Kruse Kronicle

Five good reasons Americans don't watch soccer

Five good reasons Americans don't watch soccer is a funny piece at the Christian Science Monitor today. Here are the five reasons but you have to read the commentary to truly appreciate the author's insigtht.

1. We didn't invent it.
2. We have unattractive knees.
3. We're not good with our feet.
4. We are not good at kvetching.
5. We don't understand the rules.

I especially liked the comments about kvetching.

If you've ever watched an international soccer match you know that kvetching, aka complaining or oy yoy yoy-ing about being hurt, is as important to soccer greatness as being married to an attractive model. And yet, as much as American players writhe on the ground as if run over by a Panzer division, all our efforts produce only "are you kidding" headshakes from referees. The truth is our athletes are not very good actors. Ever see a Shaquille O'Neal commercial? Barry Bonds deny taking steroids? Not exactly Oscar-winning performances.

Actually, when I played soccer twenty-five years ago, not only did we have a coach and a trainer, but a drama coach to help improve our kvetching. *grin* Seriously, if there wasn't blood flowing or a limb bent in a peculiar position, you either got off the field or risked a yellow card for delay of game. I really grow weary of all the drama these days. I also miss our coach imploring us to "Get out there and kick the crap out of 'em!....but in a Christ-like manner." Ah, those were the days.

Anti-Christ Superman: The Superhero and the Suffering Servant

I thought Anti-Christ Superman: The Superhero and the Suffering Servant in the Christian Post had an interesting take on Superman.

Superman, the secular savior-figure, manifests the superlative qualities that the world worships: power, strength, immortality. Jesus Christ embodies mercy, weakness, and suffering. But as Paul also writes, “The foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.”

The comic figure of Superman may indeed point us to Christ. Many Christian commentators are right in recognizing this. But if we do truly see Christ through Superman, it is by contrast and not by similarity.

Is Soccer Postmodern?

World Cup soccer is building to the climax next week. Scot McKnight had a fun post this week giving his thoughts about soccer. I posted a comment there that inspired my to ask a question here. Is Soccer more postmodern/premodern than American football and baseball?

George Carlin did a routine decades ago about the difference between football and baseball. He claims football is technological and baseball is pastoral:

• Football is played on a “Gridiron.” Baseball is played in a “park.”
• Football players wear helmets. Baseball players wear caps.
• Football has the bomb, the bullet, and the blitz. The goal is to penetrate the end zone. Baseball has the sacrifice, the fly ball, and being safe. Everyone is just trying to get home.

(You can read more about this here: George Carlin on football and baseball)

So comparing football/baseball to soccer, which is modern and postmodern (or premodern.) Football and baseball are dissected into many discrete parts and analyzed sequentially while soccer is one continuous flow. Stats and scientific analysis govern the strategy of football and baseball in ways that can’t be done in soccer. Football and baseball demand crisp clear outcomes: winner and loser. Soccer embraces ambiguity. Is soccer more appealing to the postmodern mind?

Theology and Economics: Self Interest

One of the most frequently propagated economic myths is that free market capitalism is founded on selfishness or greed. I can’t count the number of commentators and teachers I have heard say that Adam Smith based his economic thinking on selfishness. As we all know, selfishness is anathema to the Christian life. Therefore, we should condemn, or at least be suspicious of, capitalism.

Unfortunately, the purveyors of this myth are dead wrong! Capitalism is not based on greed and Adam Smith argued that society functions best when each person is given freedom to act on their enlightened self-interest. Selfish and self-interest are not the same thing.

Two months before his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr., preached a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The title of the sermon was the The Drum Major Instinct and was based on the passage from Mark, chapter ten, where James and John asked to be seated at the left and right hand of Jesus when he entered his kingdom. Of course, what immediately strikes us about this story is the bold arrogance James and John exhibit by asking such a question. Have they been listening to anything Jesus has been saying?

King points out a frequently overlooked aspect of this story. If you and I can see how clueless and selfish the question was, don’t you suppose Jesus saw this too? How would you or I have handled this? I can tell you how I would have handled it. I probably would have grabbed a trout, smacked them upside the head, and said, “Hello! Hello! Are you idiots listening to anything I have been teaching you!!!” But King points out that this was not Jesus’ response.

Jesus shows no impatience. Jesus does not get angry. Instead, Jesus questions them as to whether they now what they are asking. They say they do. Jesus informs them that the positions they seek are not his to grant. The other disciples find out what James and John asked and get really ticked. (Probably because they didn’t think to ask first.) Then Jesus explains how any of them can earn the highest positions:

"You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." Mark 10:42b-45 (NIV)

As King notes, every single one of us has the desire to be out front. We want to be the one who gets noticed. We want to lead the band. What King astutely points out is that Jesus does not condemn this longing! No, Jesus says “Go for it! Seek to be the very best; better than all the others. Here is how you do it: give up all your demands and wants and become the servants of everyone around you. Go for it!” Jesus turns the whole thing inside out and upside down. If we want to be seated on the left and right hand of God, then it is in our “self-interest” to become the servant of everyone else. Jesus loves and wants ambitious people.

Think about some of Jesus' other teachings. In Matthew 7 Jesus said, “Do not Judge …” Why? “… so that you may not be judged.  For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.” Is this not a direct appeal to our self-interest; the avoidance of judgment?

In Matthew 16:25-26, Jesus teaches:

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

Is not the point here that our soul is more valuable then ownership the whole world? Therefore, it is in our “self-interest” to protect our soul and avoid being deluded my worldly enticements?

What did Jesus say was the second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor and hate yourself?” No. “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” We love both neighbor AND self. The way we best do this is by making the choices available to us in our contexts that are most in keeping with God’s character and values. We love our neighbors and ourselves when we seek what God seeks for our neighbors and ourselves. It is in our “self-interest” to be other-centered.

Now Adam Smith wrote of “enlightened self-interest.” As Christians we believe that true enlightenment comes from God through the Word and the community of believers. People operating according Spirit illumined self-interest will ALWAYS bring far greater degrees of shalom than any coercive force used to compel good behavior. The practice of Spirit illumined self-interest in the marketplace, and in every other sphere of life, is precisely what it means to give witness to the Kingdom of God. It is this demonstration that will bend the will of people in the culture toward God.

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Theology and Economics: The Church

If families are the primary inculcators of virtue and values, and we live in a fallen world, how is that fallen families become cells of virtuous and righteous behavior? How is it that fallen human beings become eikons of God? The answer is the Church.

The purpose of the Church is not “ministries” and worship services. The purpose of the Church is the transformation of people into citizens of the Kingdom of God; into eikons bearing the image of the creator. The Church accomplishes this by being an effective “plausibility structure.” Plausibility structures are communities we look to for confirmation of the veracity of our perspectives and behaviors.

From beginning to end, the scripture teaches that human societies are corrupted with human illusions that lead us away from God and being eikons of God. The work of God in the world is disillusionment. God disillusions us from the deception that is around us and opens us up to the reality of who God is and what God is doing in the world. God’s first and foremost tool in this disillusionment is the Church.

The Church is to be a plausibility structure that points to a reality that is coming but has not yet fully unfolded. The way Christians behave toward one another is the example to the world, imperfect as it is, of what God intends. Through grace and sacrificial love (not power and compulsion) the church shows the love of God in the world, bending the hearts and wills of people to a relationship with God. The work of the Spirit through the opening of the Word, the practice of the sacraments, and participation in community (i.e., plausibility structure) transforms people into restored eikons of God. These restored eikons, who are dispersed throughout the community, bring their values and righteousness into every crack and crevice of human society. This includes first and foremost the family. But it also directly impacts the economic aspects of society; the innate human activity of having dominion over the world. A society populated with people who have internalized virtuous and righteous behavior (and raise there young with those values), who honor subsidiarity, and who put their values to work in a democratic society with free markets, have the greatest potential for amplifying individual freedom, healthy community, prosperity, and justice.

Scot McKnight writes the following (emphases are the McKnight's):

The central creed in life for Judaism, which Jesus slightly amended, was this:

Hear of Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord is One. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.

To which Jesus added:

And the second is this Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.

(author’s translations)

What Jesus is calling for in the Jesus Creed, for us to love God and others, is the purpose of the gospel. God restores us so we will become loving. Loving God with heart, soul, and mind is fairly easy to grasp, but what might it mean for us to love God “with all our strength’? This expression, I am suggesting, opens up the opportunity for us to consider the mission of the gospel.

The word “strength,” moedeka in Hebrew, means more than physical strength and more than just our body. It is not intended to describe weightlifters or the crisp cuts of the young. Instead, “strength” refers to our “externalities,” to our “resources,” to what we do in the physical world that can be seen, touched, smelled, and tasted. When we read “with all your strength,” instead of thinking of fitness shows on TV we should think of everything we see and touch and taste in the world.

In other words, to love God “with all your strength” means that we are to love God with everything we do, everything we say, with everything we touch, with everything we smell, with everything we eat or choose not to eat, with everything we buy and don’t buy, with everything we own, with everything we make, with every cultural establishment, with every social institution and with every global structure …. and on and on.

