Kruse Kronicle

Theology and Economics: Conclusion and Index

On February 15, of this year, I began this series on Theology and Economics. I worte in that first post:

Over the coming days I am going to layout a rudimentary theology of economics and the causes of prosperity. I will tap into the biblical narrative to see what scripture has to say to us. I am particularly going to emphasize the eschatological implications for economics. I am going to reflect on what capitalism is, on where it came from and on its promise for the future. I will reflect on what this means in terms of how we view our everyday lives and the implications this has for how we envision being the Church. Furthermore, I will tell you the ending now. I do not believe that the decline of morality in the marketplace or morality in general, is primarily a function of Enlightenment thinking. Nor do I believe it is a function of the Western political and economic systems. The primary locus for the decline in morality is in the Church, and as it relates to economics, in the Church’s marginalization of marketplace ministry.

Eighty-three posts and seven months later I am bringing this series to an end. I feel pretty good about the series and I feel like I accomplished my mission to articulate a “rudimentary” theology of economics and the causes of prosperity. I have very much appreciated the input and questions people have asked along the way. Several people have contacted me about using some of this material or invited me to talk to their group. Some have suggested that I form this material into a book. It has been my intention all along to at least develop some presentations out of this and I am now seriously investigating how I might form this into a book (I think there is more than one in here.)

My bottom line is that I think we live in a day of big challenges and even bigger opportunities. Yet the Church is mired in a host of unhealthy dichotomies and conflicts. Because of our Gnostic like dualities with sacred vs. secular, and clergy vs. laity, the Church is unable to articulate a compelling vision to the world of God’s intentions. Faithful church attending Evangelical Christians have little sense of how the biblical narrative impacts their lives beyond giving a formula for personal salvation and personal morality. Mainline traditions have virtually reduced the narrative to proof texts of the social justice cause of the moment. We need to recover the reality that we are made in the image of God; we are eikons of God called to Creation Stewardship, Kingdom Service and Employment of Gifts as we work to give at least a shadowy glimpse of the shalom that is to come. As eikons, we are the oikonomos, the household manger, given charge to use all the resources at our disposal to develop the world according to the heart and mind of God.

I pointed out that we get the word “economics” from the word oikonomos. Economics is at the core of our mission as eikons in the world. Therefore, it seems to me that it may be time for a new integrated field of study: Eikonomics – The study of being God’s image bearers as we manage the resources entrusted to us. If I get a book out of this, “Eikonomics” will likely be the title.

Thanks to all of you have participated in this conversation. I appreciate it.

Here is an index of the posts.

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

Introduction

THE BIBLICAL NARRATIVE (Visio Dei and Missio Dei)

Creation

Shalom

Rebel Eikons

Vain Illusions

Renewing Shalom

Israel and the Coming Shalom

The New (Jeru)shalom

A Summary Narrative

Remembering the Whole Story

CORE ETHICS

Having the Mind and Heart of God. (Part 1)

Having the Mind and Heart of God. (Part 2)

Paul's Subversion of the Empire

Vision, Mission, Ethic and Call

ECONOMICS IN CONTEXT

Why Economics?

Interpretive Considerations

Creation Implications

Fall Implications

Eschatological Implications

A Summary so Far

ECONOMIC RIGHTS AND ECONOMIC OBLIGATIONS

Rights, Obligations and Justice

Justice in the Old Testament

Distributive Justice

Commutative Justice

Remedial Justice

Jubilee Code

Jubilee Implications

New Testament Implications

(Index so Far)

THE CAUSES OF PROSPERITY

The Causes of Prosperity

Property Rights (Part 1)

Property Rights (Part 2)

Scientific Rationalism

Capital Markets (Part 1)

Capital Markets (Part 2)

Capital Markets (Part 3)

Capital Markets (Part 4)

Technology and Infrastructure (Part 1)

Technology and Infrastructure (Part 2)

Prosperity and the Christian Ethos

FURTHER REFLECTIONS

A Quick Review

Is Capitalism Christian?

A Matter of Will

Subsidiarity

The Church

Self Interest

The Virtue Dilemma

Capitalism is not a Synonym for Materialistic Individualism

Enlightenment Impact

The Impact of Liberal Foundationalism

The Impact of Conservative Foundationalism

The Gnostic Thread Through Church History

Contemporary Gnositcs (Part 1)

Contemporary Gnostics (Part 2)

The Clergy and Laity Dualism

Ministry

Pope John Paul II on the "Lay Faithful"

Cathedral Built of Eikons

Ecclesia and Diaspora

Priest, Prophet and King

The Elemental Institution

Equipping

Ordering

"But I don't want to be priest, prophet or king."

Two Applications

Polarity Management

APPLICATIONS: Ecology

Two Ecos

Eikons and Environment in a Fallen World

Personal Stewardship and Spiritual Formation

The Disintegration of Holistic Environmental Stewardship

Environmental Externalities and the Dyanmics of Growth

Demographic Transition and the Environment

Economic Growth and Future Resources

Climate Change (Part 1)

Climate Change (Part 2)

Climate Change (Part 3)

APPLICATIONS: Poverty

Prosperity

Two Kinds of Poverty

Making Stewards of the Absolute Poor

The Question of Relative Poverty

Missing Resources and Poverty

The Relative Poverty Conundrum

The Answer to Poverty is Stewardship

CONCLUSION AND INDEX

Conclusion and Index

Theology and Economics: The Answer to Poverty is Stewardship

I closed the last post by writing:

Therefore, the challenge is how to incentivize those who are most capable of creating wealth while steadily incorporating those in the bottom strata of the economy into becoming productive participants in growing prosperity. Directly tied to both of these is the need to inculcate a vision of stewardship in all strata of society.

So what do we need to do to achieve a more just and healthy economy?

I have made the case in previous posts that Genesis creation accounts call humanity to stewardship. As co-creators with God, humanity is to bring the earth to its full potential while honoring the beauty and majesty of the created order. The Hebrew law in Leviticus and Deuteronomy is filled with protection of private property rights. Most notably, the Jubilee Code in Leviticus 25 makes clear God’s intent that no one be permanently alienated from land and labor, the two primary means of economic production in that day. All were to participate in the co-creative stewardship of the land God had entrusted to the Israelites. I have also noted the story of the talents from Matthew 25 several times. While we often tend to overly spiritualize this parable, the parable teaches that we are to have the heart and mind of God in all we do in the period between Christ’s accession and Christ’s return. God gave us the creation stewardship mandate in Genesis and it has not been revoked. Thus, part of “having the heart and mind of God” in the present era is to be about bringing creation to its fullest potential. The one who is a steward multiplies the resources entrusted to him or here while the one who does not have the heart and mind of the master timidly preserves what has been entrusted. Again, stewardship is not simple preservation. It is about bringing the earth to its full potential while honoring the beauty and majesty of the created order. The created order includes the various institutions that support human existence.

If we look at the world in this way, then simple redistribution of wealth (voluntary or otherwise) from the wealthy to the poor in our society, or distributions of wealth from wealthier nations to poorer nations, is an insufficient model of economic justice. It reduces human beings to mere economic consumers and operates on the assumption that if people have enough wealth to consume what they need and want, we have successfully addressed poverty. It is demeaning to those intended to be God’s eikons. Redistribution of wealth is often necessary as component for ending poverty but it is not the solution.

The message we have from scripture is that God has given gifts to each eikon and made them stewards (see above) of that gift. Because of a sinful and broken world, some are simply without the mental or physical capabilities to be economically productive and society has an obligation to care for such children of God. Yet the normative standard is that each individual should be productive stewards of resources. Some will have more resources and some will have less but all are to be stewards. Two obstacles usually stand in the way of this happening.

First, there are societal and systemic issues that block the full maturing of all people into stewardship. There are totalitarian nations that see individuals purely as tools of the state with no innate value as divine image bearers of God. There are also nations that are dominated by corrupt leaders with no respect for individuals or the rule of law. Unfortunately, either through government aid from developed nations or through business alliances, totalitarian and unscrupulous leaders have been propped up by the wealthy as they suppress the rise of stewardship within their nations.

Certain subgroups, even within develop nations, find obstacles placed in their way. In the United States, for every 28 White males in college age 18-24, there is one White male in prison. For African-American males in the same age range, the ratio is 2.6 in college for every one in prison! There is something deeply, deeply wrong when so many young Black men fail to mature into productive stewards in our culture. In many cultures around the world, women and girls are viewed as inferior beings not worthy of education and legal protections. Consequently, essential to the emergence of more stewards is recognition of human rights, property rights and the rule of law in nations throughout the world.

Second, there are people who simply make unwise and self-destructive decisions. It can be debated forever how much one’s environment contributes to destructive behavior, but the reality is that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” This goes for poor people as well. Sometimes it is precisely because of their sinful behavior that poor people are poor. Still, I always get a kick out of the idea that some people say we should only help the “deserving” poor. The funny thing is I don’t think I have ever met a “deserving” poor person. Just like all the wealthy people I have met, they are all sinners. In fact, the poor are often among some of the most distasteful and manipulative people I have met. But they are all people whom Jesus Christ came to redeem! Loving the poor is often exasperating and thankless work. Kind of like the work Jesus did to redeem us. We must not make excuses for sinful behavior on the part of others but we also must not excuse ourselves as a society (all the institutions of society, not just government) from engaging the poor. We are to equip the poor with the financial and social resources they need to make good decisions. We need to strengthen the intermediary institutions in their communities like family, school and church. The Jubilee Code allowed for people to make foolish decisions and suffer the consequences but it also clearly taught that perpetual generational poverty was not acceptable.

There is too much indifference toward those at the bottom of the economic spectrum in our country. Those with wealth have increasingly isolated themselves from the poor and been content to keep them out of site. When the poor get noticed with events like hurricane Katrina, they are blamed for their own “stupid” behavior. “They made their bed. Let them sleep in it.” Exactly the words Jesus would have used I’m sure.

Yet I have little more regard for some who bill themselves as champions of the poor. Take the minimum wage debate for example. About 20% of those who earn the minimum wage live in households that have annual incomes of $80,000 or more. The average household income for someone who earns minimum wage is about $40,000 a year. Only 15% of people who earn up to $1.50 over the minimum wage live in poverty households. The only hope unskilled poor workers have of climbing the economic ladder is entry level jobs that allow the unskilled to develop skills and work habits that will command a higher wage. When minimum wages go up, the employer that was hiring five unskilled workers often decides to settle for two or three skilled workers, or may even find ways to automate tasks that unskilled workers were doing. The unskilled worker isn’t worth what the employer is required to pay so the number of unskilled jobs shrinks (at least slightly according to past studies.) * The people that the measure is most supposed to help are at best unaffected and at worst made to jump higher for the first rung on the economic ladder. While I fully recognize that good intentions are often at work here, good intentions need to be matched with sound public policy. Too many of these initiatives are more about appearance than substance.

We as Christians tend to inoculate ourselves from truly serving the poor by the “deserving poor” strategy or the “I supported the compassionate legislative agenda” strategy. We then excuse ourselves from truly engaging the problems. This may work for politics but Christians are about creating stewards and that means nurturing the development of the social resources the poor need through society’s institutions. It is about strengthening intermediary institutions like family, school and church. This cannot be achieved through government alone.

Similarly, we cannot excuse ourselves from the suffering of the poor around the world because of their decisions and the decisions of their governments. Simply supporting aid or debt forgiveness is inconsequential if commitments to creating environments where the poor can become stewards are absent. When it comes to poverty, increasing the amount of spending money the poor have is a penultimate issue. The bottom line is the creation of stewards.

* Paul Kersey, Minimum-Wage Hikes Don’t Add Up, National Review Online.

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Theology and Economics: The Relative Poverty Conundrum

Excluding hunting and gathering societies, and nomadic societies, most populations throughout history have had a very similar distribution of wealth. There are very few people with enormous wealth, a few more people with wealth greater than that of ninety percent of the population, and there are the eighty or ninety percent of the population that live at or near subsistence levels. For many of theses societies, wealth has been thoroughly intertwined with political and religious class. The “hardness” of the boundaries to these classes varied from culture to culture but by modern standards they were quite fixed. 

The rise of industrialization and capitalism has changed all that. When we look at economic stratification in developed nations today we see distributions of wealth that more or less resemble a bell curve. There are a few very wealthy and a few very poor people with the bulk of the population owning an amount of wealth that is near the mean and median of the wealth distribution. Political and religious standing are no longer directly tied to wealth. The boundaries between strata are remarkably permeable with people being able to move up or down in economic status over the course of their lives. What find in developed nations is that even the poorest people are materially better off than the vast majority of people in developing nations.

What we know is that the bell curve distribution in developed nations probably reflects the economic acumen of the population. A few people are exceptionally gifted at working the economy, a few are very inept at it, and most fall on a distribution somewhere in between. The gifted people make themselves and society wealthier.

However, what we have seen in developed nations is that the upper levels of income and wealth keep stretching higher and higher. The bottom of the distribution is also increasing but not as dramatically. Using purely imaginary numbers, we can conceive of a country where the cutoff for the bottom 20% of the population in wealth is $10,000 and the lowest level of top 20% is $50,000. We check twenty years later and find that the cutoff for the bottom 20% has risen to $20,000 and the lowest level for the top 20% is now $100,000. Both cutoffs doubled, but the distance between the two cutoffs has now grown from $40,000 to $80,000. People frequently refer to a growing “gap” between rich and poor but there really is no gap. What we have is flattening bell curve with fewer people (though still the majority) being concentrated around the average and being more thinly spread across the widening terrain between top and bottom. From a purely economic standpoint, this all seems justifiable and appropriate. But people are not purely economic beings.

Most historians give partial credit for the success of Western democracies to the presence of a middle class; a large majority of the population that has roughly similar economic standing and therefore similar concerns, values and interests. But what happens if the second fifth (upper class) and the fourth fifth (lower class) of an economic distribution grow while the middle fifth declines and the top and bottom stretch farther apart? Absolutely essential to a healthy democracy is for the great majority to have a sense of ownership in the institutions of society and when they don’t have ownership to have the realistic hope of improving their situation. When people have no sense of ownership, or hope of ownership, they can become destructive to their communities and to themselves. Everywhere around them are images of people who have achieved at levels they could not dare to dream about and this by implication reminds them of their relative failure. The corollary of the “self-made man” is the “self-unmade man.” Heap on top of this issues like racism and discrimination for some of the poor, and a volatile mixture of frustration begins to spread like a cancer throughout the rest of the economic body, threatening the health of an economic system that has allowed the wealthy to make their wealth. The reality is that the wealthy have an economic interest in making sure the poor have the opportunity to “get into the game” and have a sense of ownership.

Unfortunately, how this has very often been translated has been in terms of wealth redistribution; voluntarily or through taxation. While this improves the material well-being of the poor it does not increase their sense of ownership. In fact, it can even lead to a sense of resentment for the dependency it creates. Furthermore, ill conceived government assistance in the past has actually devastated support institutions in some communities that might otherwise have alleviated poverty.

From slavery through, through Jim Crow, and up into the 1960s, 80% of children African-American children were born to two parent family homes. No small feat when we consider the incredible pressures that were put on families during these years. Yet some of the Great Society programs of the 1960s created a situation where mothers could actually receive more money if the father was absent than when the father was present. It basically told Black men that they were irrelevant, if not a detriment, to their families. The net effect was the dissolution of families to the point that only 30% of African-American children are now born into families with two parents. Hispanic children are only marginally better off. The birth’s of White children appear to be slowly moving in this direction. Yet one of the single best determinants of whether a child grows up in poverty and remains in poverty is whether or not there are two parents in the home.

The Great Society programs also went into competition with institutions in the African-American communities like Black churches. The churches required that recipients be a part of the community. There they could offer the resources like emotional, mental and spiritual support I mentioned in my last post. They offered role models and relationships. The government programs stepped in and intentionally sought to end this community based approach for “unbiased” standardized means of financial assistance. They ended up making the individual unaccountable to the community, free from any pressure to better themselves and made them dependent on government programs.

These are just two examples of how “helping the poor” through government assistance violated the principle of subsidiarity and devastated intermediary societal institutions in meeting societies needs. We would do well to heed what the Jewish Philosopher Maimonides taught about eight levels of charity.

[1] The greatest level, above which there is no greater, is to support a fellow Jew by endowing him with a gift or loan, or entering into a partnership with him, or finding employment for him, in order to strengthen his hand until he need no longer be dependent upon others...

[2] A lesser level of charity than this is to give to the poor without knowing to whom one gives, and without the recipient knowing from who he received. For this is performing a mitzvah solely for the sake of Heaven. This is like the "anonymous fund" that was in the Holy Temple [in Jerusalem]. There the righteous gave in secret, and the good poor profited in secret. Giving to a charity fund is similar to this mode of charity, though one should not contribute to a charity fund unless one knows that the person appointed over the fund is trustworthy and wise and a proper administrator, like Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon.

[3] A lesser level of charity than this is when one knows to whom one gives, but the recipient does not know his benefactor. The greatest sages used to walk about in secret and put coins in the doors of the poor. It is worthy and truly good to do this if those who are responsible for distributing charity are not trustworthy.

[4] A lesser level of charity than this is when one does not know to whom one gives, but the poor person does know his benefactor. The greatest sages used to tie coins into their robes and throw them behind their backs, and the poor would come up and pick the coins out of their robes so that they would not be ashamed.

[5] A lesser level than this is when one gives to the poor person directly into his hand, but gives before being asked.

[6] A lesser level than this is when one gives to the poor person after being asked.

[7] A lesser level than this is when one gives inadequately, but gives gladly and with a smile.

[8] A lesser level than this is when one gives unwillingly. (*)

Society is responsible for the poor and the least among us. Yet we too often we conflate government with society. Government is one institution in society and it plays an important role when it comes to assistance through things like Earned Income Tax Credits. But government can not replace families and local institutions in providing the non-financial resources necessary to rise from poverty.

Therefore, the challenge is how to incentivize those who are most capable of creating wealth while steadily incorporating those in the bottom strata of the economy into becoming productive participants in growing prosperity. Directly tied to both of these is the need to inculcate a vision of stewardship in all strata of society.

So what do we need to do to achieve a more just and healthy economy?

(*) From "Maimonides' Eight Levels of Charity" at Chabad.org.

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Theology and Economics: Missing Resources and Poverty

There is considerable mobility in economic status (up and down) in the United States. Only a small percentage of people stay in poverty over lengthy periods of time. We know from the study I cited in the previous post that over a four year period only 2% of people where in poverty for every month over a four year period. About 80% were in poverty for less than a year. That said, there are many more who live their lives at, or just above, the poverty line who find themselves in and out of poverty over most of their lives. I think it is safe to say that probably somewhere from 5% to 10% of people are in these circumstances, which could be upwards of 30 million people. The majority are White, although a highly disproportionate number of Blacks and Hispanics are in these circumstances. It is often assumed that poverty is largely an urban problem but studies I have read suggest there may be nearly as many poor in rural areas as in our urban cores. (Relatively rural Mississippi is the state with the highest poverty rate.) What is our response to the poor among us in the context of the twenty-first century United States? The most obvious answer seems to be that we need to give the more financial resources.

The poverty rate for families in 1959, before the Great Society programs of the Johnson administration, was at 22.4%. It dropped to 17.3% by 1965, the year the Great Society programs began to be rolled out. The rate dropped again  to 14.7% in 1966 and eventually hit an all time low in 1973 of 11.3%. For the more than thirty years since 1973, the rate has fluctuated between 11.3% and 15.3%. It currently stands at 12.6%. All this is to say that more than three decades of wealth redistribution programs have not eliminated poverty. This is not to say that financial aid to the poor is wrong or bad. However, it is to say that it is insufficient.

Our problem is that we have looked at poverty through a purely materialistic lens. People in long-term poverty definitely need resources, but investment of financial resources without investments of other kinds of resources is futile. Dr. Ruby Payne has written some highly readable and widely used books to help educators understand poverty. In her book A Framework for Understanding Poverty, she lists resources requisite to being a functioning person in our society.

• Financial: Having the money to purchase goods and services.
• Emotional: Being able to choose and control emotional responses, particularly to negative situations, without engaging in self-destructive behavior. This is an internal resource and shows itself through stamina, perseverance, and choices
• Mental: Having the mental abilities and acquired skills (reading, writing, computing) to deal with daily life.
• Spiritual: Believing in divine purpose and guidance.
• Physical: Having physical health and mobility.
• Support Systems: Having friends, family, and backup resources available to access in times of need. These are external resources.
• Relationships/Role Models: Having frequent access to adult(s) who are appropriate, who are nurturing to the child, and who do not engage in self-destructive behavior.
• Knowledge of Hidden Rules: Knowing the unspoken cues and habits of a group. (1)

Many of us take these for granted but for the underclass poor, many of these are absent. All the financial resources in the world will not help if these other resources are not presnet. Here are just a couple of examples of how this lack of resources plays out.

First, drawing the field of psychology, Payne points out that when we speak to others and internally to ourselves, we use three voices:

• The Child Voice: Defensive, victimized, emotional, whining, losing attitude, strongly negative non-verbal.
• The Parent Voice: Authoritative, directive, judgmental, evaluative, win-lose mentality, demanding, punitive, sometimes threatening (though it can be loving and supportive)
• The Adult Voice: Non-judgmental, free of negative non-verbal, factual, often in question format, attitude of win-win. (2)

The adult voice in this triad is the one that mediates between the child and parent voices. It often uses abstract reasoning and sophisticated cognitive skills to evaluate the content of the child and parent voices. The poor tend to be lacking or without the Adult voice. Consequently, when dealing with authority, there is the tendency to use the child’s voice. When in positions of authority there is the tendency to use the parent voice. When there is internal conflict, the battle is between parent and child. Yet the great majority of middle and upper middle class conversations occur in the adult voice.

When police officers respond to a call, the first thing they do is size of up the situation. They start by asking folks “What happened?” A middle class person will tend to respond with a statement like, “My neighbor collapsed on her front porch.” When asking someone in poverty, the officer often receives a jangled rambling story describing all that happened with a host of inconsequential details. The person lacks the ability to abstract out what is pertinent from the series of events. It is a jumble of actions, emotions and perceptions. As Payne observes:

If an individual depends upon a random, episodic story structure for memory patterns, lives in an unpredictable environment, and has not developed the ability to plan then…

If an individual cannot plan, he/she cannot predict.

If an individual cannot predict, he/she cannot identify cause and effect.

If an individual cannot identify cause and effect, he/she cannot identify consequence.

If an individual cannot identify consequence, he/she cannot control impulsivity.

If an individual cannot control impulsivity, he/she has an inclination toward criminal behavior. (3)

One of the absolutely essential factors in achieving personal economic prosperity is the ability to have a long term time horizon and the ability to engage in deferred gratification.

Second, relationships are valued by people in all social strata. However, in poverty, one often has no resources other than their network of family and friends. When family or friends leave, the people left behind experience great loss of resources. Therefore, when someone decides to get an education by finishing high school and going to college, often that person’s social network goes into action to prevent them succeeding. I know more than one African-American from a poverty background who has completed college who endured constant criticism from family and friends for trying to be White and uppity. The same pertains to the poor from other communities. If the ambitious person succeeds, he/she may leave the community and a resource will be lost.

These are just a couple of the examples of the challenges faced in equipping people with the skills to be stewards of God in the economic life of the community. Financial investment is only one small part of the problem. Other resources are every bit as much in need and they are not being provided.

(1) Ruby K. Payne,  A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Highlands , TX: aha! Publications, Revised, 2005. 7.

(2) Payne, 83-84.

(3) Payne, 90.

(Note: If you are interested in more of Payne's material be sure to check out Hidden Rules of Class and What Every Church Member Should Know About Poverty. You will have to scroll to the right book at these links.)

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Theology and Economics: The Question of Relative Poverty

Two posts ago I wrote:

Relative poverty is based on a statistical distribution. Theoretically, we could place the amount of wealth each person or family has on a continuum. Then we decide that people who are below some percentage cutoff line on the continuum (5%? 10%? 20%?) are in poverty. The only way poverty is eliminated here is when everybody makes exactly the same amount of wealth; otherwise there will always be someone who is relatively poorer than others.

Until the time of the industrial revolution nearly every (non-nomadic) society throughout recorded history has tended to have great masses of people living at subsistence level with and a small minority of people with wealth and economic power. With industrialization, that began to change. By the time the developed nations moved into the post-industrialized economy era something more similar to a bell curve emerged. I used the chart below to illustrate this point a couple of days ago.

Even the poorest people living in developed nations today are materially better off than most people have been throughout history and they are better off than large segments of societies in developing nations today. Yet they experience themselves as poor and marginalized. Why?

Imagine being in a community of 100 people. We will call it Ancientland. One person is unimaginably wealthy. Then there are another nine people who have considerably more than everyone else but not nearly to the degree of the first person. Then imagine there are ninety other people including you who all have similar amounts of wealth. You are number eighty in the last group of ninety people in this community. But because there is so little difference between you and number twenty, your experiences of life are very similar. Even though there are eighty-nine people ahead of you, you experience yourself as normal member of the community.

But let us move to the community of Richland. It too has 100 people. Here again there is an exorbitantly wealthy person. Then there are four people who are not quite as wealthy but still have beyond what most could imagine. Then there are fifteen more people with still lesser wealth but have so much they do not have to worry about life and have enough for many luxuries, should the wish to buy them. They are followed by twenty more people who are pretty secure financially but can’t afford much extravagance. They are followed by twenty more people who have stable lives. They sometimes find themselves in a pinch and probably can’t afford some of things the forty to sixty people ahead of them can. This group is followed by another twenty people who live modest lives and they likely experience financial hardships on occasion. They do without a great many things that the sixty to eight people ahead of them do without. They find they are unable to afford the recreation and lifestyles those above them take for granted. Because of this, they at times feel excluded from the broader life of the community. Then there is the bottom twenty people who are almost perpetually in financial difficulty. They need assistance from others. Coping with life in an advanced economy consumes all their energy. Sometimes they get by and sometimes they don’t. You are number ninety in this group of people from 81-100. Do you feel you are a “normal” member of community? Not likely! This is in spite of the fact, that on a material basis, you might have more than 95 people in Ancientland have. Living in the left-tail of the economic bell-curve can be devastating.

The truth is that in a place like Ancientland, very little education or input is needed for an individual to become a productive member of society. Often a strong back and a healthy mind may be all that is needed to eke out an existence. Direct financial or material assistance can often make a positive difference in the life of Ancientland citizens because most people have the basic skills needed to function at their economy’s present level of sophistication. New resources and incremental introductions of evermore sophisticated technologies can spiral the community to higher standards of living.

However, advanced economies like Richland’s economy require much more. One has to have more sophisticated cognitive and social skills in order to function in the economy. Without them, you can not effectively function as a steward of resources in the economy. In Richland, poor citizens often just consume whatever resources are given to them and then they end up right back where they started. Transformation into genuine stewards requires far, far more than pure financial assistance.

So how many people are poor in a Richland like the United States?  Economic data suggest the poverty rate was about 12.6% in 2005. That would be about 37 million people. However, two observations need to be made here. First, the poverty rate is a measure of income and over the past decade assistance to the poor has been increasingly coming in the form of non-cash assistance. Thus, this percentage probably overstates the level to some degree. Second, in developed nations there is rapid movement by people in and out of poverty. According to Poverty in the United States: 2002 by the Census Bureau, here are a few pertinent facts:

• Spells of poverty lasted for four months or less for 51.1% of people in poverty.
• Nearly 80% of spells in poverty are less than a year.
• Over a four year study period, 34.2% of the population was in poverty for at least 2 consecutive months but only 2% were in poverty for all 48 months.

