Christianity and economics again

This past weekend I went to L'Abri in Southborough, MA, and spent some more time studying the intersection between Christianity and economics. I wanted to post a few of the things I learned while studying.

Firstly, to give credit to my sources, I got these ideas from listening to a few of Jim Ingram's lectures on Christianity and economics, and from reading parts of Craig Blomberg's Neither Poverty Nor Riches: A Biblical Theology of Possessions. I'll be adding one point, but for the most part all of the following comes from them in one way or another (and mostly Ingram). As a prefatory point: Ingram was a trained Keynesian economist before he converted to Christianity, so any lack of knowledge in economics in the comments below will most likely be due to my ignorance, not his.

Essentially, one of Ingram's central points is that an economy will only successfully deal with the problem of scarcity if it is redeemed by Christ. He did this primarily by exposition and by deconstructing the three main economic ideologies: communism, free-market capitalism, and Keynesianism (he was lecturing around the time Reagan was elected). Moving historically, he starts by describing free-market thinking. Classical economics, he explains, developed the three laws of economics: the law of supply, the law of demand, and the law of diminishing returns.

The law of supply, that work is viewed by people as utility (as opposed to good in itself), means essentially that people see it as something they need to be compensated for. Further, it says that this is normal human behaviour. But Ingram points out a problem with this: while this is observationally speaking normal, it is not normal according to the Christian narrative. Rather, for Christianity, work is part of human nature because we are made in God's image as co-creators, and thus work is not supposed to be viewed as strictly a utility. To view it is as such, only, is tantamount to what scripture calls "laziness".

The law of demand, that people are non-satious (i.e., never satisfied), is similarly posited as a fundamental and obvious law of human economics. But once again Ingram points out that this is not normal for Christianity in the sense of being morally right; the biblical work for non-satiety is greed or "covetousness".

The law of diminishing returns, that the more one invests into production, eventually it will provide less and less return, is also, finally, not normal according to Christianity, but equivalent to Genesis' "curse on the ground", once again the result of human sin.

Ingram points out that free-market economics, in believing that these laws operating on their own will eventually lead to equilibrium is essentially a rejection of the biblical narrative which says these are a result of idolatry and thus will never ultimately lead to social harmony.

On the other hand, Ingram criticizes those ideologies which posit government interference to solve this problem, because, in his way of explaining, these agree that the universe is essentially impersonal and mechanistic, only adding the qualification that the government has to step in from time to time to 'tune up the machine'. In the end, these ideologies (like Marxism and Keynesianism) suggest that enough violence/revolution/interference will produce social harmony. At this point, I'd add one theological confirmatory point: the scriptures, especially in the New Testament, describe governments under the numinous term 'the powers', generally in a pejorative sense. For the most part, the powers are viewed as the enemy of Christ and the church in the current era. Thus, there is good reason to think that Ingram is right here: there is no reason to trust that free-market (or, greed + laziness) + interference by the powers (or, violence + dehumanizing manipulation) will result in social harmony. Rather, we would expect it to consistently fail to meet its goal. (To this point Ingram adds Keynesianism failed in the 70's, and that Marxism was failing in many ways (producing totalitarianism, etc.).)

Thus, Ingram's solution was this: the church must accept that the state will be necessary to solve some immediate economic problems (i.e., it should not be libertarian), but at the same time work morally and spiritually against the solutions of the state: i.e., the church should be doing its job as the redeemed human race, through mission and mercy, through bringing people out of economic bondage by alms, by education, and by evangelism, and that these solutions ultimately undermine and make obsolete the kinds of solutions to the failures of a free market made by the state using force. Only as the society is renewed, through the missionary work of the church, by the Spirit and Christ, will social harmony ever be reached. None of the modern systems will actually solve the problems they intend to, because all of them put their faith in something other than Christ as the redeemer of all human society.

A few more points I remembered learning:

• Both Blomberg and Ingram (and Douglas Jones in various ways at his blog) point out that in the NT, solutions to structural/systemic evil are generally not structural, i.e., the NT is not very concerned with what we would call "political" solutions to economic problems; rather, it follows the same lines that Ingram does (the work of the church is the way the church brings redemption, not lobbying/revolution).
• There is some prima facie circumstantial evidence for believing this general criticism, that none of the major ideologies will bring economic salvation: none have yet, and there are many well trained economists who are very good at pointing out the problems of the other side; I realize this is not an air-tight point, but it's not entirely worthless, I think.

