NEOPURITAN

Now when Sanballat heard that we were building the wall, he was angry and greatly enraged, and he jeered at the Jews. And he said in the presence of his brothers and of the army of Samaria, “What are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore it for themselves? Will they sacrifice? Will they finish up in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish, and burned ones at that?”…So we built the wall. And all the wall was joined together to half its height, for the people had a mind to work…And I sent messengers to them, saying, “I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?”

NEHEMIAH 4:1-2, 6, 6:3

God places Adam in the Garden to work it and keep it, and then, in the fall, Adam is still doing that as it brings thorns and thistles. Without both of these formative events in mind, one will fall into one or the other extreme. One is to make creativity, profit motive, and hard work evils in themselves and the other is to deny the problems of scarcity and exploitation of people in labor. The Nehemiah text, incidentally, is a good example of the struggle between meaningful God-glorifying work and the natural, parasitical assault on this masculine motion against the sphere of nature. We will see this struggle between production and plunder throughout.

• THE GENESIS OF ECONOMICS
• WEALTH AND POVERTY
• FISCAL AND MONETARY POLICY
• THE CHRISTIAN VOCATION

The Big Idea is that man as a mover reflects the motion of God in the economy of his works.

The stuff of the house (oikos) is, first, the workmanship of God. Remember Ephesians 2:10—“We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” God makes the resources and ordains the reformulation of these resources for our good and his glory. Let us ask ourselves the “glory” question in both the unity and diversity of work. What does the motion of man in work say about God? And what does this particular calling, at this particular place of labor, say about God?

I. THE GENESIS OF ECONOMICS

A) Basic Elements: Efficient, Form, Material, Instrument, End

1. The efficient cause of an economy is God and all the world is its stage. The word ‘economics’ comes from the Greek word for house (oikos) and, moreover, the steward of that house (oikonomian) was left in its charge, to work it and keep it. An economy is a finite body of resources, allocated for the good of its members. Economics is the study of that body of resources and members. Any other definition of an economy and economics says something different about God—that He is not the sovereign Lord over material resources or, in the case of economic text books that define the study as the “allocating of scare resources for the good of society,” that the body of material goods are “the good of society” and that to the state belongs that chief end of man.

2. The form of an economy is referred to as its “circular flow,” pictured here:

We have already seen that the form of government is not theologically neutral. By extension of the same logic, if we inserted the state into this circular flow, that government, by definition, will have changed its form and in so doing polluted both spheres—government and labor—so that the conception we have of this circular flow is not theological neutral.

3. The material of the economy we will cover in our section of “Wealth and Poverty” shortly. One of the difficulties of this study is that material and instrument are so closely linked, particularly as one compares notes between rival concepts of economic theory. For instance, labor and machinery may both be viewed as a “means of production” (capital) in that both cost money to employ in production. Money is used as an instrument for attaining both. But does this mean that laborers are merely material, or that they are an instrument? Either way, it will appear to many that this dehumanizes the worker.

4. The end of the economy, again, is to speak about God. The relationship between dominion [1:28] and cultivation [2:15] is not that the one just is the other. It is that both are to be though about by the collective. The mistake of the collectivist is to think that they are therefore the same entity; the mistake of the individualist is to divorce them only by not thinking about either. This will ensure that the individualist does all the producing (but only in private); and the collectivist will do all the planning and doing for us all. It is a suicidal tradeoff. At any rate, Israel was told again, when they entered the land, to subdue it [cf. Num. 32:22, 29, Josh 18:1, 2 Sam. 8:11], so that dominion began with the people groups who were usurpers of the land (state) and then extended, once the rule of law was enforced, to the cultivation, or subduing, of the land’s resources (labor). Wayne Grudem answers the question of what this work says about God:

Just as God is sovereign over the whole universe, so he gives us opportunity to be sovereign over a small portion of land, or a car, or clothing and books, and so forth. In our stewardship of these possessions we have opportunities to imitate God’s wisdom, his creativity, his love for other people, his justice and fairness, his mercy, his knowledge, and many other attributes. Ownership of possessions also provides many opportunities to test what is in our hearts and gives us opportunities to give thanks to God for what he has provides to us (see Col. 3:15, 1 Tim. 6:17).[1]

Imagining, developing and voluntarily exchanging better goods from the earth that betters the life of others speaks of God’s creative goodness as well as the wisdom of his design—that this “invisible hand,” as Adam Smith called it, is actually not a failure.

