Updated: 3/2/20
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Genesis 1:26).
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This one was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him there was not one thing made that has been made (John 1:1–3).
God’s creation of the universe out of nothing established His legal ownership over everything. “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). This starting point is theocentric. God is sovereign; man is not.
The New Testament says that God had a purpose before the creation. This purpose was redemptive (Ephesians 1:1–11). Analytically, God’s purpose precedes the creation. Judicially, the creation is fundamental to economics. It establishes God’s original ownership. But in the case of God’s creation of the universe, purpose preceded both creation and ownership. Creation manifested God’s original ownership. God’s providence sustains His ownership. It is the metaphysical foundation of coherence. The epistle to the Hebrews explains both the creation and providential coherence in terms of Jesus. “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in many ways. But in these last days, he has spoken to us through a Son, whom he appointed to be the heir of all things. It is through him that God also made the universe. He is the brightness of God's glory, the exact representation of his being. He even holds everything together by the word of his power. After he had made cleansing for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (1:1–3).
Genesis 1 begins with the creation. It reveals that God established the dominion covenant with mankind. This covenant reveals a God who is plural: “Let us.” This is the first indication in Scripture of the doctrine of the Trinity. The Gospel of John begins with the identification of the Creator: the Word. This is the Second Person of the Trinity. He created the universe. Paul echoed this doctrine of creation: “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” (Colossians 1:15–16).
In this system of ownership, the Second Person of the Trinity, incarnated in history in the Person of Jesus Christ, acts as God’s steward in history. He is a perfect man. He is the covenantal replacement of Adam after Adam’s rebellion. He is the lawful heir. Jesus made this clear in His parable of the thieving stewards. “After that, the owner sent his own son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the vine growers saw the son, they said among themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and take over the inheritance.’ So they took him, threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those vine growers?’ They said to him, ‘He will destroy those miserable men in the most severe way, and will then rent out the vineyard to other vine growers, men who will give him his share of crops at the harvest time’ "(Matthew 21:37–41). [North, Matthew, ch. 43]
He builds up the kingdom in history. Then He will transfer it to the Father at the end of time. “Then will be the end, when Christ will hand over the kingdom to God the Father. This is when he will abolish all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For ‘he has put everything under his feet.’ But when it says ‘he has put everything,’ it is clear that this does not include the one who put everything in subjection to himself. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will be subjected to him who put all things into subjection under him, that God may be all in all” (I Corinthians 15:24–28). [North, First Corinthians, ch. 17] At that point, God the Father will transfer this inheritance to the church: the bride price. I discuss this in Chapter 47.
This is the biblical model of stewardship. It begins with a hierarchy of authority within the Godhead. God the Father delegated to the Son the task of creation. After Adam’s fall, God the Father assigned to the Son the task of redemption. Redemption is not simply the redemption of souls. It is the redemption of the fallen world. It involves buying back the fallen world. This is done by Christians on behalf of Christ, and in the name of Christ. This is hierarchical: covenant-keepers are under Christ, and Christ is under God the Father. At the end of time, Christ hands the redeemed world back to God the Father. This is footstool theology. It involves economics. It is a matter of ownership. This program of economic redemption is the fulfillment of Adam’s task of dominion. It will end history.
What follows history? The marriage supper of the lamb. “Then I heard what sounded like the voice of a great number of people, like the roar of many waters, and like loud crashes of thunder, saying, “Hallelujah! For the Lord reigns, the God who rules over all. Let us rejoice and be very happy and give him the glory because the wedding celebration of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. She was permitted to be dressed in bright and clean fine linen (for fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints)” (Revelation 19:6–8). At that time, God the Father will endow the church with the bride price. It will be her inheritance in eternity. The bride price was a dowry under the Mosaic law (Exodus 22:16–17) and even before. Shechem offered to pay a bride price to Jacob if Jacob would allow him to marry Dinah (Genesis 34:11–12). Legally, it was paid to her by her father, but the groom paid her father this dowry. The transfer of the money accompanied the transfer of covenantal authority over her from her father to the bridegroom. Because the bridegroom paid this dowry, the inheritance of her brothers was not depleted. In the case of the church, the bride price to God the Father will be paid by Jesus. “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will be subjected to him who put all things into subjection under him, that God may be all in all” (I Corinthians 15:28). God the Father then will transfer this dowry to the church. In this way, the total inheritance of history will be transferred to the church. It will serve as capital for the continuation of the dominion covenant in the new heaven and new earth (Revelation 21, 22).