And one last thought that occurred to me today: if it is correct to interpret the Gospel/the kingdom of God/salvation holistically, not limited to but including economic restoration, then the biblical teaching that "there is no other name under heaven by which man can be saved", or that Christ is the "only begotten", etc., would together imply Ingram's point, it seems to me: socio-economic harmony and flourishing cannot come from anywhere but Christ (and thus, because of how the NT sees Christ operating, mainly through the church's continuation of Christ's work).

(I should point out, in case some people are suspicious that I'm trying to slip pacifism past them without them noticing, that none of the people I quoted above are pacifists; despite that, I think the economic position is very consistent with a pacifism presented by the likes of Yoder, Hauerwas, Cavanaugh, etc.)

Eat your bread in happiness

[sorry for neglecting Puritas, to anyone who still has me listed on their roll; the reason there hasn't been much here is because I've been contributing to civitatedei.wordpress.com; here's something I just posted there today]

A week ago I finished reading Raj Patel’s new book, Stuffed and Starved, and can say without a doubt that it was a huge eye opener.

I’m not a math kinda guy, so a lot of the economic things he said were lost on me, but I definitely understood enough to see that the international food system right now is in no way a just one.

At his website, he gives a condensed list of some suggestions he has for action, one of which I want to highlight here:

2. Eat locally and seasonally.
You can find resources on eating locally and seasonally here - but the joy of it is that eating locally and seasonally happens most easily and healthily by growing the food oneself. Nothing tastes like a homegrown tomato. Why not google your local allotments and gardening centres to see what resources they can offer?

Now, I don’t have the money or the time at the moment to start growing all my own food, but I have been trying to take this point to heart. Frankly, I have no right not to, given the enormous amount of suffering the international trade of food is causing people. Eating locally is a necessary first step. Ignorance is really no excuse; with little effort I was able to find a cookbook with seasonal and local recipes for a reasonable price. It isn’t that difficult to do.

I have to say, forcing myself to drink and eat less pre-prepared food (including my much beloved coffee) has made me realize how much sub-standard food we actually consume. Patel has an interesting quote related to this on the site I just mentioned:

As Marco Flavio Marinucci says at his Cook Here and Now website,

Evolution gave us the gift of having to eat frequently: Let’s not treat it as a chore. I believe that when we devote attention to what we do, we feel more satisfied and satiated by it. Each meal gets my full and undivided attention. Choosing the best ingredients from what’s in season locally, preparing the dishes from scratch as often as time allows, and keeping in mind who’s sharing them – it’s all gastronomical foreplay that creates the emotional build-up released in a delightful meal.

Now, if Marinucci has enough awareness to realize that the joy of eating is something he has to be grateful for, even though he thinks that joy was given to him by a series of purposeless events, shouldn’t Christians be doing even better? Should we not be even more grateful, and even more focused on preparing and eating food in a way that recognizes the great many varieties of food and the gift of artistic talent that God has given to us?

Solomon once wisely wrote:

Go then, eat your bread in happiness and drink your wine with a cheerful heart, for God has already approved your works. Let your clothes be white all the time, and let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the woman whom you love all the days of your fleeting life which He has given to you under the sun; for this is your reward in life and in your toil in which you have laboured under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 9:7-9)

I think we need to consider this more, as 21st century Christians; the greatest earthly gifts in life are the simplest: shelter, drink, love, food. Let’s not squander them, nor abuse them through negligence.

1 Corinthians 7:14 and infant baptism

Several contemporary scholars have argued that Paul is using Jewish halakhic categories in 1 Corinthians 7, especially in 7:14, based on the fact that the concepts he uses, and the way he uses them, is remarkably similar to the ways rabbinic Jews used them.

While this text has traditionally been used by paedobaptists to justify their practice, the new reading does throw into question viability of this text as a proof for that position.

However, I think that there a few connections that have been missed by the aforementioned scholars that, if recognized, would basically justify infant baptism.

Let me outline the two basic exegetical points these scholars have made, and then add my own thoughts:

1. The term “sanctified” used in reference to spouses in this text essentially means “made licit for marriage”, not some other, moral meaning.
2. The term “holy”, used in contrast to “unclean”, with regards to offspring in this passage means “has full right to access the temple/religious community”. In OT laws, children made unclean by being born of illicit union were refused access to the temple “unto the tenth generation”.

