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How Shall the Godly Respond to Passing on Affluence?

Monday, October 29, 2007

I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me. With me are riches and honor, enduring wealth and prosperity. My fruit is better than fine gold; what I yield surpasses choice silver. I walk in the way of righteousness, along the paths of justice, bestowing a rich inheritance on those who love me and making their treasuries full.

Proverbs 8:17-21

The biblical wisdom literature makes it abundantly plain, as does the rest of the entire Bible, that it is God alone who grants both wealth and blessing. There are numerous ways to get wealth but the way of godly gain is by seeking God, and the way of his righteousness, alone. And those who are given wealth by God will usually have an inheritance to give at the end of their lives. This is summed up quite well in these words: “But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors as it is today” (Deuteronomy 8:18).

I have been thinking a great about the theology of wealth over the past two or three years. I have also been immersed in a discussion of the subject, with about twenty Christian businessmen and women, for the past two days at the Kuyper Business Summit in San Diego, sponsored by the Center for Cultural Leadership. I have become convinced that the Church has little or no balanced understanding, in the pulpit or the pew, about this subject. We either feel that seeking wealth is inherently wrong, and then deal with the attendant guilt feelings that come with generating wealth, or we promote a “health and wealth” theology that stresses great wealth as the personal promise of God for every Christian who knows how to ask and receive by faith. Both are failed ideas theologically and thus badly distorted when applied to daily living.

Wealth is the blessing of God! He alone gives it. To some he grants the ability to gain wealth for his glory. This, in itself, means much more than merely attaining wealth so you can support your family and then give large sums to charity. (These are both good goals but not the whole picture!) Some are clearly called to make wealth as a divine calling. Indeed, I am convinced that many businessmen and women are so called by God to produce wealth but the Church has been of little or no help in creating the right context and support for this to actually happen in the right way. An alternative theology to these two extremes is to be found in the work of the Dutch Calvinist Abraham Kuyper, thus the name of the very event I am attending. Serious readers should explore Kuyper’s thought on this matter. John Schneider’s outstanding book, The Good of Affluence (Eerdmans), should also be a must read for serious consideration of this important subject. (Schneider is a professor at Calvin and presents, by far and away, the best short volume on this subject in our time.)

Posted by John H. Armstrong in Bible and Theology at 07:52 | Comments (5) | Trackback

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affluence, bible and theology, wealth

Giving and the Rise of Volunteerism

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Whenever an ex-president releases a new book there is considerable buzz in the media. When Bill Clinton released a new book in Chicago this week the buzz was more than considerable. President Clinton’s new book, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World (Knopf 2007), is sure to provoke good and important discussion. My hope is that those who love him, as well as those who despise him for whatever reason, will take a long look at his central argument (even it they refuse to buy his book). The argument he makes is simple and he uses stories to make it—each of us can make an important difference in the world, a much greater difference than we’ve ever imagined.

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Posted by John H. Armstrong in Effective Compassion at 12:31 | Leave a comment | Trackback

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bill clinton, charity, christianity, effective compassion, giving, volunteerism

A Labor Day Benediction

Monday, September 3, 2007

Labor Day is one of those special American holidays that we all enjoy. We mark the end of summer by it, though fall doesn’t begin for several more weeks. This is the time we get back into our non-summer routines and school is now in session for most students and teachers. It is also a time for one final long weekend.

In the liturgy of my own church the benediction from yesterday’s worship said it well:

In the name of Jesus Christ, the carpenter’s son, let your labors be for the glory of God and for the common good.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Mary’s son, let all of your living be for love.

In the name of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, let our labor not be for a paycheck but for a world changed by God’s love and justice.

May God, Creator of the universe, maker and shaper of all things, bless you labor as well as your rest. May the Son of God, the son of a carpenter, bless all of the work that you do. May the Holy Spirit, ever working for the new creation, bless your service and keep you in God’s purpose, now and forevermore.

Amen!

I am reminded, by such a solid and theologically based expression of prayer, of just how weak my own childhood tradition was in handling the question of work done by Christians. There were at least three examples of this that are common to evangelical Pietism. (1) Work is only a means to an end, make money so that you can pay the bills and serve God in other ways. Many Christian conservatives still teach this in various forms. (2) Labor unions, and various expressions of work solidarity, are wrong. Christians should submit to their employers in such a manner that all efforts to improve working conditions are seen as a waste of time, if not outright rebellion. (3) Work is entirely secular, thus far less important, than ministry, mission or evangelism, which are all seen as sacred.

Don’t you think that the liturgical benediction expresses a much better approach to labor and rest?

John H. Armstrong is founder and director of ACT 3, a ministry aimed at “encouraging the church, through its leadership, to pursue doctrinal and ethical reformation and to foster spiritual awakening.” His home blog is located here.

