The Ends Don't Justify the Means

The most destructive of ideas is that extraordinary times justify extraordinary measures. This is the ultimate relativism, and we are hearing it from all sides. The young, the poor, the minority races, the Constitution, the nation, traditional values, sexual morality, religious faith, Western civilization, the economy, the environment, the world are all now threatened with destruction—so the arguments run—therefore let us deal with our enemies by whatever means are handiest and most direct; in view of our high aims history will justify and forgive. Thus the violent have always rationalized their violence.

But as wiser men have always known, all times are extraordinary in precisely this sense. In the condition of mortality all things are always threatened with destruction. The invention of atomic holocaust and the other manmade dooms renews for us the immediacy of the worldly circumstances as the religions have always defined it: we know ‘neither the day nor the hour. . . .’

Wendell Berry published these paragraphs in 1972 in an essay called “Discipline and Hope”, but they could have been written yesterday. Maybe some of his examples would have changed, but the point is still valid.

Though Berry is still alive and the book is not quite old enough to count as an “old book” by Lewis’ definition, it is helpful to realize that about 50 years after these paragraphs were penned, the problem is still very much the same. It’s ok to be brutal to people on “the other side” because they are trying to destroy the SBC, the nation, the economy, the environment, Christianity, etc. The story is the same and so is the truth.

The truth is that it won’t matter much which side wins the culture war if the goodness of the culture is torn down to win it. Looking back, our children’s children will think we are fools and backward for a number of reasons that we can’t see and would never to think to recognize. They will look at some of the battles being fought and wonder why there was so much energy spent, when really the obvious problem was. . . .

But we can’t see what fills in that blank. And that is the nature of it. The very things that we do not question today because we can’t conceive of them being questioned will be the things that are assumed to be completely true or false (and obviously so) by a future generation.

As Christians we can see that there are many things wrong with this world and many people taking a wrong direction. But I can see the same thing in myself. The difference is that I can do something about myself and I have only limited influence on the rest of the world. My most significant influence on the world may be by living rightly in my own sphere of influence, showing people a positive way forward based on the truths of Scripture, and embodying those to the maximum extent possible. If the culture war is about goodness and truth, then so should our daily lives be.

The ends don’t justify the means. It is no good to win the culture war and lose our own souls, which is exactly we are risking. History may judge us all fools, and it may judge some on one side or the other of any issue as morally better than the others. But history isn’t the ultimate judge. God is. At the end of this life, our individual legacies will be laid before God. Our works will pass through the fire. Only those works wrought with faith, hope, and love will remain. The ends will be judged by the means.

We don’t know when the judgment is coming, but we Christians know the judge. We know his character. We have access to his standards through Scripture. We of all people should live like we know his judgment is coming, which should shape the way we fight our political battles today.

How Rigged is the Economy against Individuals?

One of the prevailing themes in contemporary American public discourse is that the economy is irredeemably rigged against the little guy. The theory runs that the richest 1% have so much money that they are keeping the rest of us down.

That is a powerful story. It feeds on examples of cases where there are excessively wealthy people who do not have financial concerns that some anywhere close to the ones that ordinary citizens have. There are legitimate cases of harassment and discrimination prevent some people from achieving their potential.

However, the more complete story seems to be that despite inequalities in wealth, the potential for people to gain moderate levels of wealth is still present, even for people with median incomes.

In the FIRE community (Financial Independence/Retire Early) one of the more common targets for net worth prior to checking out of the workforce is $1M USD. Given that about 40% of American adults claim they can’t cover an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing or selling something, some argue that breaking into a seven-figure net worth is impossible.

Considering that the median household income in 2018 was estimated to be about $63K, which doesn’t include non-cash benefits like the company portion of insurance benefits, I’m more inclined to believe the people that tend to be optimistic about economic opportunities. Thomas Stanley and Sarah Stanley Fallaw’s recent book, The Next Millionaire Next Door, tends to support general optimism.

The first and most obvious allowance we must make in the whole debate, however, is that not everyone can get to the point of having a large net worth. There are people who have disabilities or medical conditions that will prevent them from engaging fully in the workforce and whose assets are regularly depleted by needed expenses. There are others who have, due to little or no fault of their own, been left in a precarious economic position because of poor choices by others or have had to leave a situation due to abuse. And, to be fair, half the households in the United States fall below the $63K income threshold, which makes it more difficult (though by no means impossible, down to a certain level) to create a large net worth.

But many in the top half of earners are not millionaires and never will be. In fact, according to Forbes in 2019, 18.6 million Americans have a net worth over a million. That means that approximately 1 in 17 people in the US are millionaires. That’s 5.6% of the population. Not bad when you think about it, but not as much as you would think.

The Next Millionaire Next Door is a follow up to Stanley’s 1996 book, The Millionaire Next Door, and basically asks if the economic system is really so rigged that no one can get ahead. He began the work with his daughter (Sarah Fallaw), and she completed the book alone due to his untimely death in 2015. The conclusion is that the basic patterns of behavior of millionaires has not changed in a fundamental sense in two decades.

The recipe for growing your net worth into the seven figures is the same as it was in 1996 and basically the same as it ever has been. Find work that uses your talents and do it vigorously. Live below your means by avoiding “status wars” with people at and above your income level. Invest your money; don’t just let it sit in a coffee can or a savings account. Do this for an extended period of time.

The upshot is that the path to becoming relatively wealthy is extremely simple. It has a lot to do with hard work and frugality. In fact, both the 1996 book and this latest book emphasize frugality as a central element of financial success. Even in 2019, the vast majority of millionaire’s surveyed had never spent more than $300 on a watch. Most of them drive Fords, Toyotas, Hondas, or Chevy’s that were purchased used, and very few of those surveys had ever spent more than $40,000 on a vehicle. Although they can “afford” to purchase more expensive products, they chose not to because the increase in value did not match the increase in price.