The logic of Paul’s argument implies that if the children are a product of a licit marriage of which a believer is a part, the children of that union are holy; otherwise, if the marriage the believer is involved in is not licit, the children are unclean.

Today I read an article where these points were made, and the author suggested that Paul may have prohibited unclean children from being in the church, or else Paul would have just been inconsistent on this regard (if he did allow them into the church along with “holy” children). If the former were the case, then it would be hard to ground infant baptism on this text; if the latter, there are more serious problems for biblical authority and theology in general.

But I think the scholars have missed a fairly significant point, made by Jesus and later Paul himself. That is, in the New Age/Covenant, impurity is simply immorality; the other kinds of impurities under the Law/Old Age no longer apply. This point is made explicitly by Jesus in reference to food laws, and the church subsequently applied this principle to Jew-Gentile relations in general. Paul certainly recognized this in his letters to the Romans, Galatians and Ephesians, among others.

Given that this conception of purity was universal in the early church, I think it is fair to reinterpret what Paul means when he uses the term “sanctify” with reference to marrying. Essentially, I think Paul implies that illicit marriages in the New Age are simply marriages that are morally impossible to engage in. That is, based on OT principles as reconfigured in the new, incestuous and adulterous marriages are no marriages at all; if someone tries to marry in these circumstances, they are sinning. And further, if someone engages in these behaviours they are to be considered an outsider until they repent.

It is for this reason, I think, that Paul considers the children of illicit unions to be unclean: they are the product of unions that are de facto impossible for believers to be in, because if they do engage in them they, by that very act, make themselves just like unbelievers (even the worst of them, in the case of incest). If children are considered holy because their parents are holy (given Paul’s logic in 7:14), they would be considered unclean if their parents were unclean, which they would be by engaging in these illicit unions.

What then of the case of the believer who has produced offspring by these illicit unions? Are the children of such unions prohibited from entering the church? I think if I am right about Paul’s logic here, the answer would be no in the case that the believer repents and breaks off the union that produced the child and the child is raised by them (not abandoned to the other parent). If the child is raised by them, and they are holy (having repented of their previous uncleanness), then the same principles that apply in cases of adoption would obviously apply here: the child takes on the status a natural child would have because of the status of their parents, in this case a holiness, when adopted by an adoptive parent.

Thus, interpreting Paul’s concept of uncleanness in a thoroughly Christian way allows us to avoid the problems entailed by the interpretation given by the scholars mentioned above, and also implies that infant baptism is justified. The children of holy parents are made holy, and thereby have a right to access the temple, which in this New Age is the church itself. And if the mark of entry to the church is baptism, then they have a right to that as well.

Paul's doctrine of inspiration

2 Timothy 3:16 reads as follows:

"All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,"

A few comments need to be made here, I think:

This common translation of the word theopneustos as "inspiration" is actually a mistranslation, despite its commonness (which comes from dependence on the Vulgate). The term contains no idea of God breathing into (as in "inspire") something that already exists (as presented in, e.g., Brian McLaren's analogy of inspiration to Adam's being breathed into by God); rather, the idea is of God breathing a thing out. In this case the thing is a set of ordered, written words, the graphe, the writings. This idea of "breathing out" is not new; it alludes back to texts like these:

Psalm 104:30: "You send forth Your Spirit (ruach, breath), they are created; and You renew the face of the earth."

Job 32:8: "But there is a spirit in man, and the breath (ruach, Spirit) of the Almighty gives him understanding."

Job 33:4: "The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life."

These texts are, of course, themselves alluding back to the Genesis account:

Genesis 1:2-3: "...And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said..."

The general image is of God/the Spirit (Breath) bringing entire objects into existence. In the case of 2 Timothy, the things created are writings. Essentially, then, Paul is saying God the Spirit directly created these communications, that he intended to produce communications, that he authored these communications. It is this logic that allows for the ubiquitous attitude of the Scriptures toward themselves: what the Scriptures say, God says.

For example, Paul says in Romans 9:17: "For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, 'For this very purpose I have raised you up...'." But if we go back to Exodus 9:13-16, who is speaking these words? "Then the Lord said to Moses... 'But indeed for this purpose I have raised you up...'." For Paul, there is an equivalence between what God says and what Scripture says; the logic for this is given in 2 Timothy.

Or for another example, in Matthew 19:4-5 Jesus says, "Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.'" And yet, if we go back to Genesis 2:24, it is the narrator (Moses?) who says "For this reason...". Like Paul, Jesus equates the words of Scripture with the words of God.

