THE COVENANTAL IDEAL OF ECONOMIC GROWTH When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given thee. Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day 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; Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint; Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee, and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end; And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day (Deut. 8:10-18).
The theocentric focus of this law is God as the gracious Provider. God demands thankfulness on the part of the recipients of His grace. The message here is clear: covenant-keepers can become spiritually forgetful as a direct result of the visible blessings of God. As a result of the gift, they forget the Giver. That covenant-breakers forget the God who gave them their blessings should come as no shock, but this warning was directed at covenant-keepers.
Because the sin of covenantal forgetfulness is universal, this law was not a seed law or land law. Those theologians who argue that this was exclusively a land law want to escape from its implications: God brings sanctions in history against those who forget Him. The problem is, when they argue this way, they strip the covenant of its predictability and therefore also its authority in history. Those who forget God are supposedly in no worse shape in history, and perhaps far better shape, than those who remember Him.
Social Theory
Forgetfulness is an aspect of point two of the biblical covenant model: hierarchy. The covenantally forgetful man forgets something quite specific: his complete dependence on the grace of God. Moses here listed the external blessings that God had given them in the wilderness, a hostile place that would not sustain a large population. They had received water out of the rock and a daily supply of food. In the wilderness, they had been kept humble and subordinate by their reliance on God's miracles. God would soon give them blessings after they conquered the Promised Land. The transfer of inheritance from Canaan to Israel would be an aspect of God's comprehensive deliverance of the nation out of bondage and into freedom. Their freedom would initially be accompanied by a discontinuous increase in their external wealth: military victory. Then this wealth would multiply.
Miracles as Welfare The move from Egypt to Canaan is a model of the move from slavery to freedom. The model of a free society is not Israel's miraculous wilderness experience, where God gave them manna and removed many burdens of entropy. The predictable miracles of the wilderness era were designed to humble them, not raise them up. The wilderness experience was not marked by economic growth but by economic stagnation and total dependence. They were not allowed to save extra portions of manna, which rotted (Ex. 16:20). On the move continually, they could not dig wells, plant crops, or build houses. At best, they may have been able to increase their herds, as nomads do (Num. 3:45; 20:4; 32:1). The wilderness experience was a means of teaching them that God acts in history to sustain His people. The wilderness economy with its regular miracles was not to become an ideal toward which covenant-keepers should strive. Israel longed for escape from the wilderness. It was God's curse on the exodus generation that they would die in the wilderness.
The wilderness economy was a welfare economy. The Israelites were supplied with basic necessities even though the people did not work. But they lacked variety. People without the ability to feed themselves were fed by God: same old diet. People without the ability to clothe themselves were clothed by God: same old fashions. Israel wandered aimlessly because the nation had refused to march into war. They were not fit to lead, and so they had to follow. They were welfare clients; they had no authority over the conditions of their existence. They took what was handed out to them. And like welfare clients generally, they constantly complained that their life style just wasn't good enough (Num. 11). They had been unwilling to pay the price of freedom: conquest (Num. 14). God therefore cursed them to endure four decades of welfare economics. The only good thing about the wilderness welfare program was that it did not use the State as the agency of positive blessings. No one was coerced into paying for anyone else's life style. God used a series of miracles to sustain them all. There was no coercive program of wealth redistribution. Israel was a welfare society, not a welfare State.
The lure of the welfare State remains with responsibility-avoiding men in every era. It was this lure which attracted the crowds to Jesus. "Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled" (John 6:26). They wanted a king who would feed them. They viewed Jesus as a potential candidate for king because He could multiply bread. They associated free food with political authority. He knew this, and He departed from them (John 6:11-15).
Men in their rebellion against God want to believe in a State that can heal them. They believe in salvation by law. They prefer to live under the authority of a messianic State, meaning a healer State, rather than under freedom. They want to escape the burdens of personal and family responsibility in this world of cursed scarcity. They want to live as children live, as recipients of bounty without a price tag. They are willing to sacrifice their liberty and the liberty of others in order to attain this goal.
One mark of spiritual immaturity is the quest for economic miracles: stones into bread. The price of this alchemical wealth is always the same: the worship of Satan. "And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God" (Matt. 4:3-4). Modern welfare economics teaches that the State can provide such miracles through positive economic policy, i.e., by taking wealth from some and transferring it to others, either directly or through monetary inflation. This belief is the presupposition of the Keynesian revolution, which dominated twentieth-century economic thought, 1936-1990. John Maynard Keynes actually described credit expansion -- the heart of his system -- as the "miracle . . . of turning a stone into bread."(1)
When Israel crossed into the Promised Land, the identifying marks of their wilderness subordination were removed by God: the manna and their permanent clothing. This annulment of the welfare economy was necessary for their spiritual maturation and their liberation. The marks of their subordination to God would henceforth be primarily confessional and ethical. The only food miracle that would remain in Israel would be the triple crop two years prior to a jubilee (Lev. 25:21). God promised to substitute a new means of Israel's preservation: economic growth. No longer would they be confined to manna and the same old clothing. Now they would be able to multiply their wealth. The zero-growth world of the welfare society would be replaced by the pro-growth world of covenantal remembrance.
The Power to Get Wealth This passage includes this command: "But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day" (v. 18). This verse is one of the most important verses in the Bible regarding wealth. Covenantally speaking, it is the Bible's most important verse on the nature and purpose of wealth. It states that wealth is a means of God's establishment of His covenant.