The dominion covenant is eternal. Eternity will not be endless consumption. There will be much to learn. Members of the church will learn by doing in eternity, just as they do today. “Be doers of the word and not only hearers, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word but not a doer, he is like a man who examines his natural face in a mirror. He examines himself and then goes away and immediately forgets what he was like. But the person who looks carefully into the perfect law of freedom, and continues to do so, not just being a hearer who forgets, this man will be blessed in his actions” (James 1:22–25). This will be true in eternity, just as it is true in history.
Orthodox Christianity teaches that God is one. It also teaches that this God is in three Persons. These Persons possess equal ultimacy. None of them is less God than the others. The Nicene Creed (325 AD) says of Jesus that He is “the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through Whom all things came into being, things in heaven and things on earth.” The revision of Constantinople (381 AD) added this regarding the Holy Spirit: “who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” This was the early church’s challenge to the heresy of Arianism, which made Christ a created being, and therefore not originally divine. From the standpoint of economic theory, this doctrine implies that ownership is simultaneously one and many: one God, three Persons. Not one of the Persons of the Godhead is a subordinate owner. God possesses lawful title to everything.
Orthodox Christianity also acknowledges a subordination of function within the Godhead. Theologians call this the economic Trinity. The idea here is the original Greek word, eco: family. There is a division of labor among the Persons. God the Father was not incarnate in history. Jesus said: “No one has seen God at any time. The one and only God, who is at the side of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1:18). “It is written in the prophets, ‘Everyone will be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father, except he who is from God—he has seen the Father” (John 6:45–46). Jesus represents the Father as a trustee. “All things have been entrusted to me from my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matthew:11:27).
Christians must uphold both aspects of the doctrine of the Trinity: ontological and economic. They must affirm that God is one. They must also affirm that God is many. This is basic Trinitarian doctrine. They must affirm the equal ultimacy, meaning equal sovereignty, of the three Persons. But this sovereignty is manifested in a hierarchical system of authority. The Son represents the Father. So does the Holy Spirit. At the Last Supper, Jesus said: “I have many things to say to you, but you would not understand them now. But when he, the Spirit of Truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak from himself. But he will say whatever he hears, and he will tell you things that are to come” (John 16:12–13). (The Western Church affirms that the Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son. This is known as the Filioque clause: “and from the Son.” This was proclaimed at the third council of Toledo in 589.)
How does this affect economic theory? First, it insists that ownership is both corporate (one) and individual (many). This means that purely individualistic ownership is incorrect, as is full state ownership. Second, with respect to the subjective imputation of economic value, this imputation is both individualistic and corporate. When God evaluated His work at the end of the days of creation, this imputation was both unified and plural. There was agreement among the Persons of the Godhead that the work was good. Because a sovereign God made this evaluation, it was objectively true. It was a matter of sovereign opinion.
Adam Smith began Wealth of Nations (1776) with three chapters on the division of labor. He was impressed by the greater productivity that is made possible through specialization. Specialization requires coordination. It also requires interdependence. Specialization and independence are necessary for human society. The Trinity is the model of this outlook. Three Persons coordinated production. This was not their response to scarcity. They could have jointly created the universe, but they did not. They had joint purposes. They had a joint plan. When it came time to create man, they jointly concluded “let us.” There was no need for a market system of exchange for them to reconcile their plans. There was no give and take required to lay out their plans. No Person of the Godhead had to give up something of value in order to gain something of value. But there was specialization. There was plan coordination.
Had he been a self-conscious covenant economist, Smith would have used the five points to structure his presentation. He should have devoted part of Chapter 1 to God’s original ownership: point one. Then he should have discussed stewardship: point two. This would have placed ownership at the heart of his analysis: original ownership followed by delegated ownership. If he had begun with Trinitarian ownership, he could have discussed the foundations of the division of labor early in his book in Chapter 3. That would have been point three. As a mild deist, none of this occurred to him. His god was unitarian, as we can see in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). In contrast, the God of the Bible did use the division of labor in the creation week. He did not do this to overcome limits imposed by scarcity. He did it to reflect His character.
