34 LIMITS TO GROWTH For I will have respect unto you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, and establish my covenant with you. And ye shall eat old store, and bring forth the old because of the new (Lev. 26:9-10).
The theocentric meaning of this passage is easy to summarize: God, the author of life, establishes the covenantal laws governing life. The biological promise in verse 9 is two-fold: the multiplication of obedient covenant-keepers in history and the equal or greater multiplication of their crops. This two-fold promise is covenantal. It is therefore conditional. The dual positive sanctions of a growing population and growing food supplies are tied to the law of God. As in the case of every positive covenantal sanction, there is an unstated assumption: the threat of negative sanctions. In this case, the negative sanctions match the positive sanctions: 1) zero population growth or even population decline; 2) hunger. Corporate disobedience calls forth these negative sanctions.
Were these two sanctions part of what I have called seed and land laws? No. A seed law, in the sense that I am using it in this commentary, was tied to the promised Seed, the Messiah, the prophesied son of Judah. It had to do with maintaining the tribal divisions in Mosaic Israel until Shiloh came (Gen. 49:10). The earlier promise given to Abraham regarding the multiplication of his heirs through the Seed, Jesus Christ (seed, in Paul's sense)(1) was not a seed law sanction in the sense that I am using the term, i.e., Jacob's later prophecy. Jacob's prophecy governed the promise up to the coming of the Seed: the end of the Old Covenant. God's promise to Abraham regarding the multiplication of his seed -- heirs -- applies to both Old and New Covenants: a cross-boundary covenant and promise (Gen. 15:5). Its mark in the Old Covenant was circumcision (Gen. 17:10). This was a covenantal stipulation in the sense of confession rather than geography: a visible boundary separation from covenant-breakers rather than geographical boundary separations among biological units (tribes). Leviticus 26:9 is an application of the Abrahamic covenant, not Jacob's tribal prophecy.
Broadly covenantal sanctions applied outside of the land of Israel. That is, these covenantal sanctions were common grace sanctions. Societies that obeyed the covenant's external laws would prosper; those that rebelled would not. The promise of high population growth in this passage was an implicit threat of reduced population for rebellion. The archetype of this threat was Noah's Flood: a pre-Abrahamic sanction. God will not again bring a flood to cut off all mankind, but He does reduce the populations of rebellious societies, primarily through the covenantally predictable effects of social organization in a particular natural environment.
The Curse of Hunger Hunger is a major covenantal threat in God's law. "Because thou servedst not the LORD thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things; Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the LORD shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee" (Deut. 28:47-48). Again, "They that be slain with the sword are better than they that be slain with hunger: for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field" (Lam. 4:9).
Food is therefore a major covenantal blessing. This blessing is stated in Leviticus 25:10 in a way that is easily recognized by an agricultural people: "And ye shall eat old store, and bring forth the old because of the new." The time of greatest potential crisis for an agricultural society is the period immediately preceding the harvest. The old store is running low; the new store has not yet arrived. The word for "old" is used with regard to the stored produce in the year following the jubilee year. "And ye shall sow the eighth year, and eat yet of old fruit until the ninth year; until her fruits come in ye shall eat of the old store" (Lev. 25:22). God's promise is not slack. Israel need not fear famine; the stored crop will not be entirely consumed before the new crop is harvested.
This means that the covenantal blessing of "fruitfulness" was comprehensive, applying equally to the fertility of obedient covenant-keeping families and to their crops. The rate of human population growth inside the boundaries of Israel would be matched by the rate of population growth in the fields. In this way, God promised to confirm His covenant publicly. He promised a growing population in Israel: the application of Genesis 1:28 and Genesis 9:7 to His covenant people, the true heirs of the promise. This means that God's corporate, covenantal standard for the expansion of covenant-keeping families is above two children per family, the biological replacement rate.(2)
The modern world understands hunger as a threat to humanity -- not a curse, which is personal, but a threat. Unlike the Bible, a majority of modern humanist intellectuals and their accomplices within Christianity have contrasted the blessing of food with population growth. They have argued since the mid-1960's that in order for the world's poorest people to attain sufficient food supplies, they must be willing to reduce the size of their families. These intellectuals have also frequently argued that the West, which has abundant quantities of food, must give away food to the world's poor. This means having Western governments give food away to the governments of Third World (aid-receiving) nations. Such political food transfers have been going on throughout the post-World War II era.
