Axe to the Root with Bojidar Marinov | Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Network

Welcome to Episode 7 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about basic economics; specifically, how does economic growth happen? What is the nature of economic growth? And then, we will ask, why are some nations economically more developed than other nations? What does modern worldly wisdom say about economic growth? What does the Bible say about it? What is the place of technological progress in economic growth? And how does technological progress come about, anyway?

And of course, the first question we need to answer is this: why are we asking these questions as Christians? Is there a Biblical, covenantal significance to the issue of economic growth? Should Christians care about economic growth, what it is, and how it comes around?

The present state of the American church and of its seminaries is such that most of our thinking as Christians is captured in the quagmire of a modern form of dualism. That modern form of dualism believes that special, salvific grace, can only be applied to the individual’s soul – and may be to his church. The individual is saved by this grace, and perhaps – only perhaps – his ethical conduct is changed and redeemed, to a certain extent. But when we come to the life of his society and institutions, they are only under common grace, and there is no redemption applied to them. We are going to talk about common grace and special grace in another episode in the future, and we are going to cover the nature of common grace and special grace, and we are going to see how the modern Reformed churches, in their limiting special grace to the individual, in reality elevate common grace as the sovereign grace, while special grace is only subservient and secondary. That theological issue needs an episode of its own, for we will have to explain all its practical implications.

For now, though, the important part in our narrative today is this: because of that dualistic theology that limits special grace only to the individual, the world outside the individual heart of man is rather left outside the scope of the theological interest of the church. We don’t have any place for economics in our theology. We don’t have any place for theory of government, social theory, science, history, business, etc. These things are left to the world, and our seminaries never speak of them from a Biblical perspective. Since they are assumed to be “common” to believers and unbelievers, which actually means “morally neutral,” there are no attempts by our theologians, seminary professors, and pastors to push any antithesis between the Christian worldview and the pagan worldviews. Most of our own Christian intellectual elite is not even aware that the Bible has economic theory, or social theory, consistent with its concept of God, man, law, judgment and the future. Most of those who man our pulpits couldn’t tell you what the difference is – ethical or covenantal – between the Biblical view of business and the anti-Biblical view of business. I said “most,” but the correct phrase would be “all of them with a few very precious exceptions.” Our own so-called “Reformed” seminaries crank out multitudes of graduates every year who can’t produce a coherent Biblical thought in any area of life except in speculative theology and academical hermeneutics. It is as if Christ and Satan basically agree on everything, and have the same views and same agendas on everything in respect to man’s society, and their only real conflict is over the eternal state of human souls.

It is for this reason we as Christians never challenge the prevalent economic theories of the day – and in fact, we most often subscribe to them. We are not even aware that they are anti-Biblical, for they make the society follow ethics that is anti-Biblical. We don’t care. The Bible just can’t be used as a book on economics. Not even as a book on the ethics of economic doctrines. There is no economic theory in the Bible, our own churchian celebrities tell us.

It is this silence of the church on the comprehensive application of the Gospel to every area of life – including economics and economic policies – that has led to the rise of economic theories that do nothing else but institutionalize greed and envy. And I mean Keynesianism and Marxism, and all of their modifications in the last 40 years. All these theories have been based on a worldview hostile to the Bible, and therefore a worldview that views man, man’s psychology and ethics, and man’s society and institutions, and specifically economic growth, through lenses hostile to the Bible. But faith has consequences. When man views the world through a worldview hostile to the Bible, this worldview produces practice hostile to the Bible. The church has been silent on what the Bible says about economics and economic growth, and therefore a pagan view of economics and economic growth has prevailed, and therefore we have been led into economic policies and practices that have been eating away the wealth and the development our Christian forefathers have built.

So, the question now is: How do we restore the Biblical worldview in the field of economics? And, specifically for this episode, what is the Biblical view of the nature of economic growth, and how does it compare to the prevalent anti-Biblical views and practices?

Now, to make a disclaimer, what I am going to share here is not something new. I have talked about it before, in sermons and lectures and articles. And people greater than me have written about it: R.J. Rushdoony and especially Gary North. So this is not something new, and you may have heard it or read it before. Don’t expect me to always be original.

