Christian Economics: Student's Edition
[Updated: 1/18/18]
Part 1 introduced you to the five points of the biblical covenant as they apply to economics prior to the fall of man. These points were applications of what I have called the dominion covenant. The dominion covenant encompasses all of life and all of creation, while economics relates to the issues of resource allocation.
Part 2 introduced you to the five points of the biblical covenant as they apply to economics after the fall of man. The fundamental economic categories did not change, but their applications did. This was the result of Adam's sin and God's negative sanctions on Adam's body and the ground. The earth is now under a curse.
One of the requirements associated with the dominion covenant is to reduce the impact of God's curses on the ground and his curses on Adam's body. This has to do with medical science. It has to do with agronomy. It has to do with chemistry. But it obviously has to do with economics. As we work out the implications of the economic aspects of the dominion covenant, we should expect relief from the curses.
Let me give an obvious example. One of the curses on Adam was sweat. Residents in the economically developed world now live in temperature-controlled comfort because of air conditioning. Air conditioning was an invention of the early twentieth century. It was first used commercially to cool large movie theaters. It is now in most homes. This has made our leisure time more comfortable in summer, but it has also made us more productive in the heat of the day. In other words, air conditioning should be regarded as a consumer good, but it should also be regarded as a producer good. It is a blessing of God, but it is also a tool of production. I think it is representative of all of God's economic blessings. It is also easy to understand.
You have now read those sections of this book that deal with Christian economic theory. In Part 3, I deal with applications of the theory. But this is only the beginning. I intend to follow this book with three supplemental books, longer and much more detailed. This book is designed to get you started.
I have not covered the bulk of the topics that you find in any college-level economics textbook. I have not dealt with monetary theory and monetary policy. I have not dealt with the issue of cartels. What about pollution? What about labor policy? What about the stock market? All of these topics are institutional applications of market pricing and government policy. They all can be explained in terms of a handful--actually, two handfuls--of fundamental principles of economic analysis. They began with the dominion covenant (one hand), as revised by God after the fall of man (another hand).
I do not expect you to remember the five-point breakdown that I supplied in each chapter. I do expect you to remember the governing concept in each chapter. Before the fall, the five-point covenantal structure of economics was this: God's absolute ownership, man's subordinate responsibility as a trustee, the ethical requirement of private property, the judicial requirement to impute economic value accurately, and the economically mandatory requirement to leave an inheritance. I derived these from a relatively simple exegesis of the first two chapters of Genesis. I have developed these in detail in my economic commentary on the book of Genesis, Sovereignty and Dominion. It was published in PDF in 2012. An earlier version was published as a hardback in 1982: The Dominion Covenant: Genesis.
After the fall, the dominion covenant remained in force, but it was restructured by the imposition of the curses on Adam's body and the ground. The world now labors under God-cursed scarcity. The five points of the dominion covenant today are these: God's providence, the principle of service, the terms of the leasehold agreement, entrepreneurship, and compound growth. Whenever a society honors these principles in morals and also in civil law, the curses that God imposed on the ground are steadily removed. This is God's program of redemption. Redemption is not limited to the saving of souls. It extends to the healing of societies.
You can count the five points of the Christian economics, pre-fall and post-fall, on the fingers of two hands, plus both thumbs. The two thumbs are these: God's absolute ownership, which is based on his original creation, and His providential sustaining of the universe. This includes His sustaining of economic coherence in a world governed by private property, the profit-and-loss system, double-entry accounting techniques, and money. We therefore have legitimate confidence that economic decisions that are beneficial for individuals and families, in a society governed by biblical law, produce benefits for the entire social order. The pursuit of private profit in a social order based on the principle of the rule of law and the principle of private property will not produce negative consequences for society.
I have attempted to keep my analysis simple. I have also done my best to show why my analysis is an extension of biblical revelation. My analysis is not grounded on a theory of autonomous man in a universe whose origin came from the unexplainable explosion known as the Big Bang. Man did not evolve out of the impersonal cosmos. The laws of economics did not evolve out of the unplanned actions of autonomous men and women.
The Scottish moral philosopher Adam Ferguson wrote in 1767 that society is the product of human action but not of human design. He was arguing in favor of social evolution. He was wrong. Society is the product of God's design, which in His total sovereignty allows for responsible individual action. So is the economy. This is why Christian economics is fundamentally different from humanistic economics. The differences have to do with rival assumptions about the locus of sovereignty. They have to do with the differences between the doctrine of God's creation of the universe out of nothing and the rival doctrine of impersonal cosmic evolution. There is no way to reconcile these differences. These differences are at the core of the conflict between the city of God in the city of man.
Every social science must be re-structured in terms of the five points of the biblical covenant. My work in developing a self-consciously Christian economics is the first attempt to do this. I hope it will be a model for other scholars.
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