For yet a third example, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews begins his letter by saying (1:1) "God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets...". Later, he makes the following statements:

Hebrews 4:3-4: "For we who have believed do not enter that rest, as He has said: 'So I swore in my wrath, "they shall not enter My rest,"' although the works were finished from the foundation of the world. For He has spoken in a certain place of the seventh day in this way: 'And God rested on the seventh day from all His works';".

Hebrews 4:6-7: "Since therefore it remains that some must enter it, and those to whom it was first preached did not enter because of disobedience, again He designates a certain day, saying in David, 'Today,' after such a long time, as it has been said..."

In the former passage, the author assumes (like Jesus), that the narrator of Genesis, clearly speaking of God in the third person, is God. In the latter passage, the writer assumes that the section of the quote from Psalm 95:7-8 he focuses on, the word "Today", clearly spoken by David prior to David's quotation of God in the verses following that statement, is the word of God spoken "in" David (presumably as an instrument). Not only are the quotes of God God's words, but the human introduction of God's words are also God's words. Clearly the logic for both of these ways of speaking about Scripture is found in the first verse of the letter, and is identical to the logic seen in 2 Timothy.

What does all this mean?

Well, firstly, it is insufficient to describe God's relation to Scripture as simply His using, or taking up, a human product. The Biblical writers have no problem, and seem to even subconsciously, attributing the words of Scripture directly to God, and directly stating that God has produced these words. It is very true that God takes up these words by His Spirit in His acts of illumination, conviction and witness, but in terms of a full explanation of God's relation to the graphe this does not go far enough, it seems.

Secondly, making the same point from a different direction, it is the words that are said to be produced by God; this rules out any explanation of God's relation to Scripture which says God inspired ideas which were interpreted by humans and expressed in human words. Instead, Paul says something much more radical: the written words themselves were breathed out by God. This may help to explain the meaning of verse in 2 Peter 1:20-21: "knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." Given that the context of this verse is focused on the reliability of Scripture, not the interpretation of it by readers, the interpretation in question is likely referring to that of the prophets themselves; this would mean that what Peter is saying is that the words of Scripture, given by the prophets, are not from the prophets privately (i.e., in exclusion from God), but are produced by the Spirit as He moves the prophets to speak. Thus Paul's words illuminate Peter's: the words of Scripture, not just the visions or auditions received by the prophets which prompted the writing of those words, are themselves from the Spirit.

Thus another view of inspiration is seen to be insufficient: it is not just that God inspired the writers of Scripture by giving them moving ideas, which they then tried to express in their own words. Rather, God both gave them the ideas/visions/auditions, and then moved them to write the words that He wanted them to say. Thus Scripture as Scripture is God's word(s), not just the ideas we can extract from the Scriptures. In fact, anything we extract from Scripture will be our interpretation of it, which actually will have less authority than the words we are interpreting (we are nowhere told that our interpretations of Scripture are God-breathed).

Finally, and most simply, it should be obvious that the argument frequently given that "2 Timothy does not give a theory of inspiration" is just false. If a theory is simply a way of understanding something, then Paul's use of the idea of "God-breathed" certainly does give us a way to understand something. And further, in case anyone is keeping track, the last two points I made cover the traditional terms "plenary" and "verbal" in the old theory labeled "plenary verbal inspiration". It is because of the conviction that the words of Scripture are God's words that inerrantists believe in inerrancy; it is because of this deep conviction about the origin and nature of the Scriptures that Jesus could say something like "the Scriptures cannot be broken"; and it is because of this conviction, shared and handed down through the ages by followers of Christ, that the doctrine of inerrancy has been the main view of the church through history with regards to the authority of Scripture in its indicative statements.

[Virtually all of the arguments I made above were made by BB Warfield in his book The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible a century ago]

Another thought related to the problem of evil

Given the intuition in the last post, there's a further point.

The goodness of any being is proportioned to the being (i.e. what makes a baseball bat good is different from what makes ice cream good, and both are different from what makes a human good, etc.). Given this, if there were an infinite being, the kind of goodness proportionate to that being would be infinite.

But this would be beyond finite capacity to understand (or at least exhaustively describe). Understanding what was good for such a being would have to be based on communication from that being.

This means that we can't assume something is good for an infinite being just because it is good for a human being, unless we know that that thing is good for another reason (e.g., that infinite being's self-disclosure).

