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IMPARTIAL JUSTICE VS. SOCIALIST ECONOMICS Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour (Lev. 19:15).
The theocentric meaning of this law is that the State is to imitate God by doing what God does: judge all people without respect to their persons, i.e., their class, status, or power.
This law is one of the two most important laws in the Bible that deal with civil government. The other verse is Exodus 12:49, which insists that civil judgment in the land of the covenant must apply to all men equally, whether strangers or Israelites: "One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you." Exodus 12:49 confirms the judicially binding nature of the civil law of God: biblical civil laws are to be applied equally to all people residing within the geographical boundaries of a biblically covenanted society. The same civil laws are to be applied to everyone residing in the land, regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin.(1) These binding civil laws have been revealed by God directly to mankind in the Bible, and only in the Bible.
All those who reside within modern geographical boundaries are under a particular State's sanctions,(2) but not all of these people are citizens. This means that they are not being represented judicially as members of an earthly court. They are not part of the civil hierarchy even though they are under the law. If they were part of it, they could apply judicial sanctions for or against these representatives by voting. What God's law requires is that civil magistrates, as agents of God's heavenly court, represent these people. The judges represent God in man's courts, and they represent men under their jurisdiction in God's court. This is why civil authorities are called ministers by Paul (Rom. 13:4, 6). They possess ministerial authority. Judges must therefore apply the Bible's civil laws impartially to residents who are inside the geographical boundaries of a covenanted society but who are outside the judicial hierarchy. The publicly visible evidence of the judges' representative authority in God's heavenly court is their faithfulness in applying God's law impartially.
Almost every legal theorist in Western society accepts the principle of equality before the law. This ideal is one of the bedrock foundations of Western civilization. It comes from the Bible, not from Greek and Roman law, both of which explicitly denied the concept of equality before the civil law. Classical law protected only citizens: males who had lawful access to the religious rites of the city. Women (half the adult population), slaves (one-third of all males), and foreign-born residents were excluded.(3) The ultimate manifestation of the biblical principle of equality before the law in history was God the Father's willingness to place His incarnate son, Jesus Christ, under the negative sanction that had threatened Adam. Paul writes: "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" (Rom. 8:32). Among these things that God gives is liberty. It is a product, along with other judicial factors, of the ideal of equality before God's law. (It is not, contrary to the textbooks, a product of Classical Greek political theory or practice.)(4)
Natural Law Theory: Ethical Dualism The issue of the absolute authority of God's specially revealed civil law challenges the competing theoretical structure of natural law, natural reason, and natural revelation. We need to ask: Can these three theoretical ideals serve as sufficient guides for establishing God's legal requirements? Or is direct revelation from the God of the Bible mandatory covenantally in the civil realm?
Let us take the easiest case to analyze. God told Adam that he was not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If natural law, natural reason, and natural revelation were sufficient to inform mankind of the judicial boundaries established by God, then why did God reveal to Adam this single binding law and its single negative sanction? Adam was morally perfect. His eyes were not yet blinded by sin. The creation was without blemish in Genesis 2. It did not yet provide misleading information to mankind. But God nevertheless revealed His law verbally to Adam. Why? Because natural law, natural reason, and natural revelation alone are not sufficient to enable men to know God's binding covenant law in its entirety. If this was true for Adam, then it is surely true today, since men possess only fallen reason, and the creation itself is under a curse.
Had God's civil laws been revealed in some way other than through direct verbal revelation to Moses by God, such as through the universal reason of mankind, there would have been no need for God to require that the whole law be read publicly in Israel every seventh year (Deut. 31:10-13). Men would already have known this requirement "rationally." But they did not know.(5) Then what do men know? They are responsible before God, so they must know something about God's law. Men always know enough about God's covenant law to get themselves condemned by God eternally -- the work of the law (not the law itself) written in their hearts (Rom. 2:14-15)(6) -- but not enough to enable them to build the kingdom of God in history. This is why those Christians who affirm natural law rather than biblical law as the sole authoritative moral standard for society almost always also explicitly deny that it is either possible or required by God that Christians build the kingdom of God in history as God's designated judicial agents.(7)
A Question of Judicial Subordination
The inherent ethical dualism of natural law theology has had catastrophic effects in history. The dualism between Bible-revealed personal Christian ethics and religiously neutral, universally perceivable civil law inescapably demobilizes Christians in society and simultaneously anoints pagans as the lawful interpreters of natural law. Ethical dualism inevitably places God's designated judicial agents -- Christians -- under the civil and cultural authority of Satan's designated judicial agents. Why? Because it places natural law, natural revelation, and natural reason above God's revealed law, His progressively restored creation,(8) and the mind of Christ (I Cor. 2:16).(9) There is no neutrality; there is always judicial hierarchy. Some law-order must be on top. Some transgressors of this law-order must be on the bottom. Christian natural law theorists in principle place a hypothetically neutral natural law on top and Christians on the bottom.
In the early stages of this cultural conquest by covenant-breakers, natural law theory is a highly useful tool for covenant-breakers in their epistemological and political disarming of Christians. The infiltrators applaud ethical dualism: separate ethical standards for believers and skeptics, but a common civil law-order for all. This common law-order must not be based on some "narrow" appeal to standards uniquely revealed in the Bible, an ethical handbook for covenant-keepers only. Dualism keeps Christians happily subservient to politically successful pagans in the name of Jesus. That is to say, dualism keeps Jesus covenantally subordinate to Satan on earth and in history. When Norman Geisler asks, "Whose ethical standard shall we use?" and immediately answers, "a moral law common to all men"(10) -- natural law for the natural man -- he has in principle delivered society into the hands of Satan's designated judicial agents in history. The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit (I Cor. 2:14); therefore, the ethical dualist is logically compelled to affirm, the Holy Spirit has nothing judicially binding to say or do with society and politics. If He did, then the natural man, not being able to receive the things of the Spirit, would be spiritually unreliable to exercise civil authority. Political pluralism rests philosophically on ethical dualism, for it asserts the legitimacy of common citizenship based on religiously neutral civil law. Ethical dualism necessarily asserts the judicial irrelevance of the Holy Spirit to both social theory and political theory. For almost two millennia, ethical dualism has been the dominant outlook of the church's main spokesmen.(11)
There is no neutrality. The ethical dualist denies this with respect to civil law. By elevating natural law, natural reason, and natural revelation above God's inspired word for the purpose of establishing social and political theory, the Christian ethical dualist has anointed the covenant-breaker as the lawful master of the covenant-keeper in every area of life outside the four walls of the Christian church and the Christian family. But the consistent covenant-breaker is not about to honor these two fragile, judicially unprotected institutional boundaries, any more than Pontius Pilate honored the innocence of Jesus Christ against the Pharisees' court.
Here is the problem: Christian ethical dualists keep insisting, century after century, that the Pilates of this world are judicially reliable. The Pilates of this world are supposedly not in need of personal regeneration and the revelation of the Bible in order to carry out their lawful and judicially neutral cultural mandate in history. On the contrary, we are assured, they need only be faithful to "ancient Hindu, Chinese, and Greek writings," to cite Dr. Geisler's recommended primary sources.(12) This is why Christian ethical dualists are at war with biblical civil law, biblical civil sanctions, and covenantal postmillennialism.(13) Christian natural law theorists implicitly offer this daily prayer to God: "Thy kingdom not come, thy will not be done in earth as it is in heaven." (Unless, of course, they become really consistent and argue that natural law in principle should rule in heaven, too. Then their prayer becomes: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in heaven as it is on earth." We do not find such consistent ethical dualists.)
Sanctions: Evaluation and Imposition Biblical civil justice must seek to apply written laws to public acts. Neither the social status nor the economic class of either the victim or the accused is to be considered in judicial proceedings. The pronouncement by the judge or the jury regarding the fit between the law and the public act of the accused is to be based solely on the law and the evidence. Justice is never impersonal; it is wholly personal: the law, the act, the evidence, and the court's judgment.
Judgments should involve the imposition of sanctions: blessings (on the victim) and cursings (on the criminal). There is no neutrality. Any failure to impose biblical sanctions, apart from the permission of the victim, is necessarily the imposition of unbiblical sanctions. Biblical sanctions are limited. There must be the application of sanctions, but the victim always has the right to reduce the sanctions. Biblical sanctions are always based on the principle of restitution: to God and the victim.(14) The victim is to gain back what he lost plus a penalty payment. But biblical sanctions must not exceed what is legally appropriate to the crime. This places limits on the judges. The judges are not to declare greater sanctions than God's law allows. The judges therefore are under a legal boundary.
The imposition of the sanctions restores the judicial status quo ante. Judicially, at the end of the trial and after the sanctions have been imposed, both the victim and the criminal are restored to their original judicial status. Their economic status has changed. This is because of the restitution payment. The victim is richer than before the commission of the crime. The convicted criminal is poorer than before the commission of the crime. This fact categorically denies the ideal of economic equality. The economic positions of the two individuals are not equal after the sanctions have been enforced. On the other hand, the judicial positions of the individuals are equal after the sanctions have been imposed. Therefore, judicial equality before the law has to mean economic inequality after the sanctions have been imposed. The civil law determines the maximum extent of the change in economic positions. The victim is entitled to reduce the penalty.(15) Also, under the Mosaic Covenant, the kinsmen-redeemer was entitled to pay the victim in the name of the convicted criminal. If this was not the case, then Jesus Christ, the archetypical Kinsman-Redeemer, cannot lawfully pay for our sins against God. The Mosaic kinsman-redeemer became poorer than he would have been had the crime not been committed. Once the restitution payment was made by anyone, the judicial status of each party was restored to what it had been prior to the commission of the crime. Both the victim and the criminal could return to honest work. Their legal status was restored to what each had been prior to the commission of the crime.
