Douglas Wilson
I want to discuss the nature of Christian testimony before the world. Julian the Apostate lamented how well the early Christians took care of one another, and the icing on the cake was the fact that this Christian care overflowed into the pagan world -- the Christians offered mercy work to unbelievers, and were more aggressive with it than the pagans themselves were. Julian knew that this was an effective testimony against the pagan worldview -- he was exasperated and annoyed by it. And given his premises, he ought to have been. Christians taking care of their own, and with plenty to spare, was a powerful refutation of the pagan system.
So flip this around. What about things that Christians might do that would reflect badly on the Christian Faith in a pagan world? This was the kind of thing that Paul is acutely aware of. It is the reason he went sideways when some of the Corinthian Christians were hauling one another before unbelieving civil courts. We really need to pay closer attention to Paul's reasoning here.
"Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints? Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters? Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life? If then ye have judgments of things pertaining to this life, set them to judge who are least esteemed in the church. I speak to your shame. Is it so, that there is not a wise man among you? no, not one that shall be able to judge between his brethren? But brother goeth to law with brother, and that before the unbelievers. Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded? Nay, ye do wrong, and defraud, and that your brethren" (1 Cor. 6:1-8).Paul is not concerned because a Christian has taken a fellow Christian before a civil court. That is where barking dog disputes, property line disputes, and defamation suits belong, and when we eventually come to "judge the world," to use Paul's phrase here, that is where such disputes will be settled. Nothing whatever is wrong with civil court. The problem for Paul was that Christians, who were slated to govern in the coming age, who were going to inherit those civil courts, showed their current incompetence and unreadiness for the task by taking disputes from within their own midst, and asking the pagan system of Rome to sort it out for them. Paul was humiliated by this, as he should have been, and he said it was such a big deal that a defrauded Christian should prefer to let the fraud stand, rather than to obtain redress from unbelievers.
In sum: it was a grievous humiliation for Christians to ask unbelieving judges in an unbelieving court system to determine a just sentence between two Christian disputants. Anyone who would initiate such a court case doesn't have the faintest idea about Christian cultural engagement. Not a clue. But say it was seventeenth century England and two Christian neighbors had a property line dispute. The judge was a Christian, the legal system was Christian, everybody swore on a Bible, and the lordship of Christ was acknowledged over all. Would Paul have been humiliated by this? Of course not.
So I am humiliated for the same reason when Christians resort to programs like Medicare. The issue is not primarily family/Church/civil. The issue is believing/unbelieving. That is the antithesis.
But this Medicare humilation comes from two directions. The first occurs when we get word that a river of Obama dollars is rolling toward the sea, and then I find that a bunch of Christians are (surprise!) running down to that river with their bucket, and maybe two buckets. They are surrounded by a crowd of unbelievers, doing the same thing. They don't need it, not really, but it is there and it would foolish to pass on such an opportunity, or so the thinking goes. The river is going to flow anyway. It humiliates me that we are not farther along than that. It humilates me that I have to explain this.
But if the need is a genuine one, it provides a deeper humiliation. Scripture teaches that the first line of provision for Christians is the family (1 Tim. 5:8). The line after that is the Church (1 Tim. 5:16). Someone with Paul's sensitivities would not insert an unbelieving welfare system in between the family and the Church.
Someone might respond, "But if we hadn't applied for that money, we would have been saddled with a $20,000 bill." Well, okay. Make arrangements and start paying it off -- better that than telling the pagan system that the Church isn't ready for prime time yet. Look again at Paul's logic in 1 Cor. 6. He doesn't say to allow yourself to be defrauded unless the monetary levels make it unreasonable. He is profoundly concerned for the testimony, and he didn't put a price tag on that testimony.
I don't want parishioners acting like hungry, little piglets rooting for the federal teat. I used this image before and someone took offense at it. I was not trying to evoke the image of swine, but rather of piglets. Their salient characteristics for this discussion are that they are very hungry, they know exactly what they want, they are very cute, and they are terrible at math. When Christians who don't really need the help are turning to the unbelievers for help anyway, this reflects badly on the Church. They are clearly not being taught well. And if I am their teacher, I can imagine Paul writing me a pretty stiff letter. "I say this to your shame. You have people who . . ." And all I would be able to do is a little pastoral shuffle, looking at the carpet.
And if the need is genuine, the whole situation is worse. The Church should be a place where we rally around. And I have seen plenty of instances where our people do rally round. When the need is unquestioned, and the resources are not there for someone, I have seen tremendous outpourings of help. But when this happens, the need is public.
But sometimes there is a combination of difficulties; there is a genuine need, but there is also poor understanding on the part of the one who has that need. Someone might have a genuine need, but they are too embarrassed to tell the saints about it. They want and need the help, and they also want their privacy. In that case, there is great pressure to go to the unbelieving goverment. Remember that the primary issue here is not civil government v. church government. The issue is unbelievers v. believers. The Church should never send any of its dirty laundry out to Ol' Debbel's Laundromat.
Business disputes are not the Church's proper business. But if we have an unbelieving court system, we should jury-rig our own court system for the time being. We should do this for the sake of our testimony. Now, if we should do this in an area which is not our proper sphere, then how much more should we be embarrassed when our people are getting help in an area which is our proper sphere?