B) The Biblical Teaching on Property, Force and Fraud

1. “You shall not steal” [Ex. 20:15] is the eighth commandment, and the tenth prohibits even thinking about it: “You shall not covet” [Ex. 20:17]. God is clear that this property is “your neighbor’s” seven times in the command, ending with the universal qualifier—“or anything that is your neighbors.” It does not belong to anyone else; and for that same reason it does not belong to everyone else. And similar to the hierarchical set logic involved in the case of Christ and Caesar, it is precisely because all property is sacred that fairly earned and given property is private. “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” [Ps. 24:1]. Of the summary of God’s things, each portion which is cultivated by the individual or corporation—not engaging in force or fraud—says something about God, and to that extent is justly private. In the two most famous instances of the state transferring private property to itself in Israel, it is treated as a great wickedness. In the case of Samuel’s warning of what Saul would do as king [cf. 1 Sam. 8:10-18] and in the case of Ahab seizing the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite [cf. 1 Kings 21:1-29].

2. Now the abolition of private property also eliminates liberty by extension, because as the law negates (whether by outright seizure or degrees of control) the flow of voluntary exchange, it controls what can be purchased, invested in, saved, passed on, and therefore where you will live and what you will do for a living. Indeed nothing, not even your home, would be exempt. If everything is reduced to the economic, and if the economic is subsumed by the state, then everything is subsumed into the state. It is a simple syllogism. But then the loss of liberty also demands the loss of life, as the entire life of man is owned by the state, the same state may, whenever it sees fit, dispense with any particular life form. Thus the loss of private property and the loss of the right to life are inseparable.

II. WEALTH AND POVERTY

A) Economics 101

1. Now how does an economy work, scientifically? No one has said more to describe what the “stuff of the economy” is than Adam Smith in his classic work The Wealth of Nations (1776). His thesis was essentially that the wealth of an economy was equal to the amount of natural resources it exploited and turned into real goods and services; and that the value of such resources was exactly what the market will pay for it. Money is not the wealth of a nation, though it is the objective standard for that wealth when it comes to the event of exchange. Reflecting on the true interpretation of 1 Timothy 6:10, that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil,” Grudem comments, “Money in fact is good in itself because it enables people to buy the goods they need and sell the goods they produce on the basis of a standard item…on which everybody agrees about the value.”[2] Likewise, poverty is not the excess of wealth concentrated in a class. Poverty is first and foremost the lack of wealth. Hence the solution to poverty is not to spread it evenly; rather the solution to poverty is the increase of wealth.

Smith also unpacked the relationship between the division of labor and the price system that emerged by self-interest. Each person acting upon only that information that is relevant to their special degree of labor and their particular wants will guide the entire structure of the economy more efficiently than any amount of planning. Thus it is sometimes called laissez faire, or “hands off,” economics. Even if a particular head of household was better at producing virtually everything better than his neighbor, it would not pay him to do so. There would be a law of diminishing returns.

Now the aggregate levels of supply and demand are a critical component of a nation Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the classical view. This brings us to perhaps the most fundamental principles in economic growth. Though versions of it were already floating around, Jean-Baptiste Say, in his Treatise on Political Economy (1803), formulated what we now know as Say’s Law—that supply creates its own demand. What this means is that each generation of goods and services were yesterday’s cultivation of the ground, to reassert the imagery from Genesis 2. The more we began to look at both Adam’s mandate and the study of economics, the more we will grasp that supply-side economics is merely the commercial expression of some of the most important spiritual realities in creation.