Anti-population growth proponents refuse to admit that there is no specter of famine haunting the vast majority of humanity, and where it does haunt a handful of small, backward nations, all located in Africa, this is the result of government policies, such as: 1) war, especially civil war; 2) a government monopoly on the purchase of food from farmers, with prices set far below market prices; or 3) government intervention into the local agricultural economy.(3) That is to say, people face food shortages because the free market is not allowed to function.(4)
Physical Limits to Growth Boundaries are limits. In a finite world, there are limits to every promise of growth. These limits may be geographical or they may be economic, but there are limits to growth. This is the inescapable reality of finitude. The process of compound physical growth cannot go on forever in a finite world. Growth has temporal limits.(5)
God calls for population growth because He calls for covenantal obedience. He wants to see positive growth in covenant-keeping societies. Long-term compound growth is a moral imperative in God's covenantal universe. Long-term stagnation is a sign of God's curse. Yet there are unquestionably limits to growth. This is why God's call for population growth points to God's final judgment at the end of history and the transformation of mankind into a host like the angels: fixed numbers, either in the lake of fire (Rev. 20:14-15) or in the resurrected New Heaven and New Earth (Rev. 21:1-2).
Covenant-breakers who do not wish to think about the final judgment have become advocates of zero population growth: an exchange, either compulsory or voluntary, either natural or political, of a compounding human population for extra eons of time. The growing acceptance by intellectuals in the West of the zero-population growth movement(6) and the zero economic growth movement,(7) which became a unified cause and intellectual fad almost overnight in the mid-1960's, testifies to the presence of widespread covenant-breaking and philosophies to match. In 1970, the world's population could have been housed in American middle-class comfort in a city the size of Texas and New Mexico -- 15 percent of U.S. land -- with a population density no larger than what one-third of Americans experienced. If people had been content to live in a city as crowded as New York City, they could all have fit in the state of Montana.(8) Yet intellectuals became fearful of the "population bomb."
Living Space
At some point, even covenant-keepers will run out of living space if they continue to grow in number. They will reach environmental limits: boundaries beyond which man's dominion cannot extend. We need to consider three facts regarding man's limits to growth. First, any rate of growth, if compounded, eventually becomes exponential. The population of any multiplying species approaches infinity as a limit. But environmental finitude makes its presence felt long before population infinitude is reached. The environment places limits on growth. No species can maintain a positive growth rate indefinitely. Second, mankind, unlike the angels, is not a numerically fixed host in history. Yet mankind is ultimately limited by the environment. This fact points to the ultimate limit to growth: time. At some point, mankind will reach its maximum population. Third, and by far the most significant fact, this point in time of maximum population is reached when God returns in final judgment. What must be understood is that this maximum population limit is covenantal more than environmental. It comes because God runs out of mercy for covenant-breakers, not because mankind runs out of living space or food.
The limits of nature and the reality of compound growth indicate a point in history when mankind reaches a maximum. We do not know where this point is -- it is in this sense indeterminate -- but we know that the environment does impose limits. The economist's evidence for this is the rising price of some goods in relation to others. One thing cannot grow forever. It is governed by what the economist calls the law of diminishing returns.(9) But this "Newtonian" insight is significant only insofar as it warns rational covenant-breakers of the reality of finitude and the limits to growth. The reality of finitude is not nearly so significant a limit as the reality of covenantal rebellion. It is not mankind's fertility in general that presses our species toward its biological limits; it is rather covenant-breaking man's rebellion that reaches God's judicial limits in history. While the logic of finitude does warn scientific man of autonomous mankind's limits -- the destruction of all meaning in the heat death of the universe(10) -- this insight can be misinterpreted by covenant-breakers. They can (and have) proposed technical solutions to a covenantal problem. One such proposed solution is the zero-growth ideology.
Limits: Newtonian vs. Covenantal
According to a strictly Newtonian interpretation of the environmental limits to growth, the faster the rate of compound growth, the sooner growth will cease or time will run out. The greater the blessings of growth, the shorter the time remaining before time runs out or mankind ceases to grow. Man's limits are regarded as exclusively environmental.
The Bible speaks of other limits as more fundamental. God brings final judgment in response to a final rebellion of human covenant-breakers against human covenant-keepers (Rev. 20:7-10). The discussion of the limits to growth needs to be framed in terms of the Bible's covenantal limits -- moral, judicial, and eschatological -- rather than in terms of Newtonian environmental limits: mathematical, physical, and biological.(11)
The growth of population points either to the limits of growth or the limits of time. Because the Bible affirms that the limits to covenant-keeping man's population growth are covenantal rather than biological, the Bible affirms that there will be a final judgment. The Bible's promise of growth in one segment of the human population -- covenant-keepers -- is a testimony to the end of history. Men are expected to obey God's law; if they do, God promises to extend to them the positive sanction of growth. Therefore, time will run out. But, the Bible also tells us, time will run out before mankind presses against unyielding environmental limits. The primary limit to growth in history is covenantal. The environmental limits to growth are merely theoretical -- not hypothetical, but determinate physical limits that are indeterminate in man's knowledge.
