PREFACE And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? (Luke 6:46).
This is the question, generation after generation. It was a rhetorical question. It implied that His followers did not take His commands seriously enough to obey them. Two millennia later, Christians still suffer from the same hesitation. They are not sure what Jesus wants them to do. They wear WWJD? (What Would Jesus Do?) sweatshirts, but they have no clue as to how they might begin to answer it, should anyone ask them to, which no one does. Their lack of specific answers to specific social, political, and economic questions is due to the fact that they have cut themselves off from the source of specifically biblical answers by means of another popular slogan, "We're under grace, not law!"
What Jesus said He wanted His followers to do in the sphere of personal economics seems utopian to a fault, so His commands are ignored by most preachers. They always have been. In the recorded history of the church, the vast majority of Christians have not tithed. Unwilling to tithe, how seriously have they taken these words? "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" (Luke 12:33). Not very. Yet Jesus said these words. What would Jesus do? Exactly what He personally did. "And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head" (Luke 9:58).(1)
Writing an economic commentary on the Gospel of Luke has been an emotionally unsettling experience for me. As I wrote it, day by day, in the first five months of the year 2000, I found that the words on my computer's screen called me either to rethink or repent. In trying to explain Jesus' words, I found that my summaries of, and comments on, His words that dealt with personal economics placed me under conviction. I found in His words no praise for the supreme belief of the industrial and post-industrial West: faith in the socially redemptive power of compound economic growth. Instead, I found warnings against the personal pursuit of riches. Yet the pursuit of personal gain is at the heart of all modern intellectual justifications of free market capitalism, and has been for over two centuries. Jesus warned against the worship of mammon, while modern economists have placed mammon worship at the center of their analysis of how the world really works, and how it must work if we are to attain efficiency. Writing my economic commentary on Matthew's Gospel should have produced the same awareness, but Luke's is even more unrelenting in its condemnation of the pursuit of riches.
American Christian Schizophrenia in the Year 2000 Today, the West is awash in riches, not only by all previous standards of living but also by the prevailing standard of living of three-quarters of the world's population, who do not live in the West or one of the "Asian tigers."(2) But the attainment of unprecedented personal wealth has not produced satisfaction in the hearts and minds of most Westerners. On the contrary, their unprecedented wealth has inflamed their desire to attain even greater wealth. In the final months of the twentieth century, popular magazines in the United States are dominated by cover stories promoting the systematic pursuit of wealth. The stock market is the universal topic of discussion.(3)
The United States is socially Christian. Most of its citizens tell pollsters that they are church-attending followers of Jesus Christ. Yes, they are lying; church buildings could not hold even a quarter of them on a Sunday morning -- and never could, not even in Puritan Boston in 1660. Most Americans think of themselves as reasonably faithful servants of Christ, but their magazine reading habits and television viewing habits indicate that they are spiritually adrift in a sea of unprecedented prosperity. Christ's words of warning regarding the corrupting effects of great wealth seem to have come to pass for the nation that sends out more foreign missionaries for Christ than any other. The lifestyle of poverty that is adopted by the foreign missionary is verbally honored by the Christians who fund world missions. Yet most of these donors are caught up emotionally in the pursuit of riches. How can this be? Have they not understood Christ's words? Are they disobedient? Or do Christ's words mean something different from what they seem to mean?
In economic affairs, the modern church seems to be in violation of Jesus' explicit teachings. The church's silence on Jesus' call to sacrificial service and sacrificial charitable giving reveals a widespread complacency regarding the spiritual perils of prosperity, both personal and corporate. Jesus said, "And that [seed] which fell among thorns are they, which, when they have heard, go forth, and are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection" (Luke 8:14). The church rarely preaches on the moral requirement of tithing. Yet Jesus told the religious leaders of Israel, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone" (Matt. 23:23). These ought ye to have done: this requirement surely applies to members of Christ's church if it applied to the Pharisees as a minimal requirement. But pastors rarely mention this obligation to their congregations. They tell their followers to give generously, as the Holy Spirit leads. But the Holy Spirit seems to lead them to give much less than a tithe.