Smith’s focus from the beginning of Wealth of Nations is point three: the division of labor. He did not understand the creation week. The creation week established a pattern for mankind: cooperation (point three) through hierarchy (point two). Smith’s hypothetical pin factory was hierarchical, though he never discussed this. Someone owned it. Someone managed it. This hierarchy managed the division of labor. God in the creation week reflects this. The Son created under the Father’s authority. The creation therefore testifies to a God who is both one and many. There is communication among the Persons of the Godhead. There is talk. Talk is also basic to humanity. This is why the destruction of communications at the tower of Babel divided mankind after mankind attempted to speak with one voice to commit evil. In response, God once again said: “Let us.” “The Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people with the same language, and they are beginning to do this! Soon nothing that they intend to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they may not understand each other’” (Genesis 11:6–7).
The free market is the product of coordination. It is not centralized coordination. It is a matter of voluntary cooperation. It is coordination by prices, which are established by competitive bidding. High bid wins. Coordination by bidding is far less true in families, churches, and civil governments. There, cooperation is based on mutual obligations that are enforced by a chain of command. The church will extend into eternity. The family and civil government will not. There will still be cooperation in eternity: the new heaven and new earth (Revelation 21, 22). There will be no cooperation in the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14–15). There will be no human action. There will be no dominion.
Point three of the covenant establishes boundaries: judicial and ethical. The human division of labor involves interdependence. It involves uncertainty. No one can be certain of the performance of others in the production process. People must trust each other. None of this applies to the three Persons of the Trinity. They have exhaustive knowledge of each other: past, present, and future. There is no uncertainty. So, they can trust each other completely. They honor each other’s tasks and therefore their operational boundaries in their relations downward toward the creation and upward toward God the Father. The Spirit was involved with the creation on day one: “The earth was without form and empty. Darkness was upon the surface of the deep. The Spirit of God was moving above the surface of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). So, the conceptual categories of the division of labor apply to the Godhead. This makes Trinitarian economics fundamentally different and conceptually different from all rival economic theories.
Point four is judgment. In economics, this is the imputation of value. God imputes economic value collectively and individually: one and many. So does mankind. The Godhead imputes economic value subjectively. So do individuals. The difference between God’s imputation and mankind’s is that His imputation is objective because He is absolutely sovereign. This is not simply a matter of opinion. This objectivity is the basis of mankind’s objective value. Mankind’s imputation is not exclusively nominalistic. The opinions of others shape the outcome, mainly through competitive monetary bidding. This is not true of the Godhead.
Point five is succession: linear history. The creation week is the model. It had sequence: days one through seven. God could have created the universe personally and purposefully in one instant, analogous to the way that cosmic evolutionists say that the infinitely dense pre-Big Bang “stuff” impersonally and purposelessly created the universe through “inflating.” [In the 2019 Wikipedia entry for “Big Bang,” we read: “In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch lasted from 10 -36 seconds after the conjectured Big Bang singularity to sometime between 10 -33 and 10 -32 seconds after the singularity. Following the inflationary period, the universe continues to expand, but at a less rapid rate.” In layman’s language, this was instantaneous.] But He didn’t. Neither does man. Man’s creativity is sequential: purpose, plan, cooperation, entrepreneurship, and capital accumulation.
There are four oath-bound covenants in history: individual, family, church, and state. I cover this in detail in The Covenantal Structure of Christian Economics. The ethical stipulations for each of these covenants are binding on those who affirm it, whether personally or through legally authoritative representation (trusteeship). So are the covenant’s judicial sanctions. This means that God’s delegation of ownership to families, churches, and civil governments is valid. Biblical covenant theology therefore denies the fundamental premise of anarchism, including anarcho-capitalism, namely, the illegitimacy of civil government. All branches of the Christian church have always insisted on this. The phrase “Christian anarchism” is an oxymoron: an inherently self-contradictory statement or idea.