There was a “brief moment” when supply-side economics was the rule. That was in the early nineteenth century in England and America, yet died the death of half-hearted resistance to its nemesis in the early twentieth century. In other words, we are talking about a singular century—the 1800s—in the nations won over to the Protestant theological outlook. In the middle fifty years of the nineteenth century, real, median wages in Britain increased by 80%. That is because those wages were tied solely to productivity, and that productivity was in turn tied directly to the exponential advancement in wealth production.

2. Those who focus on the demand-side as the key to economic health do so for many reasons. One reason that economists do is the fear of overproduction—i. e. that supply will often not create its own demand and the ensuing deflation will force massive market corrections. Yet in a genuinely free market, such is not even possible.[3] Think about it. The moment a good is devalued, its producer will shift either means or material in order to continue to make as much money as possible. In the immediate, he will simply reduce prices until inventories are gone, and he will learn from the experience. The same is true with new innovations. They are expensive until they are so necessary for business to compete that this flood of demand will drive down the prices. Thus, yesterday’s luxury items are today’s necessities.

Nor is increasing societal complexity an irritant to this process. The more technologically advanced we become, the better information will be shared and thus the more efficiently the market will signal to producers to shift gears. At the end of the day, any suspicion that the logger or the steel mill or the silicon plant will make massive miscalculations only to be stuck with warehouses of unused goods assumes that a social planner—not in the industry—can do it better: that a centrally located group of elites can coordinate an economy very much like a chess board. The fact of the matter is that whenever there is a natural disaster, a war, or an instance of corporate fraud, either the price system will have to directly correct it (free market) or that same price system will have to indirectly correct (central planning). The only difference will be whether countless experts making the most careful decisions about what immediately affects their bottom line will make those decisions in units, or whether a handful of intellectuals will have to pull together the totality of all of those very same units to decide on things over which they bear no direct cost and have no immediate expertise. In other words, it assumes that everyone on the supply side, from producers of raw materials to wholesalers to shop owners, will fail to adjust once the market signals come to them—i.e. to stop producing or shipping or investing or stocking X, since the demand has gone down. But what makes the planner think he will have a greater incentive to adjust, much less receive the signal faster, than the one most intimately involved? It is an idea as arrogant as it is absurd! It violates common sense on a level so common that only an elitist could become intoxicated by it.

3. Moreover public ownership and public obtaining of resources cultivates stagnation in the individual and in the economy as a whole. Experience tells us that we treat things differently when we own something, personally, and if we have put our own effort into it. This is why the welfare program dehumanizes its recipients and this is why pollution and working conditions are always far worse in nations operating by command economy. Have you ever driven by public housing projects and compared them to the privately owned? Did you know that the per capita expenditure in our nation’s inner city schools exceed those of the suburbs and country sides by two-to-one and three-to-one amounts? And what is the crime like in an inner city area with the strictest gun laws as opposed to an area with nothing but private property and armed citizens? We can see an inverse relationship everywhere between what and how much government spends, on the one hand, and the exacerbation of the problem it is supposed to fix on the other.

4. To principles for the business cycle will show us how one-sided this question is.

Principle of Supply-Side Growth: To Invest in Exponential Production is to Grow an Economy.

Principle of Demand-Side Contraction: To Redistribute is to Stunt and Shrink an Economy.

Redistribution of wealth via taxation not only transfers potential capital to less productive sectors, but also reduces (and often squelches altogether) the incentive to produce for individuals and businesses seeking to invest at marginal rates of income. It is a bit like the “give-away/take-away” ratio in football. Every dollar transferred from private sector industry to public sector subsistence is both given and taken. It is not just one or the other, but both. There is a doubly negative trend toward contraction therefore.