Also important to note is that those who accumulate wealth tend to be much more generous with their wealth. Individuals and families that have a high income, but a very low net worth do not tend to give much away. However, those that tend to save much of what they earn at whatever income level are, statistically speaking, more generous than your average American. Many of these next-door millionaires give away more than 5% of their income per year to registered charities, in addition to gifts to family.

To some this may seem counter-intuitive. Why should the savers be better givers? However, it makes sense when we consider the question from a different angle. High spenders don’t hang onto their money, but they have been mastered by their money and take pleasure in its spending. They, therefore, have a stronger love for money because of what it can get them. In contrast, the savers have mastered their money. They see it for its good beyond immediate consumption. They are also much more likely to want to see those funds invested into their community in a way that will cultivate hope for others.

The Next Millionaire Next Door leads me to believe that the majority of the “rich” are not the ones that are featured in the tabloid news or that are constantly scrabbling greedily for wealth. Rather, many of those who have obtained wealth in our society have, in some form or fashion, heeded the principles of 1 Tim 6:8–10:

But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.

Though the political left, especially young socialists, tend to demonize those that have worked within the American economic system for decades to slowly accrue wealth, that demonization appears to be unwarranted. Those Christians who demean others, especially other Christians, for building businesses, working hard, participating in the community, giving regularly, and still managing to cultivate relative wealth are missing the fact that many of the next-door millionaires have done so by not loving money.

This is an interesting reversal. Next-door millionaires tend to be those who are generally content with food and clothing. They did not desire the wealth, but when they acquired wealth, they were good stewards of it. Statistically speaking, they give generously, live modestly, and work diligently. In fact, for most of those highlighted in this book, becoming wealthy was a secondary result of living wisely with those behaviors.

This sort of study might be helpful in overturning some negative perceptions and hostile rhetoric toward a portion of the population that has been diligent and, often, less self-interested than others in their pursuit of the good life. In this case, the good life being defined not as the unending accumulation of wealth, but of working hard, loving family and neighbor, and stewarding resources to have a reasonably secure future. In the United States that sort of lifestyle is often (but not always) rewarded with an abundance of resources over time.

Your Money or Your Life - A Review

In 1992 a little book was released that is still creating ripples today, nearly three decades and three editions later. Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez published Your Money or Your Life not long after a major stock market crash on Black Monday 1987, as the United States was suffering under a slow-recovery recession after a decade of decadence. Your Money or Your Life is largely credited as the inspiration of the FIRE movement, which calls people to work hard, live frugally, save vigorously to achieve financial independence with the goal of being able to step away from the daily grind years before normal cultural expectations.

In true American fashion, the book is fashioned as a simple nine-step process that raises the reader’s awareness of where your money has gone, where it is going, and where you would really like it to go. The central concept of the book is that in the modern economy, humans trade time for money. And, since time is the one thing every human has a limited amount of in this life, they describe the employment relationship as one of trading life energy for money, hence the title: Your Money or Your Life.

As with many truly helpful things, the book’s premise is incredibly simple: For a great many people, raising awareness of expenses and asking a few value questions can reorient attitudes in ways that help shake of consumeristic habits and lead to a great deal more financial freedom. The concept works much better for those that are middle-income or higher, since the poor tend to already have a tight focus on their finances. But as Robins points out, many middle-income people have no idea where their money goes and are wasting a great deal of their time earning money to spend on things or experiences that give little satisfaction.

The practical advice in Your Money or Your Life is sound, which helps explain why a third revision was just released. The core is sound, though the specifics of recommendations have had to change. For example, in a low interest environment, the early advice to use bonds to fund retirement would be a relatively quick path to ruin.

Philosophically the book is all over the place. It mixes a few proof-texts from the Bible with Eastern thought, as well as some assumptions that are more American than anything else. However, by common grace there is a helpful integrity to the outlook, however quilted the underlying ideas may be.

One of the more helpful ideas that the book promotes is that all of life should be viewed as a whole. We can’t see our budget as one piece of our lives, our work as another, and our home life as something entirely different. All of them are of a piece and impact one another, as anyone who has worked alongside someone going through a divorce can attest. This isn’t to suggest that getting one thing right fixes everything, but what Robin and Dominquez point out is that viewing them all together helps us make better choices in the places we have agency. Spending money is, for many of us, one of the places we have the most agency. Therefore, the encouraging people to ask questions about how their spending reflects their values can lead to changes that open up opportunities in other areas.

Another significant element of the book is that it forces readers to rethink the nature of work. They argue,

The real problem with work, then, is not that our expectations are too high. It’s that we have confused work with paid employment. Redefining “work” as simply any productive or purposeful activity, with paid employment being just one activity among many, frees us from the false assumption that what we do to put food on the table and a roof over our heads should also provide us with our sense of meaning, purpose and fulfillment. Breaking the link between work and money allows us to reclaim balance and sanity.

There are too many eggs in the “work” basket for many of us. We define ourselves by our job and invest our best energy into tasks that may be demeaning or seem to be designed to be frustrating.

To some degree, that is the nature of an industrialized economy, which sometimes reduces tasks to repetitive minutia in the name of efficiency. Connected to this reduction is that due to the liquidity of modernity, there are few stable aspects of a contemporary human’s life. We are likely to change jobs, move thousands of miles, and undergo shifts in vocation that would have been unthinkable for the majority of human history. Work was meant to be satisfying as we create and organize, being made in the image of God. What work has become is not what it was meant to be. This is helpful truth that the authors recognize.

