What is Money For?

The Beat of A Very Different Drummer

Given the relative wealth that washes around in New Zealand, and in the West generally, a question is begged that is seldom addressed.  What on earth is money for? 

The answer our pagan culture most often advances is that wealth is for self: self satisfaction, pleasure, self-aggrandizement, self-indulgence, living "the good life", and so forth.  The Puritans had a different answer: they believed, taught, and lived the doctrine that money is a social good, not a private possession. 

It is granted immediately that the doctrine of money being a social good is also widely believed in secular society today.  Money is to be taxed--as highly as the electorate will permit--to be dispersed by the State for whatever good the State determines.  Those who espouse this doctrine of money, however, tend to cover over its implications.  These include a belief that the real owner of all property is the State; that the role of citizens is to produce money, wealth and property to fuel the State's demands; and that the function of private citizens and corporations is akin to serfs or slaves. 

It is at this point we are confronted with the great divide between modern secular culture, on the one hand, and Puritan (or Christian) culture, on the other.  The Puritan ethic called for believing men and women to work hard, live modestly, and use their excess earnings for their neighbours' good and the good of society as a whole.  The present secular ethic is a perversion of this doctrine.  Modern secular society is confronted by the State's overtaking personal and private stewardship with taxes, imposts, rules, and regulations. 

The flip-side of this Statist aggression is for the citizen to avoid paying taxes whenever and wherever possible and use the squirrelled funds to spend upon themselves and their appetites.  After all, why should citizens be concerned about the welfare of their neighbours and community, when the State has taken over that responsibility?  At this point the modern State and the citizens resemble more the kleptocracy of the Roman Empire than the ethics and practices of the Christian faith.

William Perkins was one of the greatest Puritan theologians.  Here is his summary of how Christians ought to use their property, wealth, and income:

We must so use and possess the goods we have, that the use and possession of them may tend to God's glory, and the salvation of our souls. . . . Our riches must be employed to necessary uses. These are first, the maintenance of our own good estate and condition.  Secondly, the good of others, specially those that are of our family or kindred. . . . Thirdly, the relief of the poor. . . . Fourthly, the maintenance of the Church of God and true religion. . . . Fifth, the maintenance of the Commonwealth.  [Cited by Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Zondervan/Academie Books, 1986),  p.67.]

This sort of thinking came straight out of the Continental Reformation.  Calvin wrote fifty years earlier:

If we acquire possessions in gold and silver, it is our duty . . . to do good to our neighbours.   

And elsewhere:

All the rich, when they have property with which they can be of service to others, are here . . . to assist their neighbors. . . .  Those to whom God has given much grain and wine are to offer part of these goods to those who are in need of the same.  [Ryken, ibid.]

The money-ethic of so many in our materialist society has been summarized by a cynic:  money is a race and competition to:

Get all you can;
Can all you get; and,
Poison the rest.

This is the natural default position of the average secularist living in a society where the acquisitive State extracts citizens' wealth by force in an attempt to achieve social and economic "justice", or, more accurately, egalitarianism.  If the State is "taking care" of the poor and needy, why should we, the citizens, take any responsibility?

But Christians march to the beat of a different Drummer.  They know that they must give an account to God for all that God has given them.  They rejoice in that duty and responsibility. It is an honour.

The Historical Zeitgeist of the American Holiday of Thanksgiving

'The Pilgrim Chronicles' (Excerpt)

The Faith and Focus of the Puritans

by Rod Gragg  

27 Nov 2014

Breitbart News

Through the Act of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity, Queen Elizabeth’s Settlement solidly established the Church of England as the nation’s official government denomination. It was a compromise of sorts: the Church of England would retain its Protestant doctrine, but it would also keep familiar, Catholic-style worship ceremonies and traditions. The publication of English language Bibles, once outlawed in England, now proliferated, and commoners and gentry alike eagerly purchased personal copies. Learning and sharing Scripture became the rage in England. “Everywhere might be heard the eager conversation of minds enlightened by the truth, speaking those wonderful words which the Most High had spoken unto men,” reported nineteenth-century church historian Edward B. Underhill. “The street, the tavern, the ale-house, the church and every company were the scenes of earnest dispute or holy zeal [as] scripture was compared with scripture and its sense closely scrutinized.” By the early 1600s, the common people of England were awash in a flood of faith. “The whole moral effect . . . was simply amazing,” observed renowned English historian John Richard Green. “The whole nation became a church.”