No Respect for Persons Leviticus 19:15 is an application of Exodus 12:49. Exodus 12:49 insists that the same laws must apply to everyone. Leviticus 19:15 specifically identifies two groups that must be treated equally in civil courts: the poor and the mighty. While Exodus 12:49 refers to covenantal rivals -- the stranger in the land and the Israelite -- Leviticus 19:15 refers to the legitimate differentiation of wealth and power. This verse formally legitimizes the simultaneous existence of degrees of power and degrees of wealth within the holy commonwealth. The poor man is to be judged by the same law as the rich man.
The focus here is not simply on the law itself, but on the person who is actually bringing formal judgment as a member of the court. This is the judicial agent who determines the validity of a particular lawsuit. Men are not to respect persons in rendering judgment.
Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God's: and the cause that is too hard for you, bring it unto me, and I will hear it (Deut. 1:17).
Thou shalt not wrest judgment; thou shalt not respect persons, neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous (Deut. 16:19).
Wherefore now let the fear of the LORD be upon you; take heed and do it: for there is no iniquity with the LORD our God, nor respect of persons, nor taking of gifts (II Chron. 19:7).
These things also belong to the wise. It is not good to have respect of persons in judgment (Prov. 24:23).
For there is no respect of persons with God (Rom. 2:11).
But he that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong which he hath done: and there is no respect of persons (Col. 3:25).
But if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors (James 2:9).
And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear (I Pet. 1:17).
The Theology of the Poor; or, Poor Theology From the late 1960's through the late 1980's, a movement known as liberation theology had considerable influence on the thinking of highly educated -- i.e., humanist-certified -- North American evangelical Christians and Latin American Roman Catholic priests.(16) This movement developed out of a self-conscious attempt by Communists and far-Left heretical Christian groups to fuse Marxist social diagnoses and solutions with biblical rhetoric.(17) This phrase became the rallying point of the liberationists: "God is on the side of the poor." Is this phrase true? No, and Leviticus 19:15 is the most obvious passage in the Bible demonstrating the phrase's falsehood. Hardly less powerful in this regard is Psalm 62:9: "Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than vanity." Conclusion: "Trust not in oppression, and become not vain in robbery: if riches increase, set not your heart upon them" (Ps. 62:10). In short, judge righteously.
Whose Side Is God On?
The Bible says specifically that God is on the side of the righteous. Occasionally, the Bible does say that God identifies with certain members of the poor. The poor who are poor not by their own fault, and especially those who are poor because of oppression by others, become identified with God by God's grace. God does care for the righteous. But the Bible makes it clear that God is not on the side of the poor in general. This is why liberation theology is heretical when it is not actually apostate.(18)
In his book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977), Ronald J. Sider devotes a chapter to the topic "God and the Poor." This book established Sider as the primary "theologian of the poor" in the American evangelical Protestant community.(19) The peculiar fact about Sider is that he understands the meaning judicially of Leviticus 19:15. He understands that the Bible insists that no one should be partial to a poor man in his law suit. Sider says, "God instructs His people to be impartial because He Himself is not biased." He even cites Exodus 23:3: "Neither shalt thou countenance a poor man in his cause." But then he goes on to deny the meaning of the texts he had just cited. In the extension of his remarks, he transforms biblical theology into liberation theology. "The most crucial point for us, however, is not God's impartiality, but rather the result of His freedom from bias."(20) Note the phrase: "not God's impartiality," meaning not God's judicial impartiality. Sider focuses instead on what he says are the economic results of this impartiality -- the economic results of God's "freedom from bias." He does not explore the implications of the impartial application of biblical law; instead, he invokes God's care for the poor. "The text declares Yahweh's impartiality and then immediately portrays God's tender care for the weak and disadvantaged."(21) Immediately? Tender care for the poor? Nothing like this appears immediately after Exodus 23:3, Leviticus 19:15, or Deuteronomy 1:17, the only texts he cites on impartial justice. The text he then cites is Deuteronomy 10:17-18.(22) His concept of "immediately" is textually unique.
Having referred in passing to Leviticus 19:15 and two confirming texts, he then rejects their message. His exposition makes clear what the nature of his objection to Leviticus 19:15 really is: he wants specific economic results rather than impartial civil justice. This is the judicial heart of the dispute between free market capitalism and socialism. This has always been the judicial heart of the dispute. The civil courts can judge impartially, case by case, or else they can hand down decisions that consistently reward the poor. They cannot do both. Sider is correct: we must choose which kind of civil justice we want, impartial justice or class justice. He wants the latter. Unfortunately for his theological position, the Bible demands the former.
Two Kinds of Equality The same inescapable choice confronts all those who proclaim the moral and judicial legitimacy of the goal of equality. Which kind of equality do we want? Free market economist and legal theorist F. A. Hayek made it very clear that we can choose between two kinds of equality, but we cannot gain them both simultaneously. We can pursue equality under the law, or we can pursue equality of economic results, but we cannot rationally pursue both simultaneously. He wrote in 1960: "From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either the one or the other, but not both at the same time. The equality before the law which freedom requires leads to material inequality."(23)
The Bible requires equality before the law. The inescapable result of impartial civil justice is economic inequality. This fact is an affront to all socialists and semi-socialists (i.e., defenders of the corporate State).(24) They want to redistribute wealth by State compulsion, either through State ownership of the means of production (socialism) or though adjusting the incentives of the economy, even though legal ownership remains with private individuals or organizations (fascism, Nazism, and Keynesianism).(25) Always, the socialists focus on the supposed need for specific economic results rather than the need for an impartial declaration of impartial law and the impartial application of predictable sanctions. Therefore, Sider concludes, "the God of the Bible is on the side of the poor just because he is not biased, for he is a God of impartial justice."(26)
Notice what Sider has done. He says that God is uniquely on the side of the poor because He is not biased. In other words, God is on the side of the poor because He is a God of impartial justice. Logically, this has to mean that the poor are poor in history because of other people's unrighteousness. If his statement does not mean this, then the impartial application of biblical law would not consistently reward the poor as a class. But Sider calls for judicial impartiality and therefore the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. This means that in Sider's universe, the poor are necessarily victims of unjust oppression. This oppression is what makes them poor. Therefore, "Salvation for the rich will include liberation from their injustice."(27) He equates "the rich" with "injustice."(28)
This perspective on poverty is basic to all socialist thought. The socialist blames poverty on the capitalist system, not on scarcity and not on immoral behavior on the part of the poor. The phrases that Sider and his colleagues used again and again are "structural injustice"(29) and "structural evil,"(30) meaning unjust institutions. It is therefore not cursed mankind (Gen. 3:16-17) and cursed nature (Gen. 3:18-19) that bring poverty, the socialist insists.(31) Widespread poverty as a social phenomenon is always explained by capitalism's critics as the result of unjust institutions that are in turn the product of politically powerful rich men who successfully exploit others. This is a vision of a universe not under a curse, not populated by sinners, and not under God's judgments in history -- factors that would frequently bring people under the negative sanction of poverty. Proverbs 19:15 -- another 19:15 verse that is despised by the socialists -- tells us: "Slothfulness casteth into a deep sleep; and an idle soul shall suffer hunger." The socialist discounts this message almost to zero.(32)
Which Poor? The biblical question is not whether God is on the side of the poor. The question is this: Why is God on the side of some of the poor? The liberation theologians never ask this question. They ought to ask another one, too: Was God on the side of poor people in Egypt when he killed all of the firstborn sons in all of the Egyptian families? Was God on the side of the Canaanites when He told the Israelites to destroy all of them (Deut. 7:16)? Was God on the side of the poor in Assyria and Babylon when he brought judgment against them: Assyria being destroyed by Babylon, and Babylon being destroyed by the Medo-Persian empire? What about all the poverty-stricken people who came under God's wrath under the Old Covenant? Above all, what about all the poor who perished in the Noachic Flood? Why was God not on their side? Why didn't God defend them against His own vengeful hand? Why did God pull down the very waters of the heavens and raise up the oceans against the whole population of mankind if it is true that God is on the side of the poor?
The answer is quite simple: God is not on the side of the poor. God is on the side of the righteous.
Time and again, God brought the poor of Old Covenant Israel under judgment. He brought them under foreign domination by a whole series of invaders, from Phoenicia to Rome. He had no mercy whatsoever for them just because they were poor. Rich and poor alike in Israel were repeatedly brought under judgment: this is the crucial judicial point. It was not that God was on the side of the poor; it was that God was totally opposed to the population of Israel, and later the population of Judah. God was on the side of God. God was on the side of His law and His righteousness. All those who opposed His law and His righteousness by disobedience to His covenant came under His righteous indignation. He did not respect persons. He did not respect classes. He did not respect the social status of anyone. He brought them all under judgment because all but the remnant had rebelled against Him. This included the exploited poor in Israel. When Israel was in rebellion, there is no doubt that rich men exploited poor men, but exploiters and exploited alike went into captivity.