The covenant is established by grace. God brings covenant-breakers under His covenant through adoption. Israel's adoption by God is the biblical model (Ezek. 16:6-13). Adoption takes place by God's declarative judicial act: God announces His lawful claim on His children. God told Moses: "And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD, Israel is my son, even my firstborn: And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn" (Ex. 4:22-23). God's claim superseded Pharaoh's false claim of ownership. God's deliverance of Israel out of Egypt's bondage was His declaration of a superior claim of jurisdiction. Liberty under God was the alternative to servitude under Pharaoh.
God delivered Israel progressively out of bondage: out of Egypt, through the wilderness, and into Canaan. So, the judicial reality of Israel's definitive liberation by God was established visibly through Israel's progressive deliverance out of the burdens of Adam's curse. Israel survived in the wilderness through a series of miracles: the overcoming of scarcity (manna and water), the overcoming of entropy's curse (wear and tear), and the overcoming of their enemies in battle.
Why the need for progressive deliverance? Why not instant liberation? Moses gave them the answer: their need for humility. God had humbled them in order to prove them (vv. 2, 16). They had not been morally fit to inherit immediately after their deliverance from Egypt. The first generation was still a nation of slaves. They had the slave's mentality. They could not forget the onions of Egypt (Num. 11:5). They remembered onions and forgot God. This element of covenantal forgetfulness would remain Israel's great temptation until their return from the exile. They kept forgetting that God was the source of their blessings. They kept returning to idolatry.
Their power to get wealth in the Promised Land was analogous to their experience of miracles in the wilderness. The wilderness miracles were designed to strengthen their faith in a God who delivers His people in history and who fulfills His promises to His people in history. The problem was that the continuity of these miracles became a part of Israel's predictable environment. Israel began to take them for granted. Moses twice repeated the fact that God had humbled them in the wilderness (vv. 2, 16). Moses wanted them to understand that the threat of being humbled is always present with the promise of covenantal blessings in history. The wilderness miracles had been designed by God to remind Israel that God was their deliverer. Moses then extended this principle: wealth was to remind them that God is their deliverer.
God delivers men visibly through covenantal blessings. These blessings can be measured: "And when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied. . ." (v. 13). What is visible to all testifies to the existence of a covenantal realm of bondage and deliverance that is invisible. This is a manifestation of the covenantal principle of representation (point two): the visible testifies to the existence of the invisible. "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead" (Rom. 1:20a). Jesus' miracles of healing were examples of this principle of representation. They authenticated His messianic office under God.(2)
The visible blessings of God in history are to remind men of the blessings of God in eternity. The visible curses of God in history are to remind men of the curses of God in eternity. But in Old Covenant Israel, there were no clear distinctions between eternal negative sanctions and eternal positive sanctions. Not until the last section of the Book of Daniel was the doctrine of the bodily resurrection clearly enunciated (Dan. 12:2-3). The grave seemed to cover all men equally. The distinction between paradise and hell is a New Testament doctrine. So, the focus of Old Covenant covenantal sanctions was historical.
Economic Growth
Moses enunciated here for the first time in recorded history the doctrine of permanent economic growth. In all other ancient societies, history was seen as cyclical. Men viewed history much as they viewed nature. The fruitfulness of spring and summer would inevitably be overcome in the fall and winter. The idea of linear history -- temporal beginning and end -- was not believed because the covenant-breaking world rejected the cosmic judicial basis of linear history: creation, Fall, redemption, and temporal consummation. The twin idols of nature and history were cyclical in covenant-breaking religion. Only the new idol of autonomous philosophy offered some possibility of linear development: the growth of knowledge. But this came late in ancient man's history. Philosophy appeared in Greece at about the time that Israel was sent into exile and ceased worshipping the carved idols of Canaan.
In Israel, the doctrine of compound economic growth (Deut. 8) preceded by 900 years the doctrine of the bodily resurrection (Dan. 12:2). Moses taught Israel that compound economic growth is possible through covenantal faithfulness. If Israel remembered God as the source of their wealth -- an act of covenantal subordination -- and continued to obey His law as a nation, then God would shower them with even more wealth. This wealth was designed to confirm the covenant. God's covenantal blessings and cursings had been visible in the wilderness, Moses reminded them. The curses were designed to humble them, he said. Then what of the prophesied blessings? Moses was equally clear: they were designed to confirm the covenant. God would continue to deal with Israel covenantally, which meant that they could expect visible blessings and visible cursings in terms of their own ethical response to these blessings. Do not forget who provided these blessings, Moses warned, when blessings multiply. These external blessings would not be covenantally neutral. They would be signs of the continuing covenantal bond between God and Israel.
Economic growth was an aspect of the covenant. The presence of the covenant should be recognized in the compounding of wealth. If visible blessings confirmed the covenant over time -- a progressive fulfillment -- then economic growth was in principle as open-ended as the covenant. The covenant is perpetual; so is the possibility of long-term economic growth. Economic growth would not automatically cease because nature is cyclical. Economic growth would compound through the seasons because the covenant transcends the seasons.