And, because it concerns how we love the whole created order, the gospel is a holistic work of God. The gospel unleashes a cycle of grace that is extended to the entire created order. If God embraces the entire created order in his plan, then we too are invited to join him. (1)

Imagine what the world would look like if a community of people who loved God with all their “strength” were on display in every aspect of human existence, feeding their values into the dynamic and empowering systems of democracy and free markets, exponentially magnifying the impact of their decisions throughout the world. But also imagine what the world would look like where a community of people driven by selfishness fed their values into the system with the same magnifying power.

That brings us to an important differentiation that needs to be made between two frequently confuse terms: Selfish and self-interest.

(1) Scot McKnight, Embracing Grace: A Gospel for the Rest of Us, Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2005. 75-76.

(Note: I stole the word "eikons" form reading Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog. However, after having own "Embracing Grace" for about four months I finally go around to reading it. I was stunned at the similarities in what he wrote with significant portions of what I have been writing in this series. The book is great and I highly recommend it!)

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And Then There Were Eight

We are down to the quarter finals now in the World Cup. It was a very interesting second round. Germany just keeps sailing on through. England still looked flat but fortunately for them, Beckham can still bend ‘em. Argentina prevailed in a hard fought battle over Mexico with an incredible goal by Maxi Rodriguez. I tuned in to the fights one afternoon and a soccer game broke out between Portugal and the Netherlands (A tied record of 16 cards handed out). Italy stole the game in the last seconds on questionable penalty kick call against the Aussies. Switzerland and the Ukrainians both did their best not win in a scoreless game decided in a shoot out. Despite losing 3-0 Ghana showed they were for real against the favored Brazil. France managed to pull it together against Spain.

So here is where we stand with the teams I am cheering for in bold.

June 30

Germany vs Argentina
Italy vs Ukraine

July 1

England vs Portugal
Brazil vs France (Argh! Can they both lose?)

Go With Strengths

I recently read Reggie McNeal's The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church. There is a lot of good stuff in this book. One topic he touched on, which I am very passionate about, was developing our strengths instead of being obsessed with our weaknesses.

As a component of a spiritual preparation architecture, strengths include both strengths awareness and strengths building. The focus on strengths as a preparation for the future runs counter-intuitive to what most Americans think. Most of us believe the best way for us to improve is to engage in some form of self-remediation (lose weight, stop a bad habit).

Our culture focuses on weaknesses. If a child comes home from school with a report card of four A’s and on C, what does the discussion typically center on? Often we tell children they need to spend more time on the things that come the hardest to them, leaving underdeveloped those talents that are most natural. We do this because we have been taught that only what comes hard counts. So we wind up helping people spend lots of time trying to develop talents they don’t have. We also try to “balance” people out. Balance is a myth. I do not know a single balanced leader. In fact, leaders by definition are imbalanced people. They are “out of round” in the areas of their passion, their giftedness, and their vision.

Your best shot at making your best contribution is for you to get better at what you are already good at. God called you, not in spite of who you are (this is such a prevalent view) but precisely because of who you are. Your strengths (the development of your talent with experience) provide a clue to your calling and ministry assignment. When we ignore them we degrade the work of God in us. When we focus only on fixing weaknesses we tell God his gifts are not an important part of who we are. Our efforts at mending ourselves are a form of idolatry, another evidence of our trying to be God. Only he has all the talent. I am talking about talent, not character, which we should obviously strive to improve. (111-112)

Clearly we should not ignore our weaknesses and McNeal goes on to say more about this. However, our focus should be on our strengths and on appreciating other people’s strengths.

"Wage debate should focus more on skills" Mary Sanchez

Wage debate should focus more on skills is an excellent commentary on the minimum wage by Mary Sanchez in the Kansas City Star. The minimum wage issue is one of the most frequently used topics for demagoguery but both our political parties. I think Sanchez does a great job of framing the issues.

And yet, so many politicians seem bent on continuing to argue solely for higher wages for the low-skilled. They should be arguing for giving people higher skills, not more money for low skills that could soon be obsolete anyway.

Theology and Economics: Subsidiarity

(Sorry for the two week intermission on this topic. In case you forgot where we were, here is the index. I intend to devote most of my efforts (with some interruptions) to wrapping this series up fairly soon.)

I ended the last post by asking the following questions:

But where do the morals and values come from that are so critical to both government and economy doing the maximum good? Where is the human will shaped?

To answer to this question effectively we need to introduce the idea of subsidiarity.  Subsidiarity views society as a set of interwoven institutions. These institutions can be viewed as existing in a set of concentric circles. At the center is the most elemental of institutions, the family. At the outside of the concentric circles is the national government. (We could likely put international institutions as ring even beyond this.) Emanating outward from the family are a variety of intermediate institutions with each succeeding ring being more distant in personal involvement and knowledge of individuals and families. Close in to the family might be congregations, schools, or voluntary associations. More removed might be local government and Universities. Still more removed might be corporations and state governments.

Subsidiarity holds that each institution from family, to intermediate institutions, to national government, have important roles to play but each institution should only undertake initiatives which are beyond the capacity of private individuals and families, or lower order institutions in addressing their concerns. The concept is explicitly present in a number of institutions, not the least of which is US Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Presbyterian Church USA has as part of its Constitution:

The jurisdiction of each governing body is limited by the express provisions of the Constitution, with powers not mentioned being reserved to the presbyteries, and with the acts of each subject to review by the next higher governing body. (Book of Order, G-9.0103)

One of the most influential articulations of subsidarity came from Pope Leo XIII in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. The Pope was wrestling with totalitarian impulses of laissez-faire capitalism and rising socialism. The one led to the total domination of life by the economic institutions and the other to the domination of life by the government. It was argued the family and the individual, along with their voluntary intermediate institutions, have primacy. The more macro institutions exist in support of them. Individuals and families do not exist at the pleasure of, or in service to, the state or the economy. Higher level institutions are expected to maintain safe boundaries for lower order institutions and they are to interfere with more elemental institutions only when the lower level institutions become broken, always with the objective of restoring them to health.

Implicit in the idea of subsidiarity is the idea that the family, supported by its voluntary associations, is the primary place for moral instruction and shaping of the individual’s will. Why? Because the family is the institution most intimately in relationship with the individual. It is made up of the people who know a child the best and are most likely to have the child’s best interests at heart. They are the ones who are most likely to be able to bend the child’s will toward virtuous behavior through loving relationships.

“But families are imperfect and many are not healthy” the critic complains. This is true. In some cases, intervention by higher order institutions is necessary to safeguard individuals from unhealthy families. However, let us remember that with each succeeding ring we move away from the individual and family in our circles of institutions, we move to institutions who will view the individual less and less intimately and be more prone to view individuals as abstract realities. These institutions often have interests that are contrary to any given individual’s best interest. Sin is every bit as much present in other institutions as it is in individuals and families. Yet, as the maxim says “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There is a profound tendency for institutions with power to try to extend that power into arenas that are nor their responsibility. Witness the common thread from Stalin, to Hitler, to Mao, to Pol Pot, to any number of utopian government schemes that have as a common theme the elimination of family structures so that the state can have unfettered access to the formation of individuals.

Subsidiarity demands respect of boundaries for various institutions but it also recognizes the human inclination to corruption. As Christians, we also recognize that the family is the only institution established by God prior to the fall. The idea of exercising dominion over the earth would seem to anticipate the creation of human structures to achieve these ends but these all emanate from the enviable institution of the family. The family is the default locus of moral instruction and internalization of virtue. When families generate people with internalized virtue, the virtue is then amplified through the exceptional mechanisms of democracy and free markets. When families generate people without virtue, their values are amplified just as well.

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And Then There Were Sixteen

We are through the first round of World Cup play and there are now sixteen teams left. Here are the match ups for second round play. Bold indicates the teams I am cheering for, not necessarily the ones I think will win.

June 24, 2006

Germany vs Sweden
Argentina vs Mexico

June 25, 2006

England vs Ecuador
Portugal vs Netherlands

June 26, 2006

Italy vs Australia
Switzerland vs Ukraine

June 27, 2006

Brazil vs Ghana
Spain vs France

Watch Out Where You WiFi

Wireless Freeloader Charged Because He Never Bought Coffee is an interesting story.

A Vancouver, Wash. coffee shop tired of seeing a 20-year-old man mooch off their free wireless Internet access called the police, who charged him with "theft of services."

Koster Presbyterian Outlook Article

How It Is That the General Assembly Did Not Authorize “Local Option” is an interesting article in the Presbyterian Outlook about the PUP report implications by presbytery stated clerk Edward Koster.

Koster notes that the line about review by governing bodies was altered to read:

Whether the examination and ordination and installation decision comply with the constitution of the PCUSA, and whether the ordaining/installing body has conducted its examination reasonably, responsibly, prayerfully, and deliberately in deciding to ordain a candidate for church office is subject to review by higher governing bodies.

The underlined portion is the part that was changed on the floor. It made clear that the higher governing denominational courts could review not only the process but the content of the decision. Koster believes that this closes the a "loophole" that allows presbyteries to ordain anyone they see fit. I agree that the additions to the statement were postive and helpful but I am unpersuaded that they accomplish what Koster has concluded.

