For which of you who desires to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost to calculate if he has what he needs to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to mock him, saying, “This man began to build and was not able to finish.” Or what king, as he goes to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and take advice about whether he is able with ten thousand men to fight the other king who comes against him with twenty thousand men? If not, while the other army is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for conditions of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not give up all that he has cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:28–33).
You have reached the end of the primary section of this book. Only appendixes remain. Congratulations. It is now time to count the cost of rereading all four volumes. This is what I am asking you to do if you choose to become a Christian economist. You have the general idea of what Christian economics is, as well as what it is not, by having read all four volumes, but you have not internalized them yet. You have not made them second nature to your thinking. Now the hard work must begin if you accept my challenge.
You will spend the remainder of your calling challenging the most entrenched, self-confident practitioners of what is known as social science: economists. Their degree of arrogance regarding the reliability of their presuppositions, their logic, and their methodology exceeds that of practitioners in any other social science. They are not noted for their humility. Yet they are not good as economic forecasters. Their confidence is in their conceptual apparatus, not their actual performance.
I hope that by now you have an understanding of the epistemological sand on which modern humanism rests: the irreconcilable dualism of Kant’s deterministic phenomenal realm of science vs. his noumenal realm of indeterminism, devoid of predictability and reason. In the field of social science, the contrast between the self-confidence of the economists and the shaky foundation on which they have constructed their seemingly scientific edifice should be apparent to you by now. That is why I wrote Part 1 of this volume. I want to give you confidence in the face of what appears to be a scientifically validated intellectual construct. It is no more secure than the epistemology undergirding the science which supposedly validates it. Humanistic economic theory and modern science are like a pair of drunks who are holding up each other as they stagger home after an evening of self-congratulatory toasting.
My critique goes beyond a critical examination of Kantian presuppositions and their applications in economic science. The economist’s problem is not merely intellectual. He faces the personal problem of the meaninglessness of his work, a problem that all humanists face. No modern social scientist was any more perceptive about the inherent limitations of the calling of science than Max Weber was. He was correctly perceived as an intellectual giant in his era. He is still widely acknowledged as the greatest social theorist of the twentieth century. He was not some crackpot on the fringes of the world of scholarship. He was a self-conscious humanist. He was willing to spell out the implications of a lifetime of academic learning. His forthright pair of presentations of what it means to be a humanistic scholar have long provided me with an incentive to complete my calling. I recognized early that humanism is bankrupt. No one made this clearer than Weber. The setting in which he made these admissions was also important.
Weber is famous among social scientists for two lectures, “Politics as a Vocation” (1919) and “Science as a Vocation” (1917). He delivered “Politics as a Vocation” ten weeks after the end of World War I. He spoke to students of the Free Students Union of Bavaria: January 28, 1919. This was during the post-war revolution when Munich was briefly the capital of the People’s State of Bavaria, which was established on November 8, 1918 during the German Revolution. It replaced the Kingdom of Bavaria. It was led by Kurt Eisner until his assassination in February 1919. On April 6–7, Communists and anarchists jointly announced the creation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. This experiment in Communism ended on May 6 after the Republic’s army of 30,000 men lost to an army of 20,000 paramilitary troops of the demobilized German army. In short, Weber gave this lecture in a time of unprecedented local social upheaval. Yet no reader would guess this by reading this typically Germanic professorial verbal performance.
Vocation means calling. He had a specific view of calling in mind. He had described this in the articles he wrote in 1905 and 1906, which we know as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He equated calling with occupation. I do not. I define calling very precisely: the most important thing you can do with your life in which you would be most difficult to replace.
In the final paragraph of his lecture on politics, he wrote: “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth—that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.”
I first read this lecture in 1967, when I was taking an upper division sociology course from Robert Nisbet. I was a graduate student in history. Graduate students in one academic discipline rarely take courses outside their discipline. I did not honor this rule. The lecture appears in an early English-language compilation of his writings: From Max Weber (1946). That seemed like an old book in 1967: two whole decades. I write this in July 2019, a little over a century after Weber delivered the lecture. These words are crucial: “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” I have never been able to get these words out of my memory. I hope they will not get out of your memory, either.