Doing the math, this probably means that only about 20% of the of 37 million people are in what some might call the underclass (generational poverty), although there are likely several million that are in precarious situations above them. Many of the people who end up briefly in the poverty numbers are recently divorced people, temporarily unemployed, students and a host of other people who have the resources to alter their situation. Thus, many in poverty are not like our fictional character in Richland. They have hope of better future.

The key group I want to focus on here are those who experience poverty as a chronic generational problem. What is our response to them?

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Theology and Economics: Making Stewards of the Absolute Poor

The idea of steward (oikonomos, “household manager”) by definition means control over resources by a steward. It is not ultimate control. It is control subject to the will of the one who appointed the steward in the first place. But it is control that is relatively free from interference by other persons or entities. Otherwise, the steward can neither truly develop the resources entrusted nor be held accountable when there is failure. Let me highlight again that stewardship is not equated to our spending, consumption or conservation of resources. This is a part of stewardship. Like the stewards in Jesus parable on the talents, God expects a return on his investment with us. Let us not over spiritualize this “return” to apply only to spiritual matters. Jesus said to love God with all our “strength” which better translates to everything we have at our disposal.

I wrote in an earlier post that the only two relationships we can have to the material resources is to be stewards or forgoers. As stewards we can be good stewards or bad stewards. The defining difference is the degree to which we handle the resources according to the desires of the one who entrusted the resources to us. Forgoers can be people like monks or nuns who devote themselves to some special purpose and chose to go without material resources. However, more typically, forgoers are people have been denied control of resources.

Some totalitarian governments insert themselves as owner of all resources and to the degree people own anything, they do so as stewards of the state, not as God’s stewards. What is entrusted by the state can be withdrawn by state. What is produced by individuals can be taken without justification. Individuals have no control or ownership and therefore are not truly stewards. Even softer forms of government control like democratic socialism create some of the same effect.

A similar situation is a society where there is rampant corruption and anarchy. Bribes, arbitrary decisions by authorities, and unclear property rights discourage any risk taking or long term investment. This discourages any attempt by people to exercise their stewardship mandate because they have no reasonable assurance that they can get a fair price for the products of their labors. The simply work to get by from day to day.

Therefore, someone who lives in absolute poverty or in a totalitarian society has been denied the opportunity to answer God’s call to stewardship. The question becomes about how we transform the absolute poor into stewards?

From a Christian standpoint, I think the place to begin is with the message of the Word. People need to now the story that God is unfolding in history and his call to each of us for creation stewardship, Kingdom service and employment of gifts. They need to know that what is, is not what always must be. In other words, they need hope of different future. Someone has to deliver this message. When people have fully embraced this message, watch out! Care for neighbor emerges. Demands for justice arise. Grace is extended. All create an environment of hope improving well-being.

Very few of the absolutely poor live in developed nations. They are overwhelming located in nations where corruption (i.e., anarchy, tribalism and totalitarianism) are present. The first and primary focus should be in getting governments to develop and enforce property rights and facilitate business formation. Where you or I can go to the city clerks office and get a business license for a minimal fee and open up a business in one day, many of the poorest nations have processes the take weeks and months to complete, often with fees and bribes built in all along the way that prevent all but the wealthiest from legitimately going into business. That means that a majority of business is done outside the law. This makes the development of credit institutions impossible. Well defined and easily transferred rights to property and legitimate business arrangements are essential for prosperity to take root.

Increasing widely shared prosperity starts a cycle of demands for other changes. When people have enough property at stake to be concerned about its loss, they begin to demand property rights, just legal systems and democracy. When prosperity increases a little more, they become more concerned about their natural environment and working conditions. This leads to greater health and productivity which leads to more demands for quality of life improvements and so on. Increasing prosperity tends to be the engine that drives the demand for all the other institutions and social arrangements that we take for granted in our developed nations. Pressure should be applied to developed nations and institutions like the World Bank to do what they can to get nations to set this upward spiral in motion. Technology transfers and financial aid for building infrastructure can also help advance growing prosperity.

Developing economic and democratic institutions is something that developed nations have had a long history with and can be helpful in advising developing nations. However, this only holds true when a commitment to rule of law and an end to corruption is in place. Too often, aid from developed nations has served to prop up and reward corrupt leaders instead of generating this upward cycle of prosperity.

Microfinance, the practice of making very small loans to business people, might be one way to jumpstart the road to prosperity. Organizations like Opportunity International have been doing this for some time. Just last year an organization called Kiva started that allows any individual to make loans to people in developing nations through the internet and PayPal.

Another key aspect to developing prosperity is literacy. People who can read, write and do math are able to equip themselves and learn new things on their own. They are also able to better monitor and understand what authorities are doing and to hold them accountable. Transfers of technology like by organizations like One Laptop Per Child and Green Wifi are just a couple of innovative ways to increase access to knowledge that are happening. It is essential that these efforts include women and girls.

The poor also need clean water systems, reliable energy sources, vaccinations and in tropical areas something as simple as mosquito netting could make radical improvements in reducing mortality rates. When it comes to Africa, clearly a cure for Aids is desperately needed.

We need to work on developed nations to end protectionist policies of their own that prevent developing nations from competing in the markets where they might have the most to contribute. Free trade needs to be expanded and we need to find ways to more effectively integrate developing nations into the world economy. However, this goes back to the rule of law and property rights issue. Until a commitment to these practices emerges, these nations will not prosper from being connected to global markets.

This is a suggestive list, not a comprehensive one. Yet a common piece that ties them altogether is the need to respect property rights and the rule of law.

For Christians it is not enough to merely redistribute wealth to poor people. This falls into the trap of seeing poverty as only material issue. It isn’t. Poverty is a deeply moral and spiritual issue. The world is filled with material resources but the most precious resource of all is the stewardship potential of each human being on the face of the planet. Denying literally billions of people the opportunity to develop this potentiality is the greatest “environmental” disaster of our day. The mission of the Church must not become reduced to “saving souls.” It is about the redemption and transformation of every person into creation stewards, Kingdom servants and the employers of gifts that God has called them to be. It is about becoming God’s eikons filling the earth.

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Theology and Economics: Two Kinds of Poverty

Yesterday I wrote:

Prosperity is about the amount of wealth and resources that can be generated and sustained over a lengthy period of time. Prosperity comes from the dynamic interplay between a set of human resources, values and social institutions.

Coming from a biblical understanding that God wants all of his people to participate in creation stewardship and that there are to be no poor among us, how do we bring people who are not living in prosperously into prosperity? That is my overarching question in these closing posts.

It is important to distinguish between two different ways of understanding poverty: Absolute poverty and relative poverty. Absolute poverty is the absolute minimum that people need to survive from day to day. Theoretically, the poverty threshold would not change from nation to nation or place in time. If everyone in a population lived at the absolute poverty level and we doubled their wealth we would have eliminated poverty.

Relative poverty is based on a statistical distribution. Theoretically, we could place the amount of wealth each person or family has on a continuum. Then we decide that people who are below some percentage cutoff line on the continuum (5%? 10%? 20%?) are in poverty. The only way poverty is eliminated here is when everybody makes exactly the same amount of wealth; otherwise there will always be someone who is relatively poorer than others.

Most entities that measure poverty use neither of these measures when they talk about poverty. Since human beings are more than animals, subsistence is not considered adequate. Some level of wealth is deemed necessary for a person to have not only adequate food, clothing and shelter, but education, healthcare and other quality of life enhancements. An amount of wealth is agreed upon that is believed to provide for this minimum standard of existence. Therefore the percentage of people who live below this threshold could expand or contract. Conceivably poverty could be eliminated under such a standard. However, the reality is that this perception of a minimal standard of existence tends to rise as the overall wealth of a culture rises. There is also the idea by some that there should not be a great divergence between the top tier and bottom tier of wealth but just what the balance should be often proves illusive.

Last December the Economist had an article that is a wonderful case study in relative poverty called The Mountain Man and the Surgeon. It compares the lives of Enos Banks from Eastern Kentucky and Mbwebwe Kabamba from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

When Americans hear the words “poor” and “white”, they think of someone like Mr Banks. He has half a dozen cars in varying states of disrepair parked outside his trailer, car-parts everywhere and a pile of crushed Pepsi cans below his porch.

He [Enos Banks] “draws” $521 a month in supplemental security income (a form of cash assistance for the elderly, poor and disabled). He laments that the authorities deduct $67 a month because he won $3,600 on the slot machines. Why, he asks, won't they take account of all the money he has lost gambling? It is a fair question. If middle-class America had this problem, accountants would surely find a way round it. Mr Banks also complains that he cannot draw food stamps. In order to qualify, he would have to sell his truck, which he cannot bear to part with. Mr Banks would probably be surprised to hear that, thousands of miles away in central Africa, there lives a prominent surgeon whose monthly income is roughly the same as his. Mbwebwe Kabamba is the head of the emergency department at the main public hospital in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. After 28 years as a doctor, his salary is only $250 a month, but by operating on private patients after hours, he ekes it out to $600 or $700.

Given the lower cost of living in Congo, one might guess that Dr Kabamba is better off than Mr Banks. But the doctor has to support an extended family of 12, whereas Mr Banks's ex-wife and three sons claim public assistance. Indeed, the reason Mr Banks split up from his wife, he says, is because they can draw more benefits separately. She still lives in the trailer next door.

Why juxtapose the lives of a poor man in a rich country and a relatively well-off man in a poor one? The exercise is useful for two reasons. First, it puts the rich world's wealth into context. A Congolese doctor, a man most other Congolese would consider wealthy, is worse off materially than most poor people in America. That, in itself, is striking.

The second purpose of the exercise is to shed light on some ticklish questions. What is the relationship between wealth and happiness? And what is the significance of relative poverty? Mr Banks makes $521 a month in a country where median male earnings are $3,400 a month. Dr Kabamba earns $600 a month in a country where most people grow their own food and hardly ever see a bank note. The two men's experiences could hardly be less similar. But which of the two would one expect to be happier?

The reality is that poverty is a very slippery concept; especially when we begin to talk about relative poverty. If we take the poorest one percent of Americans (about 3 million people) and compare them with the top one percent of Americans, the enormous disparity would is obvious. However, if we offered the one billion people who live on less than one dollar a day a chance to swap places with our 3 million poorest Americans I have little doubt they would jump at the chance. Furthermore, take a look at this crude chart showing what a typical poor nation’s distribution of income looks like compared to a wealthy nation’s distribution. (I am using income assuming that wealth and income generally vary together.)

The poor nation has the great majority of people living within a very narrow range of income and a very few exorbitantly wealthy people. Because so much of the population lives in such a narrow range of income the relative differences mean little. However, in the wealthy nation, all but a few people are financially better off then the overwhelming majority of people the poor nation. But the distance between the wealthy and the poor is far greater and if you are in the bottom 10-20% of the population there are a great many people who are significantly wealthier than you. Thus, even though the people at bottom of the distribution in a wealthy nation are better off than most people in a wealthy nation they may have a much higher sense of deprivation.

Here I would interject that the income distribution  in the Roman Empire almost certainly looked like the poor nation distribution on this chart. James Jeffers ranks the social classes of Jesus day in this order. (1)

Senatorial – Approximately 300 families. Had to have an estate of at least 250,000 denarii (About one day’s wages; say $50 in USAmerica today.) Two senators are known to have had estates of 100 million denarii, which was equal to about one year’s income for the entire empire.

Equestrian – About .1% of the population. Had to have an estate of at least 100,000 denarii

Decurion – Less than 5% of the population. Had to have an estate of at least 5,000 to 25,000 denarii, depending upon locale.

Respectable populace – A small percentage of the population. Most had less than was needed to become a Decurion but were not living hand-to-mouth. They were usually small landowners, craftsman or shopkeepers. [Jesus (Carpenter), Peter, James, John, Andrew (Fishermen), Matthew (Tax Collector), and likely Judas Iscariot were of this class. We don’t know enough about the other disciples to hazard a guess. Rodney Stark writes that “…a consensus had developed among New Testament historians that Christianity was based in the middle and upper middle classes.” (2)]

The poor and most slaves – The great majority. Well more then half of the population and possibly higher than 80%. The poor were tenant farmers, urban day laborers, and dependents of patrons. Orphans, widows and disabled. There were slaves of differing status but most were in this social stratum. Many of them struggled to survive day-to-day.

For all practical purposes, the absolute poor and the relative poor were one in the same group. From what I know of ancient cultures (and I am no expert) this kind of distribution was similar to the cultures of Abraham’s day as well. Therefore, when the Bible speaks of the poor it is referring to a context that is very dissimilar to the context we live in today. It is important not read our context back into the scripture.

The issue of relative poverty in a developed nation where the poorest folks are better off than most people throughout history, and the great majority of people in some contemporary countries, is a recent ethical debate. Only in the past two hundred years have we had to confront this issue. I will turn to that issue shortly but first I want to turn to the issue of the billion or more people living at or near absolute poverty.

(1) Jame Jeffers, "The Greco-Roman World of the New Testament: Exlporing the Background of Early Christianity." Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1999. Chapter 6.

(2) Rondney Stark "The Rise of Christianity: How the Obsure , Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries." San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, 1997. 31.

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Theology and Economics: Prosperity

Back on May 18 I wrote the following:

I began this series noting that poverty is the natural human state of affairs. When we ask “What causes poverty?” the answer is “Being born.” We all come into the world owning nothing. The fact is that most people in most cultures throughout most of history have lived lives owning very little. Their lives were faced with endless cycles of disease, famine and war. Only small minorities prospered beyond bare subsistence living. Even at the height of the great Roman Empire it is estimated that maybe ten percent of the people moved beyond subsistence living. Grinding poverty and premature death have been the norm.

The real question is “What causes prosperity?” Wide spread prosperity across entire societies is a startlingly new development within human history. It began a few centuries ago but has dramatically accelerated over the last 300 years. Infant mortality rates (the number of children who die before their first birthday out of every 1,000 children born) have been 200-300+ throughout human history. There are now only a few nations where this rate is in triple digits and most rates are much lower. During the twentieth century in the United States, the rate dropped from 165 to 7. Life expectancy from birth in the US has risen from about 47 years to nearly 76 years over the same time period. Entire diseases have been eliminated across the planet. Access to varieties of food, healthcare, climate controlled homes, rapid transit and host of other amenities are available to hundreds of millions of people that would be the envy of the very wealthiest people a century ago. This prosperity continues expanding (though unevenly) all across the planet. The real question is what brought about this prosperity?

I highlighted four developments that led to the astonishing improvement in humanity’s material well being. They were:

Property Rights

• Property Rights (Part 1)
• Property Rights (Part 2)

Scientific Rationalism

• Scientific Rationalism

Capital Markets

• Capital Markets (Part 1)
• Capital Markets (Part 2)
• Capital Markets (Part 3)
• Capital Markets (Part 4)

Technology and Infrastructure

• Technology and Infrastructure (Part 1)
• Technology and Infrastructure (Part 2)

But even more elemental, these developments came from ways of thinking that were unique to Christianity. In my post Prosperity and the Christian Ethos I wrote that the concepts like human beings created in the image of God, linear time, progress and rational discernment, were distinctively Christian contributions that gave rise to these four factors.

As we begin to look at addressing the issue of poverty it is time to make an important observation about prosperity. Prosperity is not about how much wealth individuals have at any given time. Prosperity is about the amount of wealth and resources that can be generated and sustained over a lengthy period of time. Prosperity comes from the dynamic interplay between a set of human resources, values and social institutions.

For this reason, redistribution of income will not generate prosperity. Income distributed to a population that does not possess the human resources, values and social institutions to create prosperity may temporarily be wealthier but they will not become more prosperous.

There is a common template through which too many Christians filter their thinking about economic issues. It assumes that there is a relatively fixed amount of wealth in the world. Wealthy people have what they have at the expense of someone else. Wealthy people have their wealth because they got lucky or because they exploited others. Therefore, the way to address the issue of poverty is a forced redistribution of wealth from the wealthy to the poor. Much of this goes back to how we (mis)understand the biblical narrative.

When we read the Scripture we have to keep in mind the cultural context we are dealing with. The ancient world was largely agrarian. The idea of capital was a foreign idea. Wealth was measured in terms of land and herds. The idea of capital did exist in the New Testament and we see it emerge a part of Jesus’ parables. But there were no capital markets in any modern sense of the word. Labor and land were the primary means of production. If one person was more productive than another they might be able to earn modestly more but there was no way to become wealthy from your labors alone. Land was the determining factor in wealth.

The Roman elite (senators, equestrians, and decurions ) believed that the only respectable means to wealth was through land and the patronage system. They owned large villas but tended to live in the city much of the year. Your status was measured to some degree by how much you did through the agency of others rather than by your own labor. Commerce was not an honorable livelihood even though many of the wealthy participated in it to a degree. The decurion class often prospered by arranging commercial and financial transactions for transport of goods but it was not a free market. It had more to do with patronage arrangements. In addition to these Roman elite, who made up maybe 5% of the population, were the respectable poor that included small landholders. They made of up only a small percentage of the population as well. Probably more than 80% of the population were landless and subsistence workers or slaves. *

Often the only option someone had for getting ahead financially was through nefarious means. Nicodemus and Matthew would have been two such characters. They collected taxes for the hated Roman authorities and collected a portion for themselves in the process. Not only were they aiding the Romans but they became relatively wealthier than the typical Judean poor.

Wealth was directly linked with virtue in the Greco-Roman world. To be poor meant to be subjected to circumstances that could lead to theft and dishonesty. Only the wealthy that had not been subject to such temptations could be trusted with wealth. The overwhelming attitude toward the poor was one of superiority and oppression. They were more like necessary animals than people of value and worth.

Contrast this Old and New Testament era thinking to ideas like the Jubilee Code introduced in Leviticus 25. Many have read into this passage a redistribution of wealth but that was not the case. The Jubilee prohibited the permanent sale of land and limited the degree to which someone could incur debt. It ensured that each Israelite family would not be permanently alienated from their own land and labor. Everyone was to participate in ownership and stewardship. The aim was not to make sure no one became wealthy. The aim was to make sure that everyone had the opportunity to become wealthy through sound stewardship of resources in conjunction with God’s covenant.

The consequence of faithfulness to the covenant God made with the people of Israel was that they would peacefully inhabit the land and prosper. The prosperity was not just the essentials for daily living. It was characterized as an opulent abundance. Israel was to be an example to the world of God’s intention for humanity. God wants to bestow an opulent abundance on all of humanity.

One of the most frequently referenced prophetic passages in the Bible comes from Amos 5:24, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Frequently this is used as a passage to support wealth redistribution. It is said that Amos is condemning wealth and income inequality. Yet, what does Amos say he is prophesying against?

Amos 5:10-13 (NRSV)

10 They [Israel] hate the one who reproves in the gate,
and they abhor the one who speaks the truth.
11 Therefore because you trample on the poor
and take from them levies of grain,
you have built houses of hewn stone,
but you shall not live in them;
you have planted pleasant vineyards,
but you shall not drink their wine.
12 For I know how many are your transgressions,
and how great are your sins--
you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe,
and push aside the needy in the gate.
13 Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time;
for it is an evil time.

The city gate was the place where justice was administered. People came before the elders seated to have their disputes settled. The issues here are about lying (v. 10) and unjustly taking what is not ours (v. 11). Dishonesty in taking bribes (v.12) and disregarding the just claims of the poor (v.13) follow. In other words the, wealthy Israelites were disregarding property rights and the rule of law. They had become a law unto themselves and in so doing effectively barred the poor from prosperity that God intended for all his people. The central focus here is not the wealth of the oppressors but their perversion of justice. They ensured their wealth and excluded others from partaking in the prosperity God intended for everyone. If you look closely at the prophetic condemnations you will see that wealth in and of itself is not the issue.

People also like to point out Jesus’ story about the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16 as Jesus’ denunciation of wealth yet who is it that the rich man calls out to for water as he is suffering in torment? It is Abraham, the patriarch who blessed by God was considered enormously wealthy by the standards of his era. Other’s point to the story of the rich young ruler as evidence but the man’s problem was not his wealth. It was the covetous spirit with which he held on to it. Wealth obtained through just means is not the issue with which God contends in scripture. Ill gotten wealth and wealth that is valued over the one who empowered us to earn the wealth is the central issue.

Therefore, the presence of wealthy individuals or wealthy societies does not in and of itself mean injustice has occurred. Yet, living in a fallen world, there clearly is no such thing as an entirely just society. Still, we can speak of a relative sense of justice; the degree to which societies try to compensate for injustices that may occur.

The danger with the redistributionist approach to addressing poverty is that it often perpetuates the very problem it is trying to solve. First, generally speaking, those that have wealth have usually been more effective investors and employers of wealth than those without it. That is how they came to have wealth in the first place. By redistributing it to those that have the least skill in using wealth it decreases the overall productive capacity of the economy. They will go through the wealth without saving or investing it productively and end up back where they started. Second, the redistribution falsely rewards people for lifestyles and decisions that are counterproductive to a prosperous society and removes any motivation to alter their behavior to contribute to their own prosperity and that of their community. Thus, schemes involving significant wealth redistribution do not create prosperity even though they may temporarily reduce material need.

As I wrap up this post I want be crystal clear about what I have not said in this post that I suspect some may be inclined to read in to it. I have not said that we are without unjust systems in our society and that there is no ill gotten wealth. I have not said that God desires prosperity for everyone and we just need to “name it and claim it.” I have not said that the wealthy do not have an obligation to the poor. I have not said that there should be no redistribution of wealth from rich to poor (only that this as a sole or primary strategy is counterproductive.) My aim is to emphasize we are to elevate everyone into a prosperous existence. Also, 1.) being wealthy is not a shameful thing (though the pride and idolatry it can lead to clearly is), and 2.) obtaining the human resources, values and social institutions requisite to prosperity is the primary focus.

* James Jeffers, "The Greco-Roman World of the New Testament Era." Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1999. Chapter 8.

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Theology and Economics: Climate Change (Part 3)

The answer to an anthropocentric view of the environment (humans are all that matter) is not a biocentric view of the environment (nature reigns supreme.) What we need is a theocentric view in which humanity is the steward of God’s resources both in terms of the material world and socio-cultural creations. This was the gist of my last post. So what should our economic/political/scientific response be to climate change?

ECONOMIC/POLITICAL/SCIENTIFIC RESPONSE

From a scientific perspective I think the answer is difficult because the science behind many of the issues we are talking about is very unclear. For instance, global warming models show higher levels of the atmosphere heating up first, causing the atmospheres near the earth to heat up. Yet the opposite is happening. Furthermore, it is not clear that the net result of climate changes is bad. For instance, most of the global warming in recent years is attributed to warmer nights during the winter months at latitudes away from the equator. Contrary to what is being reported in the press, a decrease in the difference between polar temperatures and the temperatures found at the equator should mean the number and severity of violent storms lessens. Warmer winters should also decrease the demand for heating fuel in regions where large populations live in the northern hemisphere. Also, The United States is the single largest producer of carbon dioxide emissions in the world yet the net carbon dioxide emitted in North America is a negative number. Why? Partly because trees and foliage have been proliferating for at least the last fifty years. In fact, some studies suggest that increased carbon dioxide (combined with other factors) actually improves the efficiency of plants to taken in and process nutrients. Some believe this effect my have had a direct impact on the Green Revolution in crop productivity that has allowed us to feed the world. (For example, this article at the NASA site gives some idea the science involved with carbon and plants: Rain Helps Carbon Sink)

The bottom line is that we don’t know enough about the complex interaction of variables involved in climate change to chart a specific course of action, despite the insistence of alarmist about consensus. The alleged consensus is the opinion of scientist about the relationship between greenhouse gasses and global warming. It is not based on real world measurements but on computer models (and there are several) that are completely dependent on the assumptions scientist have feed into the models. Yet these models vary considerably in their assumptions about how variables interrelate. To date they have had little predictive value. With opinions but no scientific model, where do we start, particularly when the alleged consensus is heavily influenced by a nexus of mutually reinforcing interests that have a vested interest in perpetuating a crisis. Let us start with the science we do now.

What we do know is that fossil fuel puts pollution into the air. Particulate matter less than 10 microns in diameter can be taken deep into the respiratory tract. The United States has cut its absolute level of pollution by 25% over the past thirty years even though there was rapid growth in population and productivity. The US cities with the highest levels of particulate matter (measured in mpcm, micrograms per cubic meter) are Los Angeles at 38, followed by Chicago at 27 and New York at 23. But look at the level for cities outside the US.

Dehli, India = 187
Cairo, Egypt = 178
Kolkata, India = 153
Bejing, China = 106
Sophia, Bulgaria = 83
Bangkok, Thailand = 82 (1)

These cities are in nations that are in stage two or three of the Demographic Transition. Development and implementation of technologies that lessen the use of fossil fuels or the emissions from fossil fuels would improve plight of countless millions of people. Increased prosperity would also lead to a greater demand by the populace for just such improvements. Prosperous societies create far less pollution on a per capita GDP basis than do poor ones. The wealthier a society becomes the more concerned they become about the environment. The poor are not stewards. They are desperate survivors. The world needs every person to become a steward so that every corner of the earth can be filled with people using resources efficiently with least amount of harm to the natural order.

Property rights and capital markets are the central issues blocking the growth of many developing countries. Until property owners know they will reap the rewards from investments they make in land and production facilities, they will not take the risks required to make improvements. As soon as they do the government or some powerful interest will simply seize what they have built up. Capital markets can not flourish because there are always clouds of doubt about who actually owns what. Property rights and capital markets in many impoverished countries would set the on a track toward prosperity and eventually less pollution.

There is an axiom that says that negative incentives encourage people to do the minimum they need to do in order to avoid being punished. Positive incentives encourage people to meet and excel the minimum. Therefore, we need to find ways that get people invested in environmental protection and avoid government mandated behaviors whenever possible. Here is one example from Africa.

There many endangered species in Africa, elephants being one of them? Several countries have tried to protect elephants from poachers through tough regulations and they virtually all fail. The fact is that for villagers and people who live in close proximity to elephants, elephants are far from being considered a desirable exotic creature. They are more like rats. They trample crops and destroy property. So when a poacher comes along and offers some cash to a villager for info on the location of some elephants, what do you think the villager will do?

Safari operators have an interest in conserving the wildlife but they face an economic challenge. If they spend money on conservation it benefits not only them but all the either safari operators. They have to either increase their prices or reduce their profits relative to their competitors, so they too have incentives not to address the problem.

So why not do what Costa Rica did? About 25% of the land has been set aside as a rainforest wildlife preserve. They offer eco-tours for people who want to view the wildlife and take pictures. Approximately 11% of their national income comes from these tours. No wildlife, no profits. There is an incentive to protect it. The same could be done in Africa. Create large preserves and license safari operators to give tours with a portion of the profits going to the government. The villagers and the safari guides would have incentives for conserving the wildlife, the villages would be rid of destructive animals and poachers would find much less assistance in their activities. (2)

We need to resist central planning and draconian measures like the Kyoto Accords. The Kyoto Accords would have required the United States to cut its greenhouse emissions by 10% over a few short years but left China and India free to produce what the wanted. Had the Kyoto Accords been approved and honored, it likely would have caused a retrenchment in the world economy (US alone by about 2-3% in annual GDP) and caused more pollution. Why? The Accords would have made many manufacturing operations finically unviable in the United States. Factories would close. Places like China would have picked up the slack in production. But Chinese pollution technology is much inferior to that in the West. They are without the trees and foliage that cover North America which is essential for processing carbon dioxide. Therefore, we would have been taking manufacturing away from the producers who produce the most products with the least amount of input and the least amount pollution per product, and would have been giving it to the nations that are the least efficient and most polluting. If reducing pollution and carbon dioxide emissions is the aim, then this is not the answer.