The book carries some significant baggage philosophically. The authors seem to assume that one of the primary purposes of humanity is to achieve a degree of autonomy. The number of cases of divorce they seem to celebrate is significant. There is an assumption that happiness can be achieved in some measure through material goods. All this and more lie beneath the surface, which should cause the Christian to read this book with care. At the same time, the advice is presented by non-Christians who argue for a distinct worldview, which makes it easier to chew the meat and spit the bones than when someone reads Dave Ramsey or another of the Christian financial gurus, where a heavy dose of proof-texts and testimonies saturated with church language can cause us to lower our guard, allowing greed to slip in when we least expect it. Your Money or Your Life is helpful, in part, because it is written from a different perspective that can be illuminating even as we filter it carefully.

For many American Christians, the lure of consumerism has led to an increase in consumer debt, a lifestyle of excess that would have shamed earlier generations of believers, and an increasing difficulty to enjoy the benefits of real wealth in one of the most affluent societies on earth. Books like Your Money or Your Life can present an alternative picture that is, in fact, closer to a biblical attitude toward money and the unity of life than many similar products from faith oriented Christian publishers offer. It’s high time American Christians began to rethink their money habits, and Your Money or Your Life is a decent place to start.

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Fully Revised and Updated for 2018

By Robin, Vicki, Dominguez, Joe, Mr. Money Mustache

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Vaclav Havel and the Power of the Powerless

There are at least two types of tyrannical political order. The first is one that is implemented by brute force with soldiers or police patrolling everywhere looking to enforce the ruler’s will on a frightened population. The second type of tyranny is one enforces by the people on the people. There is always a coercive force, but it does not require constant patrols by soldiers, because people (whether they believe in the tyrannical policies or not) enforce them or call in the authorities to do so.

Of the two types of tyranny, the second is the more awful. There will always be some toadies in an oppressed culture that will jump over to the other side and work with the oppressors in the first type of tyranny, but the vast majority of people will outwardly comply, but inwardly hope for and be prepared to assist a rebellion. Resistance is cheered, even in small things. This is a totalitarian system of government.

In the second form of tyranny, internal cultural forces demand absolute compliance and offer little hope of freedom. It requires the deletion of civil society—those groups that exist for non-political purposes and which hold societies together—and their replacement with government authorized programs. The second form of tyranny induces citizens, even those who do not explicitly favor the government’s policies, to enforce them through social pressure and, sometimes, by calling in the government’s enforcers. There is little room for people to live in dissent. Vaclav Havel calls this second form a post-totalitarian system.

In Vaclav Havel’s essay, “The Power of the Powerless” he describes what it means to live in a society in which dissent is impossible. He is speaking of his experience in Czechoslovakia, where he was a significant member of the resistance that eventually contributed to that nation being freed from communism.

Havel describes a simple act by a greengrocer, who one day refuses to put the approved Party sign in his windows. He does not believe that “Workers Unite” has any particular significance in a political system designed to entrap everyone in a miasma of misery. He may have already declared his allegiance in various public and semi-public ways through participation in Party activities, without ever believing the concepts. But one must go along to get along.

And yet, though many of the customers will not particularly care about the sentiment “Workers Unite,” because it has no real meaning, the minor resistance of the greengrocer in no affirming the approved common sentiment will be deemed a rebellion. In a post-totalitarian society, social auto-totality will lead to conformity, as word will spread and reach the authorities who will by force ensure compliance, often by removing the right to work. It may not be physical force that is brought to bear, but commercial and social pressure.

The crime of the greengrocer was simply to stop living the lie. He had never truly believed the slogans, like most of the population, but had simply done what was needed to get by. In that moment when he chose to stop putting up slogans, stop voting in farcical elections, and, perhaps, even positively voice an opinion at a political meeting, the greengrocer will have begun to live in the truth, but society will not allow it.

Havel writes as one who has experienced a post-totalitarian system under Communist rule. He worked against the system, though the system did not acknowledge him, and eventually became the prime minister of Czechoslovakia after the end of the Communist oppression ended.

We, however, are seeing the beginning of a very different regime of oppression that is being brought to bear on society more gradually and yet no less insidiously. At present, there is still room to live in the truth, but there are an increasing number of voices looking to make the lie the only possible way of life.

Consider, for example, the rush to ignore differences in sexual expression and the demand to support various forms of LGBTQ lifestyles. One may think those good or not, but participation in much of society is now becoming dependent on active, public affirmation of those lifestyles. There is no room for neutrality or even quietly thinking, along with many of the voices in human history, that this is an unhealthy lifestyle. Instead, employers require affirmation of “diversity” along arbitrarily invented lines, which necessarily exclude diversity of thought, or, really, any thought at all. To refuse to wear a rainbow ribbon on the culturally approved day or affirm the latest evolution in sexual ethics is a form of open rebellion, much as the green grocer’s refusal to post the sign, “Workers Unite.”

At times there is force of law behind these edicts, as with the states that are attacking bakers and florists that decline to participate in same-sex wedding celebrations, but much of the punishment for violating societal norms is meted out by regular people. This is an auto-totality. In Western culture, it is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Havel’s concerns are certainly different than those we face in the auto-totality, but the methods used by the contemporary culture to gain and maintain control are similar to those used by the Soviets in oppressing the people of Eastern Europe. Havel’s essay, “Power to the Powerless,” is informative because it provides a roadmap for those who disagree with the consensus that is being hammered over society to maintain their integrity and not live the lie.

The hope of the resistance should be to create an existential revolution, so that people see and pursue a radically different way of thinking and knowing. That is, the resistance needs to demonstrate that an alternate, moral reality exists and live in a way that points people toward it.

As Havel writes,

“Above all, any existential revolution should provide hope of a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I have called the ‘human order’, which no political order can replace. A new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of ‘higher responsibility’, a new-found inner relationship to other people and to the human community – these factor clearly indicate the direction in which we go.”

Havel wrote his ideas on living in truth to fuel an existential revolution leading to moral reconstitution when the fall of communism still seemed unlikely. As the storm clouds of our present auto-totality continue to deepen, we may find it necessary to tighten the boundaries of our contrast communities, rebuild the moral structures within them, and live with greater integrity to demonstrate the plausibility of our moral vision for the world.