In stark contrast to most modern evangelical preaching, Jesus in the three synoptic Gospels is pictured as being hostile to the pursuit of riches. (John's account ignores these warnings.) The pursuit of great tangible wealth is a spiritual snare and a delusion, Jesus warned. To pursue it is foolishness that threatens the soul. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36). In Luke, this message dominates the accounts of Jesus' discussion of money.
The Problem of Poverty Christ's hostility to the pursuit of tangible wealth raises an intellectual problem. Ever since the publication of Adam Smith's book, The Wealth of Nations (1776), the personal pursuit of tangible wealth has been seen by free market economists as the sole engine for the reduction of widespread poverty. If we had no other revelation from God except the synoptic Gospels, we would have to conclude that Smith's book is among the most wrongheaded in history. This would compel Christians to draw one of two conclusions: 1) every covenant-keeping society must learn to live with widespread poverty; or 2) charity is the only legitimate means of reducing widespread poverty. But charity alone has never been shown to be successful in reducing widespread poverty. Individual charity is ameliorative on a case-by-cases basis, but there is no evidence that it has ever produced compound economic growth, which alone has reduced the burden of poverty on a society-wide basis.
This is a dilemma for Christians that can be solved only by an appeal beyond the synoptic Gospels to the Old Testament. We possess more written revelation from God than what we have in the Gospels and the New Testament's epistles. There is no doubt that the New Testament ignores the issue of national economic growth. Paul was generally hostile to the pursuit of personal wealth (I Tim. 6). To find a biblical justification for national economic growth, we must search the Old Testament. This search should begin with Genesis 13:2: "And Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold." His biological heirs were the designated beneficiaries of the covenant between God and Abram (Gen. 15; 17). But beneficiary status extended beyond biological sonship. It extended to all nations. "And the LORD said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do; Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the LORD, to do justice and judgment; that the LORD may bring upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him" (Gen. 18:17-19). This prophecy is significant for economic theory because the Old Testament links national obedience to God's law with national prosperity. "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" (Deut. 28:11-12). Christians must go to the Old Testament in search of permanent economic principles, or else they must content themselves with repeated calls to personal poverty, which few Christians will heed.
Here is the Christian economist's problem: the Old Testament is what millions of Protestant Christians insist we must avoid in any search for authoritative standards. (Non-Protestant Christians also avoid the Old Testament. Instead, they go to natural law theory.) They tell us, "We're under grace, not law!" If this view of the Old Testament is correct, then modern Western man's tangible wealth -- unprecedented in mankind's history -- is not the product of Christian principles. In fact, this great wealth is a snare and a delusion. Christians should therefore reject it and call men to return to the ideal of poverty, beginning with themselves. Such a message, not surprisingly, we do not hear very often. When we do hear it, it tends to be announced by an upper middle-class social studies professor in a Christian college.
Jesus' Social Theory In a review of a book by Robert Royal, The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century (Crossroad Publishing, 2000), libertarian and Catholic columnist Joseph Sobran writes: "Unlike most spiritual leaders and moral leaders, Jesus of Nazareth offered no formula for worldly happiness and social order. Just the opposite: he told his disciples to take up their crosses (an image he used well before the Crucifixion) and to expect suffering. He warned them that the world would hate them as it hated Him; it was their destiny as Christians."(4) His view is shared by most Christians today.
The problem for those who hold this view of Jesus' ministry arises as soon as their society embraces Christianity. This happened under the emperor Constantine and his successors, as Sobran notes. Martyrdom for Christians ceased. It has reappeared with a vengeance in the twentieth century -- the most militantly anti-Christian century since the fall of Rome. In the intervening centuries, how were Christians supposed to discover God-given answers for the multitude of social and political issues that confront leaders in every era? If Jesus really offered no social theory, then how could His followers have known how to rule ethically from 325 A.D. to, say, 1700, when casuistry began to disappear in the West? Without casuistry -- the application of Christian principles to specific cases -- the church becomes dependent on promoters of one or another nonchristian social theory. The twentieth century has revealed where this voluntary defection by Christians ends: either in the persecution of Christians, which is the left wing Enlightenment's answer to Christianity, or in their political marginalization, which is the right wing Enlightenment's answer.