It is not just politics that is marked by the strong, slow boring of hard boards. Every calling can be described accurately with these words. This is why so few people ever self-consciously adopt a calling. I tentatively did in 1960. It became self-conscious with me in the summer of 1963. You are now reading the culmination of my decision.
If you have been persuaded by the logic of my presentation in this volume, and also by the three volumes that preceded it, you must now make a self-evaluation. How important are these ideas in your life? Are they sufficiently important that you are ready to adopt as a calling the development of some of these ideas in your area of personal responsibility? If your answer is yes, then you must reread all four volumes. This second reading must be more intense than your first. Thie second reading will provide your lifetime drill. There are a lot of boards.
More important from the point of view of a life of scholarship is the other lecture: “Science is a Vocation.” Most Weber scholars believe that he delivered this lecture at Munich University in the midst of World War I. The British blockade had reduced food supplies in Germany. It was a trying time.
The implications of this lecture have been in my memory ever since 1967. He opened with two questions. “What are the conditions of science as a vocation in the material sense of the term? What are the prospects of a graduate student who is resolved to dedicate himself professionally to science in university life?” Those two questions were before me in 1967. First, I had decided on my calling no later than in 1963: to develop an explicitly Christian theory of economics. I knew that no college was likely to pay me to do this. I also knew that few if any pastors or economists would take my work seriously, assuming that I completed it. Pastors are uninterested in economic theory, and economists are epistemological agnostics when it comes to God’s role in economic theory. Second, I had a deferment from the military draft because I was a graduate student. The Vietnam war was still escalating. The death toll was still rising. I could therefore identify with the students he had addressed half a century earlier.
About a third of the way into his long lecture, he made this observation.
In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work, to which it is devoted in a quite specific sense, as compared with other spheres of culture for which in general the same holds. Every scientific ‘fulfilment’ raises new ‘questions’; it asks to be ‘surpassed’ and outdated. Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact. Scientific works certainly can last as ‘gratifications’ because of their artistic quality, or they may remain important as a means of training. Yet they will be surpassed scientifically—let that be repeated—for it is our common fate and, more, our common goal. We cannot work without hoping that others will advance further than we have. In principle, this progress goes on ad infinitum. And with this we come to inquire into the meaning of science. For, after all, it is not self-evident that something subordinate to such a law is sensible and meaningful in itself (p. 138).
He then asked the obvious question: “Why does one engage in doing something that in reality never comes, and never can come, to an end?” He offered no answer. He was a consistent humanist. He viewed science as meaningless.
Under these internal presuppositions, what is the meaning of science as a vocation, now after all these former illusions, the ‘way to true being,’ the ‘way to true art,’ the ‘way to true nature,’ the ‘way to true God,’ the ‘way to true happiness,’ have been dispelled? Tolstoi has given the simplest answer, with the words: ‘Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: “What shall we do and how shall we live?”’ That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable. The only question that remains is the sense in which science gives ‘no’ answer, and whether or not science might yet be of some use to the one who puts the question correctly (p. 143).
Weber understood what humanism and rationalism had done to the men of his era who had believed in humanism and rationalism. “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations” (p. 155). That phrase—“the disenchantment of the world”—became one of his most famous. It is quoted in countless academic studies.
At the conclusion, he offered the young men in his audience no hope from science as a vocation. He said that hope lay in mystical retreat from this world.
To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. After all, they do not make it hard for him. One way or another he has to bring his ‘intellectual sacrifice’—that is inevitable. If he can really do it, we shall not rebuke him. For such an intellectual sacrifice in favor of an unconditional religious devotion is ethically quite a different matter than the evasion of the plain duty of intellectual integrity, which sets in if one lacks the courage to clarify one's own ultimate standpoint and rather facilitates this duty by feeble relative judgments. In my eyes, such religious return stands higher than the academic prophecy, which does not clearly realize that in the lecture-rooms of the university no other virtue holds but plain intellectual integrity (pp. 155–56).
