Repenting From Secular Capitalism

The Recovery of Christian Stewardship

The Christian Church in the West has in many ways lost its moorings.  It will not make progress again until it repents and returns to the fundamentals of faith.  Where can those fundamentals be found?  In Scripture, of course.  But there are also helpful doorways to Scripture available.  The most useful of these are the universal creeds (Apostles, Nicene, Athanasian).  

Many of the bulwarks of Western civilisation were built over time on these fundamentals of faith.  But the Unbelief of the West, commencing with the Enlightenment and eventually running at breakneck pace until our days, has effectively destroyed the foundations of Christian culture.  With the foundations gone, the superstructure cannot last.  If we are to avoid the inevitable calamity falling upon us--which is the judgement of God upon the apostate West--Christians and churches must return to our fundamentals--to the "once-for-all-delivered-to-the-saints faith [Jude 3].

We also need to discern what is happening in our generation and come to some understanding about what must needs be done.  It is well past the time when we could focus upon what "society" needs to do to reform and recapture the truths, conventions, and institutions of of Western Christendom which made the West so culturally potent.  Rather, we need to focus upon ourselves, our families, and our Christian communities.  We must also strive daily to conform our living (individual, familial, ecclesiastical, and communal) to the Scriptures and the fundamentals of faith revealed therein.

We Christians are now a remnant.
  It's time we started living and acting like one.  Fortunately, there is lots of Scriptural counsel on how remnants ought to believe, live, and act.  After all, the Christianisation of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East resulted from a "remnant" of Judaism which believed in the advent, death and resurrection of the Messiah.  Much of the New Testament corpus was written to exhort, encourage, and instruct the "remnant" church how to live so as to be leaven amidst a wildly pagan society.

But it does require that we re-think everything that our society now owns as "normal" or "ordinary".  Sociologist, Daniel Bell gives us some heads-up on a few of the societal changes of the last three centuries, helping us understand what has been lost culturally, what has replaced it, and (therefore) what must we do (and not do) in rebuilding Christian communities.

In the early development of capitalism, the unrestrained economic impulse was held in check by Puritan restraint and the Protestant ethic.  One formed because of one's obligation to one's calling, or to fulfill the covenant of the community.  But the Protestant ethic was undermined not by modernism but by capitalism itself.

The greatest single engine in the destruction of the Protestant ethic was the invention of the installment plan, or instant credit.  Previously one had to save in order to buy.  But with credit cards one could indulge in instant gratification.  The system was transformed by mass production and mass consumption, by the creation of new wants and the means of gratifying those wants.  . . . When the Protestant ethic was sundered from bourgeois society, only the hedonism remained, and the capitalist system lost its transcendental ethic.  [Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 21.]

It is now deceptive and misleading to focus primarily upon the burgeoning power of the State and the consequent reduction in liberty.  To offer up the virtues of capitalism and a free market in the face of a debt fueled hedonism makes no sense.  Capitalism, stripped from its biblical context, becomes little more than a system of gratifying lusts.  If we are to champion the merits of capitalism, it must be in the context of the Christian ethic of stewardship, and the uses to which accumulated capital is put.  Hedonism and the gratification of one's lusts is paganism revived, not an echo of Christendom. 

Under the aegis of Unbelief, capitalism and the free market have been perverted into a system of instant gratification and a lust for sensual pleasure.  Therefore, to champion the free market and capitalism in our perverted generation is to champion perversity.  Now is the hour when we need to champion (amongst other things) Christian stewardship--which restores what Bell calls "Puritan restraint" and the "Protestant ethic".

The values and ethics of Christian stewardship strike hedonism a fatal blow.  We need to ensure that in our homes, churches, and communities there is a revival and a recapturing of this fundamental Christian ethic.  The ethic of all Christian stewardship resides at this juncture:  all that one has, owns, inherits, earns, and purchases belongs to God, and Him alone.  We are just temporary guardians and stewards.  Therefore, as faithful stewards, our duty is to administer wealth and property to His glory and the advancement of His Kingdom.  It is not to spend it as wastrels upon our lusts and hedonistic pleasures.  It is to be preoccupied with how much of the estate we temporarily supervise we will manage to pass on to our heirs and those who succeed us--and with what quality and condition that estate will be in.