The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe

By Havel, Vaclav

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The Humane Economy of Wilhelm Ropke

To some people, free market economics is the worst social evil of our age that is responsible for every other social evil. What causes Racism? Capitalism. Child abuse? Free market. Objectification of women? The market economy. War? Economic liberty. Poverty? The same. Bad hair days? Definitely capitalism, too. You get the idea.

On the other hand, there are others for whom free market economics are akin to the good news of Jesus Christ. Andrew Carnegie did, after all, write a book called, The Gospel of Wealth, which largely extols the market economy. There are others to this day who see capitalism as not merely permissible by God, but actually required by a correct reading of Scripture.

In reality, liberty, including economic freedom, is a necessary condition for human flourishing, but it isn’t a sufficient condition. The free market economy the cleanest dirty shirt we’ve got. Like any human system, it has sinful people involved, so it is subject to abuse and distortion. Unlike other human economies that have been envisioned, it has the best means to keep people’s natural tendencies toward evil and oppression in check.

One of the most careful proponents of a free market that I’ve read in Wilhelm Röpke. He was a German who emigrated to Turkey in 1933 because of his resistance to the National Socialist regime. Early in his life he was inspired by socialism, later by the Austrian school of economics, and finally landed on a position that encourages a free market with targeted and limited government interventions. Röpke argued for what might be described as a humane capitalism. Röpke was one of the main thinkers that inspired the creation of the West German economic system after World War II, which helped to shape its balance between social welfare and free market, a system that resulted in West Germany rapidly recovering and developing into an economic power, with East Germany lagging behind, mired in socialism.

Röpke’s classic book, A Humane Economy, is an important book for socialists and libertarians to read so they understand both the needs for and perils of a free market.

One of Röpke’s concerns is over “mass society.” It was the enmassment of human activity that Röpke had witnessed in the rise of fascism in Europe before the war. Like other forms of socialism, the National Socialists ceased to recognize people as individuals or small units, and pursued global solutions with a faceless homo economicus as the actor. This faceless stand in for humans sometimes makes a good generalization, but it fails to take into account the goodness of owning a business, of small firms being able to compete in a grand economy, and of individual craftsmanship. At the extremes, unfettered capitalism and socialism lend themselves to aggregating humans into the faceless mass. Röpke was just as opposed to corporate monopolies as he was to state monopolies. Unlike some contemporary neoliberals, Röpke recognized that the power of the state was essential in preventing any sort of monopoly from forming.

What makes Röpke particularly significant is that he honestly represents the damage that redistributive programs like welfare can have as they encourage inflationary economics and can reduce the incentives to engage in meaningful economic activity. At the same time, he demonstrates that well-designed welfare systems can be essential to provide a safety net and can actually prevent the worst cases of abuse by the state and by corporate entities. Röpke is exactly the sort of thinker that will make people on both poles of contemporary social and economic debate uncomfortable, which is one of the best reasons to listen to him.

Another important aspect of Röpke’s perspective is that he emphasizes the necessary balance between collectivism and individualism. Both ideas in the extreme are debilitating to society. Röpke writes, “Man can fulfill his nature only by freely becoming part of a community and having a sense of solidarity with it. Otherwise he leads a miserable existence and he knows it.” A more apt criticism of most forms of socialism and the contemporary economy in the United States could not be written. In socialism, one is forced to assimilate with the mass, to contribute as the authorities deem necessary and to receive in exchange only that which the collective deems warranted. In late post-industrial capitalism, one tends to be isolated from the collective, set to gain what one can earn on her own, and catechized to believe that individual freedom is something of a summum bonum. To some degree, at least, Röpke seems to offer a golden mean.

In A Humane Economy there is resistance both to state totalitarianism and the totalitarian utilitarianism of some economics. But he is unquestionably opposed to the ravages of Communism. Röpke argues:

“Totalitarianism gains ground exactly to the extent that the human victims of this process of [social] disintegration suffer from frustration and non-fulfillment of their life as a whole because they have lost the true, pre-eminently non-material conditions of human happiness.”

He continues,

“What the free world has to set against Communism is not the cult of the standard of living and productivity or some contrary hysteria, ideology, or myth. This would merely be borrowing Communism’s own weapons. What we need is to bethink ourselves quietly and soberly of truth, freedom, justice, human dignity, and respect of human life and the ultimate values. For these we must set our course unerringly; we must cherish and strengthen the spiritual and moral foundations of these values and vital goods and try to create and preserve for mankind such forms of life as are appropriate to human nature and support and protect its conditions.”

This sort of attitude is what makes Röpke so helpful. He recognizes the horrors of socialistic economics, but also sees the abyss that is a purely materialistic utilitarian capitalism. Röpke reminds us that at the heart of the economy is the human. We are not graphs and statistics alone. Those things can be helpful, but they are not enough. We need to be more humane by treating people around us like humans. Economics can only function when it is constrained by virtue.

A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market

By Röpke, Wilhelm

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Consumer Debt and the Coming Recession

For those that pay attention to such things, the news is filled with extreme views about the current and future state of the economy. At the same moment in time, there are pundits arguing that most Americans are in abject economic misery, while others argue that life has never been better economically. One group is arguing that imminent economic doom is upon us, another tells us that things are only going up from here.

If most of us are honest, in the decade since the Great Recession, things have generally gotten better for most people. However, in many cases, people do not feel great about the economy and, at the same time, are setting themselves up for problems during the next recession.

The Inevitability of Recessions and Stock Declines

News reports predicting a coming economic recession or a significant stock market decline are correct. They have no idea when those things are going to come, but some sort of economic perturbation is pretty much inevitable.

One of the more interesting aspects of our attention economy is that when the next economic dip happens, its significance will be determined, in large part, by how people respond. For example, if people get skittish and sell during a stock market decline, that will make the stock market decline even worse. If people alter their consumer behaviors radically during a recession, that is likely to make the recession worse.