We have said to the presbyteries/sessions that they may discern what is essential and grant scruples accordingly. If a presbytery/session using sound procedures opts to ordain someone who has a scruple that is contrary to the constitution, then there is no basis on which to reverse their decision. Compliance may be reviewed, but simple lack of compliance can not be a basis for reversal, otherwise why have the scruple process in the first place? Nothing in the constitution is essential unless a presbytery/session says it is, otherwise we would not be allowing them to "scrupple" any and all parts of the Constitution. With no denominational statement as to what is essential, on what basis would a higher judicatory challenge a presbytery's or congregation's decision?

Effectively, the higher judcatories may only review constitutional compliance for questions that relate to some unarticulated scruple that did not recieve approval. As I read it, declared scruples accepted by a presbytery/session are untouchable by the higher governing body with regard to constitutional compliance. The higher judicatories  have abdicated their authority to contradict what a presbytery/session says is essential. Consequently, we have established the prospect of 173 versions of the essential tenets of the reformed faith for ministers of the word and sacrament and 11,000 for elders and deacons. With the confusion and chaos these changes will create, the PUP report needs to be relabled the "Presbyterian Lawyers Full Employment Act."

Go Ghana!

I went over to Arrowhead Stadium Pavillion this morning to watch the USA lose to Ghana 2-1. Italy beat the Czechs and all the USA had to do was win in order to advance. The refs made another terrible call that gave Ghana a penalty kick and a goal. However, I don't think that was the primary reason for their loss and elimination from the World Cup. The primary reason for their elimination is that they are at as good as the teams they are playing.

Ghana is an interesting story. They are the only African nation left in World Cup heading into the sweet 16. They keep defying everyone's expectations. They will play powerhouse (and #1 ranked) Bazil next. Ever the cheerleader for the underdog, I will be pulling for Ghana. (Actually I am cheering for ABB: Anyone but Brazil.)

I have put a photo album of today's event in Kansas City in the right column.

Man Pledged Millions To Church, In Trouble

I know many of you do not (yet) subscribe to Presbyweb but there is an article there you have to see. The stuff around the assembly just keeps getting more bizarre. Denver TV station 4 has run the following story about Stanely Anderson who announced a gift of $150 million to the PCUSA: Man Pledged Millions To Church, In Trouble

A Denver businessman and elder with the Presbyterian Church (USA) who promised to donate a record $150 million to the church owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to creditors and has had his assets frozen, according to public records reviewed by The Denver Post.

Stanley W. Anderson, 62, said Tuesday he was working to pay off his debts and was confident he could pay the donation he pledged last week in Birmingham, Ala.

......

"If he says he will deliver it, he will deliver it," Detterick said. "I have complete faith in his integrity."

The PCUSA "Dissent" into Chaos

The General Assembly of the PCUSA has just approved the Peace Unity and Purity Report at the General Assembly. What this means now is that what were once constitutional mandates are now optional if a presbytery or session believes them not to be part of the essential tenets of the of the Reformed Faith. Keep in mind that no list of essential tenants exists. Each presbytery and session makes those up as they see fit. We are to comply with optional standards discerned from non-existent essential tenets. In other words, the General Assembly has inflicted utter chaos upon the denomination. The dissenters have succeeded in swaying the majority. How terribly sad and needless.

“Making Freedom a Reality: Estonia's Path from Communism to the Free Market” Dr. Mart Laar

“Making Freedom a Reality: Estonia's Path from Communism to the Free Market” is a speech given by Dr. Mart Laar, former Prime Minister of Estonia, at the Acton Institute event I attended last week. Laar was 32 years old when he became prime minister after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. In this speech he describes the implementation of free market economics and its impact on Estonia. You can listen to his 36 minute presentation by clicking here. Unfortunately you can't see the great slide show he had along with his presentation.

Will Team USA Survive?

Having been out of town at a meeting that consumed my every waking moment Tuesday through Friday of last week, I have been unable to keep up with my everything I wanted to write about. Top among those issues was Team USA and the World Cup.

A week ago today the USA played their first game against the Czech Republic. The Czechs showed up and the officials show up, but Team USA appeared to be present in body only. The USA lost in an uninspired performance. Saturday was the second game of the series. This time Italy showed up and Team USA showed up, but the officials were missing. The officiating was horrendous. The officials robbed Italy of a likely goal by calling an offsides on a guy who was onside by at least a couple of yards. They gave a red card (appropriately so) to an Italian player who bashed a guy in the face with his elbow during the first half. But later they gave a USA player the red card (near the end of the first half) for a slide tackle that was at most a yellow card and (in my estimation) a mere foul. There were a host of other inconsistent calls throughout the game. That reduced the teams to ten players each. Then, early in the second period, a USA player comitted his second yellow card offense of the series and was ejected from the game. The USA went on to play Italy, a dominant world class team, to a 1-1 tie and nearly beat them, playing 9 men to 10 most of the second half. A pretty impressive feat!

It turns out that the referee was suspended from the 2002 World Cup because of complaints by other referees about his inconsistent officiating in games before the World Cup. Ahem... FIFA...We came to watch "futbol," not refs. A few adjustments please?

Anyway, if the USA team that showed up on Saturday shows up on Thursday against Ghana (who just upset the #2 ranked Czechs), and there is some decent officiating, I think the USA will win. If so, all they need is for Italians to bump of the pesky Czechs in the second game to advance to the final 16.

Thursday moring I am expecting to head over to Arrowhead Stadium and watch the game with other soccer fanatics. I'll probably stay for the Italy vs Czech game afterword. I am planning to take my camera and may post  a few shots if I take any good ones.

The Sad Irony of the PUP Recommendations

Two and one quarter centuries ago the founders of the United States secured their independence from Great Britain. Then came the ominous task of developing a form of government. The states initially created the Articles of Confederation. Under this form of government each state could chose whether they would participate in the new nation. They could dissolve their relationship if they deemed it in their best interest. Furthermore, since there was little central authority, if a state had a scruple with some aspect of the Articles they simply didn’t comply. There was no means of enforcement. It was entirely up to the each state to determine to what degree they would comply. As any student of American History knows, the Articles of Confederation were unqualified failure.

After ten years of struggling with the Articles the founders created the present Constitution. What is not often not fully appreciated is the impact the Presbyterian’s Reformed idea of sphere sovereignty (called subsidiarity in the Roman Catholic tradition) had on the formation of Constitution. The concept holds that there are institutions (ex., family, government, church) each with its sovereignty over certain aspects of life. Deeply embedded in the concept is the assumption of sin and the tendency for power to breed corruption. By separating powers into sovereign spheres it reduces the possibility of a totalitarian power seizing control of society’s institutions. The challenge is to develop a system that both honors the sovereignty of each sphere and allows for intervention by one sphere into another sphere for the restoration of justice when corruption emerges. This Reformed thinking entered directly into the discussion about balance of power between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, as well as the balance of power between states and the federal government. The framers learned from the Ariticles of Confederation that there must be some centralized authority to compel compliance with essential issues. The ratification of the Constitution was the states affirmation of the federal government's authority on these key issues. Of so much influence was Presbyterian Reformed thought on the founding documents that some historians have referred to the American Revolution as the Presbyterian Revolution.

There have been many divisive issues for Presbyterianism over the past two centuries. Slavery, fundamentalism and women in ministry are just a few. From the beginning, our Presbyterian system has allowed for considerable exercise of conscience. With that conscience has come considerable responsibility. It is perfectly acceptable for a Presbyterian to dissent from the majority and work for change through persuasion of others, but there is a caveat: The decisions of the majority are to be honored and willfully obeyed. If one does not agree with the majority and can not in good conscience abide by the decisions as they work for reform, then they are to leave the denomination.

Over the past thirty years the central issue that has gripped Presbyterianism is homosexuality. A significant number of those advocating the acceptance of homosexual behavior have done anything but live by the model I just described. They have openly rebelled, disrupted General Assembly meetings, defied the Constitution, and some judicial commissions have made a mockery of simple logic in adjudicating cases. Furthermore, the denominational authorities have usually done little in the face of open defiance. With this open defiance we should have had court cases and other actions that increasingly clarified the lines on these issues for the denomination. From there, the denomination would have been able to reflect and pray about the wisdom of the church’s positions. Instead, what we have had is an ever escalating power struggle as those in the minority who have not gotten their way through majority votes at the General Assembly and have not embodied their interpretation within the body politic, have resorted to procedural tactics and manipulation of processes to force their minority position on the denomination.

The crisis of the PCUSA is not rooted in homosexuality and ordination standards. We have always had controversial issues and always will. The crisis of the PCUSA lies in the unwillingness of a vocal minority to abide by their Presbyterian vows to live peaceably within the denomination or withdraw. It is exacerbated by the absence of resolve by our highest judicatories to hold people accountable.

The answer to the present crisis is clarity and accountability. What the PUP report offers is confusion and chaos. Some have suggested that the PUP report merely encourages us to trust presbyteries with making discernments about circumstances that may be at the edge of constitutional boundaries and trust presbyteries in those decisions. It doesn’t. We already do that. What it does is give each presbytery the power to decide which parts of the Constitution it deems essential and whether it will abide by those portions of the Constitution. The higher governing bodies will be prohibited from reviewing content and restricted to reviewing process. Rather than presbyteries deciding about issues at the margins the Constitution becomes a cafeteria buffet from which each presbytery selects which items it will take.

