INTRODUCTION Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also (Luke 12:32-34).
The Gospel of Luke, more than the other three, returns continually to the theme of personal treasure. Jesus' economic message is encapsulated in these words: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (v. 34).
Treasure is an inescapable concept. It is never a question of treasure vs. no treasure. It is a question of the form, value, security, and location of one's treasure. Jesus told the rich young ruler, "Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me" (Luke 18:22b). Jesus therefore told him to exchange treasure in history for treasure in eternity.(1) The young man's wealth was tangible. Jesus told him to exchange it for intangible wealth, i.e., wealth that cannot be lost or stolen, only accumulated.
Jesus strongly recommended the accumulation of heavenly treasure. This means that His disciples should adopt extreme future-orientation. In assessing the future, all men discount the value of expected future income. Economists call this rate of discount the rate of interest. The further away in time that an expected unit of income is, the less valuable it is in the present. The same discounting process also applies to expected future costs, although economists rarely discuss this aspect of the interest rate, except when they are discussing the economics of crime. They assume that expected future income is net income, with costs already deducted. This discounting process is a law of human action.(2) A positive interest rate cannot be avoided. The only question is: How high a rate of interest does a person use to discount his expected future income and future costs?
Jesus told His followers to elevate eternity above history in making their plans. First, He told them to fear hell more than any punishment in history. "But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him" (Luke 12:5). "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" (Matt. 16:26). Second, He also told them to elevate the benefits of heaven far above any benefits attainable in history. This is why Christians are to lay up treasure in heaven. In economic terms, this means that the stream of income that will begin in heaven is guaranteed by God to last forever. In contrast, all streams of income in history are both uncertain and of short duration. Also, a person's ability to receive a stream of income may be very short. "But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?" (Luke 12:20).(3) The parable of the barn-builder is found only in Luke. This is consistent with Luke's concern with Jesus' words regarding the spiritual threat of riches.
The Author of This Gospel No author is mentioned by name in the text of any of the four Gospels, yet the church has long identified each Gospel by the name of an author. A man named Luke had been Paul's travelling companion (Col. 4:14; Philem. 24; II Tim. 4:11).(4) Paul called Luke the beloved physician (II Tim. 4:14). There are indications in the text that the anonymous author was interested in the details of sickness.(5) Most conservative commentators assume that Luke the physician wrote the Gospel whose title has long carried his name. If this identification is accurate, then his main audience was the gentile world, just as Paul's was.
The Gospel of Luke emphasizes Jesus' warnings against the quest for riches more than the other three do. Gentiles were more likely to be caught up in the temporal quest for riches than the Jews were. Gentiles had no concept of an absolutely sovereign God. Their gods were not sole creators. No absolute god of the gentiles was said to own the earth. No god of the gentiles claimed this for himself: "For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?" (Psalm 50:10-14). The local gods of classical civilization demanded feeding. The head of a household placed food on the altar of local spirits of the field in order to keep them from haunting his home. The Jews knew better. They understood that animal sacrifices were not the care and feeding of God.(6) Animal sacrifices were representative. They testified to men's own iniquity.
Jesus' words in the Gospel of Luke are uncompromising in their identification of riches as a snare. This is not to say that Matthew and Mark do not record many of these warnings. They do. But Luke's Gospel emphasizes them. This is especially evident in the Luke's account of the Sermon on the Mount. Compare it to Matthew's account, which is far more detailed and less focused on the sins of tangible wealth.(7)
Was Jesus Anti-Capitalistic? What do I mean by the word, "capital"? I mean any asset that produces income for its owner. Capitalism is a social order that always results from a system of civil law that establishes a legal claim by individual owners to their capital assets and the fruits thereof. This system of private property is what biblical law establishes. This is why Christian critics of capitalism are hostile to biblical law. This is why they tell us that the Bible, meaning the Old Testament, must not be used by Christians to discover blueprints for economics.(8)
In my analysis of Jesus' attitude toward earthly riches, I consider two forms of capital: tangible and intangible. Tangible capital can be sold or transferred in discrete units that will produce income for the new owners: money, tools, and land. Other forms of capital are called human capital: morality, knowledge, reputation, managerial skill, economic forecasting ability, etc. Human capital is intangible. The output of human capital can be sold, but not the capital asset itself, unless 1) slavery is legal and 2) slaves are expected by potential buyers to remain obedient. These two forms of wealth should be kept distinct in the mind of anyone who tries to explain Jesus' hostility to riches. He was not hostile to human capital.
