Give to a wise person, and he will become even wiser; teach a righteous person, and he will add to his learning. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding (Proverbs 9:9–10).
The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Why? Because God is the Creator, the Law-giver, and the final Judge. God is the source of providence, which sustains the cosmos. That is to say, God is sovereign.
For social theory to be accurate, it must deal forthrightly with five general categories: sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and time. Every social theorist must then identify the applications of these five general categories in his specialized field. If he does this, he will not overlook something crucial. He should also discuss lots of subordinate categories, but these are supplemental. They are not foundational. The five points are foundational.
Part 2 introduces the five categories of economic analysis: purpose, allocation, boundaries, imputation, and inheritance. These categories govern the whole of Christian economic theory in the period between man’s creation and the final judgment. The fifth point, inheritance, will not apply in the heavenly era of the new heaven and new earth, in which there will be no marriage. It will be replaced by succession, which will be based on the division of labor. Succession is point five of God’s overall covenant: God, man, law, sanctions, and succession.
Why are these the five crucial categories for economic theory? Why not the five categories in Part 3 of the Student’s Edition? Part 3 of the Student’s Edition is a call to commitment. It offers an intellectual structure for an inter-generational program of economic redemption. The categories are providence, service, leasehold, entrepreneurship, and compound growth. This is a list of themes leading to the economic redemption—buying back—of society. They are replacements for the categories that provide the intellectual structure of the long-term program of humanistic economics: chance, autonomy, theft, bureaucracy, and disinheritance. They are needed to guide anyone who is serious about restoring the productivity of the pre-fall world that man lost, and then extending that world beyond the geographical boundaries of the garden of Eden. I used these categories to structure Volume 3: Activist’s Edition. In contrast, Volume 4 has a different goal: the reconstruction of economic theory, meaning economic analysis, along biblical lines. I have identified and developed the categories in Part 2 as intellectual tools to provide coherence to the topics that follow Part 2.
Basic to my approach to economics is this: it is theocentric. It begins with God, not man. Specifically, it begins with the Trinity. That’s why it is Christian economics. Any form of economics that does not begin with the Trinity is not Christian. That should be easy to understand. But what aspect of God should we begin with? That is the crucial question. Here is my answer. Actually, it is three answers. All three answers have to do with the same topic: the sovereignty of God.
Point one of the biblical covenant model and its applications in every field always has to do with God’s sovereignty. The creation out of nothing was the manifestation in history of God’s sovereignty. To begin with any other doctrine of origins is to begin with man as autonomous. Man’s autonomy is where all modern humanistic sciences begin. In contrast, in every Christian science, point one is connected to God’s creation of the universe.
How does this principle of interpretation apply in economic theory? The following three economic categories are aspects of point one: God’s sovereignty.
In Chapter 1 of Student’s Edition, I argued that God’s original ownership was the starting point of economic theory prior to the fall of man. This concept derives from God’s creation of the world. “The earth is the Lord’s, and its fullness, the world, and all who live in it. For he has founded it upon the seas and established it on the rivers” (Psalm 24:1–2). [North, Psalms, ch. 5] In Chapter 2, I argued that God’s delegation of ownership to man in the dominion covenant (Genesis 1:26–28) established man’s authority: stewardship. [North, Genesis, ch. 3] Stewardship is a matter of delegated sovereignty. This sovereignty is limited by boundaries: law, geography, and time.
God is the Owner of the universe because of two things: His original creation of the universe and His providential administration of it subsequently. The completion of the creation on day six, coupled with God’s declaration of its goodness, jointly constitute the starting point of any discussion of economic imputation. “God saw everything that he had made. Behold, it was very good. This was evening and morning, the sixth day” (Genesis 1:31). This verse establishes God as a uniquely transcendent God: separate from and dominant over the creation. It also identifies God as the source of all imputations of value. The doctrine of God as sovereign Imputer is crucial for any discussion of economic value, as we shall see.