Posted by John H. Armstrong in Bible and Theology at 21:25 | Leave a comment | Trackback

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Evaluating the New Sanctuary Movement

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Across America a group of Christians have banded together to promote a movement to protect illegal aliens from deportation. This is not a new phenomenon at all. What is a little different, at least about some aspects of this renewal of an older movement, is that it has now focused primarily on protecting Mexicans, who are living illegally in the U. S., from deportation. A celebrated case is unfolding day-by-day here in Chicago so I hear a great deal about this on a regular basis. I am not entirely sure how to think about the movement or this particular case. (As is true with many similar issues there seems to be no simple, single, obvious answer.) I see some things clearly here but then there are some issues that seem less clear to me.

The Chicago story is a pretty straightforward sanctuary case. Elvira Arellano, 32, came to America as an undocumented Mexican alien in 1997 to find work. She was deported shortly thereafter and then returned and worked at several different jobs, including child care. She moved to Illinois in 2000 because she had friends in Chicago. Here she took a job cleaning planes at O’Hare International Airport. While she was in the U. S. illegally she got pregnant and had a son, Saul, who is now eight years old. This means Elvira’s son Saul is a U.S. citizen by virtue of his birth place. Elvira was arrested in 2002 at O’Hare and later convicted of working under a false Social Security number. Last August, 2006, she was to surrender to authorities but decided to take refuge inside a Methodist church in Chicago. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials consider her a fugitive because she failed to surrender for deportation.

Elvira now intends to leave her sanctuary at the Methodist Church and lobby Congress for immigration reform, even if it means she will be arrested and deported. She says that if she is deported her son will stay in the U.S. Her plans for D.C. are to pray, with a group of immigration rights people, for eight hours on the National Mall on September 12th. Her supporters have invited others to join her in prayer and to participate in a boycott from work, school and shopping on that specific date. However, on Monday, August 20, she was taken into custody in Sacramento, choosing to come out of her church Chicago sanctuary sooner than she had at first stated. Deportation plans are now in the works as of today.

The proposal that Elvira supports by her efforts is one that says there must be immigration reform which would include a safe-harbor visa program for illegal immigrants parents who have U. S. citizen children and a five-year temporary visa for those who qualify under national security standards. She adds, “Families should not be separated. I understand fear because I fear being torn from the arms of my son.”

Consider this issue as dispassionately as possible. (I doubt this can be done by most of us if we are really, really honest.)

Update: Arellano has been deported to Mexico. Read Brooke Levitske’s July 11 Acton commentary on the New Sanctuary Movement here. -- Ed.

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Posted by John H. Armstrong in Effective Compassion at 08:56 | Comments (14) | Trackback

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chicago, effective compassion, elvira arellano, new sanctuary movement

The Global Warming Debate: Yada, Yada, Yada

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

I am not a prophet, not even a futurist. I do study trends, now and then, and I try to pay careful attention to popular culture. One thing I am quite sure about: global warming will be a central issue in public debates and political campaigns for some time to come. It has become the Apocalypse Now issue of our generation. (Overpopulation, the nuclear threat and global cooling did it only a few decades ago.) The simple premise, virtually unchallenged in many places, is that we are all destroying the planet. If we do not stop it now we are doomed to wreak havoc everywhere and kill millions of animals and people. Only calloused, cold-hearted, paleo-cons would be willing to battle such “hard” scientific facts and not support all moral efforts to save the earth.

Just last week Newsweek, generally a fairly moderate news source, had a cover story that provided a first-class object lesson about this debate. The story reduced the battle to one between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” and you can easily guess who is who without even reading the story. With righteous indignation (Is there any other kind in this debate?) Newsweek argued that there is a well-funded, anti-scientific “denial machine” at work in America that is determined to stop all serious attempts to solve this crisis. This machine is driven by money from oil companies and by loony-tunes conservatives who are driven by the almighty dollar. (Don’t look now but many profit-driven companies are getting on the global warming bandwagon because they read the signs of the times and intend to make a good profit by the scare itself! Check out Archer Daniel Midlands and look at their future plans for development sometime.)

In a great op-ed in this week’s edition of Newsweek (August 22) Robert J. Samuelson noted that “Newsweek’s cover story on global warming was a wonderful read, but misrepresented a very complicated and intractable problem.” Well, hooray for Newsweek for including this excellent rebuttal piece. That is more than I can say for many publications on the left or the right. Makes me want to keep getting the magazine really.