When God speaks of being on the side of the poor, it means that He is on the side of the poor in spirit. Blessed are the poor, Christ promised. Blessed are the meek. But this means poor in spirit and meek before God. It does not mean that poverty-stricken people who are poor because of their own economic or moral mismanagement are going to inherit the kingdom of God. It does not mean that people who are professionally meek are going to inherit the kingdom of God. The text does not say that the wimps shall inherit the kingdom of God; it says that the meek shall inherit, and it always means meek before God and therefore active before men. Writes radical theologian John C. Raines of Calvin's view of man: "Calvin understood the Christian life not as `a vessel filled with God' but as an active `tool and instrument' of the Divine initiative. But this is precisely our point. Active toward the world, the Christian knows himself as utterly passive and obedient toward God, whose Will it is his sole task to discover and obey."(33)
Covenant-breakers, refusing to become meek before God, cannot indefinitely sustain an active attitude toward the external world. Many Western intellectuals since 1965 have been ready to accept the passivity of pantheism, if not its theological presuppositions. If the Creator God of the Bible is not above the creation, with mankind beneath Him and over the creation, then mankind becomes merely part of the creation, without a meaningful appeal beyond it. This leads to passivity in the face of the creation. The "deep ecology" movement is evidence of this trend from humanistic activism to passivity. Deep ecology theory places man under the dominion of nature.(34) For example, forest fires caused by non-human events are supposed to be left alone and allowed to burn themselves out, since they are natural phenomena. Fire fighting is not natural. The long-popular cartoon figure, Smokey Bear, is not appreciated by deep ecologists. Smokey's slogan, "Only you can prevent forest fires," is the essence of ecological activism, which deep ecologists reject except insofar as it can be used as a justification for mandatory human population control by the State: fewer people to start unnatural forest fires. The National Park Service adopted a let-burn policy in 1987. It led in 1988 to the disastrous million-acre fire at Yellowstone National Park: almost half the park. Yellowstone was the world's first national park (1872). From 1972 to 1987, only 34,000 acres had burned. By the time the National Park Service reversed its let-burn policy, after one month of fires (late June through late July), it was too late. The Park Service's prediction of August rains did not come true. The fires raged out of control until September 10, when it rained. They cost $120 million to fight. But the Park Service seems to have persuaded the American press that its let-burn policy is sound ecological science.(35)
The Rich Is God on the side of the rich? Consider this: God promises great blessings of wealth and prosperity to those who are covenantally faithful, but warns them not to forget Him, "Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; And when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage" (Deut. 8:12-14). God does the same in Proverbs 11:28: "He that trusteth in his riches shall fall: but the righteous shall flourish as a branch."
The Bible's picture of God's blessings in history to those who are covenantally faithful is a picture of widespread prosperity. The idea of being covenantally faithful is connected covenantally to the idea of getting rich. This does not mean that every covenantally faithful person does get rich in history, because there are covenantally unfaithful people who from time to time are allowed by God to become oppressors (Eccl. 7:15). This is true when covenantally faithful people are a tiny minority in a society that is overwhelmingly perverse. The best example of that in Scripture is the family of Lot. Lot was vexed (II Pet. 2:7) because he was living in a society that was covenantally rebellious. God removed him from that society and immediately brought total historic judgment against that society. But God favors wealth; He does not favor poverty. God favors the wealthy if they are wealthy because of their previous righteousness -- righteousness being defined as living in conformity to God's Bible-revealed law. God favors the triumph of the righteous in history, and part of this triumph is their accumulation of wealth. The Bible says specifically that the wealth of the wicked is laid up for the just (Prov. 13:22b). Wealth is not laid up for the poor; it is laid up for the just. The wealth of the wicked is going to be removed from them because of their wickedness, and transferred to the just. The poor in spirit and the meek before God will inherit the earth.
The Middle Class Is God on the side of the middle class? That is to say: Is middle class income God's economic goal for most people throughout history? Yes. Most people should pray Solomon's recommended prayer: "Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain" (Prov. 30:8-9). Most individuals are supposed to strive for conventional comforts, but not for great wealth. Individuals are also to do what they can to stay out of poverty. This indicates that there will always be conventional standards of wealth and poverty. This also indicates that there will always be the rich and the poor. The bell-shaped statistical curve will never be eliminated from human existence -- in economics or anything else. Normal Christians are supposed to strive to be in the middle so as to become defenders of righteousness, and not be tempted to do evil either as rich men or poor men. Like any other quest for special blessings from God, the quest for wealth is not to be attempted for its own sake. We are to seek first God's kingdom, and all these things will be added unto us (Matt. 6:33). This refers primarily to covenantal blessings corporately experienced.
This doctrine of progressive corporate sanctification and its resultant corporate blessings is why Christians should strive mightily to live in the midst of an increasingly wealthy society that is enjoying the compound external blessings of God because of the progressive economic sanctification of the vast majority of at least its employed members -- a sanctification forced on them by intense worldwide competition. A stock market investment proverb says, "A rising tide raises all ships," i.e., an individual stock will go up in value when all stocks do. Middle-class people get richer over time in an era of collective blessings. They do not need the best things in life in order to regard themselves as blessed.(36) Economic growth is a valid biblical goal. We should not forget that prior to the rise of Puritanism in late sixteenth-century England, with its defense of biblical law and covenantal postmillennial eschatology, no civilization had ever adopted a doctrine of long-term economic growth.
The middle-class orientation of the Bible therefore does not mean that there should not be rising wealth for most or even all members of society. Certainly in the late twentieth century, poor people in the West are far richer in goods than the vast majority of kings ever were in the history of man. This is especially true if the king contracted a disease like cholera.(37) The advancement of twentieth-century public health programs is the best testimony to the wealth of the poorest man in a rich, blessed, formerly covenantally faithful nation.(38) Falling infant mortality rates are the single best sign of God's blessing today. Most newborn babies are expected to live long enough to become adults; two centuries ago, they were not. Similarly, kings before 1846 did not have anesthetics during surgery. Who today would trade places with one of them when the surgeon wields his scalpel? Kings did have treasuries of gold and silver, meaning shiny pieces of metal that might buy them some extra time in a crisis or extra food in a famine. But very wealthy people were always at risk. There could be famine, plague, fire, flooding, and the general burdens of life prior to the industrial revolution. Kings and oligarchs did not have television to entertain them, inexpensive books to inform them, videotapes(39) to record images of their children to view in their old age, or any of the myriad of benefits that the poor can buy today. Even if a poor person cannot afford to buy a videotape camera, he can rent one for very little money for use at his child's birthday party. Consider what this would have been worth to almost anyone on the face of the earth as recently as the late nineteenth century. What a king's ransom would have been available to the person who could go into a household for just one day to record the activities of that household: a permanent electronic memory for the wealthy. Gold? Silver? Lots of it. Shiny pieces of metal in exchange for permanent electronic memories? What rich person wouldn't have traded?
The biblical economic ideal is middle-class prosperity for individuals and a rising standard of living for all. This ideal is always limited to individuals who are actively seeking the will of God and obeying it. As they become more competent, as they become better judges, as they become more economically productive, they are expected by God to get richer. The Bible recognizes the inescapable reality of the bell-shaped curve: only a few people in a society can become rich, because only a few people in a society are simultaneously ethical enough and productive enough to gain and maintain great wealth. At the same time, only a few people are expected to be poor, and most of these will be recently arrived immigrants who have come to a free society to improve their opportunities. These recent immigrants are not expected to remain in poverty for more than two generations. Under capitalism, they do not.(40) The Bible tells us that through corporate covenantal faithfulness, society's technical knowledge and therefore its wealth can and should produce a rising tide of per capita prosperity. The bell-shaped curve of a society's distribution of wealth at any point in time will remain bell-shaped, but the bell-shaped "jar" can become ever-larger -- an overflowing cornucopia of wealth that serves as God's earnest (down payment) on eternity. By breaking God's covenant, society smashes the cornucopia. But this may not be visible overnight: "Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil" (Eccl. 8:11).
Avoiding Spiritually Unnecessary Temptations
The Bible is clear: there are great temptations associated with both wealth and poverty, and the righteous man should strive to remain in the middle of these two conditions, so that he does not subject himself to extensive temptation. The Bible affirms middle-class morality, middle-class values, and middle-class income. These standards have long been openly ridiculed by humanist intellectuals. This is ironic, given the middle-class origins of most intellectuals. Liberation theologians are especially contemptuous of the middle-class morality of most evangelical Christians. This is one of the anomalies of late twentieth-century "Christian" thought.
In a biblical society, most people are assumed to be members of the middle class. Most people will be in the middle of the bell-shaped curve. Why? Because most people are in the middle of the age distribution curve, the education distribution curve, and the ethical and judicial maturity curve. They are somewhat productive, but they are not vastly productive. They receive many of the external blessings of God, but not the maximum external blessings of God. They are generally competent, but they are not super-achievers. The average Christian is to pray for middle-class status precisely because he is average. He is average in terms of productivity; he is average in terms of his ethical conformity to God's law; and he is average in terms of his earthly expectations. He probably does not want to pay the price of great wealth, either an ethical payment or a payment in terms of great wealth's high costs of added responsibility. He does not want to become an over-achiever precisely because he does not want to pay the price of becoming an over-achiever. He recognizes the truth Jesus proclaimed: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more" (Luke 12:48b).