God’s ownership is absolute. Man’s ownership is bounded. It is derivative. God’s ownership is the initial judicial category in Christian economic theory. It is important for economic theory because it was point one of the biblical economic covenant in the pre-fall world. Economic theory is not autonomous, contrary to humanistic economics. It rests on a legal principle: God’s original ownership. In humanistic economic theory, this foundation is unstated. Economists begin with scarcity, not ownership. They begin with an analytical category that does not seem to be either judicial or moral.
The judicial categories are superior to the economic categories. Trusteeship is superior to stewardship. This is why, in the Student’s Edition, I began with the topic of God’s original ownership in the pre-fall world. This is primarily a judicial category. It has to be the starting point of Christian economics because it is a judicial category. It is based on the biblical account of God’s creation of the cosmos. His creation of the cosmos established His ownership of the cosmos. This is the judicial basis of God’s sovereignty in history and in eternity. His sovereignty is manifested in his judicial office. Because God is the sovereign Owner, He does not have to make trade-offs in life. He does not have to give up one thing in order to gain another. This is why a non-economic category is foundational to Christian economic theory. It precedes economic theory. This is why humanistic economics is inherently incorrect. It does not start with the judicial category of God’s original ownership, and it also does not start with the judicial category of man’s derivative ownership. It treats economic theory as if economics were autonomous. It is not. It is derivative. It is an aspect of man’s finitude. Man’s finitude is grounded metaphysically in God’s absolute sovereignty, which was manifested in His creation of the cosmos out of nothing. That was the ultimate manifestation of the absence of a trade-off. God got something for nothing.
God’s ownership is primarily a judicial category. It provides the covenantal framework for economics. It answers the question: “Who’s in charge here?” This is the covenantal issue of sovereignty. But God’s ownership does not explain the nature of human action: purposes, planning, and action. Economic theory deals with human action. Human action begins with purpose, just as God did before the creation. Christian economists should therefore discuss purpose as the key explicitly economic category for explaining the other four major categories: allocation, boundaries, imputation, and inheritance.
By metaphysics, I mean the underlying force and structure that hold the world together. Metaphysics is the foundation of causation: cause-and-effect.
The biblical doctrine of creation carries with it the idea of God’s providence. Specifically, this providence is supplied by Jesus. Paul wrote: “In his Son we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. The Son is the image of the invisible God. He is the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, those in the heavens and those on the earth, the visible and the invisible things. Whether thrones or dominions or governments or authorities, all things were created by him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:14–17).
In Chapter 11 of the Student’s Edition, I argued that in this, the redemptive era, this focus on creation must focus on the doctrine of providence. Why? Because Christian scholars must make a self-conscious break from the epistemology of humanism, which rests on the idea of purposeless and impersonal cosmic chance and the purposeless and impersonal Big Bang.
Christian scholars must begin where the Bible begins: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). God’s providence is the source of cosmic coherence, of causality. It provides metaphysical coherence, meaning unseen, underlying coherence. Jesus holds all things together. The doctrine of God’s providence is the metaphysical foundation of Christian confidence. God does not make mistakes. Nothing surprises Him. His word can be trusted. Providence is governed by God’s purpose. His decree is sovereign. For Christians, the doctrine of providence is supposed to produce optimism regarding history.
The Christian scholar must self-consciously challenge the humanists’ category of impersonal chance as the source of the cosmos: the Big Bang. This intellectual battle should begin with the doctrine of cosmic origins. The issue of cosmic origins is the issue of original sovereignty. The Bible’s account of God’s creation of the cosmos is the foundation of Christianity’s doctrine of the sovereignty of God. God’s sovereignty is another way of saying God’s providence: His day-by-day, moment-by-moment control over the cosmos. Social theorists usually think of sovereignty strictly as a judicial category: the original source of the law and the final court of appeal. But, with respect to the cosmos, God’s sovereignty is far more than judicial. It is a cosmos-sustaining providence.
