Christian Economics: Student's Edition
[Updated: 7/16/18]
Christianity teaches that history has three phases: creation, fall, and redemption. In Part 1, I covered creation. In Part 2, I covered the fall. In Part 3, I covered redemption. You now have some idea of how God calls Christians to reformulate their thinking, their lives, and their societies in terms of the dominion covenant. You are waiting for specific guidance from God and from me: “What now?” I hope that God and I agree. You should, too.
The dominion covenant applies to mankind in general. It defines mankind. It defines covenant-breaking man, and it also defines covenant-keeping man. Because it is a covenant, it applies to the four covenants that Christianity acknowledges as valid: individual covenant, family covenant, church covenant, and civil covenant. Each of these is established by an oath before God. Men are not allowed to invoke God's name in a judicial sense outside one of these four covenants. To do so is a violation of God's name, which is prohibited by the third commandment (Exodus 20:7).
An individual establishes the individual covenant by making a confession of faith. Paul wrote: ". . . if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9). The individual must also subordinate himself to the institutional church. He does this by the oath-sign of baptism, and he renews this covenant regularly by means of the oath-sign of the Lord's Supper, also called communion or holy communion. The fact that the individual must swear an oath to the institutional church is evidence that there is no pure individualism according to Christian theology.
Second, there is the family covenant. This covenant is established by mutual vows between a man and a woman. These are legally binding oaths. Both the church and the state are judicially involved, and both can bring negative sanctions against a violation of the marriage vow. There is no biblically mandated oath-sign for the family covenant, but it is common in the West to exchange rings. Rings are symbolic of being under restraint.
Third, there is the church covenant. The church administers the sacraments, meaning oath-signs. These sacraments bring church members under the judicial sanctions associated with the church: blessings and cursings. The primary negative sanction is excommunication. This cuts people off from the Lord's supper. This is judicially symbolic of the negative sanction of hell.
If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Matthew 18:15--18).
Fourth, there is the civil covenant. It is also established by oath, but usually this oath is implicit rather than explicit. Children of citizens are assumed to have sworn loyalty to a particular civil government by reaching the legal age of adulthood. There are negative sanctions associated with violations of civil law. The recurring oath-sign is voting in elections.
What are the obligations of each of the covenant law-orders with respect to economics? I provide selective answers to this question in each of the chapters that follow. We live in the era of the welfare state. This state is inherently messianic. It promises to heal. It is a false god. I have explained why this is the case in Part 2. It is therefore the responsibility of members of each of the four covenants to reject the claims of the modern welfare state. Each individual is required by God to do what he can to overturn this modern god.
Part 3 offers suggestions that are tied to money. The best way to reform or overturn any institution is to cut off its funding. This does not involve revolution. It does not involve violence. If an institution cannot collect the funds to keep the doors open, it goes out of existence. This is true of the free market, and it is true with respect to both church and state.
In the case of the church, a member can switch his membership to another congregation or denomination. With respect to the state, it is much more difficult to switch membership. Membership is geographical. The individual must move to a new jurisdiction. But in free societies, this is legal. It was not legal under Communist regimes that put up walls and fences to keep citizens from leaving the Communist paradises. The early warning of the dissolution of the Soviet Union began when the Berlin wall was torn down in 1989, and the Soviet Union did not invade to put the wall back up. On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved itself.
If churches had not defected with respect to the preaching of the gospel and the preaching of the covenant, the once-Christian West would not be in the present disastrous situation in which it finds itself. The modern welfare state would not have come into existence. The bankruptcy-producing unfunded liabilities of the West's national governments to fund old-age retirement plans and health care for the aged were voted into existence by politicians elected by Christians. If pastors had preached the laws of Christian economics, and if church members had believed them, this would not have happened. But the pastors did not preach this, so the welfare state gained support from the broad masses of Christians. From 1885 on, the idea of the welfare state began to gain support of pastors in large Northern Protestant denominations in the United States. This new theology was known as the social gospel. It was dominant in the large Northern Protestant denominations by 1925.
In 1901, Vladimir Lenin wrote a pamphlet that was published in 1902, What Is to Be Done? He stole the title from another Russian revolutionary, Nicholas Cherneshevsky, who wrote a novel with that title in 1863. The question is always legitimate in every generation. I regard Part 4 as my preliminary contribution to the answer to the question, "what is to be done?"
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