More significant than whether and when a recession is coming (it is and who knows) is how we are living day to day in anticipation of those events.

A Plea for Simple Living

There is no question that some people are struggling to meet basic necessities already. Due to a medical condition, loss of a job, a very low wage job, or bad debt choices earlier in life, many people are living paycheck to paycheck. If that is you, then feel free to check out. This post is written to the vast majority of us who are in the middle class and have some economic margin.

We once received a gift subscription to a magazine called Real Simple that amounts to an advertisement for a high-end consumeristic minimalist lifestyle. All the pictures were of perfect rooms with “simple” solutions to problems like magazine storage or whatever, but the solutions always cost hundreds of dollars. The result was an aesthetic simplicity, but that’s not how they got there. According to that style magazine, simplicity is a consumer good that is really expensive.

Simple living is less about what stuff you own and more about what activities and services you deem necessary. Simple living at its best is simply asking what aspects of life are necessary and eliminating those that don’t fit that definition. Another definition is that simple living is asking what we do that glorifies God and minimizing the extras.

When we stop asking risk vs. reward questions about our lifestyle choices, we put ourselves into the situation like the couple making $160,000 who were described as living in “modest oppression” because they “couldn’t afford” everything they wanted. Alyssa Quart’s description of the largely self-caused mental and emotional stresses of the middle class in her 2018 book, Squeezed, should serve as a warning to rational minds to make better choices.

As Christians in the American middle class, we really need to begin asking “why” questions if we are going to be effective stewards of our time, treasure, and opportunity. We have the means to get the gospel to the ends of the earth and instead we are spending our money to overflow landfills with useless plastic.

The simple life is about being focused on what adds gospel-value to the world and spending our money on that.

Avoiding Comparisons

Also in Squeezed, Quart writes, “While Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could even dream of, that means nothing when oligarchs live next door, flaunting their luxurious homes.”

The funny thing about comparisons is that we tend to make them with those living above our means. Very few of us look at those who are legitimately struggling financially and go home thankful for our abundance. Instead, largely due to the mystique of television and movies in which everything is always perfect, we continually moan about the inadequacy of our resources.

There is a reason God gave us the 10th Commandment.

Did you have a nice vacation at home? Well, the other guy at work took his kids on a safari adventure. Now that vacation doesn’t look so good.

Does your daughter enjoy soccer? The neighbor down the street does, too, so they’ve invested thousands into clinics, travel teams, physical training, and other goods and services designed to get their child ahead. Suddenly the local rec league isn’t very compelling.

There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with a big vacation or pursuing excellence in sports, but those are often excesses that we try to have without making sacrifices to compensate.

The result is that many people who are making a whole lot of money are spending all of it and a little bit more.

Rising Debt Loads

One of more frightening statistics, in my opinion, is the rise in household debt to the levels prior to the 2008 recession.

The Great Recession was rough for a lot of people in large part because people were up to their ears in debt when the problem started. For a few years society seemed to learn a lesson, but now it appears that we have forgotten.

I’m not on the “no debt ever” train, for a variety of reasons. However, I do believe that we typically position ourselves better to survive economic downturns if we minimize debt and seek to eliminate it when times are good.

A lot of the debt right now is being driven by a perception that the stock market is going to keep going up and up. In the long run this is probably true, but there may be a point at which half of the money invested in the market will “disappear” just like it did in 2008 and 2009. That is never a great feeling, but it is a really terrible feeling when you know that your pay is likely to stagnate for a while, you may lose your job, and the company bonus you budgeted to pay for your vacation is unlikely to materialize. In other words, when you are up to your ears in debt, the clouds of economic doom look a lot more ominous.

Market expert is not a title I’d claim, but I remember the pain of debt-ridden people who had a high salary but large payments and weren’t seeing the economic growth they were counting on. One way to eliminate that pain is to avoid debt and eradicate it. To do that, we should consider the common causes of debt.

The Cause of Debt

The problem most middle-class Americans have is that they are spending too much on things that they enjoy too little and bring too little glory to God.

Instead of comparing ourselves to our neighbors, we ought to be regularly asking of every expenditure how this glorifies God. We will certainly get things wrong from time to time, but a gospel-focused consumer mind will likely resist the urge to overspend on things that really do little good for anyone.

Once we get above a certain financial level, most debt is driven by buying more car than we need, a nicer house than necessary, services that we only use occasionally, and products that offer little benefit in the long run. Evaluate your household spending for the last year with a critical eye and this will likely become self-evident.

This means that rather than being trapped in system that makes us do bad things, we are in a culture that encourages us to do dumb things and we usually don’t invest the will power to stop.

For most of us, our debt is a problem we have created by being unwilling to limit our consumer choices to that which glorifies God.

We are setting ourselves up for misery in the future with our choices today. Why not begin making simple, better choices that will leave us happier when the next downturn comes?

Back to Virtue - A Review

If I had the opportunity to spend a week with one living scholar, I would probably spend it with Peter Kreeft. There is wisdom and breadth in his writings that would make conversation—better yet, simply listening—an intellectually and spiritually edifying experience.

Kreeft has authored a massive number of works. All of those that I have read have been stimulating, entertaining, and helpful. His work is saturated by a love for God, an appreciation for Lewis and Tolkien, and an intellectual humility that makes journeying along with him a pleasure.

Recently as I re-read his 1986 book, Back to Virtue, which, by its title, is something of a response to Alasdair McIntyre’s book After Virtue. McIntyre is, of course, doing something broad and sweeping and is engaging in diagnosing the problems of a highly relativistic society that has no common moral compass. It is mainly description, with the reader left to develop the solution on his own. Kreeft’s book provides something of a solution. A return to the virtues as they were understood in the medieval Christian tradition. (One of Kreeft’s most significant academic works is editing The Summa of the Summa, thus creating an accessible version of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. He is, thus, deeply familiar with the Thomistic virtue tradition.)

