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EZRA INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIANITY 9 Hewitt Ave. Toronto, ON M6R 1Y4
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General Editor
JOSEPH BOOT EICC Founder
JOSEPH BOOT
2 Editorial Joe Boot 8
Economic Atheism: The Religious Impulse of Interventionism Andrew Sandlin
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What’s Wrong with Islamic Finance? Tim Dieppe
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French Whine: Rousseau, Thomas Piketty, and the Rhetoric of Wealth Inequality Brian Mattson
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Resource Corner
Jubilee is provided without cost to all those who request it. Jubilee is the tri-annual publication of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity (EICC), a registered charitable Christian organization. The opinions expressed in Jubilee do not necessarily reflect the views of the EICC. Jubilee provides a forum for views in accord with a relevant, active, historic Christianity, though those views may on occasion differ somewhat from the EICC’s and from each other. The EICC depends on the contribution of its readers, and all gifts over $10 will be tax receipted. Permission to reprint granted on written request only. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement Number: PM42112023 Return all mail undeliverable to: EICC, 9 Hewitt Ave., Toronto, ON M6R 1Y4, www.ezrainstitute.ca
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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JUBILEE EDITORIAL: ISSUE 18
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JOE BOOT REV. DR. JOE BOOT is the founder of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and the founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto. Before this, he served with Ravi Zacharias for seven years as an apologist in the UK and Canada, working for five years as Canadian director of RZIM. A theology graduate of Birmingham Christian College, England, Joe earned his M.A. in Mission Theology from the University of Manchester and his Ph.D. in Christian Intellectual Thought from Whitefield Theological Seminary, Florida. His apologetic works have been published in Europe and in North America and include Searching for Truth, Why I Still Believe and How Then Shall We Answer. His latest book, The Mission of God, is a tour de force of biblical cultural theology, expounding the mission of the church in the twenty-first century. He is Senior Fellow of the cultural and apologetics think tank, truthXchange in Southern California and Director of the Wilberforce Academy training program in the UK. Joe lives in Toronto with his wife Jenny and their three children, Naomi, Hannah and Isaac.
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IN EVERY AREA OF LIFE faith is the de-
termining factor for the direction of our thinking and activity. It is not only Christians who have recognised this. Even radical atheists like the French philosopher Jacques Derrida have perceived the universality of faith in the life of human society, including in the area of economics: There is no society without faith, without trust in the other.… [E]ven on the economic level there is no society without this faith, this minimal act of faith. What one calls credit in capitalism, in economics, has to do with faith and the economists know that.1
The great question of life finally comes down to where we place the faith of our hearts. Ultimately will we place our faith in the creator of all things and his Word of truth, or in something that is created? From about 1864, American coinage had the words ‘In God we Trust’ imprinted on it, indicating the prevailing faith of many people of the time. This imprint raises an important question: will God be our trust or will we place that trust elsewhere, perhaps in money itself? It follows from this that people will orient the purpose and direction of their lives – including their economic life – around their heart-faith, for all of life is religion. As Scripture says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it affects everything you do” (Prov. 4:23, NLT). In the Christian faith and worldview, human beings were created by God for a purpose – to be his image-bearers to all creation by exercising servantrule in the earth, turning creation, by faithful cultural work, into the kingdom of God. In other words the image of God in the human person is not a structural but a directional idea. “It refers to that network of religious relationships which constitutes the framework for covenantal obedience.”2As human beings we are primarily task-oriented toward covenantal obedience. At the foundation of our faith is the truth that the living God calls us to serve him (Gen. 1:26-30). In short, we are made vice–regents with a specific calling. When people lose sight of their God-centred and kingdom-oriented calling, human life soon becomes
radically distorted and our work, and thereby our economic life, is turned toward idolatrous, frustrating and empty purposes. I remember reading a humorous illustration some years ago that struck home in this regard. Whilst on vacation, a wealthy businessman is walking on a beautiful beach on a bright sunny day somewhere in Bali and comes across a poor-looking fisherman lying on the sand under a palm tree, dozing in the breeze near his tired-looking boat. A conversation ensues in which the businessman asks the fisherman with some surprise why he is is not out catching more fish on a perfect day for fishing. The fisherman responds by asking why he should do that on a warm afternoon when he already had a fairly good catch to feed the family that morning. The bemused businessman says with some exasperation, ‘so you can catch more fish, make more money and grow your business.’ The fisherman with equal surprise asks in response, ‘why would I want to do that?’ Again the businessman, bemused by the apparent apathy, responds by saying that the fisherman, could, with a larger business, buy more boats, hire employees, and catch even more fish, making much more money. The fisherman is very puzzled and asks again why that would be the best approach to his work. ‘Because,’ responds the businessman, ‘with more men and more fish, you can own a fleet of boats, make lots more money, and then be able to afford to take time off, go on vacation, lie on a beach in the sun and enjoy rest and relaxation.’ Naturally the fisherman looks up and says, ‘but isn’t that what I am doing now?’ Neither man in this story actually has a scriptural understanding of work and economic life. Without a clear sense of purpose and calling in terms of God’s kingdom, we do not know the end toward which we strive, nor do we know the purpose for which we work and build wealth, hence the common experience of futility in all man’s ‘doings’ in a fallen world (see Luke 12:16-21). Yet man was not originally created to experience economic futility – that outcome is part of the fall of humanity from their true estate. God created all things very good and set within creation an incalculable wealth and bounty of resources. Yet Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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clearly, money (developed resources converted into currency) is not an end in itself. Like everything else in this world, money is something that is an aspect of creation to be used for a particular purpose. Of course God did not create a paper currency or modern coinage, but he did create all the plentiful resources of the earth which, by creative development, culture and industry have been turned into commodities and properties that can be monetized. Money is the turning of property in labour, assets or commodities into currency for the sake of exchange. For much of history that currency was a hard currency in precious metals like gold and silver. In simple terms then, money represents various forms of property (including property in labour): currency for the sake of exchange of commodities, and assets. Because money or property and wealth are aspects of creation, money is a positive good. It is useful and a tremendous blessing from God. However, when it is elevated above its proper place and intended purpose, as any other aspect of creation can be, it may be absolutized and become an idol, a false god. Where the creation (in this case the economic aspect of creation) is made all-important and defining (worshipped) instead of the creator, a disharmony of interests enters creation, destroying God’s shalom. As Calvin commented on Matthew 6:24, “Where riches hold the dominion of the heart, God has lost his authority…. [W]hoever gives himself up as a slave to riches must abandon the service of God; for covetousness makes us slaves of the devil.”3 We cannot serve both God and money, but we can serve God with our money. Christians all too often neglect careful thought about this aspect of their lives, yet like every other sphere of life, the economic aspect is governed by religious assumptions. These will either be governed by God’s Word-revelation, or we will have our economic values defined by another religious principle – whether Marxist and collectivist, or purely profitdriven assumptions. We are all involved continuously, then, in the economic aspect of life. This is not to say that we are all directly involved in the scientific field or study of economics. It is simply to recognise that every part of life in the created order has an economic aspect and so it is Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
inescapable. We all need to earn a living – that is one of the immediate economic aspects of work. We have bills to pay; budgets to keep; books to balance; goods to buy; children to fund; debts to repay; transport to arrange; gas tanks to fill; retirement to save for; health to pay for, and on and on. In fact all the apportioning of our time in life has economic implications. Everything in life has a certain value in God’s economy and lots of things have a specific, fluctuating cost associated with them. Economic realities are all around us. None of us then can escape the economic aspect of life any more than we can escape the ethical or biological aspects! So how do we begin to think ‘Christianly’ about economic life? We have seen that at creation human beings were assigned a stewardship of all of God’s resources. The starting point for thinking about a Christian view of economic matters is thus to be reminded that “the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Ps. 24:1). We are not the ultimate owners, but stewards. We are in an important sense trustees who administer God’s resources for the benefit not merely of ourselves, but others. This calling entrusted to us by God to develop the wealth of the earth for his Kingdom purposes is what gives us a goal beyond the mere accumulation and hoarding of wealth for ourselves. As God’s creatures, there is an important scriptural sense in which we are God’s pupils in the development of the wealth of resources he has placed in the order of creation. There is a certain economics of creation that we learn by God’s tutelage. For example, in Isaiah 28:23-29 we read: Listen and hear my voice. Pay attention and hear what I say. Does the plowman plow every day to plant seed? Does he continuously break up and cultivate the soil? When he has leveled its surface, does he not then scatter black cumin and sow cumin? He plants wheat in rows and barley in plots, with spelt as their border. His God teaches him order; He instructs him. Certainly black cumin is not threshed with a threshing board, and a cart wheel is not rolled over the cumin. But black cumin FALL 2016
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is beaten out with a stick, and cumin with a rod. Bread grain is crushed, but is not threshed endlessly. Though the wheel of the farmer’s cart rumbles, his horses do not crush it. This also comes from the Lord of Hosts. He gives wonderful advice; He gives great wisdom (HCSB).