Humanists do not dwell long on the doctrine of chance. They affirm it with respect to cosmic origins, but then they move on to the evolution of man: 13.7 billion years later. They identify man as the sole source of purpose in the cosmos today as far as men know. The Big Bang and the subsequent evolutionary process prior to the unplanned appearance of man were purposeless, they assert. Humanism invokes the Big Bang as a way to sever any connection between God and man. Humanists assert that the Big Bang was purposeless. It was also impersonal. They do this as part of a grand intellectual strategy: to make autonomous man the operational sovereign. They do this by means of a four-step argument, which they refuse to spell out in one place for the public to evaluate. Nevertheless, they believe it. First, the impersonal, purposeless cosmos somehow produced life about 3.5 billion years ago. Life is fundamentally different from inanimate nature. Some animals have purposes. They actively shape their immediate environments. Second, the still-impersonal, purposeless process of biological evolution produced man, a unique species. This was about three million years ago. Third, man is unique in the animal kingdom because he has purposes with respect to altering his regional environment, not just altering his immediate environment. More important, mankind evolves culturally by transmitting an intellectual heritage by words and symbols. Fourth, mankind’s all-encompassing purposes have placed collective man on the throne: sovereignty. The existence of purposes beyond the individual animal’s goal of survival is the biological basis of man’s claim to sovereignty. I call this argument “from cosmic purposelessness to humanistic sovereignty.” This is the title of Appendix A of my economic commentary on Genesis, Sovereignty and Dominion.
In the Darwinian worldview, purpose arrived in the universe only with advanced forms of life. Life arose out of purposeless change. As far as Darwinists know, man alone has long-run purposes, which can be achieved only by complex planning. For the Darwinist, purpose was a great cosmic discontinuity in an autonomous universe. For the Christian, the creation of the universe was a great discontinuity, one which was completely separate from the autonomous Creator. Purpose is eternal. The universe is not. The universe is now without end, but it had a beginning not too long ago. God’s purpose is therefore more fundamental than the universe. It precedes action because it preceded the creation.
Man’s purposes rest on God’s providence. Everything rests on His providence. Without providence, the coherence of the universe and man’s share of it could not be sustained. Providence is the general category for all science. It is an aspect of God’s creation. God did not create the universe and then depart. The biblical doctrine of God insists that He is transcendent but also present with His creation. He progressively governs the earth primarily through man. This is the meaning of the dominion covenant.
With respect to developing Christianity’s worldview, the biblical doctrine of providence is crucial. Humanists recognize this. They deny providence with respect to origins. Christian social theorists should therefore begin with God’s creation of the world out of nothing. This declaration identifies God as sovereign. It declares that the cosmos is personal. This breaks with humanism at the most fundamental level.
Providence refers to God’s active sustaining of the universe through time. God’s providence is the basis of all continuity. The continuity of the universe is not autonomous in any aspect. Christians affirm that God is present with His universe through time. He is not part of it, but He is present with it.
With respect to God’s providential administration of the world, Job 38–41 is a relevant passage. God answers Job’s question—“Why me, Lord?”—with a long list of things He had seen and done. “Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations? Tell me, if you have so much understanding. Who determined its dimensions? Tell me, if you know. Who stretched the measuring line over it? On what were its foundations laid? Who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4–7). But no passage more forcefully declares God’s sovereignty over the creation than Isaiah 45. The entire chapter constitutes an affirmation of the sovereignty of God, but these verses especially. “‘I made the earth and created man on it. It was my hands that stretched out the heavens, and I commanded all the stars to appear. I stirred Cyrus up in righteousness, and I will smooth out all his paths. He will build my city; he will let my exiled people go home, and not for price nor bribe,’ says the Lord of hosts” (Isaiah. 45:12–13).
The twin doctrines of creation and providence are the conceptual foundations of this declaration: “For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills” (Psalm 50:10). [North, Psalms, ch. 10] The twin doctrines of creation and providence establish a fundamental distinction between God as Creator and any aspect of the creation. God is in no way dependent on the creation. The creation is in every way dependent on God. God is autonomous, establishing His law for Himself and the creation. The creation is not autonomous in any way.