Social Limits to Growth The more fundamental limits to growth are social. This is the economic manifestation of the covenantal principle of hierarchy. Not everyone can attend the best universities, drive the finest automobiles, and wear the latest fashions. These goods are limited in supply. We cannot produce many more of them, so competition to use or own them is intense. Fred Hirsch uses the analogy of the person at a sporting event who wants to see the game more clearly. He stands up. But eventually, others also stand up. Then one person stands on tiptoe. Others do the same. Eventually, the tallest people with the strongest lower leg muscles get the best view. So, society informally agrees to sit down at sporting events and in concert halls, since this is less taxing on everyone's leg muscles, and in the long run, nobody can overcome his height limits. Hirsch's point: in this case -- seeing over everyone's head -- what a few people can do, not everyone can do at the same time. He calls such goods and services positional goods.(12) As economic growth continues, more and more people can afford to buy these goods, so more will be produced. When this happens, these goods lose their crucial character: providing the owners with status, i.e., position. Other goods and services, more fixed in number, are then sought by those seeking status. There will always be positional goods.
Legal Barriers to Entry
One of the ways that the rich defend themselves from new competitors is to create government barriers to entry. They get laws passed to keep "the unwashed" middle classes and successful entrepreneurs at a safe distance. Their problem is that the free market system extends wealth to many people. As economist Thomas Sowell describes it, the poor can outbid the rich collectively; there are so many of them. Land developers start buying of formerly unoccupied land in order to sell condominiums and other smaller property units to the upper middle class. Businessmen serve the needs of the less rich because the world of the less rich is where the money is. The less rich collectively bid valuable property away from the rich. This is especially true of scarce resources such as beachfront property and wilderness areas located within driving distance of commercial airports. In response to this competitive threat to their "free ride" -- scenery they do not own or are afraid their rich neighbors' heirs will sell to developers -- the rich seal off land adjacent to their valuable property in the name of preserving the environment. They do this by having the State legislate limits on all new real estate development.(13)
Members of the wealthiest class in the United States -- what some analysts have called "Old Money" -- have for over a century regarded themselves as the trustees of the nation's beautiful things: art and scenic land. By trustees, they have in mind those special people who can properly maintain these assets, mainly for themselves and their own social class. As the value of these scarce positional goods has increased, these self-appointed trustees have sought government intervention to enable them to keep the middle classes away from these treasures.
Nature is regarded by the Old Money as the means of an ordeal process (i.e., initiation rite) which the young males of this class are supposed to experience as a means of both health and maturation.(14) For example, at the age of 23, future author Francis Parkman (The Oregon Trail, 1849) was sent west by his wealthy Boston family for his health just prior to the California gold strike that launched the great gold rush. Over the next half century, he was followed by many others of his class.(15) Among them was the Old Money's most famous career model, Theodore Roosevelt, who spent much of his youth in the West shooting game, and who, as President of the U.S. (1900-1905), became the legendary promoter of conservation and Federal land control through a system of national parks.(16)
A new paganism has appeared, and members of the Old Rich have been its dedicated promoters. As Nelson Aldrich, one of their own, wrote in 1988: "Nature worship today is laying the spiritual and institutional groundwork for the closest thing to a widespread social religion (as opposed to the individualistic religion of success) that Americans have ever had. Nature is sacred to millions of people in America. . . ."(17) We have now entered the political battle for control over nature, he says, a battle that is both religious and economic. "The social religion of Nature, which began with rich kids going outdoors for their health, ends in political action against the market -- the condo developers, the shopping-mall impresarios, the army of entrepreneurs whom Old Money (and not Old Money alone) imagines to be despoiling Arcadia."(18) As Aldrich's book makes clear, the Old Money deeply distrusts and sometimes even despises the open-entry system known as the free market, for the free market transfers economic power to the masses. This is why Old Money supports such groups as the Nature Conservancy, the Wilderness Society, and the Sierra Club.(19) These groups are using their tax-exempt foundation status to buy up and seal off millions of acres of land across the nation. They use tax money to do it.