What is true of wealth is equally true of every other area of performance and reward. For example, the classroom instructor should not encourage all of his students to earn a straight-A average. Few students can achieve this, few should achieve this, and few will achieve this.(41) There is no reason to encourage frustration by calling all students to strive for comparative perfection. All students are nevertheless required by God to strive to raise their individual performance at the margin. If obeyed, this command will raise the average level of the group's performance, even though fewer than half of them can beat the class average. Like runners in a race, only one person can come in first, but all of them may be capable of beating the previous record.(42)
The general principle is this: we are to strive to become profitable servants, even though sinful men can never become profitable (net) servants in history. The principle of the division of labor determines that some people will be better at some things than most other people (Rom. 12:4-8; I Cor. 12). There will be winners and losers in every competition. Nevertheless, as individuals and also as a covenantal corporate unit, Christians are to strive for mastery over sin and mediocrity.
The Righteous God is on the side of the righteous. There are few principles in the Bible that are of greater judicial and economic importance. In verse after verse, book after book, the Bible testifies to the fact that God is on the side of the righteous. I reproduce a long list of supporting verses in the hope that readers will acknowledge the extent of God's commitment to the righteous. Both amillennialism and premillennialism deny the relevance of these verses as they apply to history.(43) But these verses do apply to history: "Behold, the righteous shall be recompensed in the earth: much more the wicked and the sinner" (Prov. 11:31). There are dozens of these verses, all ignored by liberation theologians. I have decided to cite many of them in order to make my point and also to maintain Ronald Sider's silence. (My favorite is Psalm 58:10, although I do not interpret it literally. It is the thought that counts.) Read them all, so as to drill the basic point into your ethical decision-making: there are predictable covenantal sanctions in history.
And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? And the LORD said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes (Gen. 18:23-26).
Keep thee far from a false matter; and the innocent and righteous slay thou not: for I will not justify the wicked. And thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous (Ex. 23:7, 8).
If there be a controversy between men, and they come unto judgment, that the judges may judge them; then they shall justify the righteous, and condemn the wicked (Deut. 25:1).
Then hear thou in heaven, and do, and judge thy servants, condemning the wicked, to bring his way upon his head; and justifying the righteous, to give him according to his righteousness (I Kings 8:32).
Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the LORD knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish (Ps. 1:5, 6).
For thou, LORD, wilt bless the righteous; with favour wilt thou compass him as with a shield (Ps. 5:12).
The eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry (Ps. 34:15).
The righteous cry, and the LORD heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles (Ps. 34:17).
Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the LORD delivereth him out of them all (Ps. 34:19).
For the arms of the wicked shall be broken: but the LORD upholdeth the righteous (Ps. 37:17).
I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread (Ps. 37:25).
The righteous shall inherit the land, and dwell therein for ever (Ps. 37:29).
But the salvation of the righteous is of the LORD: he is their strength in the time of trouble (Ps. 37:39).
Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved (Ps. 55:22).
The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked (Ps. 58:10).
So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth (Ps. 58:11).
The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon (Ps. 92:12).
Surely he shall not be moved for ever: the righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance (Ps. 112:6).
The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind: the LORD raiseth them that are bowed down: the LORD loveth the righteous (Ps. 146:8).
He layeth up sound wisdom for the righteous: he is a buckler to them that walk uprightly (Prov. 2:7).
The LORD will not suffer the soul of the righteous to famish: but he casteth away the substance of the wicked (Prov. 10:3).
The hope of the righteous shall be gladness: but the expectation of the wicked shall perish (Prov. 10:28).
The righteous is delivered out of trouble, and the wicked cometh in his stead (Prov. 11:8).
When it goeth well with the righteous, the city rejoiceth: and when the wicked perish, there is shouting (Prov. 11:10).
Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished: but the seed of the righteous shall be delivered (Prov. 11:21).
He that trusteth in his riches shall fall: but the righteous shall flourish as a branch (Prov. 11:28).
The wicked are overthrown, and are not: but the house of the righteous shall stand (Prov. 12:7).
The light of the righteous rejoiceth: but the lamp of the wicked shall be put out (Prov. 13:9).
Evil pursueth sinners: but to the righteous good shall be repayed (Prov. 13:21).
The righteous eateth to the satisfying of his soul: but the belly of the wicked shall want (Prov. 13:25).
The evil bow before the good; and the wicked at the gates of the righteous (Prov. 14:19).
In the house of the righteous is much treasure: but in the revenues of the wicked is trouble (Prov. 15:6).
The LORD is far from the wicked: but he heareth the prayer of the righteous (Prov. 15:29).
The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion (Prov. 28:1).
When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn (Prov. 29:2).
When the wicked are multiplied, transgression increaseth: but the righteous shall see their fall (Prov. 29:16).
There is no escape from this conclusion; the texts are clear: God is on the side of the righteous as such, not the poor as such. Why should God be on the side of the righteous? Because He announced to His people: "For I am the LORD that bringeth you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: ye shall therefore be holy, for I am holy" (Lev. 11:45). Holiness is the same as righteousness. God is righteous; so, His people should be righteous. God is righteous; so, He brings blessings in history to His people who are righteous. God is righteous; so, He brings negative sanctions against those who are not righteous. God is righteous; so, some people are deservedly poor. This is what the socialist does not want to consider.
For centuries in the West, Christian theology was manifested in civic poor laws that distinguished between what was known as the deserving poor and the undeserving poor.(44) There were some people who were poor, not through their own fault, but through external circumstances. For example, one of the great economic threats to man has been fire. Without fire insurance, an eighteenth-century invention, a fire could reduce a rich man to absolute poverty in an evening. Such a victim would have been regarded, other things being equal, as a member of the deserving poor. Such people deserved better, and society was required by God to treat them better, but for the moment they were poor.
The deserving poor were always contrasted with the undeserving poor. It was well understood by Christians throughout history that some people deserve to be poor. In fact, some people deserve death. God, however, in his mercy sometimes allows people who are deserving of death to suffer poverty instead. He gives them more time, but He does not give them extensive positive blessings. Every society understands this. Every theologian when pressed would probably admit this, but there is a question of emphasis. The liberation theologians almost never talk about the undeserving poor, i.e., those who do not deserve open-ended assistance because to give them assistance would be to subsidize evil. The liberationists almost never talk about the fact that a righteous society must bring economic sanctions against its unproductive members. They do not talk about the fact that a society that is totally equal economically would be the most unrighteous possible society. Such a society could only be established by means of coercive wealth distribution from the productive rich to the deservedly poor.
Then what of the poor? In a godly society, there should not be a vast horde of poor people. As a society progresses in its covenantal faithfulness to God, the total wealth of a society is expected to increase. God brings His covenantal judgments in a positive fashion in history: the blessings outnumber the curses most of the time. History moves forward. Mankind is given ever-increasing supplies of capital in order to subdue the earth. As this capital growth process takes place, per capita wealth increases.
Nevertheless, there will always be people who fall into the lowest third of national income. There is no escape from the bell-shaped curve. The only way that we could escape from this in history would be if hell were a society based on equality. If hell brought equal negative sanctions to everyone inside its boundaries, it might be theoretically possible to speak of an equalitarian society in history. If all sins were equal in God's eyes, and if sanctions were equally applied, then equality in hell would be a reality. Yet, even in hell, there is no equality (Luke 12:47-48). Clearly, there is no equality in heaven (I Cor. 3:8-15). So, the ideal of the equality of results is entirely mythical. It is a lie of the devil, who understandably wishes it were true.
Sanctions and Inequality Because God does not respect persons, He rewards and punishes people in terms of their actions and thoughts in history. He rewards individuals in time and eternity in terms of their conformity to His law. He rewards societies in terms of their outward conformity to His law. He brings positive and negative sanctions in history. Therefore, there is no aspect of God's creation that displays equality of results. There is no area of God's final judgment that displays inequality of judgment before the law. The impartiality of God leads to disparities of rewards. Those who achieve a great deal are given great rewards. Those who achieve average results are given average rewards. Those who achieve below-average results receive below-average rewards. Those who are out of covenantal favor with God are said to have nothing, and what they have is taken away from them (Matt. 13:12). That is to say, they are cast out of the presence of God and tortured eternally without mercy.(45) But they are not tortured equally (Luke 12:47-48).
Inequality of results is an inescapable outcome of the inequality of men's productivity, given the existence of impartial justice. Put another way, impartial justice -- justice that does not bring sanctions or evaluate public actions in terms of a person's economic status or legal status -- inevitably produces inequality of economic results. When the judge imposes double restitution on the criminal, he inescapably creates inequality of economic results. This is exactly what God does in history. When God brings His judgment into history, there will be unequal economic results.