The parallel to the forming of the United States and the present crisis of the PCUSA should be clear. The PCUSA is contemplating a devolution from a constitution to an articles of confederation. It is grounded in the same idealistic utopian hope the writers of the Articles of Confederation had that we can make it work if we just trust each other to do the right things. After centuries of living under a constitution that has wisely recognized the issues of sphere sovereignty, and transferring that powerful insight to the American experiment, the PCUSA is now willing to sell its birthright because of a vocal minority and a leadership that abdicates its responsibility. How ironic.

Acton University: Day Three

On the final day of the Acton University I attended the following:

• “Urban Ministry and the Enterprise of Private Charity” Rudy Carrasco
• “Evangelical Social Thought: An Emerging Discourse” John Nunes
• “Christianity and Social Justice: 10 Economic Lessons for Teachers” Stephen Haessler
• “Knowing Good Works: Guidelines for Effective Compassion” Fred De Jong
• “Entrepreneurial Vocation” Robert A. Sirico

This has really been a great event. It was very professional and informative. I have made some new friends from around the world and the US. I have especially appreciated the civil tone that is used in all the events. Presbyterian events of right and left could stand to learn a great deal about civil discourse from this international community of Roman Catholics, Mainliners and Evangelicals.

The New PCUSA Moderator

Atlanta pastor is elected moderator is news release about the newly elected moderator of the PCUSA, Rev. Joan Gray of Atlanta. If you were reading along with the Leading from the Center series I did, she seems to me to be the ideal candidate of the institutional loyalists.

PCUSA Given $150 Million

Surprise announcement electrifies Assembly is an article by the PCUSA News Service about a $150,000 gift that has been made to the PCUSA. It appears that money is to made for Presbytery initiatives in the form of matching funds grants. I was really thrilled about this until I realized that last month I agreed to serve on the GAC Restricted Funds Oversight Committee which oversees the allocation of restricted donations to the denomination. I see mountains of funding proposals on my horizons. *grin* Truthfully though, what better "problem" could you ask for?

Acton University: Day Two

On the menu for day two at the Acton University :

• “Introduction to the Rule of Law and Limited Government” by Anthony Bradley
• “Introduction to Globalization” by Doug Bandow
• “Spirituality, Homiletics and the Marketplace: Seminar on Pastoral Care” by Ren Broekhuizen
• “Making Freedom a Reality: Estonia’s Path from Communism to the Free Market” by Mart Laar (Former Prime Minister of Estonia)

The presentation by Larr was really exceptional. I wish I had time to share some reflections on the many discussions I have been a part of.

One thing I have to admit that continues to baffle me about so many pastors and seminarians is this: Why is it so difficult to see the rational creative work of the entrepreneur of combining and managing resources to create wealth is, in and of itself, an act of ministry before God. The only thing these pastors seem to be able to see about the role of the business person is the money they make and the opportunity they then have to give to the poor or the church. The ministry these people do by taking enormous risks to bring into reality entities that create wealth and employ people in the effective satisfaction of customer needs is utterly incomprehensible. I don’t get it.

Acton University: Day One

The first day of lectures is over at the Acton University Symposium. Today I attended:

• "Christian Anthropology: Freedom and Virtue" by Dr. Samuel Gregg
• "The Economic Way of Thinking" by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
• "Theories of Government, the Church, and Civil Society Professor" Anthony Bradley

Tonight we heard from Frank Hanna, CEO of HBR Capital, Ltd., in Atlanta:

The Desire to Do Well and to Do Good: The Necessary Harmony Between Creativity and Virtue.

It has all been good stuff but even better are the people I have been meeting. There are about 230 people in attendance and forty nations are represented. I had breakfast with a retired couple who has been directly involved in economic development dating back to the 1950s and the Marshall plan. I attended two classes and ate a lengthy lunch with Edward who is a pastor (and an entrepreneur) in Kenya. I ate dinner this evening with a women who is an intellectual property lawyer in California. Yesterday I met a woman who is working against sex trafficking in Europe, another women who is from the Vatican, and a guy who is studying law in Poland. There are a number of seminary students here. Floating around the hallways somewhere is the former Prime Minister of Estonia.

In the down time (which isn’t much) I get back to my room and watch World Cup Soccer. Economics, theology, and world class soccer. It doesn’t get much better than this!

AWOL in Grand Rapids

I have flown the coup and landed in Grand Rapids where I will be attending a three day long event called "Toward a Free and Virtuous Society." I will be returning early Saturday morning. That also means I will not be in Birmingham. I have already met people here from Poland, Hungary, England and Boston (A truly foreign country from a Kansas City perspective.) I will check in from time to time to let you know how it is going but I am suspending my substantive posts until next week. (I want to my Theology and Economics Post series finished.)

I assure I will be keeping tabs on the various matches yet to be played out over the next few days but I figure when I tire of following the PCUSA I can always watch World Cup. *grin*

USA Handed a Czech Blank: 3-0

The number 2 ranked Czech Republic handed number 5 ranked USA a 3-0 defeat in World Cup play. The USA looked like a bunch of Presbyterians at a Pentecostal revival meeting: Nervous, lifeless and uninspired. They better figure out something by Saturday or they will have a much truncated stay in Germany.

Theology and Economics: A Matter of Will

I have made the case that free market capitalism is not a guarantor of just economic outcomes. The synergy of property rights, scientific rationalism, and capital markets, joined with technology and infrastructure, are more correctly understood as powerful amplifiers of human actions and values. Condemning the “technology” of free market capitalism for evil that occurs in the economy is akin to blaming airplane technology for the atrocities of 9/11. Is there something inherent in airplane technology that leads to the willful destruction of tall buildings? At issue is the will of those using the technology.

Our Christian anthropology tells us two very important things about humanity. First, we were created in the image of God. We were created as economic beings who “work the garden” as stewards for the owner. This working of the garden was not just for conservation but creative development and improvement. We participate as creative beings in community with a creative God. Economic activity is at the very core of our identity.

Second, humanity is in a state of rebellion. We are out of community with God and have substituted our personal proclivities for creation stewardship. Therefore, whether acting individually or collectively, we are prone to rebellion and corruption. So how might God address this dilemma?

One clear option is to simply annihilate humanity and start over. God has not chosen this option although the story of Noah makes clear he considered it. A second option is for God to compel right behavior. God could set in place consequences so negative for rebellious behavior that no one would dare disobey. Or more efficiently, God could simply alter our minds so that we become automatons obeying his every instruction. This clearly would get “good behavior” but at what cost? God’s vision, as expressed in scripture, is the desire for a humanity living in loving community with the triune God. If one chooses to honor God only out of fear of retribution, or if one is completely stripped of volition, can there truly be love toward God? Inherent in love is the ability to choose love.

If the story of the gospel is anything, it is the story of God’s desire for loving community with humanity. He achieves that loving community by bending our will to him through costly grace. He tolerates and greets our outrageous rebellion against him with inconceivable acts of love and compassion, ever hoping that to win us over.

This is not to say that God abides complete lawlessness. Scripture makes clear that God has established earthly authorities to give order and to punish evil doers. There are limits to the evil tolerated but within those limits are a broad range of choices that allow for limitless good and varying degrees of evil. God sets boundaries that provide us with opportunity to choose the good. However, God does not coerce us into good behavior. In the words of G. K. Chesterton, God “…makes room for good things to run wild.”

We can certainly conceive of dystopian worlds where people “do good” in response to totalitarian control of their lives. But this is not "doing good" any biblical sense. It is merely avoiding punishment. There is no opportunity to choose the good and therefore “doing good” is never internalized. There is no transformation of the will. Lift the restraints and the good will end. For Christians, this is an unacceptable path to achieving good. God is more about right relationship than right behavior.

Right behavior will naturally flow out of right relationship. Our wills must be bent toward doing good. We must have freedom to act on our transformed will for sound values to become internalized. We must not only ask about which systems work most efficiently or effectively, but also which systems nurture people into internalizing just values and acting on them.

In order for a diverse and complex economic system like free market capitalism to do sustained good and to promote economic justice, it must have as its participants people who have internalized justice and good. They are the ones shaping the economic order, not some central authority. Therefore, while it is essential to have economic institutions that will amplify justice and good, these institutions alone are insufficient.

Democratic government gives us legitimate boundaries within which to do good. Free market capitalism gives us the greatest system ever devised for integrating and coordinating masses of people into a highly adaptive and effective economic life together. But where do the morals and values come from that are so critical to both government and economy doing the maximum good? Where is the human will shaped?

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The World Gone MAD!!!

Is it the Avian flu?

Has an evil scientist found a way to make billions go crazy?

Has global warming finally overheated human brains?

No! Its just the FIFA World Cup! Thirty-two nations, thirty days, and one World Cup.

Today begins that quadrennial leap into soccer madness. So as an American who has been playing and watching soccer for thirty years (much more watching than playing in recent years), I feel it is incumbent upon me to get my American friends up to speed.

You can follow the World Cup by clicking on my World Cup logo at the top of the right sidebar. For Team USA info just click here. Team USA is ranked in a tie for 5th out of the thirty-two teams along with Spain. Ahead of them are Brazil, Czech Republic, Netherlands and Mexico.