The system works like this. First, these organizations target certain prime wilderness areas. Second, individuals in the know buy land near these targeted areas, thereby locking up property that, in Warren Brookes' words, is ideal for "profitable upscale adjacent residential development that is then used to finance still more acquisition."(20) Third, they use tax-deductible money to buy up the prime land that makes the nearby developed areas valuable. Fourth, they sell these prime parcels -- but not the land designated for development -- to the U.S. government, thereby halting any further development inside the newly "socialized" boundaries. Fifth, they develop their privately owned parcels. Presto: a marvelous legal monopoly, purchased at low prices in part with taxpayers' money. A similar process works internationally. Large New York banks -- protected by the U.S. government's bank deposit insurance system and also by the policies of the quasi-private Federal Reserve System -- are making debt-for-nature swaps, exchanging their now-depreciated Third World debt certificates for prime land in those nations.(21) This process also can be used to remove prime land from development by those other than the favored few.
Aldrich writes: "The roots of Old Money environmentalism go back to the most fiercely protected of all the treasures of Old Money, the summer places on the coast of Maine, their `camps' in the Adirondacks, their ranches out West."(22) An early operational model of this plan was designed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. He bought a summer home on Mt. Desert Island in Maine. This unique island became the summer center of America's Establishment -- the place where elites from different fields -- finance, industry, journalism, foreign policy, and religion -- met and mixed with each other.(23) Rockefeller and Edsel Ford, along with other affluent neighbors, over a period of years bought up 5,000 acres on the island and then turned this property over to the National Park Service in 1916. This became the first national park in the eastern states.(24) Two pairs of favorable biographers insist that this was in no way a self-serving act because Rockefeller then went on to promote national conservation all over the country.(25) On the contrary, this conservation impulse is enormously self-serving. Buying up geographically unique and aesthetically desirable land for personal use and then placing the surrounding property under government control is part of a systematic elitist strategy. The rich maintain the "unspoiled" wilderness which lies on the fringes of their spacious retreats -- "unspoiled" in this case meaning "legally cut off from the less rich." The less rich may be allowed to hike in, but they are not allowed to buy land, build cabins, and in other ways permanently "spoil nature." This process of selective exclusion through government control has accelerated as the twentieth century has moved forward.
Angelic Hosts Are Fixed; Races Are Not Living species multiply. Angels do not. The angels constitute a fixed host. In heaven and hell, the number of angels remains constant. This fact of life is rarely discussed by theologians and never by social theorists. It should be. It is fundamental to understanding the ultimate origin of the zero population growth ideology.
Satan rules representatively, just as God does. He rules hierarchically. But unlike God, Satan is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. His decree is that of a creature: under God's decree. This has organizational consequences for the way he exercises power. He is dependent on the supply of information flowing to him, whether from demonic beings or from other sources. This flow of information is limited. It contains "noise," just as it does for humans. God is omniscient; Satan is not. He gets confused. He has trouble monitoring the thoughts and activities of those under his covenant.
This flow of information is finite. So is his power to make decisions and enforce them. To the extent that his sources of information and power depend on the activities of those under his command, he faces a problem. The more people he needs to monitor, the greater the flow of accurate information necessary to his empire. The greater the number of people, the more strain this places on the resources at his disposal. In short, Satan's host is put under ever-greater pressure as the human population under their covenantal authority grows. This is even more true of the pressures brought by those under God's covenantal authority. The more covenant-keepers on earth, the more the breakdown of Satan's control. Like a juggler who has to keep a growing number of oranges in the air, so is Satan.
People are a threat to Satan. They multiply; his demonic host does not. Even covenant-breakers pose a problem: the coordination of Satan's plans becomes more difficult as mankind's numbers increase. Then there is the eschatological threat: a major move by the Holy Spirit could adopt large numbers of covenant-breakers into the family of God. When this happens, Satan's fixed host will have their hands full, to use a non-angelic expression. More than full: they will find control over events slipping through the equivalent of their fingers.
The increase of mankind's numbers poses no threat to the host of heaven, for God is absolutely sovereign. God is not dependent on His angels for information. God does not suffer from information overload. There is no noise in God's perception. The angels of heaven need not rely on their own mastery of history. They rely on God. Thus, for the angels, the multiplication of humanity poses no organizational threat. They outnumber Satan's host by two to one. Stars and angels are linked symbolically in Scripture. We read: "And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born" (Rev. 12:3-4).(26) Two-thirds were loyal.
A growing population creates problems for any creature who would seek to control history. The addition of more humans creates problems for Satan and his host. Men represent either God or Satan in history. Those who represent Satan are rebels, just as he is. They cannot be trusted, just as he cannot be trusted. Thus, Satan benefits from a growing population only insofar as he can keep them under his covenant and entrap them in hell. The threat of their rejection of his covenant grows ever-greater over time: more humans to join God's forces, and more likelihood that God will send His promised days of blessing.(27) This is why the zero population growth movement, like the abortion movement, can be accurately described as satanic.