The book is divided into two parts. The first part lays out the case that society is unhealthy because people are generally not virtuous and, more significantly, virtue is not seen as something to be striven for. Published thirty-four years ago, these three chapters are interesting largely because they adequately describe our own day and age. The landscape has obviously changed, with the Cold War and the seeming imminent threat of nuclear war a distant memory, but his diagnosis still appears to be accurate.

In the second part, which is comprised of eleven chapters, Kreeft shifts to discussing virtue. In Chapters Four and Five, he defines and explains the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues respectively. Chapter Six makes the argument that the Beatitudes help confront the seven deadly sins. The Seventh through Thirteen Chapter each have a meditation on one of those sins and how the Beatitudes help counter them: pride, avarice, envy, anger, sloth, lust, and gluttony. Kreeft closes with a brief exposition of the benefits and goodness of virtue.

This book is refreshing. It is not new material, but the combination of a deep trust in the intellectual and spiritual heritage of the Christian tradition with an affirmation in its goodness makes the both pleasing and instructive to read. Kreeft reminds his readers that it’s good to be a good guy but that most people won’t agree. He writes,

“Moral traditionalists, who believe in the wisdom of the past, seem to their opponents like drab, dour doomers and damners. But they are not. They are rebels, for in an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left; and they sing as they fight. They have hope even as they pronounce judgment on our civilization. All the prophets offer hope. The patient is not dead yet.”

This brief passage illustrates the joy of reading Kreeft. He offers critique, but it is a critique with hope. His criticism of culture is not a call to destroy it, or wound those in it who disagree with us. Instead, it is a call to be the sort of person that would make a better society and then to salvage the good of civilization from within. More importantly, he still believed in 1986 it is possible, and his book makes the reader believe that he is correct.

There is no answer to the turbulence of the world around us. No simple solution will resolve the evils of society, cause racism to evaporate, erase the rift between Left and Right, or diminish poverty and all the structural ills of this world. But there is hope in the slow and steady progress toward holiness––through good, old fashioned goodness as it was defined by the saints of yesteryear and through the words of Jesus himself––if we are willing to take up the task.

Back to Virtue: Traditional Moral Wisdom for Modern Moral Confusion

By Peter Kreeft

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12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You - A Review

There is a moment of panic when you feel like you’ve lost something vitally important. It can cause a shot of adrenaline as you look around you, feel your pockets, and ask others if they have seen it. Usually after a few seconds your find where you left your phone, sitting on the counter or in the seat beside you. The crisis is averted. No big deal. Except it reveals one of the critical dependencies of our age.

Jacob Shatzer, in his book, Transhumanism and the Image of God, discusses the phone as an extension of humanity. He notes that smartphones and tablets often function as an extension of our minds, holding data, organizing thoughts, and becoming an essential means of retention and communication.

In his 2017 book, 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You, Tony Reinke focuses on how smartphones are shaping our minds, our perceptions, and reality. As we seek to understand discipleship in this technological time, this book is a critical resource for parents, pastors, and teachers to see how this often helpful and seemingly innocuous technology is having an enormous impact.

Summary

Given the title, it is not surprising that the body of Reinke’s book consists of twelve chapters, to which he has added an introduction, conclusion, and brief epilogue. The argument is structured as a chiasm, with chapters 1 and 12 forming a pair, so that the whole book centers around two chapters that focus on identity, since identity is a question of perennial significance in the human experience.

Chapter One begins by observing that modern humans are addicted to distraction. This is not up for debate for those of us who find ourselves compelled to look at our phones constantly to see whether we’ve gotten a text, what has happened on social media, or simply because there is a dull spot in the movie we are watching. Chapter Twelve argues that because of this addiction we have lost our sense of time. That is, our present physical reality is absorbed into an ethereal “now” that causes us to neglect the world in our immediate vicinity.

The second chapter notes that our distractedness causes us to ignore the physical world around us. Surrounded by our friends, we find ourselves occupied in digital dialogue. Facing the incredible responsibility of driving a multi-ton machine down the road, we are more concerned with the chimes and chirps of our silicon companion. This is fleshed out in the eleventh chapter where Reinke observes that people are often less kind to others, both in person and online, because we ignore their humanity in the face of their digital avatar. There are real ethical consequences to our digital projection.

https://www.bdcwire.com/the-internet-fell-in-love-with-this-picture-of-the-black-mass-premiere/

Chapter Three argues that smartphones have increased our need for immediate approval. Delayed feedback is devastating. If the likes and shares don’t pile up immediately, then our digital existence is for naught. If we aren’t digitally amazing, then we are not really worth anything. Chapter Ten highlights the connection between this desire for approval and the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) that characterizes so much of online life. We are drawn to envy and deceit as we try to match everyone else’s highly edited digital reality. This is a dangerous condition for the human soul.

In the fourth chapter Reinke highlights the impact that smartphone addictions have had on literacy. When I worked at a Christian liberal arts university, I was surprised to hear faculty discuss the number of our students who admitted they had never read a full book. I was also shocked to hear students argue that they didn’t need to learn (i.e., memorize) anything because they could always use their favored search engine. The always-on tunnel of information that the smartphone enables has made people more ignorant and less literate. This, in turn, leads to a loss of a sense of meaning, which is outlined in the ninth chapter. Stories are one way that humans have captured and transmitted the meaning of life through generations. By cutting ourselves off from the ability to read, listen to, or watch whole narratives, we cut ourselves off from the ways that meaning has been communicated in previous generations. This is tragic.

Chapter Five focuses on the way that smartphones turn us into consumers who objectify the people we watch. This is true with the explosion of internet pornography mediated by smartphone technology, but also in the way that we watch models and celebrities on social media. Chapter Eight then outlines how the objectification of humans can lead us to secret vices like pornography, gossip, and other sins of various depth. It becomes easier to participate in some of these anti-human vices because the pixelated being on the other end seems much less human to us.