It is part and parcel of the socialist perspective of all liberation theologians to deny this principle. They seek equality of results, and therefore they inescapably recommend policies that are a flat denial of the biblical principle of impartiality of justice. Liberation theology is a self-conscious rebellion against Leviticus 19:15. Its defenders seek to confuse their followers and their readers on this point. Impartial justice that is applied in a world made up of people with differing capacities and differing degrees of righteousness will inevitably produce inequality of economic results. It is this outcome of biblical law which enrages and outrages almost all modern Christian theologians, especially those who are either neo-evangelical college professors (outside of the natural sciences) or liberation theologians. They call for the State to use the threat of violence to steal the wealth of the successful and transfer it to the unsuccessful. They call for socialism: the State's control over resources through bureaucracy. They prefer the political sanctions of bureaucrats to the economic sanctions of consumers.
Politically Correct Thought(46)
There is a socialist-approved exception to this socialist ideology of equality of results, however: the classroom. Marxists, feminists, and assorted Left-wing ideologues teach in colleges and seminaries. They are lawfully sanctioned classroom tyrants who hand out sanctions: grades. Any student who challenges their heretical or apostate theology is risking a D, an F, or even dismissal from the campus.
Imitating their secular peers, theological liberals have hired and fired faculty members for generations in terms of this principle: no professor is to suggest that the law of God should be enforced. They have screened the entire Christian academic community in terms of this principle. They impose vengeance: sanctions without mercy. They have sought to establish entire faculties that do not deviate from humanism's party line. To achieve this, they have imposed inequality of standards and have produced unequal results: students who are coerced for ideological reasons and fellow faculty members who are humiliated into silence. This same policy went on without an institutionally significant challenge in secular institutions until 1990.(47) It is today impossible to find a single institution of higher education that mandates that the Bible be used to judge the both the content and structure of every academic discipline. It was impossible yesterday, too -- all the way back to the University of Paris in the twelfth century.
The law of God testifies against the legitimacy of any society that seeks the equality of results. The law of God testifies against any society that would use the power of the civil government to redistribute wealth on any basis except one: the proportional restitution payment from a criminal to his victim. The liberation theologians, the neo-evangelical theologians, and the humanist-trained and humanist university-certified Reformed theologians who staff and control Reformed seminaries are united on this one point: there must be equality of ideological results, and therefore there must be respect, if not for persons, then for ideological purity. The ideological purity they are talking about is the purity of perspective that says that the civil law of God is no longer to be enforced in the New Covenant era. Anyone who denies this principle will find himself the victim of the seminaries' version of modern academic freedom: "All opinions regarding biblical law are equal, but some are more equal than others."(48)
The Bible is quite clear. There must be no respect of persons. Because individuals have different abilities, there must be inequality of economic results if God's law is enforced without respect of persons. The only justification for the State to intervene to take wealth from one individual and give it to another individual is that the first individual has been convicted in a civil court due process of law for having committed a crime against the second individual. The quest for restitution for a specific crime is the only legitimate way for an individual to seek the economic intervention of the State against another individual.
In contrast to this principle of civil justice is the socialist ideal: the equality of economic results. This equality is pursued by using civil power to take wealth from those who have legally gained it through competition in a market with open entry, and to redistribute it to those who have done nothing to receive it other than being statistically classified as poor. Nevertheless, the poor are still with us. So is a growing horde of middle-class bureaucrats who administer the government-mandated anti-poverty programs. The U.S. Federal bureaucracy extracts as administration expenses at least half of the Federal government's total expenditures on welfare programs.(49)
Middle-Class Socialists
Formally educated, State-certified members of the middle class staff the State's wealth-redistribution mechanism, which vastly increases their wealth and status at the expense of both the rich and the poor. The welfare State has been the great rewarder of middle-class and upper-middle-class people who have gained access to those government positions involved in the welfare distribution process. In a perverse way, these people have sought the middle-class position that the Bible says that the average person should pray for, but these people have not prayed; they have preyed. They have preyed on the rich; they have preyed on the poor. They have kept the rich in a position of permanent anxiety about taxation, and they have kept the poor in permanent status as poor, with almost no hope of escaping the clutches of the welfare system.(50) Yet this system is defended (with the obligatory "it is admittedly unfortunate that. . . .") by the vast majority of Christian academics in the late twentieth century, all in the name of biblical theology. Sometimes, as in the case of Ronald Sider, it is even defended in the name of Leviticus 19:15.
The Rejection of Biblical Economic Blueprints The biblical standard of civil justice is simple to state: one law-order for all men, with judges acting impartially to apply God's revealed laws to specific cases. The judicial principle is this: "No respect for persons."
With this as the judicial standard, it is impossible to obey God's law and simultaneously promote the idea of socialism. The socialist ideal is a society that manifests economic equality apart from market performance: the satisfaction of consumers. The socialist State's ideal is to enforce a wealth transfer from the rich to the poor, with the poor formally represented by the State. The owners of capital are to be forced by the State to give up either ownership (socialism) or control (fascism) of the tools of production: land, labor, and capital.
The socialist aims at equality of economic results. The Bible insists on equality before God's law. The two standards cannot be reconciled. To enforce the law impartially in a world filled with people who possess different goals, talents, and capital is to make impossible the equality of economic results. The socialists' economic ideal and the Bible's judicial ideal are irreconcilable. This is why Christian socialists and economic interventionists categorically reject biblical law. They deny that the Bible offers blueprints for economics. They deny that it offers permanent economic or political models. They insist that the Bible is open-ended with respect to economics, making the Bible useless as a guide to political economy. They do this because the Bible very clearly establishes principles of legal order that outlaw all forms of socialism, and the critics hate free market capitalism. So, they make statements like these:
[Keynesian:] The fact that our Scriptures can be used to support or condemn any economic philosophy suggests that the Bible is not intended to lay out an economic plan which will apply for all times and places. If we are to examine economic structures in the light of Christian teachings, we will have to do it in another way.(51)
[Communal socialist:] Since koinonia includes the participation of everyone involved, there is no blueprint for what this would look like on a global scale. . . . We are talking about a process, not final answers.(52)
[Socialist:] There is in Scripture no blueprint of the ideal state or the ideal economy. We cannot turn to chapters of the Bible and find in them a model to copy or a plan for building the ideal biblical state and national economy.(53)
The goal is equality of economic results: "Championing the cause of the poor will lead us to labor for justice and a greater degree of equality for all people."(54) Notice his language: "all people" -- righteous and unrighteous, workers and drones, wise and foolish, Christians and atheists, and above all, covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers. This is Satan's initial lure: equality for all. And then, when his covenantal disciples gain control, Christians discover the truth: the systematic oppression of covenant-keepers by covenant-breakers. It is a replay of the creation of government-funded day schools that were promoted in the United States by Unitarian radicals from the 1830's onward. These schools initially were defended on the principle of "equal time for all views."(55) What we subsequently found was the institutional triumph of the religion of autonomous man: no time for Jesus.
It is always the same with the advocates of "no biblical blueprints." First, they tell us: "The Bible does not require free enterprise." We then ask these anti-blueprint Christian socialists: "Then does the Bible at least allow free enterprise?" Their answer is immediate: "No; never the free market. Something else; anything else; but never the free market." So, the Bible apparently does provide an anti-blueprint: no free market.
The problem is, the handful of Christian scholars who write against socialism generally refuse to defend their opposition in terms of the Bible. They rely on atheistic and agnostic free market economists to carry their water in their refutations of the writings of atheistic and agnostic socialist economists, whose works the Christian socialists have cited (if any) in search of academic support. Thus, we find Reformed Theological Seminary professor Ronald Nash (a follower of Calvinist philosopher Gordon Clark) defending the familiar academic party line of epistemological neutrality:
This book is not an attempt to produce a system of Christian economics. There is no such thing as revealed economics. There is no such thing as positive Christian economics.(56)
Attempts to deduce any political or economic doctrine from the Bible should be viewed, initially at least, with skepticism. After all, the Bible is no more a textbook on economics than it is on astronomy or geology. There is no such thing as revealed economics.(57)
If the Bible really is not a textbook for economics and politics, and if there really is no such thing as Bible-revealed economics, then all attempts to deduce political and economic doctrines from the Bible must be met with something more than mere initial skepticism. Such attempts should be met automatically with a full-scale frontal assault, i.e., total rejection, not to mention outrage. After all, such deductions are inescapably heretical if it is true that the Bible does not reveal morally and academically binding principles of economics. Dr. Nash is altogether too wishy-washy. It is not sufficient for him to dismiss The Other Side, Sojourners, InterVarsity Press, and William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company in a chapter called "The Christian War Against Economics."(58) He should also forthrightly lead his assembled academic troops in a second campaign: "The War Against Christian Economics." He should face the fact that he is conducting a two-front war: the Evangelicals for Social Action on his left; the Institute for Christian Economics on his right. It is time for him to prove, argument by argument and verse by verse, why the works of the Institute for Christian Economics are at best misguided and at worst heretical.(59) He has to show why Bahnsen's Theonomy in Christian Ethics is wrong and Volume 1 of Rushdoony's Institutes of Biblical Law is worse.(60)
Here is a secondary question: How are Christians to defend the six-day creation from the evolutionists if the Bible does not provide the authoritative revelational foundation for textbooks on geology and biology? Also, what about sociology, education, and every other social science? Is the Bible's revelation regarding God, man, law, sanctions, and time not authoritative? This self-conscious denial of the existence of biblical blueprints is inescapably a surrender to the covenant-breaker in every area of academic life. But those Christians who wish to teach in tax-funded State universities, as Nash did through most of his career as a professor of philosophy and religion at Western Kentucky University, or in private secular humanist universities face a painful choice: 1) reject the suggestion that the Bible provides authoritative blueprints as well as content for their chosen academic discipline; 2) devote their lives to teaching in class what they do not believe is true: officially neutral, and therefore anti-biblical, courses; 3) get fired for teaching religious dogma. Needless to say, the first decision is the path of least resistance. Those who take it can retain their academic respectability as well as their paychecks. This is exactly what the secularists pay them to do, and they do it remarkably well. Even when they leave the employment of the State, they rarely recant their earlier academic presuppositions.