Israel's Limits The question for Israel was this: When these limits to population growth were reached inside the nation's geographical boundaries, how did God expect the Israelites to overcome these population limits? There were either geographical limits or population limits. Walking to the feasts placed geographical limits on Israel, but without limits on Israel's population, Israel's geographical limits would be breached. Conclusion: God mandated another exodus beyond the borders of Israel when He established population expansion as His covenantal standard. The Israelites were expected to move outside of the geographical boundaries of Israel. This was the meaning of Christ's metaphor of new wine in old wineskins (Matt. 9:17): the fermenting new wine would burst its inflexible container. His people were always intended to inherit the earth, not just the land of Israel.
For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth (Ps. 37:9).
But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace (Ps. 37:11).
For such as be blessed of him shall inherit the earth; and they that be cursed of him shall be cut off (Ps. 37:22).
Inheritance in Israel implied growth for obedient covenant-keepers: growth in the number of heirs and growth in the value of their individual inheritances. But geographical limits -- family land, tribal land, national land -- were judicially fixed by the terms of the conquest. A growing number of heirs necessitated a declining per capita landed inheritance within the Promised Land. This pointed to the eschatological nature of God's covenantal laws of inheritance: a transcending of Israel's geographical boundaries. The promised inheritance of covenant-keepers pointed to the breaking of the boundaries of the Promised Land. The limits to growth of confessional Israel would not be the boundaries of geographical Israel. The original conquest of Canaan would cease to be a limiting factor in the extension of God's covenantal boundaries.
Entropy There is a trade-off between population growth and time remaining to mankind. The covenant-breaker understands this trade-off. Above all else, he wishes to escape final judgment, and understandably so. Thus, he seeks to find some way around the covenantal implications of population growth. One way of doing this is to deny that mankind's growth will continue in history. It will stop, covenant-breakers insist, but this will not end history. Another way of doing this is to deny that history will end as a result of God's Second Coming in final judgment. Instead, the universe itself will bring impersonal judgment to the processes of time: the heat death of the universe. This is the final judgment of the second law of thermodynamics: the one-way movement of kinetic (potential) energy into heat. Entropy will smother all life and motion, including time itself, in its frozen grip of absolute zero.(28)
The covenant-breaker prefers this view of universal impersonal death to the Bible's view of personal death, meaning the second death: "And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire" (Rev. 20:14-15). Better the "heat death" of the universe -- frozen wastes -- than the eternal heat death of covenant breakers.
Any attempt to place an absolute environmental limit around mankind's long-term population growth, while simultaneously affirming the extension of time beyond this absolute limit, is necessarily an attempt to deny or deflect the biblical doctrine of final judgment. It is the inevitability of some final physical limit to the population growth of covenant-keepers that points to one of two things: 1) the future breaking of the corporate covenant, but without God's temporal judgments against covenant-keepers and without the subsequent restoration of His people, i.e., (a) a steady-state, zero-growth population or (b) a shrinking population; or 2) the end of history, either because of (a) God's final judgment or (b) the death of mankind as a species.
In order to affirm both the reliability and inevitability of God's corporate, covenantal promises (i.e., His positive biological sanctions) in history, the Christian has to insist on the covenantal inevitability of the final judgment, when mankind will at last become a fixed host: covenant-keepers (New Heaven and New Earth) and covenant-breakers (lake of fire). Either man's corporate growth will cease in history or history will cease. God's covenantal promises point to the second option. The promises of God insist that corporate growth will not cease where men keep God's covenant law-order. These promises include the restoration in history of a formerly covenant-keeping society after its people have broken God's law.
And I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning: afterward thou shalt be called, The city of righteousness, the faithful city (Isa. 1:26).
For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the LORD; because they called thee an Outcast, saying, This is Zion, whom no man seeketh after (Jer. 30:17).
Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times (Dan. 9:25).
The Malthusians When Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus wrote his anonymous first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), he accelerated a great debate over the desirability of population growth. Although in later editions of his famous essay he modified the stark environmentalism of the original, it is his original words that have been cited again and again: "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio."(29) Put another way, the population of the species man grows at a geometrical rate, while the populations that man consumes grow at an arithmetical rate. This indicates that man is something special in creation: a species limited by its environment in a unique way. Also, geometrical (exponential) growth being what it is, mankind reaches its environmental limits a lot faster than any other species does. How, then, can mankind keep growing? Why, by 1798, had not mankind long since reached its limits to growth? Why was the population of Europe accelerating rapidly by the time Malthus wrote his essay? There are no obvious answers, which may be why Malthus abandoned this now-familiar phrase in the many subsequent editions of the essay.