Should someone reply: “But the individual on government subsistence will spend or invest it every bit as much as the person who exchanged labor for it—it goes back into the economy either way,” we reply: Yes and No. It is true that it is re-filtered into that same circular flow of the economy. But whether one’s income is distributed in productive exchange or redistributed by government will have massive impact on whether its receipts tend to flow more to the supply-side or the demand-side. It is a fact that we treat things differently when they are taken for granted, when they are not earned. But beyond that, as the concentration of income in an economy is distributed to those for whom there would be greater penalty to work, their own spending percentages shifts toward consumption-spending and away from saving or investing. Even the middle-class gets a lesson in that every time there is another “target tax cut” or “refund,” which is nothing but a welfare check to those who are working. How do we typically spend it? Exactly! We tend to spend it, not save or invest it. Of course, there are exceptions to this, but the rule is that income not derived from immediate, individually-planned, voluntary exchange will typically flow to the demand side of the economy and therefore typically contract the economy or at least leave it at a standstill.

B) The System of Voluntary Exchange and the Price System

1. Behind the idea that supply-side economics just is economics, there are the two phrases thrown around so often by the classical view and its critics, that it is worth pausing to define them. The free market (or free enterprise) system of voluntary exchange simply means that the members of the circular flow are free individuals (or corporations), that their motive/end remains their own, and that no force or fraud is permitted to violate these actions. Think of prices as the “DNA” of the life of an economy. It is the structure of the life: it’s what makes it work better than any other way of organizing goods and services. In this DNA there are “building-blocks” for economic life, just as there are proteins in the life that we study in biology. These will be easier to remember too, because, instead of G, C, A, T, there are only three and they all start with “I”—information, incentive, and income.

Those who supply goods and services and those who demand them both need information. The price tells everyone all that they need to know. When more people want more of a thing, then more money will be chasing that same amount of goods. Say people started eating cheeseburgers all three meals of the day, then instead of a hundred customers at lunchtime, you would have three hundred—additional groups of one-hundred at breakfast and dinner. If one cheeseburger cost $1, then the regular lunchtime money into the restaurant ($100) would turn into $300. If the restaurant usually ordered 700 meat patties every week, they would then have to multiply that by three to make it 2,100. This would mean more money from restaurants chasing more product (meat) from the meat market. Therefore, the price of meat from the market would go up. Soon—all other things being equal—the price of the burger would increase as well. Another way this would happen is if more people started preferring cheeseburgers over pizza and sandwiches for lunchtime. Say that the one-hundred people at the burger restaurant started to draw another hundred from each of those two other places. Now there would be $300 chasing the same amount of goods at one time. Therefore the price would immediately increase at the counter. When the price of goods and services goes up in an entire economy due to more dollars chasing the same amount of goods, this is called inflation. On the other hand, when the price of good and services goes down in an entire economy due to more goods being produced than people want to buy, this is called deflation. Excess stock of goods then need to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Yet with so much more to choose from, no bidding war need arise, as the flood of goods on the market would diffuse the frenzy of dollars chasing those goods into alternative choices.

Redistribution is seizure by increment; regulation is seizure by exhaustion.

Scarcity is real. The cursing of the ground says so [cf. Gen. 3:17-19]. One professing Evangelical economist, Paul Zane Pilzer, speaks as if scarcity is increasingly illusory as a technological gap is overcome; but that is overstatement. It would be better to say that there is an invisible frontier and interplay between the metaphysical economy and the physical economy and that what Jack Kemp once called “metaphysical capital,” that is intellectual potential productivity, creates a new supply, which in turn, creates its own demand. The bridging of the gap between the new creation and present scarcity is not necessarily an attempt to reverse the effects of the fall. God never said to Adam, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread…therefore don’t even bother!” The reconstitution of matter by metaphysical reason and physical energy is still called good because it speaks of the invisible to visible motion of God upon the world. In the history of Israel, God tells the people two basic things about the economy: 1) God is the efficient and end cause [cf. Deut. 6:10-12] and 2) the stuff of the economy and its excellent maintenance are God-glorifying things [cf. Deut. 8:7-10, 11:10-17, 28:1-14].

III. FISCAL AND MONETARY POLICY

A) Does Government Have a Role in Relation to the Economy?