Here the farmer, who is of necessity concerned with economic realities or norms, is a student of God and his creation-law. Plowing, sowing and harvesting require an understanding of the objects God has made and their distinct nature. God by his will perpetuates the distinct nature of the things he has created and thereby makes it possible for the world to continue with regularity in terms of creational distinctions. These distinctions and regularity are what make economic life possible. A farmer could not have or develop a farming business if he did not understand creational regularity, have confidence in it and were he not able to plan in terms of the types of seed to plant, the time of harvest, and the kind of harvesting methods required to be fruitful. The relative ease of the tasks associated with cultivating different crops and the relative scarcity of the various seeds in the face of the differential demand are going to be factors in the value or price of the crops. As Klaas Schilder says regarding this passage in Isaiah: This farmer is a student of his God. He reads the regulations of this God.… His ability to read allows the king and the beggar to live from the field. They both profit from the apprenticeship of the farmer. And in a broader sense this law applies to all of life in society, also for technicians, etc.4
Here the farmer, the beggar and the king all live from the field that is cultivated as man learns the norms and laws that God has placed within creation. Clearly, what the creation and the tutelage of God in the life of man as his vice-regent pre-
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supposes is a harmony of interest as basic to God’s plan for human life. This reality clearly existed in Eden, it is present in the life of the church (1 Cor. 12:12-17), it is the reality of life in heaven now and will be in its totality in the renewed heaven and renewed earth (Is. 65:17-25). As Christians, we know that sin has introduced greed, selfishness, covetousness, envy, theft, manipulation and extortion into human economic life. Larceny has entered the heart of man. Here the intended harmony of interests in creation is disrupted. The atheist revolutionary Karl Marx sought to account for all human strife in terms of economic life. In the opening words of his Communist Manifesto he claims that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the class struggles.”5 He never did get around to defining what a class actually is, but it certainly entrenched within the modern political landscape the practice of scapegoating certain abstract ‘groups’ for all the ills of the world. Scripturally however, the history of all human society is not class warfare, but an ethical warfare against God and his law (Jas. 4:1), within which God is bringing all things into judgment and toward salvation or condemnation (Eccl. 12:14; 2 Cor. 5:10). Human history is the unfolding of God’s covenant and kingdom in the earth; which is to say that human history is God-centred, not man-centred. The calling of the Christian, then, in the midst of disharmony, is to pursue a kingdom harmony of interest in all of life. Since all things are being reconciled in Christ (Col. 1:20; Eph. 2:11-16), we must seek to extend the reality of God’s reconciling power by our obedience to his Word, as faithful students of the Lord, reducing the effects of sin-driven disharmony of interest. In this task we are not left without scriptural resources. The book of Proverbs, for example, is a practical application of God’s wisdom and instruction to various areas of life, and has much to say about wealth and economic realities. It tells us that the acquisition of wealth by sinful means will go sour and is of no value (Prov. 10:2). We learn that diligence brings wealth and that such earnings aid the life of the righteous (Prov. 10:4; 10:16). We also learn that wealth is God’s blessing not to be Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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despised and he adds no trouble with it (Prov. 10:22). Hoarding wealth is condemned, but giving to others can lead to great gain and much blessing (Prov. 11:24-26). The steady building of wealth by hard work and planning is better and more prudent than speculating, typically making assets grow more effectively (Prov. 12:11; 13:11). Interestingly, David Hall argues that Calvinists during and after the Reformation used these texts to inform their business practices and corporate culture; as a result wealth development followed them.6 The hardworking poor can also see an abundance according to Scripture (Prov. 13:23), and godly people will seek to leave their children’s children an inheritance (Prov. 13:22). All useful work brings some kind of profit (Prov. 14:23-24) while laziness is folly (Prov. 14:23). At the same time, exhausting oneself simply for the pursuit of riches in themselves is futile (Prov. 23:4-5) and oppressing the poor to increase one’s wealth is morally wrong (Prov. 22:16). Wealth then is a positive good and building wealth an important part of life. Many of God’s choicest servants were people of considerable wealth: Abraham; Jacob; Joseph; King David; Solomon; the women who funded Jesus’ ministry; Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea; Barnabas, who donated family lands in cause of the gospel; Mary and Martha who were able to use their large homes for church meetings, as well as many others. Wealth thus calls forth in us the task of stewardship and godly administration, generosity and service. Wealth-building activity, then, involves being God’s student, like the farmer, and expressing our God-given creativity to develop the potentials God has placed in creation. As such the creation of wealth is a scriptural mandate. No one is without property because the most basic kind of property we have is in our own creative labour. This is the foundation of all other kinds of property accruing to individuals and families and as such is inviolable. Hall has rightly argued that scripturally, “The ideal is an economic, legal, cultural environment that encourages creation, values creation, protects the benefits and rewards of creation, and allows the marketplace to judge the appropriateness and validity of the creation Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
methodology.”7 To deny this is to deny the right to private property which is presupposed and protected by God in the commandment, ‘thou shalt not steal.’ In our time the most egregious thievery is performed not by masked intruders, but by the state, in the form of progressive taxation. For property (physical, intellectual or otherwise) to be stolen and become an asset of the state is violence and theft and a serious violation of God-given human freedom. This is true, not only by virtue of man’s creation in God’s image as a free creator, but in view of the biblical revelation of redemption. We cannot use wealth redemptively as individuals and families if it is owned by the socialist state standing in for God as the absolute owner of everything. Remember no man is absolute owner, but steward and administrator of God’s property. A biblical view of economics factors in not only creation’s original harmony of interest, and the fall of man into envy, covetousness and greed, but also the redemption of man in the restoration of a harmony of interests. Here redemption triumphs over rebellion and harmony of interests is steadily restored. For biblical economics, salvation is not restricted to the soul, but concerns a person’s property – beginning with their work and service. In Christ, all our assets are redeemed and to be put to godly use. It is not ‘states’ that God saves and reconciles to the father, but people, who are then to put their resources to godly use. Christ himself is our kinsman-redeemer (as typified in the book of Ruth), in keeping with Leviticus 25:25ff. He buys us back that we might serve him and inherit all things in Christ. We are set free in Christ and released from our debts in order to be stewards and faithful servants. We are therefore to put our wealth to redemptive use by building it and releasing it for God’s Kingdom purposes in our families, churches, institutions, charities and more, for the glory of God. As a redeemed people, we put our wealth to redemptive uses in the pursuit of a renewal of the harmony of interest in the earth. A FREED LIFE AND A FREE MARKET
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God. ‘It is for freedom that Christ has set us free (Gal. 5:1).’ For, we are told, ‘if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed’ (John 8:36). In reformed thought, this freedom was enhanced and expressed in the marketplace for workers, investors and owners. God has clearly ordained markets and institutions that restrain disharmony and promote the harmony of interests. A ‘free market’ is one such institution that promotes cooperation and creative activity that works to the benefit of all when truly free. Perfect equity is not possible in life with the presence of sin, but we can work to limit disharmony by being students of God and applying his law-word. A free market is, in the economic sphere, the most important institution arising from the application of God’s Word in society. It helps to reduce the disharmony of interest due to sin, by encouraging people to voluntarily cooperate together, collaborate and mesh their individual plans by means of personal ownership of private property, freely fluctuating prices and clear profit-loss statements. Where there is a free market, workers, investors, and business owners all profit. Such a market, where interference is at a bare minimum, requires honest currency (just weights and measures); the facilitation of the free exchange of goods; and incentive to participation in the form of profits; legal protection is also required so that people are not punished for the development of their products. The free market, however, is not identical with capitalism. Modern capitalism with its subsidies and statist intervention erodes the freedom of ordinary people. It is very interesting to note that many wealthy capitalists today favor socialism and interventionism and not a free market. The motive in this is statist protection. All too often big corporations and banks are what they are because they have become cosy with big government. Furthermore, much modern capitalism in our time is concerned, not with harmony of interest and freedom, nor just currency and honest money, but purely with profit – anything for a profit. A Christian approach to economics favors above all else, economic freedom. If profit is isolated from the broader worldview of an honest and free exchange, eventually profit is eroded as FALL 2016
well. Profit is only one benefit of economic freedom. Jesus Christ is Lord and absolute owner of all things. He has created all things so that certain activities are blessed and benefitted and others are fruitless or penalized. As Christians, bringing our tithes and offerings to God is a source of blessing. Not to tithe is to rob God and come under his judgement. Tithing is a recognition that God is absolute owner and we are stewards of his trust. The tithe is the tax of the Kingdom of God for the advancement of his purposes. This is one illustration of blessing for obedience to God’s law in the economic sphere. By contrast, the reality of inflation when bad money (fiat money) is pumped into an economy is God’s judgment on the economic order as a law-sphere governed by his Word. A massive debt culture is an inflationary, boom-bust culture, because the economic aspect of life is a law-sphere that God rules and judges. Government of economic life is ultimately in the hands of God. A market can only be free when it is bound by God’s law which demands truth, fairness and justice. Without this law, man tries to manipulate markets to his own advantage. Supply and demand are not legislated by the state, but are a given order in God-ordained reality. If we do not believe in God and his law-order over all things, we will not really believe in freedom. Then we will demand a new god intervene in things to govern the economic sphere in his place. The favored god of modern society is the state. Many blindly believe in the omni-competence of the state to envelop and control every sphere of life. This the modern state is happy to do, and as it does so it makes people slaves of a new idol. But freedom is not the state’s to grant; freedom is found under God alone. The battle for freedom in economic life is one of many battles going on for freedom today for the Christian. Only by living in terms of God’s Word to us can we see the freedom of the Kingdom with its harmony of interests prosper in the days ahead. IN THIS ISSUE
Dr. Andrew Sandlin offers a sustained critique of interventionist economic policy, demonstrating that the prevailing tendency of the modern Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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state is to insinuate itself in the marketplace in the place of God. The state’s legitimate economic role is to guarantee a level playing field – punishing fraud and enforcing objective weights and measures. By contrast, the modern state has arrogated to itself the responsibility of ensuring not equal opportunities, but equalized results, in accordance with its vision of a just society. However well-intentioned, such interventionism is, in the end, economically damaging.
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2008), 6. David W. Hall and Matthew D. Burton, Calvin and Commerce: The Transforming Power of Calvinism in Market Economies (New Jersey: P&R, 2009), 5 Hall and Burton, Calvin and Commerce, 12.
Tim Dieppe examines the recent phenomenon of Islamic, or Shari’ah-compliant, finance. Based on a decades-long career in fund management, Tim’s analysis highlights some of the key features of this rapidly-growing market, demonstrating its negative impact on economic growth, as well as its association with Islamic extremists. Truly, there is no such thing as religious neutrality, even in the world of finance. Dr. Brian Mattson discusses French economist Thomas Piketty’s recent bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He demonstrates that, notwithstanding the impressive data Piketty has organized, his solution to the issue of global wealth inequality is the familiar socialist solution of mandatory wealth redistribution. Mattson discerns a humanistic theology informing Piketty’s economics, complete with doctrines of sin and redemption. Against this false theology, he exhorts Christians to a true, godly theology of freedom – including economic freedom – under the God of all creation.
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Jacques Derrida, cited in D. F. M Strauss, Philosophy: Discipline of the Disciplines (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2009), 313-14. Gordon J. Spykman, Reformational Theology: A New Paradigm for Doing Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 228. John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), 1:337. Klaas Schilder, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh: Daily Meditations on the Bible for Reformation of Family, Church and State, Vol. 4, trans. Roelof A. Janssen (Alberta: Inheritance Publications, 2013), 676.
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ANDREW SANDLIN REV. P. ANDREW SANDLIN is a Fellow of Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and President of the Centre for Cultural Leadership. He is an ordained minister in, and Executive Director of, the Fellowship of Mere Christianity, Preaching Pastor at Cornerstone Bible Church-Santa Cruz County, Faculty of Blackstone Legal Fellowship of the Alliance Defending Freedom, and De Jong Distinguished Visiting Professor of Culture and Theology, Edinburg Theological Seminary. He founded CCL in 2001 with the conviction that only eminently equipped cultural leaders will actually create a new Christian culture — and that only transformed Christians can transform the present anti-Christian culture of the West.
The Religious Impulse of Interventionism Editor’s note: This article is based on a lecture delivered on February 25, 2011 at the Virtue of Prosperity Conference, Newport Beach, California. It has been revised and expanded for publication.
I START WITH A BOLD – some would say
impudent – premise: one’s view of economics is arguably the most revealing indicator of one’s worldview. I assert, further, that the dispute over economics in which the West is presently embroiled is actually a conflict of worldviews and visions. I posit, finally, that these worldviews and visions are, at root, religious (as all worldviews and visions ultimately are). Consequently, the battles over economics and economic policy are religious, even if often implicitly religious. The concept of worldviews has been prominent since the nineteenth century.1 Worldviews are, quite simply, ways of viewing the world. In the wake of Immanuel Kant, thinkers came to realize that we humans construct a mental reality from the objective world we everywhere encounter.2 The totality of that mental reality is an individual’s worldview. It is a world picture, in terms of which we love and reason and evaluate and judge and make our decisions. Worldviews are like pancreases. Every person has one, even if he doesn’t know or think about it.
“On a life issue as pervasive, concrete and visible as economics the religious impulse is, and must ever be, the controlling one.”
Then there’s the idea of visions, popularized by Thomas Sowell.3 Sowell notes that visions are even more fundamental than worldviews. Visions are precognitive impulses about the way the world works. While worldviews centre in our thinking, visions centre in our perceptions and intuitions – our gut feelings, we might say.
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question is: How does man relate to God? The way people answer this question is the most basic division within humanity In the Apostle Paul’s terms, it is a divide between those who worship and serve the Creator and those who worship and serve the creation (Rom. 1:25), including man himself.4 This division isn’t a sectarian or denominational division. It’s not, in other words, Roman Catholics versus Protestants. Or Methodists versus Baptists versus Presbyterians. Or evangelicals versus non-evangelicals. No, the basic religious division is between those who situate the Triune God at the centre of their lives and those who shunt him off to the side or ignore him altogether. Of course, the division is not absolute. The most devout believers carry with them a residue of the sinful nature and its rebellion against God. And the most vocal atheist still bears the imago dei, the image of God in his being (and should be treated with dignity for precisely that reason). But the fact that the division is not absolute doesn’t make it less real. To put it bluntly, the world is populated by Creator-worshippers and by creature-worshippers. And, in principle, no compromise can bridge the gap between them. They worship and think and act in very different ways, because they begin from very different, mutually exclusive, fundamentally irreconcilable, life-premises. At this point, I might be accused of “Manichean reasoning” – of asserting that the world is locked in a great battle between equally powerful forces of good versus evil. Of falling prey to the same error exposed by the “enlightened” criticism of Ronald Reagan, when he declared that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire.” Or of George W. Bush, when he included Iran in the “Axis of Evil.” On this point, however, I seek to be not Manichean, but Christian. True, there is great good Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Economic Atheism
and great evil in the world; they are opposite, but not equal. And man for his part manifests this conflict between good and evil in his Creatorworship or his creature-worship. This division cuts right through life’s great themes. One of those themes is economics. We cannot assume that a consistent, Creator-worshipping economics will resemble a consistent, creature-worshipping economics. How could it? By “economics” I mean how we compensate one another in exchanging goods and services, how we share the earth’s natural resources, how we transfer possessions from one generation to the next, whether or how much the state is permitted to seize those resources as well as the possessions of individuals, whether, in fact, individuals should even be permitted their own possessions, and such related issues. On a life issue as pervasive, concrete and visible as economics the religious impulse is, and must ever be, the controlling one. Creator-worshipping economics must, by its very nature, conflict with a consistent, creatureworshipping economics. None of this means that all Christians exhibit the proper Creatorworshipping impulse and that all non-Christians do not. Not for a moment would I hold that my brothers and sisters in Sojourners, for example (a group that, in my view, champions creatureworshipping economics), are anything but fellow Christians.5 But I do argue that they do not think and act as consistent Christians in economic matters. In the same way, many non-believers act as Christians in their economics. But when they do, they betray their non-Christian impulse. The issue at stake is consistency with our basic religious impulse – Creator-centeredness or creature-centeredness. Let me mention briefly three ways in which these two impulses conflict as they relate to economics in today’s world. PROVIDENCE
The prevailing economic worldview of Western elites6 in our time is interventionism. By this I do not refer to the idea that the valid role of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
state in economics is to guarantee a level playing field (enforcing contracts, suppressing fraud, and such). This is just what the state should do, but that view is nearly the opposite of interventionism. If man is sinful, as Christianity asserts, he’ll often try to get an unfair economic advantage by not fulfilling what he promised, by lying about goods and services, and by stealing from his neighbour. One reason for the state, in Christian theology, is to assure that sinful man cannot commit these sins with impunity (Rom. 13:1–7). Within the Christian model, the “I mean by state keeps economic exchanges fair so that interventionism each can act freely, but the state itself must that a prime role also act honestly. The state interferes in the of politics is to tip market only to make sure nobody is stealing or defrauding (Ex. 22:1–6). the level playing This is not the entirety of the state’s role in economics, however, according to today’s elites. That role must be interventionist in a very different way. I mean by interventionism that a prime role of politics is to tip the level playing field to guarantee specific results – results in line with what is deemed by the elites to be a just society. For example, politicians decide what a “living wage” is, and they mandate a minimum wage. That is, they do not allow employers to contract with employees freely; employers must pay no less than a certain amount.