A more viable concept seems to be something like the pollution credit model I described earlier. An international body would set standards for the maximum level of air pollution allowed in a geographic area. Pollution credits would be issued to each factory based on several factors like capacity, technology used and past performance. Factories that choose not to upgrade to cleaner technologies must buy credits in order to cover their excess pollution. Factories that do upgrade to cleaner technologies will have a surplus of credits to sell to other factories thus off-setting much of the cost for upgrading. You can either pay more and pollute or pay more and upgrade. At some point it simply becomes cheaper to upgrade. An important feature of this arrangement is that rather then mandating technologies to be used it gives an incentive for factories to be innovative and possibly find pollution cutting methods that exceed existing technologies.

Additionally, I think USAmericans need to be pushing for alternative fuels. My concerns are less about greenhouse gasses than they are about national security. Some of the most radical regimes on the face of the planet are funded through our consumption of petroleum. Alternative energy sources would both decrease the amount of money that flows to these radicals and the need for the USA to factor petroleum issues into its national security. Cutting off the flow of money to the powerbrokers who run these regimes might actually create an environment for more healthy societies to emerge.

Finally, there are the things we can do in our personal life. Here is a sampling of some things the Evangelical Climate Initiative (which I have been critical of) suggests you might do:

• Organize your life so that it is easier and more desirable to walk, bike, car pool and use public transportation.
• When a new passenger vehicle is required, purchase the most fuel efficient and least polluting vehicle that truly meets your needs.
• Keep your car's engine tuned up, the tires properly inflated, and don't carry weight unnecessarily in the car (e.g., using the trunk for storage).All save gas.
• Weatherize your home to conserve energy and cover your water heater with a fire-safe insulator. (Check to see if your utility or your local or state government offers an incentive or rebate program to help you weatherize your home.)
• Purchase compact fluorescent light bulbs and energy efficient appliances. (Look for the "Energy Star" label.)
• Choose electricity produced from renewable sources if available in your area.
• Support businesses that are reducing their global warming pollution by your investments and purchases.

I have no problem with this list and already do many of them. Yet this highlights my concerns about the new Religious Left mantra on global warming. Sound Christian stewardship of economic and material resources would suggest that actions like these are good actions regardless of whether there is anthropogenic global warming or not. So rather than trying to scare people into stewardship with questionable apocalyptic visions, why not instill within people a sound basis for Christian environmental stewardship and let that have its ramifications throughout the culture? There is an adage that says that a marriage of science and religion soon makes religion a widow. Where will be if (and I think when) global warming is shown to be something far different than we have been led to believe but we have grounded our motivation for environmentalism in that scientific assumption? Our basis for Christian stewardship needs to be grounded in the Word of God not in a pseudo-scientific political strategy for countering political forces we don’t like. We need a stewardship that honors the role of humanity as productive beings bringing the earth to its fullness all the time honoring the beauty and majesty of the created order.

(1) “The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2006.” New York: World Almanac Books, 2006. 301.

(2) Charles Wheelan, “Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science.” New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 2002. 24-25.

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Theology and Economics: Climate Change (Part 2)

What is an appropriate Christian response to climate change? My response would be to do very little about climate change. I think it is mostly a lot of hot air. (*grin*) Instead of addressing global warming I think we should be about finding more efficient and more cost effective ways to reduce pollution and CO2 emissions, as well as finding new cheap and sustainable energy sources. Confused?

I recently wrote a review of Al Gore’s movie called An Inconvenient Truth in which I spelled out my skepticism climate change science. I will not recapitulate all that here. What I want to focus on here is the convergence of two powerful political agendas over the past few years.

TWO AGENDAS

The first is the agenda of a scientific community deeply entangled in highly politicized government research funding. I blogged at length about this in my previous post so I will not go into detail here. In short, there is a nexus of (1.) politicians who want to be seen as dynamic visionary leaders (some to a messianic degree), (2.) of scientists whose livelihood depends on the perpetuation of a climate change crisis and the government money that perceived “crisis” generates, and (3.) media outlets that find sensational stories about climate change generates viewers and readers.

The second agenda in the convergence is the agenda of the politically left-leaning religious community. Except for a brief time during the Clinton administration, the religious left has felt itself increasingly marginalized in the political arena over recent decades. A highly symbolic event happened in 1998, when President Clinton went to China to talk to President Jiang Zemin about religious persecution. He took a rabbi, a Roman Catholic archbishop and two representatives from the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). No mainline or National Council of Churches (NCC) representatives were included despite their appeals to be a part of the diplomatic mission. I suspect President Clinton knew that the NCC was captive to the Democratic coalition and the NAE represented a powerful and growing constituency that could be courted.

Over the past generation, conservative and fundamentalist religious leaders have articulated fears of their communities about a decaying social order and motivated them into political action. For better or worse, politically conservative Christians (“Religious Right” would only be a subgroup of conservative Christians, by which I mean a diverse large group of people who are right of center politically and devoted Christians) are now driving much of the political agenda either by their actions or by the opposition their actions provoke. Liberal Christians (by which I mean a diverse group of devoted Christians who are to the left of center politically) have found themselves frequently in the role of defensive critics.

It is my suspicion that environmentalism is viewed by many on the Religious Left (politically liberal Christians who are thoroughly engaged in the political realm) as a political opportunity to regain a voice and set an agenda. They intuitively sense that many Christians have some sense of earthly stewardship as a part of their heritage and I think they are correct. Tapping into this issue is a way to regain power. This raises interesting questions. Is the driving force a profound theological and scientific concern about the environment seeking a political voice? Or is the driving force a weak political voice manufacturing an exaggerated concern to get a larger voice? I think both are present but I strongly believe the latter is the stronger force.

Understand that I am not alleging a conspiracy. No conspiracy is needed. It is almost an almost instinctive emergence. The twentieth century evangelical DNA seems to contain an apocalyptic gene. Dispensational theology has widely instilled the vision of an imminent rapture and apocalypse in theological strands far from Dispensationalism. Any overly vigorous sneeze heard within 500 miles of Jerusalem signifies the rapture is coming any second. The rise of the much vaunted and rivaled (though somewhat fuzzily defined) Religious Right in the late 1970s to early 1980s was due in part to apocalyptic visions of a moral collapse within the nation or of being conquered by godless communists from without.

Science has had its own Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye types. Paul Ehrlich released his book “Population Bomb” in the late1960s predicting imminent global catastrophe from over population. Not unlike Hal Lindsay, he just keeps on printing new editions after predictions fail to materialize, showing things are actually even worse than he first forecasted. The Club of Rome published their “Limits to Growth” report in the 1970s showing how we were about to run out of everything including petroleum by century end. From the late 1970s until at least as late as the mid-1990s we heard that fossil fuel emissions were creating global cooling and would plunge us into an ice age. Since the late 1980s global warming came to replace global cooling as the crisis and the area of study became known as “climate change.” (I can only presume the name change was made so that in case we need return global cooling we won’t have to adjust all the jargon again.)

I believe the crystallizing moment that sealed the convergence was the 2004 presidential election. Democrats and the media widely attributed Bush’s victory to “values voters” who were put off by the Democrats’ seemingly secularist and antagonistic posturing on faith issues. Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics was released just after the election. It offered Democrats a religious rationale for much of their political agenda. Democrats needed religion and the Religious Left needed power. A perfect marriage. Apocalyptic global warming “science” is a key piece of this alliance. The Spiritual Activism conference held last May by left leaning religious and political leaders was clear evidence of just such a strategy in progress. They are repeating the same perilous acts of the Religious Right in placing faith perspectives at the service of political powers.

The apocalyptic climate change movement is not based in either good theology or good science. Therefore, the theological response and the scientific/political/economic response are not good either. First, let us look at the theological response.

A THEOLOGICAL RESPONSE

The theological response Religious Left is incomplete. The religious left equates Christian environmental stewardship with “protecting,” “healing,” “preserving” and “restoring.” There is no question that these are aspects of environmental stewardship but this is a grossly incomplete conception of stewardship. It seems to have more in common with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s environmental romanticism than with the biblical narrative. According to Rousseau, human beings are in their most exalted and virtuous state when they are uncorrupted by civilization. It is civilization that corrupts both humanity and nature. Much of the environmental movement, including the religious versions, views humanity entirely as consumers and environmental parasites. Consequently, stewardship is equated with keeping every aspect of nature in as pristine and as untouched condition as we can.

Human beings are not parasites. They were intended to be producers. As I review scripture, I am hard pressed to find scripture that speaks directly of humanity’s relationship to nature as “protecting” and “preserving.” We do find in the Genesis Chapter 1 account of creation that God pronounced the created order good. For that reason, if for no other, creation has value beyond a purely utilitarian value. Psalms 8:5-6 says:

Yet you have made them [humanity] a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet … (NRSV)

While we tend to think of Kings exercising “dominion” as tyrannical, this would not have been so for readers in biblical times. The monarch was to be God’s instrument for building up his domain, making it prosperous, bringing order and protecting it from harm. It was not just for keeping the status quo but about seeking ever increasing good for those under his domain. They were to make their domain productive and prosperous. Thus, when Psalms 8 speaks of giving dominion it is this image that is in mind. I maintain that the biblical vision of stewardship envisions human beings getting the most output for least input while doing the least damage to the created order, all the while enhancing the fruitfulness of the human and natural order.

The creation stories hardly view the earth as some weak and fragile reed. It is a wild untamed beast that must be harnessed and subdued. Genesis 1:28:

God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue [kabash] it; and have dominion over [radash] the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." (NRSV)

According to Strong’s Concordance, the key words here mean:

OT:3533  kabash (kaw-bash'); a primitive root; to tread down; hence, negatively, to disregard; positively, to conquer, subjugate, violate.

OT:7287  radah (raw-daw'); a primitive root; to tread down, i.e. subjugate; specifically, to crumble off.

Genesis 2:15

“The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till [`abad ] it and keep it.” (NRSV)

According to Strong’s Concordance, the key word here means:

OT:5647  `abad (aw-bad'); a primitive root; to work (in any sense); by implication, to serve, till, (causatively) enslave, etc.

These are not passive words. They conjure up images of a humanity that is bending the forces of nature toward some purpose, not preserving all its pristine glory. The very act of “filling the earth” would militate against this. We need to remember that the biblical narrative begins in a garden but it does not end their. The purposes of God are not restore us to a garden but to bring us into a city, the ultimate symbol of human civilization, filled as it is with commerce, learning and government. Passages like these are almost uniformly ignored by the Religious Left in their presentations of environmentalism.

Our relationship toward creation is not purely utilitarian. We are but stewards of resources entrusted to us and we are to use those resources as the owner would use them. The owner of those resources created them and pronounced them good upon creation. Therefore, wanton destruction of resources and beauty for selfish ends would be a violation of our stewardship role. However, like the servant with the one talent in Jesus’ parable from Matthew 25, simply preserving and protecting resources entrusted to us is a violation of our stewardship role as well. If the environmentalism of the Right (or lack thereof) has veered too close to the error of wanton destruction, then the error of the Religious Left is to fall into the trap of the one talent steward. We need a biblical environmentalism that leads us to neither of these errors.

So the first response to climate change is an appropriate theological response. Now we need to look at an appropriate scientific/political/economic response.

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Theology and Economics: Climate Change (Part 1)

Only someone in coma for the past decade could possibly not be aware of the climate change controversy. Every few days there are new stories in the popular media about the topic. The crux of the theory is that carbon dioxide (CO2) is put into the air by burning fossil fuels and the concentration of CO2 is having an impact on our climate. The latest climate change theory postulates that ultra-violet rays heat the surface of the earth but the CO2 traps the heat, preventing it from be reflected out of the Earth’s atmosphere. There are several claims made that relate to this theory:

• The average global temperature is on the increase and has been for about 150 years.
• The primary cause of the warming, at least in recent years, is anthropogenic (human caused). (Increases in CO2 in the air are almost exclusively due to fossil fuel consumption.) There is an ironclad indisputable scientific consensus on climate change cause and effects with regard to the anthropogenic nature of the warming.
• The consequences of this warming are going to be devastating disasters like melting ice caps and rising sea levels (therefore displacement of many people), more frequent and more violent hurricanes, and the extinction of many species.

Critics of these claims are frequently ridiculed as “flat-earth” buffoons or minions of big corporations and energy companies. The template through which events are often reported is objective impartial scientists altruistically working to save the planet being opposed by evil greedy corporations who want to destroy the earth. It is a compelling story that plays into many of the values and prejudices people have in society. But there is another side to this story. To understand it, we have to go back sixty years.

Forty-six years ago, Dwight Eisenhower made a prophetic statement in his Farwell Address. In it, he talked about the Military-Industrial Complex. He was apprehensive about the corrupting influences of powerful corporations on society. However, if we read on in Eisenhower’s speech we find this statement:

“The prospect of the domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal Employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded. Yet holding scientific research and discovery in respect as we should, we must always be alert to the equal and opposite danger that the public could itself become captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

The development of the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project had been such a successful partnership between government, science and business that Roosevelt commissioned Vannevar Bush (no relation to the current president), one of his White House science staff persons, to develop a proposal for how this arrangement might be institutionalized to address other scientific problems in the future. Bush’s aggressive proposal made its way to Truman after Roosevelt’s death and was enthusiastically received. It resulted in the creation of the National Science Foundation working under the president and a host of other research arms in cabinet departments like Defense and later Energy. By 1960 Eisenhower was already having reservations. The problem is that the determination of what is a “problem” becomes less a scientific question than a political one. If you want to get funding you better study what the funders see as “the problem.”

The late 1970s were a time of focused efforts in studying and developing energy alternatives. It was during the 1970s that Energy Secretary James Schlesinger became interested in the possible impacts of fossil fuels on climate global warming; or as it was known then, “global cooling.” The global temperature had been declining from the 1940s to the 1970s and it was feared that emissions were blocking the suns heating capabilities and would throw us into an ice age.

Research funding continued to grow for studies on climate change through the 1980s when nature decided to throw scientists a curve ball. It was determined that since the early to mid 1970s the earth had started warming up. Not to be out foxed, scientists postulated that instead of blocking the suns heat, a greenhouse effect would be created that would trap the heat and create global warming. James Hansen of NASA indicated in congressional testimony in 1988, that we could expect the temperature to increase nearly 3 degrees C (well over 5 degrees F) in the next fifty years, an exaggeration by about a multiple of four. He later justified his extreme scenario because he needed to get the attention of policy-makers who were largely unaware of the “problem” of global warming.

In other words, if you can get the policymakers to perceive a crisis, you have created a “problem” for scientists to “solve.” The coffers open up. Politicians want “scientific evidence” that they are funding efforts to address their constituents “problems.”

So imagine you are a scientist. You do research and conclude that greenhouse gasses are not the problem. It is driven by variations in radiation from the Sun (for example). You conclude that the impact of the warming is likely to be minimal. What are you going to say at the next federal funding hearings? “Good news. No significant anthropogenic global warming. My colleagues and I don’t need your money anymore. Thank you very much.” Not only are you de-funding yourself but also undercutting the funding for every other scientist who is studying this topic and you are denying political powers some political ammo about “solving problems” with taxpayer money.

Scientists advance in their fields is by publishing in peer reviewed journals. The reviewers are people who have established a track record of publication and are believed to be experts in their fields. They are also people who have been competing for federal funding dollars with everybody else. They review the article that challenges the conventional wisdom about global warming and reject the article as flawed or in some way “unscientific.” The scientific community is a relatively tight knit community and suddenly you find you can’t get any of your research published. No publications eventually means no job; or at least no advancement.

We are not talking about purely objective scientific observers. Challenges to paradigms in the late twentieth century are no longer just about science. It is also about politics and potentially destroying the livelihoods of fellow scientists with whom you must have a relationship to advance. Check out Climate of Fear, an article by Richard Lindzen of MIT, in the Wall Street Journal last April.

To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.

If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less--hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.

So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear.

….

Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.

It is clear there are multiple vested interests affecting the debate. Corporations fear financial loss, scientist want to keep their jobs and not lose funding, government agencies what to demonstrate their importance, politicians want to rally votes (of both skeptics and diehards) and the media loves sensation.

Mainline denominations have tended to jump right on board with the most apocalyptic versions of climate change. Evangelicals have been relatively silent on these topics until just the past few years. One of the first evangelical organizations to begin to raise the issue was the Evangelical Environmental Network. They are generally supportive of claims about major environmental degradation and anthropogenic global warming. More recently, a statement called the Evangelical Climate Initiative was issued by a number of Evangelicals that the NAE ultimately declined to endorse. A group called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance was formed that supports a document called the Cornwall Declaration. It too was signed by a number of religious leaders and scientists. It takes a more skeptical view of anthropogenic global warming and differs some onhow we should respond.

So what is an appropriate Christian Response?

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Theology and Economics: Economic Growth and Future Resources

I ended the last post by observing that what we need is not less people but more people who are stewards. Stewards are people who can get the most output of the least input on a sustainable basis. The obstacle to having more stewards is grinding poverty that dominates vast regions in the world. That poverty is overwhelming a result of societies who refuse to embrace individual rights like property rights, establish rule of law and create true market economies. This is not to say that developed nations do not have a significant role in some of the dysfunction that developing nations experience but I do not believe this to be the fundamental problem.

Let us suppose we wake up tomorrow and all the dysfunctional nations of the world, to our amazement, suddenly embrace all the institutions I have been talking about. Within a few short years, their death rates drop and, after a brief increase in pollution, they begin to become more environmentally conscious. Prosperity breaks out all over the world. Won’t we have a new problem? Won’t fuel and energy to power these growing economies become a problem? Furthermore, won’t that lead to increased pollution and carbon dioxide outputs? The answer to these questions is almost certainly yes, at least in the near term!

But let us step back for a moment. Let us imagine that the year is 1900. As we look at world population, we realize that the world population has grown by more than 50% over the last century to more than 1.5 billion people. Forecasting growth into the future we can see that the population will quadruple to 6 billion. The few developed nations of the world set a goal of having about 10% of the population in 2000 living at standards at least as high as the wealthiest 1% in 1900. How will we do that? Think of the incredible number of horses we are going to need for transportation. Think of the pollution and the stench they will produce. Think of the coal that will have to be mined and the distribution networks developed to get coal to people’s homes. Just imagine the number of new ice houses that will have to be built. Etc. Beginning to get he picture?

What should our response of have been in 1900? Curtail the amount of resources we use? Start restricting the use of horses to prevent pollution? Start rationing coal so there will be enough for future generations? Thankfully that is not what happened. Entrepreneurs evaluated problems and began experimenting with solutions. Bicycle makers began taking two bicycle frames and welding a carriage between them, and then adding an internal combustion engine for a motor to power them. Before long their innovations became a very practical mode of transportation that had more power than several horses. With the innovation of assembly line manufacturing, the prices dropped rapidly and the automobiles where widely available. Other entrepreneurs began to experiment with electricity which enabled homes to be wired with electrical power. That allowed the operation of home appliances like refrigerators. The iceman became a thing of the past. The electrical power also eventually allowed for climate control devices that had required home delivered coal. With each of these inventions tremendous advances were made in the amount of utility gained versus energy used and resources expended.

As we look forward from our standpoint, we can’t see how energy demands can possibly keep pace with the demand if developing nations begin to grow, anymore than people in 1900 could see how energy demands would be met over the coming century. New energy sources were created and existing energy using devices were made ever more efficient. That process is still underway. As the cost of energy like gasoline is driven up by demand, alternative fuels will become more attractive. As they become more attractive, more entrepreneurial efforts will be expended toward bringing these options to the market. It is entirely possible that by spurring economic growth we will increase the demand for fuel, causing the price to rise to a level that alternative fuels and new technologies will enter the market. Economic growth might be the quickest path to newer less polluting technologies, not economic retraction.

The fact is that most commodities in the world have been getting cheaper, not more expensive. Dropping prices indicate an increasing abundance in supply relative to demand. When some resource begins to escalate in price, innovators create alternatives that can be substituted more inexpensively. Too many of us view the economy statically (simply projecting the status quo into the future) and not dynamically (people reflect on and respond to demand and supply signals and innovate.)

With that said, do we just ignore issues like pollution and carbon dioxide emissions? Certainly not. A zero pollution option would be ideal but that does not yet exist in any way that can be mass deployed. This creates a public policy issue. We have to weigh each incremental benefit of pollution reduction against the costs to economic growth which will provide the resources that help us find new answers to pollution.

I am not arguing for a Pollyanna “head in the sand” optimism that just assumes everything will work out. But projecting impacts of existing technologies and circumstances into the future is equally naïve. There is no neat formula for how to proceed but both extremes are perilous. Unfortunately, in our polarized times, these extremes are where many people tend to gravitate. I believe striving for balance is the responsible choice but that means catching hell from two sides.

I have said before that carbon dioxide is not technically a pollutant. To plants and trees it is known as fresh air. But can too much “fresh air” be a bad thing? That brings us to the question of climate change and what to do about it.

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Theology and Economics: Demographic Transition and the Environment

The Demographic Transition Model is a model used my demographers to describe the transition form high birth rates and high death rates to low birth rates and low death rates that occurred during industrialization in Western nations. It occurred in four stages. (See “Demographic Transition” chart for reference.)

Stage 1: Prior to the mid-eighteenth century death rates (per 1,000 population) and birth rates (births per 1,000 population) varied but tended to balance each other out.

Stage 2: Death rates began to decline in the late eighteenth century in England and shortly thereafter in other nations undergoing industrialization. Birth rates stayed constant for a while and then began to drop in a pattern similar to death rates. Consequently, even though they were both declining, the fertility rate was significantly higher than the mortality rate in any given year for many decades. This led to a significant increase in the population.

Stage 3: Beginning in the mid to late nineteenth century, death rate declines began to slow and level out. Meanwhile fertility rates continued to decline leveling out at a later date. The population continued to experience significant growth but at an ever declining rate.

Stage 4: Death rates and birth rates stabilized at or below replacement levels in the mid to late twentieth century.

Stage 2 emerged in response to increased agricultural productivity. Improved farming methods and technological innovations played a role. A surplus of food meant that diet improved. This improved health and vigor. It reduced the death rate as people lived longer and people lived more productive lives. With improved health and enough to meet basic subsistence needs, people began to address pollution problems like waste elimination and personal hygiene. This lessened the amount of disease and allowed more people to live longer and more vigorous lives.

Stage 3 was a period where the infant morality rate (children dying before their first birthday) was noticeably lower. Whereas only four or five children out of eight might have lived to adulthood in the past, now seven or eight children might reach maturity. Fewer children were needed to perpetuate the family and birth rates declined. Increased industrialization also meant urbanization and a departure of traditional values about family size and the role of women. Women no longer gained as much status from family. They become more educated and literate, often entering the workforce. This led to greater affluence and greater sophistication in knowing how to create a better quality of life. People become evermore empowered and greater demands were made for environmental improvements and safety.

Stage 4 has seen a stabilization of death and birth rates. Concerns about quality of life issues including pollution and environmental concerns have risen in importance. Some believe there may be a stage 5 in which birth rates stay the same or decline but death rates begin to increase because of decreased physical activity and increasingly unhealthy lifestyles like overeating. Whether this is true and to what degree is a subject of debate.

What does this have to do with environmental concerns? People at or below the subsistence level are oblivious to long term environmental concerns. Most of the people in Stage 1 don’t have the luxury of worrying about deforestation, land erosion, pollution and contaminated water. They need to survive today. As the Demographic Transition starts, there is more despoiling of the environment and there are more people affecting the environment. However, as more people move beyond mere subsistence they begin to raise environmental questions. They become stakeholders in the economy and pollution begins to have an impact on their private property. Demand for pollution solving techniques and technologies increases. The environmental improvements become a contributing factor to extending lives and reducing infant mortality rates. This creates greater affluence which means both larger numbers of educated people who can address quality of life issues and more financial resources with which to address such problems. While there is an increase population, the rate of pollution actually declines. The World Bank believes that pollution increases with economic growth until a society gets to about $3,500 per capita and then, for the reasons just given, per capita pollution declines.

But not only does the quality of life go up and the pollution decline per capita; the productivity per capita increases as well. As a society, people become more and more effective stewards (producers) of the resources. They create ever higher outputs relative to the amount of inputs. It is inaccurate to achieve an estimate of future events by looking at the per capita amounts of consumption and pollution at a point in history and multiplying that by a projected increase in population. Neither can we do this for levels of productivity. Consumption becomes more efficient and less polluting while productivity increases.

Now the really big question is “Well this transition hold true for the rest of the world?” That is a question for legitimate debate. There are no nations remaining in Stage 1 today according to most demographers. Several other nations have gone through the four stages or are near the end of the third stage. The time over which they made the transition has been radically accelerated.

For most Western nations the transition was made over a 150-200 year timeframe. Most nations outside the West were still in Stage 1 by the start of the twentieth century. The big change came as Western nations began to invest large amounts aid in other countries. Vaccinations, health education and introduction of certain technologies made radical improvements. Death rate decreases that took Western nations decades to achieve occurred in less than a decade in some nations. However, birth rates are much more a function of culture decisions than are death rates and they are more resistant to change. Thus, for a time there was a wide disparity between birth rates and death rates leading to an explosion in population. (See the chart about developing nations.) Governments and international organizations invested heavily in family planning training and contraception in efforts to change cultural values about family size, often with mixed success. But over time many nations made the journey toward stage four.

There are, however, nations that have made their way into the second and possibly even third stages and stagnated. These would include some nations in Latin America and Asia, much of Africa and several Mid-Eastern nations. The remaining communist nations like China, North Korea and Cuba also would be included. Why? The initial technological increases have made some initial dents in the death rates but rule of law, market exchange, clear property rights and resistance to culture change with regard to certain cultural values (especially as it relates to women and girls) prevent nations from forming the institutions that will take them down the path to Stage 4. Totalitarian and corrupt governments, ingrained “rent-seeking” mentalities and deeply embedded values about patriarchal domination of women all are contributing factors. Western nations had to overcome some of these same barriers but they had two centuries to work through the transitions. Some of these nations have had this radical change compressed into a timeframe of two generations. One has to wonder if this isn’t one of the contributing factors to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in recent decades.

It is often said that the world has an over population problem. Overcrowding and population density creates poverty and pollution. I challenge that. Look at the population density of some of the most densely populated nations and their per capita gross domestic product:

Singapore: 16,514 per sq mile; $27,800
Taiwan: 1,648 per sq mile; 25,300
South Korea 1,279 per sq mile; $19,200
Netherlands 1,023 per sq mile; $29,500
Belgium: 879 per sq mile; 30,600
Japan: 873 per sq mile; $29,400
Israel: 783 per sq mile; $20,800
United Kingdom: 639 per sq mile; $29,600
Germany: 598 per sq mile; 28,700
Italy 500 per sq mile; $27,700

Then look at some of the least densely populated nations and their gross domestic product.

Congo: 4 per sq mile; $700
Bolivia: 21 per sq mile; $2,600
Sudan: 42 per sq mile; $1,900
Mozambique: 63 per sq mile; $1,200
Laos: 68 per sq mile; $1,900
Madagascar: 80 per sq mile $800
Cameron: 93 per sq mile; $1,900
Tanzania: 101 per sq mile; $700
Yemen: 102 per sq mile; $800
Nicaragua: 109 per sq mile; $2,300

Population density is not the issue. The issue is rule of law, property rights and market economies. Those nations that have embraced this model have prospered. Those that haven’t, have not. The world could easily support many billions more people if space is the only concern.