Blueprints: An Inescapable Concept
Blueprints are an inescapable concept. It is never a question of "blueprints vs. no blueprints." It is always a question of whose blueprints. Blueprints establish boundaries. They include and therefore must also exclude. Rival systems of law and economics are excluded by blueprints. There has to be a blueprint. This is why there is a biblical economic blueprint. Either this blueprint excludes the various forms of socialism or else it includes socialism and excludes the free market. There is no halfway house in between, no permanently mixed economy. There are biblical economics and biblical civil justice, and there are all the other covenant-breaking rival positions.
This assertion is rejected almost automatically by the vast majority of Christians who hold teaching positions as economists in secular institutions. Typical are the arguments of Ian Smith, a lecturer in economics at St. Salvator's College in St. Andrews University in Scotland. In a Festschrift to Carl F. H. Henry, America's leading neo-evangelical social theologian after 1945, Smith surveys various attempts by non-theonomic Christian economists to present a Christian alternative to secular economics. He finds all such attempts "rather limited" and "pedestrian." He continues: "Perhaps this is inevitable. The Bible does not furnish us with specific and authoritative economic models that can be directly applied to contemporary society. Some authors have disputed this observation and sought to devise a biblical economics based on the Old Testament law. However, a reliance on the Mosaic legislation to provide a blueprint for reconstructing the modern economy is theologically dubious and culturally anachronistic."(61) The idea of a biblical blueprint is anathema to him. ("Anathema," of course, is far too judicial a word for such men to employ. It implies permanent negative sanctions.)
Without so much as a footnote to even one book by a theonomist, he dismisses "Rushdooney" (misspelled), North, and Bahnsen.(62) He admits that "The Pentateuch is also the richest biblical resource in terms of economic content. . . ." He also admits that "Much more detailed and precise analyses and proposals have been forthcoming from the theonomists than from other Christian camps."(63) But he nevertheless dismisses theonomy as misguided. He speaks representatively for the whole of the modern Christian academic world: "The corollary of this position that I am affirming is that none of the Mosaic legislation per se is binding as independent lex. New covenant believers are not obliged to obey it, not one jot or tittle; on the other hand, they do fulfill it by living in conformity with the new covenant to which the old covenant points. In short, Christians live under the stipulations of the New Testament and interpret the Old christologically."(64)
Having dismissed the entire Old Testament as judicially non-binding, he then concludes that Christian economics is "perhaps" inevitably pedestrian. In short, having stripped Christianity of its binding legal content, he then finds Christian economics pedestrian. Like a man who first removes all the black marbles from an urn filled with black and white marbles, he then discovers that all the marbles are boringly white. Christian academics prefer pedestrian academic alternatives to contemporary humanism. This way, they can continue in good conscience to receive their above-market, taxpayer-subsidized paychecks from State universities. They can continue to be members in good standing of covenant-breaking secular faculties. They can continue to sell their birthrights for a mess of tenure.
Nevertheless, in order also to maintain their good standing in evangelical local congregations, they rush to affirm their verbal commitment -- a highly deceptive commitment -- to the Old Testament. Smith writes: "However, this does not preclude studying the Old Testament social system as a rich ethical resource, so long as it is not appealed to as normative -- that is, divinely ordained as authoritative for today."(65) He could as easily have appealed to the Koran or the Talmud as a "rich ethical resource." This is cafeteria ethics: you select whatever you like and leave the rest behind. Smith's verbally gushing praise for God's supposedly non-binding revealed word is a polite way of saying, "If I were unmarried, I could commit bestiality if I felt like it, since there's no New Testament law prohibiting it." Such Christian scholars are quite willing to defend the economics of perversion in the name of Jesus. Their name is legion.
The Economics of Perversion
The existence of biblical economic blueprints is loudly denied by Douglas Vickers, a Keynesian economist and defender of the "mixed economy" who has presented his case against Christian economics in the name of the Bible and Cornelius Van Til's presuppositional apologetics. In his secular calling, Vickers wrote a post-Keynesian money and banking textbook.(66) His two Christian economics books are open in their rejection of the continuing validity of Mosaic law, including the Bible's economic laws. He is consistent when he rejects: 1) the ideal of a judicial theocracy,(67) 2) the ideal of the possibility of reconstructing society along biblical lines,(68) 3) the ideal of a free market economic order,(69) and then proclaims as the Christian economic standard an even greater extension of the range of State economic intervention than is promoted by the twentieth century's principle of the mixed economy.(70) He acknowledges that the Mosaic economy stands against the graduated income tax system of the modern world, and so he rejects the ideal of the Mosaic economy.(71) He regards John Maynard Keynes, the homosexual Cambridge economist whose General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) established the overwhelmingly dominant economic outlook of the 1945-65 era, as having "brought something of morality back into economics."(72) Vickers is a believer in the economics of perversion.(73) So are most of his fellow Christian academics in the social sciences. This is why they are adamant: no biblical law! Biblical law precludes socialism, fascism, and the Keynesian mixed economy.
Legislating Morality Are Christians required by God to oppose socialism in all forms? Yes. Are they then required to pressure the State to pass civil laws that sanction private property? Yes. Are they morally required to elect political representatives who then repeal all laws that restrict the use of private property except in cases that the Bible prohibits specific uses (e.g., homosexual prostitution and pedophilia)? Yes. Does this mean that Christians are required to legislate morality? In the sense that they are to legislate against certain forms of public immorality, yes. There is only one alternative to legislating morality: legislating immorality.(74) But doesn't this mean the establishment of religion? Yes. All civil legislation is the establishment of some religion. Thus, the Bible requires this legislation to be explicitly biblical: Old and New Testaments.
Every nation is required by God to become formally, judicially Trinitarian. "And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (Matt. 28:18-19). Civil government is not exempted from the Great Commission.(75)
On the contrary, we are assured by those who reject biblical blueprints, the Bible also does not provide a blueprint for establishing a theocracy, i.e., the rule of God over civil government. Then does the Bible at least allow theocracy as one option among many? "No; theocracy must be avoided, although all other political systems are conformable to the Bible's non-blueprints." So, the Bible supposedly provides an anti-blueprint: no theocracy. And so it goes. What the Bible categorically requires, these critics "inside the camp" deny as illegitimate even as an option in a supposedly open-ended world. Why? Because if the Bible really does provide judicial blueprints, there is no biblically legitimate possibility of a judicially or institutionally open-ended world. There is no morally legitimate "process" outside the limits of the Bible's judicial blueprints. This conclusion appalls them. They would rather surrender three-fourths of the Bible than accept such a conclusion. And so they have done, generation after generation. They believe that the Old Testament is "God's word, emeritus."
Conclusion Leviticus 19:15 establishes a fundamental principle of justice: the impartial application of God's legal standards to all men, irrespective of their wealth or status. It proclaims the judicial principle of equality before the law. This biblical principle of civil justice is the antithesis of all socialism. The socialist proclaims the need for the equality of economic results, not equality before the law. There is no way to achieve the former without abandoning the latter, and vice versa. Logically, the socialist has to deny the legitimacy of Leviticus 19:15; logically, the defender of Leviticus 19:15 has to deny socialism. People are not always logical, however. What we find is that defenders of Christian socialism either ignore the existence of Leviticus 19:15 or else reinterpret it to mean the opposite of what it says. They interpret it, as Sider interprets it, to mean that the judge must uphold the poor man in his cause. But upholding the poor man in his cause is as great a sin as upholding the mighty in his cause. The text says so.
The response of Christian socialists and welfare statists has been to deny that the Bible offers biblical blueprints for economics. Any appeal by a Christian economist to the Mosaic law is rejected as illegitimate. This has to be their response, since the legal order of the Mosaic Covenant, if obeyed, would inevitably produce a free market social order. Without the Mosaic law, however, it is not possible to say what kind of social and economic order would have to develop from Christianity. Thus, in order to leave the social order biblically open-ended, the Christian defenders of the welfare State are forced to deny that the Bible offers any blueprints at all. Then they tell us what kind of economic order they would like to see established in God's name (by way of Keynes, Marx, or no economist at all).(76)
The issue of wealth redistribution through taxation is never discussed by Christian defenders of the welfare State in terms of Samuel's warning in I Samuel 8: a tyrannical king is marked by his willingness to extract as much as ten percent of his subjects' net income. To return to such a "tyrannical" tax rate, every modern industrial nation would have to cut its average level of taxation by 75 percent. Yet Christian defenders of the welfare State insist that far too much money is left in the hands of today's citizens. We need more "economic justice" in the name of Jesus, they say. We need greater taxation of the wealthy -- and the not-so-wealthy. We need a "graduated tithe."