I ask what seems to be the obvious ethical question: “Why should integrity matter in a cosmos that has been stripped of God’s sovereignty, man’s delegated authority over nature, fixed ethics, predictable ethical sanctions, and guaranteed hope in the future?” The combined message of Immanuel Kant and Charles Darwin by 1919 had done its corrosive work. World War I had stripped optimism out of the old liberalism to which Weber had been committed. His lecture on science offered no personal hope for intellectual life in Kant’s realm of the phenomenal. There is nothing in that realm but meaninglessness and guaranteed obsolescence intellectually. All that he could offer as an alternative was Kant’s realm of the noumenal. But there is no ethics in that realm. There is no meaning in that realm, either. There is no causation. It is devoid of anything rational. It does not connect with the realm of the phenomenal. It is as hopeless as Kant’s phenomenal realm of science is.
He then called them to make a vain sacrifice: “We shall set to work and meet the ‘demands of the day,’ in human relations as well as in our vocation. This, however, is plain and simple, if each finds and obeys the demon who holds the fibers of his very life.” That was how he ended his lecture. He died 16 months later at the age of 56.
This is the spiritual condition of consistent humanism. It offers no hope to its adherents. In contrast, the Bible offers hope to covenant-keepers, not just in eternity but also in history. With this in mind, you should reflect on this event.
So the king sent to Dothan horses, chariots, and a large army. They came by night and surrounded the city. When the servant of the man of God had risen early and gone outside, behold, a large army with horses and chariots surrounded the city. His servant said to him, “Oh, my master! What will we do?” Elisha answered, “Do not fear, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Elisha prayed and said, “Lord, I beg that you will open his eyes that he may see.” Then the Lord opened the servant’s eyes, and he saw. Behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire around Elisha! When the Arameans came down to him, Elisha prayed to the Lord and said, “Strike these people blind, I ask you.” So the Lord made them blind, just as Elisha had asked (II Kings 6:14–19).
This brings me back to the question of your calling.
What about you? If you are a Christian, there are people around you who will recommend something comparable to what Weber recommended to those young men. They will recommend pietistic withdrawal from the intellectual world. They will recommend personal ethics, a strong family life, and perhaps even ways of making a lot of money. I am offering you something very different. I am offering you a calling. The calling I am offering may not be the one for which you are best equipped. But you had better find some calling.
We do not live in Weber’s imaginary Kantian/Darwinian world. Our work will not be overcome by scientific progress if it is committed to the Bible. It will be extended. Parts of it will be made obsolete. That is the price of progress. It is a small price to pay. The Bible teaches that there is linear history, and there is also historical progress. It will culminate in the final judgment, followed by the marriage supper of the Lamb. Then the accumulated capital of covenant-breakers and covenant-keepers will be transferred by God the Father to the bride of Christ. Christ will have paid this bride price: definitively at the cross, progressively in history, and finally. The positive results of your efforts in history will be part of that bride price. This inheritance will be transferred to you with a positive rate of return interest at the marriage supper of the Lamb.
I offer a warning. It is the warning that F. A. Hayek gave to a group of undergraduate economics majors in 1944. His address, “On Being an Economist,” is reprinted in Volume III of his Collected Works. He said this: “We can never be sure what our suggestions will produce and whether our best meant efforts may not result in something very different from what we wish.” This is the law of unintended consequences at work. I therefore recommend this strategy: be precise in what you write. Spell things out, even to the point of sounding needlessly obvious. Provide examples to clarify grandiose statements. Finally, specify what you are not saying. Close off avenues of misinterpretation.
Count the cost. If you then decide to become a Christian economics scholar as a calling, I offer this strategy. Correct my errors, extend my breakthroughs, write several monographs, produce videos, recruit and train followers, and do not become sidetracked. It is easy to become sidetracked, especially by money. Also, if someone asks you what kind of economist you are, never say “Northian.” “Northist” is even worse. Say that you are a covenantalist.
Now, find your calling and get to work.
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