I have selected three video clips for your viewing pleasure. First, for all those snobbish Yanks who look down their nose at soccer, I give you this Nike ad.

Second, here is 3.5 minutes of Team USA qualifying play highlights.

Finally, here is a great Pepsi commercial with David Beckham.

Now, let us all stand together and sing the international soccer anthem.

Ooohlay
Ohlay Ohlay Ohaly
Oohlaaaay
Oohlaaaay....

(Let the games begin!)

Theology and Economics: Is Capitalism Christian?

Is free market Capitalism Christian? Any discussion of theology and economics is bound to arrive at this question sooner or later. There are at least three ways of interpreting the question.

If the question is whether or not free market capitalism is the biblically prescribed model for the economic life, then the answer is an emphatic “No.” There is no culturally transcendent economic model given in the bible. Therefore, no economic model is Christian. Those that would take capitalism (or any other economic system) down to the river and baptize it as THE Christian model engage in idolatry.

If the question is whether or not free market capitalism emerged from a society with a distinctively Christian ethos, then the answer would clearly be “Yes.” The ideas of human beings created in the image of God, linear time, progress, future orientation, and vision oriented ethics, were the soil from which capitalism grew. This is NOT to say that free market capitalism is the best of all economic systems that can, or ever will be, conceived. It is merely to acknowledge the roots from which it sprang.

The third way of interpreting this question is to evaluate the degree to which free market capitalism moves us in the direction of the coming age of shalom. It is this evaluation that has to be asked about every human construction, always with an eye to the fallen state of humanity and the inability to achieve utopia in our present age.

Detractors of free market capitalism have a litany of charges to file against the concept and readily denounce it as anti-Christian. Inequality of economic outcomes, exploitation of the economically vulnerable, environmental harm, and consumerism are just a few of the charges leveled. Examples of all the above clearly happen. Isn’t the presence of these realities evidence enough that free market capitalism is not Christian? Let us look at this by way of an analogy.

Cell phone technology has come into its own over the last decade or so. Because of the technology, people are able to stay in touch like never before. People are able to coordinate activities with each other from almost anywhere on the globe. Emergencies can more effectively be reported and responded to. We can now even catch news video and do text-messaging with this technology. It is made a marvelous contribution to human existence.

However, cell phones have also made it easier for unscrupulous governments to track the moves of unsuspecting citizens. It has contributed to automobile accidents by distracted cell phone users. It has needlessly interrupted countless concerts, worship services, and meetings. It is used by illicit lovers to make rendezvous and drug dealers to sale their goods. Recently captured terrorists in Canada were creating explosives that could be remotely detonated by cell phone. Isn’t the presence of these realities evidence enough that cell phones are not Christian?

Take an even more simple technology: The hammer. I can use it to hammer nails as I construct shelving in my basement, as I build a Habitat for Humanity home, or as I hang beautiful artwork on my wall. I could also use it to walk by the cars on my street and smash their windows. Hammers have also been used as murder weapons. Isn’t the presence of these realities evidence enough that hammers are not Christian?

Just like cellular technology and hammers, the institutions and practices of free market capitalism are tools that allow us to amplify and magnify human behavior. They amplify and magnify the good that we do. They also amplify and magnify the evil we do. They are not guarantors of moral outcomes. The moral outcomes are rooted in the users of the “technology” not the “technology” itself. It is one thing to acknowledge that evil can emerge from a technology and set appropriate boundaries for its use. It is another to conclude that the technology itself is evil.

We could eliminate any given technology and thereby eliminate its evil uses. Yet we also eliminate the good that it does along with it. There is no alternative technology that can not be used for evil. To point to the evils that occur within free market capitalist societies as the grounds for condemnation of the system itself is to live by the illusion that there exists some economic “technology” out their that will allow us to live in a state economic perfection.

No economic system is Christian because there is no economic system given in the Bible. No economic system is Christian in that no economic system can bring us into a state of perfect economic morality. We can only talk in terms of which options move us closer to, or further from, the vision of the New (Jeru)shalom.

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Kiva Update

A few weeks ago I wrote about two businesses I have made loans to through Kiva. One of the borrowers is Robert Ocora. Kiva is now linking a blog about Robert's efforts at Live in Africa.

Older, greener generation puts young to shame

Older, greener generation puts young to shame is an interesting article in the Telegraph.

Youngsters may claim to care most about the environment but in practice do the least to protect it, according to a study.

And a new demographic is born: The Geezer Greeners.

(Hat tip to Scott Gilbreath)

Theology and Economics: A Quick Review

The Vision and Mission of God

Visio Dei (Vision of God) - The triune God existing in prefect shalom with all creation, dwelling in perfect community with His animate eikons as they fill the earth and fulfill their call to be stewards of creation.

Missio Dei (Mission of God) - Reclaim and renew all creation by calling into community broken eikons, filling them with His presence and transforming them into imperfect but compelling exhibits of the visio dei, until shalom is fulfilled at Christ’s return.

Two Great Commandments

Without describing it as such, over the last three posts I have been writing about Jesus’ two great commandments, the ethical heart of the body of Christ.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” We are individually and corporately to have the mind and heart of God, thinking His thoughts and feeling His emotions, in all we do. We worship God primarily through the conformity of our being and action with His being and action.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” By being other-centered within the social structures of our particular contexts, we subvert “the powers” and infuse them with God's love.

The Triune Call

Individually and corporately we are called by God in three interrelated ways. (1) A call emanates from each person of the trinity, yet so integrated are they that each may be seen as emanating from all the trinity.

Call to Creation Stewardship - Father

God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." (Genesis 1:28)

Call to Kingdom Service – Son

And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." (Matthew 28:18-20)

Call to Exercise Gifts – Holy Spirit

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. (1 Corinthians 12:7-11)

Some  see an explicit expression of this triune call in 1 Corinthians 12:4-6:

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.  (TNIV)

Spirit – Gifts
Lord – Service
God – Works

Why Economics?

God has given us a narrative of His acts in history and that narrative points us to sound stewardship of His creation. It gives us a vision of what the ultimate outcome should look like (the New Jerusalem) even though we know it will not be realized until Christ’s return. The bottom line is this: All work that it is done out of reverence for God and in response to his call and purposes in the world, whether at the office or in the home, whether for profit or for no pay, is ministry! Creation stewardship is in fact the first ministry God ordained and it is the only call that extends into eternity. Evangelism and social justice are indeed essential works of the Church and part of our call to Kingdom service in this age. Kingdom service is only one piece of the triune call.

Interpretive Considerations

Craig Hill writes,

Believers today are employed at the same essential task as the New Testament authors, namely, the attempt to make sense of their world in light of God’s self-disclosure in Jesus. I call this the “But in Christ” project. Like us, the writers of the NT were located at particular moments in time and in specific cultural environments. Like us, they accepted much of their situation as a given; however, at certain points they realized that their situation as a given; however, at certain points they realized that their world was challenged by what they had seen of God in Christ. Those are the “But in Christ” moments. Yes, first-century this and first-century that about women, but in Christ “there is no longer male and female” (Gal. 3:28). I would contend that it is precisely at these junctures that the New Testament is most important and most revelatory.  (Craig C. Hill. In God's Time: The Bible and the Future. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Puclishing, Co., 2002. 26.)

Hill uses slavery as an example. To literally conform to the New Testament would require the sanctioning of slavery. The “But in Christ” points us on a trajectory that goes beyond the status quo of New Testament life.

Hill introduced the “but in Christ” concept. I want to expand it just a little bit further. Indeed there are many “but in Christ” explicit statements in the New Testament. But there are many other implied “but in Christ” cases in the New Testament and “but as God’s chosen people” cases in the Old Testament. Often the Israelites or Christians were given instruction that was counter to the surrounding culture without an explicit contrast being made to the those cultures. For instance, when the law was given in the Torah forbidding slavery among the Israelites, all the surrounding cultures practiced slavery. Such directives should be given special attention because they teach us that God was moving in a different direction.

By observing these “but” instances in conjunction with other instances in the scripture, we can often discern an arrow that points us on a trajectory from the story of the Bible, through our time, and on into the New Jerusalem.

Narrative Implications of Creation, Fall and Eschaton

Creation Implications

• Ultimate ownership of everything belongs to God.
• Individual human beings were made in God’s image but as community human beings give the fullest expression of God’s image. Any elevation of either individuality or community over the other gives a distorted picture of humanity.
• Human beings, both as individuals and communities, were made for stewardship of the earth on behalf of, and in community with, the triune God.
  
  There is no choice about being stewards for God. There is only the choice of just or unjust stewardship.
• The created world is important because God made it and values it.
• Human economic work (production, distribution and consumption of goods and services; activity concerned with the material welfare of humankind) pre-dated the fall and is at the center of humanity’s purpose.
• There is linear time and an unfolding purpose for creation.