Sanctification is progressive. The blessings of God are supposed to compound because the visible confirmation of God's covenant in history is designed to reconfirm the terms of the covenant to each succeeding generation. Each generation is to experience positive feedback: blessings, remembering, obedience, blessings. This process of economic growth is what makes possible an ever-increasing inheritance. God's gracious kingdom grant is progressively appropriated by the heirs through the progressive confirmation of the covenant. The goal is the conquest of the whole earth through conversion and confirmation. "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: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen" (Matt. 28:18-20).(3)
The Idea of Progress and Inheritance The ideal of economic growth parallels the idea of progress in history. Moses made it clear that the covenantal faithfulness of Israel was not a static ideal. History is progressive because corporate sanctification is progressive. It is not simply that history is linear; it is also progressive. This section of Deuteronomy is important because it sets forth the ideal of progress. God had delivered Israel from bondage. He had led them through the wilderness. Now, in fulfillment of His promise to Abraham, He was about to lead them into the Promised Land. In the Promised Land, they could legitimately expect the multiplication of both their numbers and their wealth. "And when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied" (v. 13). This multiplication process is basic to the fulfillment of the dominion covenant given to Adam and Noah. But this process is at bottom covenantal, not autonomous. It is an aspect of God's positive historical sanctions in response to corporate covenantal faithfulness.
To sustain corporate progress, two ideas must be widespread in a culture: the idea of linear history and the idea of progressive corporate sanctification. When the idea of linear history is absent, men do not sustain hope in the future of corporate progress, for progress must inevitably be swallowed up in the retrogressive phase of the next historical cycle. The Great Reversal will overcome the hopes and dreams of all men. It will cut short every program of social improvement. The discontinuity of reversal will always overcome the continuity of progress.(4) In short, if history is not linear, the visible inheritance will eventually be destroyed. The visible distinctions between covenant-breaking societies and covenant-keeping societies will disappear or be made operationally irrelevant by the magnitude of the Great Reversal. Such an outlook requires the following re-writing of the second commandment: "Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and doing the same unto them that love me, and keep my commandments."
When the idea of progressive corporate sanctification is absent, men do not sustain hope in the either the supposed mechanism or the supposed organicism of progress. Progress is, at best, limited to an elite core of individuals: a matter of inner discipline, secret knowledge, capital accumulation (e.g., money-lending), or mystical retreat from history. When a society loses faith in corporate progress, its citizens lose a major incentive to forego consumption in the present for the sake of greater future income. Men become more present-oriented than those in societies that retain faith in corporate progress. They apply a higher rate of discount (interest) to future income. The rate of economic growth slows as the rate of saving drops. If there is no possibility of sustained covenantal progress based on a distinction between the earthly fate of the wicked vs. the earthly fate of the righteous, then the present consumption of capital is the recommended policy. Solomon summarized this view: "There is a vanity which is done upon the earth; that there be just men, unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked; again, there be wicked men, to whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous: I said that this also is vanity. Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun" (Eccl. 8:14-15). In short, if there is no visible corporate sanctification, then the visible corporate inheritance will also be dissipated.
The pagan ancient world did not have a doctrine of compound economic growth because it had no doctrine of sustainable corporate progress. J. B. Bury wrote in 1920 that the idea of progress requires faith in the inevitability of mankind's autonomous advancement. This advancement must not be the result of any outside intervention; it must be man's gift to man.(5) It is not sufficient for the development of the idea of progress that men recognize the existence of advancement in the past. The question is this: Must there be inevitable long-term advancement in the future?(6) Belief in progress is an act of faith.(7) Classical Greece did not possess this faith.(8) "But, if some relative progress might be admitted, the general view of Greek philosophers was that they were living in a period of inevitable degeneration and decay -- inevitable because it was prescribed by the nature of the universe."(9) As Bury noted, Greek science "did little or nothing to transform the conditions of life or to open any vista into the future."(10) What was true of Greek thought was equally true of every ancient society except Israel. The world was in the grip of an idea: cyclical history.
Science was stillborn in every society in which belief in cyclical history was dominant.(11) Physicist and historian Stanley Jaki has presented a series of masterful expositions of the relationship between the Greeks' view of cyclical history and their failure to extend the science they discovered. The Christian ideal of progress made possible the advancement of Western science; it was not Renaissance science that launched the modern idea of progress. Contrary to Ludwig Edelstein,(12) the Greeks did not take seriously the idea of progress, for they believed, among other anti-progress ideas, in the Great Year of the cosmos: the 26,000-year rotation of the heavens, an idea that was denounced by several church fathers from Origen to Augustine.(13) Belief in this Great Year was common in many ancient societies. It was important in Platonic thought.(14) Priests and astrologers noticed the precession of the equinoxes.(15) Ancient astronomers knew that every few thousand years, the pole star changes. We know today that the wobbling of the earth's axis is the cause; the earth whirls like a spinning top with an inclined axis. Ancient societies explained this odd movement in terms of the unbalanced rotation of the heavens. The heavens were seen as rotating around the earth as if the stars were part of a system analogous to a broken mill.(16) Paralleling this, classical thought developed the cyclical idea of an original golden age which was followed by degeneration,(17) and which will be followed by a new golden age.