The reality is that the world will not need to support many billions more. There are approximately 6.5 billion people living today. The United Nations median population growth scenario projects a population of about 9 billion in 2050, with a leveling or even decline following. Low end projections are at about 7.5 billion. As these figures seem to keep revising downward over the years it seems likely it will top out at 7.5-8.5 billon people. This is hardly a catastrophic number.

The bottom line is that by increasing prosperity throughout the world, you end up with people who produce the greatest amount of output per amount of material and financial input and you get people who become increasingly concerned about cleaning, protecting and maintaining their environment. In other words, you get stewards. We don’t need less people. We need more people to become stewards!

Of course, this begs the question about sufficient energy and material resources and issues like carbon dioxide emissions.

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Theology and Economics: Environmental Externalities and the Dynamics of Growth

My last post traced how our connectedness with the natural order has been lost. I also noted that pollution increased dramatically form the late 19th Century until after the mid-twentieth century. I suggested this was due in part to ignorance of pollution’s effects and the exponential growth in pollution from industrialization. I also suspect that it was influenced by the fact that fewer and fewer had connection with the natural world and did not trouble themselves with such concerns. This combination of events led to a growing problem in what economists call externalities.

An externality happens when a decision by two parties has a significant impact (good or bad) on a third party who was not part of the transaction. Pollution is one of the most frequently cited examples of an externality. A factory emits pollution into the air through its smokestack. That pollution doesn’t just stay over the factories property. It disperses across everyone’s property in the region. Through free exchange, the factory and the factory’s customers have reached a financial exchange agreement but many others who were not a party to that agreement are compelled to bear part of the cost in the form of a polluted environment. Therefore, the some of the cost and benefits are allocated to those who are “external” to the market transaction.

The rise in pollution during the twentieth century has forced nations to develop new schemes for dealing with these externalities. One of the problems with the air pollution issue is that if one factory makes significant reductions in air pollution it creates two self-defeating problems. First, it spends money other factories do not spend which forces the factory to either reduce profits for its shareholders or raise prices to customers to cover the costs. Meanwhile, competitors get the benefit of the cleaner air and the ability to sell to customers at lower costs. There is no incentive for a factory to act on its own.

One strategy for addressing this issue is  to have government sets standards for the maximum level of air pollution allowed in a certain geographic area. Pollution credits are issued to each factory based on several factors like capacity, technology used and past performance. Factories that choose not to upgrade to cleaner technologies must buy credits in order to cover their excess pollution. Factories that do upgrade to cleaner technologies will have a surplus of credits to sell to other factories thus off-setting much of the cost for upgrading. You can either pay more and pollute or pay more and upgrade. At some point it simply becomes cheaper to upgrade. An important feature of this arrangement is that rather then mandating technologies to be used it gives an incentive for factories to be innovative and possibly find pollution cutting methods that exceed existing technologies.

So as capitalism generated an enormous boom in economic prosperity it also created some unintended externalities as it relates to the environment. When we all worked in agriculture we were both producers and consumers. We could see direct connections more easily and the type externalities we face today did not exist. This need not spell disaster. As I noted in the previous post, since 1970 in the US, the Gross Domestic Product has risen 161%, vehicle miles traveled has risen 149%, energy consumption has increased 42%, the US population has increased 39%, but aggregate emissions of the six principle pollutants has declined by 25%. With increased prosperity has come increased technological knowledge and increased financial resources to address the pollution problems. We have seen this process repeated over and over. Barely a hundred years ago a demographer would have seen a world population of less than 2 billion people but realized it was growing rapidly, possibly tripling within the next century. How would we possibly deal with the number of horses needed for transportation and their need for food and water, not to mention the manure pollution problem? Enter the internal combustion engine and the automobile. We know now that these engines have created their own sets of problems but they are vast improvements over the problems we would have had had they not been invented.

There is a balance that needs to be struck between pessimistic static views of the world that simply project current behavior into the future (ex. In 1900, “We are going to need more horses.”) and a Pollyanna optimism that ignores the problems existing technologies create. The process of democratic capitalism created environmental externalities. Unfortunately, some have decided that democratic capitalism is evil because of this and human beings are looked at as environmental parasites rather than productive stewards of creation. There is a widely shared assumption by many who focus on environmental issues that the answer lies in developed nations reducing their production levels, thus increasing their costs of production. Yet it is the technology of the developed nations that produces the greatest quantity of goods for the least amount of pollution per unit produced. By overly increasing the cost of production for low level polluters it makes products made in nations (especially totalitarian ones like China) that are less concerned about the environment more competitive.

While we should always be looking for ways to eliminate waste and improve efficiency, I do not believe the answer lies in penalizing the economies of developed nations. The answer lies in ending poverty around the world. People who are poor don’t care about the environment and they are environmentally destructive. When you are struggling to find food for your family today you don’t have the time to worry about future impacts of your decisions. Even if you did care, you would not have the resources to address the problems. The destitute poor are not able to be stewards. Part of the answer to the problems of environmental degradation is the formation of more stewards. To understand why, we need to think of human societies dynamically not statically. One place to begin is by looking at what demographers call the “Demographic Transition.”

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Theology and Economics: The Disintegration of Holistic Environmental Stewardship

When it comes to environmental stewardship, we live in a unique time in human history. The vast majority of people have worked in agricultural throughout history. They produced almost everything they consumed. It was demanding work with little assurance of a productive outcome. Drought, floods, pestilence and a host of other natural challenges could easily negate all of one’s labors. There was a direct link between stewardship of natural resources and survival, much less prosperity. Life moved to the rhythm of nature.

As we saw in earlier posts, small factories began to emerge in Western Europe prior to the eighteenth century, most notably in Great Britain. Machine power was discovered and perfected during the eighteenth century and when it was applied to factories, there was an exponential increase in productivity per individual. These machines required small army’s of workers to operate them and maintain them. Meanwhile, as machine power began to be applied to agriculture, a surplus of agricultural labor developed and the great move toward urbanization began. By the end of the eighteenth century Great Britain had rushed headlong into the industrial revolution.

Make no mistake; life in these early factories was horrendous by our standards. Yet it is inaccurate to characterize the move from farms to factories as going from bucolic utopias into servitude. For many it was a reduction in the standard of living but for a great many others it was an improvement in economic stability and opportunity. From an environmental standpoint, a major impact of industrialization was that workers no longer gathered resources and took them through a process that led to a final product. Workers worked repetitively at one task that contributed to the overall production effort. The connection between what they did and its impact on their environment was uncoupled. Work also moved out of the home. The home ceased to be a place of both production and consumption and became primarily a consuming unit. Life shifted from the rhythm of nature to the rhythm of the factory.

Industrialization rapidly moved on to transform other parts of the world. As recently as 1885, in the United States, families produced 80% of what they consumed. By 1915 the amount had dropped to 20%. Even the way we understand time changed. Each locale used to set timepieces so that high noon was always when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. Every fifteen miles you traveled east or west, high noon was a minute earlier or later. That worked fine when very few people traveled no more than a few miles within a day, but when railroads came into their own it required massive time conversion tables to work out schedules at each stop. Time zones were created in the 1880s to simplify this problem. Inventions like electricity made work and leisure something that could be done twenty-four hours a day, thus blurring the distinction between day and night.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the West began to move out of the industrial age into what many call the information age. The 1950s marked the first time in US history that a majority of people were not engaged in agricultural or manual labor. That majority has continued to grow every since. The impact of this development was that use of natural resources became even more abstract for the average person. Not only was contact with raw materials eliminated but many never even saw raw materials as they went through the production process. As Alvin Toffler has written, so blurred has our connection with nature become, and even our connection with the physical aspects of production, that life no longer moves to the rhythm of nature or the machine. It moves to the rhythm of the individual heartbeat.

Of course, one of the major consequences of the industrial era was pollution of the water and air. Initially, pollution was of little concern. Little was understood about its impact and relatively small amounts were easily absorbed by nature. By the mid-twentieth century that began to change as both our scientific knowledge increased and the scale of pollution increased. Many point to events like the polluted river the caught fire in Cleveland in the 1960s and smog days that could almost blot out the sun as turning points in cleaning up the environment.

It was also during this time that the Baby Boom generation began to become adults. Many of them rejected the technological industrial world of their elders and opted for a Rousseauesque environmental romanticism. The first Earth Day was held in 1970 and most point to it as the birth of the modern environmental movement.

The 1970s saw the creation of entities like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Since 1970 water  and air pollution has been greatly reduced. Since 1970 in the US, the Gross Domestic Product has risen 161%, vehicle miles traveled has risen 149%, energy consumption has increased 42%, the US population has increased 39%, but aggregate emissions of the six principle pollutants has declined by 25%. (Carbon Dioxide is technically not a pollutant. Plants and trees call it fresh air.) 

Within the religious community, mainline denominations were quick to adopt environmentalism as a cause, including working with some of the most radical environmental organizations. There have always been pockets of Evangelicals that have been devoted to environmental issues, but in recent years, the focus by the media on claims of anthropogenic (human caused) global warming has brought environmental stewardship to the fore. In keeping with almost every other issue of consequence in our day, the issue has quickly become polarized. Those who advocate measures for reducing the quantity and impact of pollution, and carbon dioxide emissions, are quickly labeled tree hugging flower children. Those who are skeptical of claims popularized in the media about environmental issues and worry that over commitment to an exaggerated problems could led to other problems are accused of supporting unbridled capitalism and want to pillage the earth.

The reality is that unlike every previous era in the history of Christianity, most of us living in developed nations have little direct connection with the natural environment. We see our impact on the environment almost exclusively from the vantage point of consumers. Therefore, environmentalism is almost exclusively about our consumption choices.

Yet, if we recall the Genesis creation stories, the word given by God to humanity was to tame nature. Bring it to its full potential. Stories like the parable of the three stewards entrusted with talents by their master (Matthew 25) shows that stewards multiply what is put under their care and make it more prosperous. Their ability to multiply and make what has been given to them more prosperous is the very thing that has earned them the role of steward in the first place. In the parable, it is the steward who does not make his talent productive that the master has such disdain for.

Stewards are not forest rangers, keeping nature in its pristine state. But neither are stewards despoilers and plunderers who destroy the source of their survival, prosperity and aesthetic wellbeing. A true understanding of environmental stewardship can not be had without out a full orbed view of being both producers and consumers. The challenge is to think about this holistically in such a complex economic environment. 

(For a very well written piece on the complexities of how something as simple as a #2 pencil comes into existence read I, Pencil. It goes a long way toward explaining why our economy is so remarkably productive and yet no one knows how to make a pencil from raw materials to finished product. It was written fifty years ago but it still holds true today.)

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Theology and Economics: Personal Stewardship and Spiritual Formation

Most discussions of environmental stewardship in Christian circles these days begin with some discussion about travesties being perpetrated on the environment and then define Christian stewardship as a list of actions done to end or reverse those travesties. At the individual level we are encouraged to live more simply and be in tune with the environment. These are important issues but I think we do ourselves a disservice if don’t address this from the larger view of what it means to be steward of God in the world.

There is no escaping the siren call of our age to define ourselves by what we own. Conspicuous consumption is ubiquitous in our culture. It is the compulsion to buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, in order to impress people we don’t like. Some of us may not be conspicuous consumers, but we are convinced that if we just had the right house, the right car and the right income, we would be truly happy. Others of us buy things because of the endorphin high that comes with getting something new. Too often this is merely a way to medicate some pain or emptiness in our lives. Our consumerist culture thrives on, and even encourages, these types of buying motives.

Some have rebelled against consumerist culture. They will not become captive to the consumerism of the age. They have decided to live “simply.” Purchasing and financial decisions are processed through a matrix of perceptions of what it means to live the simple life (insert Green Acres soundtrack). The nagging problem is that you can always find someone who has taken the simplicity thing one step further than you have. Then you find yourself in a game of conspicuous non-consumption, or not buying things you might enjoy, with money God has provided, in order to impress people who make you feel less holy.

Not surprisingly, neither consumerism nor simplicity, as presented here, give us peace. Why? They are mirror reflections of the same problem. They are attempts to find spiritual peace by how we relate to the material world rather than finding peace in a relationship with the eternal God.

Richard Foster, in Freedom of Simplicity, invites us to imagine dropping a length of string on a table and then using our fingers to arrange the string in a perfectly straight line. It is hard to do. However, if you put one finger on one end of the string and begin to draw it across the table, all the kinks come out of the string and eventually you have a perfectly straight line. The same is true with our priorities. When we focus on God and follow God, all the other priorities line up behind in their proper order. Simplicity is not about quantities of possessions. It is about singularity of focus.

One of my favorite Proverbs is Proverbs 30:8-9 (NRSV):

Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that I need,
or I shall be full, and deny you,
and say, "Who is the LORD?"
or I shall be poor, and steal,
and profane the name of my God.

As Christians there are only two relationships to material possessions. One is to be a steward for God and the other is to forgo material possessions altogether. There may be some who are called by God to forgo material possessions in pursuit of some unique call. That is always a small minority. The rest of us are stewards. The only choice we have is whether or not to be good ones or bad ones. Will we use them with the mind and heart of God or will we use them toward our own satisfaction? (Not that the two necessarily are always, or even frequently, in conflict. It is a question of ultimate loyalty.) I hear church folk boast about being good stewards because they tithe 10%. That is all good and well but what are they doing with the other 90% of God’s resources?

Becoming good stewards requires that we be transformed into Christ’s image. Robert Mulholland defines spiritual formation as, “The process of being conformed to the image of Christ for the sake of others.” I have always appreciated this description and the way Mulholland breaks it into four pieces in his book Invitation to a Journey.

First, it is a “process.” God doesn’t zap people out of brokenness. There can be great leaps of growth and there can be agonizing failures. But the process does not end until Christ returns and makes a new creation. Spiritual formation is not optional! We are all in a process of spiritual formation. There is only one question. Are we making ourselves available to God for transformation or are we allowing our environment to form us? Those are the choices.

Second, “…of being conformed…” We are to live lives that are full of worship, prayer, Bible study, reflection, meditation, confession, fasting, giving and service. Spiritual formation happens through the practice of spiritual disciplines privately and in community. However, it is not the disciplines that transform us. God works transformation. Notice that Mulholland wrote “…of being conformed…” not “conforming ourselves.” The disciplines are ways of placing ourselves before God to do his work. (It has been my experience that God is never working on the same timetable with the same priorities I am.)

Third, “…into the image of Christ…” We are to become God’s eikons. Formation is about confronting who we are in all our glory and all of our shame. It is about coming to see Christ for who Christ is. When we do this, we come to a clear appreciation of our value in God’s eyes and the pleasure he takes in the way he has created us. It also means owning just how much our brokenness is integral to who we are. It is about undergoing the often agonizing and disorienting process of letting go of that which God never intended to be part of us.

Fourth, “…for the sake of others.” As Mulholland observes, too many Christians in our consumerist society define spiritual formation “The process of being conformed to the image of Christ…” The part about “…for the sake of others” is absent. God is making us into Christ’s image (i.e., making us eikons) so that we may reflect God’s image in the world and in community. Spiritual formation isn’t an exercise in self-actualization. It is about becoming active animated reflections of God’s presence to others in the world.

The materialistic dichotomy of trying to find our identity through what we own or what we deny ourselves springs from an unhealthy identification with one pole of a polarity where both poles must be fully embraced. One reality is that God has given each of us certain gifts and passions. God takes immense pleasure in the pleasure we get from using our gifts and entering our passions. I often think of the movie Chariots of Fire where missionary Eric Liddle ran in the 1924 Olympics. There is a wonderful scene of him in the race where his head goes back, his mouth drops wide open, and he explodes toward the finish line. The voice over has a flashback of him telling his sister, “When I run, I fell God’s pleasure!” There is absolutely nothing wrong with using resources on those things that bring us pleasure. God takes pleasure in our taking pleasure. In fact, playing a game of golf, going shopping with a friend, owning and decorating a house, restoring an old car or watching a movie on a big screen TV, can be ways of deepening our appreciation of God and of who God created us to be. Doubly blessed is one who finds employment that directly coincides with his or her passion. The danger is that we begin to worship the gift instead of the giver; we elevate our enjoyment and pleasures out of proportion to other priorities. That is one of the reasons I think we it is so critical that we give away at least 10% of all we earn. Not just because of the benefit it brings to others but because of the check it places on covetous self-centered wills.

The other reality is that we live in community with others. God calls us to be priest, prophet and king in the world to those around us. We have obligations to family first and foremost, but also to friends and the larger community. Focusing on the needs and concerns of others around us takes us out of ourselves and reminds us that we are not the center of the universe. The ability to deny our wants and needs at any given moment makes the fulfillment of those needs and wants all the richer when we indulge them. We know that we have been able to accept fulfillment of those needs and wants with joyous thanksgiving rather than slavish compulsion. The danger here is that some come to believe that any gratification of their desires is selfish. They think everyone else’s concerns always come first. They rarely experience the joy God intended for them by engaging the gifts and passions God placed within them. Some become overwhelmed by the need they see around them and any personal indulgence seems sinful. Yet the gospels record several occasions of Jesus leaving the crowds and leaving his disciples to be alone and recreate with God. We can’t give out of an empty well and some of us need permission not to own every care of the world.

Many people are looking for a formula. There is none! God has not called us to libertinism or to asceticism. He has called us to a relationship, to community and to stewardship. When we feel the urge to self indulge and recreate, it can be an opportunity to converse with God. We can determine if we are trying to avoid problems or whether it is just God saying “Let’s go have fun together!” When we feel the urge to deny ourselves and do things for others, it is an opportunity to converse with God and discover if we are trying to solve problems on our own or whether there is a genuine need that calls us to personal denial. I think the reality is that in a great many cases there is no right and wrong decision. We have equally good choices before us. It is the cumulative effect of the choices we make over time that shapes who we become. As the picture of who God is calling us to be becomes clearer, some questions about daily decisions begin to answer themselves.

With this larger perspective on stewardship and spiritual formation in mind we can then begin to factor in the impact our personal decisions will have on our environment. Some people chose to ignore the impact of their decisions on the environment while others seem to treat humanity as a parasite.  How do we deal responsibly with environmental stewardship issues?

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Theology and Economics: Eikons and Environment in a Fallen World

We are called to be God’s oikonomos or stewards of God’s household, namely creation. We are to be living eikons of God in the world, reflecting God’s character and values in all that we do. However, in our present state, we are broken eikons who are ever inclined to elevate our own image to that of godhood. We are dis-integrated from the God of the universe. Because of our fallen nature we experience what sociologists call “anomie,” a disorienting state of lawlessness. In Genesis 3 were learn that Cain went out from God’s presence to settle in “the land of being unsettled,” or Nod. As communities we seek autonomy from God. Like the people at Babel, we will not be named by God but rather “we will make a name for ourselves.” Yet, we rival one another within our communities for autonomy and godhood as individuals. We will supply or own meaning. We will perpetuate it by domination and destruction of any human or natural forces that threaten our human made “home” here in the land of wandering. Economics and ecology are front and center in this quest to build a home.

Francis Shaeffer, in several of his books, gave a chart that is helpful for thinking about a dichotomy in our human existence. At the top of the chart he placed “The Personal-Infinite God.” Then he created two hierarchical columns that went like this:

Column 1:

Personal Infinite God
Humanity
(A chasm)
Animal
Plant
Machine

Column 2:

Personal Infinite God
(A chasm)
Humanity
Animal
Plant
Machine*

Column 1 highlights that we are like God in that we are personal rational beings. We are self-consciousness beings who quest for meaning and eternal transcendence. In this sense, we are similar to God but dissimilar to all else. Column 2 highlights that we are corporeal beings. We are of the dust of the ground and to the dust of the ground we return. We are finite. In this sense, we are not like God but are like all the rest of creation. Because of the fall from grace we are live in an irreconcilable dilemma.

One horn of the dilemma compels to establish ourselves as gods. But we are finite. We die. We are powerless to make our will and our stature prevail over more than a few human lifetimes, at the most, and then we are forgotten. Unflinching honesty about our attempts at godhood shows that is it pure futility.

The other horn of the dilemma is to deny or “transcend” that within us that makes us distinct from nature. We try to conform ourselves to the patterns of nature and lose that within in us which does not conform to the cycles and forces of nature. But we were meant for something beyond nature and it is integral to who we are. We find resist becoming engulfed by nature. “Becoming one with nature” is also futility.

Ancient civilizations tended toward the second horn of this dilemma. Pagan worship routinely involved symbolic reenactments of events in nature, calling worshipers to conform themselves to the patterns of nature. The fertility goddess is the most common religious figure in the ancient world. Ancient cultures were agrarian societies. Crops and agricultural production were the center of their economy. It is only through agricultural surplus that societies were able to engage in other human endeavors. Perpetuation of a society’s existence was directly linked to its agricultural abundance. Immortality was linked to society’s survival. Also linked to a sense of immortality, is the birth of new generations, which is linked to human fertility.

The Judeo-Christian heritage emerged and directly challenged a number of the elements pagans used to build a home for themselves. First the creation stories directly challenge the idea of an eternal unchanging universe. God is beyond and above nature. God created it and nature is not God. Second, God was exclusively referred to as male. This was not a dispersion on women but rather the erection of a barrier to characterizing God as a fertility god. God is neither male nor female. (Scripture uses feminine imagery in reference to God’s acts though God is never referred to as female.) Third, scripture unmistakably places humanity in a position that is above nature as co-regents with God. I referenced the two creation stories in Genesis in the previous post but there are also passages like Psalm 8 (NRSV):

1 O LORD, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens.
2 Out of the mouths of babes and infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
to silence the enemy and the avenger.

3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?

5 Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.
6 You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet,
7 all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

9 O LORD, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Fourth, the Judeo-Christian heritage views a progression over time toward some higher state for the created order. “Filling the earth” and “exercising dominion” over the earth in Genesis implies moving from a state of chaotic and unproductive beauty toward another beauty where humanity fills the earth and acts as co-regents with God, creatively evolving nature toward its fruition. The beginning of the story starts in a garden called Eden but it does not end their nor return there. It ends in a city called the New Jerusalem. The city is always considered to be the crowning achievement of humanity. The New Jerusalem seems to be a melding of the natural world God created with the creative work of humanity in making the earth a home.

I wrote in earlier posts that reason and the idea of progress are two major contributions Christianity has brought to the world. It has unleashed unprecedented learning, prosperity and freedom in the world. However, in so doing, humanity has also found new tools they may employ in their “home building” efforts to exclude God. Over the past three hundred years, extending back to the Enlightenment, we have seen the emergence of a type of “progress” that is based in ruthless subjugation of creation and bending it toward human aims that are disconnected from God’s values.

One virulent stream is a Social Darwinist survival of the fittest headlong pursuit of power and control over nature. Nature is nothing more than a repository of raw materials for the every whim and pursuit of human ambition. Nature is the enemy. Urban architecture during the modernist era is highly symbolic of this attitude. Concrete and Steel structures with their box like windows rise up and block out the sun. They consume every square inch of surface space leaving only small paths for people to move in. Plant and animal life have been banished from the presence of these eikons of modernist humanity that dwarf anything on the human scale and reduce the human being and nature to the inconsequential and the invisible.

A second virulent stream is the Christian heresy of Marxism. God was banished from the world but the message of progress and the inevitable realization of a new world order were retained. What is paramount is the realization of the new world order. Consequently, the natural world and individual human beings are of little significance. They are often considered obstacles to the emergence of the new world order. Everything must be laid on the altar of new world order.

The fact is that neither Social Darwinism nor Marxism hold the influence they did 50-100 years ago when they were at their peak. But echos of them still reverberate strongly in our era.

* Francis Schaeffer, “Pollution and the Death of Man,” in Francis Schaeffer, The Complete Works of Francis Schaefer: A Christian World View, Vol 5, A Christian View of the West, 2nd ed., Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1982. 29.

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Theology and Economics: Two Ecos

The word “Economy” is laden with meaning for Christians. It comes from the Greek word oikonomia meaning “household management.” (oikos = household or home; nomia =management) Related to it is the word oikonomos, which means “household manager or steward.” The household in mind here is the large villa of the Greco-Roman world. These were self-sufficient plantations owned by Roman citizens known as a paterfamilias. The household consisted of the paterfamilias, his family (including adult children and their families), free workers and their families, and slaves. Wealthy Roman citizens were often absent from their villas for months at a time, spending most of their time living in the city. In their absence, they left a highly trusted oikonomos (household manger) to take care of the oikonomia (household management.) Jesus was drawing directly on this social arrangement for his Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30 as I noted in an earlier post.

The etymology of the English word “Steward” is also worthy of note. The most valued possession of an English Lord was his herd of swine. Consequently, the lord would place only his most trusted servant in the role of ward over the sty where the swine were kept. Thus, the word “sty-ward” came to mean a lord’s most trusted servant. Over the years, the word morphed into “steward.” It is a close parallel to the Greek oikonomia.

The Genesis creation stories tell us that God made all that is and “it was good.” (Genesis 1:31) The natural world is good and valuable because God created it and valued it. The creation stories also tell us:

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." Gen 1:28 (NRSV)

and

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. Gen 2:15 (NRSV)

Words like “subdue” and “dominion” are not words most of use in our every day vocabulary. Kabash is the Hebrew word translated “subdue.” A better world might be “tame” to our modern ears. The world is wild and needs to be harnessed toward productive ends. Similarly, the word radah is the Hebrew word translated dominion. It is similar in meaning to kabash but carries with it the concept of “prevailing against” and “reigning over.”

For those of us living twenty-first century democracies, the world “dominion” conjures up the ideas of King-doms and rulers. We are predisposed to have negative feelings about such things. However, in past centuries in the West, it was believed that the king held his great power by the will of God and would use that power for the benefit of those in his domain. He would protect them from the threats and chaos that existed beyond the borders of the kingdom. If we look at dominion in this way, we see it less about tyrannical domination and more about being empowered to do good for the domain. In other words, exercise dominion.

The Creation stories tell of God creating the world and then creating eikons (images) of himself that will fill the whole earth as representatives of his authority and loving care for all that exists. In the Ancient Near East, kings would erect images (eikons) of themselves throughout their kingdom to remind everyone that they were in authority over that area. God was doing the same with his eikons except his eikons were living breathing animated eikons who could reason and be in relationship with him. They would be his stewards or household managers over the “household” of creation he had made, acting as he would act and valuing what he would value, and thus reflecting his image.

However, the biblical narrative tells us that Adam and Eve distrusted and minimized God. The eikons rebelled. They sought to be more than they were, but ended up becoming far less than they were intended to be. They were left in an existential predicament. With their eyes open, they realized that rebellion did not elevate them to gods. They could not go back to what they were before but they also realized they could not go back into God’s presence. The fall had it at least four effects.

• First, it separated humanity from God. Without relationship to the eternal God, human existence was reduced to a meaningless existence that ends in negation.
• Second, it dis-integrated the individual human being. We can not live without eternal purpose. We were made for eternity. Separated from God we must at least find illusions of immortality that shields us from the utter futility of our existence. Cain went out from God’s presence and started a city (civilization) and started a family to perpetuate his name. It is delusional but the illusion is more tolerable than the reality.
• Third, human beings are separated one from another. Having only our delusions as an integration point for meaning in life we must prevail over the delusions of our neighbors for our meaning to survive. Instead of being one integrated community in union with God, we have become fractious and anxious beings wrestling with each other to maintain our autonomy.
• Fourth, we have corrupted our dominion over the created order. Sometimes we have done so by choosing to see ourselves as mere products of nature and abandoning ourselves to it, other times by ruthlessly misusing nature to fuel our delusions of autonomy and power.