Fall Implications

• Anomie - Human beings live in a state of disoriented lawlessness (what sociologists call “anomie”). Human beings were created to be stewards over creation under God. Through rebellion, they have been “cut loose from their mooring” in God. They are alienated from God, disoriented from personal meaning, and in conflict with neighbor and nature.
• Settled in the land of wandering - The achievement of autonomy by finite human beings is the height of absurdity. Yet human beings have cut themselves off from God, the only source of meaning. Consequently, as delusional as it may be, human beings are ever engaged in the enterprise of “making a home” (building civilization) for themselves that by definition is an illusion. They choose not to honor God and they can’t live without meaning.
• Autonomous community - At the root of sin and rebellion is the desire to live autonomously and eternally. The perpetuation of the community is what gives the illusion of immortality. Consequently, all alternative challenges to the illusionary “home” a community creates must be suppressed or meaning will be lost. Conquest and subjugation of all challengers, foreign and domestic, even nature itself, must be conquered.
• Autonomous individuality - The desire for individual autonomy is ever present with human beings and presents a challenge to community survival. Individuals are often faced with the dilemma of wanting total autonomy but needing community to have meaning. Thus, there is always a tension in every human society between conformity that perpetuates community and yet placates a desire for personal autonomy.
• Economic Exploitation - Since human beings were created to be stewards over the created world, economics is at the heart of human made civilization. The inclination is toward autonomous ownership by either individuals or the state.

Eschatological Implications

• The present mission and institution of the church is a temporary while the call to creation stewardship is intrinsic to what it means to be human from the beginning of the biblical narrative to the end.
• Christians live as dual citizens. We are citizens of the world in this present age but we are ultimately citizens of the New Jerusalem living proleptically in this age.
• The calls of creation stewardship, kingdom service and use of spiritual gifts are all equally present and incumbent upon on us in this age.
• Utopia, the full restoration of shalom, will come but it only will come at the time and in the way of God’s own choosing. No one knows the time and manner in which it happens.
• Despairing resignation is unfaithfulness to God and a denial of God’s transformative works in this age.
• Futurist activism is unfaithfulness to God and an attempt to usurp God’s transformative role in the world.
• Because of the promise of the eschaton from we are free from the temporal order and we are free to the temporal order. Precisely because our ultimate identity and meaning is not found in this age we are free from the seductive but unattainable vision of personal or social utopias. Furthermore, because we have nothing of ultimate value to lose in this age we are free to live in relation to the present world order in a way that honors God, even to the point of surrendering our very lives.

ECONOMIC RIGHTS AND ECONOMIC OBLIGATIONS

Justice

The biblical narrative teaches that human beings are made in the image of God. Because they are in God’s image each human being is entitled to expect dignity and respect. In our day, we have referred to this as having certain rights. This cuts two ways for any given individual. First, each person should have an expectation that their status as an image bearer will be respected. Second, each person is obligated to respect the image bearer status of others. There are both rights and obligations. This is also true when we think of the individual versus the community. The community should not disparage the image bearing character of individuals and yet individuals must have limits on their actions out of regard for fellow image bearers.

Justice is the right balance between these competing rights and obligations. For Christians it is not found in some codified morality. At it is root, justice is grounded in the shalom vision of the Kingdom of God or the New Jerusalem. There is no God ordained economic structure in the Bible. We have revelation of the character of God. We have a record of how God dealt with people in various ages. We have a vision of a coming age of shalom. From there we are instructed to discern what is right and good.

Economic Justice

There are essentially three aspects to economic justice:

1. Distributive Justice – Addresses how capital and goods are distributed throughout the society.
2. Commutative Justice – Addresses the truthfulness of parties to an economic exchange.
3. Remedial Justice – Addresses just compensation and punitive action when there has been malicious or careless damage done to life, liberty or property.

Jubilee Code

The Bible touches on all three types of economic justice but the portion of scripture that deals most directly with economic justice is found in the Sabbath and Jubilee Codes of the Old Testament. It is also the idea of jubilee that Jesus draws on to characterize the nature of his ministry in Luke Chapter 4.

The Jubilee is often characterized as a time of debt forgiveness. It was not. The Jubilee had more in common with modern lease agreements. The Jubilee was held every fifty years. Land could be “leased” to another for an amount equal to the amount of crops that would be harvested form the time of the “lease” to the time of the next Jubilee. All leases were set to expire at the jubilee. One’s labor could be sold on similar terms but slavery was not permitted between Israelites.

Jubilee Implications

The net effect was to ensure that each person and their descendants would never become permanently alienated from land and labor, the economic means of production. They would always have an ownership stake in God’s work. The practices of Sabbath and Jubilee would have been powerful reminders of who it was that gave them the land in the first place and from whom all prosperity comes. However, there is no evidence that the Israelites ever practiced Jubilee.

New Testament

Jesus says little about economic systems per se. Jesus’ focus seems have been to orient us to a coming day of shalom and then have us reason back to our own circumstances what is just and good.

THE CAUSES OF PROSPERITY

Many ask what causes poverty when in fact poverty is the natural state in to which we are born. The real question is what causes prosperity. Economic historians vary some in their perspectives on which factors were more important than others but William J. Bernstein’s analysis isolates four factors that most economists would agree are central.

Four Factors

Property Rights – Individuals have to have a reasonable hope that the fruits of their labors will not be arbitrarily taken or destroyed. Otherwise, why invest time and resources into productive efforts. Property rights tie in with the idea of respect for the intrinsic value of each individual and their right to enjoy the fruits of their labor and decisions. It also ensures better and productive use of societal resources than communal ownership does. With private ownership almost all property is the focused attention of someone while communal ownership generally inspires people to take no more responsibility for property than they have to get by. Resources become grossly underdeveloped and employed.

Scientific Rationalism – Precise knowledge of how the world operates generates enormous power to manipulate the world for specific ends. Superstition and tradition, while often giving a sense of order, can also inhibit creative innovation. The idea that God is a rational being operating with a purpose in the world spawned the rise of science.

Capital Markets – Most of human history has been limited to land and labor as the economic means of production. Large enterprises need ways to amass a large a number of resources and mobilize them toward a particular end. Banking systems emerged in Europe along with ideas of corporations and limited liability equity investing. Along with them have emerged institutions that facilitate the movement of capital from one place to another.

Technology and Infrastructure – Reliable infrastructure for transportation, communication and energy are essential for a prosperous society. The application of scientific rationalism and effective capital markets has ushered in an explosion of new technologies that over the past two centuries has made infrastructures faster, safer, and cheaper than anything imagined in the past.

Christian Ethos

Under girding all the development of these four factors in at least three ways has been the Christian ethos :

• Human Beings in the Image of God – Respect for individuals and their property deeply rooted in the Christian ethos.
• Linear Time and Progress – All other religions have tended to be oriented toward stories and laws written in the past. Christianity introduced an orientation of future world and used it as its organizing principle. The idea of progress is a distinctively Christian notion.
• Vision Driven Discernment – Jesus left us with no instruction manual. What he left us with was a vision. Discernment becomes based on having a vision of a coming age while looking through the eyes of Jesus’ followers at how Jesus communicated that vision into a particular context. From there we must reason as to what is appropriate for our context. This use of reason eventually spilled over into analysis and understanding of the world, giving birth to science as we know it.

The four factors of prosperity were not a cosmic accident. They were direct results of a Christian ethos.

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Theology and Economics: Prosperity and the Christian Ethos

Over the last several posts we have reviewed William J. Bernstein’s four factors that led to prosperity in the modern world.

• Property Rights
• Scientific Rationalism
• Capital Markets
• Technology and Infrastructure

Various cultures have seen the emergence of one or more of these for a period of time. The ancient Greeks had a form of property rights for few centuries in the first millennium BCE. The Muslims had some success with science and technology. But it is only in the West where we have seen these four factors emerge as an organic whole. All four factors are essential. Any three without the fourth will not lead to sustained prosperity.

Why did this happen only in the West? Did the West win the equivalent of some cosmic jackpot where all the pieces just came together? Or was there something unique to Western Civilization that gave rise to these engines of prosperity? I believe that far from being happenstance, the rise in prosperity is inextricably connected with the Christian ethos. Christianity brought three things to the Western way of “being” that have not existed elsewhere in human history: Individuals as the image of God, linear time and progress, and vision driven discernment.

Humans in the Image of God

I began this series writing about the concept of eikons and showed how the biblical narrative consistently puts forward a vision of an earth filled with images of God. Ancient Near East kings would erect totems or images (eikons) throughout their territory to symbolize their authority throughout the region. No doubt the first chapters of Genesis were calling this idea to mind when the first humans were called “images of God” and told to fill the earth. They would be God’s junior partners showing forth God’s authority throughout the world. Unlike wooden or stone eikons, these animated eikons would share the faculties of reason and creativity. As God’s eikons, each individual human being has intrinsic value. This perspective is novel to the Judeo-Christian heritage.

We see the impact of this thinking on property rights. The Old Testament code lifted up the private ownership of property not as a tool that serves the best interests of the state but as the rightly ordered state of affairs established by God. God calls us individually and corporately to be stewards of the created world. Property is to be held and used in trust for God not the state. Therefore, while ownership is not absolute, neither is it to be arbitrarily violated by the state or other powerful forces. Property ownership is intrinsic to the mission of being an eikon of God in the world.