1. Yes—the state is related to the economy negatively. It promotes economic growth and stability by preventing force and fraud: in other words, prosecuting theft and other infractions of the law, enforcing contracts and patent rights, and obviously prosecuting anything like a slave trade. What about regulations involving personal safety and environmental protection? This may rightly be viewed as a form of preventing force and fraud. But even here there is a discernible spectrum, where minimum wage laws and mindless OSHA requirements for buckets and ladders against the wall stands at one absurd end, and the local restrictions of unwanted resources or products at the other. The control of the informed local citizenry is important for balancing freedom and form once again.

2. Fiscal policy is the government’s adjustments to the levels of taxing and spending in the public budget of a nation. Contrary to the popular belief, every dollar that the government spends is transferred from the possession of the private sector to the public, so that a reduction of the tax rate in the next fiscal year is not a government expenditure but a reduction in receipts collected by the treasury. This myth stands in logical sequence between two others. Behind it is the assumption that the government produces wealth. But we have already seen that money is not wealth, but the accepted standard of its value in exchange. Flowing from this myth is the conclusion that, therefore, a public deficit is the equal result of either tax reductions or spending increases. Again, the tax cut is viewed as an increase in spending, which further assumes that it is the government’s money to begin with! As a fourth myth corresponding to these, it is concluded that with tax cuts comes deficit increases and vice-versa. In our section on empirical evidence we will refute this by the historical record.

Monetary policy is the government’s maintenance of a fair coin. We mentioned before that while money was not the stuff of wealth, it is nevertheless the agreed standard of it. So, much like the enforcement of contracts, the maintenance of a sound money standard has to be stable over the long haul for individuals and businesses to trust the current system of voluntary exchange. As Milton Friedman argued, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”[4] It is not the result of market forces operating on their own; those will correct via personal incentive.

By printing more an amount money that exceeds the real value of goods produced, the currency becomes inflated; and since these numbers have been recorded for centuries, those who study the rates of growth in the government know perfectly well the general trajectory. This has led many to the very reasonable conclusion that central banks inflate the currency on purpose since this applies a secret tax to purchasing power. When the price of essential goods and services increases, the demand for even more taxes / transfer payments corresponds to alleviate the cruel “market force.” In this way, central governments increase their power, incrementally, through a combination of secret taxation and economic ignorance. That this is evil is a biblical valuation: “Unequal weights and unequal measures are both alike an abomination to the LORD” [Prov. 20:10]. So while bad fiscal policy is an example of force—what Bastiat called “legal plunder”—fiat currency practiced by central banks is an example of fraud.

4. The simple fact of the matter is that government cannot control an economy without controlling its members, and so for the government to set out to invade this sphere is not the sort of thing that can be corrected easily. The principle of separation, as Friedman says, is that “competitive capitalism…promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.”[5]

As Reagan once said, the statist law of economics is simple: “If it moves tax it; if it keeps moving regulate it; if it stops moving subsidize it.”

B) The Clear Empirical Evidence in Favor of the Free Market

1. If we begin at a hundred years ago—1911—we can see from the basic economic indicators—GDP, unemployment, inflation rates, interest rates, deficits and debts—how the fiscal policies of the warring schools, classical and Keynesian, have fared. The results are clear. Keynesian, demand-side, economics has been a colossal failure and that because it does not accurately grasp what an economy is in the whole of reality. It is an appendage of a total irrational worldview.

Between the October 1929 crash and the end of the Hoover administration in early 1933, the economy was recovering and U.S. gold stock rose. The Keynesian vision, accepted by Roosevelt, in fact created the Great Depression, not the other way around. Unemployment actually rose from 6.4% to 17.2% from the first year of the decade of the New Deal. Another good barometer of this trend is how much of our national income is spent by the public sector and at what level. In 1928—the year before the stock market crash that forever altered the public’s conception of a free economy—around 10% of the national income was spent by the public sector, 3% of that at the federal level. Fifty years later, those numbers increased to over 40% and 25%—so that within the theme of governmental growth, there is also a theme of centralization of the ensuing power.