Edelstein sees the documentary evidence of classical optimism as being "widely dispersed"(18) -- another phrase for "scattered and unsystematic." He sees the idea as "popular in antiquity," but his presentation of the scattered and fragmentary evidence is insufficient to prove his case. Edelstein, as is the case with the vast majority of modern historians, sees in Renaissance science the recovery of the lost classical scientific heritage.(19) Yet the primary origin of the details of Renaissance science was the deliberately unacknowledged science of the late middle ages, a fact demonstrated by physicist Pierre Duhem in ten detailed volumes. The demonstrated fact of the medieval origins of modern science has been ignored or actively suppressed by the humanist academic world. The first five volumes of Duhem's Le Système du Monde were in print in 1917; the second five volumes appeared only in 1954-59. In between, the French academic community and publishing world suppressed their publication because they undermined one of the most cherished myths of the Enlightenment, namely, that medieval science was "medieval." The story of this exercise in humanist academic censorship has been written by Jaki.(20) Duhem is still unknown to most historians. An exception is Robert Nisbet, who offered two brief, favorable sentences in his History of the Idea of Progress (1980).(21) Yet Nisbet repeatedly relies on Edelstein's book to defend his own view that the classical world accepted the idea of progress.(22)
It was Christianity, with its doctrine of creation, Fall, redemption, and the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20), that brought together the Old Covenant idea of God's positive corporate sanctions and the New Covenant idea of world transformation. The twin doctrines of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ and His ascension to the right hand of God made possible the overcoming of the more cyclical Old Covenant pattern of man's ethical Fall, his ethical redemption by God, and a subsequent fall. Christ's resurrection and ascension were definitive historical acts of victory over the familiar cycle of fall-redemption-fall. "And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept" (I Cor. 15:17-20). Christ's bodily resurrection set forth the personal model; His bodily ascension set forth the civilizational model. The ascension proved His post-resurrection claim of total power over history (Matt. 28:18-20).
Finitude: Things and Time Twice, God told mankind to multiply: Adam (Gen. 1:28) and Noah (Gen. 9:1). This command was a call to fill the earth. This is the dominion covenant. But it was also necessarily a call for man to acknowledge the limits of time. At some point in the future, the dominion covenant will be fulfilled. That day will mark the end of history. "Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet" (I Cor. 15:24-25). At that point, a new covenantal order will come into existence: an eternal order.
There is no possibility of permanent long-term growth in a finite universe. Nothing compounds indefinitely. At some point, the population reaches the limits of growth. At any positive rate of growth, wealth approaches infinity as a limit when the curve turns upward and becomes what we call an exponential curve.(23)
The Realm of the Quantum
The only thing in our recent history -- or any history -- that does seem to grow without meaningful limits is the capacity and speed of computer chips, which doubles at least every two years, possibly every eighteen months.(24) At this rate of growth, the computer chip will equal man's brain capacity sometime in the second half of the twenty-first century. Then, two years later, it will be twice as large. Two years after that, four times as large, and so on. If this growth of chip capacity really is a law -- Moore's law rather than Moore's observation -- then men will face in the mid-twenty-first century the implications of a continuing theme in modern philosophy and, more graphically, science fiction: the replacement of man the decision-maker with one of man's tools. The data storage capacity of the microchip will equal man's brain in, say, 2050. Then, less than two years later, this chip capacity will double. And so on, ad infinitum. If knowledge is power, then impersonal computer systems will gain power to the extent that their computational ability is equated with knowledge.(25)
But what of the cost of manufacturing these chips? The cost of building a single chip production plant is running into the billions of dollars. At some point, the cost of pursuing Moore's law -- the doubling of microchip capacity every two years -- should reach the limits of capital available to build the production facilities. The big questions are these: Will the chips ever be used to create less expensive chip production facilities? Will microchips be used to design microfactories? Will the capacity of the chips overcome the cost of capital? Will the "intelligence" of the chips lower the cost of their production? If so, then we will have arrived at a state of affairs in which the law of decreasing returns is overcome in one area of life, and the most important area economically: the cost of obtaining usable information (though not necessarily wisdom).
Is this state of affairs conceivable? Yes. Raymond Kurzweil, a developer of computerized machines that convert written text into voice patterns, thereby allowing the blind to read, has stated that most of the cost of a computer comes from the chips, and all but about two percent of the cost of the chips derives from the cost of the information embodied on them.(26) George Gilder concludes: "Driving the technology in the quantum era will not be Goliath fabs [fabrication factories] that can produce millions of units of one design but flexible design and manufacturing systems that can produce a relatively few units of thousands of designs."(27)
The linear increase in the speed of the chips seems to violate a fundamental economic law: the law of diminishing returns. But even if exponential linearity is possible in the quantum realm of the microcosm, as Gilder asserts, men so far can gain access to this microcosmic realm only through physical production of the gateways into the microcosm: the chips themselves. The non-quantum realm of chip manufacturing is still governed by the law of diminishing returns, as enormous capital losses in chip manufacturing testify from time to time. Yet even if this ever ceases to be true, there is still no reason to accept Gilder's moral vision: "Overthrowing matter, humanity also escapes from the traps and compulsions of pleasure into a higher morality of spirit."(28) Gilder has confused the realm of the quantum with the human spirit, a mistake going back to Kant's theory of the noumenal realm. The antinomies separating the realm of the quantum from the realm of molecular reality are analogous to those separating Kant's noumenal from his phenomenal. The impersonal quantum realm has no ethics; neither does the impersonal phenomenal realm of cause-and-effect science. This is the problem with Kant's nature/freedom or science/personality dualism. The God of the Bible is shoved out of both realms. So is His law. So are His sanctions.