Chapter Six reminds us that we are shaped by what we “like” on social media. This is true in at least two ways. First, we become like that which we fixate upon. When we absorb media, it shapes the way we think. Second, to maximize traffic, the algorithms of social media and search engines are designed to feed us what we have already shown an interest in, which only perpetuates the transformation of our informational feasting. Chapter Seven turns this to show that this tendency leads toward isolation as we get narcissistically caught up in a self-shaped reality and turn away from the people around us.

Conclusion

I was expecting Reinke’s book to be much more technophobic. In fact, he recognizes that value, convenience, and, perhaps, the necessity of smartphones in our technological age.

And yet, this book provides a significant warning of the ways that we can and are being transformed by something that has become so ubiquitous that we may be tempted to ignore its impact.

This is an important book for people to read. It is balanced and well-researched. The time-bound nature of the research will tend to limit its direct applicability over time as technologies continue to advance, but the lessons in the book are timeless.

12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You is, like Andy Crouch’s Tech-Wise Family and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, a book that grasps the real challenges of our day and helps us navigate through the seismic shifts in society that cannot be ignored.

In Search of the Common Good - A Review

At the end of Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth warns his audience, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”

This was, of course, a favorite quip among seminarians who both loved the quest for knowledge and, at the same time, found it wearying.

In that vein, I did not read Jake Meador’s book, In Search of the Common Good, for more than a year after I received it. There are a number of books on my shelf that address similar issues. As the subtitle indicates, Meador is trying to help his readers understand what it means to be a faithful Christian in a fractured world.

Though there are myriad of books that are promoting faithful Christianity in our modern world, Meador’s book is a welcome addition. Not only is it a good addition to my library and a useful tool for my own research, but it would be a good place for many people to start in on the conversation.

The book begins by considering the problem, at least in the US: We have too little community and too little sense of shared experience with each other. This is a common theme that is recognized by Rod Dreher, Wendell Berry, Ben Sasse, Arthur Brooks and many more. Our lack of a sense of belonging to a community or a place helps explain a great deal of the dis-ease of our time. Among the problems that community could help solve and that are now overwhelming what remains of community are a loss of meaning, a loss of wonder, and a loss of good work. It is entirely possible to disagree with some of the particulars in Meador’s argument here, but there is substantive force even if one does not agree fully. We have lost our way.

As a result, Meador calls readers back to what he calls the practice of community through a vision of the Sabbath and fulfillment in worship of the creator, participation in a community with works, and a thoughtful return to meaningful work. The book concludes by discussing civic virtues and by pointing toward our final hope in heaven. Both are important parts of faithful living.

Meador writes well and uses thoughtful illustrations, which makes this a pleasure to read even for those that have covered the ground extensively before. For those that are new to the discussion, In Search of the Common Good, may well raise a sense of longing for something that is missing from so many of our lives and which the church ought to be able to provide. Meador gives a reminder that the common good is not something that we snatch from the center and devour in our own home. Rather, it is like a symphony that is only enjoyable when all the instruments lend their voices together to make the whelming wave of music.

This is a good book that would be worth examining with a group of friends, a small group at church, or a series of neighbors. All the answers are not contained within the pages of this relatively short volume, but there are some practical examples along side the theoretical discussion. Most significantly, no careful reader will walk away from this without a deeper sense that there is a vision here that, if made real, would be lovely to be a part of. This is the sort of volume that makes the reader long for something good, wholesome and true.

In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World

By Meador, Jake

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NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume with no expectation of a positive review.

On Sin and Our Duty to Fight It

8 And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. 9 And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. (Matt 18:8–9)

There are two extreme positions on sin that both misunderstand the gospel. First, that sin is no big deal because Jesus’ atoning death paid for it all for those who believe. Second, that sin is so terrible that we need constantly be in fear of the fires of hell.

Being a Christian is to always be in a two-front war. When God commissioned Joshua after Moses death, he said, “Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success wherever you go.” (Josh 1:7)

There is a reason why Jesus describes the way of salvation as a narrow gate. In Matthew 7:13–14, Jesus said, “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

We are always pulled between at least two directions—sometimes they are temptations—neither of which honors God. Our task is to thread the needle, which we can only do with Jesus’ help.

So, if you are in the camp of people that believe sin is no big deal because you’ve signed a special deal with God by praying a prayer or whatever, this passage is for you. In Matt 18:8–9, Jesus teaches here that sin is so significant that physical deformation and suffering in this life is better than the natural outcome of sin.

But, if you are in the group of people who believe your sin is so huge that nothing could ever take care of it, then we’ll get to the joyous good news of the gospel in just a minute, so hang on tight.

When Jesus speaks of cutting off a hand or gouging out an eye, he is being hyperbolic––he is exaggerating. He isn’t actually telling anyone to self-mutilate, but I think he is quite earnestly explaining how bad sin is. Jesus also isn’t telling his audience, in this case his disciples, that if they cut off an appendage, then they can stop the sin for which they deserve hell.

This begins to make sense when we consider how dangerous our sin is.

The Nature of Sin

In this passage, Jesus is really telling us that sin is bad. It’s really bad.

Herman Bavinck describes sin as,

“appallingly many-sided, with untold moral dimensions, at its heart it is a religious revolt against God and thus appropriately summarized as lawlessness. . . . Sin is never an arbitrary matter, merely a whimsical displeasure of a jealous God. Sin is knowingly breaking God’s command and flows from a heart that rebels against God.”[1]

Sin is both an actively corrupting force within in us and a negator of God’s goodness outside of us. Sin always takes God’s good creation and turns it away from God’s good purposes.