field to guarantee specific results – results in line with what is deemed by the elites to be a just society. ”
Similarly, they determine the level and kind of education to which the country’s youth are entitled, and they mandate tax-financed schools to implement that educational vision. Parents are not permitted to deviate from that kind of education, if they send their children to tax“The financed schools. Likewise, political elites arrive at an allegedly just minimum standard of healthcare for all citizens. These politicians then coerce medical providers and insurance companies to enact this universal vision of healthcare – all publicly (that is to say, politically) financed. Whatever we may think of these policies, one thing is clear: they are not identical to what would happen if individuals (both
valid role of the state in economics is to guarantee a level playing field (enforcing contracts, suppressing fraud, and such). This is just what the state should do. ” FALL 2016
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as consumers and producers) were free to make their own choices in these matters. For example, entry-level workers might delight in minimum wage laws, but most small business owners certainly don’t. They might want to hire more employees but simply be unable to do so, because they are forced to pay inflated wages to present employees In fact, they might go out of business because they can’t pay the labour costs. Then nobody gets paid. But for interventionist elites, this is the price we must pay to guarantee their desired results. Keeping young people from getting jobs is okay, just as long as the few who already have them get a minimum wage. Moreover, some parents might prefer a highly secular and often substandard secondary school experience for their children. But many others would prefer to use their own income, presently devoted to taxes that in part fund this substandard system, to purchase a different kind of education. Interventionist economics increasingly denies them that opportunity. Likewise, certain middle-aged and elderly citizens of low and lower middle-class income might cherish universal healthcare. But most younger workers certainly won’t – they generally want healthcare coverage suited to their “Ultimately, human own age and physical condition. But unihistory is what it versal healthcare is less about what any is because of God’s specific person wants than it is about providence. But what the elites want.
proximately it is what it is because of human action.”
The non-interventionist viewpoint, by contrast, values a level playing field. It wants individuals (business owners as well as customers) to make their own decisions about wage costs, education, healthcare and life’s other decisions. They admit that this means everyone won’t make the same amount of money, get the same educational opportunities, or be able to afford the same level of healthcare. They’re all right with inequality, because they value liberty more than equality. Behind these two approaches stand two religious impulses, not just two economic views. The interventionist worldview conflicts with the Christian worldview at a basic level. Christians affirm
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God’s providence.7 We hold that God created and sustains all things. We hold that God is at work in the world. He sets up and tears down kingdoms. We do not believe he overrules man’s choice to accomplish his will. He works organically with man’s choices to accomplish his will. We cannot fully explain why he allows evil. His ways are mysterious. But we much prefer faith in God’s benevolent, mysterious ways to faith in man’s malevolent, unmysterious ways. Solomon writes, “A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps” (Prov. 16:9). Without coercing man’s choices or overriding his personality, God operates within him to accomplish his purposes in that individual’s life and in the world. This gets to the heart of the religious impulses of both non-interventionism and interventionism in economics. We non-interventionists trust God to be at work in the world. In his time, he rewards righteousness and punishes evil. He blesses wise economic choices. He governs investments. He causes some enterprises to succeed and others to fail. We don’t always understand his ways, but we do have faith that he’s actively at work. In the end, truth and justice will triumph in the world – and in the marketplace. Ultimately, human history is what it is because of God’s providence. But proximately it is what it is because of human action. Of course, the decisions that make up history are often communal (the family, business, church and state), but these communities consist of individuals who think and act. In the end, it’s individuals who are responsible. They are God’s main agents of providence. Neither do we deny that the state itself is a part of God’s providential ordering of the world. But it has prescribed limits, according to God’s revelation. It protects against external molestation of person and property. The state is not here to bring absolute perfection and cosmic justice before breakfast next Thursday, but to allow individuals maximum liberty, under law, to think and act and live on God’s good earth (1 Tim. 2:1–2). Individuals work out their own salvation as God works in us (Phil. 2:12), but God is at the centre Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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of everything, upholding all things by the word of his power (Heb. 1:3). But interventionists can’t trust God’s providence. They’ve already decided what the just society is and how soon it should appear. God’s ways are too mysterious and tardy. God allows some to get rich and others to remain poor. He takes much too long to provide. He allows greedy capitalists to make too much money. In fact, according to many interventionists, he is either not there at all or has left the ordering of the world to humanity – specifically to a few noble, wise and gifted individuals – people like them, of course. To most interventionists, therefore, the state is secular providence. In a creature-worshipping impulse, politics occupies the role of providence that God occupies in a Creator-worshipping impulse. They have lost faith in God, or at least in an active, caring God, intimately at work in his world. Therefore they vest their hopes and dreams of economic equalization in the state. The state must bail out failing companies (with money coercively confiscated from its citizens). The state must provide for the elderly (or, it has been suggested, allow for their elimination, when they no longer serve the social purposes of the elite). The state must educate the young in the ways of fairness, goodness and democracy. The state must equalize incomes, since economic inequality is unjust. Unjust, of course, in the eyes of the interventionist elite. This enforced justice must be implemented, even if it produces economic harm in society. Consider part of an exchange between President Barack Obama and Charlie Gibson in the Pennsylvania presidential primary debate prior to Obama’s election: GIBSON: And in each instance, when the [capital gains] rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected? OBAMA: Well, Charlie, what I’ve said Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness. We saw an article today which showed that the top fifty hedge fund managers made $29 billion last year – $29 billion for 50 individuals. And part of what has happened is that those who are able to work the stock market and amass huge fortunes on capital gains are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries. That’s not fair.8
“Interventionists can’t trust God’s providence. They’ve already decided what the just society is and how soon it should appear. God’s ways are too mysterious and tardy. ”
I draw your attention to a salient fact: even if decreases in capital gains taxes spur the economy (thus helping the poor) and create increased tax revenue, they are wrong because they are not fair. Mr. Obama sets himself up as arbiter of what is fair, even if that fairness harms the poor and the rest of the country. The issue is not poverty and wealth. The issue is that these elites wish to play God and to decide who gets what. They cannot trust God to be God. Interventionism is at root a faithless, agnostic and even atheistic creed. Even when Christians espouse it, they are thinking and acting as unbelievers. HUMAN NATURE
There is a second aspect of the economic conflict with roots in the two conflicting religious impulses of Creator-worship and creature-worship. It is perhaps best summarized by an unbeliever, Francois Bizot, the only journalist to have survived capture by the Khmer Rouge – radical Cambodian communists who murdered one third of their country’s population between 1975 and 1979. After observing the Khmer Rouge at painfully close range, he wrote: “I detest the notion of a new dawn in which Homo sapiens would live in harmony. The hope this Utopia engenders has justified the bloodiest exterminations in history.”9 The Khmer Rouge were not unique. Robespierre and Lenin, Stalin and Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot – all these believed that humanity was innately good, but corrupted by human institutions. They could usher in utopia – if only they could reengineer human nature by expelling the FALL 2016
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“How is it that most tyrants in the modern world have espoused radically optimistic views of human nature?”
individualism and self-interest and traditional religious allegiance from the human heart. They all failed miserably. Their failure was not harmless. It left millions dead, murdered, tortured, and dehumanized.
But creature-worshippers have given up recourse to the supernatural. Therefore, they vest their hope in natural means to change human nature. Whereas Creator worshippers espouse future supernatural perfectibility, creature-worshippers have confidence in present natural perfectibility.
How is it that most tyrants in the modern world have espoused radically optimistic views of human nature? And how is it that at the root of a right understanding of what it takes to protect human liberty is a dim view of human nature? Isn’t this juxtaposition contradictory? It is not.
This is a recipe for horror, and that recipe has been cooked time and again over the last 300 years – always served as the same bitter dish. And this recipe almost always includes economic intervention as a key ingredient.
We know the Creator-worshipping “Even redeemed view. Man is born sinful, but he can be human nature is redeemed by Jesus Christ, who died to not without sin save us from our sins if we trust in him. in this life. It can But even redeemed human nature is not without sin in this life. It can be imbe improved by proved by God’s grace, but not perfected. God’s grace, but It certainly cannot be perfected by man. not perfected. It It will be perfected, and only in eternity, certainly cannot be by God and not by man. In other words, perfected by man.” we believe in future, supernatural perfectibility. All of us long for salvation, a better life now for ourselves and our family and friends and a future life better than the present. We all agree that the world is not what it should be and should be better than it is. But to have a better world, we need a better humanity. God has an answer for this problem – salvation from sin in his Son Jesus Christ (John 3:16). This is the only way that the world can change – by God gradually restoring His image in man, though this work is not fully com“Because pleted in the present life. This is sanctifisanctification is cation. God incrementally conforms us to never complete in the image of his Son. This conformity has this life, Christians social benefits. But because sanctification deny the possibility is never complete in this life, Christians of earthy utopias. deny the possibility of earthy utopias.10 A better world can only be achieved on A better world can God’s terms and with his power – and only be achieved never fully realized prior to the eternal on God’s terms and state. We cannot change what it means with his power .” to be human. Only God can change us, and he has chosen to change us finally only in eternity.
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We sometimes identify Marxist states as centres of social engineering. But they are equally hotbeds of economic engineering, and the one is rarely found without the other. Economic engineers, like social engineers, lust for the levers of the politics of coercion, because they want to change human nature by changing human conditions. This is no less true of Western, democratic interventionists than of radical Marxists. As early as the Humanist Manifesto I (1933), signed by such significant figures as John Dewey, we read: Religious humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life. The intelligent evaluation, transformation, control, and direction of such associations and institutions with a view to the enhancement of human life is the purpose and program of humanism. Certainly religious institutions, their ritualistic forms, ecclesiastical methods, and communal activities must be reconstituted as rapidly as experience allows, in order to function effectively in the modern world. …The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society [this means the free market, of course] has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order [there is the interventionism] must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible. The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world.11
remedy is the state. The state sanctifies us. It taps into the best of human nature. It takes our wealth and redistributes it more justly. It makes us better people than we are.
Note that connection. Man’s religious impulse becomes to reshape culture and society in order to engineer a new, fulfilled humanity. And the way to do that is to employ interventionism. Interventionism is the social tool to create the new and improved human nature. Man must be at the centre of all things, and interventionism must guarantee the just human society – as defined by elites, of course.
Left to ourselves, we educate our children selfishly, narrowly and one-dimensionally. But the state sanctifies our children. In state schools they are taught global obligation, secular values, egalitarianism. In state schools our children are liberated from the shackles of individual self-interest and traditional religion (usually Christianity). The state succeeds with our children where we parents fail.
Not all interventionists espouse radical human perfectibility, but almost all vest hope in politicized economics to change the environment, in order to change man. Man is greedy. The elites must grind this greed out of him so that we can have a just and fair society. This is accomplished by confiscating man’s wealth and possessions. By making him dependent on the state for his health, education and welfare. By discouraging injurious habits like smoking tobacco and eating fatty foods and owning firearms.
Left to ourselves, we indulge unhealthy habits like smoking tobacco and eating fatty foods and owning firearms. Not to worry. The state is the Great Sanctifier. The state will limit or criminalize these injurious actions. The state will succeed where we fail. Human nature is corrupt. But the state will perfect it – will make us better than we can otherwise be.
