Category Archives: Bible & Theology

Is there such a thing as Christian economics? 1

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Where to start?

Why don’t we start with people?

Are they a good idea or a bad idea? Are they valuable or a drain?

I was looking at the content for the “new” version of Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, and I noticed that, despite a great deal of backtracking about claims as to what will happen, he still refuses to let go of the myth of the population explosion. We are supposed to help other people, and that means making sure that no more come into existence to eat “our” pie. I assume Evangelicals for Social Action (or whatever organization fulfills its functions now) is pretty much against immigration laws (and they should be!). But the most draconian immigration control is the one guarding married couples from having (“too many”) children.

From Psalm 127:

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
Blessed is the man
who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

As with Genesis 1:

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

I don’t think the fact that modern technology allows for couples to decide when and how many children is necessarily a bad thing (assuming no abortion is involved or even risked!). But whatever decisions husbands and wives make as those recently granted new powers of stewardship, if your economic theory says that people are a drain on resources and that population growth is a problem, then the problem is you.

In my opinion this is a modest proposal: If you think the growth of the human race is a curse, you are pretty much telling us the Bible is a misleading document.

And, if you write a book that demands that the planet’s population be curtailed, then the economic theory behind your proposal is properly labeled unbiblical and non-Christian.

Yes, you may be a Christian espousing this error, just like John Lennon was not a Christian but showed more Christian generosity to generations to come. But it is still an error and a serious one.

And it demonstrates the impossibility of “neutral” economics. Viewing resources as “just there” is the hallmark of static, oppressive, pagan societies. Christianity says the future is open and people (not things) are the source of good. These are competing value claims that result in differing economic theories.

 

New Covenant Curses

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“The Levitical administration brought strong curses for disobedience (Heb. 2:2-3); the New Covenant administration brings much greater curses (Heb. 10:29; Heb. 12:25). Christians commonly assume that the really terrifying curses for disobedience were given in the Old Testament, and that under the New Testament all is grace. But this is precisely the opposite of the New Testament’s teaching on the subject” (To a Thousand Generations, pp. 28-29).

via New Covenant Curses.

Once you attack someone, you have to constantly tell a story about how they must have deserved it.

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Right now, the PCA is in an imbroglio over the FV, and what it is showing us, I fear, is that we have neither the desire or ability to discipline anyone.

via Straining at gnats, swallowing camels… – BaylyBlog: Out of our minds, too….

No, it shows that passing off falsehoods, even via a GA-produced, stacked-committee list of extra-Confessional affirmations, doesn’t coerce presbyteries to condemn the innocent.

At least not yet. But never give up, Ken. Who knows how much rope God might bless you with if you just push forward.

Baptism and Assurance: Getting past the fallacies

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Since not everyone who is baptized into the visible Church is predestined to heaven, and some who are not baptized are indeed predestined to heaven, many people are skeptical of the Christian claims about baptism and the importance of membership in the visible church.

But in many ways, their claims against baptism and church membership are also claims against professing faith in Christ.

I say “many ways” because there is a difference. For those who reach the age of maturity, I don’t believe anyone is predestined to heaven who is not also predestined to profess faith in Christ as a means of reaching that fore-ordained destiny.

But on the flip side, most of us know people who have professed faith and then later proven false, just as we know people who have been baptized and who have proven false, and who have been members of the the visible church, which is the house and family of God out of which there is ordinarily no salvation, and who have proven false.

If we are going to preach against baptismal efficacy, not only should we stop claiming to be Presbyterians, but we should also preach against professing faith in Christ as a basis for assurance.

Being skeptical of baptism means being skeptical of faith in the only form that it is publicly known.

And just so we are clear: who does and does not counts as a believer, is supposed to be a public fact, not a hidden secret. The Apostle Paul could not write “let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother,” (Romans 14.13) it who was a believer was some kind of mystery. Likewise, Paul said he knew who was a member of the visible church by who was baptized.

“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” — 1 Corinthians 12.27

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many.” — 1 Corinthians 12.12-14

Here is a brief paper I wrote to present the teaching of the Westminster Confession, and Larger and Shorter Catechism, on the sacramental efficacy (which, in case this is not clear to you, includes baptismal efficacy). Naturally, this is not really as important as arguments from the Bible. But my concern at the time was a lack of knowledge among those who claimed to subscribe to Westminster.

The Westminster Standards and Sacramental Efficacy

Also here are some great things you can read about baptism:

Analogies to baptism by Peter Leithart

Baptism and the Church by Peter Leithart

Baptismal Efficacy and the Reformed Tradition: Past, Present, and Future by Rich Lusk

Finally, here is a great little piece about assurance in the context of all God’s public means of grace, and also the sufficiency of faith for salvation:

Overheard in a Pastor’s Study by Peter Leithart

The Belgic Confession on Baptism

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We believe and confess that Jesus Christ, who is the end of the law, made an end, by the shedding of His blood, of all other shedding of blood which men could or would make as a propitiation or satisfaction for sin and that He, having abolished circumcision, which was done with blood, has instituted the sacrament of baptism instead thereof; by which we are received into the Church of God, and separated from all other people as strange religions, that we may wholly belong to Him whose mark and ensign we bear; and which serves as a testimony to us that He will forever be our gracious God and Father.

via Peter J. Leithart » Blog Archive » Belgic on Baptism.

God tests us and hides his justice

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I state here that God judges sooner than the Last Day. This fact can be taken to infer some mistaken conclusions.

God judges the wicked and rewards the righteous. All of these rewards are delayed because God is patient and because he tests everyone. A huge part of growing up is learning delayed gratification, and living by faith is part of that. If God responded immediately to all provocations, we would never learn to either believe nor be faithful. Both faith and faithfulness require “space” or, more literally, time. God does not stand there when Satan is tempting Adam and Eve. He has withdrawn his presence to evaluate them later. They would be much less likely to disobey if God was standing there behind the serpent. But their obedience wouldn’t indicate much either about their trust in God nor their character and maturity.

And when Jesus does come and judge us, he does so in a way that is not easily understood. There are a thousand variables. Some of these variables may indeed involve what God has reserved for the Final Judgment, the Last Day. But others simply involve factors that are too complicated or numerous for us to track. In some cases, the wicked who should be judged repent in time to delay it or escape it, and in some cases the offspring of the righteous who should flourish lose patience and depart from the Lord (see Ezekiel 18, for example). Plus God tests the endurance of the righteous for a time.

So you can’t condemn anyone who is poor because he is poor and you can’t commend anyone who is rich because he is rich. The evidence for all this is found in the Book of Proverbs which sees no problem assuring people that God rewards on earth but warning them about judging either the poor or the wealthy.

So there is no straight line you can see. But you can’t infer that God is not judging in history. He is. And that is why you can resist constructing a State to establish the “perfect justice” that you think needs establishing. That will not result in judgment. It will be a judgment. Don’t go there. Trust God instead and remain free and wise.

A switch flipped over in my head

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I notice when I was blogging in 2000, my posts, for all their flaws, were much more personal. I’m afraid controversy has changed my stance. Also, the results of controversy: I was a lot more confident about my personal future and my ability to provide for my own back in 2000. (Some of this confidence was somewhat sinfully naive, I think. But much of what happened was truly unforeseeable.) Optimism produces a different tone.

Anyway, this is kind of a throwback autobiographical emotive thingy.

I’ve always been a six-day creationist, “young” earther–at least since college anyway. I’m convinced 1. the Bible teaches these things and 2. that the Bible is true. Until one of those premisses changes, I remain a young earther.

But I have hated having to argue about it in the unbelieving world. It seems so much easier to start with Jesus and the first century and argue for his resurrection and then from there to the reliability of Scripture (I’m not renouncing presuppositionalism, here, by the way).  So intellectually faithful but emotionally weary or wary, I was. I believed and would assert what the Bible says about chronology, but I wanted to talk about other things.

But something has happened. I don’t know how to explain it other than the analogy of a switch flipping in my head.

Suddenly I think the fact that history has barely begun is an exciting truth that deserves to be trumpeted. The whole world seems tired and depressed right now. Even the people trumpeting Keynsean myths about how the future can be opened up don’t seem to believe what they are saying. (It seems far easier to believe that people hate those who disagree with global warming or evolution or quantitative easing or environmentalism than that they are firmly convinced of the ideas they defend. Am I the only one who detects this?) We’re running out and running down. Austerity is ahead.

But like John Paul Jones, Jesus has not yet begun to fight. History has barely begun. Remembering that the earth has just started, and that Jesus came quite near to the beginning of history rather than waiting a million years, just seems like good new worth sharing.

I think a couple of things have converged to make me more excited about this message. For one, the financial crisis is also a Science ™ crisis. Science has been a welfare case especially since WW2 and it has all the resulting features of a bubble and corruption. (More on that in a later post, perhaps). On a personal level, I’ve had to direct my one homeschooled child to do some science reading, which means I’ve been doing some myself.  So this has all become the focus of my attention as has not been true for some time.

Anyway, I think people need to know that the human story has just begun. It is not ending. Whatever judgments we need to go through (and yes we need to repent to avoid eternal wrath) austerity is not the future of the human race. Unimagined prosperity lies ahead for our children–our many many unrestricted, unaborted children with unrationed wealth. Jesus is gracious and he is just starting.

 

Phinehas and Abraham, both Jew and Gentile justified by faith

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I think it is time to amplify and restate a point I posted about in December 2009:

Mark Horne » Blog Archive » Gentile Abraham, David, and Phinehas.

After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” But Abram said, “O LORD God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” And Abram said, “Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.” And behold, the word of the LORD came to him: “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir.” And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.

In Romans 4, Paul argues from the way Abram responded to a promised reward, and the nature of the promise, in order to prove justification is by faith, not by works, so that believing Gentiles are justified by God along with believing (and only believing) Jews.

For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” Now to the one who works, his reward is not counted as a gift but as his due. And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works:

“Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
and whose sins are covered;
blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”

Is this blessing then only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised? We say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness. How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well, and to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.

The “very great” “reward” that Abraham believes he will receive is a nation that is covenanted with the LORD that will go into Egypt and then come out, as the rest of Genesis 15 explains. But it is more than that. Paul points out that the content of the promise mentioned in Genesis 15, which Abra[ha]m believes, includes what is said in Genesis 17:

And God said to him, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.”

So the promise itself, even though it includes a special nation marked out by circumcision, promises that Abraham will be the father of a multitude of nations. “The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well, and to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.” This promise, is, in fact, an OT reality. Jacob hears it begin to be fulfilled when Joseph tells him that he has been made a father to Pharaoh (Genesis 45.8). The OT is filled with believing Gentiles, contrary to many Evangelical (and quasi-Marcionite) myths about the world before Christ. Paul is not satisfied with the OT benefits, however. He sees the promise as promising that eventually all nations will belong to God in the same special way as Israel so that there is no longer any distinction or special privilege among them.

But I’m getting away from my main point.

Paul makes a huge deal about the language of Genesis 15.6: “And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.”

This passage is treated by unbelieving commentators as an occasion to mock Paul’s reasoning, and I don’t see Evangelical commentators really confronting the difficulty (though this is a blog post, not a research paper, so I haven’t read many of them before writing this. If you know of someone who deals with the issue, let me know). The reason is that Abraham is not the only person in the OT to whom something he did “was counted as righteousness.”

Then they yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor,
and ate sacrifices offered to the dead;
they provoked the LORD to anger with their deeds,
and a plague broke out among them.
Then Phinehas stood up and intervened,
and the plague was stayed.
And that was counted to him as righteousness
from generation to generation forever.

Thus, Psalm 106 explains the story of Phinehas in Numbers 25:

And behold, one of the people of Israel came and brought a Midianite woman to his family, in the sight of Moses and in the sight of the whole congregation of the people of Israel, while they were weeping in the entrance of the tent of meeting. When Phinehas the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation and took a spear in his hand and went after the man of Israel into the chamber and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman through her belly. Thus the plague on the people of Israel was stopped. Nevertheless, those who died by the plague were twenty-four thousand. And the LORD said to Moses, “Phinehas the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, has turned back my wrath from the people of Israel, in that he was jealous with my jealousy among them, so that I did not consume the people of Israel in my jealousy. Therefore say, ‘Behold, I give to him my covenant of peace, and it shall be to him and to his descendants after him the covenant of a perpetual priesthood, because he was jealous for his God and made atonement for the people of Israel.’”

So like Abraham, Phinehas’ reward was very great. His act of zeal and loyalty to YHWH was counted to him as righteousness, which means, just like was true for Abraham, his descendents would be a special priestly covenant people.

It is ridiculous to read Romans 4 as if Paul was ignoring Phinehas’ story because it worked against his argument from Genesis 15. If Paul singles out language only used two times in the OT we can be sure that Paul is not incompetent and that he is arguing from both stories! After all, what is Paul’s argument? That Abraham is “the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well, and to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised. As Paul goes on to write:

That is why it is of faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the one of the law [the believing Jew like faithful Phinehas or forgiven David] but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham [the uncircumcized believer], who is the father of us all, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”

The whole point is that Abram the believing uncircumcised Gentile was justified just like Phinehas the faithful believing Jew. Thus, if Abraham receives the same (and really a greater) reward as Phinehas, righteousness and covenant standing for himself and his heirs, then the reason for Phinehas’ reward cannot be his Jewish works, but the faith he held in common with the uncircumcised Abram.

Paul does not thoughtlessly overlook Phinehas. He argues from him, albeit silently. Just because we don’t read Numbers or the Psalms that much doesn’t mean Romans is supposed to be understandable without such knowledge. We have no business treating Paul as ignorant as we are or as accommodating such ignorant readers, and then self-righteously deciding his argument is flawed on that false assumption.

“Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your wage shall be very great”?

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I don’t like the above translation of Genesis 15.1. It seems misleading.

But it is relevant to the way Romans 4.4 gets translated:

Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due.

Now this statement occurs in the middle of a great deal of commentary on Genesis 15. It seems, frankly, to come out of nowhere.

I noticed recently however that the Greek word does not have to be translated as “wages.” “Reward” is a common translation of the same Greek word.

In the context of “one who works” it makes sense that translators would think of “wages.”

But what about the context of a discussion of Genesis 15?

Genesis 15.1:

After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”

This “reward” is precisely the promise that Abram believes and so is justified–the main topic of Romans 4. And the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures in Paul’s day, the Septuagint (or LXX as it is commonly abbreviated) uses the same word that our English translations produce as “wages.”

In my opinion, Genesis 15.1 should count as context to Romans 4.4 and affect how we translate the word.

“Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”

Now to the one who works, his reward is not counted as a gift but as his due.