There were three times in the twentieth century that supply-side economics informed our nation’s fiscal policy, the fruits of the only three presidents that understood economics—Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan—in the form of tax reduction on marginal rates of income. All three times it worked to the fullest. The prosperity of the 1920s, 1960s and 1980s is not questioned. What is usually attacked are its “real causes” or harmful effects. In these cases, the rich got richer, true, and they paid more in taxes than they did at the higher rate. By 2006, the top 50% of income earners paid 97% of the taxes; the top 1% paid 40%.

Not only do people have the idea that the revenues collected in taxes somehow originate with the government; but this same public has gotten the idea that the economy is a static amount of money whose annual production has little to no bearing on those same revenues. This is called the static analysis of economics that sees a nation’s wealth as a zero-sum game. If Joe gets rich, he took it from Billy. If the government taxes 10% of $100, it gets $10. If it raises the rate to 50%, it gets $50. Again, this is a perfectly accurate infant snapshot. But in the real world, people do not hide their money under mattresses: families have children, businesses invest and hire, inventors invent their ideas, and there is a direct connection between the level of the rate and the incentive for production. Hence, there is a direct connection between the level of the rate and the actual production in the following year. A liberal hero such as John F. Kennedy understood this. In a 1962 press conference, he said that,

It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now…Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.

Now that first arena that these confusions manifest themselves is in the whole Robin Hood fantasy. What reason does the average person give for making the rich “pay their fair share”? Someone will chirp in that it is really jealousy. Wonderful, but we have a better argument than that, so leave that on the shelf for now. The assumption is that by government redistribution, we will move closer to leveling the playing field. But that does not bear out in the statistics. And all of this raises serious concerns for the supposedly humanitarian motives that people have for this failed vision of political-economy.

IV. THE CHRISTIAN VOCATION

A) Calling (efficient), Work (material), Art (form), Talents (instrument), and Motive (end)

1. The question is not simply “What am I good at?” We are all good at any number of things, but that doesn’t mean that God has called us to do that thing.

Remember Adam cultivating the ground? Aristotle drew a distinction between violence and nature that the Christian can retranslate in biblical terms. What brought form to matter was the violent motion which was so named because it violated the present static, passive, potentially meaningless void of things in themselves, and said, NO—this thing, this nature, is not an end in itself. It is a canvas and God is the artist and I am the brush. God made man and woman to cultivate; but He specifically made man to reshape the earth, to move it, to be a mover and shaper of stuff / ground (adamah) and to chart out the trajectories of that work in history; whereas He made woman to be a mover and shaper of persons / relationships (ishah / ish), which is why the two conceive of the main work the way they do when they’re healthy and why they avoid and undermine the work like the plague when they’re not.

2. What is the motive? The fear which hesitates to create makes God out to be an exacting owner, as the Parable of the Talents makes clear. There should be an inherent joy to the work, not simply in the act but in the finished product. Now we may still be tempted to separate self-interest as a necessary evil—a thing that “makes the economic world go round”—in the macroeconomic sphere, but totally inappropriate for the Christian worker as an individual. But this still misconstrues ‘self-interest’ for ‘interest-at-the-expense-of-others.’ That is an assumption that we must at least deconstruct. Piper’s Christian Hedonism gives us some valuable first steps in doing just that.[6]

Though one may reject the ultimate foundations of Rand’s ‘virtue of selfishness,’ yet some of her criticisms belong to the Western tradition and, in large measure, Christianity itself. A dictionary definition of selfishness only speaks of action directed toward one’s own benefit. Any moral valuation implied is derived from the outflow of ethical theories and so it begs the question. The culture of altruism, in other words, has cheated. We have skipped the hard work of philosophy and have simply assumed the altruist conclusion, as Rand says, that, “the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value—and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.”[7] When altruism wins out, it slices society into two basic opinions, each placing its morality on the foundation of felt needs and not reason. One side is the respectable majority which sides with Kant. They say that we should never do anything but what benefits others and that is the only reason why we act, why we sacrifice. On the other hand is Nietzsche—whose egoist ethic was often confused with Rand—and he says that we ought to do as we please, or specifically because it is I who choose. But Rand claimed that she avoided both by appealing to rational self-interest. And rational self-interest does not mean “what my reason” happens to think benefits me, but what is discovered to be the real interest of my-self. It is therefore not a whim.