Man and woman can be better than they are, as we, the elite – the virtuous, the magnanimous, the selfless, the wise and, above all, the humble – construct a better world by reconfiguring human nature. You see: when man loses hope in supernatural sanctification, he instead places his hope in human perfectibility. Just as interventionism is a form of secular providence, so social engineering is a form of secular sanctification. Let’s make this more concrete. We hear the expression “angels of our better selves.”12 These days, there always seems to be a political component attached. We might term it political perfectibility – the idea, usually implicit, that through politics we can become something noble that we cannot be outside of politics. Politics offers a sort of personal sanctification. The state makes us better people. Left to ourselves, we greedily amass more possessions than we need. We have no care for the medical or end-of-life needs of our fellow citizens. But there is a remedy for this disease. That Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Left to ourselves, we start businesses that oppress workers by not providing healthcare coverage or maternity leave or offering sufficiently high wages. Never mind that these are often cost-prohibitive to provide. Never mind that we may have to lay people off or see high rates of unemployment in order to fulfill these worthy goals. Those are trifling details. The real issue is making us “the angels of our better selves.” We cannot do this alone, of course, and we cannot trust a provident God to remake us. But we can trust politics to make us better. Man left to himself is a sorry lot. But man engineered by the state becomes what he was meant to be. This is the agenda of political perfectibility. When Barack Obama famously declared, “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” he was speaking this language of political perfectibility. Creature-worshippers want human perfectibility apart from the Creator and his ways. They want the state to secure that perfectibility. But that perfectibility is impossible without interventionism. After all, changing human nature isn’t cheap. You need lots of money to improve human nature.
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But the real issue cuts deeper. Interventionism grinds the bad qualities out of man. It makes corrections that individual man could never be trusted to make. And we certainly could never trust God to make those changes in man. This is why our hope must rest in political perfectibility. This political perfectibility wants sanctification without the Triune God. It wants to change man in man-centred ways. This approach is nothing less than practical agnosticism, operational atheism. And the tool of political perfectibility is economic interventionism, which springs from a deeply non-Christian impulse. WEALTH
This brings us to the third and final conflict between rival religious impulses as they relate to economics. These are the competing views of wealth and wealth creation and transmission. The problem here isn’t just economic interventionism. It is also a strange bias against concentrations of wealth – often, in Christian circles, under the guise of piety. Surely, you might say, if there’s anywhere that the Christian testimony sides with interventionism, it’s here.
“The prosperity Gospel is a travesty of the biblical Gospel.”
For example, what about all those biblical warnings to the rich and the exaltation of the poor? After all, it was the rich man who ended up in hell fire, and it was the impoverished Lazarus who was laid in Abraham’s bosom (Luke 16:19–31).
We read in Proverbs 23:5: “For riches certainly make themselves wings; [t]hey fly away like an eagle toward heaven.” And, in James 5:1, we read: “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you!” be,
“Riches can and often are, dangerous. They can lead us away from a full confidence in God’s provision.”
We must face these teachings squarely. Riches can be, and often are, dangerous. They can lead us away from a full confidence in God’s provision. Riches can inculcate in us a sense of self-sufficiency and pride. Wealth can divert our attention from eternal things and monopolize our energy and attention. It’s no wonder that so many Christians are suspicious of and even frightened by wealth and suspicious of the wealthy.
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But if we read of these biblical texts closely and in context, they are warnings about the misuse of wealth, not condemnations of wealth itself. We find similar biblical warnings about sex and power. Yet God doesn’t condemn any of these things – only their misappropriation. Sex, power and wealth, like fire, water and wind, make great servants and mighty bad masters. In fact, wealth in the Scriptures is often a reward for patient faithfulness, humility, generosity, and support of the Lord’s Kingdom. Not all professing Christians understand this relationship. For example, there’s the prosperity Gospel: God wants everybody to be healthy, fat, rich and happy – and if we aren’t, it is because we lack faith. This view is so fatuous that anybody who knows the Bible knows that it’s wrong. Job’s friends, for example, claimed that he was a sinner, based on the fact that God had deprived him of his wealth. But the friends were wrong. God favoured Job despite his poverty, which was God’s will for this holy man at that stage in his life. The prosperity Gospel is a travesty of the biblical Gospel. But an overreaction to the prosperity Gospel is the poverty Gospel, such as we see at Sojourners and in many evangelical churches, as well as in liberation theology.13 The idea here is that God is irrevocably on the side of the poor. The rich are God’s enemies – or at least dangerously skirting his will. Christians should be poor or, at least, not wealthy. The state exists partly to keep people from getting too much wealth and to redistribute any excess wealth to the people who really deserve it – the poor. The state’s job is to keep the wealthy from getting too wealthy. Poverty is thought to be as much a blessing as prosperity is a curse. But there are biblical teachings simply incompatible with the poverty Gospel, though they seem to get much less press in the church. We read, for example, in Deuteronomy 28 that God will bless with great material possessions those who are faithful to him and his law. It’s important to recognize that these promises should not be “spiritualized.” Listen to God’s promises to his faithful:
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And the Lord will make you abound in prosperity, in the fruit of your womb and in the fruit of your livestock and in the fruit of your ground, within the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to give you. The Lord will open to you his good treasury, the heavens, to give the rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hands. And you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow. (Deut. 28:11–12)
In no way may these very earthy promises of wealth be transformed into ethereal, eternal promises for the afterlife. No self-respecting, God-fearing Jew would have thought so. These are very concrete promises of temporal wealth. Likewise, we read in Proverbs that if we are humble and fear the Lord and work hard, God will bless us materially (Prov. 13:4; 22:4). What about our Lord? Well, he seemed to hang out with wealthy people as well as the poor. And he loved banquets that necessitated wealth. This was one of the charges against him – John the Baptist was abstemious, but Jesus came eating and drinking – partying, we might even say (Matt. 11:19; Luke 5:33-35). Jesus promised not just that his disciples would have hardship in this world, but also “in this time – houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions – and in the age to come, eternal life” (Mark 10:29–30). St. Paul wrote, “I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need” (Phil. 4:12, KJV). These are not the words of a man uncomfortable with wealth. They are the words of a man who is comfortable wherever God situates him – including enjoying times of plenty. I highly recommend John Schneider’s remarkable book The Good of Affluence if you want an extensive biblical argument on the goodness of wealth.14 Some of the most arresting and convicting lines in his book expound Jesus’ parable of the talents (Matt. 25), in which the good master rewards the hard-working investor and punishes Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
the lazy servant who sticks his master’s money safely in the ground. Schneider notes:
“But an overreaction to the prosperity Gospel is the poverty Gospel.”
There is not much in Christian theology today that honors God as a warrior-king, or that honors the courage of godly people in the marketplace. But this is a parable of power and the enlargement of dominion through wealth. It is a parable that honors the fearsome courage and strength of a warrior and king, who will not stop until his realm is enlarged over all the earth. It is a parable that honors the strength and courage of his servants who are fruitful in the worldly realms of power. It is a parable that honors the enlargement of people who would become stronger, and would “There is not much make their master stronger, through in Christian the creation of wealth. And it is also theology today that a parable of dire warning against a honors God as a spirit of timidity and fruitlessness in warrior-king, or response to the world.15
Why do Christians today not think in these terms, recognizing that God will hold us responsible for a lack of vigorous economic investment? That he will punish the miserly servant, who in fear keeps the Lord’s money locked away? Who refuses to engage the marketplace to multiply the Lord’s money? And make no mistake: it is all the Lord’s money, and he wants us to multiply it for his glory. Therefore, the state’s implicit, pervasive assault on business people is an attack on the Lord’s work.
that honors the courage of godly people in the marketplace.”
Let me state it boldly: when we attack wealth and its creation as such (not its perver“When we attack sion), we are attacking a critical part of the wealth and its Lord’s plan for extending his Kingdom in creation as such his world. Let’s unpack this assertion for a (not its perversion), moment. We think immediately of the sanctimony that surrounds “public service.” Public, of course, meaning political. We hear it bluntly in the words of John F. Kennedy: “Political action is the highest responsibility of a citizen.” Oh, really? Make no mistake. I’m appreciative of the faithful politicians
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(few though they may be) who labour hard for just laws and less government and protection of our borders. Thank God for the men and women who discharge this task faithfully. May God give us many more of this kind in public service. But why not also applaud all those in “private service”? I mean those women and men who risk hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money to start a small business. Why not celebrate all the people who get up at 4:30 am and work until 10 pm, serving other people by providing goods and services those people want. Let’s give it up for the business owner who endures government-mandated wage laws and the hypocritical snipes of everybody from President Obama to Sean Penn, just for trying to serve people and provide a living for him/ herself and their employees. Yes, let’s give it up for the people who make it possible for children from modest homes to have Wendy’s frosties and Wal-Mart jeans and enjoy a trip to Disneyland every once in a while.
“When Christians argue for “the simple life,” they are actually arguing for a diminished capacity for the Lord’s work in the earth.”
It is mostly these people, not the “public servants” who, from a human and horizontal perspective, are most instrumental in feeding and clothing and housing us and our children and grandchildren. Who give even the more modest among us a degree of luxury – occasional prime rib dinners, down comforters, Pelikan fountain pens, 401-K’s, heating and air conditioning, and so on.
These are not the benefits afforded to us by “public servants.” Public servants are very proficient at doing two things with wealth: extracting “Public servants are it and redistributing it. They don’t know the first thing about creating it. This is the very proficient at severe limitation – and the grave danger doing two things – of economic politics. To say or imply with wealth: that those in “public service” are someextracting it and how more selfless, noble, and humble redistributing it. than business owners is a form of rank They don’t know hypocrisy and an utter disgrace to the the first thing about very people whom God uses to keep our nations materially sustained. In the final creating it.” analysis, “public service” is really a misFALL 2016
nomer. The people who most serve the “public,” at least at the level of material provision, are the “private” servants – the businessmen and women. And, ironically, the “public” servants are almost always, in reality, servants of private interests – their economic policies benefit not the wider population, but certain favoured groups and industries, like unions, farmers, coal miners, and automobile producers. We might say, therefore, that the “private service” of hard-working businesspeople furnishes the greatest public benefit, while the “public service” of politicians harms much of the public in the interests of a select individuals, groups and industries. Yet, instead of calls for reform, we hear pious calls and admonitions to live “the simple life.” This is the idea that we should make do with less and less – almost subsistence living. (Not quite: after all, good Western Christian, even the economic moralizers, still require absolute necessities like corn-fueled cars and fresh organic pomegranate juice. It takes lots of money to live the simple life these days.) Still, the idea is that we are helping the economy and not oppressing others if we spend less and buy almost everything used and live as much as possible on the bare necessities. It would be hard to envision a more selfish, self-centred, economically catastrophic strategy. Let me illustrate this truth by a conversation I once had. A friend and I were talking about Christians and wealth. He stated: “There’s no reason for a Christian to spend $80,000 for a car. Nobody needs an $80,000 car. That’s just plain wrong. And heartless!” I said: “Why would you want to snatch food from the table of little, needy children? Why would you want to promote poverty and throw people out of work?” He apparently wasn’t following, so I explained: “The workers who made that $80,000 car don’t even make $80,000 a year. They have children to feed. They feed those children with the payment they get from the $80,000 that a rich man or woman spends on the car they make. But if people quit buying these cars under the guise of piety, those workers lose that livelihood and their children suffer.” Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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I said something else to him: “If nobody needs an $80,000 car, why do they need a $15,000 van like you drive? $15,000! Do you know much food $15,000 could buy? You could walk or make it on a bicycle. By the standards of much of the world, a $15,000 van is a luxury. On a global scale it’s not any less luxurious than an $80,000 Mercedes, certainly not to people in much of the Third World.” But this problem with “the simple life” is lost on too many of the economically pious. There is an important fact that too many people seem unaware of: a large and prosperous middle class is impossible without a leisure and luxury culture. The reason many of us can have a comfortable life is that a few very rich people buy luxury goods and services the middle class helps provide. In a very real way, then, “the simple life” is a form of pious self-indulgence. It harms good, hard-working people. This is a high price to pay for an aversion to paying high prices for luxury goods. This pious misconception poses even greater problems for the church and Kingdom. When I hear Christians deprecating wealth and the wealthy, I now say: “So you’re against getting the Gospel to the world. You’re against starting Christian day schools. You’re against new missions projects. You’re against expanding the Lord’s Kingdom.” Of course, they’re intentionally against nothing of the kind, but their pious economic simplicity jeopardizes these types of Christian ministries. They don’t seem to understand that you need money to do things. They seem to think that missionaries and churches and parochial schools just magically appear. But they are not miracles, as such. God works through them miraculously, but he generally uses money to get the miracles up and running. So, when Christians argue for “the simple life,” they are actually arguing for a diminished capacity for the Lord’s work in the earth. When we argue against valid wealth creation and accumulation, we are arguing against one of God’s established strategies for Kingdom success. When we say that riches are inherently bad or corrupting, when we assume that wealth is invariably a sign of greed, when we think that Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
riches reflect materialism and carnality, we deny the divine cord between faithfulness and blessings – including material blessings. When we think this way, we introduce a radical dualism into God’s world. Dualism is the idea that matter is inferior to spirit. It’s the idea that Jesus is not really Lord of material possessions and wealth, because they are unimportant at best, evil at worst. It’s an utter denial of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It shoves the triune God into the heavenlies and puts the state in charge of the earth. God is concerned with “spiritual” matters, but not material matters. Dualists don’t seem to understand that material matters are spiritual matters too. And when we separate wealth from God’s authority, we are surrendering it to Satan. This is why the religious premise behind the aversion to the valid creation and accumulation of wealth is operationally agnostic: it wants a God who is Lord of poverty but not of wealth, Lord of simplicity but not of complexity, Lord of weakness but not of power. Yet Jesus Christ is Lord of all things and all situations. And the attack on wealth is an attack on his Lordship. May God give us a new generation of economic warriors, Creator-worshippers who do not look to politics and the state for sustenance, but who fearlessly invade the market to increase their wealth and, with it, the boundaries of God’s Kingdom. CONCLUSION
Economic interventionism is an operationally agnostic worldview; it vests secular providence in the hand of the state, rather than the hand of the sovereign God by means of individuals made in his image. Economic interventionism denies the fixity of human nature and vests the state with the task of sanctification, a task which should be reserved for God alone. And economic interventionism cuts the cord between faithfulness to God and the blessing of wealth, thereby denying God’s Lordship over vast reaches of the world. For this reason, the religious impulse of economic interventionism is at war with consistent Christianity. You can be an economic interventionist, or you can be a consistent Christian. FALL 2016
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You cannot be both.
