[He] Changed my mind

Time bombs blowing dust from within my head.
Between my ears explodes the epistemic bread,
Laying waste to my building blocks, One Rock short,
The newly founded Cornerstone, where all the weary port.
Buckets of debris are cleaned up with a stain,
Blood covered rubble is washed white in a Name.
From the same vein flows now a heritage acclaimed,
Calling to my mind all the bruising, battering, blame.
The great hurricane sucked it up in a flame.
Now a new thing, led by a new Head, aimed,
I'm thinking with a heart under Yahweh's reign.

Christianity and Capitalism - Kingdom building (QUOTATIONS)

Money, Greed, and God: Why capitalism is the solution and not the problem

Again, read this book. The following are my favorite quotations.

Page 7

Despite what you’ve been told, the essence of capitalism is not greed. It’s not even competition, private property, or the pursuit of rational self-interest. These last three items, rightly defined, are key ingredients in any market economy; but the heart of capitalism lies elsewhere.

Page 22

[Regarding Acts 4, and Christians holding possessions in common]

On the surface, this looks like communism. But it’s not. First of all, unlike modern communism, there’s no talk of class warfare here, nor is there any hint that private property is immoral. These Christians are selling their possessions and sharing freely and spontaneously. Second, the state is nowhere in sight. No government is confiscating property and collectivizing industry. No one is being coerced. The church in Jerusalem was just that – the church, not the state.

Page 27-28

God created the world good, but we have fallen. Things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. Each of us bears the effects of sin. No one is immune to those effects. ‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds,’ said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.’

Page 31

[Regarding the Nirvana Myth – See previous post]

But the myth can have subtle effects even if we reject utopian schemes. To avoid its dangers, we have to resist the temptation to compare our live options with an ideal that we can never realize. When we ask whether we can build a just society, we need to keep the question nailed to solid ground: just compared with what? It doesn’t do anyone any good to tear down a society that is unjust’ compared with the kingdom of God if that society is more just than any of the ones that will replace it.

Compared with Nirvana, no real society looks good. Compared with utopia, Stalinist Russia and American at its best will both get bad reviews. The differences between them may seem trivial compared to utopia. That’s one of the grave dangers of utopian thinking: it blinds us to the important differences among the various ways of ordering society.

Page 53

The problem isn’t simply that taxes are too high. After all, not all forms of taxation are unjust. Every government has to collect taxes to fund services beneficial to all – to maintain courts, protect citizens from domestic and foreign predators, enforce traffic law and contracts, and so forth. These government functions stem from our inalienable rights. We have a right to protect ourselves from aggressors, for instance, so we can delegate that right to government. We don’t have the right tot take the property of one person and give it to another. Therefore, we can’t rightfully delegate that function to the state. Delegated theft is still theft.

Using the state to redistribute wealth from one citizen to another is different from general taxation for legitimate governmental functions, such as those enumerated in the U.S. Constitution. Rather than promoting the general welfare, redistribution schemes involve a group of citizens voting to have the government take property from others and give it to them.

Page 94-95

Okay, but what about property? Maybe my intellectual property and diligence and ideas are immaterial, but what about land? Land has a location, boundaries, dirt. That’s matter if anything is. Yes, of course plots of land on the earth’s surface are made of matter. But that’s not what makes them property. ‘Property is not really part of the physical world,’ argues de Soto [Peruvian economist], ‘its natural habitat is legal and economic. Property is about invisible things.’ Although squatters may be able to extract some value out of land they occupy by sleeping there or by planting cash crops that they can quickly harvest to eat or to sell, that land is not their property unless it is represented as part of a formal system that is widely seen as legitimate. ‘Property is not the assets themselves, but a consensus between people as to how those assets are held, used, and exchanged,’ de Soto argues.

Page 120-121

Moreover, unlike Mandeville, Smith didn’t view all our passions as vicious. We may be passionately committed to a just cause, for instance. Still, he saw greed as a vice. So while he agreed with Mandeville that private vices could lead to public goods, he was an ardent critic of the Dutchman: ‘There is,’ he said, ‘another system which seems to take away altogether the distinction between vice and virtue, and of which the tendency is, upon that account, wholly pernicious: I mean the system of Dr. Mandeville.’ You’d never catch Smith endorsing Gordon Gekko.

For Smith, pursuing your self-interest was not in itself immoral. Every second of the day, you act in your own interest. Every time you take a breath, wash your hands, eat your fiber, take your vitamins, clock in at work, look both ways before crossing the street, crawl into bed, take a shower, pay your bills, go to the doctor, hunt for bargains, read a book, and pray for God’s forgiveness, you’re pursuing your self-interest. That’s not just OK. In most cases, you ought to do these things. Only foggy moral pretense confuses legitimate self-interest and selfishness.

Page 128

Money makes entrepreneurial investments possible since it allows the entrepreneur to compare the value of different opportunities using a standard unit of measurement, just as a square foot allows you to compare the size of two plots of land, even if they’re on opposite sides of the planet.

While money represents bonds of trust within a community, an investment is an act of trust that extends into the unknown future. Like the coconuts of the mumi, investments are a gift. Such gifts don’t conform to a selfless ideal, of course, but rather to what anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called the Law of Reciprocity: ‘The essence of giving is not the absence of expectation of return, but the lack of a predetermined return.’ Like gifts, capitalist investments are made without predetermined return.