It is true that Jesus did not teach a comprehensive social theory. He did not have to. He taught from the Old Testament. He said that He was the fulfillment of the Old Testament (Luke 4:16-21).(5) In His divine nature as the second person of the Trinity, He co-authored the Old Testament. Why would any Christian believe that Jesus annulled this judicial heritage? Why would He have done this? He did not say that He did this. Where is the evidence from Scripture that Jesus annulled the social theory that had been taught from Moses to Malachi? He said that the God's law is permanent (Matt. 5:17-19).
If Jesus did annul all of the Old Testament law, His followers have a major problem: He did not replace it with anything. He has therefore left His people culturally impotent. The old political slogan, "You can't beat something with nothing," haunts all Christians who maintain this view of the Old Testament. They must defer socially and politically to anti-Christians, and do so in the name of Christ.
Ask these pro-annulment Christians if they believe in the Ten Commandments, and they say that they do. Then ask: On what basis? Ask them if the think that bestiality is immoral, and they assure you they do. Then ask them if they think that bestiality should be made illegal. They begin to get nervous. Finally, ask them if they think that bestiality should be made a capital crime, and they back off. Yet the passages in the Bible where bestiality is condemned as morally evil call for the death penalty for those who practice it.
And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast (Lev. 20:15).
And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman, and the beast: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them (Lev. 20:16).
The New Testament is silent on the practice of bestiality. So, in order to make a biblical case against the practice, a Christian must appeal to Leviticus. But most Christians do not want to have anything to do with Leviticus. That book is just too . . . too theonomic! Theonomy in turn is too theocratic. Christians prefer legalized bestiality to theocracy. Step by step, this is what they are getting.
This judicial schizophrenia of modern Christians has led to their political and cultural paralysis. Their paralysis has led either to their persecution or their marginalization politically. In the case of marginalization, most of them have praised the result. They have joined with humanists in an alliance called political pluralism.(6) They cry out, "Equal time for Jesus!" But equal time for Jesus has steadily become no time for Jesus in the public arena. Millions of pietistic Protestants prefer it this way. They believe that their retreat from public issues in the name of Jesus reduces their level of personal responsibility. It doesn't. It merely increases their vulnerability. Mammon and Jesus cannot make a political alliance. "No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Luke 16:13).(7) Mammon's followers are increasingly consistent: they seek to remove Jesus from the public arena. Christians are not equally self-conscious.
Conclusion How can we make sense of Jesus' repeated warnings against the accumulation of earthly treasure? We must search both testaments for guidance. We must learn the ways in which Jesus accepted or modified the Old Testament in His teachings on wealth. This is why the Gospel of Luke is so important in the quest for a balanced biblical view of economics. Its account of Jesus' words on tangible wealth is not balanced. For that matter, Jesus' message on tangible wealth was not balanced. If we believe that biblical truth is balanced because it is universally applicable, then we must assume that something is missing in Luke's account, for there was balance in the Mosaic law. We must search for whatever is missing and why.
In Luke's Gospel, Jesus is most adamant about the dangers of riches. If long-term economic growth is the supreme evidence of God's common grace in modern history, as free market economists would insist that it is if they believed in either God or common grace, then why does the Gospel of Luke display such hostility to riches? I do my best to answer this question in this commentary.
(Note: in this book, I capitalize the word for the four written Gospels, which I differentiate from the gospel of Christ and the gospel of the kingdom. For these four books, the word "gospel" is a title, as in "the Epistle of Jude.")
Footnotes:
1. Chapter 19.
2. Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan.
3. Among urban males, the only discussion topic that seems to match the popularity of the pursuit of wealth is sports. Despite their profession of faith in God, men's commitment to urban sports teams seems more deeply rooted than their commitment to local congregations. But the latest league standings are as time-bound and short-lived as any topic imaginable. No one will remember them a month from today.
4. Joseph Sobran, "The Church of Silence" (May 20, 2000).
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sobran/sobran63.html 5. Chapter 6.
6. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989).
7. Chapter 38.
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