Population Growth Consumes Space
We live in the space-time continuum, however much we can make use of quantum physics. We are not subatomic creatures. The impossibility of indefinite compound growth of both humanity and man's wealth points to the limit of time. There will come a time when the physical room for mankind's multiplication will no longer allow any extension of the covenantal process of dominion. At that point, the Genesis command to multiply must end. A new cosmic order will be imposed by God, i.e., a new covenantal order (II Pet. 3:10). Progressive sanctification in history will have fulfilled the terms of the dominion covenant.
Our world is generally governed by the laws of thermodynamics, even though there are exceptions, e.g., miracles.(29) The first law of thermodynamics establishes the fixity of matter-energy: the finitude of the creation. This law is as important covenantally as the second law, which establishes a one-way move from potential energy to used-up energy that can no longer do any work. Both laws point to finitude. Both laws establish theoretical limits to growth. Sections of the universe can be rearranged by man, but to do this, man must tap the energy or matter of the universe. This matter-energy is finite. Because of the cursed nature of the second law, so is time. Time's arrow moves in only one direction.
At today's rates of change, the second law seems to establish a cosmic limit of eons of time. How much time, no one can say for certain, but the estimates tossed out by cosmologists are never less than tens of billions of years. In stark contrast, human population growth accelerates the coming of the end of time, for it approaches infinity as a limit at an accelerating rate after the curve becomes exponential. The tens of billions of years supposedly remaining until either the heat death of the universe or the collapse back to the omega point of another Big Bang -- though smaller than the first one, says the second law -- are covenantally little more than conceptual side shows. Astronomical time becomes irrelevant eschatologically in the face of man's compounding population growth. What is significant eschatologically is population growth: the biological ability of man's population to reach the environmental limits of growth within a few centuries, or a few millennia if life outside the earth is environmentally sustainable. At two percent growth per annum, it will not take tens of billions of years for mankind to fill up the cosmos. Six billion people growing at two percent per year become 327 billion people in two centuries, 2.4 trillion in three centuries, or (I think improbably) 52 quadrillion, 600 trillion in eight centuries.(30)
Of course, there can be catastrophes. Population growth can be reversed. So can economic growth. But the West's attainment of sustained positive economic growth rates in the range of over two percent per year since the late eighteenth century has placed before mankind a believable vision of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. When it comes to compound growth, a little goes a long way remarkably fast.
The Zero-Growth Movement The ideology underlying the zero-growth movement -- both population growth and economic growth -- rests on a recognition that mankind will reach its environmental limits to growth relatively soon unless the compounding process ceases. There is a legitimate sense of foreboding associated with this temporal limit, a realization that man's definition of himself and his meaning in history will change radically when mankind's population reaches its environmental limits, which will not take two centuries if present growth rates continue. This sense of foreboding is the sense of impending doom, either eschatological or cultural -- the transformation of the Enlightenment's commitment to growth. The defenders of the zero growth school of thought call for coercive State action to begin to impose judicial limits to growth now, before mankind's population reaches its environmental limits. They want men to begin to come to grips emotionally with the limits of growth. They correctly sense that there is some eschatological connection between nature's limits and man's temporal limits. There is a connection: the fulfillment of the dominion covenant and therefore its temporal annulment, either through a new revelation from God, which the New Testament does not allow (Rev. 22:18), or else the end of time.
Biblically speaking, long-term compound growth of both men and per capita wealth is the result of covenantal faithfulness. The judicial condition for maintaining such growth is freedom. The zero growth movement must therefore overcome freedom in the name of the environment. It is quite open in its call to place political restraints on economic freedom. Mankind's ability to multiply both man and things over time is seen as the great threat to the survival of "the good life," as defined by academics and intellectuals who have already attained historically great wealth, especially leisure. If the price of extending such freedom and therefore such wealth to the masses of humanity is the continuation of economic growth, and if humanity keeps multiplying because of its increasing wealth, therefore making mandatory even greater economic growth, then the zero growth movement is ready to establish a new international world order that will use coercion to end the growth process.
The zero growth movement is a movement of "haves" who are determined to keep most of what they have and deny an opportunity to the "have nots." The multiplication of scarce positional goods -- goods that reflect social status and which lose their utility as status goods when lots of people can buy them(31) -- threatens the present social order in which the rich and their well-paid spokesmen are visibly on top. By calling a halt to aggregate economic growth, the zero growth movement seeks to stabilize today's production of positional goods and the wealth to buy them.
The zero growth movement is to positional goods in general what California's Coastal Land Commission is to socially prime waterfront area property. Such property would lose its status as socially prime if agents of the middle class could buy up valuable land and build time share apartments and condominiums for re-sale. Thus, the land's present owners have used the State to prohibit such purchases. In the name of preserving the natural environment, the present owners of this highly unnatural environment -- expensive homes, electricity lines, phone lines, etc. -- keep out the riff-raff. They have made it illegal for their money-seeking neighbors to sell property to your agents and mine: real estate developers. The phrase "real estate developers" is a hated phrase in socially prime circles, for it means "the middle class."(32)
Meanwhile, the middle class does the same thing to the lower middle class through zoning commissions. Zoning commissions keep apartments and mobile home parks out of middle-class neighborhoods. The freedom of buying and selling threatens today's distribution of positional real estate. Existing owners of such real estate cannot afford to buy all of these goods, so they use the State to restrict such purchases by newcomers. This raises the social value of existing property by lowering its market value. This is a State subsidy to those present owners of real estate who seek maximum status income rather than maximum money income.
Idolatry, Autonomy, and Power Moses warned them of the major temptation that lay ahead: "And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth" (v. 17). The wealth that would inevitably come from God as a way to confirm their keeping of the covenant would lead them into temptation. The covenant's ethically governed cause-and-effect sanctions in history would not sustain their faith in God. Israel would forget the sovereign Giver. They would attribute their wealth to another sovereign: themselves.
We know that Israel constantly worshipped idols until the era of the exile. These idols were fertility gods. Yet Moses' warning did not identify idolatry as the great threat to Israel, but rather self-worship. Moses did not warn them that they would attribute to idols the source of their wealth, yet this is what they did do for the next eight centuries. Israelites did not sacrifice their children by requiring them to pass through secular universities; they required them to pass through fire (II Ki. 17:17; Ezek. 23:37). How can we reconcile this seeming discrepancy?
The pre-exilic idol was a representational link between man and the supernatural. By making their requests known to the idol, men sought their own ends. But the idol was not regarded as autonomous; it was part of the continuum between man and cosmic sources of power. The idol had to be constructed by man. This creative act transferred to man partial authority over the process of environmental manipulation. The god represented by the idol required man to become part of this creative process. Without man and the work of his hands, the god represented by the idol would lack something important: man's piety and fear. The god would also not be fed. For paganism, unlike Old Covenant religion, sacrifices and oblations were the care and feeding of gods.(33)
Pagan religion is a system of mutually beneficial transactions. Man gets what he wants by placating a god who wants something from man. Man and god are part of a larger cosmic process in which each of them achieves his goals through a division of labor. Both man and his god confront impersonal fate, impersonal chance, or both, depending on the situation, and each requires the services of the other in order better to attain his own goals. Neither can claim absolute autonomy, for each is entwined in impersonal cosmic forces, and each works most effectively in cooperation with the other.
Then in what sense could the covenant-breaking Israelite say to himself that the power of his hands had brought him his wealth? Only in the sense of his shared authority in the process of wealth-getting. He would beg before an idol, and the god represented by this idol would then include him in the process of wealth-creation. It was man's request and man's ritual obeisance that made possible the creation of wealth. An idolatrous man would subordinate himself to an idol in some proscribed sense -- some set of formal ritual boundaries -- but not in the way that a covenant-keeper subordinates himself to a God who is completely autonomous and above the creation's processes. In idolatrous religion, there is no complete autonomy, but there is also no complete subordination. Both pagan man and his god were involved in a cosmic battle against impersonal forces and boundaries. Sometimes they joined forces; sometimes they did not. Pagan man saw his gods as only relatively more powerful than he was. It was a matter of degree. Thus, by linking himself to an idol, man could increase his likelihood of getting his own way by conforming ritually to a relatively more powerful being. But classical paganism saw man and god as co-laborers in the fields of fate or luck/chance.(34)
By placating a god through idolatrous worship, pagan man believed that he could in some way manipulate this god into doing man's will. Man's cleverness in getting a good deal determined the degree of his success as a bargainer. Man knew that he could not get something for nothing out of the deity, but he sought transactions that were weighed heavily in man's favor: something for practically nothing. The closer he came to this favorable exchange rate, the better he could claim, "My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth." By getting a god to do man's will on man's terms, pagan religion sought greater autonomy. What pagan man did not want was a god who drove a hard bargain.
Autonomy as Power Over Nature
Man's quest for autonomy is a quest for power: self-made law. In the West, what is called autonomy is power over nature. To gain such power, man requires knowledge of nature's processes and sufficient capital to exploit this knowledge. Law is generally regarded as natural, i.e., outside of man yet discoverable by man. In the most consistent forms of humanism, however, law is seen as man-made, i.e., an order imposed on the "raw stuff" of nature by man's creative mind. This suggestion seems crazy to most "common sense" rationalists, but it is inherent in Kant's revision of philosophical categories. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant concluded: "Thus the order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could never find them in appearances, had not we ourselves, or the nature of our mind, originally set them there."(35) So, the judicial debate in the West has been between the advocates of judge-discovered law (e.g., English common law) and legislator-made law (e.g., European civil law).(36) Neither side accepts the legitimacy of God-revealed law. Such a view would undermine man's claim to autonomy.
In contrast to Western rationalism, Eastern man seeks an escape from law and nature by immersion in the cosmic unity, which is impersonal and non-judgmental. Buddhist D. T. Suzuki announced: "Buddhism does not condemn this life and universe for their wickedness as was done by some religious teachers and philosophers. The so-called wickedness is not radical in nature and life. It is merely superficial."(37) The Eastern mystic sees both nature and law as illusions, as fetters on true understanding. But the nirvana of selflessness involves a surrender of personal autonomy in order to gain autonomy from nature and law: incorporation into the monistic one.(38) There is also pantheism, which completely denies man's autonomy and seeks immersion in monistic nature. But Eastern mystical man is as adamant as Western rational man regarding the illegitimacy of God-revealed law in the sense of publicly declared universal standards. Revealed law points to an autonomous God who dictates to an eternally subordinate man. Eastern man is willing to forfeit his autonomy for the sake of ontological wholeness, but only to impersonal, monistic, non-judgmental forces.
Autonomy is a unique characteristic of God. God alone establishes the law. Man is a creature; he must conform himself to nature's laws or else seek to escape from nature, which also means escaping from meaning and sensibility. So, what Western man means by autonomy is a knowledge of impersonal law which gives him the ability to gain control over nature for his own ends. Knowledge is power. While man does not make the law, as the discoverer of law he can use it to manipulate nature. He seeks a profitable bargain from nature. It is not that he created the law; he merely exploits it for his own purposes. This is also the goal of idolatrous pagan man: not autonomy from his deity but a cost-effective manipulation of nature through his deity. Modern man subordinates himself to an impersonal law-order with limited jurisdiction him in order to gain a lever over nature. Similarly, pagan man subordinates himself to a personal deity of limited jurisdiction him in order to gain a lever over nature. Modern man acknowledges his subordination to law in general in order to exercise control over things in particular. Pagan man acknowledges his subordination to a local deity in order to exercise control over things in particular. Modern man hopes to use the law to beat the law. Pagan man hopes to use the deity to beat the deity.
The Curse on the Quest for Autonomy Moses foretold blessings if Israel obeyed God: an extension of the nation's wealth beyond the inheritance from Canaan. But if they rebelled, they could expect an analogous disinheritance: "And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God" (vv. 19-20).
Here Moses raised the issue of false worship, which is always enmeshed in the quest for autonomy. While they would claim that the might of their hands had created their wealth, in fact they would worship false gods. They would claim autonomy, but they would practice idolatry. They would claim to be in control, but in fact they would find themselves in moral bondage. God would then apply his corporate sanctions in history. They would be expelled from Canaan as surely as the Canaanites had been. Not all of the Canaanites were expelled by Israel (Josh. 15:63; cf. 17:12-13). Similarly, not all of the Israelites were taken into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar; he left the poorest people behind (II Ki. 24:14).
God promised to visit the same kinds of sins with the same negative sanctions. Inside the boundaries of Israel, false worship would no longer be tolerated. The Promised Land was under the covenant. The nation would visibly come under negative sanctions if they worshipped other gods.
So, long-term economic growth cannot be sustained by any society unless its members honor the terms of the law. This does not mean that only confessing nations can experience economic growth. It does mean that when prosperous nations grow lax about enforcing the biblical principles of civil law, they will find that their wealth dissipates. The blessings of external covenant-keeping will fade when men cease to honor the civil principles of biblical law: private property, freedom of exchange, restitution, honest weights and measures, and so on. But will men honor these principles even though they do not honor the God who established them? This question has not been resolved, since men learned the wealth formula of private property and limited civil government only since the late eighteenth century, in a Protestant nation.
Conclusion Deuteronomy 8 sets forth the basis of compound economic growth. It ties sustained economic growth to corporate covenant-keeping. In doing so, it establishes eschatological limits to growth. In a finite world, nothing grows forever. Therefore, long-term economic growth as a predictable reward for corporate covenant-keeping becomes a testimony to the potential brevity of history. This brevity can be overcome through corporate covenant-breaking -- the quest for autonomy -- and God's predictable negative historical sanctions. Nevertheless, Deuteronomy 8 moved the discussion of time from the cosmos to the covenant. It moved from cosmically imposed cyclical history(39) to God-imposed linear history. In doing so, this passage broke with ancient cosmology. Modern evolutionism's cosmology is equally incompatible with it.
Covenantal history is not subsumed under vast quantities of cosmic time; on the contrary, it is determinative of cosmic time. Positive covenant sanctions, not the second law of thermodynamics, determine the limits of history. Deuteronomy 8 establishes not merely the covenantal possibility of compound economic growth but the covenantal requirement of such growth. A failure of a society to achieve this is a sign of its covenant-breaking status, whether permanent or temporary.
This brings me to a conclusion: the zero growth movement is a covenant-breaking movement with a covenant-denying eschatology. Humanism's "limits to growth" philosophy is misconstrued. It focuses on physical limits to growth -- inescapable in a finite world -- in order to call men to impose anti-growth policies through political coercion. The biblical goal is to call on mankind to extend existing environmental limits to growth through production, including especially the production of additional human beings. Our awareness of the existence of final limits to growth should inspire us to pursue growth through personal capital accumulation and the de-capitalization of the State. The environmental limit of time is our great enemy, not the environmental limit of raw materials, including living space. By extending man's dominion to the final limits of the environment's ability to sustain human life, man reaches the eschatological limit of time. It is our God-assigned task to fill the earth, not to impose political limits on growth.(40) The biblical concept of "fill the earth" does mean there are final limits.
The traditional plea of the foreign missions fund-raiser is woefully incomplete: "When that last sinner is brought to saving faith in Jesus Christ, Christ will return in glory!"(41) Christ will return in glory when mankind has fulfilled the dominion covenant, which includes the Great Commission.(42) That last sinner, whoever he or she may be, will complete the Great Commission, but only after mankind has completed the dominion covenant. The ideal of growth will never end in history. It is an eschatological corollary of history. Our task as covenant-keepers is to bring on the end of history by working to reach mankind's limits to growth.