Jesus' hostility to the accumulation of great tangible wealth raises an important question: Was He anti-capitalistic? He was not opposed to privately owned property. He was not an advocate of high taxation or discriminatory rates of taxation, today called graduated taxation or progressive taxation. What makes his message so very different from the intellectual defense of the free market offered by secular economists -- and most economists have been intensely secular -- is that He recommended the exchange of earthly tangible capital for eternal intangible capital. He recommended charitable giving.
A question then arises: Did Jesus abandon the Old Testament's teachings on tangible wealth? Most notably, there is the section in Deuteronomy 28 that links wealth and dominion in history. "And the LORD shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers to give thee. The LORD shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow. And the LORD shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath; if that thou hearken unto the commandments of the LORD thy God, which I command thee this day, to observe and to do them" (Deut. 28:11-13).(9) Deuteronomy announced a predictable relationship between a nation's moral capital -- its obedience to God's Bible-revealed law -- and its tangible capital in the broadest sense (vv. 1-14). It also declared the reverse: disobedience to God and reduced tangible wealth (vv. 15-66).
Was this covenantal promise tied exclusively to the nation of Israel? Has this relationship between tangible wealth and dominion in history ceased in the New Covenant? Jesus' teaching on wealth seems to indicate that it has. But if Jesus really did annul the Old Covenant's view of tangible wealth, then the dominion covenant (Gen. 1:26-28) has either ceased to apply in the New Covenant, or else it is to be fulfilled in ways very different from what Moses revealed to God's people.
Then there is the question of inheritance. If a man has given away his goods, what can he pass on to his sons? The Old Covenant recommended leaving an earthly inheritance. "Wait on the LORD, and keep his way, and he shall exalt thee to inherit the land: when the wicked are cut off, thou shalt see it" (Psa. 37:34). "A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just" (Prov. 13:22). "House and riches are the inheritance of fathers and a prudent wife is from the LORD" (Prov. 19:14). Does a prudent wife remain a sought-after New Covenant gift from God, but not the inheritance of fathers?
There is no question of the following fact. Jesus did not quote any Old Testament passages that recommended the accumulation of tangible wealth, even as a tool of dominion. He preached against the quest for personal riches. But so had the author of Proverbs. "Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain" (Prov. 30:8-9). The author -- the richest king in Israel's history -- saw the threat of great riches: autonomy. A rich man is tempted to say, "Who is the Lord?" This is an extension of Moses' warning against thinking, "My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth" (Deut. 8:17).
The logic of modern capitalism is this: personal thrift produces saving, saving leads to investment in tools, tools increase men's output, and output produces personal wealth. This was surely Adam Smith's logic in The Wealth of Nations (1776). There is no trace of this logic in the Gospels. Jesus recommended charity rather than the accumulation of tangible capital. But personal charity is regarded by economists as ameliorative at best. Because charity does not usually increase the supply of tangible capital, society will remain poor to the extent that men give their money away to the poor. Better for the poor when people invest their money rather than give it to the poor. Writes F. A. Harper,(10) a libertarian economist who nurtured me briefly back in 1961: "Both fact and logic seem to me to support the view that savings invested in privately owned economic tools of production amount to an act of charity. And further, I believe it to be -- as a type -- the greatest economic charity of all."(11) Henry Hazlitt, whose book, Economics in One Lesson (1946), became the most widely read defense of the free market in the twentieth century, quotes this statement approvingly.(12) Such is the logic of most defenders of the free market. I did not fully trust this analysis in 1961, and I still don't. I think it is incomplete. Nevertheless, it remains difficult for me to refute it in 2000.
