Gary North

Have you ever wondered:

Why Genesis 1:14-18 is more hated by humanists than Genesis 1:1

Why Darwin was successful in winning converts, when others had failed

Why God never intended that Adam should rest on the seventh day

Why Adam refused to rest on the first day as a principle of life

Why gold is money. (After all, you can't eat gold.)

Why socialism increases pollution

Why pagan cultures have high interest rates

Why the Bible says that growth can be a blessing

Why the population explosion is morally required

Why the Social Security System is going broke

What the Bible teaches about personal financial planning

These are just a few of the issues covered in The Dominion Covenant: Genesis It is the first volume of a multi-volume commentary on the Bible. It is specifically an economic commentary, the first one ever published.

What does the Bible require of men in the area of economics and business? What does the Bible have to say about economic theory? Does it teach the free market, or socialism, or a mixture of the two, or something completely different? Is there rally an exclusively Christian approach to economics? Modern economic thought is humanistic to the core, whether conservative, libertarian, Keynesian, Marxist, or whatever.

All schools of thought begin with the presupposition that man is the measure of all things, and man's mind is capable, apart from biblical revelation to interpret the world correctly. This is why modern economic theory is in the process of disintegration.

This book sets forth the biblical foundations of economics. It offers the basis of total reconstruction of economic theory and practice. It specifically abandons the universal presupposition of all modern schools of economics: Darwinian evolution. Economics must begin with the doctrine of creation. The Dominion Covenant: Genesis represents a self-conscious effort to re-think the oldest and most rigorous social science in terms of the doctrine of creation. Every social science requires such a reconstruction. The "baptized humanism" of the modern Christian college classroom must be abandoned by all those who take seriously God's command that Christians go forth and subdue the earth (Genesis 1:28).

We must begin with the doctrine of creation if we are not to end in total chaos. This is the central message of The Dominion Covenant: Genesis. God's curse of the ground (Genesis 3:17-19) made scarcity an inescapable aspect of man's existence. This is the specifically economic starting point for Christian economics. Apart from these fundamental presuppositions, economics is inescapably irrational and self-contradictory.

This is the second edition of the book, published in 1987.

Note: just for the record, I regard Appendix A as the most important academic article of my career. If you like the idea of evolution, you won't like Appendix A. It took me about 500 hours plus access to the Duke University library to write it.

To read this book as originally published, you must have the free DjVu reader installed on your computer. It is similar to the Adobe Acrobat reader. Download it here:

Then download The Dominion Covenant here: