it since childhood. They could not imagine living in another political system that does not guarantee basic human rights – which are supposedly based on a rational ascertainable law of nature. For this reason, a thorough, in-depth analysis of the religious components of modern Democracy is all the more urgent. Christians must be made aware of the fundamental differences between their biblical beliefs and the technocratic administrative state. On closer examination, it becomes clear that the conflicts between Reformation Christianity and religious Progressivism could not be more fundamental nor more diametrically opposed. The truth of this is shown simply by the fact that Democracy makes it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to practice a consistent Christianity. Progressives who follow the deeply religious rule of law have long realized that their ultimate conception of the enemy is embodied in Christianity, which teaches the biblical doctrine that eternal salvation is found in none other than Jesus Christ, the Son of God (Acts 4:11-12). The sinner, a designation applicable to all people, can only find forgiveness and salvation from eternal damnation – from punishment “with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power” (2 Thess. 1:9) – through faith in the full atonement of Jesus Christ on the cross. Western Christians thus have a duty to confront the religion of progress that forms the core of modern Democracy – a Democracy related directly to the establishment of an autocratically governed administrative state.

15. What are you working on right now, and where should readers go to follow your writing, get hold of The Greed for Gold and Glory, and support the work you’re doing?

I appreciate the opportunity to answer your excellent questions. I am always working on different book projects. Previously, I mentioned the book on a portrayal and analysis of Romantic Religion, which has been promoted by C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, John Piper, and Tim Keller, among others. Currently, I am also researching and writing a sequel to my book World Federation: The Ecumenical Agenda. My English and German books are listed on the Amazon Author’s page. As you know, I write short articles five times per week (Monday-Friday) on Substack under the title “Musings of the Court Jester.” The book The Greed for Gold and Glory appeared in four editions: German original, abridgement, and their English translations.