It is the last of these four that I want to focus on specifically. One of the most controversial topics of our day is how should humanity relate to the environment. Ecology is a word that was introduced about 130 years ago. It has the same root word as “economics.”: Eco- is from the Greek oikos. As we saw above, it means “household” or “home.” Ecology is literally “the study of the home.” Webster’s Dictionary defines it as, “The branch of biology dealing with the relations and interactions between organisms and their environment, including other organisms.” Ecology is essentially a study of the environment, the world we live in as our home.

Human beings are both organisms that are part of the ecology and they are eikons of God that are other than the purely biological world. Human beings live in the ecological world but their (now corrupted) mission in the world is to be the household managers. From a moral and ethical perspective, we can’t talk about ecology (study of the household) without also talking about economics (study of the household managers.) What does it mean to be the household manager in a fallen world?

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Theology and Economics: Polarity Management

As I was preparing to blog about ecology today, it occurred to me that I need to introduce a key concept that influences how I approach complex and controversial problems like these. It is called polarity management.

A few years ago I read a wonderful book by Dr. Barry Johnson called, Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems. His thesis is that a great many (not all) of the issues we define as problems to be solved are actually polarities to be managed.

To illustrate the point, ask your self a question. Which is more important to breathing; inhaling or exhaling? The question is absurd because breathing is the oscillation between these two polar activities.

Johnson uses the idea of matrix with four boxes. The boxes in the left column are one pole and the boxes in the right column are the other pole. The boxes on the top row are the positive aspects of the two poles and the bottom row are the negative aspects.

 

With the breathing analogy, call “inhaling” Pole 1 and “exhaling” Pole 2. The positive side of inhaling is that the body receives oxygen (Quadrant A). However, if we stop there, carbon dioxide builds up and we die (Quadrant B). This pushes us to the positive aspect of exhaling which is that we expel the carbon dioxide (Quadrant C). However, if we stop there, we will be deprived of oxygen and die (Quadrant D). This pushes back to Quadrant A, and the cycle repeats it self.

The idea is that this same dynamic applies to many polarities in human relationships. For example, take a church board that is divided between those who want a rigidly scheduled and tightly controlled church and those who want a spontaneous, adaptive, and free flowing style of ministry. Call Pole 1 “Planned” and Pole 2 “Free-Flow.”

Quadrant A -  The positive side of a planned environment is that everyone knows their responsibility. Lines of accountability are clear. People know what to expect and how to plan. Resources can be effectively and efficiently marshaled for a given task.

Quadrant B – Life together becomes stale. Activities are done by rote. Creativity is stifled. Opportunities are missed because the focus is on keeping the “machine” running. New people with new gifts and passions have no way to plug in.

Quadrant C – The move is toward the free-form. The possibility of new dreams and visions is embraced. New opportunities are identified and pursued. Creativity is unleashed. People begin to find new ways to minister they had never thought of before.

Quadrant D – Eventually chaos ensues. Overlapping activities happen while other concerns drop through the cracks. Creativity is stifled because there is no way to effectively engage the community. Opportunities are missed because there is insufficient structure to mobilize people to action. This pushes the group to Quadrant A and the whole thing starts over.

The fact is that in most polarities, most of us tend to lean toward one pole or the other. We tend to be overly (if not exclusively) focused on the positive aspects of our preference and the negative aspects of the polar opposite. Throw together people leaning toward opposite poles and what too often happens is a power struggles to make one pole or the other prevail. The irony is that should either one win, they will likely kill the organization; just like valuing inhaling over exhaling.

Tremendous breakthroughs can occur when everyone comes to see the polarity for what it is. Understanding begins when I can openly acknowledge the potential downside to my polar preference and express appreciation for the positive aspects of what the polar opposite brings. That lessens the defensive stance of my polar counterpart to do the same, hopefully allowing us to appreciate each others contribution to a healthy polarity. The aim here is not to find a moderate position between the poles. Using the breathing analogy, that is called being dead. *grin* We need to firmly embrace both poles and appreciate their interrelated contributions.

Johnson uses the human function of breathing. The Apostle Paul used the analogy of “the body” to illustrate his perspective on how the various gifts should function in the church. The body is a myriad of managed polarities like breathing. As the body of Christ, we need to learn better how to breathe.

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Theology and Economics: Two Applications

Over the past six months I have been blogging this series on Theology and Economics. I have made the case that scripture, inspired by God, places us within a narrative. Scripture gives us God’s unfolding story up to the days of the First Century Church. It also tells us something about the end of the story. The intervening part is our age and is presently being written. God invites us to participate with Him in the unfolding of the rest of the story.

The central theme of the story God is unfolding is the formation of a world that is filled with His eikons. I wrote that in the ancient Near East, kings would erect images (eikons) of themselves throughout their Kingdom to remind the inhabitants that they were under his authority. The idea that God created humanity “in his image” (eikons) and wanted them to “fill the earth” clearly draws on this understanding. Of course, God’s eikons would be unique because they are living animated eikons, not inanimate objects. As eikons, they are representatives who should be expected to act with the same mind and the same values as the higher authority who placed them. They have authority only in so far as they represent the mind of God, the one who placed them.

The narrative tells of a rebellion of by the eikons. They sought to establish there independent authority and coalesce rather than scatter and fill the earth. They became so evil that God destroyed them all, except for one remnant family. He told the remnant to multiply and fill the earth. The very next story in the narrative is the descendants of this remnant coalescing and setting themselves up as their own authority. God intervened, confused their plans, and scattered them across the earth. The eikons were now scattered but they were broken eikons that did not reflect his image.

God sought to restore his image by calling out a special people for himself that he could use as a symbol of his character and thereby draw all peoples back to him. But this group, called the Jews, rebelled too. They wanted autonomous authority and refused to reflect Gods image to the world.

Finally, God came in the form of a man, paid the penalty for the rebellious eikons, gave them an example "with flesh on it" of what an eikon is, and then sent redeemed eikons out to fill the earth with his image and intentions for the world. God made clear that he will persevere until his world is filled with fully restored eikons among whom he dwells.

I have written that in our time we are called to live and work as communities of God’s shalom, and that we are to work and pray for the shalom of the world. We are to be world transformers, informing others in word and deed of a coming age. Understanding, exactly what shalom should look like in our age and knowing how to form it is the great challenge. We are fallen and finite people who are easily disoriented. That means we have to make ourselves available to God for our own continuing transformation as well.

I pointed out the different kinds of justice God has revealed that he expects of us. I have written that God’s strategy for transforming his broken eikons is to subvert their delusional strategies by interjecting communities of people who practice other-centered love. People who have the very heart and mind of God. As eikons, we are called to creation stewardship, Kingdom service and the employment of gifts as the priestly, prophetic and kingly body of Christ in the world.

I have written about what has transpired for the Church since the New Testament age and how ideas like progress, linear time, reason and the value of the individual have culminated in the greatest explosion of prosperity in the history of humanity. I have also written about the foibles and missteps of the church in recent times and reflected on what that has meant for how we got to where we are today.

It is now time to turn the application of all this examination and reflection toward some practical issues that face our day. How would it work to have all that I have written in mind as we look at some pressing issues? I want to reflect on economic ethics as I wrap up this series by focusing on two particular aspects of our economic lives.

Economic activity requires at least two things: Material resources and markets. What is our relationship to the material resources over which God has made us stewards? With regard to the second issue of markets, markets only exist when people have both the desire and the ability to trade. Free markets have brought unprecedented prosperity to large numbers of people and that prosperity is expanding. But what about those who are isolated from the markets, both among the relatively poor in countries like the US and the absolutely poor in other regions of the world? What is our responsibility to them? It is to these topics I will turn next.

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Theology and Economics: "But I don't want to be priest, prophet or king."

One of my favorite classic movies is The Court Jester starring Danny Kaye. Melissa and I watch it two or three times a year, particularly when we need to laugh. (Which has a curiously high correlation rate with my returns from Presbyterian General Assembly Council meetings.)

The movie is set in Medieval England with a Robin Hood like scenario. Hawkins (Danny Kaye) and maid Jean have just discovered a way to sneak Hawkins into the castle controlled by a usurper king. They are readying Hawkins to go in under the guise of a court jester when maid Jean informs Hawkins one of their spies, a confederate, is already in the castle. She withholds the name from Hawkins for fear that if Hawkins is exposed he might be compelled to divulge confederate’s identity. The following dialog ensues.

Hawkins: “I’d like to ask you one question. After months of pleading for just this kind of action, what makes you think that anybody…anybody…could force me to reveal the name of our confederate?”

Maid Jean: “Because they’d put you on the rack, crack your every bone, scald you with hot oil and remove your nails off your fingers with flaming hot pincers.”

Hawkins [In a shaky voice]: “I’d like to withdraw the question.”

I have been making the case that each Christian is called to be priest, prophet and king to the world. We are called to creation stewardship, Kingdom service and employment of gifts. This requires our ongoing spiritual transformation.

The thing is that spiritual transformation sounds like such an uplifting and intriguing experience. Spiritual formation does have times of great solace and inspiration. But it has also been my experience that spiritual formation will cut every sense of security out from under you and leave you completely disoriented. It will pick you up, slam you down, and press your face into the mud, until you recoil into a corner and cry out, “Daddy where are you?” It will break you to the core…and then do it again! It can be the spiritual equivalent of being put on the rack, cracking your every bone, scalding you with hot oil and removing your nails off your fingers with flaming hot pincers. Like Jesus said, we get to pick up the cross daily and follow him.

Furthermore, when you do experience spiritual growth and begin to truly reach out as priest, prophet and king, some are going denounce you, spew their derision on you and spit in your face. Others are going to try to co-opt you and mollify your exuberance. Others will simply abandon you. We are the body of Christ and that means we also inherit the sufferings of Christ. With that said, let us now do a recruitment drive. “Okay. Who wants to sign up?”

The reality is that the romance of it all sounds quite alluring. We are inspired by the possibility of doing great things for God. Then we encounter some of the brutal realities of spiritual formation and conclude, “Hey, wait a minute. I didn’t sign up for this! I don’t really want to be priest, prophet and king anymore. Just give me a pastor who can medicate the empty spots in my life with give some inspirational advice and comforting platitudes to get me through the week.”

Meanwhile, there are pastors who have entered the ministry with the idea of developing a warm cozy family where everybody likes him or her. There was never any intent of doing the work of transformation in the life of the body. Other pastors come with a mission of transforming the people by their own power and charisma. (I have one pastor friend who says he keeps turning in his application to be savior of the world. God keeps returning it saying “Sorry. The position is already filled.”) Some, have come in with more balanced visions but each of these later two groups of pastors eventually become worn down by the stiff-necked resistance of their congregants. They become discouraged and either just do what it takes not to rock the boat or they disappear from pastoral ministry. They didn’t sign up for the pain they get either. I have met many of these pastors and a dim flicker still exists for a vision they once saw but they have become conditioned not to get their hopes up.

Toward the end of Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall, Alvy (Woody Allen) tells a joke about a man who complains to a psychiatrist that his brother thinks he's a chicken. "Well, why don't you turn him in?" says the doctor. The man replies, "I would, but I need the eggs." Pastors are the chickens and the congregants love their eggs. And any pastor who is ready to quit being a chicken had better be prepared for the smattering of eggs in his face.

G. K. Chesterton wrote that “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” We need pastors who are ready to break their “chicken” addiction. Not necessarily with a big fanfare, mind you. (Envision incoming eggs.) But maybe in the sense of finding just a few people they sense God is fanning the flames in and then pouring themselves into the discipleship of those folks.

But even more importantly we need people who are not pastors to catch the vision of what it means to be priest, prophet and king in the world, and be willing to pay the cost. They need to identify themselves to pastors and seek out others to band with who are willing to pay the cost. The awareness of their presence would embolden the hearts of some pastors enough to resist their own coronation by the people who keep crying out “Give us a king!”

The Gnostic influences at work in our culture, the consumerist approach to being the Kingdom of God, the attitude of a culture that resists pain and suffering at all costs, and just plain old human sinfulness and laziness, all mitigate against the transformation of the people of God into his body, doing the priestly, prophetic and kingly work God has placed before us. We keep trying new techniques but I wonder if Jesus words from Mark 9:28-29 might not be prophetic for our circumstances:

When he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, "Why could we not cast it out?" He said to them, "This kind can come out only through prayer . (NRSV)

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Theology and Economics: Ordering

I ended the previous post by asking “So what should the leadership of a community of broken eikons undergoing transformation look like?” The answer? At the risk of being simplistic, it should look like whatever structure most effectively creates maturing eikons and “breathes” them out into the world.

The Roman Catholics understand Jesus to have established Peter as the first pope and they see an unbroken line of bishops down to the present. The Anglican and Episcopal world generally accepts the development of the church up to about the fifth century, which includes the emergence of clergy and laity (probably by about the third century) and the development of a hierarchy of bishops. The Orthodox traditions likewise consider evolving Church tradition and practice authoritative. Personally, I do not consider Church tradition to be authoritative to the degree, and in the same ways, these traditions do. Thus, dialog about church structure within this context requires extensive dialog about the role of Church tradition and that is beyond the scope of this discussion. So I will simply leave it here, noting the divergence.

Protestants have evolved differing forms of government that can loosely be grouped into three categories: Episcopal, Congregational and Presbyterian. Episcopal types are overseen by a hierarchy of bishops. The bishops provide oversight for churches and pastors under their jurisdiction. Congregations are appointed a minister who works in conjunction with leaders of the local congregation. The United Methodist Church and several African-American groups follow this model.

The congregational types see the congregation as the determinative authority. They call their own pastors and make their own decisions by democratic procedures. The may link up with other congregations in affiliations, associations or “conventions” for mutual ministry but these larger organizations do not have the same level of authority or power over congregations that high levels of church structures have in other bodies. The pastor is usually a member of the church and leads along with a group of deacons or elders. Baptist, congregational and free churches would be typical examples.

The Presbyterian model is somewhere between these two. Congregations have a session (board) made up of ordained elders. Congregations are grouped in presbyteries. Pastors, who are considered specialized elders, locate their membership in a presbytery and then serve in a congregation when the pastor, the presbytery and the congregation agree about a call. PCUSA Presbyteries consist of a 1-to-1 ratio of pastors and elders from all the churches, while some other Presbyterians use different ratios. Nevertheless, the congregation is understood to be overseen by team of elders of whom the pastor is a specialized member. Above the congregation are the presbytery, the synod, and the general assembly in that order and they are all balanced using a ration between elders and pastors. Most of the American bodies with “Presbyterian” in their name would be of this variety including some others with that have made modifications.

My take is that you can neither fully justify nor fully discredit any of these models from scripture. As much as some try to find it, there is no prescribed structure for the Church. That is not to say there is no guidance. For instance, we see in Ephesians Chapter 4 that the primary mission of the leadership, however they were configured, was to equip the people for ministry and building up the body of Christ. We find elders being appointed by Paul to congregations in some instances (Acts 14:23) and we find Paul delegating the appointment of elders in others. (Titus 1:5) It appears that some churches may have selected elders based on the synagogue model. There was specialization among elders as some devoted themselves to preaching and teaching. (1Timothy 5:17). Deacons were formed in order that the physical needs of the body could be better addressed and the elders could be freed for the study and teaching of the Word. (Acts 6:1-7) People with prophetic messages regularly spoke out in gatherings as alluded to in several of Paul’s letters. There were leaders of whom higher standards were expected. (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1, James 3) And is evidenced throughout the New Testament letters, there were mechanisms for ordering ministry and exercising discipline. But there was no prescribed structure for ordering ministry.

One of the aspects I have appreciated about the Emerging Church Conversation is the willingness to work from mission toward structure. Now some seem to conclude that having any structure should be resisted and I find that more than a little naïve. Two or more people doing anything together create a structure. The only question is how intentional are the parties going to be about the type of structure they create. Places like Korea have developed massive cell church movements with a fairly authoritarian and hierarchical structure. It is in keeping with their culture. Other places like China have developed more fluid and less hierarchical structures because of the oppressive circumstances under which they must exist. Emerging Church folks suspect that we may need new structures for mission as Western culture becomes increasingly post-Christendom and postmodern. I think they are right. The challenge is to do what works best in the context without unwittingly bringing in modes and mindsets that are foreign to the Kingdom of God.

The bottom line for me is not in bringing the Church into conformity with some (nonexistent) prescribed Biblical model. It is in understanding mission in context and then equipping the entire body of Christ to be priest, prophet and king as they do creation stewardship, Kingdom service and employ gifts in dispersion throughout the community, and as they gather together for corporate worship, ministry to each other and exhibit the Kingdom of God through larger coordinated efforts.

We are almost ready to return to the question of economics but before I do, I think we need to do a reality check on the resistance to truly becoming the priesthood of believers. And I am not talking about the people standing behind the pulpits on Sunday or folks working in denominational offices.

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Theology and Economics: Equipping

Ephesians 4:1-16 (NRSV)

1 I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

7 But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ's gift. 8 Therefore it is said,

"When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive;
he gave gifts to his people."

9(When it says, "He ascended," what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? 10 He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) 11 The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13 until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. 14 We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. 15 But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.

This is one my favorite passages in all of scripture. In these sixteen verses, Paul has given us the essence of what it means to be the Church.

Notice verses 15 and 16. At the beginning of verse 15, the word “speaking” is not present in Greek. It is inserted by translators because there is no grammatically correct way to translate the Greek into English. The nearest we could come would be to change “But speaking the truth in love…” to “But truthing in love…” It is not just about cognitive communication. Every aspect of our being is to be exuding God’s truth in all that we do. We are to be “truthing in love.”

I wrote in earlier posts that the head was the life giving source that the rest of the body sinks its roots into for sustenance. It is a little like a plant sending its roots into the soil except here, the “soil” (head) is geographically at the top and the roots are sent upward into the “soil.” “…we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, …” This passage has tremendous richness but for purpose of thinking about structure I want focus on verses 11 and 12 in particular.

This passage is one of the prime “go to” verses for thinking about Church, structure and leadership. Here is the emphasis we usually place on this passage:

11 The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, …

From here we list out these four or five gifts. (Four if interpret this as pastor-teacher and five if you interpret this as pastors and teacher. I treat them as four.) Then we carefully try to discern a job description for each. We administer spiritual gifts inventories to see who might have the gifting to fulfill these roles. Then we give people education and the tools they need to fulfill these roles. In so doing, I believe we have utterly missed the point.

I believe the emphasis is as follows:

11 The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, …

Or in other words Paul could just have easily written:

11 The gifts he gave [were a variety of leaders], 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,…

We have become fixated on titles and job descriptions to the near exclusion of:

A. equip the saints for the work of ministry
B. for building up the body of Christ

I do not believe it was the New Testament’s intent to establish job titles and job descriptions. I believe it was to focus us on the need for more mature believers to equip less mature believers and for mature Christians to provide fertile ground for the Church to grow and thrive in. Of course the big question is what does it mean to equip?

The Greek word translated “equip” is katartismos and Greg Ogden presents a wonderful analysis of the nuanced meanings of this word in Chapter 6 of his book Unfinished Business. He identifies three connotations to the word. Here are my descriptions:

Fixing what is broken – Fisherman would use this word when they talked “mending” their nets. Each and every one of us is deeply broken. We are not fit for service until we are willing to honestly face our brokenness and bring it before God. We need a place where can weep over what others have done to us and what we have done to others. We need to be set free from trying to find fulfillment in our lives apart from God all time recognizing that complete fulfillment comes only with Christ’s return.

Bring back into proper alignment – Galatians 6:1 give us another example of equipping: “My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.” (NRSV) We often become disoriented. Priorities get out of alignment. Part of equipping is bringing each other into alignment.

Supply what is lacking - 1 Thessalonians 3:10 says, “Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you again and supply what is lacking in your faith.” (NIV) We need instruction, modeling, encouragement and discipline as we participate in the lifetime journey of transformation. We may need direct intervention of God to supply us with strength, courage, knowledge or whatever, in order to move ahead in our maturation process.

Ogden points out that he has yet meet a pastor who is truly effective in doing all three of these well. Some do two well and most do one. Part of the reason we need a community is because God equips the community to equip us, not a just a specialized professional.

So what should the leadership of a community of broken eikons undergoing transformation look like?

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Theology and Economics: The Elemental Institution

Each baptized member participates in the priestly, prophetic and kingly ministry of Jesus Christ. We have been called to creation stewardship, Kingdom service and employment of gifts. Our primary focus and locus of work is as the diaspora, the church in dispersion throughout the community. While we are all directly connected to Christ as individuals we are also called to be a Kingdom community. That at least implies layers of connections beyond our immediate circle of believers. What are these connections to look like and what is their purpose?

What I have to say here may be controversial to some, but my read of scripture is that it gives no transcendent structure to the Church. I have read and heard people make passionate cases for this or that form of church government from the New Testament. I find many beneficial aspects to various forms of church government but I am thoroughly un-persuaded of an ordained transcendent structure in the New Testament.

Please do not interpret what I have written as saying that there is no need for structure or that one structure is as good as another. I am not. I think scripture gives us some important instruction. Here are a few thoughts.

The single biggest mistake we make about Church structure is in what we assume to be the most elemental institution of the Kingdom of God: the congregation. The family is the elemental institution of the Kingdom of God, not the congregation. Marriage, and implicitly family, is the only institution established by God prior to humanity’s fall from grace. Thinking in terms of subsidiarity, the family is the default institution for every type of creation stewardship and Kingdom service. Any institutions that exist just beyond the family level exist only to do those things that families cannot do for themselves. The next layer of institutions beyond that exist only to what families and the more localized institutions below them are not be able to do. The central institution of the Church is the family.

Marriage is the institution established by God for creating the ultimate in intimate human community. We are drawn into other-centered relationship between intrinsically different (male and female) but complimentary people. Just as humanity was born out of the three-in-one complimentary community of the Trinity, so is human life born out of a two-in-one union of male and female in enduring community. Even in a fallen world, it is to be assumed until proven otherwise that parents are the two individuals most likely to have the best interest of their children at heart and have the greatest devotion to their welfare.

The family is not a creation of the state. It precedes the state. It is an enviable institution. The state may solemnize a marriage to give it legal standing in the eyes of the community for civil purposes but marriage and family do not exist at the pleasure of the state. Family is the institution that ensures the best nurture and socialization of new generations. They also serve as a check on the totalitarian impulses of both state and church. It should be instructive that whether we are talking about Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot or Kim Jong-il, the universal necessity of totalitarians is to dissolve the institution of the family so that the state has unfettered access to the control and socialization of individuals.

As a side note, it is not possible to have a same-sex marriage. It is an oxymoron. I am saying nothing here about the morality of same-sex relations. I am saying that joining two people of the same sex is a grouping or a pairing, but it is not a marriage. A same-sex union may involve acts of mutual sexual stimulation and emotional bonding but it does not provide for a union of two complimentary beings uniting as one with the potentiality of birthing life. Society may choose to create alternate institutions, and the state can call these institution whatever it wants to, but a marriage is only between a man and a woman. The only question for the state is whether or not it chooses to use language that has correspondence to an external reality or whether it chooses to officially confound differing realities and thereby undermine the institution of the family.

Let me be clear about something here. About 40% of adults over the age of 15 in the United States have never married, are divorced, or are widowed. I am aware of these circumstances and it is not my intention to in any way demean single people. What I am talking about is institutions and individuals are not institutions. The church and state need to nurture intermediary associations and institutions of people that are not in families. But the alternatives will not be literal families.

As I read the New Testament, it appears to me that most “gatherings” probably had no more than two or three dozen people. This is smaller than many of our modern congregations. From a subsidiarity viewpoint, the modern congregation should often be considered two or more steps away from the family. Just above the family might be something similar to what is called a small group, cell group or house group in current ecclesiastical lingo. (These groups might be the alternative associations or institutions created to incorporate people not in families.) The congregation may exist at a level above the cell groups, linking and nurturing them, doing what cells or families can not do for themselves. Cells would exist to do what families can not do for themselves. Any level above the congregation would exist to do what congregations, cells or families cannot do for themselves. I think you get the picture.

The problem is that congregations tend to bypass the family as an institution. They segment the congregation by any number of demographics and seek to provide comprehensive programming that speaks to individuals at each stage of life. This is not entirely bad unless it is done in the absence of a larger vision to equip and empower families. The tendency is to become personal religiosity marketers instead of family equippers. In so doing, they are undermining the most effective institution that God has established for raising up generations of priests, prophets and kings in the world.

Now clearly we live in fallen world. While we are all eikons, we are all broken eikons. We have to be formed and transformed more fully into the image of God. Where does this formation come from and what is the role of the structure and leaders in nurturing it?

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Theology and Economics: Priest, Prophet and King

Several passages in the New Testament have lists of roles played by people within the Church. Passages like Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12 or Ephesians 4 would be just a few examples. But search all you want, there are two positions you will not find listed as part of the Church: king and priest. Both of these are significant.

Israel did not start out with a king. As you might recall, God wanted to be their King but the people wanted an earthly king. From 1 Samuel 8:4-9:

4 Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, 5 and said to him, "You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations." 6 But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, "Give us a king to govern us." Samuel prayed to the LORD, 7 and the LORD said to Samuel, "Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. 8 Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so also they are doing to you. 9 Now then, listen to their voice; only -- you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them." (NRSV)

The Israelites got what they wanted and it wasn’t pretty. With Jesus Christ and Pentecost, there was no longer need for a king because, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus could reign in the hearts of women and men anywhere and everywhere.

The priestly caste was established by God to offer sacrifices, to teach the people the ways of God and to mediate between God and the people. However, at Jesus’ crucifixion, the curtain that hid the Holy of Holies was ripped in two. The ultimate sacrifice, that all previous sacrifices had prefigured, was made. There was no longer a need to offer sacrifices in worship before God. There was no longer a need for mediators between God and humanity, since each person now had access to Jesus. The earthly hierarchy of a select few interceding on behalf of the rest of the people ended.

I mentioned the idea of munus triplex in my previous post, which teaches that the anointed offices of priest, prophet and king have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. We have already seen that the need for human beings who are anointed to the hierarchical positions of king and priest has passed. But what about the prophets? Ephesians 4 mentions “prophet” as one of the gifts that God gives to the church and there are mentions of prophets and prophecy throughout the New Testament.

Prophets are often thought of as people who tell about the future. While that is sometimes the case, it would be more accurate to say that they “tell forth” the purpose’s of God in concrete situations, drawing people to God and calling people to repentance. In the Old Testament, God selected certain individuals and anointed them to be his prophetic messengers. However, because everyone now has direct access to God, there is no longer a need for select people whose role is to be the oracle for everyone else. Paul makes clear in his letter to the Corinthians that the gift of prophecy could fall upon anyone the Holy Spirit chooses. It is entirely possible that some individuals will more frequently be tapped as the mouthpiece for God’s prophetic message but they are not prophets in the Old Testament sense of the word. Prophetic knowledge is open to all through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

One way to look at the post-Pentecost era is to say that there are no longer priests, prophets and kings among the people of God. Another way might be to say the every believer is a priest, prophet and king. I think the more accurate picture painted by Paul is that Jesus is the priest, prophet and king, and because we are joined to him as his body, we engage in priestly, prophetic and kingly functions on his behalf. Baptism is our anointing into the priestly, prophetic and kingly functions we are each called to. There is no other anointing, not even to “the ministry!” So what is the nature of these functions?

The priestly function – We minister through corporate worship as we come before God’s as a community and offer “sacrifices” of praise. We confess and our sins to each other and offer absolution based on God’s promise. We pronounce blessings over one another. We offer prayers of intercession not only for one another but for those outside the community as well.