These four covenants are established by oath under God’s authority. This hierarchical structure of judicial authority is established and enforced by a God who is both one and many. In three of the four covenants, covenant-makers are both individual and corporate. Marriage vows are plural under God. Church membership in the New Testament church was plural. The head of a household spoke judicially in the name of those under his covenantal authority. He was God’s designated trustee. We know this from the story of the Philippian jailer. “The jailer called for lights and rushed in and, trembling for fear, fell down before Paul and Silas, and brought them out and said, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’ They said, ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your house.’ They spoke the word of the Lord to him, together with everyone in his house. Then the jailer took them at the same hour of the night, and washed their wounds, and he and those in his entire house were baptized immediately” (Acts 16:29–33). Fathers under the Abrahamic covenant circumcised their newborn sons on the eighth day. This was a legally binding oath-sign. Churches that baptize infants—the overwhelming majority of churches in history—allow a parent to act as a legal spokesperson (trustee) for children, who are baptized by the church. With respect to the state, there are public oaths of loyalty to the nation when citizens are naturalized and when citizens are sworn in as jurors or military members.
An institution sealed by a covenantal oath has the right to own property. This is representative of other collective agencies. Ownership is not limited to covenantal institutions. Contractual institutions also have the right to own property. This establishes the concept of representative ownership. Designated agents of the organization act legally in the name of the organization (trusteeship). They also act on behalf of the organization (stewardship).
Representative agents of corporate members act in terms of subjectively imputed economic value. These agents impute value to assets, but always as legal agents (trustees). They are not supposed to impute value solely on their own behalf. They have fiduciary authority, which is legal authority. It involves responsibilities to the owners who are represented. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines fiduciary. “Fiduciary relationships often concern money, but the word fiduciary does not, in and of itself, suggest financial matters. Rather, fiduciary applies to any situation in which one person justifiably places confidence and trust in someone else and seeks that person's help or advice in some matter. The attorney-client relationship is a fiduciary one, for example, because the client trusts the attorney to act in the best interest of the client at all times. Fiduciary can also be used as a noun for the person who acts in a fiduciary capacity, and fiduciarily or fiducially can be called upon if you are in need of an adverb. The words are all faithful to their origin: Latin fidere, which means ‘to trust.’”
There are no numerically measurable objective standards of economic valuation available to economic actors: “exactly this much more or less value.” In human affairs, economic value is subjective. It is imputed. But Christian economic theory also insists that economic valuation, while subjective, is not purely subjective. Why not? Because the Trinity imputes economic value to every asset and every action. This imputation is objective, even though it is imputed subjectively. God is sovereign. Therefore, His subjective imputation has objective value. This imputation is the standard by which every person’s economic valuations will be judged objectively on judgment day. It is each person’s responsibility to impute value according to God’s standards, but imperfectly as a creature. This preserves Christian economics from the cacophony of nominalism: “every man for himself.” This is why it is possible for organizational policy-makers to come to a decision about the right things to do and also how to do things right. People are capable of making interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility in family, church, and state. This is denied in theory by strict nominalism, not just with respect to economic valuation, but to all valuation. The famous assertion of this position is Chapter VI of Lionel Robbins’ Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932). He was at the time an intellectual disciple of Ludwig von Mises. He was a strict nominalist. But he abandoned this position in 1938 in his debate with Roy Harrod in The Economic Journal. He never put the pieces together: subjective nominalism, but with sufficient objective realism mixed in to enable political policy-makers to use economic theory to guide them in discovering an optimum valuation of the competing subjective valuations of society’s members. Neither has any other humanistic economist. The epistemological problem is ignored.
Ownership is theocentric. It is Trinitarian, but it is uniquely Christocentric in history. The Second Person of the Trinity created the world and has redeemed it. Administering it as a judicial trustee and as an economic steward is His responsibility forever. Why? Because He is the cosmic Owner. Ownership is always judicially connected to responsibility.
Trinitarian ownership sends a warning to individualists and collectivists: neither organizational system can work. It sends a message to nominalists and realists: neither theory of mankind’s imputation of economic value is true. It sends a message to defenders of a mixed economy: there can be no theoretical or operational resolution of individualism and collectivism that is based on the doctrine of the autonomy of man. Always, some covenant-breaking owners will seek to play God, either through the market process (wealth) or centralized economic planning (power). There will be more attempts to build a tower reaching to heaven.
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