But this means we can't judge that being to have done something evil unless that being tells us it did something evil. Otherwise, the ontological-cognitive distance between us and it are too great to make such a judgment. We could judge that if the infinite being were human such-and-such an act would be moral or not, but that obviously would not be a relevant judgment about the infinite being itself.

It also means we could only judge that being to have done something good unless the being revealed to us that it did good. In Christian theism, God reveals that everything he does is good. Thus, we can judge everything he does to be good.

Further, we have no reason to believe he has done evil.

Basically, I think all of this is just an elaboration on Lewis' point, and God's point in Job before him, that we are in no position to judge God; rather, He is our judge.

***

One point usually made against naturalists is that if they want to make an external argument against the goodness of God (as opposed to a reductio), they have to establish there is such a thing as objective good against which God would be measured. Some naturalists don't believe in such a thing, and thus cannot make this argument; others do, based on things like teleological, deontological and virtue-ethics based systems.

The bonus side-effect of the above argument is to undermine the possibility of making this argument. Since naturalists have basically abandoned (for good reason) Kantian deontologism, they are left with teleological arguments. If right and wrong is based teleological principles (like the social-contract or utilitarian theory), then there is no way of knowing that a certain act which would be wrong for a human being to do would also be wrong for an infinite being to do. We would have to know everything about that being, and everything that being knows (i.e., all the consequences of their actions), to be able to judge whether that being did something for the maximum good. And I can't see how the social-contract logic would apply to an infinite being at all. (For the purposes of this argument, the virtue-ethics systems would succumb to the same point as the utilitarian theory, not to mention not really being able to apply to an infinite being, since it would have no unactualized potentiality.)

I also do not see how a secular philosopher could possibly appeal to innate ideas of right and wrong here (i.e., why would we have innate ideas about what is objectively right and wrong for an infinite being to do if no such being existed?).

Further, the fact that secular philosophers cannot even agree on how to judge human actions is good circumstantial evidence that they would have no idea how to judge the acts of an infinite being.

Another problem with the problem of evil

Sometimes it seems to non-Christians as if God is operating in a way we would consider wrong if we were judging a human. It seems as if God is not bound by our rules of morality.

I think there is a good reason to think exactly that: God's ways are higher than our ways, and what goodness means for us is different than what it means for God. It is analogically related (and thus not completely the opposite), but not identical.

And it's not strange to believe that goodness could demand one thing of one being which it would not demand of another, in a similar situation. We believe that children, because of their lack of understanding and power, have less responsibility than their parents; further, we believe people with great power (like heads of state) have more responsibility than people who have no power, and we believe people with great knowledge (like scholars) have more responsibility than those who have innocent ignorance.

So it's not strange at all that what is good for God might not be good for us, given normal human ethical intuitions. An infinitely good, infinitely knowing, infinitely powerful being would have different moral "constraints" (though they would not be external, but internal, to Him) than a human being.

Original Guilt and theodicy

Many theologians have criticized Augustine’s doctrine of original guilt of being inhuman and nonsensical, but I don’t think that many give credit for what it does help to explain.

At least in the case of theodicy, original guilt goes a little way towards explaining some of the evils which people have a hard time giving reasons for. If everyone is guilty from birth, then no one deserves good; if anyone does experience good in this world, it will be entirely because of God’s mercy and love.

Now, of course, this does nothing to explain how original guilt makes sense in itself. It only gives some circumstantial evidence for it: if original guilt was true, it would predict a world much like the one we have.

As for explaining original guilt itself, it occurred to me that perhaps there is no way to fully explain it. But for a Christian, that may not be a problem.

As John Frame points out in his Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (not sure of the page reference off-hand), there has yet to be a complete explanation for Christ’s relation to the church (Platonic, “realistic”, and federal explanations all have their points of disanalogy). Yet, the overflow of Christ’s grace to the church is a central teaching of the Christian faith. If we can accept that this is not unjust (and we have to say it is just in some sense, even if it isn’t in others: cf. 1 John 1:9), then we have some justification for believing in original guilt, even if we can’t explain how it works satisfactorily.

Also, for what it’s worth, the worst consequences of original guilt emotionally speaking can be ameliorated if one takes a relaxed version of extra ecclesiam nulla sallus, ala the Westminster Confession of Faith, as opposed to Augustine’s more Cyrianic (and harsh) version of the doctrine.

Thus, original guilt might be of use to Christian theology after all, for all its drawbacks.