1 David K. Naugle, Worldview (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 68–147. 2 Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1991), 341–351. 3 Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 3-8. 4 Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1967), 46–50. 5 Sojourners is a cross-denominational group of Christians who, among other things, espouse an interventionist, redistributive economic model. See www.sojo.net. 6 On this elitism, see Angelo M. Codevilla, The Ruling Class (New York: Beaufort Books, 2010). 7 I am talking about God’s prescriptive providence: what God desires of his world as found in the Bible. I am not talking about his decretal providence, his secret counsels that he has not disclosed to man before the fact. It may be God’s decretal providence to bring political (and economic) tyranny on a culture (Hab. 1:5– 11), but man must live by God’s prescriptive providence, which opposes tyranny (1 Sam. 8:1–18).
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“Transcript: Obama and Clinton Debate,” ABC News, last modified April 16 2008, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/DemocraticDebate/ story?id=4670271&page=3. 9 Francois Bizot, The Gate (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 6–7. 10 Clark H. Pinnock, “The Pursuit of Utopia,” in Freedom, Justice and Hope, ed. Marvin Olasky (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1988), 76–82. 11 “Humanist Manifesto I”, American Humanist Association, last modified August 19 2016, http://americanhumanist.org/humanism/ humanist_manifesto_i. 12 Coined by Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address, March 4 1861. See http://www. bartleby.com/124/pres31.html. More recently
popularized by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011).
13 Ronald Nash, ed., Liberation Theology (Milford, MI: Mott Media, 1984). 14 John R. Schneider, The Good of Affluence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). 15 Schneider, The Good of Affluence, 189
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
WHAT’S WRONG WITH
Islamic Finance?
19 PAGE NO.
TIM DIEPPE In 2014, Britain made history by becoming the first non-Muslim country to issue an Islamic bond.1 This bond was issued as part of the government’s commitment for the UK “to become the western hub of Islamic finance.” The British government has been encouraging the growth of Islamic finance for over ten years,2 and has succeeded in this aim. There are now over twenty banks offering Islamic financial services in the UK – double the number in the US. The global market for Islamic financial services was estimated to be $2tn in 2014, and expected to grow to $3tn by 2018.3 TheCityUK estimated that there are over 100,000 Islamic finance retail customers in the UK.4 Globally, the UK is by far the largest provider of Islamic finance courses at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level, with offerings at around seventy educational institutions. With so many people seeing this as an attractive growth market, are there any reasons for caution? I believe there are many, and this article seeks to expose some of the pitfalls and problems with Islamic finance. PROBLEMS WITH ISLAMIC FINANCE
The ban on interest is a modern radical interpretation of the Qur’an. Muslims throughout history have borrowed and lent money with interest.5 The idea that interest is banned in the Qur’an is a modern fundamentalist interpretation. As Timur Kuran says, “The alleged antiquity of the doctrine is a myth.... Even the concept of Islamic economics is a product of the twentieth century.”6 Mahmoud El-Gamal, a Muslim scholar, writes that “Islamic finance was conceived in the 1970s.”7 Patrick Sookhdeo explains: “The drive for the establishment of an interest-free Islamic economic system was started by Abul A’la Mawdudi (1903-1979), founder of Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
the militant Pakistani Islamist Jama’at-i Islami movement.”8 The debate on the banning of interest in the Qur’an hinges on two passages. The first is Surah 3:130: “O ye who believe! Devour not usury, doubling and quadrupling (the sum lent). Observe your duty to Allah, that ye may be successful.”9 The Arabic word here translated ‘usury’ is Riba. It is clear that this verse refers to extortionate usury, since the verse talks about ‘doubling and quadrupling.’ This is why Pickthall translated with ‘usury.’ The Yousef Ali and Sahih International translations also put ‘usury.’ As Raquib Zaman says, “this is the only definition of Riba available from the Qur’an.”10 The second passage is Surah 2:275-79: Those who devour usury will not stand except as stand one whom the Evil one by his touch Hath driven to madness. That is because they say: ‘Trade is like usury,’ but Allah hath permitted trade and forbidden usury. Those who after receiving direction from their Lord, desist, shall be pardoned for the past; their case is for Allah (to judge); but those who repeat (The offence) are companions of the Fire: They will abide therein (for ever). Allah will deprive usury of all blessing, but will give increase for deeds of charity: For He loveth not creatures ungrateful and wicked.… O ye who believe! Fear Allah, and give up what remains of your demand for usury, if ye are indeed believers. If ye do it not, Take notice of war from Allah and His Messenger. But if ye turn back, ye shall have your capital sums: Deal not unjustly, and ye shall not be dealt with unjustly.11
TIM DIEPPE is the Director of Islamic Affairs at Christian Concern. Prior to this he had a 23-year career in fund management in the City of London which included him being named by Citywire as one of Britain’s top 100 fund managers. During this time he exposed extremist links to Shari’ah Compliant Finance and subsequently refused to run a Shari’ah Compliant Fund. Tim is completing an MA in Kingdom Theology with Westminster Theological Centre. He is passionate about informing and equipping the church to respond effectively to the challenge of Islam.
This is where some translations have substituted ‘interest’ for Riba instead of ‘usury,’ as transFALL 2016
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lated by Pickthall and Yousef Ali.12 Raquib Zaman shows how all the classic commentators on the Qur’an understood Riba as usury.13 He also shows that there is no support in the Hadith for the meaning ‘interest.’14 Modern Islamists have not drawn on traditional practice or interpretation in order to interpret Riba as ‘interest.’ They have interpreted Riba in its strictest possible sense with no actual basis for this interpretation. And it is this interpretation that western financial institutions are promoting, as if it is the only interpretation, and are thereby agreeing with the modern radical view that Shari’ah law bans all forms of interest. Not only financial institutions, but the British government itself states unequivocally that “the taking or receiving of interest (Riba) is strictly prohibited as, under Shari’ah principles, money is not valuable in itself and no charge should be made for its use.”15 When did Western governments become an authority on the meaning of Riba? Why have they accepted the modern, strictest possible interpretation? In promoting this understanding of Riba they are promoting radical fundamentalist interpretations of the Qur’an. The removal of interest in Islamic finance is deceptive. Islamic finance products are marketed as being interest-free. In fact, the net result is a product with charges that look a lot like interest. This is not a coincidence. It is a deliberate deception which raises questions about the “Islamic finance system. Timur Kuran explains: “Murabaproducts are ha, the most popular lending mechanism marketed as being of the Islamic banks, is simply an ancient interest-free. In ruse. It consists of several interest-free transactions that together amount to infact, the net result terest.”16 is a product with
charges that look a lot like interest.”
In fact, many Muslims have spoken out about this. Kuran cites Khurshid Ahmad from Pakistan, as “a prolific writer who has held influential positions on key government commissions charged with steering the Islamisation of Pakistan’s economy.” Ahmad has “publicly criticised his country’s Islamic banks, saying that ’99 percent’ of their business is still based on interest.”17 Muhammad Saleem is another Muslim
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critic of this system. In his book Islamic Banking - a $300 Billion Deception he writes: In their murabaha transactions (the dominant mode of financing), the difference between the purchase price and the selling price recognises the time-value of money in the same way that charging interest does. Put more bluntly, Islamic banks charge interest on 95% of their financing transactions, but concealed in Islamic garb. By charging interest in various guises, essentially designed to obfuscate products, Islamic banks engage in deception, duplicity and thus promote dishonesty. The real question is: in the eyes of Allah which is a greater sin, charging interest openly or engaging in dishonest practices.18
El-Gamal is also a Muslim who criticises this deception. He cites a comment in Fortune magazine: “The result looked a lot like interest, and some argue that murabaha is simply a thinly veiled version of it; the mark up [bank’s name] charges is very close to the prevailing interest rate. But bank officials argue that God is in the details.”19 He also cites a Reuters report of a sukuk bond issue which is described as “interest free,” but with “4 percent annual profit.”20 Elsewhere he argues: Almost all contemporary writings in Islamic Law and/or Islamic finance proclaim that Islamic Law (Shari’a) forbids interest. This statement is paradoxical in light of the actual practices of Islamic financial providers over the past three decades. In fact, the bulk of Islamic financial practices formally base rates of return or costs of capital on a benchmark interest rate such as LIBOR, and would easily be classified by any MBA student as interest-based debt-finance.21
Why is the western world promoting a deceptive form of finance? Islamic finance is interest-bearing finance disguised as interest-free finance. Islamic finance is promoted by and associated with Islamic extremists.
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Islamic Finance
Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani chairs the Shari’ah Standards Board of the Accounting and Auditing Organisation for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) which aims to set up international standards for Shari’ah finance.22 He is a Shari’ah advisor to several banks and has been chair of the HSBC Amanah Shari’ah Advisory Board, chair of the Shari’ah Board of the Dow Jones Islamic Index, and chair of the Shari’ah Board of Citi Islamic Investment Bank.23 Usmani’s book, Islam and Modernism,24 has been translated into English, and relevant pages are available online.25 In this book he responds to a question about whether Jihad needs to be waged in lands where Islam can freely be preached. He responds by quoting the Qur’an and stating “here killing is to continue until the unbelievers pay Jizyah after they are humbled or overpowered.”26 Jizyah is the subjugation tax imposed on non-Muslims under Islamic rule. He goes on to explain, “if the purpose of killing was only to acquire permission and freedom of preaching Islam it would have been said ‘until they allow for preaching Islam.’” He has subsequently been removed from the HSBC and Dow Jones advisory boards, but still sits on several other advisory boards and is regarded as a leading Islamic authority on Shari’ah compliance finance. It stretches credibility to assume that the other Shari’ah advisors sitting under Taki Usmani’s chairmanship of various boards were unaware of his fundamentalist views. Patrick Sookhdeo, in his book Understanding Shari’a Finance, points out several connections between fundamentalist groups and members of Shari’ah Advisory Boards in the UK.27 The McCormick Foundation Report gives detailed profiles of several Shari’ah Advisory Board members, showing their links to extremist groups, and in some cases statements in support of terrorism.28 Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir told a banking conference in Kuala Lumpur in November 2002 that “A universal Islamic banking system is a jihad worth pursuing, to abolish this slavery [to the West].”29 The enthusiasm of fundamentalists for Shari’ah finance should be an immediate cause for concern as we think about whether we should be supporting Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
and promoting Islamic finance. Islamic finance aims to create a separate, rival financial system.
“The aim and motivation of radical Muslims in creating and involving themselves in the entirely modern concept of Islamic finance is to create a rival financial system.”
The aim and motivation of radical Muslims in creating and involving themselves in the entirely modern concept of Islamic finance is to create a rival financial system. Islamic finance serves to prevent the integration of Muslims into western societies. Muslims are told that they are not allowed to use standard financial products. Financial institutions are told that they must create and market separate products for Muslims than for everyone else. All of this separates Muslims from mainstream economics whilst creating a rival financial system directly influenced by Islamic scholars. Timur Kuran puts it this way: The real purpose of Islamic economics has not been economic improvement but cultivation of a distinct Islamic identity to resist cultural globalization. It has served the cause of global Islamism, known also as ‘Islamic fundamentalism,’ by fuelling the illusion that Muslim societies have lived, or can live, by distinct economic rules. In fact, now as in the past, the economic life of Muslims has adhered to the very same principles observed elsewhere.30
He further describes the emergence of Islamic economics as: “a weapon of civilizational resistance,” noting that, “unsurprisingly, the theme of clashing civilisations appears in all early contributions to Islamic economics.”31 Robert Spencer cites examples where Muslims have successfully refused interest payment to IRS, Mastercard and other creditors.32 This serves to illustrate the extent to which resistance to civilisation is encouraged by Islamic finance. Michael Nazir-Ali questions whether funds provided for Shari’ah-compliant financial products can be obtained from conventional finance. Logically the answer is not, which then would “require the establishment of free-standing institutions which engaged only in sharia-compliant activity.”33 A completely ‘interest-free’ Islamic economy would ultimately be entirely isolated from the rest of the FALL 2016
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global economy. A rival financial system would be the result. It would be controlled by Muslims and would be very likely to be“Shari’ah finance has come discriminatory against non-Musquickly become part lims. Western financial institutions and of the economy, with governments have been incredibly naïve in their encouragement of this subversive jobs and government system of finance. loans dependent on
it. Shari’ah law is in fact inherently discriminatory in relation to both women and nonMuslims.”
Islamic finance lends credibility to Shari’ah Law which is illiberal, undemocratic and discriminatory.
Linked to the above creation of a rival financial system is the way in which Islamic finance legitimises Shari’ah law. The promotion of Shari’ah finance as a way to enhance the credibility of Shari’ah law more generally is a key aim of the Islamists involved. As leading scholar Timur Kuran puts it, “successful Islamization in one domain lends credibility to Islamization attempts in other domains. So a significant consequence of the economic activities undertaken in the name of Islam is the support they give to the broader Islamist agenda.”34 Once people are comfortable with Shari’ah finance, they find it harder to criticise Shari’ah law more generally. Our accommodation of Shari’ah into the financial world makes it harder to “Using the system object to accommodating Shari’ah into of zakat ‘al-Qaeda family law. Shari’ah finance has quickly become part of the economy, with jobs was able to receive and government loans dependent on between $300m it. Shari’ah law is in fact inherently disand $500m’ criminatory in relation to both women over a decade and non-Muslims. Shari’ah finance does ‘from wealthy not directly discriminate in this way, but businessmen and lends credibility to a system which does. We should be wary of anything which bankers’.” supports the wider influence of Shari’ah law in our culture. Zakat is paid in some cases – where does it go? The payment of zakat is one of the five pillars of Islam. It is described as charitable giving of 2.5% of profits. Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi has issued a fatwa stating that zakat can be used to finance violent Jihad.35 An Internet questioner asked whether he could pay zakat to UNICEF. He received the answer “No,” followed by a list FALL 2016
of legitimate recipients of zakat money based on the Qur’an. Point 7 includes: “propagation of Islam, Jihad etc.”36 Indeed, zakat is the single largest source of funds for terrorism.37 The French terrorism expert Jean-Charles Brisard, in his Terrorism Financing report for the Security Council of the United Nations explains that, using the system of zakat “al-Qaeda was able to receive between $300m and $500m” over a decade “from wealthy businessmen and bankers representing 20% of Saudi GNP, through a web of charities and companies acting as fronts, with the notable use of Islamic banking institutions. Most of this financial backbone is still at large and able to support fundamentalist organizations. ”38 A Center for Security Policy Paper puts it this way: Financial jihad through zakat, of course, is nothing particularly new and has been carried out for a long time. Zakat committees in Gaza have been a prime transfer mechanism of funds for Hamas, for instance, and the radical jihadist madrassas in Pakistan have been partly funded from zakat for decades. What’s new with Islamic finance is the sheer volume of potential zakat collections and a move afoot to centralize both collections and distribution under one central authority that almost certainly will be controlled by committed Islamists. Every bank offering Islamic products appears required to donate 2.5% of revenue generated from them to zakat and with some 400 banks in 75 countries and a trillion dollars in Islamic financing currently the potential zakat sums are staggering.39
Islamic finance then, is increasing the availability of funds for terrorism. Islamic finance is vulnerable to money laundering and fraud due to the lack of transparency. The additional complexity of Islamic finance lends itself to abuse in various ways. El-Gamal Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Islamic Finance
explains: The ‘degrees of separation’ utilised by Islamic bankers to camouflage an interest-bearing loan as commodity or asset trading bear a striking resemblance to the ‘layering’ techniques used in financial crimes.… Since financial criminals have expertise in utilising similar methods, it would be easy for them to abuse the mechanics of Islamic financial Shari’a arbitrage to reach their criminal ends.40
A recent IMF working paper highlights “The complexity of Islamic finance products as a factor increasing exposure to risk” of money laundering.41 It also states that very little study has been done of the risks of money laundering and terrorist financing from Islamic finance.42 This risk of money laundering is in addition to the use of zakat highlighted above. Islamic finance disadvantages Muslims through increased complexity and transaction costs. Islamic financial products are more complex than equivalent standard financial products in order to comply with the demands of the fundamentalist view that the Qur’an prohibits interest. This additional complexity incurs additional costs. As El Gamal writes: “Islamic finance as it exists today has been shown to reduce economic efficiency by increasing transaction costs, without providing any substantial economic value to its customers.”43 These costs are born by the customers, thereby disadvantaging them. Inefficiency of Islamic finance is therefore inevitable. El-Gamal explains: Where the substance of contemporary financial practice is in accordance with Islamic law, adherence to pre-modern contract forms (with or without modification) leads most often to avoidable efficiency losses, thus violating one of the main legal objectives that defined classical Islamic jurisprudence.44
Muslims using Islamic finance incur increased costs and are thus disadvantaged relative to those Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
using standard financial products. Islamic finance is not supported by most Muslims
“Before the creation of the modern fundamentalist concept of Islamic finance there was no demand for it. Muslims have been happy to use normal financial products for centuries.”
Before the creation of the modern fundamentalist concept of Islamic finance there was no demand for it. Muslims have been happy to use normal financial products for centuries. As El-Gamal says, “in fact, however, Islamic finance has been largely a supply-driven industry, with jurists who participate actively in Shari’a arbitrage helping to expand the industry’s customer base through indirect advertisement (at various conferences and publications), as well as religious admonishment that Muslims should avoid conventional finance.”45
Most Muslims see the problems with Islamic finance and do not want to participate in a fundamentalist, deceptive, disadvantageous system. Timur Kuran cites evidence that “where Islamic banks operate alongside conventional banks, their share of Muslim deposits has remained under 20 percent; in some predominantly Muslim countries, the figure is as low as 1 percent.”46 Sookhdeo cites a 2004 survey which found that 75% of the Muslim population in Britain was indifferent to Shari’ah finance and that there was no automatic demand for it. 83% of Muslims questioned the necessity of Shari’ah-compliant Islamic financial products approved by Islamic scholars.47 In 2013 the Islamic Bank of Britain carried “The idea behind out a survey of attitudes to Islamic finance Islamic finance is and found that only 36% of Muslims curto create a rival rently use Shari’ah-compliant finance, of 48 financial system which 9% use it exclusively. This fact seriously undermines the fundamentalist’s and to enhance message that Muslims are strictly prohibthe influence of ited from standard financial products, as fundamentalist the vast majority of Muslims continue to Islam in the use them. CONCLUSION
financial world.”
Islamic finance is based on a modern radical interpretation of the Qur’an and is deliberately subversive and deceptive. The idea behind Islamic finance is to create a rival financial system and to enhance the influence of fundamentalist Islam FALL 2016
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in the financial world. It is remarkable the extent to which Western financial institutions and governments have not only allowed this system to flourish, but also encouraged and endorsed it as representative of mainstream Islam. Their naïvety is extraordinary. The only good news is that, in contrast to the banks and the government, most Muslims have not bought into this system. We should be encouraging these moderate Muslims, not joining with fundamentalists in encouraging them to involve themselves in Islamic finance. It is time for the west to wake up to the true nature of Islamic finance and to expose its deceptive roots.
1
UK Excellence in Islamic Finance, (London: UK Trade and Investment, 2014). https:// www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/367154/ UKTI_UK_Excellence_in_Islamic_Finance_ Reprint_2014_Spread.pdf 2 “The UK: Leading Western Centre of Islamic Finance,” (London: TheCityUK, 2015). https:// www.thecityuk.com/research/the-uk-leadingwestern-centre-for-islamic-finance/ 3 “The UK: Leading Western Centre.” 4 “The UK: Leading Western Centre.” 5 Patrick Sookhdeo, Understanding Shari’a Finance: The Muslim Challenge to Western Economics (McLean, VA: Isaac Publishing, 2008), 9-12. 6 Timur Kuran, Islam & Mammon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 83. 7 Mahmoud El-Gamal, Islamic Finance: Law, Economics, and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 137. 8 Sookhdeo, Understanding Shari’a Finance, 13. 9 Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: an Explanatory Translation by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, (New York: New American Library, 1953). 10 M. Raquibuz Zaman, “Usury (Riba) and the Place of Bank Interest in Islamic Banking and Finance,” International Journal of Banking and Finance 6, no. 1 (2008): 2. 11 Pickthall translation. 12 Sahih International translates with ‘interest.’ 13 Zaman, “Usury,” 2-3.
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14 Zaman, “Usury,” 3-6. 15 UK Excellence in Islamic Finance, 7. 16 Kuran, Islam & Mammon, 15. 17 Kuran, Islam & Mammon, 16-17. 18 Muhammad Saleem, Islamic Banking, a $300 billion Deception: Observations and Arguments on Riba (interest or usury), Islamic Banking Practices, Venture Capital, and Enlightenment (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2005), 68-69. 19 El-Gamal, Islamic Finance, 2. 20 El-Gamal, Islamic Finance, 2. 21 ““Interest” and the Paradox of Contemporary Islamic Law and Finance,” Fordham International Law Journal (2003): 1. 22 “Members,” Accounting and Auditing Organisation for Islamic Financial Institutions, last modified 2015, http://aaoifi.com/members2/?lang=en 23 Hussain Kureshi, “Mufti Taqi Usmani,” Islamic Finance, last modified August 18 2013, http://islamicfinancialsystems1.blogspot. co.uk/2013/08/mufti-taqi-usmani.html. 24 Taqi Usmani, Islam and Modernism, trans. Dr. Mohammed Swaleh Siddiqui (New Delhi, India: Adam Publishers and Distributors, 2006). 25 See Mufti M. Taqi Usmani, Islam and Modernism, http://www.saneworks.us/uploads/ application/40.pdf. 26 Usmani, Islam and Modernism, 131. 27 Sookhdeo, Understanding Shari’a Finance, 81-88. 28 “Shariah, Law and ‘Financial Jihad’: How Should America Respond?,” (McCormick Foundation, 2009), http://www.saneworks.us/ uploads/application/49.pdf. 29 Rachel Ehrenfeld, “Financial Jihad,” Human Events, last modified September 22 2005, http://humanevents.com/2005/09/22/financialjihad/. 30 Allison Engel, “Conversation with Timur Kuran,”USC News, last modified December 18 2006, http://news.usc.edu/20744/Conversation-With-Timur-Kuran/. 31 Kuran, Islam & Mammon, 98. 32 Robert Spencer, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2008), 185-86. 33 Michael Nazir-Ali, “Islamic Law, Fundamental Freedoms, and Social Cohesion: Retrospect Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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and Prospect,” in Shari’a in the West, ed. R.J. Ahdar and N. Aroney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 83. 34 Kuran, Islam & Mammon, 62. 35 Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, “Is it permissible to spend charity money on Jihad - Fatwa Zakah Jihad,” Free Republic, last modified April 11 2002, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/ news/666056/posts. 36 Kazakh, “Can you pay zakat to the organisations like UNICEF?,” Yahoo Answers, last modified 2009, https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/ question/index?qid=20100205104923AAh86 2S. 37 Sookhdeo, Understanding Shari’a Finance: The Muslim Challenge to Western Economics, 42. 38 Jean-Charles Brisard, “Terrorism Financing: Roots and Trends of Saudi Terrorism Financing,” (Report prepared for the President of the Security Council, United Nations, 2002), 3. 39 Alex Alexiev, “Islamic Finance or Financing Islamism?,” Center for Security Policy, 2007, 12-13. 40 El-Gamal, Islamic Finance: Law, Economics, and Practice, 176. 41 Nadim Kyriakos-Saad et al., “Islamic Finance and Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (Aml/Cft),” in IMF Working Paper (2016), 9. 42 Kyriakos-Saad et al., “Islamic Finance and AntiMoney Laundering,” 8. 43 El-Gamal, Islamic Finance, 190. 44 El-Gamal, Islamic Finance, xii. 45 El-Gamal, Islamic Finance, 190. 46 Kuran, Islam & Mammon, 73. 47 Sookhdeo, Understanding Shari’a Finance, 78-79. 48 “Majority of non-Muslim UK Consumers Believe that Islamic Finance is Relevant to all Faiths,” Al Rayan Bank, February 7 2014, http://www.alrayanbank.co.uk/useful-infotools/about-us/latest-news/jan-dec-2014/ majority-of-non-muslim-uk-consumers-believethat-islamic-finance-is-relevant-to-all-faiths/.
