Echoes in Eternity

Doug Wilson has an excellent post on the natural and Biblical progression from the freedom brought by the Spirit of God to economic freedom for all mankind.

Everything about God’s purposes and plans converge upon liberty. This is the Spirit of jubilee. Proclaim liberty throughout the land, which cannot be done apart from the gospel. And when the gospel is preached in power, men are set free.
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And when these men are set free from their sins, these freed men in turn set their markets free. Slaves have never built a free economic system, and they never will. They always build tyrannies, with the people enslaved to their lusts and their masters at the bottom, and their masters enslaved to their lusts at the top.

One of the fundamental confusions that drives much of our discussion of American free markets is the confusion between businesses and markets. Being pro-free-market is not at all the same thing as being pro-General-Electric (say). Over the course of our history, American markets have only been comparatively free, but the Spirit of God is nowhere near done with us. We have been free compared to Cuba and Sweden, but we are not yet free compared to the standards of a postmill biblical republic.

The free market consists of the rules of the game. Someone who is pro-free-market thinks that clipping should be clipping for all teams, holding should be holding, and so forth. Someone who is pro-business only sees the rules of the game as one instrument among many that can be used to advance the self-interest of their favored team. Their only rule is winning. Now in the American game of free market football, our refs still make plenty of bad calls, with more than a few of them on the take. But the rules of the game are (still) somewhat recognizable.

Enter the Jim Wallis types, who point out all the cheating, and want to solve the problem by making it legal to bribe the refs and, for good measure, to make it legal for the refs to threaten the wife and children of any of the players. If pressed, he might even cite the Jubilee laws of the Old Testament, apropos of nothing.

So it is hard to determine which is sillier—professed Christians manufacturing chains with Lev. 25:10 stamped on every link, or atheistic Austrian economists pulling theories of true liberty out of the unregenerate heart of man. The former tries, using confused appeals to Augustine, to make the Spirit a slave trader, and the latter tries, using confused appeals to the Scottish Enlightenment, to make the devil the Lord of Manumission.

Recently, Jim Wallis, in response to claims that his Sojourners organization received significant funding from George Soros and other liberal groups (after hypocritically lambasting other Christian groups for taking money from conservative groups), said the following:

It’s not hyperbole or overstatement to say that Glenn Beck lies for a living. I’m sad to see Marvin Olasky doing the same thing. No, we don’t receive money from Soros.”

Turns out, Wallis is wrong. They DO receive money from organizations led by Mr. Soros. The bigger issue, though, is the ease with which Wallis slandered other people. Thankfully, he did get around to apologizing this week. However, it's a pretty weak apology for several reasons.

"I was really tired that day. I did one interview too many. I was in the back of a taxicab... I was wrong, out of anger at the insinuation about the dependence on these foundations, I was wrong to imply that like Beck, Marvin lies for a living," Wallis said. "Glenn Beck does lie for a living. Marvin Olasky doesn't lie for a living; that's not something I should say about a brother in Christ."

First of all, an apology couched in excuses is hardly an apology. My wife wouldn't let me get away with that. Second, and the primary thing that caught my eye, apparently, in Wallis' world it is bad to wrongly accuse a Christian of lying but it's not a problem to slanderously accuse a non-Christian (Beck is Mormon, I believe) of having a deceitful character. For someone who talks a lot about living like Jesus, Wallis seems to not have much of a grasp of how to love his enemies. Methinks there will not be a second apology coming.

This is exhibit #432 for why American liberalism should die like the rot it is in the Church. Few things destroy the Church more quickly than being a poor witness to both the freedom offered in Christ (by instead promoting Marxism) and the love He exhibits to ALL people (by acting like Wallis does on a regular basis). This is true too with people like Fred Phelps who are legalistic and hateful toward people they disagree with. You want to know why the Church is nearly dead in Europe? It's largely due to the above reasons... the welfare state and a degradation of behavior. To slightly modify Wilberforce, we need a suppression of socialism and a reformation of manners. We need Christ (and not the one Jim Wallis peddles).

I loved Doug Wilson's response to Jim Wallis' vitriolic vacuity. Seriously, I'm not sure if Wallis could get any more intellectually dishonest or imbecilic. Read Wilson's piece in its entirety here.

Jim Wallis recently offered the opening salvo of an invitation to discuss exactly how "Christian" the Tea Party movement is.
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His five points are these:

1. The Libertarian enshrinement of individual choice is not a Christian virtue;
2. An anti-government ideology is not biblical;
3. Supreme confidence in the power of markets is not biblical;
4. Libertarian preference for the strong over the weak is not biblical;
5. The Tea Party is just too white.
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Later in his discussion, Wallis cites Jeremiah 22:16 and Amos 5:15 authoritatively, which is fine by me, but the Old Testament has a lot of other verses too (Ex. 22:18). If you are going to reason this way, you are going to have to give an accounting of the political ramifications of all Scripture. You can't just treat troublesome verses like a cluster of distant trees on the bank which you float by on the river of benevolent niceness, in the rowboat of exegetical detachment.

