Updated: 2/22/20
Serve with all your heart, as though you were serving the Lord and not people, because we know that for whatever good deed each person does, he will receive a reward from the Lord, whether he is slave or free (Ephesians 6:7–8).Your serious work now begins. Mine is nearing completion. Probably.
The Scholar’s Edition is a treatise. It is not a textbook. There is a big difference between a treatise and a textbook. A full-time teacher writes a textbook in order to make lots of money from book royalties. His targeted audience is huge: ideally, hundreds of thousands of high school students or university students in a particular academic field. He has received a contract from a textbook publishing company. Textbooks are expensive to produce. They sell for very high prices. The most famous college textbook in economics was written by Paul Samuelson in 1948. The nineteenth edition sells for $220. That was the price of a sixth of an ounce of gold in 2019. A textbook author hopes that a committee of experts in his field will recommend his manuscript for publication. Members of this initial screening committee know that the book will also have to be approved by textbook-review committees in schools. A textbook may be vetoed by a majority faction in a majority of schools on this basis: it deviates too far from the dominant outlook in the field.
The textbook must be up to date. This means that it must be written to become out of date within a few years, so that the publisher can sell a new edition. This is vital for the publisher’s income. The publisher knows that used copies of the textbook will drive down the price of the latest edition. The larger the number of used copies of the latest edition, the less the demand for new copies. All publishers, no matter how anti-free market they are, understand and acknowledge the reality of the law of supply and demand. So, there must be a new edition every three years. Ideally, there must be many new editions for decades.
No one re-reads his college textbooks. He may keep them on a bookshelf as visible proof that he attended college, but he does not re-read them. Why not? There are at least two reasons. First, textbooks are written to get past two committees. A skilled author learns a basic rule at some point in his career, preferably early: never write for a committee. Instead, he must write to persuade his mental image of a future reader. This imaginary reader represents the group that is the author’s targeted audience. I learned this technique by writing direct-response advertisements. Second, an old textbook is out of date. This is the inescapable nature of all textbooks. They are written to be timely. But any book that is written to be timely loses its connections with readers within a few years. It becomes old fashioned, meaning out of fashion. It becomes, if not obsolete, then at least “old hat.” This is why you cannot find textbooks on the shelves of research university libraries. Librarians know they will be filler within a few years: never checked out.
A treatise is different. It is written “for the ages.” It is supposed to be timeless. Of course, nothing is timeless except God and the Bible. But the more timeless a book is, the more likely that it will have long-term influence. The author of a treatise wants long-term influence for his book. Also, the author’s steadfast hope in his book’s long-term influence softens the multiple blows of today’s lack of sales, readers, and footnotes to his book by other scholars. English-speaking people have a familiar saying for this: “Hope springs eternal.” The author of a treatise believes that he understands the broad truths of his academic field. He also believes that he understands unchangeable and nearly unbreakable laws of causation. These fixed laws can be understood only because the laws of thought are also fixed. He believes that there is a correlation approaching 100% between the fixed laws of his academic field and the laws of thought. He thinks he understands both. He thinks that book explains this correlation between the external realm and universal reason. He may be willing to write a new edition of his book if some influential book reviewer challenges a section of his first edition. He wants to answer it in the second edition. Or he may seek to clarify some minor issue. But he does not expect to make major changes in either his book or his thinking. Such changes would imply that his book is incomplete. Why? Because it is subject to change, and therefore it is not a book for all time and across all borders. This thought is unacceptable to the author of a treatise. He thinks his book is universal. He expects readers down through the ages and across the oceans to re-read his book in order to renew their commitment to the timeless truths that his book presents in a compelling way.