Samuelson demonstrates the complications in this debate by showing that there really is no cabal driving this issue at all. Newsweek, he shows plainly, has treated this story very sympathetically since way back in 1988, with numerous cover stories over the years speaking about “the dangers” and why we all should be “worried” about the planet. In 1989 a Gallup Poll found that 63% of Americans worried “a great deal or a fair amount” about global warming while in 2007 the number rose to 65%. (I am surprised it is not a lot higher actually.)

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Posted by John H. Armstrong in Environmental Stewardship at 11:31 | Comments (9) | Trackback

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climate change, environmental stewardship, global warming

Markets and Their Importance to the Electorate

Thursday, August 2, 2007

I have argued for many years now that free markets are intrinsically good. I have tried to engage this issue with Christians but many are either not interested or do not see any importance in the pursuit. I know markets can become bad masters when people lack virtue. I also know that the alternatives to free markets have littered the twentieth century with more death than any single cause in human history. (Think socialism, fascism and Marxism.) And representative democracy, a republic of just laws, is not perfect either but it sure beats the alternatives. Shared power is always better than control by the one or the few. Social engineering and economic planning by an elite and powerful few strips us of both human dignity and true freedom.

Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University, is the author of a new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Politics, that has a significant bearing on how we should think about the political side of economic concerns in America. Professor Caplan concludes, in words that are not at all comforting to me personally, that most Americans cast their votes on the basis of irrational biases about economics. This, he reasons, is why candidates who oppose free markets, free trade, profits and immigration win. Sadly, I am quite sure that he is right about this point.

Creators Syndicate writer John Stossel, in reviewing the professor’s new book, says: “People tend to acquire wrong opinions about economic policy packaged in worldviews they inherited while growing up.” Since people resist, and often strongly, having their own worldview challenged or changed they will vote for those candidates who make them feel good. Stossel concludes that this means “They will vote irrationally.” I have long sensed that this was true on an intuitive level but the professor’s argument tends to fortify what I had only sensed but not quite had a handle on how to argue my case well. Simply put, most voters see no compelling reason to vote otherwise since their choices in elections bear no direct consequence on their lives, at least as they understand their lives. Gloomily Stossel concludes, “When irrationality is free, people will indulge their biases.”

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Posted by John H. Armstrong at 13:27 | Comment (1) | Trackback (1)

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A Weekend Emergent Village Experience

Monday, July 23, 2007

This weekend’s Midwest Emergent Gathering, held July 20-21 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, was an event that I enjoyed participating in immensely. I was invited, by my friend Mike Clawson of up/rooted (Chicago), to answer several questions in a plenary session. I was billed as a friendly “outsider.” We laughed about this designation since many of my critics now assume that I am a “heretical insider” to Emergent. The truth is that neither is totally true. I am not so much a part of this movement, at least not in any recognizable or formal way, as I am a real friend of all things missional that sincerely address the basic questions that I feel very strongly must be faced by Christians within Western culture.

It is a basic fact that the church regularly reduces the gospel, to something less or other than than the gospel, in its various attempts to translate the good news into a faithful witness within any culture. This is true in Asia, Latin America and Africa as well. (Witness the cover story of the current Christianity Today on the impact of the prosperity gospel in Africa, where the greatest church growth is also taking place.) This does not mean the church is no longer the church. It does mean reformation is always necessary, thus the faithful church must be semper reformanda, always reforming. This realization grows out of a sober view of the humanity of the church. (The church is a divine organism with the life of Christ in it but it is also very human at the same time.) But many conservative Christians, especially if they are over forty, tend to think serious criticism of the church, or questioning the ways Christians think and believe (epistemology), is tantamount to arrogance and undermining the faith itself. Because I want to open a wide discussion of epistemology (i.e., the ways that we know what is true and not true) I am routinely questioned about whether I still believe in truth at all. When I say that I clearly and strongly do believe in the truth then I am then called a liar, or given some similar flattering insightful response.

(Continue reading the rest of the article at the John H. Armstrong blog...)

John H. Armstrong is founder and director of ACT 3, a ministry aimed at “encouraging the church, through its leadership, to pursue doctrinal and ethical reformation and to foster spiritual awakening.”

Posted by John H. Armstrong in Bible and Theology at 12:09 | Leave a comment | Trackback

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christianity, emerging church, theology

Americans Giving at Record Numbers

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Charitable giving in America has risen for the third consecutive year. The picture behind this recent report is rather interesting. Due to the absence of natural disasters, both nationally and internationally, large giving to major relief projects declined. Giving to human services also fell. The giving of corporate America rose only 1.5%. But in a shift from previous years giving to the arts and to cultural and humanities organizations grew rather significantly. The lion’s share of giving is still done by individuals, not by foundations, bequests and corporations. In fact, individual giving was about four times the amount given by all of these other sources combined, demonstrating once again that when individuals have the freedom to gain wealth they are enabled to share. But, as always, the largest percentage of giving was not among the rich. (This comment is not one meant to oppose affluence since there are several reasons why this remains true, and not all of these reasons suggest that the rich are universally uncharitable in the least. There is not a simple pattern here to explain this fact.)