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26 PAGE NO.
BRIAN MATTSON
DR. BRIAN MATTSON is a theologian, writer, speaker, and recording artist. He has a B.A. from Montana State University-Billings, an M.A.R. from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland). He serves as Senior Scholar of Public Theology for the Center for Cultural Leadership and faculty of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship. He’s the author of the popular-level book, Politics & Evangelical Theology, and an academic monograph, Restored To Our Destiny. Brian lives with his wife and three girls in the Big Sky country of Billings, Montana.
French Whine: ROUSSEAU, THOMAS PIKETTY, AND
the Rhetoric of Wealth Inequality 2014 brought the world one of those periodic “publishing events.” Sometimes these events are so sensational people cannot stop talking about them for years – J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series comes to mind. Alas, with increased Internet “noise” and the information glut that accompanies the 24/7 news cycle, the “event” of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century seems to have lasted just a few weeks.1 That does not make it less noteworthy, however. Books can and often do lie dormant for many years before producing fruit. Piketty, a French economist, assigned himself the task of once and for all proving that capitalism as an economic system contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. This thesis has been argued for centuries, but Piketty has built himself (rather ironically) what venture capitalists call an “unfair advantage.” He has compiled immense sets of economic data heretofore unknown and unavailable. What used to be a purely ideological debate has now been brought down, he believes, to the realm of empirical observation.
My real interest is to inquire into some presuppositions involved in the widespread contemporary concern about economic inequality, but some explanation of the current state of thinking about the discipline is necessary. And Piketty is as current as they come. There “Thomas Piketty is no need to let his impressive collection is here to rescue of data overwhelm and obscure what is capitalism from actually a very simple thesis, presented as itself and to save the formula r > g. The “rate of return” democracy. It is on capital (i.e., the accumulation of a novel posture wealth) is greater than the rate of overall economic growth. This means that, due for one seeking to to the miracle of compound interest (or rehabilitate Marx.” curse, depending on how you view it), income provided by capital investments of the “haves” will always grow faster than the FALL 2016
income generated by the “have-nots.” And this means that economic inequality will inexorably expand. In other words, the “have-nots” cannot ever “catch up” to the “haves,” or level the playing field. On the contrary, Piketty believes that Marx was essentially right with his theory of infinite accumulation: as this inequality increases, the “haves,” barring some intervention, will continue to acquire and control more and more, until they own everything. While he notes that it is unlikely that this situation will ever obtain, he is, variously, “concerned,” “alarmed,” and “disturbed,” because this trajectory forebodes a breaking point where the social tension produced by extreme economic inequality leads to revolution and bloodshed. It is not a full-throated endorsement of Marx, exactly, but nevertheless somewhat begrudgingly allows a point in his favour: “Sorry about that revolution…but you capitalists really did have it coming.” Thomas Piketty is here, in other words, to rescue capitalism from itself and to save democracy. It is a novel posture for one seeking to rehabilitate Marx, I grant. Considering the extent of Piketty’s influence and the bold claims made concerning his theory and data sets, a few observations are worth noting. He insists that the question of wealth inequality must be analyzed on a strictly empirical, datadriven basis. This principle, strangely enough, does not extend to his own proposals. He admits that his solution is “utopian,” a term the average reader may be forgiven for interpreting as “impossible.” He proposes that wealth must simply be confiscated from the “haves” and redistributed to the “have-nots” by way of a global wealth tax. Readers will look in vain for the charts, graphs, and historical data that demonstrate the possible or probable success of this kind of proposal. This is not surprising, since the record of such experiments is quite abysmal. Marxism always boasts of its “scientific” credentials, but soon enough deEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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generates into mythology, its native atmosphere. If this is, as Piketty would have it, a world where those with great wealth inevitably seek to benefit only themselves and their own interests, who, then, is to be entrusted with the task of confiscating, controlling, and distributing this global largesse? Piketty fails to answer Milton Friedman’s immortal inquiry: “Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?”2 These “angels” are usually devils in disguise. Everyone understands and rolls their eyes at the self-serving irony of Plato’s contention that the best ruler is – surprise, surprise! – the philosopher. Perhaps our eyebrows should elevate ever so slightly when an economist who decries the temptations of great wealth proposes that he and his academic guild be the ones to control the world’s wealth. Moreover, Piketty treats different economic classes in a remarkably static fashion. He speaks of top and bottom wealth brackets as though they were frozen collections of people. And he must: his theory is that there is nothing to impede the continued growth of capital investments, except the occasional drastic historical event, such as a world war. In essence, once rich, always richer, forever. Once poor, always poorer, forever. This ignores one of the most compelling – and empirically verifiable – features of free market systems: the creation of upward mobility. Piketty himself turns to the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people to show that the rich today are much richer than they were twenty-five years ago. Only he leaves out the fact that the two lists, separated by more than two decades, contain different people.3 In fact, Jonah Goldberg notes that fewer than ten percent of the 400 wealthiest Americans in 1982 were still on the list in 2012.4 How is this possible, on Piketty’s theory? It seems he has fallen for a common fallacy: the “top 1%” is an abstract category, not a description of a living, breathing collection of people. One can be in the “top 1%” one year, and merely in the “top 5%” the next. And somebody may join you today or displace you tomorrow. Not only is there remarkable fluidity between economic classes in modern free market systems, Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
there is economic fluctuation of the discrete classes, as well. Piketty and others too often fail to notice a remarkable fact, that what we mean by “poverty” has changed drastically in the past thirty years. And it has changed because it has become far less of a problem. According to a seminal study on global poverty by Yale University and the Brookings Institution, in 1981 a total of 52% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, defined as not being able to afford housing and food. Thirty years later, that number is 15%.5 In other words, not only have the rich become richer, but the poor have become richer, too. Even when it comes to poverty of the less extreme kind, it is commonplace in “Other than an North America for people designated as arguably new officially “poor” to have housing, food, insight on the role air conditioning, and cable television. But of return on capital these undeniable improvements never lessinvestments in en the shrilling of “fact-based” economists wealth inequality, like Piketty, who continue to sound the alarm. and some new Other than an arguably new insight on the role of return on capital investments in wealth inequality, and some new data sets, Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century contains nothing new. But there is one further irony that begs for exploration. Piketty worries that free market capitalism might produce inequalities so extreme that they will result in bloody revolution. This is odd for a couple of reasons. First, we can trace the explosion of Western economic prosperity to the Industrial Revolution and ask: Where have the bloody revolutions taken place in the past 150 years? The obvious ones occurred in Russia and China, along with many smaller uprisings, which generally took place in colonized countries. It is fair to say that inequality had much to do with these conflicts, but nobody can seriously argue that these inequalities (which included much more than economic inequalities) can be laid at the feet of free markets.
data sets, Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century contains nothing new.”
But it is odd for still another reason: the seeds of modern revolution were sown by a man who spoke Thomas Piketty’s native tongue, both literally and ideologically – eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Modern FALL 2016
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revolution began with a particular sort of French “whine,” one that matured over decades, until Robespierre finally uncasked it and found it full of blood. And what irony! Thomas Piketty worries that capitalism will produce “We see in Rousseau revolution. It hasn’t. But, historically, it the emergence of was a man who shared Piketty’s obsession an ideology, the with wealth inequality who actually gave replicated DNA birth to the French Revolution. It is unof which can be likely, by Piketty’s own admission, that mere economic inequality in modern directly traced to the capitalist societies will result in bloodFrench Revolution shed.6 But we do know that stoking hysand beyond.” teria about it does. His book is alarming, but not for the reason he imagines. ROUSSEAU’S REBELLION
Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously begins Part Two of his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, first published in 1755, thus: The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!7
Wars, murders, misfortunes, and horrors came, in other words, with the advent of private property. The Apostle Paul wrote, “For sin entered the world, and through sin, death” (Rom. 5:12), but Rousseau conceptually replaced that crucial word “sin” with “property.” For him, the real “fall of man” was not a vertical theological matter, an alienation or breach between God and humanity; it was an economic one, a horizontal conflict between man and man. Inequality begins at the precise moment when there is a “have” and a “have not.” In Rousseau’s mythology (and that is, in fact, what his entire account is), private property soon led to the need for new customs and FALL 2016
institutions, like families and tribes, for humans to make alliances and protect economic interests. (Evil profit motive, tribalism, and greed? Check.) Eventually, estates grew so large that they comprised all of the land and it then “became impossible for one man to aggrandize himself but at the expense of some other”.8 (Zero-sum game? Check.) And the “have-nots,” of course, were forced to live in complete dependence on the “haves.” (Labour as perpetual slavery? Check.) “And hence,” he writes, “began to flow, according to the different characters of each, domination and slavery, or violence and rapine.”9 As Rousseau’s creation myth continues, we learn that it was at this point that the “haves” realized they had a problem. They were few, and the “have-nots” were many. No force of argument could persuade the mob that their “property,” such as it is, was somehow legitimately theirs. In fact, in Rousseau’s words: “It availed them nothing to say, ‘Twas I built this wall; I acquired this spot by my labour. Who traced it out for you, another might object, and what right have you to expect payment at our expense for doing that we did not oblige you to do?”10 (President Obama’s quip to the entrepreneur: “You didn’t build that”? Check.) It was at this point, writes Rousseau, that The rich man, thus pressed by necessity, at last conceived the deepest project that ever entered the human mind: this was to employ in his favour the very forces that attacked him…and make them adopt other institutions as favourable to his pretensions, as the law of nature was unfavourable to them.11
In short: the rich man lured the masses with promises of a new institution, the state. By embodying rules of justice and peace, the state would “secure the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure to every man the possession of what belongs to him.”12 This was, of course, a fool’s bargain, since the formation of civil society merely codified the status quo; it increased the fetters of the weak, and the strength of the rich; irretrievably destroyed Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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natural liberty, fixed forever the laws of property and inequality; changed an artful usurpation into an irrevocable title; and for the benefit of a few ambitious individuals subjected the rest of mankind to perpetual labour, servitude, and misery.13
(The capitalist state as a rigged system to keep the proletariat in grinding slavery and poverty? Check.) We see in Rousseau the emergence of an ideology, the replicated DNA of which can be directly traced to the French Revolution and beyond. One wonders if the blood washed from the guillotine has permanently infected Parisian water. I, for one, find it chilling that the first words of Capital in the Twenty-First Century are taken directly from the charter of the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man: “Social distinctions can be based only on common utility.”14 In Piketty’s broad interpretation, this means that inequality is only acceptable if it is “in the interest of all and in particular the most disadvantaged social groups.”15 And wealth is the kind of social distinction that is not, in Piketty’s view, based on “common utility.” It is therefore fair game for coercive state redistribution. The lack of self-awareness is striking. Rousseau himself seemed to realize that his ideology was based on a mythology, but Piketty acts as though this is all a matter of empirical data and good scientific thinking. But if the past century offers any lesson, it must be that there are few things more harmful to human health than collectivist ideologues reorganizing society on the basis of “science,” even if doing so for our “own good.” And like the deadly clashes of the twentieth century, the contemporary conflict over wealth inequality is not a mere disagreement about science or data; it is a clash over completely antithetical visions of reality. At bottom, we have here a clash of rival theologies. Rousseau and Piketty have doctrines of creation, sin, humanity, salvation, and, indeed, God. A RIVAL THEOLOGY
The picture Genesis 1 and 2 provides is a cosmos, not only full of splendid unity and coherence, but Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
also of distinction and difference. The text overflows with descriptions of God distinguishing this from that: God and creation, waters above and waters below, light and darkness, day and “The contemporary night, sun and moon, birds of the air and fish of the sea, and, finally, humanity itself conflict over as male and female. And there is also a hiwealth inequality erarchy here: God blesses and commissions is not a mere human beings to “rule over” the world and disagreement calls them especially to cultivate the garden about science or in which he has placed them. The creation myth of the French egalitarians, on the other hand, involves a world of strict uniformity. It imagines that inequality or hierarchy is somehow inherently deviant from the way things ought to be. Mind you, they never actually argue why this is the case. Many reviewers noticed that Thomas Piketty nowhere explains why economic inequality, in and of itself, is problematic. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, in an otherwise glowing review, noted that one weakness of the book “is that it does not deal with why soaring inequality…matters. Essentially, Piketty simply assumes that it does.”16 Precisely. This assumption has been built in since the eighteenth century.
data; it is a clash over completely antithetical visions of reality.”