The biblical solution is to restrict total personal and corporate taxation -- national, regional, and local taxation combined -- to less than ten percent of net income, just as the tithe lawfully collected by the combined levels of a national church's hierarchy is limited to ten percent. But this Old Covenant limit on taxation is too confining for welfare statists.
The State today asserts an implicit claim to be the primary judicial agent of God in history. The mark of this presumed primary sovereignty is the lack of biblically revealed limits (boundaries) on the wealth that it is authorized by God to extract from those under its jurisdiction. This is the political doctrine of the divine right of the people -- an assertion of the voters' God-granted moral authority to steal from each other by means of the ballot box. "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote."
Summary Not respecting persons and applying the law equally to all men are the twin pillars of biblical civil justice.
Civil magistrates represent all residents in God's heavenly court and represent God in historical courts.
The biblical judicial principle is equality before the civil law.
Revealed biblical law challenges natural law theory.
Adam needed revelation before the Fall.
Those who affirm natural law also deny the legitimacy of biblical theocracy.
Natural law theology is dualistic ethically: two law systems, one exclusively for Christians and the other (neutral) for all men.
Ethical dualism always puts neutral law above revealed law in society.
This places Christians under the judicial authority of non-Christians.
The Holy Spirit is dismissed as irrelevant for social theory.
Natural law theory cannot keep covenant-breakers safely outside the church's walls (sphere of influence).
Justice requires sanctions: biblical or non-biblical.
Criminal justice restores the judicial status quo ante, not the economic status quo ante.
Judicial equality before the law produces economic inequality after restitution is made.
Leviticus 19:15 legitimizes economic inequality.
God is on the side of the righteous, not the poor as such.
This denies the legitimacy of the socialists' quest for equality of economic results.
There are two kinds of equality: 1) before the law; 2) economic results.
God is on the side of the righteous, "deserving" poor.
God brought the poor of Israel and other nations under negative sanctions.
God is on the side of the poor in spirit: meek before God.
Covenantal obedience leads to national prosperity.
God favors the increasing wealth of the middle class: all ships rise together in a rising tide.
In a biblical society that obeys God, the poor will be mostly recent immigrants.
Wealth is a great spiritual temptation, not to be sought by many.
Pessimistic eschatologies deny that God is on the side of the righteous in history.
Some people are deservedly poor: not those who used to be called the "deserving poor."
There is no equality in heaven or hell.
Unequal productivity is supposed to lead to unequal results.
Liberation theologians and political liberals deny this.
The quest for restitution is the only justification for seeking the intervention of the State against another person.
The socialists' economic blueprint and the Bible's economic blueprint are irreconcilable.
This is why the former reject the existence of a biblical blueprint.
Blueprints are an inescapable concept.
Academic Christians deny the existence of biblical blueprints.
They prefer "pedestrian" and judicially non-binding Christian scholarship to biblical blueprints.
Footnotes:
1. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), ch. 14: "The Rule of Law."
2. The modern exceptions are people who reside in foreign embassies and the ambassadors themselves, even when outside their embassies. They are under their own nations' legal orders inside the boundaries of their embassy buildings.
3. Gary North, Boundaries and Dominion: The Economics of Leviticus (computer edition; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), Appendix E: "Greek Mythology: The Myth of Classical Politics."
4. See Appendix E: "Greek Mythology: The Myth of Classical Politics."
5. If this analysis is true, then the ideal of political pluralism is anti-biblical. See Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989).
6. John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1959), I, pp. 72-76.
7. I have in mind all Protestant ethical dualists, from Martin Luther to Norman Geisler. Luther was amillennial; Geisler is premillennial-dispensational; both deny that God's kingdom can triumph in history through the Spirit-backed efforts of Christians. On Luther's ethical dualism between Christian ethics and civil ethics, see Charles Trinkaus, "The Religious Foundation of Luther's Social Views," in John H. Mundy, et al., Essays in Medieval Life (Cheshire, Connecticut: Biblo & Tannen, 1955); Gary North, "The Economics of Luther and Calvin," Journal of Christian Reconstruction, II (Summer 1975), pp. 76-89. On Geisler's equally dualistic ethics, see Norman L. Geisler, "Natural Law and Business Ethics," in Richard C. Chewning (ed.), Biblical Principles and Business: The Foundations (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1989), pp. 157-74. Geisler explicitly identifies the work of the law (Rom. 2:14) with natural law: ibid., p. 158. God holds all men responsible for their acts; hence, Geisler concludes, if some men do not know about God's revealed law, God cannot lawfully condemn them. "If there is no natural law," Geisler says, "God is unjust." Ibid., p. 160. Geisler misunderstands biblical justice. Natural law, natural reason, and natural revelation are sufficient to condemn every sinful person to hell and the lake of fire, but they are insufficient to enable people to build the kingdom of God. God's system of sanctions for the reprobate is simple and clear: "Heads, I win; tails, you lose." For proof, see Romans 9:10-21.
8. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988).
9. The mind of Christ is imputed to His people at the time of their conversion, and it is progressively revealed in history, both individually and corporately, through their covenantal faithfulness. Anyone who denies this progressive, corporate, intellectual sanctification must also deny the progress of the church's various theological confessions. I know of no Christian who is willing publicly to deny the progress of the confessions at least through 1647 or 1788.
10. Geisler, "Natural Law and Business Ethics," p. 157.
11. The main exceptions historically were the New England Puritans of the first generation, 1630-60. On their theocratic legal theory, see Charles Lee Haskins, Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts: A Study in Tradition and Design (New York: University Press of America, [1960] 1985).
12. Geisler, "Natural Law and Business Ethics," p. 158.
13. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 12: "Our Blessed Earthly Hope in History."
14. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 7.
15. Ibid., pp. 294-95, 305-7.
16. The major English-language publishing house for liberation theology is Orbis Books. The major ecclesiastical organization is the Roman Catholic Maryknoll order.
17. Introductory books, critical of the movement, are Michael Novak (ed.), Liberation North, Liberation South (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1980); Gerard Berghoef and Lester DeKoster, Liberation Theology: The Church's Future Shock (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Christian Library Press, 1984); James V. Schall, S.J., Liberation Theology in Latin America (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982); and Ronald Nash (ed.), Liberation Theology (Milford, Michigan: Mott Media, 1984) A neo-orthodox critique is J. Andrew Kirk, Liberation Theology: An Evangelical View from the Third World (Atlanta, Georgia: John Knox Press, 1979).
18. Most of the time it is apostate. It is too often merely baptized Marxism. Its adherents now face a spiritual crisis: since 1989, Marxism has become terribly passé. For them, this is a far greater psychological blow than mere apostasy.
19. In England, John R. Stott held this position after 1970.
20. Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1977), p. 83. This book was co-published by the liberal Roman Catholic publishing house, The Paulist Press. I cite his 1977 edition rather than his updated, 1984 edition. The later edition was his attempt to escape the devastating critique of his book offered by David Chilton in Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators: A Biblical Response to Ronald J. Sider (3rd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, [1985] 1990). Sider never mentioned Chilton's work (and about a dozen other free market critics) in his 1984 edition, despite its promise on the cover that it responded to his critics. The 1984 edition disappeared from Christian bookstores in short order, indicating that the Sider fad was over. The first edition of Chilton's book in 1981 completely destroyed the credibility of Sider's economic views among conservatives, and the Left later moved to "excommunicate" Sider when he publicly identified homosexuality as a major sin. Caught in the ideological crossfire, he then disappeared from public view except for an occasional interview published in some small-circulation magazine. The 1990 edition of his book is rarely seen in bookstores.
21. Sider, Rich Christians, p. 83.
22. Ibid., p. 84.
23. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 87.
24. George Reisman, The Government Against the Economy (Ottowa, Illinois: Caroline House, 1979).
25. The two systems were linked from the beginning. Keynes admitted in his Preface to the 1936 German language edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: "The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under the conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons that justifies the fact that I call my book a general theory." A side-by-side translation of the Preface in the original German edition is found in James J. Martin, Revisionist Viewpoints (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles Press, 1971), pp. 203, 205. The citation appears in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (New York: St. Martin's, 1973), VII, p. xxvi.
26. Sider, Rich Christians, p. 84.
27. Idem.
28. Without any explanation, later in the book he identifies poverty as a "curse" and wealth as "good and desirable." Ibid., p. 127. Never defining justice as impartial application of biblical law, he then says: "The crucial test is whether the prosperous are obeying God's command to bring justice to the oppressed." Ibid., p. 128. This is formally correct, but it is meaningless unless there are standards of civil justice and economic oppression independent of mere wealth or poverty.
29. Ibid., p. 87.
30. Ibid., ch. 6: "Structural Evil & World Hunger."
31. Mises writes: "Most social reformers, foremost among them Fourier and Marx, pass over in silence the fact that the nature-given means of removing human uneasiness are scarce. As they see it, the fact that there is not abundance of all useful things is merely caused by the inadequacy of the capitalist mode of production and will therefore disappear in the `higher phase' of communism." Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 644n.