(Continue reading the rest of the article at the John H. Armstrong blog...)

John H. Armstrong is founder and director of ACT 3, a ministry aimed at “encouraging the church, through its leadership, to pursue doctrinal and ethical reformation and to foster spiritual awakening.”

Posted by John H. Armstrong in Effective Compassion at 12:12 | Leave a comment | Trackback

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The Cause and Cure of Poverty

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

What causes poverty? The question presently plagues many serious Christian thinkers and leaders. The answers vary but the proposed solutions are the stuff of our political campaigns every four years. We can already hear the discussion from the various candidates for the presidency in 2008, both Republican and Democrat. One candidate, John Edwards, actually wants to make poverty a major issue in the next election, maybe as important as the Iraq War. He openly presents his version of a solution and thus makes it a major part of his stump speech these days.

Many Christians, who think about these kinds of questions, will argue that poverty can not be solved in a free-market context. They believe the problem is economic since capitalism is fundamentally rooted in greed. The idea here is quite simple. The rich have all the wealth, they are the ones who create the products, make the money and drive the markets. The poor suffer all the more when this happens. Because capitalism has this perceived inherent flaw it will always, or at least ultimately, foster huge inequities in income and create greater poverty. These inequities will actually increase grinding poverty for millions of people, making things even worse for more poor people as the wealthy class grows. Since the percentage of monetary growth in the present economy shows the rich are getting richer and the poor and middleclass are gaining ground by a much smaller percentage this seems to favor these kinds of arguments against capitalism. (I will not get into this issue in this article, but there are different answers to this question that are both appropriate and sound.)

In 1981 author and political advisor, George Gilder, wrote a huge best-seller, Wealth & Poverty. This popular book influenced a new generation. It did so by challenging the “greed thesis” at its core. I have always admired George Gilder. I realized back in the 1980s that it was his thinking that powerfully influenced the Reagan administration to adopt what became known as Reaganomics, a much maligned and oft-debated theory of wealth, poverty and economics.

(Continue reading the rest of the article at the ACT 3 website...)

John H. Armstrong is founder and director of ACT 3, a ministry aimed at “encouraging the church, through its leadership, to pursue doctrinal and ethical reformation and to foster spiritual awakening.”

Posted by John H. Armstrong in Effective Compassion at 11:03 | Leave a comment | Trackback

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capitalism, George Gilder, greed, poverty

The Abject Failure of the U.N.

Monday, June 25, 2007

The idealism and the goals of the United Nations are laudable. The results, at least in recent years, have often been nothing short of a disaster. One example will suffice---the recently created U.N.’s Human Rights Council, begun a year ago this past week. This council is sadly typical of the modern collapse of the U.N. The Human Rights Council consists of 47 members, almost half of which are “unfree” or “partly free” nations, at least as ranked by Freedom House. Trying to get China, Russia, Cuba and Saudi Arabia to reach an agreement on violations of freedom in various countries is like trying to get the mafia to give up crime.

Presently there are only nine countries on the human rights “watch list.” These are Burundi, North Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Liberia, Cambodia, Burma, Somalia and Sudan. But if Cuba is watching “the watched” then that is somewhat like the the fox watching the hen house. And at China’s request the council now insists on the “broadest possible support” of at least fifteen nations on the council to act. This means, in effect, that probes on freedom of speech and political rights are likely to amount to nothing. There has been a deafening silence from the other 190 U.N. members about these developments along with strong hints that most investigations of violators will soon end.

The council recently adopted a resolution entitled “Combating Defamation of Religions.” This sounded promising. The document says that speech must “be exercised with responsibility” and limited to protect “public order, public health or morals and respect for religions and beliefs.” Well and good. But there is a small problem. The only religion mentioned is Islam.

Critics of the U.S. tell us quite routinely that we who are not huge fans of the U.N. don’t really care what goes on in the world yet the U.S. is quite often one of the few nations that will actually intervene to protect human rights, though all too slowly many times. The European Union will not protect human rights so long as it has to defend Israel thus the real enemies of human rights have no real opposition politically in most of Europe. The U.S. taxpayers cover 22% of the bill for all this mess. This is why The Wall Street Journal piece was correct last week when it suggested we have only one real option: Stop funding the U.N. Human Rights Council. I have believed in the U.N., at least in theory, for a lifetime but the reality of the real world situation is fast making me doubt its real value for the future.

Posted by John H. Armstrong in News and Events at 09:28 | Leave a comment | Trackback

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