Can Jesus' words be reconciled with Adam Smith's? If not, must Christians abandon Adam Smith? Or was Jesus speaking only to His first-century disciples? If He was speaking to His disciples down through the ages, then what is the New Testament's solution to poverty? Does it offer one? Capitalism does.
The Reduction of Poverty Adam Smith's famous book is known by its abbreviated name, just as Charles Darwin's is. Its full title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. (Darwin's is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.) Smith could just have easily titled his book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Poverty of Nations, but he was interested in wealth and how it can be increased. He believed, accurately, that most men are interested in increasing their tangible wealth and the choices that accompany it. Smith was interested in discovering the causes of economic growth, not the causes of economic stagnation. Economic stagnation needed no explanation in Adam Smith's day or Adam and Eve's day. Economic growth did.
Ever since Smith's era, the West has experienced an increase of tangible wealth at about two percent to three percent per annum. England's industrial revolution -- the first sustained compound economic growth revolution in history -- began in earnest about the time that Smith's book appeared. Compound economic growth has gone on in the West for over two centuries. This has made the West rich. By today's standards, the richest nations in Smith's day would be underdeveloped nations today. How did this transformation happen? Not by any great increase in people's rate of giving to the poor. There had been government poor laws for over two centuries in England prior to 1776. There had been private charity.(13) But there had not been sustained economic growth.
The modern defense of the private property social order has usually invoked capitalism's widespread elimination of mass poverty. No other social system has been equally successful in raising hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. There have been very few defenders of capitalism who have invoked its ability to make a few people very rich. The main exceptions were a few free market social Darwinists in the late nineteenth century,(14) who defended capitalism as the survival of the fittest. In fact, the very phrase attributed to Darwin -- the survival of the fittest -- was first used by the premier social Darwinist, sociologist (and former railway engineer) Herbert Spencer (1820-1903),(15) and was adopted by Darwin in a later edition of Origin of Species. This short-lived defense of capitalism was generally held in disrepute by 1910.
A bell-shaped curve describes the West's population distribution today. There are more poor people than rich people, and more middle-class people than either rich or poor. The economic question is this: Should we expect to see those who have become covenant-keepers increase their tangible wealth? This generally does take place, for men become more self-disciplined and more future-oriented after they are redeemed by God's grace. But if all Christians were to give away most of their goods to the poor, would society continue to experience increasing per capita wealth? Would many of the poor recipients of these donations squander most of the money, leaving the donors decapitalized? Would this decapitalization thwart the compounding process? If charity does not produce the wealth-compounding process that reduces abject poverty, then wouldn't a great spiritual revival lead to the impoverishment of the West?
The 20-80 Rule The Bible's recommended goal is middle-class wealth. Jesus said, "For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always" (John 12:8). This statement appears in three of the Gospels (see Matt. 26:11; Mark 14:7), but not Luke's. If we will always have the poor with us, then we will always have the rich with us. The bell-shaped curve of wealth distribution is inevitable. The question is: How many rich people will we have? Even more important, how much of the world's tangible wealth will the rich control? The answer is, most of it.
The shape of either a nation's wealth distribution curve or its income distribution curve does not resemble the shape of its population curve. The population curve in a Western nation bulges with the middle class. In an economically undeveloped nation, it bulges with the poor. In contrast, both the income distribution curve and the wealth distribution curve bulge with the rich, generation after generation. This does not mean that the same families remain rich. It does mean that the richest twenty percent of the population owns most of the wealth and gains most of the income at any given time. The shape of the income distribution curve resists alteration, generation after generation.