After Christian economists have self-consciously adopted providence as the basis of their explanation for causation in general, they should begin to look for a specific economic category that enables them to explain the broadest range of economic issues. This category is purpose.
With respect to economic stewardship, meaning resource allocation governed by subjectively imputed economic value, purpose is the initial analytical category, because it enables us to understand men’s economic actions. Economics is about human action. As an academic discipline, economics is about human action in the free market. (Economists generally avoid discussing economics in the church and the family, as I discuss in The Covenantal Structure of Christian Economics.) This raises a secondary economic question: the two kingdoms, God’s and man’s. Jesus made it clear that there are two kingdoms in history, not one. Humanism insists there is only one: man’s. It is a task of Christian social theorists to challenge this assertion in every field of thought. In economics, the decisive separating category is purpose. Purpose preceded the creation. It therefore preceded God’s ownership. Purpose helps us to understand why people allocate property in specific ways—ways that are more predictable by means of Christian economic theory than without it.
With the fall of man, there are now two families: Adam’s disinherited family and Christ’s adopted family. There are now two rival kingdoms: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. From an economic standpoint, the category that best distinguishes them is their rival purposes. The language of the King James Version of the Bible says it best: “No man 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” (Matthew 6:24). [North, Matthew, ch. 14] Mammon is sometimes translated as money, but that does not do justice to the Greek word. It refers to more than money. It refers to wealth generally. Jesus' parable of the rich man who planned to build barns is representative.
Then Jesus told them a parable, saying, “The field of a rich man yielded abundantly, and he reasoned with himself, saying, ‘What will I do, because I do not have a place to store my crops?’ He said, ‘This is what I will do. I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all of my grain and other goods. I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have many goods stored up for many years. Rest easy, eat, drink, be merry.’”' But God said to him, ‘Foolish man, tonight your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ That is what someone is like who stores up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:16–24).
It was not wealth that distinguished this man from the two successful stewards in Jesus’ parallel stewardship parables of the talents and the minas. It was purpose. The barn-builder was self-centered. It was this: more for me in history. Isaiah described this outlook. “The dogs have big appetites; they can never get enough; they are shepherds without discernment; they have all turned to their own way, each one covetous for unjust gain. ‘Come,’ they say, ‘let us drink wine and liquor. Tomorrow will be like today, a day great beyond measure’” (Isaiah 56:11–12). This is the outlook of the covenant-breaker.
Purpose lays the foundation for planning. Purpose precedes planning. Planning in turn lays the foundation for resource allocation. Christian economists should therefore begin with purpose as the crucial idea that links God’s original creativity to man’s subordinate creativity. Economics is about man’s creativity in a world of scarcity. Purpose in economic theory has to do with man as a legal trustee and as an economic steward. Man’s purposes should be God’s purposes for him as a trustee/steward.
I argue in Chapter 6 that purpose preceded God’s creation of the cosmos. I also argue that the crucial conceptual link between God and man with respect to economics is purpose. Christian social theorists must focus their studies on a discussion of man’s purpose as it applies in their fields. Why purpose? Because man’s purposes reflect God’s original purpose. Man’s purposes are not autonomous. They are representative. By declaring man’s purposes as subordinate to God’s purposes, Christians challenge Darwinian humanists in their attempt to place man on a supposedly empty throne. Humanists correctly view purpose as the mark of sovereignty. They want man to possess this mark exclusively. Christians must counter this argument by insisting that God has never surrendered either purpose or the throne. They must defend God’s sovereignty by defending (1) God’s pre-creation purpose, (2) the creation, (3) God’s ownership of the cosmos, and (4) God’s comprehensive providence ever since. All four concepts are necessary for understanding the biblical doctrine of God’s sovereignty. Humanists deny all four with respect to cosmic origins. They deny cosmic purpose prior to the Big Bang, at the Big Bang, and after the Big Bang until man evolved purposelessly 13.7 billion years later.