That is surely true in my case. I do not intend to revise this volume. For one thing, I hate to index my books. If I had to change anything significant in this volume, it would probably change the book’s pagination. I would then have to re-index it. That thought is horrifying. Second, I think it is sufficiently accurate in theoretical content as to be close to timeless in scope, although not in all of its details. If it is not, then I have wasted almost six decades of research and over five decades of published writing. That thought is also horrifying—even worse than re-indexing. Third, I am 78 years old. Fourth, I was diagnosed with stage III prostate cancer in mid-2017, when I was halfway through writing Volume 1. Despite radiation therapy, I do not expect to be around long enough to revise my book. I have other projects to complete.
In this volume, I initially set forth the theoretical foundations of a reconstruction in economic theory along explicitly biblical lines. This has not been attempted before. But this book is more than a treatise on economic theory. I am attempting to set forth general principles of interpretation that will lead to a reconstruction of every field of thought, academic and non-academic. I am using economics as a model for the other fields. Nothing like this has been attempted before.
Treatises are rare. Academia avoids them. They are even less popular than books on epistemology: “What can men know, and how can they know it?” There are few if any courses on epistemology in academic departments other than philosophy and (maybe) religion. Even in philosophy, the teacher does not set forth a view of epistemology that he says should bind others in his field. That might get him fired. It would surely get him attacked by his peers. So, it is a course on various competing approaches to epistemology.
In the field of economics, the first all-encompassing treatise on economics was Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action, published by Yale University Press in 1949. It had this subtitle: A Treatise on Economics. There are two other books like it, both written by Mises’ disciples. One is Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles, published by Van Nostrand in 1962. The book was financed by the libertarian Volker Fund. The other is George Reisman’s Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, published by the tiny Jameson Books in 1996. It is a huge book: over 1,000 pages of two-column, small-print text. It is rarely cited in footnotes. Members of other schools of economic opinion avoid writing treatises. So do university professors in other academic disciplines.
If you consider all four volumes of this book, you will see that they go beyond all previous treatises. Volume 1 targets beginners. Volume 2 helps transform beginners into teachers. Volume 3 calls all readers to specific action steps. Volume 4 lays the presuppositional foundations of a reconstruction of economic theory. This multi-volume book, in the vernacular, is a package deal. It is not an armchair book. It is a work of applied theology. If people do not begin to change their lives after they have read it, then writing it and the 45 volumes that laid the groundwork for it was an exercise in failed entrepreneurship. I am well aware that most projects fail, and almost all grandiose projects fail. This has been a grandiose project.
What is unique about this four-volume book is this. It does not merely lay the foundations of the discipline of economics. It goes beyond this. It discusses the way the world works as a cosmos. It does not limit its discussion to economic causality and man’s understanding of this causality. This is what Mises did in the first four chapters of Human Action. In contrast, I discuss economics as a subset of cosmology. Academia denies the legitimacy of such an attempt. Yet every academic discipline imports issues of cosmology and general human understanding into the discipline, usually by the back door. This is surely the case in the social sciences. The back door in economic theory is economic practice: the importation of non-scientific, non-neutral ethical principles into economics by way of policy-making. The economist as policy advisor is the economist as prophet: speaking on behalf of an implicit but unstated religious worldview. But he cheats. He refuses to admit that he has moved from his respected position as a guild-certified scientist to a politician.
A treatise must have a starting point. Here is mine: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). To be faithful to the Bible, a Christian economist must begin with this verse. So must a Christian political theorist, a Christian psychologist, a Christian sociologist, and a Christian anything else. The doctrine of God’s creation out of nothing is supposed to be the starting point of all human thought. This is why the Bible begins with God’s week of creation. It does not begin with the Big Bang. Second, Christianity identifies God as a Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This is where Christian economics must begin. So must Christian political theory, Christian psychology, Christian sociology, and Christian everything else. Third, God had a purpose before the creation: the redemption of the lost.