That said, let us consider his points in turn.

"The Libertarian enshrinement of individual choice is not the pre-eminent Christian virtue. Emphasizing individual rights at the expense of others violates the common good, a central Christian teaching and tradition."

But he misstates the question. The question is not "shall we have individual rights or shall we have the common good? Which shall it be?" The debate is over which form of social organization is most conducive to the common good.

"Libertarianism is a political philosophy that holds individual rights as its supreme value and considers government the major obstacle."

For Christian libertarians, individual rights are not the supreme value, and to assert that they are is idolatry, pure and simple. The glory of God, and the gospel of His Christ, are the supreme political values. But once we have faithfully answered the first question in the Shorter Catechism, we still have to figure out our social and political arrangements. In the process of doing that, it is simply a misrepresentation to say that those who want to protect individual rights in the first instance are disinterested in the fate of the common good. Overweening government is not just the major obstacle to an enjoyment of individual rights, it is the major obstacle to the common good.

Because Wallis does not understand economics, or logic, he cites Bible verses into the air.

"Jeremiah, speaking of King Josiah, said, 'He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well' (Jeremiah 22:16). Amos instructs the courts (the government) to 'Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts' (Amos 5:15). The prophets hold kings, rulers, judges, and employers accountable to the demands of justice and mercy.

They most certainly do, and I am an unabashed theocrat on these issues. Kings are responsible to God to protect and defend justice, and He will judge them at the last day for any failure to do so. Kings are responsible to defend and protect the poor from the predatory rich. But it will not do for Wallis to cite a Bible verse with the word justice in it, and then import an alien definition of justice, and reason from there. When employers rip off their employees, the righteous prince will be right there, and will enforce the demands of justice (Jas. 5:4). But when an economic illiterate demands that we destroy an inner city with minimum wage laws and rent control, what charge shall we bring against him? For my part, I would charge him with not hating evil, with not loving good, and with not maintaining justice in the courts.

Christian liberals need to get it into their heads that the prophet Amos never said, "And thou shalt be sure to maintain your charitable niceness pure and undefiled with the pixie dust of good intentions."

"An anti-government ideology just isn’t biblical."

Sure. Great. Amen. Governments are established by God, and we should all acknowledge it. Anarchism is out. But . . . it is interesting to me that folks like Wallis haul out the Romans 13 lecture to hector attendees of Tea Party rallies, where American flags and Uncle Sam hats abound, and they go deathly quiet when actual anarchists riot in Toronto.

Anti-government ideology is unbiblical, but being anti-tyranny isn't. The problem is that advocates of hubristic governments think that any opposition to that hubris is opposition to the original point of constitutional government. Which it isn't. Wallis acknowledges this in the abstract -- "a power-hungry government is clearly an aberration and violation of the proper role of government in protecting its citizens and upholding the demands of fairness and justice." So what do we do when that happens? And will we be able to do it in a peaceful and orderly way without men like Wallis lecturing us, as though we didn't know already, that responsible government is a good thing?
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"The Libertarians’ supreme confidence in the market is not consistent with a biblical view of human nature and sin."

Just one quick point here. Markets are formed when men agree to not behave coercively toward one another in their economic transactions. Governments are formed when men agree together on what the structure of their collective coercions shall be. Markets are not coercive, by definition. Governments are coercive, by definition. The person who needs to have his unbiblical views of the nature of sin adjusted is the person who thinks that government presents less of a temptation to sinners than markets do.

My political philosophy can be summed up this way -- keep coercion to a minimum. This exhibits naivete about the reality of sin? Hardly.

"The Libertarian preference for the strong over the weak is decidedly un-Christian . . . To anticipate the Libertarian response, let me just say that private charity is simply not enough to satisfy the demands of either fairness or justice, let alone compassion."

First, this objection is wrong simply as a matter of fact. The underlying premise, driven by envy and ressentiment, is simply wrong. Is it true that the rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer? Is it true on a basic factual level?
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But secondly, let us translate what Wallis is actually saying on the theological level. He is arguing that compassion cannot survive apart from coercion. Compassion comes out of the barrel of a gun. The demands of compassion require that we threaten a lot of people with hard time in chokey if they don't fork it over now. Wallis is a theocrat, as am I. But his vision of theocracy has a lot more guns, jails, and fines in it than mine does. How many guns and jails do we need? I don't know -- how far did we fall short on the compassion index this year? Anybody who thinks that someone with Wallis' political philosophy is ever going to say at some point, "that's enough, we have finally fed the poor" . . . probably doesn't have a biblical understanding of sin. But I am repeating myself.

"Finally, I am just going to say it. There is something wrong with a political movement like the Tea Party which is almost all white. Does that mean every member of the Tea Party is racist? Likely not."

Ah, the race card. This objection, which is doubling as a violation of the ninth commandment to boot, is amazing. I confess myself poleaxed and flummoxed. Look at what he is actually saying here. It is not "likely," but obviously still possible, that "every member" of the Tea Party is racist. He says this on the basis of who shows up at open-invitation events? Compare this to the line-up of an invitation only operation . . . here. Heh.

Marvin Olasky has an excellent response to the dust-up between Jim Wallis and Glenn Beck over the issue of "social justice."

Let's review the history: Was "social justice" born as a Catholic term? Yes, Jesuit theologian Luigi Taparelli tried to stem a socialist surge in the 1840s by arguing that religious and civic groups could justly improve living conditions without relying on governmental force.

Did Communists and Nazis flip "social justice" into a promotion of government power? Yes. Communist Party USA leaders instructed me in 1972 and 1973 to use those words. I haven't personally researched Nazi usage, but a leading Nazi sympathizer during the 1930s, radio priest Charles Coughlin, established a National Union for Social Justice and published a million-subscriber magazine, Social Justice. His radio audience of 16 million heard him attacking an "international conspiracy of Jewish bankers."

Do those historical wrinkles mean that the term should not be used? No, but it should certainly be defined. We can study the 150 or so times that mishpat in Hebrew and kreesis in Greek—words commonly translated as "justice"—appear in the Bible. Biblically, justice—tied to righteousness—is what promotes faith in God, not faith in government. Prophets criticized not entrepreneurs but those who combined economic and political power to lord it over others, as today's bureaucrats and corporate/government partnerships tend to do.
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Furthermore, modern usage by liberal preachers and journalists is thoroughly unbiblical: Many equate social justice with fighting a free enterprise system that purportedly keeps people poor but in reality is their best economic hope.

How to respond? I'd suggest four possible ways, one of which is a variant of Beck's: Challenge those who speak of "social justice" in a conventionally leftist way. If your local church is committed to what won't help the poor but will empower would-be dictators, pray and work for gospel-centered teaching. If necessary, find another church.

A second: Try to recapture the term by giving it a 19th- (and 21st?) century small-government twist. The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute are trying to do this. I wish them success.

A third way: Accept the left's focus on systemic problems but not its faulty analysis. Learn about the biggest institutional hindrance to economic advance for the poor: the government's monopoly control of taxpayer funds committed to education and welfare. Work for school vouchers and tax credits that will help many poor children to grow both their talents and their knowledge of God.

Fourth and best: Tutor a child. Visit a prisoner. Help the sick. Follow Christ.

This piece by Jim Wallis is so utterly disingenuous and intellectually dishonest, I both grimace and grin while reading it. It's difficult to take him seriously when he has no idea what he's talking about or is too dishonest to acknowledge the possibility that people might disagree with him for logical and moral reasons. Or am I wrong, is Wallis both charitable and correct?

Here is a good critique of Jim Wallis' recent interview with the Boston Globe.

No matter how you slice it, Wallis is dodging the fundamental moral issue at the bottom of the abortion debate—that a person can kill an innocent human being with the protection of the law at any point during gestation. Wallis’s rhetoric indicates that he thinks he has staked out some “middle place” between the Democrats and the Republicans. In reality, he hasn’t. His position in this interview is no different from the hackneyed line made famous by former President Clinton—that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

Calling on the Democrats to press for a “reduction” in abortions is just plain silly in light of what’s at stake. If abortion really is the taking of innocent human life, does it make any moral sense simply to call for a “reduction” in abortions while keeping it protected in law? It makes about as much sense as calling for a reduction in pedophilia while keeping pedophilia protected in law. The point is that if abortion is an affront to human dignity, then the laws (or Supreme Court decisions) that protect it are immoral and should be overturned. The only moral position is the one that seeks to protect the unborn in law, but apparently Wallis thinks this to be an “extreme” position.

What is perhaps even more astonishing is the fact that Wallis speaks of what “most Americans” want as if it provided some kind of norm. It may be true that most Americans don’t want to outlaw abortion, but it also may be true that most Americans are wrong. It is precisely for this reason that most Americans need to hear a clear word about the moral status of abortion. In other words, they need a prophetic word from Christians about what God thinks about abortion. Does Wallis seriously believe that God occupies the “middle place” on this question?

One thing is certain. God is not indifferent about the slaughter of the innocents. If that is not clear to people now, it will be on the Great Day. Shouldn’t faithful evangelicals be about making this truth plain in advance of that day? If Wallis wants to have a “prophetic voice,” he’ll have to do much better than this. This kind of talk is shamefully anything but prophetic.