While Queen Elizabeth’s compromise solidified Protestant doctrine in the Church of England, it also placed requirements and restrictions on Protestants as well as Catholics. The English people were required to abide by the standards and policies of the Church of England as stated in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer.

Pastors and preachers were forbidden to publicly “preach, declare or speake any thing” that was not sanctioned by the Anglican Church. Disobedient pastors could be discharged from their salaried positions in the Church and even imprisoned for life. The punishment for any minister who deviated from Church policy was outlined in the Book of Common Prayer:

Holding the Centre

Joyful Puritans

There has been much made and unmade about the Protestant work ethic.  However, what is sometimes overlooked is that this social work ethic, together with its economic and industrial impacts, was essentially a Puritan affect.  Historian Christopher Dawson makes this claim in his book about religion and progress.

Historians like Troeltsch and Max Weber have shown how much the industrial movement owes to the moral and social ideals of Puritanism.  The Protestant asceticism of the 17th and 18th centuries did not lead men to fly from the world and to give up all the goods to the poor and the Church, as in the Middle Ages.  It inculcated the duty of unremitting industry and thrift, while at the same time it discouraged rigorously every kind of self-indulgence and extravagance in the expenditure of what had been gained.

The result was extensive capital formation--capital that was not subsequently applied to consumption and gross displays of wealth and flippant expenditure, but to further commerce and industrial and trade activities.

Thus there grew up a new social type, the hard-working, conscientious, abstemious man of business, whose only interests were in his counting-house and in the meeting house of his sect; men who spared themselves no more than their employees, and who looked on their work as a kind of religious vocation.

We believe Dawson overstates the case here.

Homosexuality is a Sin--Along With Other Things

You Are What—and How—You Read

Rosaria Butterfield
12:05 AM CT
Gospel Coalition

I just returned from a well-known (and well-heeled) Christian college, where roughly 100 demonstrators gathered on the chapel steps to protest my address on the grounds that my testimony was dangerous. Later that day, I sat down with these beloved students, to listen, to learn, and to grieve. Homosexuality is a sin, but so is homophobia; the snarled composition of our own sin and the sin of others weighs heavily on us all. I came away from that meeting realizing—again—how decisively our reading practices shape our worldview.

This may seem a quirky observation, but I know too well the world these students inhabit. I recall its contours and crevices, risks and perils, reading lists and hermeneutical allegiances. You see, I'm culpable. The blood is on my hands. The world of LGBTQ activism on college campuses is the world that I helped create. I was unfaltering in fidelity: the umbrella of equality stretching to embrace my lesbian identity, and the world that emerged from it held salvific potential. I bet my life on it, and I lost.

Douglas Wilson's Letter (From Moscow)

Believing One Half of the Wrong End of It

Posted on Tuesday, August 13, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

An easy mistake concerning Calvinism is that it somehow must necessarily reduce to a stiff-upper lip Stoicism, particularly in its teaching on contentment. “It is one heart-quieting consideration in all the afflictions that befall us that God has a special hand in them.” This is from the great Thomas Watson, and some might find it easy to think that he and the other Puritans were stuck on this one speed.

The apostle Paul says similar things, but the reason he doesn’t get tagged as a Stoic is that we have read everything else by him, and know that he knew how to weep with those who weep. He was a passionate man, and to charge him with Stoicism is laughable — even though he tells us that all things work together for good.

But we are forced into fair play with Paul because a bunch of people have read the whole Pauline corpus. That is not true of history’s whipping boys, among whom we may place the Puritans in the front row. The Puritans can be easily slandered as those who decontextualized the command to be content, turning it into a charge to “be tough for Jesus.” But the real problem is that we have decontextualized the need to not misrepresent our brothers.