Italian sociologist-economist Vilfredo Pareto in the late nineteenth century made detailed investigations of the distribution of income in European nations. He discovered an amazing fact: the slope of the income curve, from the richest to the poorest members of society, was similar in every nation that he studied. The richest members received most of a nation's income. This statistical relationship, first published in 1897,(16) has not changed significantly over the last century, irrespective of the economic policies of individual industrial nations. Later studies by other economic historians indicated that in 1835-40, 1883, and 1919 in Great Britain, the richest ten percent received fifty percent of the nation's income.(17) This statistical relationship has come to be known as the Pareto law or the Pareto rule or the 20-80 rule. A 20-80 distribution has been found to apply in social institution after institution, as well as in their diverse operations.(18) No one seems to know why. An economist wrote in 1965: "For a very long time, the Pareto law has lumbered the economic scene like an erratic block on the landscape; an empirical law which nobody can explain."(19)
A 1998 study by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards in Ottawa, Canada, revealed that the 20-80 rule still applied quite well in the United States. The top twenty percent of the population owned 81 percent of household wealth in 1962, 81.3 percent in 1983, 83.5 percent in 1989, 83.7 percent in 1995, and 84.3 percent in 1997. For the top one percent, the figures are as follows: 1962: 33.4 percent; 1983: 33.8 percent; 1989: 37.4 percent; 1995: 37.6 percent; 1997: 39.1 percent.(20) These changes have been in the direction of greater concentration of tangible wealth in the United States.
This seems impossible. Don't middle-class people own their homes? No; they reside in them, but they borrow to buy them. They pay mortgages. The rich are the holders of these mortgages. Title is passed to the home owner, but the asset has a debt against it. Most middle-class Americans own very little debt-free marketable wealth. They use debt to buy depreciating assets: consumer goods. They do not save more than a small fraction of their income.(21)
The rich use their money to buy appreciating assets and income-producing assets. They save a much higher percentage of their wealth. When the rich in one nation cease to save at high rates, the rich in another nation will replace them. This is why the United States today runs a massive balance of trade deficit. Consumers in the United States are borrowing from Japanese and European investors to buy imported consumer goods. Foreign manufacturers send their agents to the United States to sell their goods, and consumers take on the debt. "The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low. He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail" (Deut. 28:43-44).
There is no known way for any industrial society to alter significantly the share of tangible wealth owned by the rich. When political force has been applied in the form of tax policy, the percentages have stayed pretty much the same. It is not even clear that there will be different wealth holders after the new taxation policies are in force, unless the existing wealth owners are deliberately expropriated or executed, as they were in Communist nations. Finally, there is no legitimate biblical justification for using the monopolistic force of civil government to redistribute private wealth in order to achieve greater equality.
The key economic issue regarding wealth distribution is this: the lawful means for gaining control over tangible capital in a particular society. How do the rich gain their share of the national wealth? By power, by bribery, by political skills, or by satisfying consumer demand? To benefit the largest number of people in society, civil governments should establish legal guarantees to all owners of property. This will encourage the self-interested rich to continue to use their wealth for consumer-satisfying purposes. The rich should continue to save, invest, and provide tools for their employees. The legal protection of all people's right to own and use property will also encourage the bottom eighty percent to do the same. Through competition to satisfy consumers, members of lower-income groups will steadily replace those in the higher-income groups. Technological innovation is especially conducive to this replacement phenomenon. The percentage of tangible capital in each quintile will not change very much, but the amount of wealth produced by this capital will increase dramatically over time, as the compound growth process takes over.
Capital accumulation by the richest twenty percent of the population is the most important measurable source of a capitalist society's increasing tangible wealth. The rich provide the money that buys the tools that raise the output and wealth of the other classes.
But tools are not enough to make a society rich among nations. A society's other classes must possess moral capital, such as the willingness to work hard, future-orientation, honesty, and a good reputation. Moral capital is intangible, but it is nonetheless real. It produces income for its owners.
Moral Capital
If we consider moral capital as income-producing capital, then the Pareto wealth distribution curve does not apply. There is only so much moral capital that any person can possess. The rich cannot amass moral capital in the way they amass tangible capital. If members of all economic classes in a society have approximately the same moral standards and degree of adherence to them, then the shape of the curve of society's moral capital will match the shape of the population curve.