Many Christian critics of capitalism look at capitalists and see only the superficialities. They notice that entrepreneurs work with money and seek to multiply it. They associate greed with money, money with entrepreneurs, and so greed with entrepreneurs. This simpleminded reasoning fails to distinguish the modern entrepreneur from the medieval miser. Entrepreneurs don’t look at their money but through it to what it can do. The money in hand is a means, not an end, even if one of the possible ends is more money. They risk actual wealth in the hope of multiplying it. They pursue visions; they seek to create something they imagine may fulfill some need or desire…

Page 130-131

In fact, entrepreneurial capitalism requires a whole host of virtues. Before entrepreneurs can invest capital, for instance, they must accumulate it. So unlike gluttons and hedonists, entrepreneurs set aside rather than consume much of their wealth. Unlike misers and cowards, however, they risk rather than hoard what they have saved, providing stability for those employed by their endeavors. Unlike skeptics, they have faith in their neighbors, their partners, their society, their employees, ‘in the compensatory logic of the cosmos.’ Unlike the self-absorbed, they anticipate the needs of others, even needs that no one else may have imagined. Unlike the impetuous, they make disciplined choices. Unlike the automaton, they freely discover new ways of creating and combining resources to meet the needs of others….

Very few critics of capitalism understand this. But the problem isn’t just with the critics. Too often, even the fans of capitalism neglect the entrepreneur, focusing on free markets rather than on free men and women. Adam Smith, for instance, was rightly intrigued by the invisible hand. Most economists have followed Smith preferring to study the measurable market rather than the mysterious man. Too often, elusive entrepreneurs get replaced with simple abstractions like supply and demand. It’s easy to see why this picture is so attractive. If economists can assume that everyone is producing and trading according to something simple like ‘self-interest,’ they have some hope of predicting what will happen in an economy. Everything is account for, and we don’t have to worry about the virtues, vices, and surprises of individual businesspeople. In short, we get capitalism without capitalists.

Page 149

[Regarding Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success]

‘The rise of the West,’ Stark argues, ‘was based on four primary victories of reason’:

1. Faith in progress within Christian theology

2. The way that faith in progress translated into technical and organizational innovations, may of them fostered by monastic estates.

3. The way reason informed both political philosophy and practice to the extent that responsive states, sustaining a substantial degree of personal freedom, appeared in medieval Europe

4. The application of reason to commerce, resulting in the development of capitalism within the safe havens provided by responsive states.

Stark especially identifies the development of systematic theology, ‘formal reasoning about God,’ in Christianity. He argues that such intellectual exercises were not trivial, but eventually led to tangible social progress.

To defend his thesis Stark spends much of his time describing the profound cultural and technological innovations that emerged in the so-called Dark Ages. Despite centuries of bad climate, during this time improved water mills, windmills, horse collars and horseshoes, wheeled plows, chimneys, eyeglasses, clocks, stirrups, the magnetic compass, and may other inventions sprang up. Similarly, education and capitalism emerged not with the Reformation or the Enlightenment, but in medieval monasteries.

Page 150

Stark probably focuses too much on reason. Other Judeo Christian themes clearly contributed to capitalism as well. Here are just a few:

· The idea that God’s creation is good, even if marred by sin

· The idea that private property is right and proper, not a material evil

· The Christian moral code as a whole

· An optimism about the future tempered by the doctrine of original sin—which together encouraged hard work, investment, innovation, limited government, checks and balances, and a distrust of utopian schemes.

Page 165

Contrary to the stereotype, capitalism is not compatible with a vicious populace. Consumerism in particular is actually hostile to capitalism, at least in the long term. Thinkers as diverse as Max Weber and Karl Marx understood that capitalism and overconsumption could not long coexist.

….

Remember, advanced capitalism needs financial habits and institutions that allow wealth to be reinvested so that wealth itself becomes wealth producing. That requires not only that wealth be created, but that some of that wealth be saved rather than consumed. Delaying gratification is restraint; it’s the opposite of gluttony. So consumerism is hostile to capitalist habits and institutions. This is why statistics about consumer spending are not reliable indicators of the long-term health of an economy. Every economy will have consumption. But a sustainable capitalist economy needs large portions of wealth creating, saving, and investing as well.

Page 166-167

[Regarding the case articulated by E. F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful that argues against global capitalism]

Sometimes it makes sense to buy locally. In the summer, I can get the best vine-ripened tomatoes at the Fulton Street farmers’ market about a mile form my house. But applied to everything, the advice to ‘buy local’ ignores most of the lessons of basic economics. If correct, the United States would be better off if we had stayed separate colonies trading goods, services, and capital only within the borders of each colony. And we’d be better off if the individual cities just traded within their borders, and still better off if the neighborhoods—wait—individual families—wait, individuals—just traded with themselves.

Only a few lone survivalist nutcases try to take the local-is-better philosophy to such an extreme, but that’s the logical end of the illogical train. Stopping the illogical train at the state or county level only masks the irrationality, and that only very thinly.

Page 180-181

In The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises points out that the literati often make the mistake of comparing the furniture, art, and architecture available to the aristocracy in previous centuries with mass-produced things that are widely available to the average person now. Capitalism gives many people – the great unwashed – the means to make choices denied earlier generations. By definition, the great unwashed don’t always make refined choices. Lots of people think Domino’s pizza makes for a heck of a good meal. They have neither the time, nor the budget, nor the inclination to find and frequent the local gourmet Italian restaurant. But isn’t it better that they can enjoy Domino’s pizza in heated homes that have to live a subsistence existence where such luxuries are a fantasy? That’s the relevant comparison between past and present.

Critics complain about vulgar popular culture. Much of it is vulgar, of course, but the vulgarity isn’t unique to capitalist countries. And it’s easy to miss the hundreds of well-funded literary societies and libraries and art galleries, the opera houses in larger cities, and theater companies in Midwestern towns, and the symphonies in cities everywhere. In previous centuries, only aristocrats enjoyed such pleasures. Capitalist wealth has made them available to vastly more people.

….

Sure, some things are just ugly. I don’t know anyone who thinks ordinary strip malls and oil refineries are beautiful. But that’s not their purpose. It’s unreasonable to expect every building to satisfy high standards of artistic merit. Uniform aesthetic laws, for, say, grocery stores would jack up the price of many bottom rung of the economic ladder. Sometimes surface beauty takes a backseat to other concerns. That’s OK.

Page 191-192

If we get past the short-term spikes in energy prices and look at the big historical pictures, it quickly becomes clear that energy has grown cheaper and cheaper over time. When England switched from wood to coal, energy became more abundant and energy costs went down. Over the long run, energy has continued to become less scarce and less costly. Think about it. You can get free electricity for your laptop in random outlets in most American airports. Such a thing would have been unimaginable in earlier times, and still is in impoverished regions today.

….

‘The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil.’ [Sheik Yamani, Saudi Arabian oil minister and founder of OPEC]

….

History again and again teaches a basic lesson: the fact that there’s a fixed supply of wood or coal or oil or uranium doesn’t mean that we are doomed to run out of energy supplies. The image conjured up is of some fixed pot of stuff called ‘energy,’ where the big kids are getting more than their fair share. We need to use less so that others can have more. So complains feminist theologian Sallie McFague: ‘We do not love nature or care for two-thirds of the world’s people if we who are 20% of the population use more than 80% of the world’s energy. There is not enough energy on the planet for all people to live as we do (and increasingly, most want to) or for the planet to remain in working order if all try to live this way.’

But what exactly does McFague mean by ‘80% of the world’s energy’? Presumably the ‘world’ refers to the earth, and not the universe. But she can’t be thinking of all the energy in all the earth’s matter. That amount of energy is almost unimaginably high. At any time, we’re using only the tiniest fraction of that. Besides, the earth isn’t a closed system. We get energy from the sun. Thus, she can’t be talking about all the currently feasible energy sources, since there’s a whole lot of uranium, sunlight, wind, waves, and river currents, for instance, that we’re not using for energy. And she’s quantified the total so precisely that she can’t be referring to all the oil, since we don’t know how much oil the earth has.

So she must be referring to the total amount of available energy being produced at the moment. And that one little verb changes the picture entirely, since it begs the question, Who’s producing it? Usable energy isn’t just sitting in a battery somewhere, first-come, first-served. Somebody has to produce it. So unless the energy consumers are stealing from the energy producers, what’s the problem? Some places produce, buy, and consumer more energy than other places. The problem isn’t that some places are able to produce or buy ample energy. The problem is that other places are not.

Page 202

Remember, environmental protection is a costly good. Societies start to worry about the environment once they have solved basic problems of survival. Americans with four-bedroom houses, three square meals, two cars, and one dog are much more likely to fret about recycling, topsoil erosion, and the plight of fish in the local reservoir than are Africans who live in shantytowns. The developing world will become more environmentally conscious if and when it becomes economically wealthier….

Moreover, the wealthier you are, the easier it is to adapt to change. Any change in the economy or the climate is going to hit the poor the hardest because they have the fewest means to adapt. So even if the current warming trend continues and makes it harder on the poor, it’s much wiser for us to help them to become wealthier than to stage quixotic campaigns to regulate civilization back to the Stone Age.

Page 206

We know market economies grow. So why do we often fall for claims that contradict what we already know? Because we forget what late economist Julian Simon called ‘the ultimate resource’—the creative imagination of human beings living in a free society. The more human beings in free society’s there are, the more inventors, producers, problem solvers, and creators there are to transform material resources and to create new resources. Man, not matter, is the ultimate resource.

‘If you want 1 year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want 10 years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people.’ [Chinese proverb]

Page 209-210

The Top Ten Ways to Alleviate Poverty; or, Creating Wealth in Ten Tough Steps

1. Establish and maintain the rule of law.

2. Focus the jurisdiction of government on maintaining the rule of law, and limit its jurisdiction over the economy and the institutions of civil society.

3. Implement a formal property system with consistent and accessible means for securing a clear title to property one owns.

4. Encourage economic freedom: Allow people to trade goods and services unencumbered by tariffs, subsidies, price controls, undue regulation, and restrictive immigration policies.

5. Encourage stable families and other important private institutions that mediate between the individual and the state.

6. Encourage belief in the truth that the universe is purposeful and makes sense.

7. Encourage the right cultural mores—orientation to the future and the belief that progress but not utopia is possible in this life; willingness to save and delay gratification; willingness to risk, to respect the right and property of others, to be diligent, to be thrifty.

8. Instill a proper understanding of the nature of wealth and poverty—that wealth is created, that free trade is win-win, that risk is essential to enterprise, that tradeoffs are unavoidable, that the success of others need not come at your expense, and that you can pursue legitimate self-interest and the common good at the same time.

9. Focus on your competitive advantage rather than protecting what used to be your competitive advantage.

10. Work hard.

Page 214

‘If our present order did not exist we too might hardly believe any such thing could ever be possible, and dismiss any report about it as a tale of the miraculous, about what could never come into being.’ [F. A. Hayek]

Christianity and Capitalism - Kingdom building

I will likely post my favorite quotations from Dr. Jay Richards's 2009 book, Money, Greed, and God: Why capitalism is the solution and not the problem, tomorrow. It's a fantastic read - and only about 200 pages.

In the book he blasts away eight (8) specific myths that have confused men as to the true character of capitalism. These myths are:

1. The Nirvana Myth - contrasting capitalism with an unrealizable ideal rather than with its alternatives
   
2. The Piety Myth - focusing on our good intentions rather than on the unintended consequences of our actions
3. The Zero-Sum Game Myth - believing that trade requires a winner and a loser
4. The Materialist Myth - believing that wealth isn't created, it's simply transferred
5. The Greed Myth - believing that the essence of capitalism is greed
6. The Usury Myth - believing that working with money is inherently immoral or that charging interest on money is always exploitative
   
7. The Artsy Myth - confusing aesthetic judgments with economic arguments
8. The Freeze-Frame Myth - believing that things always stay the same - for example, assuming that population trends will continue indefinitely, or treating a current "natural resource" as if it will always be needed)

If you want to understand capitalism, you need to read this book. If you want to understand why Christians should back capitalism as the best possible mechanism for engendering virtuous economic activity (regardless of sentiments - given that those of most men are immoral), then listen to Richards. You won't be disappointed.

Even those whose arguments he skewers have recommended his book.

Wisdom - It does everybody good

The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes – Derek Kidner

Page 11

But now he must relate it to the world at large, to the scene spread out on every side: from what lies right at his feet (shrewdly pointed out in Proverbs) to what is barely visible at the horizon – the dark riddle of how the world is governed (the book of Job) and how it should be valued (Ecclesiastes).

Proverbs

Page 20

But appeal will be made to the teaching and discipline of both father and mother (Proverbs 1:9; 6:20), and at one point the grandparents come fondly into remembrance as well (4:3). Not only in these early chapters but in every section of the book it is assumed that truth is to be learnt first at home, instilled there with firmness and affection as lessons for the mind and training for the character.

….

The home remains the place from which this teaching emanates, and whatever threatens its integrity is viewed here with profound concern.

….

Two such threats are given special treatment. First, in 1:10-19 (cf. 4:14-19), there is the fatal appeal of the gang to the restlessness of youth.

…

Secondly, there is the more subtle threat of sexual temptation…The point is that she [the temptress] has put herself outside the loyalties and structures of society and the laws of God, and owes her disruptiveness and much of her fascination to that intriguing fact.

Page 23

Or again, she is Lady Bountiful, with everything to give, from riches to honour to righteousness and life itself (Proverbs 3:15-18, 8:18-21, 35); and her feast, like that of the gospel, is for the hungriest and the least promising. “To him who is without sense she says, “Come, east…and drink….Leave…, and live, and walk in the way of insight”’(9:4-6).

Page 45

Proverbs 31:1-9 (The Words of King Lemuel’s mother

This again is a direct address, in the imperative mood. Its vocational emphasis (on kingship, not on general morality) brings it especially close to the pattern of extra-biblical Instructions, since these were addressed to budding administrators, including (in the case of Amenemhet and Merikare) future kings. So, while other hortatory instructions in Proverbs point out the universal perils of loose living (e.g. Proverbs 5 on promiscuous sex; 23:29ff. on drunkenness), and the universal duty of compassion (e.g. 24:11-12), this one puts them in the special context of power and the heightened obligations which it brings. It spells out the principle of Luke 12:48 (‘much given…much required’) with maternal outspokenness!

Job

Page 56

Even in our encounter with Proverbs it emerged that our best and soundest recipes for success can only be provisional, since our management of life is limited by what exists around us, within us, and, decisively, above us. ‘How then can man understand his way?’ (Proverbs 20:24) was a question which even that book of confident answers had to raise at some point.

But in Job, what was no more than a passing cloud in Proverbs now blots out the very sky. Instead of a simple reminder of human ignorance, what faces us here is the urgent problem of divine justice.

Page 61

A closer look at the material shows that the basic error of Job’s friends is that they overestimate their grasp of truth, misapply the truth they know, and close their minds to any facts that contradict what they assume. That being so, if the book is attacking anything its target is not the familiar doctrines of other Scriptures, such as God’s justice and benevolence, his care for the righteous and the punishment of the wicked, or the general law that what one sows one reaps. Rather, it attacks the arrogance of pontificating about the application of these truths, and of thereby misrepresenting God and misjudging one’s fellow men. To put it more positively, the book shows (by its context, the opening scene in heaven) how small a part of any situation is the fragment we see; how much of what we do see we ignore or distort through preconceptions; and how unwise it is to extrapolate from our elementary grasp of truth.

Job’s well-meaning comforters demonstrate the force of this by straying ever further from reality as they pursue their fixed ideas of suffering as punitive or, at best, purgative. Shocked, instead of shaken, by Job’s denials that his suffering is deserved, they pass from gentle probings for some hidden sin, to stern rebukes for his intemperate language (e.g. Job 15), and finally inventing a fictitious catalogue of crimes for him (22:5ff.). To reinforce this, they paint idealized pictures of a world of prosperous saints and destitute sinners, brushing aside all contrary examples. And to magnify God’s holiness they are driven to adding to it the element of royal disdain, so that he distrusts the very angels, finds fault with the starry skies, and regards humanity as worms and maggots (15:15f.; 25:5f.). Small wonder that in the epilogue God charges them with folly and slander (42:8).

Ecclesiastes

Page 93

The Book as Qoheleth’s Challenge to the Secularist

G.S. Hendry has expressed this view as follows:

‘Qoheleth writes from concealed premises, and his book is in reality a major work of apologetic or ‘eristic’ theology. Its apparent worldliness is dictated by its aim: Qoheleth is addressing the general public whose view is bounded by the horizons of this world; he meets them on their own ground, and proceeds to convict them of its inherent vanity…His book is in fact a critique of secularism and of secularized religiong.’

Looked at in this way, the shafts of light that we have noticed are signals to the reader that the author’s own position and conclusions are very different from those of the secularist, in whose shoes he is standing for the purpose of his thesis. Without these signals and their final confirmation (12:13-14) the book would simply preach despair, or at best a mere whistling in the dark. But with them, it is saying that the abyss of final vanity is the destination of every road but one.

Page 96

Judge of All

This is double-edged. It has its terror for the wicked (8:13) and its warning for the exuberant (11:9), and there are moments when it could be simply reminding us that all things alike are under a death sentence (3:17 ff.). But in the context of life’s injustices and apparent lack of meaning, the fact that justice will at last be done (8:10-13; 12:14) is not bad news but good. As I have remarked elsewhere, in Ecclesiastes we have faced ‘the appalling inference that nothing has meaning, nothing matters under the sun. It is then that we can hear, as the good news which it is, that everything matters – “for God will bring every deed into judgment…”’.

Page 100

As J.S. Whale put it in a notable Cambridge Lecture, ‘If death means that all is over and there is nothing more, it is life which is pervaded with tragic irrationality. Every column in the great human tot-book adds up to precisely the same result, Zero.’

….

Two turns of speech, however, keep reminding us that these modest pleasures are not goals to live for, but bonuses or consolations to be gratefully accepted. First, they are ‘from the hand of God’, and to be taken as such with a clear conscience (‘for God has already approved what you do’, 9:7; i.e., as the author of these joys he has shown his pleasure in them). This is very different from a defiant hedonism. Secondly – and this is the other ‘constant’ in Qoheleth’s thought – these joys, however innocent, are passing, like all else that is ‘under the sun’. So they too are subject to ‘vanity’. There can be not pretence that they are more than palliatives, brightening ‘the few days of (one’s) life’, the ‘vain life which he has given you under the sun’ (5:18; 9:9).

Page 101

The common-sense sayings are too numerous to be simply foils for the occasional paradox or dark thought. Their role is positive and bracing: to show that there is much that can be done by plain good sense, since all too many of our troubles are of our own making. Just as the brevity of life is no reason to reject its joys (as we have seen), so its blows and hazards are no argument against using our intelligence to mitigate them. The only proviso is that we treat this as a mitigation, not an answer. The deeper questions remain.

Page 103

Two questions, if not three, arise here. First, do Qoheleths, own words end with verse 8? The way they echo his opening suggests this strongly, and the commending of his work to the reader in verses 9-12 has the sound of a new voice (compare verse 10 with John 21:24b). The remaining verses are no less authoritative, as canonical Scripture, for that.

Secondly, does ‘Vanity of vanities’ cancel the positive thrust of ‘Remember your Creator’ and the equally positive ‘end of the matter’ in verses 13-14? To answer this we should notice that such a sequence is typical of Qoheleth’s overall method, which is to present a prevailing picture of earthly futility and tragedy, almost (yet not wholly) unrelieved by any glimmer of light. Where other writers would commend the light to us directly, Qoheleth does it by making the darkness intolerable, allowing the light only the rarest gleam to provoke the observant into second thoughts. ‘Remember your Creator’ is, apart from the clear daylight of the epilogue, the last of these moments before the clouds close in again; and on this occasion Qoheleth is explicit in his warning that they will indeed close in, and his appeal for right relationship with God before they do.

But this leads to the third question, namely what answer even such a relationship can give to a prospect of universal death. Qoheleth, by insisting that God is a judge of every act (8:11-13) and every man (3:17), brings eternity to bear on us, even though time, without that dimension, destroys us. It follows that nothing is meaningless, for God assesses it; and no-one is forgotten, however short may be the human memory.

This is exceedingly far-reaching. Nothing less than this can answer the nihilism, the ‘vanity of vanities’, with which Qoheleth faithfully confronts the merely earthbound. If every act, every person, matters to the eternal God, man can play his part in earnest. Nothing will go unregarded, unremembered or unvalued. But beyond this Qoheleth will not venture. To the question of whether human death has any different sequel from that of animals his answer is, ‘Who knows?’ (3:21), and this must control the meaning we assign to 12:7, ‘the spirit returns to God who gave it’. As in Psalm 104:29-30, it will speak only of the breath, or spirit (ruah, as here), which God lends to man and beast alike.

Page 104

‘The end of the matter’ (12:13-14) makes no breakthrough into such a hope [eternal life], but it does bring into full view what has earlier been glimpsed only fitfully and, for the most part, in deep shadow. Now the fear of God emerges as not merely man’s duty (that word has been supplied by translators) but as his very raison d’être; and the judgment of God has, as it must have, the last word.

Qoheleth’s summarizer has not failed his author.

[per footnote: Strictly the phrase in 12:13b means ‘for this is every man’ – a concentrated way of saying, “every man is destined for, and show be wholly absorbed in, this – A.H. McNeile, An Introduction to Ecclesiastes, p. 94]

Page 115

Thus Qoheleth holds up the mirror to man, showing him the transience of his work and the fact that God’s works alone endures. This is the corrective which man needs to his perennial conviction that he can make unlimited progress; for until the end of the age and the break-in of God’s full reign, Paul’s words in Romans 8:20ff still apply to us. But whereas Qoheleth can only say that God’s work alone will last, Paul proclaims that God has acted in Christ, and that the groaning and travail of the present age will not be in vain.

Comparing the three

Page 116

Between them, the three books clearly cover three aspects of existence which no-one can afford to overlook: the demands of practical good management; the enigma of calamities that are beyond control or explanation; and the tantalizing hollowness and brevity of human life.

Page 122

Qoheleth’s godly ‘Yes’ on this point, whatever contradictions the present vanity may suggest, must be given eventually the last word – which means that his book will end, through the inspired insight of his editor, where Proverbs had begun: with the fear of the LORD God who weighs up every deed and motive. The Alpha of Proverbs has become the Omega of Ecclesiastes.

Page 123

For all his questionings, he has no quarrel with conservative wisdom, as long as it is not the means of hiding from us the darker facts of life which it is his mission to expose.

Some international reflections

Page 128

Thou shouldst not supervise (too closely) thy wife when thou knowest that she is efficient. Do not say to her: ‘Where is it? Fetch (it) for us!’ when she has put (it) in the (most) useful place…Recognize her abilities. How happy it is when they hand is with her! Many…do not know what a man should do to stop dissension in his house… [Ani (ANET, p. 421a)

Page 129

Do not marry a prostitute, whose husbands are legion,...

When you have trouble, she will not support you,

When you have a dispute she will be a mocker.

There is no reverence or submissiveness in her….

…She pricks up her ears for the footsteps of another man [ANET, p. 595b]

Page 131

Strong words from schoolmasters:

Spend no day in idleness or thou wilt be beaten. The ear of a boy is on his back, and he hearkens when he is beaten. [Pap. Lansing 19f. (Caminos, p. 377)]

Advice to parents:

My son, withhold not they son from stripes: for the beating of a boy is like manure to a garden, and like rope to an ass. [Ahikar 2:22 (Charles, p. 732)]

The final chapter - the abolition of man

Chapter 3 – “The Abolition of Man”

Page 67

From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Page 68

Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have preordained how they are to use them.

Page 70

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.

Page 73-74

To some it will appear that I am inventing a factitious difficulty for my Conditioners. Other, more simple-minded, critics may ask “Why should you suppose they will be such bad men?” But I am not supposing them to be bad men?” They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what “Humanity” shall henceforth mean. “Good” and “bad,” applied to them, are words without content: for it is from them that the content of these words is henceforward to be derived. Nor is their difficulty factitious. We might suppose that it was possible to say “After all, most of us want more or less the same things – food and drink and sexual intercourse, amusement, art, science, and the longest possible life for individuals and for the species. Let them simply say, This is what we happen to like, and go on to condition men in the way most likely to produce it. Where’s the trouble?” But this will not answer. In the first place, it is false that we all really like the same things. But even if we did, what motive is to impel the Conditioners to scorn delights and live laborious days in order that we, and posterity, may have what we like? Their duty? But that is only the Tao, which they may decide to impose on us, but which cannot be valid for them. If they accept it, then they are no longer the makers of conscience but still its subjects, and their final conquest over Nature has not really happened.

Page 75-76

The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure. I am not here speaking of the corrupting influence of power nor expressing the fear that under it our Conditioners will degenerate. The very words corrupt and degenerate imply a doctrine of value and are therefore meaningless in this context. My point is that those who stand outside all judgments of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse. We may legitimately hope that among the impulses which arise in minds thus emptied of all “rational” or spiritual” motives, some will be benevolent. I am very doubtful myself whether the benevolent impulses, stripped of that preference and encouragement which the Tao teaches us to give them and left to their merely natural strength and frequency as psychological events, will have much influence. I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently. I am inclined to think that the Conditioners will hate the conditioned. Though regarding as an illusion the artificial conscience which they produce in us their subjects, they will perceive that it creates in us an illusion of meaning for our lives which compares favourably with the futility of their own: and they will envy us as eunuchs envy men.

Page 76

At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely “natural” – to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.

Page 78

We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected…

Page 79

The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psycho-analyse her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.

Page 80

It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, our selves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere “natural object” and his judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will.

Page 81

Traditional values are to be “debunked” and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it.

….

The belief that we can invent “ideologies” at pleasure…begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are “potential officer material.”

Page 82

Nothing that I can say will prevent some people form describing this lecture as an attack on science. I deny the charge, of course: and real Natural Philosophers (there are some now alive) will perceive that in defending value I defend inter alia the value of knowledge, which must die like every other when its roots in the Tao are cut.

Page 83-84

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious – such as digging up and mutilating the dead.

Page 86-87

To reduce the Tao to a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on “explaining away” for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on “seeing through” things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.

Feeling God's Presence in Hell

Hell. Some people say a lot about it without saying much. Some people think they live there now. Some people say it's a place. Others say it doesn't exist. One famous man said it was a small location on the floor in a vast paradise. Another slightly less-famous man said it was a place where God doesn't exist.

Can you disbelieve something out of existence? No? Then if Hell is a real place, disbelieving that it is a real place doesn't shove it under any cosmic rug - at least not effectively, and not for long.

There are doctrines in the religion that follows the teachings of Jesus and his interpretation of the set of writings called the Old Testament (OT for short and Jewish Bible for the technical people). Doctrines are authoritative beliefs or systems of beliefs. Thus, the doctrines of which I speak are considered authoritative by those who follow in agreement and do the things that Jesus' words demand they do. They arise from the followers' understanding and application of the OT and the New Testament (Jesus' teachings directly to followers and indirectly through followers).

One of those doctrines relates to the character of God. The belief asserts that God is omnipresent. That mean that God is everywhere present, or everywhere all at once. Negatively, this could be stated as: there is no place where God is not. Why is this believed? Without expounding more at the moment, I will invoke the doctrine (authoritative belief) that the Bible, being the infallible, inerrant Word of God, must be our guide. As God can only be known by what He reveals about Himself, His words about Himself are doubly authoritative. And, this is what His Word says about Him in regard to His "present-ness:"

Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the LORD. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 23:24 ESV)

And

Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.
(Psalm 139:7-12 ESV)

As one can see from these words, the first passage coming as from God Himself through a prophet and the second passage as from one of His servants speaking about Him in thankfulness, God is everywhere at all times. Men cannot hide from Him. In the beginning He was everywhere when nothing was anywhere. And, what He created (heavens and earth) He filled. One cannot escape God. Ever.

In fact, all creation exists because God upholds it. He holds it all together. The visible and invisible things are His, and they wouldn't exist or be sustained if He didn't hold them together.

It might be said of a great athlete after a challenging victory that he "willed his team to win." The idea behind the statement is that the player did everything in his power to triumph. In a similar way (though such greater magnitude as to make dissimilarity the rule), without God's willing, there would be nothing, and it would be good - because that would be God's will. But, that's not God's will. God's will is that there be something, and that something is God's revelation of Himself. In that revelation is the triumph of God over evil. In that triumph, evil finds the abode God created for it: Hell. Is evil in the will of God? Yes, in so far that it is always His will to crush it.

What is Hell a demonstration of? God's will. How? God is just. That means that God is morally perfect. In decision-making, God chooses best. He does not treat anyone unfairly either by giving them more than they deserve or by cheating them out of what they deserve. And what do men deserve? Lots of things. What don't men deserve, universally? God's favor.

In the beginning, nothing evil had its way. The only one who understood what evil was was God. What is evil? It's whatever opposes God's will. Some have called evil the absence of God, but that's false. God is never absent, and yet evil exists in practice. Evil practiced exists in God's presence at times, and by His presence I mean that Jesus walked the earth among evil people. I mean that God sees all of it happening and has seen it all happen from the beginning. I say times because evil in not practice by everyone everywhere all the time, and not forever. In the beginning evil didn't have a say. In the end, it won't again.

Then what is Hell all about? It's about justice.

What did God offer His undeserving creation in the beginning? Everything good.

What did God deny His undeserving creation in the beginning? Everything harmful.

What was man's response in the beginning to God's protection and grace? A cliff-dive onto a jagged rock.

What's justice in this case? What's fair for the man or woman or child or wrinkly-man who says to God's undeserved offer of everything good - and offer of infinite proportions because God offers Himself as the little boy's friend, as His Comforter in all ways for all time, as His Lord and Counselor for everything, as His Savior Who suffered God-sized anger and fury for the boy's own rejection of that "everything good?" Logically, if God is fair, then it would have to be a "punishment meets the crime" situation. It would have to be of the same scope and of the same magnitude. It would take into account the facts that God was merciful in giving what that boy didn't deserve and whatever the boy knew or didn't know. And, the boy's account of even that wouldn't be the testimony accepted. God, because He knows everything, would provide the reliable testimony of what the boy knew or didn't know. And, God's decision would be right.

Here's the rub: God has already told us that justice is going to mean Hell for everyone who chooses against Him. How do we know that that's the fair decision? First, God decided. Second, He was merciful enough to tell us in advance.

This world isn't the best possible world. We know that because there still exists an active will at-large that opposes God's will. But, this world is the best possible world on the way to the best of all possible worlds. What's going to happen at the end, with that next world?

Evil won't be active. Evil will be a failure, a loser.

We forget that infinity is a lot longer than 100 years. Philosophers complain about God's goodness because bad things happen. It seems that they should wonder more about why bad things started to happen only after man was created, but that's another post. Nonetheless, God is good. And, He took it upon Himself to create a world where He could reveal Who He is in relation to things and ways that He is not.

God is not needy. Before He created, God needed nothing. Thus, the creation wasn't an experiment for Him to try and meet His needs.

Let's think of some characteristics of God that cannot be demonstrated - though still existent - without creation. I can think of two: mercy and wrath. God is not merciful toward Himself. He needs nothing He doesn't possess already. God is not wrathful toward Himself. His self-judgment entails praise. But, would God still have anger and wrath for all things that oppose His will (evil) even in the Trinity before creation? Yes, because God doesn't change. He's the same yesterday, today, and forever.

So, again, why Hell? To show His character. That He opposes with justice all things that oppose Him, and that He triumphs over those things and those people, forever. Such total victory is only fair.

What about God's presence and Hell? Is He gone from that place (putting aside the fact that if and since it's a creation, then it cannot exist without God sustaining it)?

It's where God's justice abounds - as does everyplace. But, in Hell, God's mercy and grace are absent. Why? It's surely fair, because mercy and grace are, by definition undeserved. Perhaps, the best answer is that the boy, the girl, the man, the wife, the grandmother rejected God's grace and mercy. They said that they didn't want it. Now how is God supposed to take that? He answers in accordance with all truth.

‘depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ (Matthew 7:23 ESV)

You can be sure that Jesus says that in a way that no one wants to hear it said of them. That it entails the loss of favor. That it precedes the subject of the declaration being in a far graver situation than he was before.

Perhaps it's uncommon knowledge that God is every man's worst enemy. That probably sounds crazy, but it's true. Outside of the free gift of salvation (that's what it is called when the enemy-status you have is changed to friend-status and even offspring-status in God's book of genealogical record-keeping), every man is God's enemy, because every man chooses against God's will (evil). Every man does that. We were all born with a propensity to do that. Our people have been doing that from the beginning.

Only one man didn't do that. His name is Jesus of Nazareth. He is God's Son. He came from Heaven. He made Himself be born of a virgin Jewish girl. He lived perfectly. He's the only man to not be God's enemy, because He lived as a Son of God should live. Perfectly. He never opposed His Father's will.

Then He chose to die, though He deserved to live. He suffered a brutal, horrible death. But, the physical torture he endured isn't what I'm talking about. He agreed with His Father that He would take the punishment that all men forever, before him and after him, deserved for breaking God's Law - for rejecting His grace since the beginning. Jesus agreed to suffer on their behalf and satisfy God's wrath against their opposing will (which rejected God's good gifts). You see, God had to punish men for that, otherwise, how could He be just? He knew the didn't choose right. He couldn't turn a blind eye. This is why it is accepted that Satan, the accuser, could accuse before Jesus came. It wasn't revealed that God was just and Justifier, because people did evil and it didn't appear that God punished them justly. After Jesus suffered for all men on that Roman cross, however, it was apparent that Jesus was God's display of justice in showing grace to all men. What men couldn't do to reconcile themselves to God, Jesus did. Thus, in a nutshell, that's how we can see that man is God's enemy unless he believes in Jesus - believing that Jesus did what the Scriptures testify to Him as doing, repenting (turning away from) of former opposing-will activities, and replacing such activities with obedience to His commandments.

So, what's worse? Knowing that your worst enemy (God) is leaving you alone forever? Or, that your worst enemy (God) is coming after you? Justice demands the second to be true, as the first would be merciful and therefore unjust (having none to deserve that justice - whereas Jesus earns the mercy of salvation for those who trust and believe in Him so they may be counted just). Whew!

Hell: a place where God continually shows His triumph against the opposing forces with a strong hand that never grows weary, where God is ever-present with unlimited and indefensible justice, justice that's ever fresh and sweet for His people and ever lamented and bemoaned by His foes, where God's face in Christ shines so bright in fury that it explodes with intensity against the ungrateful, like a scorching east wind that never dies. As it it written:

And another angel, a third, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God's wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.”
(Revelation 14:9; Revelation 14:10-11 ESV)

For those who say that Hell is where God's presence isn't, they don't understand justice.

A meeting of men

Lewis, Clive S. The Chronicles of Narnia. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

On Three Ways of Writing for Childrenˆ

Page 778

Once in a hotel dining-room I said, rather too loudly, “I loathe prunes.” “So do I,” came an unexpected six-year-old voice from another table. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny. That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities. Of the far higher and more difficult relations between child and parent or child and teacher, I say nothing.