If our people have a true need, then we should take care of it. If they don't have a true need, then they have no business avoiding the deacons (who would tell them they don't need it) in order to go to some bureaucrat who won't tell him that.
First posted in Blog and Mablog
4 comments:
While I agree that Christians should do all in their power to be self sufficient, I see no reason not to take back from the government what the government has in turn taken from me, and taken by threat of penalty if I do not comply in giving it to them in the first place.
What's your view on Doug's Dictum?
Hi, La. Doug has agreed that the problem is multilayered and complex. One of the points of his post was to stop humiliating ourselves and our Lord and focus on the covenant community taking up its God-given responsibilities and duties which would ensure that state welfarism would weaken, wither, then eventually die away.
The point is essential to the coming of the Kingdom. If someone who does not take care of his own house is worse than an Unbeliever, we are just kidding ourselves if we think the Kingdom is coming while our people remain dependant upon state welfare.
So, individuals, families, extended families, congregations, and the wider covenant community have to take up crosses and assume basic duties of responsibility and care for others around us lest we be guilty of gross hypocrisy when we pray, "Thy Kingdom come."
Dependence is the key concept. Would I be unable to fulfil my God given duties and responsibilities to my family and those entrusted to me if the State were to cease its great ponzi scheme? If we would be unable to do so, then we probably need to make some significant and substantial changes to our lifestyles.
As to getting back what the State has immorally stolen via excessive taxation--there is clearly an argument to be made. But, it seems to me, we must be careful that our actions remain opportunistic and do not seduce us to the dark side of dependence. We also need to be conscious that if everyone acted this way, the entire ponzi scheme would be ten times worse, since the transactional costs of state welfare are very, very high. Money that has been expropriated from me via the tax system and which returns to me via NZ super or "working or families" or some other systemic largesse is never dollar for dollar. It shrinks inexorably because it has to fund an exorbitant bloated horde of state employees required to administer the ponzi.
So, each of us needs to devise plans and execute strategies to deal with the mess without getting messed up. For example, in my case, I am planning to take every last dollar I can get from NZ superannuation when it eventually comes, but it will go straight into a perpetual charitable trust required to preserve capital in perpetuity and to use annual income to help fund Christian day schools. There are a myriad of tactical opportunities such as this one example.
That is what I mean by arranging affairs so as to be independent of the ponzi scheme and helping wean the next generations off it. But the fundamental spirit of self-reliance, independence, responsibility, and acceptance of duty towards others has to come from the heart, and it is Spirit borne.
The last thing to say is that when we consider these issues and the magnitude of what confronts us, we are always left with all embracing conviction that collectively we have heaps and heaps of work to do. But a journey of a thousand miles always begins with one step. I am convinced that the end of state welfarism will come by the death of a thousand cuts. Each of us needs to keep our knife sharp, cutting into the umbilical cord repeatedly and everywhere we can. One of the consequences will be that the whore on the seven hills will bleed out over time, becoming weaker generation by generation.
Shalom.
You're right, as usual. My comment was borne more out of fear and frustration than any real desire to take anything from the gov, no matter how entitled I might be to it.
However, on another issue you raise (re Ponzi schemes), I read somewhere that the bulk of the US's debt is not held by China, as is commonly thought, but by the US itself: 4.something trillion held by the Fed, which was multiple times more than what is held by China.
So, in other words, the US is printing money to feed it's own bottomless pit of a finance beast.
If this is true, how far away, in your opinion, is a real financial Armageddon?
Yes, you are right. The Fed has been by far and away the most active buyer of the newly issued government bonds--which are required to fund the burgeoning Obama national debt. This is nothing other than a naked printing of money on an historic scale. Helicopter Ben is living up to his sobriquet.
Now to the hard question--when is the real financial Armageddon going to come? Now, or in the future? On the question of timing, we are strictly agnostic. We have no idea. We are very confident it is going to happen. But when is impossible to predict.
It is always this way with Ponzi schemes.
The continuation of the scheme depends upon a ready supply of bigger fools who will buy into it. The Madoff fraud illustrates this very well. After a while, the very fact of the continuity and longevity of the scheme becomes "proof" of its soundness, which leads to even more people buying into it. Bigger and bigger fools emerge.
So, if the US manages to pull through this crisis (albeit with its national debt quadrupled) the animal spirits will likely be unleashed even further. Expect another bout of debt fuelled (false) prosperity, fraud, manipulation, and a deeper and stronger belief and expectation in the omnicompetence of the Fed and the government to deliver all from peril.
This will ratchet up the scale of the next crisis--which may take another ten or fifteen years to transpire. And so on.
How will it all end? The US empire is in its "decline and fall" stage. The pattern is similar to the decline and fall of Rome. Like that empire, its Achilles heel is its dependence upon the outlying regions of the world to fund its national lifestyle. The debt burden will eventually become too great. In its economic collapse, the US may break up into smaller collections of states, which will squabble amongst themselves, as has happened with the dissolution of the old Soviet Empire. But this is just speculation on our part.
The Lord will not allow the idolatry of the US (or our own, for that matter) to go unrewarded. Since the US is judging itself to be unworthy of eternal life, the Gospel, together with its covenantal blessings, is being received by others. Within two generations the "world stage" is likely to reflect a very different configuration.
Meanwhile, we have heaps of work to do, and wide open doors for service! Selah.
JT
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