32. So, by the way, did fundamentalist C. I. Scofield, of the Scofield Reference Bible fame. Sider quotes him at the beginning of Chapter 9: "The present social order is the most abject failure the world has ever seen. . . . Governments have never learned yet to so legislate as to distribute the fruits of the industry of their people. The countries of the earth produce enough to support all, and if the earnings of each was fairly distributed it would make all men toil some, but no man toil too much." Scofield, Our Hope, X (August 1903), pp. 76-77. Scofield, a dedicated defender of the dispensational escape religion, is found to support Sider, a defender of the statist power religion. This should surprise no one; pietism and authoritarianism are usually in an operational alliance against dominion religion. Cf. North, Moses and Pharaoh, pp. 2-5.
33. John C. Raines, "From Passive to Active Man: Reflections on the Revolution in Consciousness of Modern Man," in Marxism and Radical Religion: Essays Toward a Revolutionary Humanism edited by John C. Raines and Thomas Dean (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1970), p. 114.
34. For a non-scientist's defense of "deep ecology," see Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).
35. Micah Morrison, Fire in Paradise: The Yellowstone Fires and the Politics of Environmentalism (New York: Morrow, 1993). The U.S. Forest Service, a rival bureaucracy, wanted to fight the fires.
36. I do not own the best computer that money can buy. I use a $2,000 computer that is about 200 times faster than either the 1981 microcomputer that cost me $6,000 or the used minicomputer that cost me $40,000 in 1980. The cost per magabyte of hard disk memory is $1 in 1993; in 1981, it was $100. The word processing program I use cost $225 in 1991, mail-order price ($495 retail). When I first used a very primitive version of this program in 1980, it cost $7,500, and I needed a 30 cubic foot, $40,000 computer system (used price) to run it, plus $600 a month for maintenance insurance. By 1993, a $1,400, 5-pound notebook computer vastly exceeded its power. For an additional $100 in 1991, I bought a program that allows me to typeset a book in a few hours with the $225 word processing program, producing camera-ready output from a $1,600 laser printer. In 1986, my company spent $30,000 to buy a typesetting machine and paid a woman $2,000 a month, plus health insurance benefits, to achieve the same camera-ready output. Middle-class publishing equipment in 1991 was very expensive in 1986. I have the canceled checks to prove it.
Problem: the members of my society are not covenantally faithful. The economic growth that the West has experienced in the past is no guarantee of the future. On the contrary, it is a warning signal (Deut. 8:17-20).
37. Peru, which experienced an outbreak of cholera in 1991, was also the victim of the Shining Path Marxist guerrillas, massive socialist intervention, bureaucratic corruption, and widespread addiction to the coca leaf. It is a poor nation because its people are committed to ethical rebellion. Only since 1991 has there been a reversal in Peru: Fujimori, a candidate supported by Christian evangelicals, won the presidential election and began freeing up the economy.
38. Public health programs are part of the State's lawful authority to resist invaders: bacteria, germs, and so forth. The State is a defensive agency authorized by God to bring negative sanctions against invaders. The bacteria do not honor household boundaries. They must be placed under quarantine -- if necessary, by placing their carriers under quarantine: a biblically legitimate action of the civil magistrate (Lev. 13, 14). The invaders must be thwarted by collective action. Man's war against the mosquito is a representative example. It takes a co-ordinated campaign analogous to a military campaign to reduce the threat of mosquito-borne diseases. Gordon Harrison, Mosquitos, Malaria and Man: A History of the Hostilities Since 1880 (New York: Dutton, 1978), chaps. 15-27. The only absolute victory over a disease of man has been the eradication of smallpox in the 1970's, whose microscopic agents now exist only in a few laboratories. Public health programs are not the same as socialized medicine, which involves the State's distributing of positive sanctions to some individuals at the expense of others.
39. Soon to become obsolete when commercially priced digital storage technologies arrive.
40. Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
41. It is possible, however. If the test is graded numerically so that the student with the highest score (say, 100 points) gets an A, and an arbitrary percentage of this score is defined as failure (say, 60 percent or below, i.e., 60 points), and the difference (40 points) is divided up in equal portions (10 points per grade, A through D), every student could receive an A if each scores higher than 90 points. This is the grading system I adopted when I taught. I learned it from my high school civics teacher, Wayne Roy.
42. A few weeks after I wrote the original draft of this chapter, something like this happened, twice, at the 1991 world track and field championships in Tokyo. Carl Lewis broke the world record in the 100-meter dash, and the runner who came in second also broke the old record. A few days later, Lewis came in second in the long jump, breaking the previous world record that had stood for 23 years -- the oldest record in track and field at the time -- but he failed to win the event. The man who had leaped before him leaped farther. Lewis had been trying to break that record for a decade. He broke it, but he did not set the new record.
43. North, Millennialism and Social Theory, ch. 6.
44. Brian Tierney, "The Decretists and the `Deserving Poor,'" Comparative Studies in Society and History, I (1959), pp. 360-73. Cf. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Authority and Its Application in England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), p. 52. This view also was basic to Puritanism. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (New York: Atheneum [1965] 1968), p. 217.
45. Those Christians who are squeamish about the word "torture" may prefer to substitute the word "torment." See Matthew 18:34 and Luke 16:24.
46. This phrase of the 1990's refers to the control of colleges and universities by radicals and Marxists who bring negative institutional sanctions against liberals and conservatives, especially liberal professors. The liberal press discovered this phenomenon only after the fall of the Communists in Eastern (Central) Europe in late 1989. (See footnote 42.) By then, conservative students and faculty members had been the victims of the liberals' version of politically correctness for half a century or more. See William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom" (Chicago: Regnery, 1951); M. Stanton Evans, Revolt on the Campus (Chicago: Regnery, 1961). Cf. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Tradition in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), ch. 1.
47. Charles J. Sykes, Profscam: Professors and the Higher Education Game (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1988). Regnery, a small conservative publishing firm, had no influence, nor did Sykes' brilliant book. After the collapse of Communism in 1989 came Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper & Row, 1990); Page Smith, Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America (New York: Viking, 1990); Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991).
48. Nothing at Westminster Seminary protected Norman Shepherd from being fired in 1982. Gary North, Westminster's Confession: The Abandonment of Van Til's Legacy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991), Appendix E: "A Speech from the Play JULIUS SHEPHERD."
49. James L. Payne, The Culture of Spending: Why Congress Lives Beyond Our Means (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1991), p. 51.
50. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
51. William E. Diehl, "The Guided-Market System," in Robert G. Clouse (ed.), Wealth and Poverty: Four Christian Views of Economics (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity, 1984), p. 87.
52. Art Gish, "Decentralist Economics," ibid., p. 154.
53. John Gladwin, "Centralist Economics," ibid., p. 183.
54. Robert G. Clouse, "Postscript," ibid., p. 224.
55. R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Education (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, [1963]).
56. Ronald Nash, Poverty and Wealth (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1986), p. 12. Reprinted by Probe Books, Richardson, Texas.
57. Ibid., p. 59.
58. Ibid., ch. 1.
59. Unlike The Other Side, Sojourners, InterVarsity Press, and Eerdmans, I will reply in print.
60. While he is at it, he might as well include at least a chapter on Cornelius Van Til's challenge to Gordon Clark. If he does, John Robbins' Trinity Foundation will publish the book, I feel certain.
61. Ian Smith, "God and Economics," in God and Culture: Essays in Honor of Carl F. H. Henry, edited by D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 178.
62. Ibid., p. 176.
63. Idem.
64. Ibid., p. 177.
65. Ibid., p. 178.
66. Douglas Vickers, Money, Banking, and the Macroeconomy (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1985).
67. ". . . Christian economics cannot proceed as though it was in some sense legislating for the economic structure of a theocracy." Douglas Vickers, Economics and Man: Prelude to a Christian Critique (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1976), p. 73.
68. "It is accordingly improper to speak of the fact or the possibility of a Christian society. For society at large is apostate, inherently and structurally pagan." Ibid., p. 363.
69. "But there has been, nevertheless, throughout the nineteenth century and down to the present time, notwithstanding the historical testimony of the debacles of slump and inflation and depression and boom, a yearning for the intellectual simplicities of the laissez-faire theory, and for an espousal of the economic proposition that that government governs best which governs least." Ibid., pp. 349-50.
70. "In the outcome, we have seen that a Christian perspective on the economic problem will necessarily fragment into a number of operational objectives in the kind of mixed capitalist economies with which we are familiar in the Western democracies. And we have seen, without recapitulating any detail at all at this point, that it is possible to set against these operational objectives a range, a wider range than might initially have been imagined, of legitimate economic policy instruments and options." Ibid., p. 352.
71. "If, of course, we were legislating for an ideal society, or, again, for a theocratic order of an earlier kind, then a strictly proportional tax, such as the tithe, would probably be all that would be required." Ibid., p. 319.
72. Ibid., p. 350.
73. Ian Hodge, Baptized Inflation: A Critique of "Christian" Keynesianism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986). This is a detailed critique of Vickers by a non-economist who, unlike Vickers, understands free market economics.
74. George Grant, Legislating Immorality: The Homosexual Movement Comes Out of the Closet (Chicago: Moody Press, 1993).
75. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 10.
76. See the footnotes in the essays other than mine in Clouse (ed.), Wealth and Poverty: the absence of economists.
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