Let me clarify my argument by an example. Assume that in nation A, only the rich are literate. This means that the national rate of illiteracy is eighty percent. In nation B, there is almost universal literacy. Without knowing anything else about the tangible wealth of either nation, which nation would you guess has the richest rich people? I am speaking only of the top twenty percent of the population. I would guess nation B. But what if I am incorrect? What if nation A is richer, perhaps because it is a small, oligarchical, oil-exporting nation? Which group of rich people do you think will be richer one century later if the literacy rates stay the same in both nations, assuming that the rich in both nations do not send their investment capital outside their respective countries? I would still guess nation B. This has nothing to do with investment decisions made by the rich. It has everything to do with the determination of the less rich to learn how to read -- a determination based on their moral capital. A rising tide of literacy raises all economic ships: poor, middle class, and rich. I argue that this same principle of national wealth formation applies to moral capital in general.
Without widely distributed moral capital, today's rich people could not retain the market value of their investment capital for long. Competent and honest employees would become increasingly scarce and costly, thereby lowering the market value of investment capital. Voters would become envy-driven. They would elect politicians who would seek to confiscate the wealth of the rich in the name of the poor on behalf of middle-class voters (minus fifty percent for government handling). Per capita productivity would slow, stagnate, or fall. So would the nation's wealth. The shape of the wealth distribution curve would remain the same -- heavily concentrated in the top twenty percent -- but the growth of wealth in society would slow down or even decline.
When Christians Get Richer Most rich people in history have not responded positively to the gospel of eternal salvation. Jesus said this repeatedly. His analogy of the camel going through the eye of a needle is representative of His view regarding the eternal abode of the rich. Their resistance to the gospel has not changed since Jesus' era. Far more middle-class people respond. Far more poor people respond.
This creates a peculiar anomaly in a capitalist society. Rich covenant-breakers own most of the marketable wealth, but covenant-keepers become beneficiaries of wealth accumulation by the rich. This is because increasing per capita investment by the rich produces increasing per capita income for workers. Wages go up when workers' productivity rises. The owners of capital bid against each other to employ workers who can put the owners' tools to profitable use.
The rich want to get richer, so they invest. They do not consume all that they own. They do not invest in order to increase the incomes of the lower eighty percent. Their motivation is not charitable, yet the reduction of poverty under free market capitalism is greater than any system of charity has ever produced. Poverty is alleviated or eliminated for large numbers of people. Those people who are statistically most likely to reject the gospel of Christ make self-interested investment decisions that help the poor. Non-rich members of society are made richer by means of capital accumulation by the rich. The rich trust in their tangible wealth, and this eschatologically misplaced trust lures them into eternal destruction. This trust also produces increasing tangible wealth for both the middle class and the poor in capitalist societies.
This presents a dilemma for Christian economists. It is a theological version of the moral dilemma posed by Bernard Mandeville's poem, The Fable of the Bees: Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714): greedy acts by rich individuals produce socially beneficial results. On the one hand, this mitigates the destructive effects of sin. On the other hand, it creates a moral obligation on the part of moral reformers to suggest workable social alternatives to the greedy behavior they seek to eliminate. James McCosh, the president of the College of New Jersey (re-named Princeton University in 1896), a Calvinist and moral philosopher, wrote in 1875:
Mandeville, in "The Fable of the Bees," had advanced some curious and doubtful speculations as to private vices being public benefits; showing that the power and grandeur of any nation depend much upon the number of people and their industry, which cannot be procured unless there be consumption of manufactures; and that the intemperance, luxury, and pride of men consume manufactures, and promote industry. The author has here caught hold of a positive and important truth, the explanation of which carries us into some of the deepest mysteries of Providence, in which we see good springing out of vice, and God ruling this world in spite of its wickedness, and by means of its wickedness, but without identifying himself with it. But Mandeville was not able to solve the profound problem, and in dealing with it he uses expressions which look as if he intended to justify, or at least to palliate vice.(22)
Mandeville's poem showed that spending on luxuries by the rich provides employment to the poor, which is a public benefit. Far better for the poor, argue free market economists, is for the rich to reduce their spending on luxuries and invest their savings in capital goods that provide employment for the poor, who then produce consumption goods for the middle class or the poor, who greatly outnumber the rich -- hence, broader markets. But the dilemma for Christian economists remains the same: the recommended substitution of investment for charity. Jesus recommended charity, not investing.
