On Completing the Teacher's Edition of Christian Economics

Gary North - August 18, 2017

I posted the Introduction on May 27. I posted the Conclusion today. It is here.

In addition, there are 54 chapters, plus 12 section introductions and conclusions.

There is also a Preface, which I will post tomorrow. It will tell why I wrote what I wrote. Old rule for authors: "Never publish a Preface until the book is finished."

I began posting the student's edition on May 6. That was 19 chapters, a Preface, an Introduction, 8 section introductions and conclusions, and a Conclusion.

Total, that will be 99 essays. I posted them in just about three months, if you subtract Sundays.

I plan to write a Human Action-type treatise. It will target scholars. It will have the scholarly paraphernalia. But the basics are now available. I do not think I will make any major breakthrough over the next two years or so.

I got the idea for the project in the spring of 1960. That summer, I bought Ludwig von Mises' Human Action (1949) and F. A. Hayek's Constitution of Liberty (1960). I bought them from the Foundation for Economic Education. Little did I know that I would join FEE's staff in 1971. I even got Mises and Hayek to autograph them years later.

This made all the difference, intellectually speaking. I found out about the Austrian School of economics when almost nobody knew about it in my generation. That saved me from a lot of errors, academically speaking. That also kept me from going down too many rabbit trails. I was like John the Baptist, eating locusts and honey in the wilderness. Locusts are more nutritious than you might think.

My wife had the next key idea: write an economic commentary on the Bible. No one had ever attempted that before. That was in early 1973. Still, that alone was not enough. I needed a conceptual framework to put the pieces together. The crucial event took place in 1985, when my pastor, Ray Sutton, suffered a serious burn, and was laid up for weeks. He began work on a project that became a book, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant. It presents the five-point biblical covenant model. I published it through my Institute for Christian Economics in 1987. You can download it for free here. That provided the structure that I have adopted for everything I have written about Christian economics since 1986.

There is enough material available on this site in PDF format today that some bright fellow would be able to take what I have written and develop it even if I died tomorrow. This takes care of point five of the biblical covenant: inheritance.

I did not imagine in 1960 that it would take me this long.

I am happy that I figured out what I wanted to with my life at the age of 18. Most people don't figure this out when they are 18. I will not say that I needed every minute, because life is filled with detours. But I know that I needed at least 30 years. I probably needed 40 years. The 25 years from 1960 to 1985 were not exactly wasted, but they lacked an integrated framework. I spun my conceptual wheels. But at least I made a lot of money. And I got a lot of experience writing.

I am happy that I developed two skills by the time I was 16: the ability to write clearly and the ability to speak in public. Those two skills have carried me through the ups and downs, the thick and thin, the good times and bad times, the fat years and the lean years. They have been mostly fat years. I can't complain.