Notice, further, their doctrine of sin. For Rousseau and Piketty, basic human dysfunction is purely external, not internal. According to Rousseau’s mythology, the first man to expose and refuse a claim to ownership would have saved “The blame for the human race from every subsequent war greed, in other and misfortune. Sin, in this worldview, is not an ethical breach between God and words, is not laid man, as well as between humans, it is a on my covetous physical thing; it is the accumulation of heart; property that begets human dysfunction, it is the other conflict, and death. The blame for greed, fellow’s fault for in other words, is not laid on my covetous claiming to have heart; it is the other fellow’s fault for claimsomething I do ing to have something I do not. This doctrine of sin leads directly to a certain conception of the human person. Since human beings have not undergone a radical ethical corruption, they are, in fact, inherently good. They may be mired and confused in a deviant civilization full of so-called “private property”
not.”
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with all its associated ills, but this can be overcome and they can be restored to their natural, egalitarian state. And, naturally, this salAll of this is crucially vation must come by those already perfected: enlightened masters who must be important, of course, given the power to right all wrongs and because doctrines lead humanity to its destiny. of redemption or
salvation always rest on prior beliefs about what the ‘ideal’ is. Redemption presupposes creation.
All of this is crucially important, of course, because doctrines of redemption or salvation always rest on prior beliefs about what the “ideal” is. Redemption presupposes creation. For example, think about all of the “re” words in the New Testament, starting with redemption itself: re-demption, a “buying back,” a restoration of a former state of affairs. And there are others: re-storation, re-generation, re-newal, reconciliation. If one’s view of the original state of man is one of pure egalitarian uniformity, then salvation is the restoration of a purely egalitarian state of affairs. If you worship equality in the beginning, you will seek, above all else, equality at the end. Since property brought inequality and the imperfection of man, redemption – for the Rousseauian romantic – is the eradication (or, at least, the equitable redistribution) of property, which brings equality, which brings utopia.
Behind all this is, ultimately, a defective view of God. The basic standpoint from which Rousseau operated (and one shared derivatively by Piketty) is that civilization, with its culture and commerce, simply cannot be trusted. Free people engaging in free exchange and free en“If wealth and terprise – that is, not committing any ethical breach of any kind, such as deprosperity are bad frauding others – do not bring desirable things, and if God results. We therefore must replace divine seems unevenly to providence. We must tidy up, even out, reward economic and rearrange the natural outcomes with activity with wealth which God has chosen to bless economand prosperity, ic activity. This is not just an attack on God’s sovereignty, although it certainly is then God is either that; this is an attack on God’s goodness. If incompetent or evil.” wealth and prosperity are bad things, and if God seems unevenly to reward economic activity with wealth and prosperity, then God is either incompetent or evil. And so, as these arguments inevitably go, the Almighty State must take the FALL 2016
reins and correct God’s mistakes. As previously mentioned, the twentieth century has amply illustrated that such projects result in the very thing from which the likes of Rousseau and Piketty claim to be saving us: bloodshed and misery. We need more than a rival economic system. We need more than rival policies. We need a rival theology. And it turns out that defenders of freedom and prosperity need look no further than the theology that originally sparked the very economic flourishing we now seek to defend. Its roots stretch back into the medieval period, but the catalyst of the modern explosion of economic energy is found in a different sort of Frenchman from those we have been discussing: John Calvin. CALVIN, COMMERCE, AND CORAM DEO
Given the common caricature of the great Reformer of Geneva, he might appear a strange choice. Calvin cuts a severe figure: allegedly cold, aloof, tyrannical, and obsessed with predestination – how could lovers of freedom find intellectual resources in the thinking of such a man? To begin with, there is his notoriously dim view of human nature. Far from human dysfunction being something external to us, Calvin taught the “total depravity” of man. By this he did not mean that each and every human being is as evil as possible; rather, that the ethical corruption of sin reaches to the very core of our being and, therefore, taints everything we think, do, or say. Human beings are thoroughly corrupted by sin; there are no angels with whom we can safely deposit all authority for our government, much less whom we can trust to manage and disperse global wealth. One can find no better explanation as to why authority must be diffused among the many instead of concentrated among the few. In fact, the American founders fashioned their three branches of government with precisely this rationale. Moreover, Calvin’s reputation as a grim figure makes all the more striking his abundant delight in the natural order. Calvin did not see civilization, culture, and commerce as something deviant, as did Rousseau; he saw in these things the very hand of God – an invisible hand, we might Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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say, which Adam Smith later made famous.17 Although we must credit Luther with restoring the idea of “calling” or “vocation” from its subspiritual conception in the Middle Ages, it was Calvin who truly applied this principle across the spectrum of human endeavour. All of life, for Calvin, was service to God, living coram Deo, before the face of God. Life is a vocation just as much for the merchant as the monk. Herman Bavinck notes: …Calvin sees the whole of life steeped in the light of the divine glory. As in all nature there is no such creature which does not reflect the divine perfection, so in the rich world of men there is no vocation so simple, no labor so mean, as not to be suffused with the divine splendor and subservient to the glory of God’s name.18
Calvin took this principle even beyond vocation. He rescued the possessions of life from the ascetic mindset of much medieval theology. While he certainly insisted on a proper use of material possessions, he utterly rejects the notion that they are somehow unspiritual or immoral. Bavinck again: [Calvin] maintains that all these possessions are gifts of God, designed not merely to provide for our necessities, but also bestowed for our enjoyment and delight. When God adorns the earth with trees and plants and flowers, when He causes the vine to grow which makes glad the heart of man, when he permits man to dig from out the earth the precious metals and stones which shine in the light of the sun – all this proves that God does not mean to restrict the use of earthly possessions to the relief of our absolute necessities, but has given them to man also for enjoyment of life. Prosperity, abundance, and luxury also are gifts of God, to be enjoyed with gratitude and moderation.19
Even more noteworthy for our purpose here is that other early magisterial Reformers – Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli – all strictly adhered to the medieval notion that, because of the unproductive nature of money, charging interest was the sin of usury. Calvin, on the other hand, Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
did not believe that money was unproductive and argued that charging interest on capital is not sinful. He maintained that the sins of commerce should be rejected (like fraud “The ethical and theft), but that commerce in and of itself should be regarded as a calling “wellcorruption of sin pleasing to God and profitable to socireaches to the very ety.”20 Calvin always sought to distinguish core of our being between commerce as an institution of and, therefore, God and its (subsequent) corruption by taints everything humans, whereas for Rousseau and Pikwe think, do, or etty commerce – or at least its natural outsay.” comes – is corruption. Finally, Calvin did not believe in bare uniformity. He believed that every creature and every calling had its own nature: church and state, family and society, agriculture and commerce, art and science are “all institutions and gifts of God, but each in itself is a special revelation of the divine will.”21 Calvin thus sought to maintain the diversity of God’s creation and “All of life, for institutions. So, for example, contrary to Calvin, was Rousseau and Piketty, the state or society service to God, is not to be confused with the economic living coram Deo, marketplace. Calvin would not have been before the face impressed with the recent declaration of the Democratic National Committee in of God. Life is the United States, that “Government is the a vocation just only thing we all belong to.”22 as much for the
merchant as the But what about that dreadful doctrine of monk.” predestination and God’s absolute sovereignty? Far from being a sterile fatalism that calls for resignation, it is the very thing that overcomes the constant temptation for the state to become its own providence, rearranging or “fixing” outcomes outside its jurisdiction – that is, outcomes that are not the result of injustice (its legitimate calling), but the natural outcomes of labour and free exchange (i.e., “Commerce in and wealth). Furthermore, Calvin saw the will of itself should of God, not as an inhibitor of human enbe regarded as terprise, but as its catalyst. If labour and a calling ‘wellinvestment are a means to bring about pleasing to God material reward, then they are nothing less and profitable to than the good and gracious will of God, and therefore may be pursued to the fullest society’.” for his glory and our good. What greater incentive can there be? FALL 2016
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It is no wonder that modern free market systems and the astounding economic prosperity they produce developed in broadly Calvinistic countries. This is a theology of freedom. Sin is the problem, not stuff; authority should “Doctrine of be limited and dispersed; every man – predestination merchant and minister – has a God-gloand God’s absolute rifying vocation; culture and commerce sovereignty is are societal goods; the state has a limited the very thing sphere; and prosperity is the sovereign that overcomes gift and blessing of God to be enjoyed, even beyond our necessities. the constant
temptation for the state to become its own providence, rearranging or “fixing” outcomes outside its jurisdiction.”
One of the questions facing the modern free market movement, it seems to me, is whether we can retain the house without this foundation. Can a purely “secular” account really produce the same fruits, or are we instead breathing the last, wisping fumes of this high-octane theology and pretending our replacement is something of substance? I say: If Rousseau and Piketty bring a pseudo-theology to the fight, we need nothing less than true theology to meet them.
1 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). 2 See Mearbhrach, Milton Friedman - Greed, filmed 1979, YouTube video, 2:23, posted July 2007, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A. 3 See Sean Kilachand, “Forbes History: The Original 1987 List Of International Billionaires”, Forbes, last modified March 21 2012, http://www. forbes.com/sites/seankilachand/2012/03/21/ forbes-history-the-original-1987-list-of-international-billionaires/#231268ab696e; “The World’s Billionaires, Forbes, last modified August 17 2016, http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#version:realtime. 4 Jonah Goldberg, “Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness: Das Kapital Lite for the 21st Century,” Commentary, last modified July 1 2014, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/mr-pikettys-big-book-of-marxiness/. 5 Laurence Chandy, Geoffrey Gertz, “With Little
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Notice, Globalization Reduced Poverty: UN Millennium Goal to Halve Poverty May Have Been Achieved,” Yale Global, last modified July 5 2011, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/little-notice-globalization-reduced-poverty. 6 Piketty, Capital, 39, 417. 7 Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Charles W. Eliot (Mineola NY: Dover, 2004), 27. 8 Rousseau, A Discourse, 37. 9 Rousseau, A Discourse, 37. 10 Rousseau, A Discourse, 38. 11 Rousseau, A Discourse, 38. 12 Rousseau, A Discourse, 38 13 Rousseau, A Discourse, 28. 14 Piketty, Capital, 1. 15 Piketty, Capital,480. 16 Martin Wolfe, “Review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty,” Financial Times, last modified April 15 2014, http://www. ft.com/cms/s/2/0c6e9302-c3e2-11e3-a8e000144feabdc0.html. 17 See Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, (New York: Modern Library, 1994). 18 Herman Bavinck, “Calvin and Common Grace,” trans. Geerhardus Vos, The Princeton Theological Review 7, no. 3 (1909), 12. 19 Bavinck, “Calvin and Common Grace,” 12. 20 Bavinck, “Calvin and Common Grace,” 14. 21 Bavinck, “Calvin and Common Grace,” 14. 22 Charlotte in 2012 – Democratic National Convention, Welcome to Charlotte! We Make it Possible!, filmed 2012, YouTube video, 5:07, posted Sept. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dxy5LALxwPo&feature=plcp.
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity