Education and Christian Faith

The Biblical Approach to Economics

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Education

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 3

Track: ?

Dictation Name: RR306B3 –The Biblical Approach to Economics

Date:

Let us begin with prayer.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for the joy of salvation and for the certainty of victory in Jesus Christ. We thank Thee that in Him we are more than conquerors, and we pray our father that we may with boldness, with faith and with a knowledge that Thou wilt never leave us nor forsake us, serve Thee faithfully all the days of our life. Bless us now in our studying, in Jesus’ name, amen.

Our subject this afternoon is “The Biblical Approach to Economics.” As Christians, it is necessary for us to look to the Word of God in every area of life and thought. Whether our subject be economics or law, or mathematics or biology or civil government, we look to the Word of God for the guidelines.

The Bible not only gives us the Word of God for every area of life, but it tells us what man’s guideline is. Because in Genesis 3:5 we have summarized the very charter, the constitution of Humanism, of the entire anti-God movement, the tempters words, “ye shall be as god, knowing…” (That is, determining for yourself what constitutes) “…good and evil.” This is the basic sin of man. This is Original Sin. This is man’s fallen nature, his desire to be his own god, to determine for himself what constitutes good and evil, in every area of life to say it will be my word that will determine all things.

Now in Genesis 1, we have the six days of creation and we have clearly set forth, six times, God’s declaration of “Let there be…” and there was. In the Latin vulgate, for example, when it says “God says ‘Let there be light’”, it reads “Fiat lux” (let there be light.) Fiat--now that word has a very interesting role in the English language as well as in other languages, coming right out of the times when Latin was the language of learning, because that word has been plucked out of Genesis 1 by humanistic man and made the basis of his approach to every area, whether it be mathematics (and we studied this morning, one or two of you were here at the time, fiat mathematics), man-made math (modern math). Today we have fiat law. Fiat law is man-made law that has no relationship to the Word of God. It used to be said ignorance of the law is no excuse. That was when law was biblical law, because God’s Law is written into the heart of every man born. St. Paul says all men know God (Romans 1:17-21) but he says, they are without excuse therefore, because they know it, even the invisible things, but they hold I (or literally hold it down, suppress it) in unrighteousness. Man tries to be god, so he says I will imitate God’s fiats. And so whereas once law every many knew, it was the stamp of God in his being, now who knows what regulations the government creates?

I heard a businessman say on the plane back of me one seat, talking to one of his junior executives two days ago as I was flying into Pittsburgh, and said I am a Liberal. I don’t object to the basic ideas of government today, but I can’t keep up with all these regulations. Every time I turn around, I’ve broken some rule. And none of them make sense. Those are fiat laws. Fiat laws.

Our money today that you have in your wallet is fiat money. Fiat money is basic to modern civil government because it is anti-God. When the Bible says just weights, or just measures shall ye have, the word for weights there means in the Hebrew, money, because money used to be a weight of gold and silver. That was real money. Originally our gold money and our silver money, the silver was by so many grains of silver to the dollar, the gold was an ounce of gold 90% fineness constituted the double eagle or the $20 gold bill. And originally we didn’t even write ‘dollar’ on it, because in biblical fashion, it was by weight, a just weight. But now our money is checkbook money, “payable to the bearer on demand,” it used to say, so much with gold and silver. Now it says, “Payable to bearer on demand,” what? Another check. That’s why we have inflation. And that’s why inflation will continue, because you see, if you take paper and print it, it’s counterfeiting. But when the government does it, it’s legal. It’s fiat money, money created out of nothing. It’s pseudo-wealth, and therefore it erodes.

Thus, in economics today what we have in Washington, Moscow, in Johannesburg, and every capital of the world, though some of these countries still have a semblance of Christianity is really fiat economics; fiat economics, an Atheistic premise that man can legislate in the area of economics and by his own word, create wealth.

Now the basis of biblical economics in scripture is Genesis 1:26-28. God created man and said that man should exercise dominion and subdue the earth; that the whole of the earth was to be brought under the dominion of God through man. God created an estate, the Garden of Eden, and set man in it. That was to be a pattern whereby man was to learn how to develop things under God, and then the whole world was to be subjected to that pattern. So that outside the gates, that wilderness was to be subjected to the same way. Man was set to the task of developing science, of naming the creatures and to name in the Bible means to define. So that man was to define the animals, to understand, to classify, to know them scientifically. But he had an economic task in through all of this: exercise dominion. Subdue the earth.

Now economic progress depends on certain things. First of all, basic to economic progress is faith and the obedience of faith. I tie the two together because no more than you can separate can you separate faith and obedience. Faith without works is dead. And there is no such thing as faith without character. And this is basic because without this, the cornerstone of economics is gone. We read a great deal about how in many cultures, the people work long hours. Some places in Asia, 12- 14- 16- hours. Well, in India many of the people will put in 12- 13- 14- hours sometimes during certain seasons, of work. But they accomplish only as much as an American worker will accomplish in about 20 minutes. In about 20 minutes! Why? Because they begin with the wrong faith, and therefore have a wrong character and thy are not productive. Oh, but you say it’s very easy to go into Africa or into Asia and show these men (and the Peace Corp has tried to do it) mechanization and how to improve their productivity. But it doesn’t work that way. If you want to read a very important book on this subject by an economist, although it’s a moral theme, he’s not a Christian, but it’s a tremendous sermon in spite of the occasional anti-Christianity, it is by Helmut Schoeck and the title is simply, Envy. Envy. What does Schoeck tell us? It’s been confirmed by anthropological studies again and again. Supposing you show a native how to gain ten times the yield he is out of his little plot of land through modern methodology, without having tractors and all, but how to improve his methods, and you tell him (and the clincher is) you’ll have ten times as much, or at least double as much the first year in productivity. That in itself will destroy your plan for him and he will refuse to follow it. Why? Oh, but why do that? I will be the object of envy of everyone in the village or in the community and they’ll put the evil eye on me. Or if I do that, all my relatives are going to move in on me and they’ll wipe me out. I can’t afford to do too well, and 101 other reasons, all going back to a false faith and a bad character.

This is why you cannot change the economic condition of the people apart from character. This is why the Soviet Union now is facing as it has over the years, if you chart the graph of their productivity, it’s a downward slide. Why? Because they began with people that had been trained by however defective the Old Russia was, nonetheless it was more or less Christian in its emphasis, Christian in its teaching, a lot of superstition mingled with it, a lot of false doctrine, but there was a form of Christianity and it was a blessing. The older generation knew how to work. Their children did not work as well, and now their grandchildren, the new workforce have a very low productivity; a very low productivity and they have no solution for it. They have tried everything. Today they are trying to get into the production of automobiles for consumers so that they can tell the younger generation, look, you too can have a car like the youth of the West. Work hard! Save your money and you can have a car! But productivity is still declining because there is the wrong faith and a bad character.

Thus, economics from a biblical point of view begins with a godly faith and a character grounded in the Word of God.

Then second, there is knowledge which is basic. Adam was to know the animal. Very early we find that man made use of animals. He was to know the garden and the trees, because only so could he develop their utility. Knowledge is an aspect of the image of God. In its narrower sense, the image of God in various passages of scripture is defined for us as knowledge, righteousness, holiness and dominion. Knowledge, righteousness, holiness and dominion; those are the communicable attributes of God as they exist in us. God has both incommunicable attributes which are His alone, but he has communicable attributes which He has given to man, and these are four of them.

Now, knowledge is basic to economics. With knowledge, man is able to develop himself, to extend his dominion over the earth, to develop its resources and to develop tools for the development of resources. It’s not an accident that our modern technological world is a product of Christian culture and civilization. Other cultures have again and again in history developed so far and then crumbled; but not so with ours, because of the Christian character, we have developed the modern world of science and technology and if you go back and study the origins of modern science you will find it came right out of the Puritans and up until the past generation or two, the Puritan evangelical influence was basic—was basic.

Incidentally, let me digress here for a moment to go into something about faith and the obedience of faith and its relationship to man. There was a scholar who died a few years back, an unbeliever, J.D. Unwin. He did not believe that there was any truth to anything in the scripture and he especially denied the correlation that Christian theologians made between godly morality and a culture and the idea that Rome became ungodly and it fell, and so on, he felt was a myth. So he started out to disprove that on the basis of the anthropological evidences. He spent his lifetime collecting data on every known culture, including the most primitive tribe in the ancient world, the most primitive tribes of Africa and South America, South Pacific—all the nations. And he charted the relationship between cultural level and sexual regulations. He found a mathematical correlation; a mathematical correlations. Those peoples who had neither premarital and post marital chastity had a dead level of culture—could not count beyond the fingers of their two hands. The highest number they could conceive of was ten. The lived the most wretched and primitive kind of lives. Their tool-making ability would be exceedingly primitive. But where you had the development of a certain amount of chastity, pre-marital or post marital (in some instances only post marital, in other instances only premarital), then there would be a rise culturally, until when you had premarital and post marital chastity, then and then alone would you have a high culture in science and the ability to grasp abstract thought. So he found a mathematical correlation. Then he spent the rest of his life trying to figure a way out of the bind he put himself into.

Yes…

[Audience] Do you have any references on {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, his classic work which is out of print, a huge volume is Sex and Culture. However, he wrote two preliminary monographs on that which will be reprinted in the next issue of our Chalcedon Journal of Christian Reconstruction, on the family, two of his studies. So that if you write to our organization, Chalcedon, and order the Journal of Christian Reconstruction issue on the family. It will be out I think, by the end of December and it’s $4 per copy. You’ll get that plus about 120 or so pages of other studies on the family. I have one in there and there are a number by a number of other writers.

[Audience] {?} this…. {?}

[Rushdoony] Unwin. J.D. Unwin.

There is thus, as we have seen, as the basis of economics, faith and the obedience of faith, and second, knowledge; knowledge.

And that is a product only, as Unwin’s work makes clear, of a culture that is grounded on the Word of God. When it loses that faith, it will decline. Unwin found that in three generations you could come from a high civilization to a point where you couldn’t count beyond the fingers on your two hands, if you had for three generations total breakdown. Startling, isn’t it? And it was not a Christian who said it. It was someone who was emphatically not Christian.

Then third, basic to economics is work, or labor. You cannot have any progress without work, without labor. You know we have a horrible myth that clutters our minds today and which the eco freaks or the ecology advocates exploit to our ruin. The idea is that this continent was a paradise before the white man came, and of course those of the humanists who settled here believed it, even when they were starving to death. Some of the first pilgrims and puritans described it as a howling wilderness. Why? Well there were about 300,000 Indians here (don’t believe the nonsensical figure scholars have been inventing lately) and most of them were starving to death. Winter after winter they were resorting to cannibalism. The very word cannibal comes from the American. Originally it was ‘carribal’ and gradually the word carribal became corrupted to cannibal (Carib from the Caribbean Indians), but the Caribbean Indians were not the only ones who were cannibals. A very large percentage of the tribes of what is now the United States were cannibals. They don’t tell you that. The land couldn’t support them. You had from Western Illinois to the Atlantic nothing but huge forests—very little game. The forests were so thick, sun wouldn’t hit the ground and so there was no grass growing so there were no animals. Only where you had a river or a lake, around the edge of it there’d be a little grass and a few deer and a few rabbits and a few turkeys because there the light would hit. The Great Plains? Why huge herds of buffalos, each of them numbering tens of thousands. What did they do? Well you could see a buffalo a day’s journey away because it was a continual dust bowl. When you had a herd of buffalos that big, chopping up the ground with their hoofs, eating every last blade of grass and then passing on, all that remained was dust. The buffalo had to go by the way, sentimentalists to the contrary, man and the buffalo could not coexist. You know that when buffalo over-ran a settler’s farm and his house, the fences disappeared, the trees disappeared, the log cabin disappeared and if you found a piece of it equal to a toothpick, you did well. And the people disappeared. If you found so much as a red smear, that was remarkable, because those huge animals, tens of thousands of them passing over people, reduced them to nothing—nothing—not enough to bury, not enough to locate. They had to get rid of them.

But of course, some people would prefer to get rid of man. The humanist ends up as a hater of man.

And when it came to farming, well consider what your situation would have been if you had landed on the shore of the Atlantic in New England or in Virginia or anywhere else. You would have had to clear that ground. That in itself was a huge task, believe me; mostly by hand work, getting those stumps out of those giant creeks. Then that soil instead of being a rich soil was a soil on which nothing had grown because the sun hadn’t hit it. Only leaves had fallen on it and the leaves had been of one variety, only one kind of thing put into that soil and it often would be a sour soil. The riches soil is one that a farmer has worked and developed and built up over the generations. All right, then you would plant it. Well, you know a population explosion always took place wherever the white men made a settlement. Why? Because the sun would hit the ground and the grass would begin to grow and there things would begin to grow. And every porcupine and every deer and every rabbit would experience a tremendous population explosion and they’d all concentrate on this place; it was the only place where there was food. The Indians would come there too because that’s where the game would be. Dogs were very important to those settlers to keep out those animals, because you would have a ground riddled with gophers that would eat up the roots of your trees and vegetables and what they didn’t get, animals above the ground got. It was hard work, believe me. It was back-breaking, discouraging work.

The West is young enough that I knew some of the first settlers before they died. In fact, when I was a missionary among the indians, I could remember, oh I could hear tales of their memory of seeing the first white man cross the plains and the officers in our little congregation would tell me stories about the early days. In fact, they told me exactly the method of scalping, so without having any practice, I know all the details thereof. The West was young, and I talked to those men, and what a discouraging thing it was to be a pioneer. And it took long hard work, long, hard work.

And finally, it took capital. You could not go out on empty land and start. You had to have capital to do it. Faith and the obedience of faith, knowledge, labor, capital. It was rare that any man got a crop, even from a garden, in less than two years, or no, let me say, in two years, not less. And very often it took ten, fifteen years to subjugate that land, to build it up to make it productive, to get rid of the animal menace. How did you live until you did that? Why, you had to save up to do it. A lot of people came to this country as bondservants and they worked out their passage and worked seven years to gain some capital so they could go out on their own. And if a young couple got married, they were given capital by the parents. The bride normally brought with her a milk cow from her parents and the groom brought something, and he worked and then they went out and settled. They had to have capital, and many an immigrant came over with a dowry—ever heard of that word? It’s a wonderful system—and the dowry was the capital of the family. And it enabled them to go out and to survive until they could break ground. Pioneering was not easy, you see. It required faith and the obedience of faith. It required knowledge. It required labor and it required capital.

In the Garden of Eden, God provided the capital. It was ready-made, but Adam had to supply the faith and the obedience. He had to develop the knowledge, and he had to dress and to keep the garden, which means to till it, to cultivate it, to prune it; Adam worked. Never, never say that work is a curse. Work is a privilege under God, but work was cursed—as everything that man is and does—by his sin. And the glorious picture in Revelation is that His servants shall serve Him in the New Creation and there shall be no more curse. Work is a privilege under God. There’s no work in Hell. But the Fall has put a curse upon work and as we become redeemed, the curse progressively is removed and we are blessed. In a New Creation there is no more curse on work, only blessing.

Now you see the idea that wealth and progress are ready-made is nonsense. We got a late start and our time is drawing near to an end so we’ll hasten to give the other picture of how humanistic economics works, what its presuppositions are. I should say how it does not work.

First of all, basic to humanistic economics is a faith in man’s lordship. Man is lord. Man by his fiat (let there be) will create out of nothing so that we have men like President Johnson declaring, as he did a decade ago that poverty, ignorance, disease and possibly even death were to be abolished by the government. Marvelous! What are they waiting for? Let them get rid of it tomorrow! If the government can do it, let’s get Congress working and get rid of a lot of things. Let them abolish sin—declare it illegal. But his is basic to humanistic economics. It puts its confidence not in faith and the character of faith, or of knowledge, work and capital but in man’s lordship, man as god saying ‘let there be,’ when lo and behold, supposedly there is. And as a result, it sees as its basic capital, power. Humanistic economics thus wants to capitalize society not by wealth but by power. And the result is destructive.

Then second, its idea of works, of labor is works of law. See how that ties in with your theology? Salvation by works of law. Now let me give you an illustration of that: the minimum wage law. How terrible that some people make so little. Let’s have a minimum wage law to make sure that everybody does well. Well, you know, when we passed the minimum wage law we created massive unemployment? We created the Civil Rights revolution, the Negro unrest. There had never been any problem with the Negroes before. Why? Well, how previously was a poor unskilled young man, black or white, going to get a job? By being an apprentice at low wages where he could be taught and where he could acquire a skill. And so it was that any youth could, a generation ago, get a job. He might be paid very little. He might be paid $ .50 or $ .75/hr., but it was an opportunity to learn on the job. The telephone company has a real problem nowadays. It has to go on functioning, but do you know when it hires a girl as an operator, she has to work a minimum of two years before they break even on their training, their investment of time and money in her training? A minimum of two years! Well, what in the world are you going to do with the millions of youth who have no skills and you have to pay them minimum wage? You can’t afford to train them. You lose money, especially when there’s nothing that will hold them to the job. You can invest in them and they can quit on you tomorrow. Therefor you can’t afford to do it. If you don’t come with the training, I can’t take you. The result has been massive unemployment among black youth and increasingly among white youth and a chronic problem of delinquency and crime and disturbances among these people and it has been demonstrated that if they aren’t among the ranks of the employed by age 25, they never will be. It’s a rare instance that they will be, because between the ages of about 17 and 25, if they are workless, they will develop habits and attitudes that make a life of working and being under the authority and discipline of a working situation impossible for them. So our humanistic economics is destroying a sizeable percentage of our black and white youth today because it replaces work (in a biblical sense) with works of law.

Then a third, a goal of humanistic economics (to hurry on so that we finish on time) is a kingdom not of God, but of man; the kingdom of man—man as his own god, reigning, sitting on the throne.

And fourth, the concept of knowledge, in humanistic perspectives and in humanistic economics is state control of all knowledge, for state purposes. This is where you come in because what you represent is a threat educationally and economically and politically to the State. The State wants to control education as a basic tool, to create the right outlook religiously and economically in the people, to make them look to the State for their physical welfare, and hence education which under God is a basic of economics, in the hands of the modern state, whether it’s economically mercantilist (which is the proper definition of our economic order in the United States) or Socialist or Fascist, education has to be controlled by the State to serve the ends—the political economic ends of the State.

Thus, economics is a very thoroughly necessary area for us to study and to study biblically. I think we perhaps have a minute or so before the bell. Do we, Allen?

[Allen] The bell is {?} five minutes over {?} the last {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh, all right. Are there any questions now, very quickly?

Yes…

[Audience] Yes, I’ve been reading a book lately, that’s entitled, {?}

[Rushdoony] Ah, who is the author?

[Audience] Name is {?} Name is {?} or something like that….

[Rushdoony] Oh, I don’t know

[Audience] {?} His whole thesis of course is that {?} of the world in our thinking, {?} the financial bankers, the international bankers, there seems to be a movement {?} to destroy even the paper currency, {?} the future control of men by {?} using bigger numbers and so forth. If you… comment a little bit on what you….

[Rushdoony] Yes. Money is being destroyed not by any conspiracy, although there are no lack of conspiracies, it’s being destroyed by false religion. That’s basic in every area. It’s a false religion.

Now the best book on money, written by an evangelical Christian, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, is Elgin Groseclose. Elgin Groseclose and the title is Money and Man. Money and Man. There is also a book on money which is very good (I have a chapter in it, that’s a symposium), Gold is Money, edited by Dr. Hans Sennholz.

[Audience] {?} the publisher

[Rushdoony] I’m not sure and the moment. I’ve forgotten. It’s some firm up in New England.

Yes…

[Audience] what do you say {?} the Christian {?} economic provision {?}

I don’t agree with some of your words. What I’m wondering is, the first {?} to seek wealth, as Christians, {?} Are you a {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, I didn’t say we were to seek wealth, but that God said we were to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth, to make every area of life serve the Lord, to bring every area of life and thought into captivity to Jesus Christ. Now wealth, like knowledge, like work, like obedience, is a tool towards that end. So that you are setting your mind and your affection and your purposes on the things that are above—God’s calling, and we need to use whatever we gain as a stewardship. You know there’s no way we can capitalize the Christian cause, Christian schools, Christian legal defense, Christian missions, without wealth. Wealth is a tool.

Now it’s not money that the Bible says is an evil, but the love of money, a lust for it.

Yes…

[Audience] What about {?} Atheistic economy that supports, we know really well, Germany, Japan, China, economies that have no religion, no moral support whatsoever. Now why are they doing well? If what you said is true, then they must fail. {?}

[Rushdoony] Alright, China is not doing well. That’s all propaganda. We had that same kind of propaganda for a generation or two about the Soviet Union and we’re getting it about Red China. It’s an abysmal failure. Germany did exceptionally well after World War II and earlier, of course when it had the strong Lutheran background. But after World War II, the ideas of Earhart, which were very much in line with what I am talking about, prevailed and there was enough of the older generation there that still had the faith to implement them.

It’s ironic, one of the reasons Germany adopted it in part was that we recommended a radically Socialist economic program to them, but they were so hostile to us, they were ready to listen to Earhart propose exactly the reverse, so they went for a radically different kind of economics. Germany today is faltering. The steam is going out of its economic progress because the younger generations do not have the faith of their fathers, nor the ability to work.

Now in Japan, you have quite a remarkable situation too in that they also under the leadership of men like McArthur, adopted (McArthur made recommendations…. [Tape Ends]