Footnotes:
1. Keynes (anonymous), Paper of the British Experts (April 8, 1943), cited in Ludwig von Mises, "Stones into Bread, the Keynesian Miracle," Plain Talk (1948), reprinted in Henry Hazlitt (ed.), The Critics of Keynesian Economics (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1960), p. 306.
2. "And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee. And, behold, certain of the scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemeth. And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts? For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house. And he arose, and departed to his house" (Matt. 9:2-7).
3. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).
4. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), chaps. 4, 7, 8.
5. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Growth and Origin (rev. ed.; New York: Dover, [1932] 1955), p. 5.
6. Ibid., p. 7.
7. Ibid., p. 4.
8. Idem.
9. Ibid., p. 9.
10. Ibid., p. 7.
11. Stanley L. Jaki, Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe (rev. ed.; Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986). Cf. Jaki, The Savior of Science (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988), ch. 1; The Only Chaos and Other Essays (Lanham, Maryland: Academic Press of America, 1990), ch. 5.
12. Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967).
13. Jaki, The Only Chaos, pp. 74-75.
14. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols., The Spell of Plato (4th ed.; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1963), I, p. 19, and the footnotes: pp. 208-19.
15. See any standard encyclopedia under "precession."
16. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill: An essay on myth and the future of time (Boston: Godine, [1969] 1977), ch. 9.
17. Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 109-201.
18. Edelstein, Idea of Progress, p. xxxii.
19. Ibid., p. 141.
20. Stanley L. Jaki, "Science and Censorship: Hélène Duhem and the Publication of the 'Système du Monde,'" Intercollegiate Review (Winter 1985-86), pp. 41-49. Cf. Jaki, Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984).
21. Robert A. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), pp. 78, 101.
22. Ibid., ch. 1. Nisbet was heavily influenced by his teacher, Frederick Teggert, who compiled a book of classical references to progress: The Idea of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949).
23. Gary North, "The Theology of the Exponential Curve," The Freeman (May 1970); reprinted in Gary North, An Introduction to Christian Economics (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), ch. 8.
24. This is known as Moore's law. This "law" was articulated in the 1960's by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corp., the creator of the modern microcomputer chip. A similar relationship law is Metcalfe's law: the cost-effectiveness of computer networks grows exponentially to the number and power of the terminals. George Gilder in 1997 added a third "law" governing telecommunications bandwidth. He forecasted that the supply of bandwidth will triple every year for the next 25 years. Gilder Technology Report (Feb. 1997), p. 1.
25. There is a science fiction story of an interstellar federation that decides to link its computers. A scientist throws the switch. The first question that the federation's representative asks it is this: "Is there a God?" The answer: "There is now." The scientist reaches to disconnect the switch, but a bolt of lightning comes from the ceiling and fuses it.
26. Cited in George Gilder, Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 328.
27. Ibid., p. 329.
28. Ibid., p. 381.
29. See Chapter 18, above.
30. A 2% rate has a doubling date of about 36 years: 73/2.
31. Fred Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 11.
32. Thomas Sowell, Pink and Brown People and Other Controversial Essays (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1981), p. 104. This essay appeared originally in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (March 23, 1979): "Those Phony Environmentalists."
33. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, vol. 3 of The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 148.
34. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, [1944] 1957), pp. 157-59.
35. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), A 125. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 147.
36. Cf. N. Stephen Kinsella, "Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society," Journal of Libertarian Studies, XI (Summer 1995), pp. 134-81.
37. D. T. Suzuki, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (New York: Schocken Books, [1907] 1963), p. 128. Schocken Books is a Jewish publishing house.
38. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), pp. 364-67.
39. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959).
40. State land, including rain forests (such as on the Olympic coast of Washington State) and jungles, should be auctioned off by the State to the highest bidders. The income generated by such sales should then be used to pay off government debt. Government debt is a great civil evil in our day. As the supply of privately owned rain forests and jungles grows smaller, their prices will go up. Corporations or other well-capitalized groups can then buy them up to construct rain forest preserves or jungle preserves, turning them into non-profit wild life parks, or scientific research centers, or profit-seeking adventure theme parks. "Save the tigers" will become an ecologically attainable goal when the breeding of tigers for tiger-hunting game preserves becomes profitable. Meanwhile, it is not the State's job to set aside wild life preserves at taxpayers' expense, any more than it is the State's job to set aside preserves for smallpox germs. When you hear the politically correct words, "protect the environment from man," think "smallpox." If men are willing and able to pay for cleared land where a snake-infested jungle now stands, it should be cut down and plowed under. This is for private owners of jungles to decide, not State bureaucrats. An ecological problem today is this: men are burning down government-owned rain forests to get access to free land. When a private firm can increase its wealth by burning down part of a government-owned rain forest, the government has in effect posted a large sign in front of every rain forest: "Burn Me!" Some gasoline and a match are a lot cheaper than a sealed-bid auction.
41. I heard just such a plea sometime around 1965. I heard it again in early 1997 at a church-sponsored missions conference. Eschatology affects missions.
42. Gentry, Greatness of the Great Commission.
If this book helps you gain a new understanding of the Bible, please consider sending a small donation to the Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. You may also want to buy a printed version of this book, if it is still in print. Contact ICE to find out. icetylertx@aol.com