The prophetic function – We disillusion each other and those out side our community from the illusions that ensnare us. We speak out against injustice and expose it. We discern the vision of God and speak it aloud, calling people to that vision through faithful obedience and action.

The kingly function – We organize and employ the material and human resources entrusted to us toward godly ends including the provision of sustenance for ourselves and others. We exercise dominion over our own wandering cravings and desires. We nurture and provide for children, raising them up to become eikons of God. We make ourselves available for service in the pursuit of an orderly and just society.

All of these are the work of all the baptized as the body of Christ, according to the gifts and circumstances God has given them. Most of this work is done as the diaspora not as the ecclesia. This is how Christ “the anointed one” has chosen to fulfill his role of priest, prophet and king in the world.

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Theology and Economics: Ecclesia and Diaspora

I wrote in my last post about viewing the Kingdom of God as a growing body or expanding temple (cathedral) that fills the earth. From beginning to end, scripture holds forth a vision of a world filled with God’s eikons living in community with God as co-creative stewards. So how do we order ourselves for ministry? (By “order” I am not speaking of hierarchy. I am speaking of “arrangement” or “organization.”) Where are the job descriptions? We must first begin with Jesus the Christ.

The word “Christ” means anointed. There were three anointed offices in the Old Testament: priest, prophet, and king. With the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all three offices have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. (This idea is called munus triplex by John Calvin.) Consequently, anointing people to these offices has ceased. There is only one Priest, Prophet and King who is our high priest, the prophet of prophets, and the King of Kings: Jesus the anointed.

Jesus Christ exercises his offices of priest, prophet and king through his body, the Church. However, “church” is a tricky word because we use it to mean so many different things: a) the elect of God throughout all the ages, b) people living today who are Christians, c) a denomination, d) a building used for Christian worship services, or e) a group of people who meet regularly for Christian worship. The word “church” is from the Greek ecclesia and literally means “the gathering.” It was used to refer to any assembly of people long before it became associated with religious connotations. Consequently, when we read “church” in the New Testament, we need to be cautious about reading 2,000 years of “Church” history back into the word. It was not yet infused with images of specific practices, leadership hierarchies and physical plants. I suspect when early Christians said “church,” thy used the term in much the same way might talk about “the group meeting.”

Still, the idea of the “gathered Christians” had some unique qualities. First, there is and eschatological implication. The idea of “the gathered” is aspirational. New Testament writers repeatedly raised the theme of being “aliens” in a foreign land. Only at Christ’s return will we be truly gathered as “the Church.”

Second, while the Church has an aspirational quality, the Kingdom of God is very much in the present. Paul repeatedly uses the idea of the body of Christ, signifying that all believers in Jesus Christ are one unit, one body, or one society, no matter how dispersed we may be across the earth. This was truly radical.

In the New Testament era, the Roman Empire was the only institution that was allowed to have more than a local influence. Gatherings of more than a few of people were forbidden by the empire. If you wanted to have a meeting you had to form a society and submit a list of members for approval to the magistrates. The four basic voluntary societies were:

• Household – societies organized around the operations of a particular household.
• Professional – societies organized around a trade.
• Religious – societies organized for worship of one of the approved gods.
• Burial – societies organized usually by the poor to mutually assure a proper funeral and burial for family members.

By special dispensation from the Romans, the Jews had been allowed to gather and even build synagogues in Roman cities. For the first thirty years after Jesus accession, Christianity was viewed as a Jewish sect. They frequently met in synagogues. Some did not have this option and Christians had to meet under other auspices, particularly after a falling out with the Jews in the 60s C.E. Those with at least one wealthy patron might form as household society but many formed as burial societies. They were the least restricted and monitored.

Whether household, professional, religious or burial societies, none of these societies saw themselves as having any organic connection with any other society. The concept of having local chapters of a larger organization would have been largely unthinkable and almost certainly repressed. Yet Paul repeatedly refers to the gatherings collectively as the “body of Christ” and does things like take up an offering from one group of gatherings to help with the needs of another group of gatherings. Paul and the New Testament writers actively encouraged the idea of Christians seeing themselves as part of a vast network, all with the triune God as their connecting point. It was international both in that it covered vast geographic areas and in the fact that, in a great many local gatherings, there were people of different nationalities and social status. Indeed, it was this diversity that the Romans found “unnatural” and made them suspicious of Christians. The interconnected and international nature of the Church was unparalleled in human history.

I will turn to structure in a the next post but I think it is important that we first recognize some often overlooked aspects of how the Kingdom of God exists in the world. We are not yet the gathered people (ecclesia) in the eschatological sense of the word. We are the people of God in dispersion (diaspora) throughout an alien world. It is absolutely essential that we meet and worship together. Corporate worship is desired by God but it also has an eschatological and evangelistic significance. When we worship together, we are giving a shadowy example of what life will be like in the age to come. It is a sign to this age of a future that is yet to come. And when we say those words together “Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” we are both calling for divine intervention and committing ourselves to the realization of the Kingdom. This activity of worshiping and being Christians in ecclesia is essential.

However, what we have all but lost and forgotten is that the primary work of the church does not take place in ecclesia. The primary locus and focus of the Church’s mission in the world is as the diaspora not the ecclesia! God’s vision is of his eikons dispersed throughout creation during the week, offering up daily sacrifices and fragrant offerings of obedient service as co-creative stewards and messengers of the good news, employing the gifts the Spirit has apportioned to them. If we conceive of the Kingdom of God in this way, it has radical implications for how we understand the Church. Each eikon becomes a priestly, prophetic and royal image of the priest, prophet and king, Jesus Christ. So what does it mean to be priest, prophet and king to the world as the diaspora ?

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Theology and Economics: Cathedral Built of Eikons

One day during the Middle Ages, a gentleman was walking through a European village when he came across a large construction site. Being curious about the project, he asked a stone mason what he was doing. “I am laying stones,” replied the mason rather sarcastically.

Not satisfied with the answer, the gentleman approached a carpenter busy at work and asked him what he was doing. Rather preoccupied with his work, the carpenter said, “I am making railings.”

Still not satisfied, the gentleman found yet another worker. He was a boy mixing mortar for the mason. The gentleman asked him what he was doing. The boy stopped what he was doing and looked at the man rather incredulously. “Sir. Can’t you see?” he said. Then making a sweeping gesture with his hand toward the construction site he exclaimed, “I am building a cathedral!”

I have heard countless versions of this story. This is my own rendition. Every time I hear it my mind wanders to Ephesians Chapter 2:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. (Ephesians 2:19-22 NRSV)

What I like about this passage from Ephesians is that Paul alludes to three powerful metaphors for the Church.

First, Paul writes of the “household of God.” Probably the most frequently used metaphor by churches about themselves is “family.” However, what we mean by “family” and what the Paul meant by “household” are not direct parallels. Economically speaking, our twenty-first century families are consumptive. We leave the family environment to go to work and earn an income. Then bring that income back to the family for our consumption needs.

In our families, the husband and wife relationship is considered to be the most intimate of human relationships. The most frequent theme of our literary and theatrical masterpieces is the relationship of a man and a woman. The family is primarily a place of personal sustenance and emotional nurture. The fracture of the bond between husband and wife is the considered the most grevious.

The Greco-Roman household Paul has in mind was headed by a father. He was called the paterfamilias. He was the supreme ruler of the household and technically had the power of life and death over members of the household. (Although some of this was changing during the first century.) The household consisted of the paterfamilias, his wife and children, slaves and their children, and often free persons with their families. It was not uncommon for adult children with families to live in the household.

In contrast to our era, marriage was a contractual arrangement that enabled the paterfamilias to perpetuate the family line. Wives kept their primary allegiance to their father’s household, not their husband’s. Children’s relationships with their fathers were more of reverence and respect than warmth and tenderness, although the later was not necessarily always missing. Their mothers were not fully a part of the family lineage. Consequently, the primary intimate relationship was between siblings. When we want to write a story about tragedy or horror, we write stories about husbands and wives betraying each other. For the Romans, they wrote stories about brothers betraying each other.

The household Paul has in mind would equate to a large villa in the countryside owned by a Roman Citizen. These households were economically self-sustaining enterprises. Everyone worked in the family business. That means they all participated in a common mission. This is far different from our Western twenty-first century family where our common mission tends to be about our common comfort and emotional support. What truly made the Greco-Roman household a community was its focus on the common mission of the family business. Robert Banks notes that all of the uses of the word koinonia in the New Testament, which we usually translate “community,” are all related to the camaraderie realized through engaging in a common activity. Therefore, when Paul writes about the “household of God,” he is not writing about a navel gazing group looking for warm fuzzies. He is talking about a productive close knit community of brothers and sisters engaged in common mission.

Second, there is the idea of an organic growing body in the Ephesians passage. “In him the whole structure is joined together and grows…” In our language, we correlate matters of the intellect with the head and matters of emotion with heart. The Greek world associated matters of intellect with the heart and matters of emotion with the kidneys. (Just think what complications that would cause for Valentine’s Day.) The head was commonly a metaphor for the source of life that animated the rest of the body. All the ligaments, bones and organs spring from the head and are held together by the head from which they receive their animation. Paul’s “joined together and grows” is surely alluding to the Church as the “body of Christ” of whom Christ is the head. Therefore, the household of God is a living growing organic body that is growing and coming to maturity.

Third, Paul writes “…and grows into a holy temple in the Lord.” The household is morphing into a temple. Before Jesus, God occupied the temple in Jerusalem and the people came there to worship God. After the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God came to dwell within each believer. Therefore, the temple, God’s dwelling place, has become an animated growing temple. “For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will live in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’” (2 Corinthians 6:16 NRSV)

Peter elaborates on this temple image even more in 1 Peter 2:4-10 (NRSV):

Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God's sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in scripture:

"See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame."

To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe,

"The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner,"

and

"A stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them fall."

They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Not only are we being built into a temple but we are now the priests proclaiming the good news of “…the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” We are also offering “spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” What are these sacrifices?

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God -- what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:1-2 NRSV)

In other words, we are to offer up all that we do and all that we are to God so that we may be transformed into images (or eikons) of the living God, bringing God’s presence into every nook and cranny of the temporal order so that one day, “…at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil 2:10-11 NRSV) With God’s household fully transformed into an all encompassing temple, the body of Christ having come to full maturity, and with God’s restored eikons "filling the earth," we will then declare, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." Revelation 21:3-4 (NRSV)

God has given us the image of a temple under construction. Referring back to the beginning of this post, God is building a living "cathedral." God invites us to become a living stone in the cathedral and he invites us to become co-workers with him in the construction. As the building rises and we ardently tell others of our work, God will add more living stones and more workers.

The problem is that we have forgotten what we are building. The vast majority of us spend most of our lives just “laying stones” or “building railings” when at the forefront of our minds should be the construction of the cathedral. God's desire is that whenever someone asks us what we are doing as we are plowing a field, balancing a chart of accounts, teaching an English class, doing the laundry, ringing up a customer’s tally, writing a traffic ticket, changing the oil on a customer’s car, changing a dirty diaper, debugging software code, piecing together a public stock offering, cutting someone’s hair, diagnosing someone’s back problem, voting on a piece of legislation, flipping hamburgers at Wendy’s, running from one child’s soccer game to another child's piano recital, making travel arrangements for the boss, and …yes... preaching a sermon, that we answer, “Can’t you see? I am building a cathedral!”

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Theology and Economics: Pope John Paul II on the "Lay Faithful"

The following are selected quotes from Pope John Paul II in The Lay Members of Christ’s Faithful People. All emphases are in the original. (Pope John Paul II, Christifideles Laici, The Lay Members of Christ’s Faithful People. Post Synodal Apostolic Exhortation. Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1988)

At the same time, the Synod has pointed out that the post-conciliar path of the lay faithful has not been without its difficulties and dangers. In particular, two temptations can be cited which they have not always known how to avoid: the temptation of being so strongly interested in Church services and tasks that some fail to become actively engaged in their responsibilities in the professional, social, cultural and political world; and the temptation of legitimizing the un warranted separation of faith from life, that is, separation of the Gospel’s acceptance from the actual living of the Gospel in various situations in the world. (12-13)

In giving response to the question “Who are the lay faithful?” the [Vatican II] Council went beyond previous interpretations which are predominantly negative. Instead it opened itself to a decidedly positive vision and displayed a basic intention of asserting the full belonging of the lay faithful to the Church and to its mystery. At the same time it insisted on the unique character of their vocation which is, in a special way, to “seek the Kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and ordering them according to the plan of God.” “The term ‘lay faithful’” – we read in the Constitution of the Church, Lumen Gentium – “is here understood to mean all the faithful except those in Holy Orders and those who belong to a religious state sanctioned by the Church. Through Baptism the lay faithful are made the one body with Christ and are established among the People of God. They are in their own way made sharers in the priestly, prophetic and kingly office of Christ. They carry out their own part in the mission of the whole Christian people with to the Church and the world.” (25-26)

The “world” thus becomes the place and the means for the lay faithful to fulfill their Christian vocation because the world itself is destined to glorify God the Father in Christ. (36)

The lay faithful’s position in the Church, then, comes to be fundamentally defined by their newness in Christian life and distinguished by their secular character.

The images of salt, light and leaven taken from the Gospel, although indiscriminately applicable to Jesus’ disciples, are specifically applied to the lay faithful. They are particularly meaningful images because they speak not only of the deep involvement and the full participation of he lay faithful in the affairs of the earth, the world and the human community, but also and above all, they tell of the radical newness and unique character of an involvement and participation which has as its purpose the spreading of the Gospel that brings salvation. (37-38)

In the context of the transformations taking place in the world of economy and work which are a cause of concern, the lay faithful have the responsibility of being in the forefront in working out a solution to the very serious problems of growing unemployment; to fight for the most opportune overcoming of numerous injustices that come from organizations of work which lack a proper goal; to make the workplace a community of persons respected in their uniqueness and in their right to participation; to develop new solidarity among those that participate in a common work; to raise up new forms of business enterprising and to look again at systems of commerce, finance and exchange of technology. (110-111)

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Theology and Economics: Ministry

Each and every Christian is ordained for ministry at baptism. The big problem with this statement is our dualistic understanding of the word “ministry.” We frequently hear people talk about going into the ministry. Some talk about quitting their jobs and going into full-time ministry. On several occasions I have asked a groups what ministry is. Repeatedly I have heard back from one or more people that ministry is what you do without receiving profit or personal gain.

The Greek word diakonia is the word we translate as both “ministry” and “mission.” What does it mean? It means anything done in the employ of another. Consequently, ministry is anything we do in the employ of God. How has God chosen to employ us?

There are three ways that God has chosen to employ us. They are three distinct calls to service yet they are thoroughly and inextricably related. It can be helpful to identify each call with a person of the trinity so long as we keep the inextricable unity of the trinity in mind.

First, there is the call of the father to creation stewardship. In the first two chapters of Genesis, God gave humanity dominion over creation and told humanity to subdue it. Humanity has been given the mission of “working” the garden. Subduing the earth does not mean abusing or defiling the earth, but neither does it mean leaving it intact and unaltered. God places us as stewards over his resources and commissions us to become co-creative with him in fashioning creation into something more complete. God tells humanity to fill the earth as eikons of his authority and of his intentions for the created order. As a result of the fall, this work has become frustrated but the call has not been rescinded.

By the uniting of Adam and Eve into a family, God established the family as the only pre-fall human institution. The command to fill the earth and subdue it clearly implies that humanity will need to develop relationships beyond the family in order to coordinate and accomplish the mission. God does not give any instruction on how to do this or on what form such relationships should take. It appears that the formation of human relationships, emanating from the family to ever widening relationships, is to be part of the co-creative process humanity will pursue with God. Therefore, when we speak of creation stewardship we are not just speaking of material resources. We are speaking of the whole temporal order of human activity and institutions.

Second, there is the call of the son to kingdom service. Jesus said:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
(John 3:16-18 NRSV)

Through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has been established. The forces of evil are thrashing about in the throes of death but they have been vanquished. God has called us to occupy his Kingdom and be his ambassadors until he returns and fully establishes his Kingdom of shalom. Every authority will be brought back under the authority of the Prince of Peace. This future is certain and cannot be altered.

Jesus calls us to bring the future into the present by giving faithful witness in word and deed as to the world order that is to come. Jesus gave us the Great Commission.

“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 28:18b-20 NRSV)

Jesus last words at his accession were:

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." (Acts 1:8 NRSV)

Kingdom service is bringing the future into the present by carrying on the work of Jesus in our present age.

Third, there is the call of the Holy Spirit to exercise gifts. Every person (without exception) has been given gifts. There are two ways we can think of gifts. One way is when abilities are given to us that have nothing to do with our personal makeup or skills. The Holy Spirit, for whatever reasons, empowers us to do supernatural (i.e., that which is not natural to our abilities) works. There are also our natural gifts. These gifts emanate from a combination of innate personal characteristics and a lifetime of experience and formation. Whether supernatural or natural gifts, the call of the Holy Spirit is to employ those gifts in creation stewardship and building up the Kingdom of God.

The sad reality of our dualistic thinking is that the call to creation stewardship has largely atrophied. What the Scripture calls creation stewardship, we now call secular work, which is taken to mean that it is of the material world and therefore of lesser or no consequence when compared to matters that deal with our “spiritual lives.” For too many, Kingdom service has ceased to be about “occupy until I come” and has become a call to exit the world (where God will one day come to dwell with humanity) for the hope of some future disembodied spiritual utopia. Others attempt to “breathe the spirit of God” into the secularized natural environment, into themselves, or into their Utopian visions, thus mistaking the created order, or themselves, for God. When it comes to exercising gifts, countless congregations do “spiritual gifts” inventories but the purpose of these inventories is to figure out which slot in the ecclesiastical machinery a person should fill. Since we all know that ministry occurs only within the machinery of the church, helping people to understand how their gifts should be used in creation stewardship would not be helping them to understand how they can contribute to the ministry. This is pure madness!!! It is also the reality of the context we live in.

Ministry is not defined by what we do. It is defined by who we are doing for. God has given us a Trinitarian call and all work that is done in response to that Trinitarian call is ministry.

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Theology and Economics: The Clergy and Laity Dualism

I have been writing about the influence external factors have had in creating the Gnostic dualism that pervails in the American church. Yet the problem is not purely a result of outside influences. There is an internal dualism that has plagued the Church since not long after the New Testament era. It is the dualism of clergy and laity.

I can’t count the number of times I have heard pastors and theologians say that “laity” means “the people” and is the English word for the Greek laos. However, the term “laity” is not a direct translation from the noun laos (“people”). It came indirectly from laos through the Greek adjective laikos, meaning “of the common people.” Laikos is not in the New Testament and it is not in the ancient Greek version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint!

The first known mentions of laikos come from about 300 BCE. It was an adjective used in papyri to describe the profane things of the rural people in Egypt. The earliest known use of the word in Christian literature is in a letter by Clement of Rome to the Corinthian church, written circa 96 CE. In exhorting the church to preserve godly order, he alludes to the order of the Old Testament era. He discusses the responsibilities of those who were neither priests nor Levites, and calls them laymen (laikos anthropos.) (1 Clement 40:5) (1)

Laikos was used sparingly by Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion in their Greek translations of the Old Testament during the second and third centuries. It was used as a synonym for bebelos which means “profane” or “unholy.” Laikos was also a synonym in Greek literature for idiotes which meant “nonprofessional.” (It is the word from which we get “idiot.”) Laikos did not begin to enter the common Christian vocabulary until the third and fourth centuries. Over time and across languages, the adjective evolved into the noun “laity” to represent the unprofessional, common, and profane people contrasted with the educated, holy, and sacred people known as “clergy.” (2)

The word “clergy” comes from the Greek word kleros, which means “lot” or “inheritance.” When used figuratively, as in, “we are God’s inheritance,” or “we share in the inheritance of Christ,” it refers without exception to the whole people of God. It never refers to a specially called elite subgroup of people. “Clergy” and “the people of God” (laos tou theou) are one in the same group!

The Reformers saw this as a problem but they also struggled with church order. The outcome of their struggle to reconcile the issues was retention of the clergy/laity distinction while trying to elevate the laity. (3) Did they succeed? Ask yourself if you prefer ministry by a lay- Christian, anymore than you do surgery from a lay-surgeon, or legal advice from a lay-lawyer?

“Real ministry” is what is done by a caste of Christians called “clergy,” those with special training and an extra endowment of spirituality. Laity exists to assist clergy in “real ministry.” We say we believe in the priesthood of believers but look at our language and structures. Clergy do “full-time” Christian ministry. We send people to seminaries to prepare for the ministry. We install them in our congregations as the minister. Prayer is deferred to the clergy because they have special status with God. The sick have not been cared for until visited by the clergy.

Ask anyone for a definition of laity and it nearly always is given in terms of the negative:

• Function – they do not administer the sacraments.
• Status – they don’t have reverend in front of their name.
• Location – they don’t serve primarily in the church.
• Education – they don’t have a degree from seminary.
• Remuneration – they are not paid for church work.
• Lifestyle – they are occupied with the “secular” instead of the “sacred.” (4)

When “laypeople” are referred to positively, they are said to be “the people of God” (laos tou theou.) True enough, but the “people of God” in contrast to whom? The clergy? Scripture only uses clergy (kleros) in reference to the whole people of God. Laos tou theou are the clergy!

The primary locus for ministry is the congregation in dispersion throughout the community during the week. (More on this in following posts.) We have moved the locus to the gathered congregation. Why? Because non-pastor Christians are “idiots!” (laity = laikos = idiotes = idiots.) They can be helpful assistants to clergy but they can not be fully trusted with the things of God. “Real ministry” can only be done by professional Christians, and since they can’t be everywhere, it is the job of the “laity” to bring unbelievers to the professionals for “real ministry.” Consequently, the saints are thoroughly under-equipped for ministry in dispersion, and they are demeaned and trivialized for ministry among the gathered.

I have written about this topic enough to know that the minds of many reading this post are reading into it things I have not said. I want to say point blank that no where in this post have I said there is not role called pastor. I have not said that there should be no authority structures. I have not said that the church needs to be radical democracy. If you have interpreted what I have read to say this then I invite you to go back and read what I have written again. It isn’t there. What I have said is that there is not a super-spiritual caste of people who are “God’s inheritance” or “the clergy.” The whole people of God are “God’s inheritance” and therefore the clergy. Pastor and leader are roles occupied by some of the clergy in service to the rest of the clergy.

There is yet another persistent misunderstanding with regard to my writing on this topic. Many, especially those from the Reformed tradition, read this and affirm the importance of the role of elder versus the role of the minister of word and sacrament. Again, if this is your interpretation, then you have completely missed my point. I am saying that baptism is ordination into ministry. The fact that so many define “ministry” as what goes on under the auspices of an ecclesiastical authority, usually within the four walls of an ecclesiastical facility, is proof positive of the dualistic split we have made between the material and spiritual aspects of life.

My point here isn’t necesssarily about the words “clergy” and “laity” themselves. I am using them here to illustrate a duality. Our friends in traditions like the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican traditions have a different take on the role of Church tradition and therefore retain the lingo that came after the New Testament era. My aim here is not to bash anyone uses the lingo. In fact, I sincerely believe that since Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church has done more to bring into fulfillment the work of the “laity” than have all the Protestant traditions who preach “the Priesthood of all believers.”

However, as a child of the Reformation, I find it troubling who pervasive the language of clergy and laity is a tradition that has championed sola scriptura. I like Karl Barth’s observation on this topic:

“Theology is not the private reserve of theologians. It is not a private affair for professors…Nor is it a private affair for pastors…Theology is a matter for the church. It does not get on well without professors and pastors. But its problem, the purity of the church’s service, is put to the whole church. The term ‘laity’ is one of the worst in the vocabulary of religion and ought to be banished from Christian conversation.” (5)

Above I said that “laity” is defined in the negative. Is there a mission for those not ordained to ecclesiastical office?

(1.) Weber, Hans-Ruedi. “On Being Christian in the World: Reflections on the ecumenical discussion about the laity.” Document at World Council of Churches website: www.wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/education/weber.html. 1999. Accessed May 1, 2005 The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work, and Ministry in Biblical Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 24-25.

(2.) Ibid.

(3.) Gillespie, Thomas W. “Ministerial Orders in the Reformed Tradition: A Study in Origins.” A paper presented to the delegations to the Consultation on Church Union from the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. and the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. circa 1979?

(4.) Stevens, R. Paul,

(5.) Karl Barth. Theologische Fragen und Antworten, 1957, 183-184, quoted in R. J. Erler and R. Marquard, eds., translator, G. W. Bromiley. A Karl Barth Reader. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986, 8-9. I found the quote in R. Paul Stevens. The Other Six Days. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999, 24.

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Theology and Economics: Contemporary Gnostics (Part 2)

Returning to the 1920s and 1930s, the conservative wing of Christianity took a very different path. Having become pessimistic about influencing culture, conservative Christians came to see themselves as lifeboats, plucking individual sinners from the waters of world that was doomed to destruction. Preservation of the “truth” of scripture and proclamation of the gospel to “save souls” became the only agenda. Why engage in dialog when the world we live in is slated for destruction? The world needs salvation not conversation.

Consequently, every human endeavor served one essential purpose. They were platforms for evangelization. All resources available to a Christian should be marshaled toward this end. Stewardship was equated to giving of your resources to finance evangelistic efforts. Business, politics and other “worldly” pursuits were distractions except insofar as they provided a venue for saving lost souls or financing evangelism.

Another considerable influence within Evangelical, conservative and fundamentalist communities, was an eschatology deeply influenced by dispensationalism. Dispensationalism maintains that at some unknown moment believers’ souls will be “raptured” from their bodies (a dualistic split between spirit and matter) into heaven, unleashing a series of ominous events that culminates in the obliteration of the material world. The faithful then go to live with God in heaven as spirits for eternity. This is a significant departure from the historical Christian view where God descends to earth to be with humanity for eternity in the material world of the New Jerusalem. As a consequence of this theology, and believing these events are coming sooner rather than later, there has been a strong tendency to see the material world as valueless and inconsequential. The powerlessness felt in the perceived rejection of traditional faith by major ecclesiastical bodies, and the growing political and economic crises extending from the beginning of World War I in 1914 to the end World War II in 1945, made the soil fertile in more conservative communities for sprouting such visions of a rapidly approaching otherworldly deliverance.

Also at work in this milieu was a powerful common sense anti-intellectualism. Intellectualism was often identified as the culprit that led folks away from a common sense “plain literal reading” of the Bible. Furthermore, what was the point of studying law, economics, and politics since these had no practical application to evangelism and they studied management of a world that was doomed. For many, a more worthwhile actibvity was to comb through the scriptures and develop elaborate theories about end-time prophecies. The continued fascination with this quest for secret knowledge is evidenced in everything from the massively popular Left Behind series to The Da Vinici Code.

This is not to say that all of conservative Christianity and Evangelicalism was thoroughly entrenched in this thinking. People like Carl F. Henry sensed a need for conservative Christianity to confront the problems of the world. He founded Christianity Today as a tool to promote that discussion. The cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, especially around political issues like the elimination of school prayers and legalization of abortion, motivated a host of Evangelical Christians to change their tune about involvement in the world. The election year of 1976 was called the year of the Evangelical because Jimmy Carter was unapologetic about his Evangelical faith during the presidential campaign and a great many Evangelicals turned out to support him. The Reagan wing of the Republican Party saw the natural affinity between their agenda and Evangelical values and for the first time in decades Evangelicals found themselves being courted by powerful political interests.