Also, extending from this “image of God” idea is the notion of human rights. While we often have a hard time defining precisely what we mean by human rights, we do have the belief that people should not be deprived of freedom or killed arbitrarily. The Declaration of Independence eloquently says:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We have a sense of responsibility to those who, for whatever reason, are in need of basic necessities. People have great intrinsic value and should be treated as such. In an era of hyper-individualism, it is hard to appreciate just how profoundly exceptional this valuing of individuals is in human history. Property rights and human rights as we know them could not have emerged as we know them without the idea of humanity being in the image of God.

Linear Time and Progress

Human religions throughout history have had a cyclical view of time. Religious ritual was an exercise in honoring and appeasing the cycles of nature established the gods. Life is an endless progression of cycles.

One of the most striking features of the Jewish tradition is the notion of linear time. There was a beginning. Time is moving on a course from that beginning toward some destination. For the Israelites, the end of the story was when a messiah would bring shalom to the nation of Israel and lift the nation up to its place as God’s exalted people. From the human perspective, life was about remaining faithful to a covenant laid out by God. Jews looked backward toward a promise and a code as they processed through time in anticipation of future world.

Christ took this linear view of time and utterly transformed it. Jesus gave a vision of the future and called on his followers to orient their lives based on this future reality. They were to give evidence of the future reality in the present and transform the world by doing so. Rather than looking to the past and processing through time, Christians are called to progress through time in active anticipation of a future reality.

The idea of progress is so ubiquitous in our day that it is hard to imagine how astonishingly novel this is in human history. Without the idea of progress there would be little of the drive that has been behind so much scientific research and technological development. Capital markets and the long term orientation required to make them work, would not have emerged without people who were disciplined to think in terms of realizing a different future.

Vision Driven Discernment

I wrote above that apart from the Judeo-Christian heritage that religion has largely been about bringing life into conformity with the cycles of nature. Ordering of lives is achieved through adherence to a set of stories and rituals. The cycles and the codes give order to existence. We “look back” to see patterns in the cycles or we “look back” to the codes written long ago to determine appropriate action today. Even the monotheistic religions of Judaism and Islam have had this as a central element.

Jesus was completely disorienting. He reoriented our vision from compliance with the past to compliance with the future. Jesus gave a vision of the future (i.e, the consummated Kingdom of God or the New Jerusalem) and called his followers to live according that vision. Yes, he gave some prescriptive guidance but the organizing principle is a vision and the story that leads to that vision.

Jesus did not right anything down. As Rodney Stark observes:

Things might have been different had Jesus left a written scripture. But unlike Muhammad and Moses, whose texts were accepted as divine transmissions and therefore have encouraged literalism, Jesus wrote nothing down, and from the very start the church fathers were forced to reason as to the implications of a collection of his remembered sayings – the New Testament is not a unified scripture but an anthology. Consequently, the precedent for a theology of deduction and inference and for the idea of theological progress began with Paul “For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesy is imperfect.” Contrast this with the second verse of the Qur’an which proclaims itself to be “the Scripture whereof there is not doubt.” (1)

Not only did Jesus through scripture orient us toward the future, but by the very means through which he passed down his vision he ensured that we would have to be active participants in the creation and realization of the vision. Despite the endless attempts by some fundamentalist influences in Christianity to use scripture as a codified instruction manual for human behavior, the scripture resiliently resists being boxed in this package. It is an unfolding story with a beginning and end. Documentary evidence is given by the author of history about what is happening in the story. It is an invitation for humanity to enter the story and participate in its completion. One must interact with the story and understand each element in scripture in terms of its own context and the context of the larger story contained within scripture. It requires wrestling with a general but nonspecific ordering of the world in a future age. One has to deduce and infer appropriate action. In other words, instead of executing directives we must actively reason our way to good decisions, based on a story revealed by a reasonable God.

The necessity of reason in discerning God’s will has had ramifications beyond theology. The discipline of reason eventually turned to the investigation of the material world. If God is a reasonable God, then the world he created must be organized according to orderly principles. Therefore, we can systematically study and test ideas against reality until we determine the actual order of things. In other words, science. Without the discipline of reasoning our way to God’s vision, one has to question whether scientific rationality would ever have emerged.

Conclusion

Bernstein, as well as other economic historians, have done great work in identifying the factors that have led to our age of growing prosperity. What is rarely acknowledged (or only begrudgingly so) is that the factors that created the prosperity grew out of the ground of the Christian ethos and are inextricably rooted in it. Max Weber wrote his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism a hundred years ago claiming that free market capitalism grew out of the Protestant Reformation (It is still used as a textbook in seminaries today.) On the contrary, what economic historians and scholars like Rodney Stark have demonstrated is that the rise of free market capitalism predates the Reformation by centuries. In fact, one can see a slow and steady emergence from the fall of Rome to the present. The expansive growth in prosperity is directly rooted in the Christian ethos.

(1) Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, New York: Random House, 2005. 9.

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Theology and Economics: Technology and Infrastructure (Part 2)

The year is 1789 and you are living in Philadelphia. George Washington has just been elected president of the United States. You have always been one of George’s biggest fans. He just dropped by your house and appointed you secretary of state. How long will it before the rest of the country knows of your appointment from the newspapers?

Here is the average number of days you should expect to lapse before people in other cities hear of your good news:

Albany, NY = 20 Days
Baltimore, MD = 10 Days
Boston, MA =15 Days
Charleston, SC = 22 Days
New York, NY = 5 Days
Harrisburg, PA =15 Days
Lexington, KY = 57 Days
Pittsburgh, PA = 31 Days
Quebec City = 100 Days
Portland, ME = 20 Days (1)

Ten years later in 1800, you are living in the New York and decide to go on the lecture circuit about your experience as the secretary of state. Thirty years later in 1830, a biographer will retrace your steps. How long should you expect your commute will be to any given city versus how long your biographer’s commute will be to the same cities?

Albany, NY: 3 Days vs  2 Days
Boston, MA: 4 Days vs 2 Days
Charleston, SC: 2 Weeks vs 5 Days
Detroit, MI: 4 Weeks vs 1 Week
Louisville, KY: 4 Weeks vs 1 Week
New Orleans, LA: 4 Weeks vs  2 Weeks
Philadelphia, PA: 1 Day vs 1 Day
Pittsburgh, PA: 2 Weeks vs 4 Days
St. Louis, MO: 5 Weeks vs 2 Weeks (2)

Clearly improvements were happening in transportation in the early nineteenth century. Travel times declined considerably and average travel fares dropped by 50-80%. Still, as late as the 1840s transportation was very costly. The average non-farm laborer’s wage was about $1.00 a day and a free agricultural laborer’s wage was about $10.00 a month. Travel in the north would cost about 2.0-4.5 cents a mile and about 5.5-6.0 cents a mile in the south (where wages were about 50-75% of northern wages.) Furthermore, many of these trips required food and lodging expenses along the way. A roundtrip from Baltimore to New York could easily consume one month’s wages for a northern agricultural worker and two months or more for a similar person traveling similar distances in the south. (3)

I live in Kansas City, Missouri, about 2.5 miles south of downtown, which is on the Missouri River. About 1.5 miles south of me is an area called Westport. In 1850, people beginning on the Santa Fe Trail came up the Missouri River from St. Louis to Kansas City. They purchased provisions there and made the first leg of the journey to Westport, 4.0 miles south. The terrain was so rugged it could take the better part of a day to make the trip.

Yesterday I drove most of this distance down to the River Market, had lunch, and was back in less than one hour. Travel was a few cents for gas. Last week I got up one morning, flew to Chicago 500 miles away, attended a meeting, flew back home and went to bed the same day. The cost was less than one day’s wages. What happened in the last 150-200 years? The four factors of prosperity.

I concluded the last post by noting that most of the pieces for modern capitalism existed in England, in the United States, and in a few other places at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Property rights were well developed, scientific rationalism was coming of age and capital markets had become both more sophisticated and more integrated than they had been at any time in history. The missing fourth piece to the puzzle was power.

Many historians differ about which technological events had the most significant impact. The first steam powered pumps emerged in England in 1705 to pump water out mines. This technology was tinkered with over the next several decades. The watershed moment would appear to be James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1765. It took another thirty years of tinkering before the technology could be perfected and engines could be put to practical use.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, production was no longer limited to the power provided man and beast for the first time in human history. But the mass production of such machines was anything but cheap. The raw materials were expensive and they had to be finely crafted by expensive skilled laborers. The potential for exponential growth in manufacturing was staggering but the cost of the manufacturer to make engines and the cost to the end users to purchase them was equally staggering. These were the dynamics that drove governments to create laws that facilitated the aggregating of capital into limited liability corporations.

However, increased production was rather pointless if you couldn’t transport your products in large quantities. I noted in an earlier post that the English had developed horse drawn rail systems for transporting coal to various distribution centers. It wasn’t long before innovative entrepreneurs began exploring how to use the new technology to move these carts and thus the steam powered locomotive was born.

The United States faced an enormous transportation problem. I have illustrated the travel issues above. There was a desire to expand territory but the land area was already enormous at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then the Louisiana Purchase came in 1803, and doubled the size of the nation. How could a government effectively govern such a diverse and disconnected expansive area?

