Taken as a whole,
Reflections of a Political Economist is a fine collection
of essays. But if you want to get an idea of the esteem William
“Bill” Niskanen was held in at the Cato Institute, go ahead and
skip to the end, chapter 41, “A Personal Reflection on the
Trinity.” There is nothing political in this chapter. It is a
sermon that Niskanen, who died last week of a stroke at 78,
delivered at his Christ Church in Washington D.C. on Trinity
Sunday, 2006.
Niskanen’s book was published by Cato, which has a
reputation as a very secular institution. I worked there and can
say from experience that the reputation is both deserved and
overstated. Cato is nervous about religion, true. However, it is OK
with the use of some religious texts to help support its vision of
libertarianism in politics.
Cato vice president David Boaz, following in the footsteps
of Thomas Paine, opened
The Libertarian Reader with a passage from the first book
of Samuel, chapter 8 — the bit where the prophet warns the people
of Israel about the catastrophically high price they will pay if
they insist on a having a king. (“He will take your sons, for his
chariots. And he will take your daughters, to be cooks. And he will
take your fields…”) Boaz elsewhere included the same passage as
part of “the prehistory of libertarianism.”
So there was some precedent for Catoistas pointing out
that religion-inspired liberty and the more secular varieties can
play nice. But to publish a sermon on a specific aspect of
theology, and one unique to Christianity and not even accessible to
natural theology? The only person in the building who could pull
that one off was Bill Niskanen.
He was chairman of Cato from 1985 to 2008 and chairman
emeritus thereafter. Yet it wasn’t just his title that compelled
publication. The New York Times obit that ran over the
weekend
called Niskanen a “blunt libertarian economist,” and that’s one
way of putting it. He was a University of Chicago-trained
economist who was run out of jobs at Ford Motor Company and then
the Reagan administration for speaking his mind.
Niskanen opposed Ford’s push for protection against
Japanese auto imports and he opposed aspects of what became
President Reagan’s 1986 tax reforms. He also drew sharp attacks
from Walter Mondale for arguing the blindingly obvious: one big
reason for the sex disparity in pay is that women leave the
workforce to raise children. The Reagan White House insisted that
Niskanen was speaking only for himself. In his memoirs, Niskanen
called White House chief of staff Donald Regan “a tower of
jelly.”
Now, pretend for a minute that you are head of
publications at the Cato Institute. Bill Niskanen comes to you with
a collection of essays on just wars, tax burdens, global warming
treaties, defense dollars, corporate scandals, and the like, and
this very earnest man has included as a coda his sermon on the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. You want to tell him to take it
out?
I’m glad that didn’t happen because it’s an interesting
little sermon on the Trinity and it reveals a side of Niskanen most
of us never got to know. He delivered it at his longtime church.
Christ Church is an Episcopal church, but we learn that’s not where
he started. “As a former Baptist,” he says, getting into the meat
of the message, “I am first inclined to look to the authority of
the Scriptures.”
And there the problems begin. The word Trinity appears
nowhere in the Bible and is most evident in a verse in the first
letter of John that most scholars believe to be a much later
addition to the text. Rather, the Trinity was a way of resolving
several problems about Jesus and about a figure that Jesus spoke
often of, the Holy Spirit.
“The Roman church,” Niskanen preaches, “claimed that they
had resolved these differences by going beyond any of these
positions asserting that Jesus was both divine and human, as he
always was and always will be. This then left the awkward problem
of the nature of the Spirit, to which there are numerous references
in the Scriptures. So the Roman church also escalated the spirit to
a co-equal and co-eternal status with the Father and the Son. And,
voila, the doctrine of the trinity was born — later to be affirmed
by two major fourth-century church councils.”
That is the description of Bill Niskanen, political
economist, and it sounds too cynical to Niskanen, lay theologian.
You can already hear him dialing it back when he invokes the church
councils, and he next raises the “role of reason, the third source
of Christian authority, in understanding the doctrine of the
trinity.” He says that “for the most part” the Trinity lies “beyond
reason” and confesses this leaves him “very uneasy.”
Niskanen explains himself: “I am not averse to living with
mystery; all sorts of conditions that I value are a mystery to me.
But it does lead me to question whether there is some perspective
on the trinity that is both better rooted in the Scriptures and
more coherent.” And he proceeds to offer just such a
perspective.
I’ll let readers peruse his solution on their own and
close instead with Niskanen’s whimsical words on the Holy Spirit.
“On occasion,” he confesses, the Spirit’s “still small voice speaks
to me so clearly that I am surprised that others in my presence do
not also hear it. Like right now when it tells me that ‘Time’s up.
Episcopalians prefer short sermons.’”