From 1798 until today, there have been avid followers of some version of Malthus' error.(30) They regard man as a cancer on a benign host, nature. Western man is the most cancerous of all. Western man is dominion man, and this spells the end of nature, says "deep ecologist"(31) Bill McKibben: "We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature's independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us."(32) He is correct: the Western world still lives intellectually in the shadow of Genesis 1:26-28. "The idea that the rest of creation might count for as much as we do is spectacularly foreign, even to most environmentalists."(33) Man is seen by deep ecologists as a uniquely destructive species in nature.
The question of man's population growth is connected to the question of time. If man's population growth remains positive, then either time or space will run out eons before the heat death of the universe brings its impersonal judgment on the universe. The humanist decries the first outcome -- mankind's filling up of his environmental space -- because he recoils in terror at the thought of the second. But man will fill the earth. This will fulfill a major aspect of the dominion covenant (Gen. 1:28). After that comes the final rebellion and the final judgment (Rev. 20:7-9). This eschatological scenario alienates humanists of both persuasions: mechanical and organic. It rests on a presupposition: the environment is under man. If true, then nature is not autonomous.
The autonomy of nature implies the near-permanence of nature. For the humanist, man's meaning must be subordinated to nature's permanence. To save man from God's judgments, man must submit to nature's. McKibben writes: "The chief lesson is that the world displays a lovely order, an order comforting in its intricacy. And the most appealing part of this harmony, perhaps, is its permanence -- the sense that we are part of something with roots stretching back nearly forever, and branches reaching forward just as far. Purely human life provides only a partial fulfillment of this desire for a kind of immortality. . . . But the earth and all its processes -- the sun growing plants, flesh feeding on these plants, flesh decaying to nourish more plants, to name just one cycle -- gives us some sense of a more enduring role."(34) It is nature's cyclical processes within a temporally unbounded universe that supposedly provide meaning to man, who alone in the universe known by man can perceive nature's meaning. If time is essentially unbounded but the environment is not, then man's population must be made bounded. A growing human population is a threat to this worldview: a worldview bounded by physical limits rather than temporal. Temporal limits are too dangerous, for they imply a God beyond time who breaks into time, bringing final judgment.
The Malthusians challenge the possibility and therefore the legitimacy of temporally unbounded compound growth. The idea that God rewards covenantally faithful societies with expansion -- numerically, economically, and geographically -- appalls the Malthusians. The growth-oriented secular economist is willing to challenge the Malthusian vision, but only because he refuses to discuss biological limits as absolute limits.(35) But there are biological limits, even though the human population may reach 30 billion or 40 billion or 500 billion before these limits are reached. The fact is, the biological limits to mankind's growth on earth are measured in centuries, not eons. The limit of the speed of light restricts man's geographical extension. This brings covenant-breaking man face to face with one of two limits: biological expansion or temporal extension.
Conclusion The fundamental economic issue is not population growth. It is not the increase of food per capita. It is not capital invested per person. The fundamental economic issue is ethical: God's covenant. Nevertheless, the language of Leviticus 26:9-10 is agricultural. Why? Because in an agricultural society, the mark of God's blessing is food. God promised to provide bread for all. He also promised to increase their numbers.
This does not mean that He promised nothing else to them. He promised an agricultural people access in history to the city of God, the New Jerusalem (Isa. 65:17-20). The city of God is the image of a regenerate society. The city is therefore not inherently evil. Urban life is not inherently depersonalizing. Covenant-breaking is evil and depersonalizing. Covenant-breaking is made less expensive in cities because of the higher costs of gathering information about individual actions, as well as the higher costs of imposing informal social sanctions. But covenant-breaking is not inherent to cities. It can be overcome through God's grace.
If this were not the case, then the promise of population growth would be a threat to the covenant. A covenantal blessing would inevitably become a covenantal curse. The grace of God would necessarily produce the wrath of God. This is the operational viewpoint of both premillennialism and amillennialism regarding church history, but it is a false view of history.(36) While covenantal blessings can and have led to corporate covenant-breaking, just as God warns (Lev. 26; Deut. 8; 28), they do not inevitably lead to them. The covenant's blessings are conditional; they do not continue indefinitely irrespective of corporate obedience. God's negative corporate sanctions come in history, and then society is given another opportunity to repent and rebuild: "And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations" (Isa. 61:4).