Some turned to the ideas of building canals. The Erie Canal which took nearly a quarter century to build was completed in 1825 across the state of New York. It was far more expensive to build than the government was willing to risk so a quasi-corporation was established to finance its construction. Some inventors took the steam technology and applied to boats that could navigate the highly developed network of waterways. Sea going vessels were modified for international travel. The steam locomotives began to appear in England and in the United States during the 1820s-1830s. Meanwhile, English engineer John Loudon McAdam perfected a road building process called macadamization that revolutionized the quality of road construction.

The construction and maintenance of all these canals, ships, railroads and roads required huge sums of capital. Not surprisingly it was in the 1830s that the United States saw the emergence of limited liability companies. The railroads in particular would become the most significant corporations of the nineteenth century.

As amazing as the transport revolution was, even more transforming was the invention of the telegraph. It came into use in England and the United States in the 1840s. For the first time in human history information could travel faster than a man on horseback. It was not just faster but virtually instantaneous. One author describes the telegraph as the Victorian Internet. Capital markets and the economy thrive on having a broad range of buyers and sellers able to have as complete a view of markets as possible. The telegraph ballooned the number players participating in markets on a real time basis. Using the analogy I started with above, the travel of critical information quickly went from taking weeks and days to minutes and seconds.

We talk about today being a time of rapid transformation but I am inclined to agree with William J. Bernstein in his conclusion that the most rapid period of change in human history is not our current era. It was the time between about 1825-1875. (4) Most of what we have seen since is a refinement and elaboration of the changes experienced during those times. The internal combustion engine was invented during the nineteenth century. It further expanded our ability to travel by automobile and at radically reduced costs. The technology was further elaborated to create air and space travel in the twentieth century. Electricity which had been critical for telegraphs (which morphed into telephones) went on to create power for almost everything we touch. Radio waves were discovered and turned into radio and television signals in the twentieth century. Microchips were invented to handle electronic signals. They were made into computers that morphed with telephones and wave technology to create our present digital and wireless communication networks including the internet and cell phones. Then there is the controversial development of atomic energy. The list goes on.

Each succeeding step has expanded and integrated ever broadening markets. Science and technological knowledge has mushroomed and is more widely shared than ever before. (An astronomy professor friend tells me we have learned more about the universe in the past ten years than in all of human history combined.) All of these have led to broadening (though clearly uneven) prosperity throughout the planet. As Bernstein notes, where a significant number of people in poverty begin to experience prosperity they begin to take a greater interest in the rule of law and property rights to solidify and perpetuate that prosperity.

This is not to say this transition of the past 200 years has been absent of its share of abuse or harmful effects. Dissecting each and every influence of these technological changes is beyond our scope here. The point that I hope is clear is how the emergence of property rights, scientific rationalism and capital markets interacted in a way that gave birth to modern technology and infrastructure. It was the rise of this technology and infrastructure that put pressures on the other three that has led to their transformation and elaboration. The four combined have generated the prosperity we know today.

(1) Allan R. Pred Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790-1840 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. 37.)

(2) Ibid, 176-177.

(3) Ibid, 175-185.

(4) William J. Bernstein The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created New York: McGraw Hill, 2004. 187-188.

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Presb. Church USA launches ambitious plan to lose only 5% of members

I got a kick out of this article at the www.larknews.com:

Presb. Church USA launches ambitious plan to lose only 5% of members

I just want to know how they got into our secret GAC strategy meetings.

`The Nanas and the Papas'

`The Nanas and the Papas' is a great article at the Chicago Tribune (requires free registration) about Baby Boomers becoming grandparents. I found the following particularly interesting.

But Dr. Arthur Kornhaber, a psychiatrist who has been studying the grandparent-grandchild relationship since the 1970s, is beginning to notice that as the notoriously workaholic Baby Boomers age, they start to realize how much they have sacrificed to advance their careers, make money and travel the globe.

"I see that with grandchildren, they suddenly realize they have another chance at things," said Kornhaber, who also is president of the Foundation for Grandparenting. "They start to grow out of their narcissism, out of their whole `me' thing. They begin to realize that transmitting their minds and talents and souls to children--their grandchildren--is what immortality is really all about."

Maybe there is hope for Boomers yet. On the other hand, as bad as Boomers have messed things up, I am not convinced passing along minds, talents and souls is such a good idea.

Voters opt for change in S. Korea

Voters opt for change in S. Korea is an article in the Christian Science Monitor about politics is South Korea.

The perception of a central government unable to deal with economic problems and weak in the face of North Korean demands lies at the crux of a reaction that guaranteed conservative victories in two-thirds of the races for provincial governorships and mayors of major cities.

For Korea, the reversion to conservatism portends the downfall of a decade of liberal leadership in the next presidential election in December 2007. While the ruling party's efforts at reconciliation with North Korea were not the paramount issue, the sense of forever making concessions to the North was a factor in the voting - and could be among the policies that change if the liberals are ousted next year.

A 'hole in the wall' helps educate India

A 'hole in the wall' helps educate India is interesting story in the Christian Science Monitor about a novel idea to help educate poor childern in India.

NEW DELHI – Free computers placed where children play could help bring basic education to India's 200 million boys and girls under age 15. That's the hope of the man behind an Internet learning experiment called Hole-in-the-Wall.

Sugata Mitra, physicist and chief scientist with India's international software giant NIIT Ltd., launched the experiment in 1999 by embedding a kiosk housing a high-speed touch-screen computer into the wall that separates the company's headquarters from New Delhi's biggest slum. Dr. Mitra was surprised to see how quickly the children had mastered navigating the Internet - within hours.

Since then, Mitra has installed more than 150 computers - with keyboards, touch pads, and Web cameras - in some 50 locations from New Delhi slums to points in rural India. In each location, with no supervision or instruction, the children "download and play audio and video, send and receive e-mail, chat, and so on," he says. They quickly move on to learn some English from English-language websites, read Indian newspapers, and even "look for jobs for their fathers," Mitra says.

.....

Hole-in-the-Wall has already helped thousands of previously nonliterate boys and girls teach themselves not only about computers but also "several pieces of primary education," Mitra says. Within nine months, the boys and girls achieve, "the proficiency level equivalent to the skills of most modern office workers."

A venture at a standstill

A venture at a standstill is an article in the Economist about the future of the European Union, twelve months after the French and the Dutch said no. If ever the metaphor of "herding cats" applied to anything, it applies here.

Colombia's Swing Vote

Colombia's Swing Vote is very interesting analysis of politics in Latin America.

Most pundits don't have a lot to say about Uribe's sweeping victory over the weekend, other than it's an anomaly in a region supposedly swinging left. That misses the point.

Colombia's voters had choices. But they went for Uribe's bold resolve against terror, and for tax cuts, free trade pacts and a no-apologies friendship with the U.S.

Throw in proven leadership, plus a growing and diversified economy, and it was no wonder Uribe had huge appeal. Sixty-two percent of Colombia's voters backed him; just 22% went for his nearest rival. The landslide not only exceeded predictions. It also was bigger than his 54% victory in 2000. And it was the first time in 98 years that anyone has been re-elected president in Colombia.

.....

Changing times and increased globalization have brought out many new political parties in Latin America. But there are three distinct political trends.

There are Reaganesque free marketers such as Uribe, Antonio Saca of El Salvador and, more dimly, Vicente Fox of Mexico.

They seek to end poverty not by ladling soup into every bowl, but by fostering private-sector growth. They are balancing budgets, simplifying rules, forcing transparency, breaking up monopolies and encouraging new businesses.

Sadly, these leaders are often dismissed as "far right" and thus out of touch with "the people." But they keep winning elections. Along with understanding free markets, this group often makes security a priority, based on the legacy of wars as well as citizen revulsion at violent crime. And it is America-friendly.

It also has plenty in common with Latin America's second political trend — toward a soft socialism that's prevailing in Brazil, Uruguay and Chile. Leaders of this movement aren't hostile to the private sector or to fiscal discipline any more than their "right wing" brethren. They focus less, however, on security and more on government spending on things like infrastructure and education.

Not too different, in short, from Bill Clinton or Tony Blair. Both the free-marketers and the soft socialists also overlap in areas such as health care.

The third political force is the anti-democratic populist left led by quasi-dictators like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia.

This movement hides behind the veneer of socialism, but has virtually nothing in common with it. It equates growth with pork-barrel spending, declares the private sector the enemy, can't distinguish party from government, divides a nation into loyalists and traitors, abuses foreign investors and in the end seeks to collectivize the population into total dependency.

The model here is Fidel Castro's Cuba, and it seemed to have the momentum. Uribe's impressive election, however, is giving the pundits pause.

One Year of Blogging

The Kruse Kronicle turns one year old today. At the behest of several friends to write down some of the stuff I am always pontificating about, and because I wanted to experiment with some ideas, I began blogging June 1, 2005.  Now 703 posts later, here we are. For the first two months I committed to writing one post a day. Then I went to at least one per day for Monday through Saturday for the next three months. Since that time I have been doing one a day Monday through Friday.  I expect that going forward I may not be as committed to getting one every day. I have decided I like this writing stuff although I may need to take a course in remedial editing.

As I check my stats the series that seem to get the most repeat visits so far are may Kenneth Bailey posts on Luke 15, Generations, Social Indicators and the current series on Theology and Economics is starting to get a lot of page views. Folks seem to like my book reviews. I may have to do more of those.

Thanks to all of you who have been reading!