Evangelism and Tangible Wealth
The long-term increase in tangible wealth owned by the bottom eighty percent under capitalism does not automatically produce better-funded evangelism programs. Put another way, this increased wealth does not automatically increase the moral capital of society. It may even reduce it. Moses made this clear: "And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth" (Deut. 8:17). So did Jesus in the parable of the four soils (Luke 8:11-15).(23)
What we do know is this: historically, the extension of the gospel has been funded mainly by the middle class and the poor. The rich do not accept the gospel or fund its extension. Because an increase in a society's moral capital will increase its per capita tangible wealth, we can safely conclude that when Christians use their tangible wealth to fund missionaries, to send their children to Christian schools, and to do all of the other things that extend the kingdom of God in history, society will become visibly richer over time. There can be positive feedback between moral capital and tangible capital. Moses made this clear, too. "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. 8:18).
Negative Feedback
The problem is, there need not be positive feedback. Increasing tangible wealth can make covenant-keepers forgetful about the source of their wealth: God. This is the great spiritual threat posed by tangible wealth and most forms of intangible wealth, such as the information imparted by higher education (humanistic). The key social asset is moral capital, which in turn rests on a Trinitarian confession of faith and a resulting response: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself" (Luke 10:27b).
Christians in the industrial West have become progressively richer over time, along with most members of their society. Today, they are able to save more money and give away vastly more money than they could have done two centuries ago. Their basic needs are being met by their capital-engendered productivity, which in turn is based heavily on investment by the covenant-breaking rich. We might imagine that Christians would donate ever-larger percentages of their income to missions and other non-profit, kingdom-building projects as their tangible wealth increases. Yet such has not been the case. The modern Western Christian does not tithe. He can afford to, but he refuses. The vast majority of Christians living in the industrial world are rich by the standards of the rest of the world and also by the standards of most of mankind's history, yet they do not tithe. As they become richer, they begin to take on the attributes of the covenant-breaking rich. They forget to acknowledge God as the source of their wealth.
So, we are back to my original question: What is the Bible's program for reducing poverty? The Old Covenant had a solution: the Mosaic law. David declared: "I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread" (Psa. 37:25). But if Jesus abandoned the Mosaic laws governing wealth-creation, then Christians have a responsibility to discover in the New Testament some other system of economic cause and effect, some other way of raising large numbers of poor people out of abject poverty -- a way that is more reliable in this regard than capitalism. I am aware of no theory of compound economic growth that recommends as the growth process's initiating act the overnight decapitalization of all Christians on behalf of the masses of poor people, who can easily consume in a few weeks whatever wealth that Christians are willing to transfer to them.
From Mission Society to Transformed Society In Chapter 25, I argue that Jesus' command to His disciples to sell everything they possessed and give the money to the poor was a call to world missions. He was laying down rules that would govern the church's initial missionary society, which was the church itself. He was calling His disciples to break visibly and emotionally with Old Covenant Israel. By surrendering ownership of all their encumbering assets, including money, they would strip themselves of any connection to national Israel and its doomed future. They would bring the gospel to the gentiles.
Those disciples who followed His advice became sufficiently mobile so that they successfully fled from Jerusalem at the time of the first great persecution, which began after the stoning of Stephen. "And Saul was consenting unto his death. And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea and Samaria, except the apostles" (Acts 8:1). This initial scattering produced Christianity's first great missionary outreach.