The biblical view of history is growth-oriented. It not only proclaims the possibility of population expansion and increasing wealth per capita, it also establishes these as mandatory corporate goals in history. Until mankind becomes a fixed host at the end of history -- covenant-breakers in the lake of fire eternally (Rev. 20:14-15), covenant-keepers developing the New Heaven and New Earth (Rev. 21; 22) -- covenant-keeping mankind is expected by God to grow in numbers, wealth, and influence.
Summary The promise of multiplied people and food is ethically conditional.
It is covenantal in the broad sense, i.e., Abrahamic rather than Jacobic or Mosaic.
It refers back to God's promise to multiply Abraham's seed (plural).
It is not a seed law in the tribal sense: an aspect of Jacob's prophecy regarding the seed of Judah (singular).
This promise and its conditional sanctions -- positive and negative -- are therefore universal in scope.
Hunger is a major covenantal sanction; food is a major covenantal blessing.
Israelites could count on food to match mouths in times of obedience.
Population growth need not be a threat.
The growth of population and food is intended to confirm God's covenant.
Modern intellectuals regard hunger as a threat.
They also regard population growth as a threat, with or without hunger.
There is no threat of famine in most of the world today except in a handful of backward, socialist, civil war-torn nations.
There are limits to growth in a finite world.
Long-term compound growth is a moral imperative, for it is the result of covenantal obedience.
As population expands, it will eventually press against environmental limits: boundaries.
This points to the end of history and final judgment: the ultimate temporal boundary.
Modern humanists resent this temporal, covenantal boundary.
Some critics call for zero population growth.
Covenant-breaking men bring judicial limits in history: the final judgment (Rev. 20:7-10).
Man's ultimate boundary limits are covenantal: moral, judicial, and eschatological.
Newtonian limits are spatial and temporal.
Quantum mechanics may not have physical limits, some theorists believe.
Population growth of any species always has limits.
There are social limits to growth.
There must therefore always be hierarchy.
A good analogy is standing on tiptoe at a sports event: the tallest people will get the best view (hierarchy).
There are positional goods: limits on simultaneous enjoyment or use.
Many poor people together can bid up the price of certain positional goods: e.g., scenic property.
Rich people often use the State to establish legal claims on positional goods rather than competing economically with the masses for them.
Angelic hosts are fixed in number; species are not.
As men multiply, the noise in Satan's hierarchy increases.
The coordination problem in a centralized top-down economy or hierarchy increases exponentially as men multiply.
Satan cannot increase the number of demons to deal with multiplying covenant-keepers.
As covenant-keepers multiply, they overload Satan's hierarchy.
A mass conversion to saving faith is a major threat to Satan's hierarchical management of events.
God's promise of multiplication gave Israel the goal of worldwide expansion and dominion.
This testified to temporal limits on Israel's geographical boundaries: new wine in old wineskins.
God's laws of landed inheritance would eventually be transcended.
Confessional Israel would break the limits of geographical Israel, if they kept the ethical terms of the covenant.
There is a trade-off between time remaining to man and mankind's population growth.
Covenant-breaking man wants to evade final judgment.
He prefers the impersonal judgment of the heat death of the universe to God's final judgment of the eternal heat death of the lake of fire.
The blessing of population growth points to the end of growth when history ends and mankind becomes a fixed host, like the angels.
Man's growth will cease because history will cease: either in God's judgment or the heat death of the universe.
Malthus' 1798 essay came out against population growth.
His intellectual heirs today regard mankind as a cancer.
Some Malthusians have adopted faith in cyclical history as a way out of the time-growth dilemma.
The temporal limits of mankind's compound population growth are measured in centuries, not eons: exponential growth.
The fundamental economic issue is ethical: the covenant.
Covenant-keepers can enjoy food in their cities if they remain obedient.
The biblical view of history is pro-growth.
Footnotes:
1. "Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ" (Gal. 3:16).
2. Actually, 2.1 children, since some children do not marry and reproduce.
3. An example: the decision by Western nations in the late 1960's to dig water wells in sub-Sahara Africa, which led the nomads to locate their herds close to the "free" water. This produced overgrazing and famine in the mid-1970's. See Claire Sterling, "The Making of the Sub-Saharan Wasteland," Atlantic Monthly (May 1974).
4. See Appendix I, below: "Malthusianism vs. Covenantalism."
5. Gary North, "The Theology of the Exponential Curve," The Freeman (May 1970); reprinted in North, An Introduction to Christian Economics (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), ch. 8.