According to J. C. Ryle,

“Sin, in short, is that vast moral disease which affects the whole human race, of every rank, and class, and name, and nation, and people, and tongue; a disease from which there never was but one born of woman that was free.”[2]

Sin is all around us, within us, and inescapable in this life.

As we think about sin, sometimes we tend to think of it in terms of being an opposite power to good. As if there is a balanced evil and good powers, like Satan and God are duking it out, and we’re just waiting to see who will win. Sin and holiness are not like the light and dark side of the Force.

Instead, many teachers throughout Church history have explained sin as the absence of good. The Westminster Shorter Catechism states, “Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.”

In his Enchirideon, Augustine writes, “For what else is that which is called evil but a removal of good? . . . For good to be decreased is evil.”[3] Therefore, when we choose to sin, we are choosing something less than the best thing available. To put it another way, we are redirecting something good from its proper course into a lesser one.

For example, sex was designed as a means of procreating and as a sign of the marriage covenant between a stable couple of the opposite sex. Sin has distorted that design in a million ways by directing it outward to images on a screen, to people not involved in the covenant, or in ways that could never fulfill the procreative type. Sex is a good thing that has been turned away from God’s good purposes in a way that distorts God’s good creation and takes away the blessings it provides.

The natural consequences of sin will always be destructive. Sin is always a tearing down of the gift that God has given us and trying to rebuild the world in our image and according to our own desires.

Again, Bavinck is helpful here: “Sin also develops an order dynamic; there is a law of sin that proceeds from suggestion to enjoyment to consent to execution and involves both our sensuality and our self-seeking.”[4]

The effects of sin are to weaken and darken the soul. John Owen notes,

“[Sin] is a cloud, a thick cloud, that spreads itself over the face of the soul, and intercepts all the beams of God’s love and favor. It takes away all sense of the privilege of our adoptions; and if the soul begins to gather up thoughts of consolation, sin quickly scatters them.”[5]

Adam’s original sin in defying God’s special command not to eat from a particular tree led to he and Eve being forced out of Eden and set this whole world into a tailspin of sin. God sent a flood to cleanse creation, which “was corrupt in God’s sight” (Gen 6:11), so he did something like a soft reboot of his creation. Pharaoh’s sin in resisting God’s command to let the Israelites go led to economic and physical misery and eventually the death of the first-born sons. Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are all filled with illustrations of how sinful every human is, with the sacrificial system given as a reminder that sin is a major problem to be dealt with. The first five books of the Bible are extremely bloody.

As the author of Hebrews reminds us, “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” (Heb 9:22)

Given that the death of God’s only son, the firstborn of all creation (cf. Col 1:15), was necessary to take the penalty of sin, we would do well to take sin seriously. If you are struggling with reading through the Old Testament, just know that it is supposed to be a reminder of sin that points you toward your need for a savior.

Dealing with Sin

For those of you who are Christian, it is vitally important that we actively fight against sin in our lives. The primary audience of Jesus’ words is the people who have followed him, who recognize he is Messiah, and who will recognize what that really means after his death, burial and resurrection.

Because sin is so serious, we need to deal with it seriously. Perhaps the most famous John Owen quote, offered by many who have never cracked one of his books, is “Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.”[6]

Owen’s entire book, The Mortification of Sin, is a masterpiece, though reading Owen is an acquired taste. But the expanded quote gives us a deeper sense of what Owen is getting at here:

“Do you mortify; do you make it your daily work; be always at it whilst you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you.”

Although Owen is writing an exposition of Romans 8, he is channeling Jesus’ words from Matthew here. Sin is a really big deal and we really need to fight against it. If we aren’t killing sin, sin will kill us. It will suck our spiritual vitality away. It diminishes our work for God and our joy in God.

As we wrestle with sin, we need to keep two absolute spiritual truths in tension:

1.       All of our sin is paid for in full by the blood of Christ on the cross; (1 Peter 2:24)

2.       Our continued sin grieves God. (cf. Rom 6:1)

Our inheritance is sure, but our calling to resist sin is just as certain.

So, for example, if you discover that something you do that you love leads you to sin, you should be prepared to give it up. It may be a perfectly good thing in itself and others may have no problem with it. But if it causes you to sin, cut it out of your life.[7]

Our process of sanctification is the process of killing sin in our lives. We strive, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to look like the people God has called us to be. Positionally we have Christ’s righteousness the moment we are saved, but our lives typically don’t reflect that immediately. Becoming what we truly are requires us to put sin to death.

When a day goes by and you don’t think about your sin––thinking about it so that you can kill it––then you are probably losing ground.

We are subject to temptation, when we think of holiness and our fight against sin, to think that if we have beaten a few of our more obvious faults, that we are really humming along toward heaven. But the Christian life demands that we pursue perfect conformity to God’s law. Though God is certainly pleased with our first steps toward holiness, just as a father is pleased with his child’s first steps, God is not satisfied with believers who can only take a few steps before falling down. He expects us, through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, to continue to strive to live perfectly in Christ’s image, even in the knowledge that we can never achieve that end.[8]

[1] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Sin and Salvation in Christ, vol III, 126. Much of this definition of the nature of sin flows from Bavinck’s discussion.

[2] J. C. Ryle, Holiness, 2.

[3] Augustine, Enchirideon, 40–41.

[4] Bavinck, Sin and Salvation in Christ, 127.

[5] John Owen, Overcoming Sin and Temptation, 65.

[6] Owen, Overcoming, 50.

[7] Intermediate application: If watching football causes you to sin by neglecting God’s Word and his people: cut it out of your life. If your job puts you in situations that lead you to defraud people or take advantage of them, be prepared to quit. Cut it off. If listening to particular radio shows or constantly streaming news causes you to despise other image-bearers and wish them harm, then turn it off. There is no limit to the types of applications, because we live in a society that seems to have unlimited temptations to sin. Whatever the issue is, be prepared to cut it off.

[8] This illustration is borrowed from C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 202–203.