Consider foreign missions as a program of capital exportation. The capital in question is moral capital. As a result of a successful foreign missions program, the targets of the missionaries' preaching will adopt the message as their own. This message will eventually transform a covenant-breaking pagan society into a covenant-keeping one. The new converts will begin to re-structure their lives according to the gospel. But men cannot change just one thing. One change begets another, as men adjust to the changes. This is a good thing. There is much in a covenant-breaking society that needs to be changed. Salvation is as comprehensive as sin is.(24) The gospel produces massive changes in any covenant-breaking social order. One of these changes is the increase of per capita wealth. People in general become richer.(25) A different group of people will replace the existing holders of great wealth in the top twenty percent.
Every society must be governed by moral and legal standards. This raises the question: By what standard? If not biblical law, then what?(26) If the Mosaic law were to become the basis of a nation's judicial system, private property would be protected. Men are commanded not to steal (Ex. 20:15). They are told not to covet their neighbor's property (Ex. 20:17). They are commanded not to secretly change the boundaries of their land (Deut. 19:14). They are told not to use false weights and measures (Deut. 25:13). The protection of privately owned property eventually produces economic growth. The crushing burden of poverty is lifted from most members of a redeemed society. The rich get richer, but so do the poor.(27)
Once the capital-accumulating system of compound economic growth begins, how valid is Jesus' command that His disciples sell all their possessions and give to the poor? Wouldn't this impoverish the entire society? What if Christians have become the richest people in the society, as a result of their greater diligence, honesty, and productivity? Should they de-capitalize themselves in a wave of charitable giving? Should they sell their income-producing assets to covenant-breakers? Wouldn't this transfer social influence to covenant-breakers? Wouldn't this reduce national economic growth by transferring the tools of production into the hands of less morally reliable people?
Social Redemption
These questions raise the issue of social redemption -- the systematic buying back of public institutions through Christian social action. God's law heals institutions as well as individuals. This creates new levels of responsibility. With greater benefits come greater responsibilities.(28) Is an economic strategy that was appropriate for the early church's initial missionary venture equally appropriate for the period of covenantal consolidation of a newly redeemed social order? The institutional church has always said no. Has the church been wrong?
A rich man who sells his assets and gives to the poor has completed a one-time transaction. His wealth-generating assets have now been transferred to someone else. If the donor is a Christian, then the new owner is probably a covenant-breaker, who can now use these capital assets to fund a rival kingdom. So, the question is: Is this strategy of using charity to ameliorate individual poverty, but at the expense of the decapitalization of middle-class Christians, a universal requirement? Will this strategy, if obeyed by Christians (which it rarely is), lead to a greater reduction of poverty over time than a program of thrift and investment would? Will it lead to a greater extension of God's kingdom, once a society has adopted the biblical covenant? The secular economist would say no. So do I.
Jesus never discussed the possibility of social transformation. The Old Covenant did. "After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do: neither shall ye walk in their ordinances. Ye shall do my judgments, and keep mine ordinances, to walk therein: I am the LORD your God. Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall live in them: I am the LORD" (Lev. 18:3-5). Those Christians who argue that Jesus annulled all of the Mosaic laws have a major problem. They do not have any answer to this post-redemption question: "How should we live now?" They have instructions from Jesus regarding the sale of all of their goods and distribution of this money to the poor, which they have not obeyed personally. Is this all the economic guidance they can offer to new converts?
Conclusion Jesus recommended an investment strategy: the exchange of earthly treasure for eternal treasure. "Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (vv. 33-34). The issue here is two-fold: the permanence of one's treasure and the focus of one's hopes.
Jesus told the disciples to avoid trusting in tangible wealth. They were to trust in God. Anything that threatened to undermine their faith in God by substituting faith in earthly treasure in place of God was a snare and a delusion, He warned. His disciples had to break the lure of a substitute faith in mammon. They were to do this by self-imposed poverty.