6. Lincoln H. and Alice Taylor Day, Too Many Americans (New York: Delta, [1963] 1965); William and Paul Paddock, Famine -- 1975! America's Decision: Who Will Survive? (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967); Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968); Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Biological Time Bomb (New York: World, 1968); Population and the American Future, the Report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future (New York: New American Library, 1972). For an economist's critique, see Jacqueline Kasun, The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of World Population Control (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988).
7. Ezra J. Mishan, The Costs of Economic Growth (New York: Praeger, 1967); Mishan, The Economic Growth Debate: An Assessment (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977); Donella Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972); E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Mancur Olson and Hans H. Landsberg (eds.), The No-Growth Society (New York: Norton, 1973); Leopold Kohr, The Overdeveloped Nations: The Diseconomies of Scale (New York: Schocken, 1977). For a critique, see E. Calvin Beisner, Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1990).
8. Robert L. Sasone, Handbook on Population (Author, 1972), p. 98.
9. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 21.
10. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), ch. 2.
11. There are some journalists and social thinkers who prefer to substitute quantum mechanics for Newtonian mechanics as a model for social theory. They want to escape the Newtonian world's determinate limits to growth by means of an appeal to the indeterminacy of the quantum world: physical indeterminacy, not merely conceptual. The two most prominent American authors who take this approach are George Gilder and Warren Brookes. At the time of his death in December of 1991, Brookes was working on a book developing this idea. He and I had spent hours on the phone discussing this issue. He had presented an early version of his thesis in The Economy in Mind (New York: Universe Books, 1982), ch. 1. He was a Christian Scientist and leaned toward accepting non-physical explanations of man's condition. Gilder outlines his thesis in Microcosm (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989). Eloquent as Gilder is regarding the exponential increase in the power of computers, he cannot apply his thesis to population growth. Bodies cannot escape into the realm of the quantum in order to evade the limits to growth. Gilder invokes Moore's Law, which says that the number of transistors on commercial microchips doubles every 18 months. This law has held true since the late 1950's. The law seems to overcome certain physical limits. But Moore's Law does not overcome the limits on biological growth. Moore's Law was discovered by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, the largest American microchip producer. On Moore's Law and its commercial implications, see Robert X. Cringely (pseudonym), Accidental Empires (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1992), pp. 41, 144, 306-7.
12. Fred Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 11.
13. Thomas Sowell, "Those Phony Environmentalists," Los Angeles Herald Examiner (March 23, 1979); reprinted in Sowell, Pink and Brown People and Other Controversial Essays (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1981), pp. 104-5. See my summary in North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 584-87.
14. Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr., Old Money:The Mythology of America's Upper Class (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 158-69. Aldrich is the great-grandson of the U. S. Senator who in 1912 introduced the original version of the legislation that created the Federal Reserve System (1913), the quasi-private U.S. central bank. The original Aldrich became fabulously wealthy as a pay-off from the business and banking interests that controlled him throughout his career, as this book chronicles without remorse.
15. Ibid., p. 160.
16. Ibid., p. 161.
17. Ibid., p. 158.
18. Ibid., p. 169.
19. Ibid., pp. 222-23. For a brief survey of these three groups, see Jo Kwong Echard, Protecting the Environment: Old Rhetoric, New Imperatives (Washington, D.C.: Capital Research Center, 1990), Appendixes 8-10.
20. Warren Brookes, Washington Times (Jan. 29, 1991), cited by Larry Abraham and Franklin Saunders, The Greening (Atlanta, Georgia: Soundview, 1993), p. 93.
21. Abraham and Saunders, Greening, pp. 51-53, 59-61, 93.
22. Aldrich, Old Money, p. 223.
23. William R. Hutchison, "Protestantism as Establishment," in Hutchison (ed.), Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 10.
24. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 147.
25. Ibid., p. 148; John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), p. 200.
26. The numbers of the judgments on earth described in Revelation 8 also indicate a two-to-one advantage.
27. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., He Shall Have Dominion: A Postmillennial Eschatology (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992).
28. North, Is the World Running Down?, ch. 2.
29. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (New York: Penguin Books, [1798] 1982), p. 71.
30. See Appendix I: "Malthusianism vs. Covenantalism."
31. The deep ecologists go beyond ecologists who want scientific planners to protect the environment in the name of mankind's higher interests. The deep ecologists want nature to govern man, or at the very least, want scientific planners to sacrifice mankind's desires in the name of nature's autonomy and therefore its authority over the wants of men.
32. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 58.
33. Ibid., p. 174.
34. Ibid., p. 73.
35. Economists rarely discuss absolute limits. To them, all limits are marginal and relative.
36. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), chaps. 4, 5, 9.
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