However, despite this change toward reengaging the culture politically, the propensity to focus exclusively on individualistic solutions to problems, suspicion of intellectual pursuits, and a tendency to adopt modes of thinking from the culture uncritically, has persisted to some to degree. There has been a tendency to transfer a consumerist mindset into the church, making some congregations into religiosity Wal-Marts. The focus has become more about the “consumer” having their needs met (however that is defined) than being disciples who are transformed into bearers of God’s image. Having a “personal relationship with Jesus” has often been about quenching a spiritual thirst without significantly touching the material aspects of every day life. Survey studies show again and again that there is little difference between the moral behavior of those who say they are Born Again or Evangelical and the rest of the population. Here again we have a Gnostic-like split between the material and spiritual world and a quest for secret or privatized special knowledge.

The impact this contemporary Gnosticism has had on how the Church relates to the economic sphere of life has been significant. Up until about the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation the Church was the central authority on all matters of life. The big questions of the times were how about how everyday living connected with transcendent issue and what was expected of each individual and community. Life was relatively simple in terms of day to day to living and required no special knowledge or instruction. The organization of day-to-day living was timeless and seemingly unchanging relative to the modern era.

With the disestablishment of the Church and the rise of the Enlightenment, the Church found itself in a disconcerting position. The Church had taught, or given tacit approval of, supernatural understandings of the world that scientists began to show had naturalistic explanations. The Church’s understandings on how the natural world functions were also shown to be in error. The Christendom began to find themselves restricted to an ever smaller circle of the “spiritual,” partly because of the hostile efforts by anti-religious thinkers from the Enlightenment onward. A materialistic world emerged that questioned the need for spiritual guidance and claimed vindication for its materialism by pointing to the prosperity and astonishing advancements it had made, often in direct opposition to the Church. Although, as we have seen in earlier posts, the material progress that was made would not have been possible if not for distinctively Christian perspectives like reason, linear time, progress and the value of the individual as created in the image of God.

By the end of the twentieth century in America, the hope of finding a materialistic basis for purpose and meaning in life has waned. People are curious about spiritual matters and searching for spiritual answers. The question has become how to conceptualize a world in which the spiritual and material world fully integrate? The Christian narrative has that answer but reeling from its disestablishment as an authority on the material world and then on the spiritual world as well, Christians in America have devolved into a variety of dualisms, as I have just described, that may give personal comfort but can’t offer a holistic picture.

If we look back over history we can see this crisis as part of sequence of unveiling and transformations God has done in the world. God established Israel and introduced the concepts of linear time and procession toward a future reality. For the first time, humanity began to be free from fertility gods and the prison of a cyclical view of reality. Through Jesus, God had provided a means for our transformation back into the eikons he intended us to be. The vision was widened to include all peoples and the role of God’s people was changed from procession through time to progression through time. Jesus left us with no written record of his teaching, leaving us to “reason” out our faith in community, based on the faithful witness of others, all through the tutelage and direction of the Holy Spirit. With the narrative of scripture and developing faculty of reason, God has progressively expanded the human capacity to “work the garden,” enabling tremendous advancements to quality of human life. (I know some will raise environmental questions here. I will address those in coming posts.)

The dilemma we experience today is that we live in a world where for the first time we have both the technology and understanding needed to be co-creative developers and stewards of creation with God. Until recent centuries, the material world has seemed a fixed unalterable reality. In such a world, all that was needed was a chaplain that ministers to people as they live out their days, largely at the mercy of the forces at work in their environment. However, when humanity finds itself able to participate in the forces that touch every aspect of their lives, it is imperative that “ministers” of God be present in each and every aspect of human existence.

Unfortunately, the transition from chaplain of a relatively static simple world to equippers of a diverse body of ministers in a dynamic complex world has not happened. The church in all its expression is still reeling from the dislocations of the modernist era and finds itself mired in a host of Gnostic dualisms. The church must recover a holistic Christian anthropology that incorporates the complexities of life today. Fortunately, a sufficient Christian anthropology is present in scripture. However, realizing it will require unlearning some assumptions and patterns that were from another age. Central to that transition is a move away from clergy and laity to equippers and stewards.

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Theology and Economics: Contemporary Gnostics (Part 1)

With the beginning with the Reformation in the sixteenth century and the disestablishment of the Roman Church, the interlocking networks of aristocracy and ecclesiastical authority began to deteriorate. By the eighteenth century, a class of wealthy businessmen were on their way to becoming the new aristocracy in nations like England and her colonial offspring. The business elite became prominent in Protestant Churches. However, the business elite had a considerable degree of autonomy from the authority of the church institutions. The church was looked to for spiritual matters of life but its input on enterprises like science and the economy were increasingly unwelcome. These practical aspects of life in material world were the domains of pragmatic rationalism about which the Church had little to say.

Karl Marx’s famous statement that “religion is the opiate of the masses” was not totally unfounded. The Churches gave increasingly secularized business interests an air of legitimacy. In societies without state supported religion, the business elite often became the central source of financial stability for church institutions. Even in societies with state supported religion, the interests of business and politicians (with authority over churches) were often closely aligned. This relationship, built on a division between spiritual and material worlds, was part of what made the acceptance of slavery so easy for Protestant Churches.

This is not to say that there were no seeds of the gospel at work within the Church institutions of the time. One need only think of William Wilberforce and his campaign against slavery in England, or the Wesleys and their work among the poor, to see that not everyone accepted this bifurcation between the spiritual and the material.

The Europeans brought their state churches to America but the much more egalitarian environments of the frontier tended to democratize religious experience and institutions. The frontier churches rejected establishment sensibilities about the role of religion if for not other reason that there was no establishment on their frontiers to promote establishment values. The religion became much more individualistic and experiential. This tension between establishment loyalty and individualistic evangelism actually led to denominational splits among groups like the Presbyterians.

However, as the frontier shrank and what was once frontier became thoroughly settled, the churches quickly became the legitimizing force for the new establishment in communities. The new establishment was dominated by the business elite. Once again, new reformist movements sprang up to challenge the compromises churches had made with the secular (materialistic) influences of the day. For instance, folks from the Holiness Movement, which emerged in the last half of the nineteenth century, saw themselves as challengers to what they believed were secular and materialistic influences of the wealthy business class that had caused the church to neglect “the least of these” in society. One holiness denomination that emerged out of this late nineteenth century milieu was the Church of the Nazarene. The name was based on the passage in the gospels where it was asked, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” It was an explicit attempt to identify with the outcast and poor, just as John Wesley had done with the Methodist a century earlier (Nazarenes were mostly a Methodist offshoot.) However, many would say that the Nazarenes have been following the same path as the Methodist toward compromising respectability.

Scholars in the sociology of religion call this the sect-to-church phenomenon. As the “church” type denomination becomes more accommodated to culture it gives birth to reform movements. These reform movements often find their efforts blocked by powerful institutional forces. Reform minded people leave the institution to establish a sectarian movement that culminates in the formation of new institutions or “sects.” Over three or four generations these highly devoted reformers tend to be successful in expanding their numbers but as they become larger and older it becomes more difficult to maintain broad adherence to the original reformist values. Furthermore, because of the members relatively ascetic lifestyles and attention to personal morality, the members of these groups tend to rise in prosperity and become increasingly influenced by other members of society in their social class. They become evermore like the establishment, thus making the journey from being a sect to being a church. This gives rise to a new sectarian reform impulse and on the story goes. The tension at the center of this sect-to-church dynamic is Jesus paradoxical instruction to “be in the world but not of it.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, free market capitalism was virtually a given in American culture and in Church institutions. In the last half the nineteenth century, the only real options were capitalism or some form of feudalism. Socialism emerged on the intellectual scene in the 1880s but didn't capture any real interest in America. Capitalism was self-evidently preferable to the people of the day. Church and sect alike took the system as a given. There were reform efforts like the enactment of child labor laws around the turn of the century and the anti-monopolist trust busting movements of the early twentieth century. Still, these movements viewed capitalism as a given and socialism was still a wild-eyed fantasy except in certain intellectual circles.

The moral debates centered more on personal morality in business rather than questioning the nature of the structures themselves. Evangelical reform minded leader William Jennings Bryan, often caricatured as the buffoon who defend the creationist position in the scopes monkey trial, was motivated in his anti-evolutionary zeal largely because of the Social Darwinian implications he feared would infect the economic and political spheres of life, reducing human beings to animals instead of being valued as image bearers of God. Businessmen’s bible studies focused on evangelizing the business community became a major phenomenon in the early years of the twentieth century.

With the catastrophe of World War I and the rise of communism in Russia at the end of the second decade in the twentieth century, theologians and scholars began to seriously question the world order, especially in Europe. The Church was believed to be complicit in fostering the worldview that had brought such destruction. The culture wars of the 1920s and the global economic collapse of the 1930s only intensified this disillusionment. Totalitarian socialism was now a real alternative. How would the church respond?

The liberal wing of Christianity, having largely “demythologized” the faith moved in a parallel pattern to the secular modernist of the day and turned toward a type of universal humanism. Proclamation was abandoned in favor of dialog. Humanity ceased to be fallen according to the “old myths.” Humanity was merely corrupted by deceptive and destructive institutions. Eliminate the evil influences of these institutions and redistribute adequate resources to all humanity and the innate nobility of humanity would come shining through. By building institutions that transcend denominational and religious boundaries (Federated Council of Churches, National Council of Churches, and World Council of Churches) and by developing global political institutions (League of Nations and the United Nations) oppressive institutions could be conquered and the innate divinity existing within all humanity would be liberated. God morphed from being the God revealed in scripture to being the divine something-or-other behind all human experience. The quest in theological circles became the quest for connection with the divine something-or-other.

How do we discover the divine something-or-other? That varies depending on who you ask but what is agreed upon is the need to deconstruct what has traditionally been known as the Christian faith. Once we have removed the falsehoods of historic Christianity, the secret to the truth will emerge. Marxist and Liberation theologians believed they found the answer in identifying with the poor. Only through struggle against oppression can we come to the truth. Some feminist theologians believe it is only through the experience of the divine feminine that we can access the truth. Others take a more New Age approach and encourage us to seek the truth that lies within us. We are to become one with the world. In some circles, that has led to the deification of the environment. It is argued that we need to surrender the idea of being created in God’s image and become one with nature. What all of these have in common is the pursuit of a secret spiritual truth apart from the revelation of God in scripture and testimony of the Church.

This quest to discover hidden spiritual truths has led to a number of responses in terms of how we relate to the material world. Some opt for a life of licentiousness. The material world is disconnected from anything of spiritual value. Why not do whatever feels good? There are no consequences. Others may be less hedonistic, exercising self-restraint and deferred gratification, but the aim is a sense of self-actualization in this life and it generally avoids probing too deeply into eternal questions. The spiritual world and the afterlife will be what they will be, and we will deal with it when we get there. Some have opted for a type of asceticism, believing that forgoing materialistic pursuits will somehow bring them closer to common humanity, to nature, or both. In doing so, they will come closer to the God who is behind our illusions. Some have opted for a pan-everythingism where God is in everything and everything is God. Here the key to spiritual truth is the absorption of humanity into the material world (or elevation of everything into the spiritual world) and the negation of humanity’s divine image bearing quality. The scripture and teachings of the Church merely become resources we each individually draw upon to support us in our materialistic pursuit. The eschatological vision of the New Jerusalem becomes a symbolic aspiration instead of an inevitable future.

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Theology and Economics: The Gnostic Thread Through Church History

Gnosticism is one the most resilient heresies in the Christian Church. It is alive and well today and it has a direct impact on how we deal with the economics. There have been many variations of Gnosticism but they all share at least two elements: First, there is a belief in a secret knowledge that is accessible to some select group. Second, there is a distinct division (dualism) between material and spiritual worlds, and the material world is viewed as evil or at best irrelevant.

Business and trade are of the material world. There has always been ambivalence in the Church toward these pursuits. We can trace this ambivalence back to the days of the Roman Empire. Economic trade was viewed as a disreputable activity by the educated Roman elite. They believed that the only virtuous “business” for a Roman Citizen was self-sufficient agricultural production through operation of large villas. When the empire fell and invaders destroyed the last vestiges of Pax Romana, much of society was thrown into chaos. The only place scholarship took place was in monasteries or places where wealthy Lords would protect scholars. Literacy became the luxury of a very select few.

Scripture was effectively removed from the community and placed in the hands of few educated elite ecclesiastical officials. It was also during this time that an overly spiritualized view of the world creped into the Church. Over the early centuries of the Church, the Lord’s Supper, which had been a common meal shared between believers around a table, became increasing imbued with mysterious content. Only a person who was schooled in the great “mysteries” of the faith could preside over this ritual and other sacraments. There was a growing chasm between the clergy (the specially called) and the laity (the common or vulgar people.) The clergy were spiritual and the laity did secular work. The political elites of later centuries still carried with them a general disdain for economic trade. The ecclesiastical elites shared this perspective along with them as they were usually from the same families and social circles.

In earlier posts, I wrote about the rise of capitalism in monasteries at the end of the first millennium. Because of the ascetic values, control over vast tracts of land, and strong work ethic in monasteries, improvements in agriculture and technology made them quite prosperous. This naturally created ambivalence for monks who had taken vows of poverty yet found themselves the wealthiest group in society. The Church increasingly became involved in international lending to the rising nation states during the Middle Ages. There is no question the financial and political power gained by the Church had corrosive influence on its ethics and leadership. This entanglement of the church in financial and political matters would lead some to conclude that business itself was evil and a corrupting influence. Nevertheless, the Church still looked unfavorably upon (officially at least) lenders and merchants.

The Reformation introduced the idea of the priesthood of all believers and the idea of individual calling. However, this new perspective tended to keep intact the status ranking of various of types of work while encouraging people to accept the calling (i.e.,  life situation) of where God had placed them. Merchants and financiers were still considered lesser, if not disreputable, occupations. Some of that began to change in England which was given the moniker (intended to be derogatory) of “a nation of shopkeepers” sometime around the Napoleonic era by Continental Europeans. The idea of business as unseemly has largely persisted down to this day.

The problem at the end of the nineteenth century was that enlightenment modernist had disestablished the Church as the final authority in culture. Ecclesiastical authority was increasingly ignored and its condescension toward “worldly pursuits” was derided. The modernist had produced several decades of unparalleled economic growth and rising prosperity through entrepreneurs and financiers who were no longer “restrained” by ecclesiastical attitudes. All that was needed was for humanity to decide where they wanted to go and humanity could go there. Humanity now had the physical and intellectual technology to apply material resources toward whatever ends they chose.

The culture was increasingly coming under the influence of secularized modernist worldviews, drunk with pride over more than two centuries of astonishing achievements. Some were inclined to welcome this progress into the Church with open arms and others saw it as threat to the Christian faith. It was in this context that Pope Leo XIII wrote his brilliant encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. He recognized both the abuses perpetrated in the name of laissez-faire capitalism and foresaw the ominous rise of socialism and totalitarianism. Both of these were direct extensions of materialistic thinking. One was utterly individualistic and the other communitarian. Both failed to honor the authority of the Creator beyond our material existence and both failed to honor the balance of individual image bearers of God living in community. The Pope’s effort was in part to establish a Christian anthropology that would inform how we think about economic behavior. It emphasized such things as human beings created as God’s image bearers, human beings being co-creators with God in the natural order, the importance of community obligations, and the importance of subsidiarity. It was actually quite prophetic.

However, the Roman Catholic influence was not strong in the US at that time. Protestant Christianity was the driving force of the day and unfortunately, rather than discerning a sound Christian anthropology, the Church in America became dominated by competing Gnostic-like dualisms that gave unhealthy interpretaions to work in the material world.

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Theology and Economics: The Impact of Conservative Foundationalism

Liberal foundationalism became partners in the demythologizing project of the modernist intellectuals. Conservative foundationalism headed in another direction. Conservative foundationalists became defenders of the traditional sacred and the supernatural aspects of the Christian faith. However, like their liberal counterparts, they appropriated the tools of Enlightenment modernists to support their aims.

I wrote that liberal foundationalism is searching for the essential truths behind all human religious expressions, not just Christianity and the scriptures. Christianity is merely a high expression of these transcendent values. The project of conservative Christianity has been to protect the traditional understanding of scripture, but without the appeal to traditional or ecclesiastical authority. The conservative project became a search for the essential or fundamental doctrines on which the rest of the Christian faith rests. All else would be built and justified upon this “foundation.” Conservative Christianity turned to rationalism and scientific analysis to show that the Bible was a perfect fail safe, bomb proof, system of teaching with no errors or unreasonableness. Any “reasonable” individual, as an objective autonomous person, should be able to see the self-evident rationality of God’s word.

During the last third of the nineteenth century, Evangelical Christianity reached a highpoint. The Holiness Movement sprang up as movement advocating social reform and recovery of Wesleyan holiness teaching. The Salvation Army was in full gear. Evangelicals trumpeted child labor laws, women’s suffrage, prohibition, and anti-monopolist legislation. Around 1900, a magazine called Christian Century was born, so named because it was believed that the twentieth century would by the century where the Church would usher in the Kingdom of God.

However, storm clouds were gathering before the twentieth century dawned. Liberal foundationalists were winning the day in seminaries and academies. The liberals began to champion more and more social causes grounded in a humanistic philosophy built on demythologized scripture. Evangelical champions saw great harm coming from what they saw as the abandonment of scripture and accommodation to secularist culture. They began to turn more of their reformist energies away from addressing the needs of society to preservation of what they believed were fundamental truths.

World War I struck a devastating blow to the hopes of a Christian century. The liberal response was to go deep into modernist rationalism to search for values on which to build a global human agenda. The League of Nations and ultimately the United Nations would become emblematic of this impulse to find grand macro level solutions to the world’s problems through enlightened humanism. Conservatives became ever more reclusive and sectarian as they sought to “defend” the Bible and traditional Christianity. Many historians identify the mid-1920s, with the battle over fundamentals in the Presbyterian Church and the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, as the watershed moments in the liberal and fundamentalist divide.

The conservative retreat increasingly became one that was anti “social gospel” and that championed change through personal conversion. It also became evermore influenced by dispensational views of a world “going to Hell in a hand basket” with the Church playing the role of a lifeboat, saving individuals from the coming Apocalypse. This continued until the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s when some Evangelicals began to rethink there disengagement from social reform. Still, their involvement until very recently has been concentrated on personal morality and individualist solutions.

Alongside these changes in Evangelicalism was the rise of Pentecostalism which radically oriented its follows toward personal experience of God. A significant offshoot of the movement is the “health and wealth” gospel. It teaches that because God wants to bless everyone, everyone who truly trusts in him will be blessed with good health and increasing wealth. It is very similar to the “self-made man” ideology of the robber-baron days. If you have enough faith, you will be wealthy. Just like the self-made man, it also had the corollary of the “self-unmade man.” There is the implication that if you do not have health and wealth there is something wrong with you spiritually.

As conservative Christianity began to reassert itself in the 1970s it sought a level of respectability that would give it influence in the world. Consequently, there has been an element of celebrity worship. Athletes, powerful business people, politicians, or other prominent people who espouse a personal relationship with Jesus, are paraded about not because of their exceptional spirituality, but rather because of the legitimacy their presence gives to Evangelical agendas.

The bottom line is that when it comes to economics in Evangelical circles, the analysis is almost totally focused on personal financial responsibility, personal ethics and how economics can be used to “save souls.” The business environment is often touted as ministry but what this usually translates into is that the workplace as an important staging ground for one-to-one evangelism and living out one’s personal morality. Not that these are wrong. But absent from the picture is a comprehensive view of what it means to be a steward of the God’s resources as it relates to systemic issues in business and economy, and addressing ethical issues like environmental impact or racism.

In short, the Evangelical analysis of the world is one where the ability to see systemic evil has atrophied. Over the past century, the economic sphere of life has become evermore secularized, materialistic and individualistic. Evangelicals, who have a long history of pragmatism when it comes to employing cultural tools for personal evangelism, have too often bought into a form of individualistic capitalism that is harmful to the formation of healthy image bearers of God.

Too many conservatives and Evangelicals seem to take the attitude that as long as the economic system is reasonably fair (which they generally suppose it to be), and they have played by the rules, then the failure by those who did not play as well by the rules is not their concern. They are merely reaping the consequences of their poor decisions. Yes, there are “deserving” poor who fall into poverty by no fault of their own and they deserve our help. But in a robber baron, survival of the fittest mentality, the “undeserving poor” are not our concern. Like the older brother in the story of the Prodigal son, there is outrage at the notion that anyone should run through the village to bring back into community these wayward souls without first exacting punishment. Jesus said we would always have the poor with us and some in conservative and Evangelical circles seem to be intent on fulfilling that prophecy. Even in circles where compassion is found there is still a strong tendency to promote a strategy of individual salvation without addressing the systemic issues that have led people to bad decisions and, like tentacles of monster, they are dragged back into broken eikonhood.

If there is a decided bent to toward statist and socialist thinking on economic issues in mainline seminaries, then in Evangelical seminaries there is virtually no economic thinking at all! What does economics have to do with personal salvation or running a church? With no intentional effort to form economic thinking, the ethos of economic forces of an increasingly secularist and individualist culture become the formative teachers. Theological reflection on business or economics is absent.

The two primary embraces of business and economics I see in conservative circles fall into two categories. First, business people are important because they make a lot of money enabling them to give to ministries and charities. Second, business people have skills and insights that will make ministries and congregations more efficient and effective in the goal of “reaching lost souls for Jesus.” Rarely is there any hint given that the work that the business person does as a business person is ministry in and of itself.

I have been hard on both liberal foundationalists and conservative foundationalists in these last two posts. I am sure you can name examples from both camps that don’t fit the description I have given here. I know I can. In addition, I have largely ignored the Roman Catholic contributions which have become increasingly significant at the national level over the last half of the twentieth century. Still, I think these two forms of foundationalism have been the driving forces in the USA over the past century. What I find interesting is that in addition to their foundationalists commonalities they also both seem to be tainted with a type of Gnostic-like dualism.

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Theology and Economics: The Impact of Liberal Foundationalism

The Church’s response to the rise of the Enlightenment and the modernist world has been foundationalism. Foundationalism is rooted in scientific rationalism. It has as its central tenant that there are objective core truths behind all we experience and these truths can be ascertained through rational examination of reality by autonomous objective human beings. The goal is to identify these core truths and build all other understandings upon them. These truths are the “foundations” upon which all else stands. However, foundationalism, as it has played out, has resulted in the development of two opposing camps.

One camp joined in with the demythologizing impulses of the modernist world. Scripture and tradition were weighed against scientific rationalism and found wanting. From the eighteenth century forward, and especially in the twentieth century, these theological modernists began to look for the truth “behind” scripture. A common universal experience of the transcendent was postulated for the entire human race. Each culture merely expresses it in different terms. The Bible is a wonderful expression of the transcendent but it is only a piece of the truth. By applying the tools of reason and scientific investigation it was believed that the common foundational truth would be uncovered.

This mindset, of necessity, leads to a type of elitism. Only the “high priests” of the rational scientific approach to scripture can speak authoritatively about the nature of spiritual truths. They are the “anointed ones” to direct the rest of the community in the ways of wisdom and truth. It is unrealistic to expect the masses would have the intellectual resources and sophisticated skills to discern foundational values, so they must be re-socialized into a new understanding. Some theological modernist have proposed radical revisionism but more typically the approach is an incremental effort to infuse ancient concepts and words with different meanings, thus subtly shifting people’s understanding without every directly challenging them.

The parallels between this mindset and the rise of socialism should be quite clear. Socialism has as a central tenant that a small group of elite intellectuals, applying rational and scientific analysis can plan a better economy than is created by a society of disparate individuals freely engaged in exchange. Some nations like Russia and China embraced this ideology and implemented radical reform. In many other places, the strategies have been more incremental and less confrontational.

Even in more capitalist societies like the United States, the trend toward controlling more and more of the decisions people make with massive human organizations developed. During the first half of the twentieth century businesses learned the enormous productivity they could gain by standardizing products and mass producing from one centralized location. The federal government also began to insert itself in various aspects of life using standardized programs with centralized bureaucracies in response to the crisis of the Great Depression. Even mainline denominations began to subsume previously independent mission and ministry organizations under one comprehensive umbrella to be managed by a centralized bureaucracy.

Having exhausted the economies of scale from mass standardization, and with the introduction of new technologies, businesses long ago began a transition to mass customization using flatter and more decentralized structures. However, the centralized bureaucratic management mindset has become sacrosanct in government and mainline denominations, where the idea is that an “anointed” elite are needed to “manage” the lives of their constituencies. This, of course, dovetails perfectly with the theological modernist mindset.

Reflecting back on the issues of subsidiarity, this twentieth century transition into centralized bureaucracies has had two consequences. First, it has atrophied the abilities of intermediate organizations and the skills of individuals in addressing their own needs. Second, it has created a dependency mindset so that when a problem emerges, the immediate response is to hold the large bureaucratic institutions responsible. When President Bush first rolled out his faith based initiatives agenda (an agenda that I will be the first to admit has some serious problems) the National Council of Churches cast a wary eye, fearing that it would undermine the role of the federal government as the primary caretakers of the poor!

The mindset of an anointed elite managing government and society has long dominated mainline theological education. Paul Tillich believed that “Socialism is the practice of which Christianity is the religion.” Liberation theology, feminist theology, and a host of other perspectives have largely been various mutations of this thinking. Survey’s consistently show that an easy majority of seminarians matriculating from mainline institutions are at best suspicious of free market enterprise and many are clearly hostile.

What has clearly developed over the last century is a far more individualistic and materialistic society. Theologians assume this to be a direct consequence of the free enterprise system. In fact, I argue that it is the bankrupt theology of a demythologizing elite that is a primary culprit. (I will also argue in the next post that Evangelical theology has been as big a culprit.) People have become more materialistic because, instead of infusing the world with sacred meaning, the sacred has been eradicated. The sense of call and purpose in daily life has been blurred or completely obscured. Rather than bringing the revelation of a transcendent God into a materialistic world, mainline institutions have aided and abetted the rise of materialism. Rather than suffer under the pontifications about the latest social philosophy dressed up in theological mumbo-jumbo, people have left church institutions in search of transcendence elsewhere, often in Gnostic-like philosophies that don’t challenge their materialism.

The errant fusion of materialistic individualism with free market capitalism is not the exclusive work of mainline Christianity. There have long been voices in the Evangelical community who do the same thing. Jim Wallis is one of the most prominent in recent years. I see a heavy does of it in Emergent circles. I recently read N. T. Wright’s “Simply Christian.” I am an N. T. Wright fan but look at this following paragraph published in the book:

And now we have the new global evils: rampant, uncaring, and irresponsible materialism and capitalism on the one hand; raging unthinking religious fundamentalism on the other. As one famous book puts it, we have ‘Jihad versus McWorld.” (Whether there is such a thing as caring capitalism, or for that matter thoughtful fundamentalism, isn’t the point at the moment.) This brings us back to where we were a few minutes ago. It doesn’t take a Ph.D in macroeconomics to know that if the rich are getting richer by the minute, and the poor poorer, there is something badly wrong. (1)

“Whether there is such a thing as caring capitalism?” “Poor are getting poorer by the minute?” With all do respect, what planet is he writing about? Look at the level of prosperity in the world that has emerged over the last quarter of a millennium in the Western world. Lower middle class people live lifestyles today that most of the wealthy could not imagine one hundred years ago. Look at the stunning decline in disease and infant mortality rates coupled with rising life expectancy throughout the world in the Twentieth Century. No famine has occurred in a nation over the past several decades that embraces free markets and rule of law. More people than ever before live in politically free countries. The two most populous poor nations on the planet, India and China, are experiencing staggering economic growth that, while uneven, is expanding farther and farther throughout their respective societies. That bastion of “right-wing economics,” the United Nations, reports enormous  and steady growth in the number of people earning more than one dollar a day over the past couple of decades. Their major objective is how to make it happen to more people faster. And all of this happened with the world tripling in population size since the 1920s. The poor are getting poorer???