But what about the rest of us? Can we break our addiction to our confidence in tangible wealth without giving away everything we own, the way the disciples were told to do? Does tangible wealth offer the same degree of risk to every Christian that alcohol offers to every recovering alcoholic? The institutional church has always said no.
Protestant fundamentalists argue that a person should never drink alcohol because he might become addicted, even though the vast majority of people who drink alcohol do not become alcoholics. Fundamentalists never say the same about money. But Jesus' words indicate that the threat of addiction to money is far more widespread than the threat of addiction to alcohol, a threat which He did not bother to mention.
Jesus said nothing against the private ownership of the means of production, but He repeatedly advised his followers to avoid extensive ownership. He told them to sell what they owned and give to the poor. If this command is a universal rule, obedience would mandate that capital be transferred to non-Christians, sale by sale. Christians would live as permanent strangers in the land. They would remain as stewards of covenant-breaking capital owners rather than becoming capitalist stewards under God by way of serving consumers.
To determine whether this really is what Jesus has required of His people down through the ages, we must carefully consider the Gospel of Luke. We must consider especially Jesus' concept of treasure.
(Unless otherwise noted in the text, when I write of wealth or riches in this commentary, I have in mind tangible wealth, just as Jesus did.)
Footnotes:
1. Chapter 41.
2. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949), ch. 19.
3. Chapter 24.
4. William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary: An Exposition of the Gospel According to Luke (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1978), p. 4.
5. Ibid., p. 5.
6. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, vol. 3 of The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 59.
7. Chapter 9.
8. See Chapter 46, section on "His or Ours," subsection on "Wiser Than God."
9. Gary North, Inheritance and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Deuteronomy, electronic edition (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1999), ch. 67.
10. Paul L. Poirot, "The Writings of F. A. Harper -- A Review," The Freeman, XXIX (Aug. 1979).
http://www.libertyhaven.com/thinkers/faharper/writingsharper.html
11. F. A. Harper, "The Greatest Economic Charity," in Mary Sennholz (ed.), On Freedom and Free Enterprise: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1956), p. 99.
12. Henry Hazlitt, The Conquest of Poverty (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1973), ch. 19, note #4.
http://www.hazlitt.org/e-texts/poverty/ch19.html 13. W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1959). This is a summary volume of three other regional studies.
14. These social Darwinists should be distinguished from the pro-government planning social Darwinists of the same era and beyond, most notably Lester Frank Ward. See Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), Appendix A.
15. Spencer, Principles of Biology (1864).
16. Vilfredo Pareto, Cours d' Econonomie Politique, vol. 2 (1897), pp. 370-72. The book has still not been translated into English, although it remains famous.
17. D. H. Macgregor, "Pareto's Law," Economic Journal (March 1936), pp. 81, 86. Reprinted in Mark Blaug (ed.), Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar, 1992), pp. 21, 26.
18. Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 1998).
19. Josef Steindl, Random Processes and the Growth of Firms: A Study of the Pareto Law (London: Charles Griffin, 1965), p. 18. Cited in ibid., p. 3.
20. John Schmitt, Lawrence Mishel, and Jared Bernstein, paper prepared for a panel on "Economic Well-being in North America," Canadian Economic Association Meetings, May 31, 1998, Table 7.
http://www.csls.ca/new/rtw.html#17
21. In the late 1990's, the United States experienced a negative savings rate, i.e., net borrowing from reserves.
22. James McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy (1875), ch. 7.
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/text/mccosh/mc-7.htm
23. Chapter 14.
24. Gary North, "Comprehensive Redemption: A Theology of Social Action," in Journal of Christian Reconstruction, VIII (Summer 1981). Reprinted in Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), Appendix C.
25. The most spectacular example of this process in the last two decades is the Guatemalan town of Almolonga. For the story of the town's transformation, see George Otis, Jr., Informed Intercession (Ventura, California: Renew, 1999), pp. 18-23.
26. Greg L. Bahnsen, No Other Standard: Theonomy and Its Critics (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991).
27. See Chapter 15.
28. Chapter 27.
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