Any form of Christian thought that does not forthrightly begin with these three presuppositions is not systematically Christian. Any form of human thought that denies the truth of this three-part affirmation regarding God and His creation of the universe out of nothing, as well as the epistemological necessity of beginning with it, is a denial of the legitimacy of Christian thought. It necessarily denies the relevance of Paul’s affirmation to covenant-keepers: “‘For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ” (I Corinthians 2:16). Paul warned Christians not to be deceived in this regard. “Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority” (Colossians 2:6–10).
I remember going on a speaking tour in Northern California sponsored by Chalcedon, R. J. Rushdoony’s educational foundation. He, Greg Bahnsen, and I presented a series of three-hour evening seminars. This was probably sometime between mid-1973 and late 1974. Bahnsen and I were both on Chalcedon’s payroll at that time. I recall vividly that Bahnsen used this passage as his starting point in his presentation on the necessity of consistent Christian philosophy.
All three of us were disciples of Cornelius Van Til. This had been Van Til’s message throughout his career: resisting the lure of non-Christian philosophies. Van Til argued that without biblical revelation, all of mankind’s speculation is fallacious. Covenant-breaking people can speak the truth, he argued, but they do so only by means of premises that implicitly rest on God’s creation of the cosmos out of nothing and His revelation to men in the Bible. The covenant-breaker uses stolen intellectual goods. In Rushdoony’s first book, By What Standard? (1959), a book on Van Til’s philosophy, he wrote this prescient passage.
Autonomous man is thus like some Western families, whose sole means of subsistence is in swinging a wide rope. Such men emphatically deny that they rustle cattle, although they have no other visible means of support, while at the same time living entirely on the ranchers’ stock. Thus natural man does have knowledge, but it is borrowed knowledge, stolen from the Christian-theistic pasture or range, yet natural man has no knowledge, because in terms of his principle[,] the ultimacy of his thinking, he can have none, and the knowledge he possesses is not truly his own. If the rustler were faithful to his profession of honesty, he would either starve to death from lack of food or be compelled to honesty. If the natural man were faithful to his own presuppositions, he would either admit that he has no knowledge whatsoever and can know nothing, or he would turn to the ontological trinity as the sole source of knowledge and the only true principle of interpretation. The natural man has valid knowledge only as a thief possesses goods (p. 24).
All human thought is circular, Van Til argued. It necessarily begins with a set of premises. He called these presuppositions. If a system of thought is logically consistent, it must end where it began: affirming both the validity and efficacy of these presuppositions. He argued that the circularity of Christian thought is not a liability. All human thought is circular. Christian circular reasoning should be self-conscious. He spent his long classroom teaching and writing career seeking to make Christians self-conscious regarding the biblical foundations of this circular reasoning process. He argued that the starting point of all human thought is supposed to be the biblical account of the creation. Christians should begin here. Second, the God of the Bible is a Trinity. Third, the final court of appeal is God’s definitive declaration on the day of judgment (Matthew 25:31–46).
In between the creation and the final judgment is history. In history, there is no final court of appeal, but there are multiple courts that possess legitimate authority. They offer preliminary assessments of truth and falsehood. The covenantal courts are these: individual, family, church, and state. In the realm of intellectual matters, there are multiple courts: academia, publishing markets, social media, YouTube, and many others. None issues a final judgment outside of its jurisdiction. Any declaration of truth or falsehood in any of these realms is tentative. Opinion-setters come and go. Successors change their minds. Also, a defeat in one area of influence is not always a defeat in others.
This brings me to the science of economics.
Economics was the first social science to be developed in terms of the assumption that neither theology nor ethics has any role to play in economic theory. This is the argument in William Letwin’s 1963 book, The Origins of Scientific Economics. In a detailed study of late seventeenth-century mercantilist publicists, who were the first scientific economists, he concluded that their negative reaction to the devastation of the English Civil War (1642–1649), which was a war between Protestant factions, King vs. Parliament, led to a conclusion: theology cannot bring men to peaceful conclusions. Therefore, they concluded, economic policy must be grounded in science, especially science based on numerical calculation, which is neutral. They believed that such a science could produce agreement regarding economic policy. This assumption has been dominant in the economics profession ever since. It is believed as deeply today as it was then.