Now whether Rand could justify it or not, given her foundational commitments, can we call God’s commission to man for work a ‘rational self-interest’? Certainly: if by “rational” we mean the mind’s conformity to the reality of the world as it is, and if by “self-interest” we mean that the individual is moved to action x for the chief end of his or her own happiness, then in that case the answer to the first question of the Catechism and the ethic of Rand are at one. If it is true that ‘God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him,’ then it must follow that the heights of the individual’s happiness and the heights of God’s glory are mutually interdependent[8] in every action of the individual out into the world.

The Eighteenth Century Christian apologist Joseph Butler argued for a distinction between self-contained self-love and the kind of self-interest to which the Bible so often appeals. This self-love is always coupled with love of others. But is that the most accurate way to think of it? Are they merely “coupled,” as if the one is a parallel reality to the other? Or are they not—like the glory of God and happiness of the creature—mutually interdependent? The great apologist of the following century, William Paley, seemed to take one more step in the same direction by defining virtue as, “doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.”[9]

Here I think is where Rand’s weakness lies. In order for the “interest” to be rational, it must be true to the reality of the individual (as man), the world and the whole moral realm. All three are real and therefore the soul’s conformity to the whole of reality alone can be called rational. We cannot call “rational” that which conforms only to that part of reality that one wants to be the most pressing motivation. And thus one cannot be a thoroughgoing adherent to rational self-interest unless they are a Christian because all other views will present something less than the whole of reality as it relates to the self and even its most selfish ends. In claiming to have an objective ethic, Rand makes “What is good and right?” into “Why does man need ethics?” as if the “need” escapes the possibility of subjectivism and whim! The reason man makes value is that only ‘Life’ is capable of valuation, and in that card trick, the Randians equate “Life-to-existence” out of one side of their mouths, while arbitrarily denying an ever existent Life (which would seem to be infinitely more objective) out of the other. By making value start in the finite life of volition and reason, the Randian ethic is hopelessly subjective and emotional.

B) The Relationship Between Work and the Other Spheres

1. The first and most obvious relationship is between our place of work and our place of living. Here a Christian forms an economy within an economy, in that his or her income becomes a material capital for the formation of the image-bearing industry at home. This is where a command economy is appropriate! The allocation of these few precious resources says something about God and therefore a budget, and a theological vision for that budget, is crucial. What is also crucial is that husbands and wives are counseled (preferably beforehand!) to form this gender-specific division of labor so that the specifically called work can be done with excellence and enjoyment. A freeing wife is like a hand in the glove that the man is, as he handles the ground. A contentious, relationally immovable wife is like a hand trying to fit on different gloves, forcing the man to conform to a suburban cell when God has called him to move something very specific.

2. Since morality is a function of religious truth, the system of voluntary exchange protects the collectivization of morality that naturally occurs when a state decides what people should do with their property. Thus the free market is necessary to the integrity of religious freedom.

The Christian doctrine of calling demands that though the church informs the other spheres, the individual is called by God ethically and so bears the weight of responsibility to initiate in his or her particular sphere. It is not the church’s responsibility to employ, invest capital, or appoint people to what they should be doing. This is usually obvious. But in a time and place in which there is a revival in the church, and a recovering of the biblical worldview with it, directionless young men especially may become disenchanted with the church that is not “making it happen” with their particular gifts. The church needs to inform these members of the body that avoiding atrophy is their responsibility. They are as much a missionary in culture as the living local church itself was when it first broke ranks with the cultural church of death. The church that tries to animate everything will come to nothing.