In the Darwinian worldview, purpose arrived in the universe only with advanced forms of life. Life arose out of purposeless change. Higher animals display purposeful behavior. This is how we define “higher.” The closer to man that an animal is in the chain of covenantal authority, the more it displays purposeful behavior. Purposeful behavior is a series of sequential actions in which learning takes place, thereby changing the actor’s future sequence of actions in what seems to be a similar environment. The main change in the environment is the animal’s mastery of new information regarding causation. It learns to manipulate its environment in order to achieve its goals. It learns new connections between ends and means. It remembers them.
As far as Darwinists know, man alone has long-run purposes, which can be achieved only by complex planning. For the Darwinist, purpose was a great cosmic discontinuity in an autonomous universe. For the Christian, the creation of the universe was a great discontinuity, which was completely separate from the autonomous Creator. Purpose is eternal. The universe is not. The universe is now without end, but it had a beginning not too long ago. God’s purpose is therefore more fundamental than the universe. It precedes action because it preceded the creation.
Humanists have made purpose the defining feature of man’s sovereignty. There is a reason for this. As creatures made in God’s image, humanists recognize that the defining feature of God’s sovereignty is purpose. From the beginning, the creation has reflected God’s purpose. This is why Christians should affirm God’s purpose for creation. Humanists recognize that purposefulness is the mark of sovereignty in history. They do not officially care about sovereignty in eternity. They see cosmic evolution as beginning in purposelessness (the Big Bang) and ending in purposelessness (the heat death of the universe). This is the price they are willing to pay in order to declare that man gets to rule as sovereign in between. This is the logical basis of their revolt against God.
While humanistic economists discuss men’s purposes, they do not discuss God’s purposes. This is part of humanism’s deeply religious program to keep autonomous man on the throne. This is how humanists silently affirm man’s sovereignty. It is sovereignty by default. Economists play their specialized roles in this civilization-wide operation: the kingdom of man, meaning the kingdom of mammon. To combat them, Christian economists should begin with the idea of men’s purposes as reflecting God’s purposes. They should begin with this confession of faith: apart from God’s purposes, men would not exist. They would have no purposes. This was Cornelius Van Til’s approach to apologetics. It is presuppositional. It affirms this: without the presupposition of the Trinitarian God of creation, human thought is illogical.
The ability to devise purposes has not placed man on the cosmic throne. God already occupies it. But man’s derivative purposes place mankind on the delegated throne of dominion over nature.
As you read each chapter in this section, you will see that I follow a specific pattern. First, I introduce each chapter with a Bible passage. This is the same strategy that I have used throughout this four-volume series. This is also the strategy that I used in all 31 volumes of my economic commentary on the Bible. This strategy is explicitly biblical.
I have read lots of articles and even books claiming to be on the topic of Christian economics. But they do not begin with an exposition of the Bible. They are not based on a comprehensive body of material that exegetes Bible passages from an economic framework. There are no supporting economic commentaries on the Bible. They do not begin with some aspect of God. Each author adopts the framework that he finds in economics textbooks in structuring his discussion of economics. He puts in some Bible verses. He may refer back to some supposedly Christian philosopher. But he does not make his case based on his own exegesis of the Bible, point by point.
In contrast, I began with a framework that is explicitly based on the Bible: the five-point covenant model. I then fill in the outline with Bible passages. I exegete each passage. I show how it is related to a particular economic principle or category. Then I provide a detailed presentation of why this particular verse's point is relevant to the field of economic theory or practice. You will see this approach in action in Part 2. In each of the chapters in Part 2, I break down the chapter into the five points of the biblical covenant model. With respect to social theory, these are as follows: sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and time, meaning eschatology. Each of these subcategories has an important place in every social theory, Christian and non-Christian. This is how social theory should initially be analyzed by Christians. We should be more self-conscious about this. We need a reconstruction of social theory in general. I then show how these categories apply to the field of economics, meaning to each of the five main categories of economic theory. There is a cookie-cutter element in this approach, but this approach guarantees that I will not miss anything significant. I will not mention lots of things in Part 2, but I will deal with subcategories within each category that have to be dealt with in order to understand Christian economics.
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