A century later, Adam Smith challenged the mercantilists’ arguments favoring state intervention into the economy in the name of making a nation wealthier. He wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) as a refutation of such interventionism. The market, not the planning state, is what increases individuals’ wealth and therefore also the wealth of the nation. Smith did not adopt mathematics to make his case, but he adopted the mercantilists’ outlook on the need to avoid appeals to theology and ethics. He did not mention, let alone invoke, his ethical and theological arguments in his other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). The two books shared only this: the phrase “Invisible Hand,” a metaphor for the order which results from the dual sanctions of the free market: profit and loss.
This was self-deception on a massive scale. There can be no policy recommendations apart from ethics. This was not clear to economists from the 1650's until 1938. In 1938, there was a debate in the pages of the British academic journal, The Economic Journal, between a follower of Mises, Lionel Robbins, and a follower of John Maynard Keynes, Roy Harrod. Robbins had argued in his book, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932), that it is impossible to make scientific comparisons of people’s subjective values. He was logically correct. It is not scientifically possible, given the premises of modern economic science, which are implicitly atheistic. But then Harrod challenged him in print. If Robbins’ argument is true, he said, then it is illegitimate for an economist, in the name of science, to make policy prescriptions. Every policy guarantees that there will be winners and losers. Harrod asked if Robbins was denying the scientific validity of all policy recommendations. Robbins backed down. In doing so, he abandoned any legitimate appeal to scientific neutrality. This fact should have been widely perceived within the economics profession after 1938: all economists who make policy recommendations in the name of economic science do so only on this basis: their recommendations are not ethically neutral. There can be no ethical neutrality in policy-making.
That 1938 debate is long forgotten. In fact, it was widely ignored at the time. But its implications are inescapable for all policy-making economists. What Robbins conceded means that the mercantilists’ original quest for neutrality in the name of a hypothetically value-free, common-ground methodology was hopeless then, and it remains hopeless today. I have been making this argument in print ever since my 1982 economic commentary on Genesis. I shall continue to make it in this book.
I present my case for Christian economics in terms of this conclusion: there can never be value-free economic theory. Theological neutrality and ethical neutrality are myths. Neutrality has been the reigning myth in economic science ever since late-seventeenth-century mercantilism. This myth is rarely challenged in books written by economists. It is never challenged in academic economics journals. It is simply assumed. This assumption has not been proven. The Bible teaches that it cannot be proven. Jesus said: “The one who is not with me is against me, and the one who does not gather with me scatters” (Matthew 12:30). here can be no neutrality. This is why I decided to write this book and the volumes that preceded it.
I take up this question in Chapter 4 on epistemology. Epistemology is not a popular topic outside of advanced university classes on philosophy. In every academic discipline, most scholars and practitioners simply assume that what they are doing is value-free. The main exceptions have been Marxists. Marx taught that philosophy and ethics are merely defenses of the ruling class. They are aspects of the mode of production, which he called the substructure of all society. He called philosophy the superstructure. It is ephemeral. When the prevailing mode of production is replaced by a new mode, the class philosophy of the superseded era fades away. But there have been few self-conscious Marxists in the West, and even fewer academic Marxist economists. Today, Marxist philosophy, unlike the capitalist mode of production, has been replaced. This happened almost overnight in the aftermath of Gorbachev’s public dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. When the Soviet flag was lowered, so was Marxist philosophy, sociology, and economics. (http://bit.ly/FlagLowered)
It is time to raise the flag of Christian social theory generally, and specifically the flag of Christian economics. I invite you to participate in this metaphorical ceremony in your circle of influence. But I warn you: not many Christian academics will salute it. Before you decide to commit to this lifetime calling, count the cost (Luke 14:28–30). Second, finish what you start. “Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God’” (Luke 9:62). Take these warnings seriously.
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