None of this is to say that world situation is all peaches and cream. I am not saying that there are not serious injustices in the world and issues that need to be addressed. But we are talking about trajectories here, and capitalism, not a band enlightened elitists, has driven these advancements.

I suspect what is behind some of the aversion to free market capitalism by the Evangelical left and Emergent types is the pervasive individualism and materialism in Evangelical circles. These same Evangelicals are usually big supporters of free markets and capitalism. Borrowing from the critique of mainline Protestantism, I suspect that many of the critics have made the same errant fusion of materialistic individualism with capitalism. But the materialistic individualism in Evangelicalism does not spring from capitalism in my estimation. It is to the Evangelical ethos we turn next.

(1) N. T. Wright. Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2006. 8.

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Theology and Economics: Enlightenment Impact

The Enlightenment, beginning in the seventeenth century, set off shockwaves that are reverberating down to this day. It altered our ideas of knowledge, authority and human existence. I have discussed the impacts of the Enlightenment throughout this series of posts so I will not give a lengthy review of the Enlightenment and its impact here. Instead I want to focus on two aspects of the Enlightenment as they have affected the Church: The concept of the autonomous objective individual and the supremacy of scientific rationalism.

De Cartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am” construction placed human experience and mental faculties as supreme source of knowledge, displacing tradition and revelation as the ultimate authorities. The application of rationalism to the study physical world unleashed an explosion in knowledge and mastery of the natural order unparalleled in human history. This set the authority of the Church back on its heels as science quickly came to be seen as the arbiter of truth throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The success of science and the Enlightenment gave rise to several issues that have directly impacted the church over the past couple of centuries and especially in the twentieth century.

1. Reason, especially as related to science, was elevated to the supreme arbiter of truth. Demythologizing has been a major project of intellectuals for the past couple of centuries.
2. Part of the demythologizing has been the reduction of human beings to elements of the natural order from beings “created in the image of God.” Humans are merely complex material beings.
3. As reason is the highest expression of human existence, each individual is to be valued to the degree they have actualized the human potential. Those who do not or can not actualize the human potential are less than fully human if they are indeed human at all.
4. There was the rise of what I call the “expertocracy.” If scientific reason is the highest form of knowledge, then it stands that those with the highest degree of scientific knowledge or expertise (i.e., “objective” knowledge untainted by dogma) should be in charge of social institutions.

The rise of these themes set the stage for both radical individualism and totalitarianism in the twentieth century. The Social Darwinists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, grounded in the work of Herbert Spencer, applied Darwin’s survival of the fittest to the human economic and social order. The icon of the “self-made man” emerged and all that was needed to lead humanity on to new heights was the removal of restraints from these “self-made men.” The removal of restraints would allow the best and brightest of the human race to evolve to yet higher states of existence. This was clearly the mentality of the Robber Baron class.

Of course, the corollary of the “self-made man” is the “self-unmade man.” These people would be ground under by the wheels of progress. Some callously looked at this as a small price to pay for human progress. In fact, some endorsed genocide of inferior peoples as a way to keep lesser humans from dragging down the rest of humanity. This would allow for greater actualization of human potential among a broader part of the population. Others felt that the wretched losers in society should be treated more humanely but this should be done without placing limits on “self-made men.”

In contrast to the Social Darwinists came the totalitarians, dominated by intellectuals, who believed the path to human advancement lay in the application of rationalism to human systems and organizations. The evolution of humanity should not be trusted to an elite group of economic opportunists. It should be done by a group of elite experts who would have the broadest interests of society at heart. However, just like with the Social Darwinists, the plight of any given individual is inconsequential to the overall goal of evolving humanity to a higher state of being. All institutions from national government down to the institution of the family must be dissolved and reconstituted in a ways that give primacy to the state’s higher call.

Author Dick Keyes once wrote “The terible irony of the fall is that we expect more than Eden and yet can only realize far less.” (1) Being an image bearer means we are subservient to some higher authority. The demythologizing Enlightenment sought to create autonomous individuals apart from the idea of being God’s image bearers. The irony in this grasp for supremacy is that individual human beings have lost there dignity and have been reduced to complex material beings desperately seeking actualization of their potential. Intended for dominion, we have devolved into complex matter.

Much of the Twentieth Century became a battle over how best to evolve humanity toward a higher state of being: Survival of the fittest competition where only the brightest and most cunning survive or an expertocarcy where the state is controlled by experts that reason their way to a better world through social engineering. Both perspectives had the underlying assumption of progress deeply engrained. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century witnessed the height of the Social Darwinist school of thought and the Russian Revolution of 1917 touched off a seventy year period of devastating totalitarian experiments. Since the early twentieth century, the battle in the West has largely been about finding a balance between some modified form of Social Darwinism and expertocracies. Both are grounded in the concept of the autonomous objective individual and the supremacy of scientific rationalism. Both have led to an increasingly materialistic perspective on human existence. Neither truly respects the idea of human beings created for community in God as God’s image bearers, exercising dominion over the earth.

The rise of postmodernism at the end of the Twentieth Century appears to be a reaction to the impasse form the Enlightenment and modernist eras. The shift is away from macro stories of evolving humanity but it is still in opposition to human beings as “image bearers of God” and transcendent revelation. Instead, truth is found by belonging to a localized community that creates its own reality. How human autonomy (or lack thereof) is handled is determined by the community with which one affiliates. What is sacrosanct is the individual’s choice of community and their “truths.” In a spirit of complete diversity and inclusion, no group or individual can be critical of another individual’s community and truths. Human autonomy still reigns even to the point of disintegrating social structures through lack of consensus.

What has the Church's response been in the middle of this firestorm?

(1) Dick Keyes. Beyond Identity: Finding your way in the image and Character of God. United Kingdom: Paternoster Press, 1998. 40.

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Theology and Economics: Capitalism is not a Synonym for Materialistic Individualism

Pope John Paul II wrote the following in Centesimus Annus:

Can it perhaps be said that after the failure of communism capitalism is the victorious social system and the capitalism is the victorious social system and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path of true economic and civil progress?

The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant and economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property, and the resulting responsibility for the means of production as well as free creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy,” “market economy,” or simply “free economy.” But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative. (Centesimus Annus, 42)

Pope John Paul II clearly saw the distinction between capitalism grounded in biblical ideas of shalom and human community versus capitalism based in laissez-faire, survival of the fittest, materialism and individualism. The economic system is, by and large the same. The fundamental difference is the values fed into the economic system and the institutions that spring from those values.

I want to reiterate what I am calling capitalism. I use Rodney Stark’s definition:

Capitalism is an economic system wherein privately owned, relatively well organized , and stable firms pursue complex commercial activities with a relatively free (unregulated) market, taking a systematic, long-term approach to investing and reinvesting wealth (directly and indirectly) in productive activities involving a hired workforce, and guided by anticipated and actual returns. (56)

I don’t think the economists I know would have a problem with this definition. They might tweak it slightly but it is a good working definition of capitalism. What I want to emphasize is this: Free market capitalism is not intrinsically individualistic or materialistic. Just because many expressions of capitalism today are very individualistic and materialistic, it does not follow that the economic system itself is defective. This is like the lung cancer patient concluding she got lung cancer because of defective lungs, after years of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. However, both socialism and completely unregulated markets are flawed systems that damage the image of God in humanity. No amount of virtuous intent will make them work.

Many theologians and social observers have correctly identified the Western world’s slide into individualism and materialism. Some communities of Christians have completely adapted themselves to this individualism and materialism. They unquestioningly embrace it. This is seen all too frequently in many Evangelical and conservative circles. Social critics rightly point out this cooption and challenge it.

The critics of this accommodation often come from mainline traditions, from a minority in the Evangelical left or from groups like those involved in the Emergent conversation. (The Roman Catholic tradition has people who are all over the map.) While they rightly diagnose the problems of materialism and individualism, they incorrectly view them as intrinsic to capitalism. Capitalism, following thinking similar to that of Max Weber’s, is believed to be a product of Enlightenment era thinking. To be postmodern means abandoning modernist affectations and capitalism is at the top of the list things to be abandon.

But as I have shown in this series, capitalism pre-dates the Enlightenment by several centuries and deeply rooted in Christian perspectives on humanity and the world. The particular economic outcomes we see today are the consequence of modernist players in the market acting on their values. Change the orientation and actions of the market players and you will get different outcomes. No, it is not the economic system that is the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is the Church. (Stay tuned.)

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Theology and Economics: The Virtue Dilemma

I have written about the importance of a society being populated with people who have internalized virtuous values and behaviors. The family is the primary institution for socializing children into virtuous people. The family is aided in this socialization by a variety of intermediary institutions, most notably for Christians, the Church.

However, it doesn’t take much observation to see that a great many people in our free market capitalist society live by less than virtuous values. Whether it is corporate executives plundering pension funds, drug dealers leading millions into addiction, porn producers degrading human beings, or just every day folks drowning in debt to “keep up with the neighbors,” not everyone makes virtuous decisions. As we each examine our own lives we can point to less than virtuous decisions we have made.

The libertarian idea that all we need to do is to lift all restraints and people will behave virtuously does not take seriously the fallen nature of humanity and the inclination toward evil. Boundaries are critical for a virtuous and just society. They restrain the most virulent forms of evil behavior, thus providing a safe space where virtuous behavior can flourish.

But where do we put the boundaries? This is always leads to a dilemma. Does the fact that I didn’t rob the bank I visited today make me a virtuous person? Not necessarily. It is entirely possible that I very much wanted to rob the bank but the threat of years in prison was of greater concern to me than the potential financial reward. I was compelled to behave in a way that a virtuous person would behave without necessarily having internalized the virtuous values. This gives the semblance of virtue when in fact it is only the avoidance of negative consequences. Remove the negative consequences and the desired behavior will end.

The trap for conservatives and liberals is to use of the state to compel certain behavior rather than seeking a populace that behaves virtuously out of internalized values. Ironically, the more we try to force good behavior the more externalized, rather than internalized, the motivations for good behavior become. Conservatives tend to look for external means to control bad social behavior and liberals tend to look to external controls to control bad economic behavior. Take away the external motivations and the good behavior dissipates as well.

Therefore, a society without state enforced boundaries will lead to rampant corruption and evil behavior. Virtue is destroyed. A society where every boundary is defined and enforced by the state prevents the internalization of values. Virtue is also destroyed. This is the virtue dilemma.

The virtue dilemma is why overly ideological commitments to a libertarian, conservative, or liberal mindsets are not usually helpful in discerning a solid biblical response to public policy. As Christians, we are always weighing essential boundaries against the goal of seeing each human being living up to their full potential as virtuous eikons of God. Our primary strategy is the transformation of the broken eikons. The more poorly the Church does its job at creating virtuous people, the more other institutions, like the state, must intervene in order to keep a stable society. This puts more power in the hands of the state and, as already noted, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That is why a prolonged slide away from virtue driven behavior makes a society more and more vulnerable to totalitarian control. Too much power concentrated in the hands of the most benevolent state will ultimately lead to corruption. Strong families, and strong intermediate institutions that support them, are essential for a prosperous society.

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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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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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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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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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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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Theology and Economics: Technology and Infrastructure (Part 1)

We have now briefly reviewed three of William J. Bernstein’s four factors that led to today’s unprecedented prosperity: property rights, scientific rationalism and capital markets. Bernstein refers to the fourth factor as “power, transportation and light.” I am simply referring to this as technology and infrastructure. (1)

Not everything every technological innovation that contributed to Europe’s growing prosperity originated with Europeans. A number of inventions similar to ones the Europeans developed had appeared earlier in other cultures like China or the Muslim world. But the central issue is not how early a specific invention occurred but the ability of that invention to have an impact on culture and the economy. Europe made slow but steady innovations in the 1,200 years following the fall of Rome. Then about 200-300 years, an explosion in technological innovation began, nurtured and sustained by property rights, scientific rationalism and capital markets. The advances in technology in turn influenced these other factors.

One of the theses of Rodney Stark’s book, Victory of Reason, is that the so called “Dark Ages” were not so dark.  (2) Historians often point to the days of the Roman Empire as the Zenith of Western Civilization. The fifth century saw Rome’s demise and then there was 1,000 years of “darkness” until rediscovery of the classical West gave birth to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The evidence says otherwise.

Stark points that Roman society knew nothing of waterwheel powered technology. When William the Conqueror took his census in England in 1066 he counted approximately one water powered mill for every fifty families. What had changed over the previous five centuries? Motivation. What need did the master of a Roman villa have for water power when he could simply acquire more slaves to do the work? Common Europeans had no such luxury and turned to ingenuity to solve their production problems.

Much is made of the elaborate Roman road system but rarely is it noted that roads were largely restricted to military traffic and luxury goods “extracted” from outlying regions for the wealthy in the city. They had little impact on the economic well being of he average person in Roman society.

Most of the significant early European innovations were related to agricultural production. Roman agricultural was based on a two crop rotation system and required half the land to lie fallow at any given time. Europeans created a three crop rotation system in the seventh century where only one third of the ground had to be kept out of production. By rotating particular crops in order, the land’s fertility was actually enhanced. The fallow land also served as excellent grazing land for livestock that produced manure and further increased the lands fertility. As I noted in an earlier post, these innovations began to produce an agricultural surplus, freeing some for pursuits other than agriculture. Monasteries owned vast tracts of land and benefited greatly from the technological advances, allowing them to begin to specialize in other activities. They eventually became centers of commerce in European life and developed many features of modern corporations.

Rodney Stark points out that it was Europeans who invented the horse harness and horseshoes by about the eleventh century. A horse with a harness can pull more than an ox and can work twice as long. The horseshoe greatly decreased the injury to horses and improved their traction on difficult surfaces. The Europeans also invented wagons with brakes and swiveling axels. These wagons combined with harnessed horses greatly enhanced the ability to move heavy loads over long distances. Europeans also greatly improved ship design including the use of rudders. They invented windmills that greatly increased the agricultural productivity in the lowlands of Northern Europe. Eyeglasses were invented in the thirteenth century and greatly extending the working life of many craftsmen. From the end of the Roman Empire to the eighteenth century there was a slow but steady flow of technological improvements. From about the eighteenth century on, the steady flow became a tidal wave.

I have already noted in previous posts the proto-capitalist enterprises emerging in Northern Italy in the first centuries of the second millennium. Forerunners of the modern corporation were in place that included double-entry bookkeeping, by-laws and financial markets. Water powered fulling mills, developed in England during the thirteenth century, created small factories all across the English countryside. The thirteenth century also was when a reliable mechanical clock was invented. Town clocks were installed in bell towers with chimes to mark the day. For the first time people over a wide area of real estate could coordinate activities. By the end of the seventeenth century property rights and capital markets had been well established and more people than ever had strong incentives to innovate. The pace of innovation and invention began to increase in a variety of areas through the use of scientific rationalism. The missing link was just around the corner: Power.

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

(2) Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, New York: Random House, 2005. See Chapters 2 and 3.

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Theology and Economics: Captial Markets (Part 4)

Industrial Revolution to Present

It is over the last two centuries that we have seen an exponential growth in capital markets and capital formation. The key to this growth has been the creation of mechanisms that allow for the aggregation of enormous sums of capital for large enterprises. Other than the owner’s personal equity, nearly all business financing was secured in the form of debt up until the nineteenth century. What changed?

The European discovery of America in 1492 set off a global expansion of trade. For at least the next two centuries mercantilism held sway as the dominant economic way of thinking. According to mercantile thought, there is a fixed sum of wealth in the world. The way to power and wealth was to amass capital and keep it within the nation. Domination and extraction of resources were the operative policies of all European nations when it came to international commerce although it was especially pronounced with Spain and Portugal. It was essentially an extension of the rent-seeking mentality inherited from feudalism.

As trade expanded, the need to finance ever more complex and risky ventures began to develop. In response, the Dutch led the way with the joint-stock company. A company, like the Dutch East India Company (formed in 1601) would be given a monopoly for trade in a certain region. Individual investors could buy dividend paying shares. The British and others soon followed but the Dutch with their highly developed financial markets had a distinct advantage. (Many forget that the Pilgrims were living in Holland prior to their departure for America and they organized as a British joint-stock company. In fact, an issue that plagued them for years was that they had made landfall and settled north of the area they had been given a patent for, placing their territorial claims and economic improvements in jeopardy.)

Most of the seventeenth century was a time of great turmoil in England while Holland was under constant threat from France. The turning point was the Glorious Revolution in 1688 when Willem III of Holland was invited to assume the British throne as William of Orange. With him came a number of Holland’s best financial minds. Part of the Agreement was that Parliament would have supremacy in law and in exchange the monarchy would receive regular funding. The combination of Dutch financial expertise and British rule of law, especially with regard to property rights, spelled the demise of the Dutch and the rise of the British as the financial center of the world.

The British had yet another advantage in their rise to financial power. Before the Renaissance, Britain was viewed much like a giant sheep ranch, supplying wool for markets in Italy and Holland. By the end of the fourteenth century, the British developed water wheel powered fulling mills and were making their own high quality cloth for export. These mills needed  streams and rivers making it a highly decentralized industry. With the absence of feudalism that dominated rural continental Europe and the lower cost of rural living, the British had a distinct economic advantage.

Also of significance during the same time period was the transition to coal fuel. Wood was becoming scare in the fourteenth century and England made the transition to coal. Some industries began to locate near coal mines. Elaborate systems of horse drawn railways were created for transporting coal to distribution points in England. The net effect of the water and coal power was to create a broader and more widely dispersed middle class.

Thus, Britain entered the eighteenth century with a secure property rights, a broadening middle class, and the best financial minds of the age. By mid-century theorists like Adam Smith were articulating for the first time a full-blown theory of economics that grasped the idea that wealth creation is not a zero sum game. By each person concentrating on what they do best and exchanging with others doing likewise, both parties win and wealth is created. The sum total of wealth grows and everyone can participate in that wealth creation. Smith and others provided the intellectual foundation for modern economic thinking. However, the major catalyst for change in capital markets was technological.

The eighteenth century marked the beginning of the industrial revolution. A steam mechanism had been developed for pumping water out of mines in England in1705. Sixty years later James Watt would make improvements to this technology that would make it a viable power source for a variety of applications including factories and trains. We will visit the impact of technological innovation shortly but the central focus here is that the technology quickly gave birth to enterprises requiring massive amounts of capital investment create and operate. So much capital that no small group of investors could finance it out of their own wealth and debt financing would be cost prohibitive because of the massive amount needed. An effective means of raising equity capital was needed.

As result, the modern corporation was born. By the 1830s in the United States, and shortly thereafter in Britain, investors in corporations were held liable only for the sum of money they invested. No longer was an investor putting their entire fortune and personal liberty at risk by buying shares in a company. This enabled company ownership to be divided up into thousands of tiny pieces thus enabling thousands of investors to contribute to the capital formation of a corporation. Later in the nineteenth century, bankruptcy laws were written in England and the United States that forbade the imprisonment for debt default. This was a tremendous boon to risk taking entrepreneurship.

Information technologies also played a role in the development of capital markets. With the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s, information could for the first time move faster than a human being on a horse or train. The growing integration of the capital markets through communication technology increased the rate at which capital could flow; a process that is in effect to this day. The story of the twentieth century was largely about the expansion of and refinements of capital markets including the formation of institutions and regulations that limit their abuse and provide a measure of stability.

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Theology and Economics: Capital Markets (Part 3)

Renaissance to Enlightenment

Most of Europe was a collection feudal agrarian societies before the Renaissance. Serfs paid rent to a lord for the use of land. That lord paid rent to a higher lord who in turn paid rent to a King. Lack of clear title for land ownership made exchanges in real estate very difficult. Furthermore, tenants were unlikely to make more than minimal improvements to property because their hold on property was so tenuous. It was enough just to survive.

This “rent seeking” practice was ingrained in most of the monarchies of continental Europe. As the economies grew, rent seeking expanded into every aspect of life. Permission was needed from the government to engage in most economic activities. Permission was granted upon payment fees to government officials. The King’s nobles, exempt from taxes themselves (along with clergy), were the ones who collected the fees. By paying a large fee to the King, one could purchase a position of nobility. In return, the King would grant the noble a monopoly on collecting certain fees in certain areas. These nobles might in turn sell rent collecting positions to others under them.

The result of this behavior was to create a highly corrupt government system that was utterly indifferent to economic productivity. It created an economy where prosperity was achieved by securing government favor and living a life of leisure off of the revenue exacted from productive workers. In France, this rent-seeking system eventually forced farmers to sell their lands and become indentured servants to the nobility. It also brought on the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.

However, not all of Europe was dominated by despotic monarchies. The city states of Northern Italy were an important exception; Venice in particular. Venice’s inhabitants were the descendants of wealthy refugees who fled from the mainland of Italy when the Lombards attacked in the years following the collapse of the Roman Empire. Its geography made it an excellent defensive position as well as an ideal location for shipping traffic. Initially Venice aligned itself with the Byzantine Empire and its leading residents were considered nobility. However, they were nobiles without landed estates and they were located at the far edge of the empire. From the start, their economy was tied to trade between the East and Europe.

The absence of dominant feudal systems and the focus on trade made cities like Venice, Florence, Pisa, Genoa and Milan the most economically innovative centers in Europe. By the thirteenth century these cities produced banking families that had outlets as far away as present day Germany, England and Portugal. They used and perfected the letters of credit method used by the Templar Knights and the monasteries. (In fact, the Knights may have learned their financing techniques from the city states.) The abacus, Arabic numerals and the concept of zero were made widely accessible in Europe in 1202. Schools sprang up to teach these skills and concepts in Northern Italy. Double entry bookkeeping was invented. By the fourteenth century these firms had created corporations complete with by-laws, corporate seals, charts of accounts and in some cases the concept of share ownership in the corporation. Family companies like Riccardi, Medici and Peruzzi dominated lending and finance all across Europe by the fifteenth century.

It is important to note that these were indeed family businesses. During the Roman Empire, business failure and loan defaults could result in the complete confiscation of property and servitude for the defaulting party. This tradition carried over into Europe including the Italian city states. For this reason, all branches across Europe were run by family members partly because no family member would exact such draconian penalties on other family members. It was also for this reason that almost all commerce conducted up to this time, and for a few more centuries beyond, used debt financing. Partnership or share ownership with others meant that if the business went under, everyone connected stood to loose everything they had including their freedom. Lending meant only the capital lent was at risk.

The Northern Italian model of city state commerce quickly spread north to cities that had escaped dominance by the rising nation-states of continental Europe. Other cities and regions managed to gain some autonomy but the rural areas of continental Europe remained trapped in feudalistic relationships. The Northern Italian cities quickly declined as Spain expanded its despotic control over the area in the early decades of the sixteenth century. The center of commerce shifted to the great cities of present day Netherlands and England.

The story of Dutch commerce is of great importance to economic history. It played out primarily in the sixteenth through eighteenth century when France brought about its demise. For our purposes here, we will simply note the Dutch, along with Spain, France and England began the world colonization process that eventually created the global economy (although initially with a highly destructive mercantilist mentality.) This expansion of trade and commerce led to continual refinements in market practices both at home and internationally. The Dutch were leaders in the development of joint-stock companies, the forerunner of the modern corporation. We have more to say about this in the next post. The next major leap forward in capital markets would come from England and from the United Sates during the Eighteenth Century to the present.

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Theology and Economics: Captial Markets (Part 2)

The term “capital” first came into use in the fourteenth century to identify funds that have the capacity to return income, rather than simply being of consumable value. Thus, in early usage, “capitalism” referred to the use of wealth (or money) to earn wealth (or money). Put another way, the word “capitalism” implied using wealth to provide income with the intention that the initial value of the wealth would not be reduced, as with money lent at interest. It is investment, the systematic risking of wealth in pursuit of gain, that distinguishes the capitalist from those who merely exact their wealth through rents, taxes, conquests, or banditry. (1)

Early Capitalism

The fathers of the early church shared the Greco-Roman world’s general disdain for business and trade. This began to change by the fifth century. Augustine maintained that the price of a good was not simply determined by the seller’s costs but by the buyer’s desire for the product. This was an important step toward thinking in terms of supply and demand.

Not long after the collapse of the oppressive Roman Empire, innovations began to occur. Farmers discovered a three crop rotation system that proved far more productive than the universally practiced two crop rotation system of the Romans. It created more fertile soil and generated greater production. Monasteries owned vast amounts of land and put the new practices to work. These new practices increased production and, in combination with frugal lifestyles, led to the creation of considerable wealth for the monasteries. Other innovations like the invention of the horse harness around 1000 CE also contributed to production. Monasteries often took their resources and invested them in more land, further increasing their wealth.

The increased prosperity brought people to the monasteries seeking trade. Eventually, at least one day a week was set aside for a market fair. People gathered at monasteries to barter and trade. At first they traded primarily with the monastery, but later between each other as well. People began to permanently settle around the monasteries. Many of these monasteries grew into present day European cities.

Eventually the monasteries began to specialize in one type of product (cattle, grain, wine, etc.) and then trade with each other for their other needs. This specialization led to further improvements in productivity and quality, but it also made trade considerably more complex. In response, they moved away from a barter economy and began to introduce a cash economy. Money was used for exchange instead of direct bartering.

The monasteries were by far the wealthiest institutions in Europe. They began hiring laborers to do the work at the monasteries, freeing them to engage in a much wider variety of scholarship and religious activities (like selling indulgences.) Since advancement in the monasteries was based on merit instead of feudal caste considerations, it insured that only the most effective managers rose to the top. When lords and rulers needed to borrow, the Church was the only lender of consequence. The monasteries became the proto-capitalist multi-national corporation. 

Meanwhile, as the crusades developed in the early part of the second millennium, a great many Europeans began making pilgrimages to the Holy Land. This was an exceedingly dangerous and expensive undertaking. Carrying large amounts of wealth made one a target for bandits. The Knights Templar emerged to protect people who took these pilgrimages. Soon they developed their own economic structures. The knights would sell a chit (a tally sheet) to the pilgrim. The pilgrim would stay at way stations provided by the knights along their journey. They could purchase goods in the Holy Lands from merchants approved by the knights. At each stop, charges would be added to the chit using encrypted code. When the pilgrim returned, the chit was remitted to the issuing knights and the pilgrim either received back what had not been spent or was issued a bill for what had been spent in excess. Meanwhile the Knights settled the bills between themselves.

It wasn’t long before the Knights also realized they could prosper by making similar arrangements with merchants traveling not only to the Holy Land, but on other trade routes through Europe as well. Usury was prohibited by the Church so the knights opted to “rent” the chits out to pilgrims and merchants, collecting at the end of the pilgrims journey. This careful use of semantics kept them from running afoul of the Church.

The Knights Templar began to experience reversals in their military endeavors by the thirteenth century. Their military prowess had waned considerably by the beginning of the fourteenth century but they still controlled a vast amount of real estate and wealth. Meanwhile, European aristocracies were growing in power. When the Knights Templar and King Philip IV of France came into conflict of over a loan the King had received, King Philip persuaded the Pope to bring a variety of charges against the Knights. Some members were arrested in 1307. Some were tortured and eventually executed. Exactly what became of the Knights and their holdings is not accounted for in the historical record, making them a frequent subject for conspiracy theorists and story tellers.

The Knights may have vanished but the knowledge and systems of commerce survived them. As Europe entered the Renaissance, the growth of capitalism emerged from another sector.

(1) Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, New York: Random House, 2005. 55-56.

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