My favorite starting point is Robinson Crusoe, the famous fictional character of the English author Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe as a character doesn’t need any introduction to any native English speaker, I hope, nor to any non-English speaker, for that matter; the novel is translated in virtually every language on the planet. May be a short introduction to the author is needed, since most people don’t realize the worldview behind the novel. Daniel Defoe was born in the family of Presbyterian dissenters, and he received his education at a Puritan dissenter school. I use the word “dissenter” because for the first almost 30 years of his life he grew up in England where dissenters were persecuted. He even took part in the unsuccessful Protestant Monmouth Rebellion against the Roman Catholic king James II. The rebellion was defeated, but he was saved from repercussions by the successful Glorious Revolution and the establishment of the Protestant rule of William and Mary. Defoe created his Robinson character to represent the Puritan worldview of a man who, despite his circumstances, is capable of conquering and civilizing the world, and conquering and civilizing the pagan savages. This significance of the novel Robinson Crusoe is often missed even by Christians: it’s popularity shows the power of a truly Biblical worldview in the application of the Dominion Covenant. Given that, it is not difficult to see the reason for the decline of Christianity in the last one century: we have lost – or, rather, rejected – that original idea of God’s Dominion Covenant to man. But we will talk about this in another episode.

So let’s use the concept, and imagine our Robinson who has just been cast on an island, and needs to start creating his own “economy” from scratch in order to survive. And let’s place him in the worst of the circumstances: a situation of bare survival and subsistence where his only option is to to work enough to fill his basic needs of nourishment, and nothing else.

So our Robinson is on that island, there are a few tools he has, but all of these tools are only good in an already developed economy, an economy of division of labor. (After all, you know, if you are stranded on an uninhabited island and you have a Ferrari, it is of no value to you; the same applies to all the other things that may have certain value in our society today but don’t have value outside an economy of division of labor and infrastructure.) Robinson needs to meet his basic need: he needs to eat. And let’s imagine he is lucky to have at least his basic need met: There are fruit trees on the island, very near to the beach where he landed, and these trees grow berries that are edible and meet his basic needs.

There is only one problem: In order to meet his daily ration, Robinson needs to climb these trees 12 to 16 hours a day. After 12-16 hours a day, he is exhausted. He has enough strength to go to the nearest fresh water spring, have a few swallows of water, and go to sleep. Nothing more. Unless he gets rescued from the island, his prospects of the future are bleak: With age, he will grow weaker and weaker, and one day he won’t have the strength to climb those trees to get enough for his survival, and then starvation comes.

The only solution for him, then, if he assumes that the rescue party is not coming soon, is to do something to grow his economy. That is, he needs to find a way to make his economy produce more value – that is, more value than he needs for his survival, so that he can start saving some of it for his advanced age. But what can he do to make his economy grow? What is the nature of economic growth, and therefore, what can he do to produce that economic growth?

If we look to the modern dominant economic theories, the answer of Keynesianism is this: He needs to increase his consumption. Wait, what?, you will say. Yes, you heard well. Keynesianism, the theory behind all modern economic and financial policies of all the governments in the world, says that the way to produce economic growth is by making people consume more. The more people consume, the more activity there is, and therefore the better the economy is. What Keynesian economists never say is this: Increased consumption without previous economic growth will only consume more of what has already been produced, and will decrease the value of the economy. Increased consumption doesn’t produce economic growth, it only redirects resources from economic growth to consumption. And when everything that is accumulated is consumed, the economy will return to Robinson’s condition: nothing to consume, except what we produce. Thus, in the final account, we will be back to a lower level of consumption, except that the accumulated assets will have been destroyed. And how would Keynesianism work in Robinson’s case? The man already consumes everything he produces. How is this going to lead to a better economy?

Marxism and socialism have no answer to this question. They never discuss Robinson as a theoretical case. Why? First, because for Marxism, the definition of economy is exchange; no value is economic value for Marxism unless it is meant for exchange. What a person produces for himself is not economic value. I know you are deeply surprised, but yes, that’s Marx’s definition of economic value. Remember Aristotle who said that main is a social animal, and a man who doesn’t need a society is either a beast or a god? Well, that’s Marx’s view of man too. Marx was such a committed collectivist that not only couldn’t he imagine a man like Robinson Cruso, he refused to apply his economic analysis to a one-man economy. And there’s a second reason, which is better known among many of us: Marxism, and any socialism whatsoever, never assumes a world without already developed economic resources. Socialists, as you all know, never think in terms of where these resources come from. They only assume they exist just like that, out of the blue, and then they just want to re-distribute them. Thus, the example of Robinson is rather troubling for them: Wait, you mean there are no existing economic resources? In their world, economic growth can be produced only after some economic growth has already been produced, and then socialists come to re-distribute it. Yes, that’s how stupid socialism is. But while you are laughing at its stupidity, keep in mind that many of your pastors and churchian celebrities fall for it. No, not just the liberal variety. Those of the supposedly “conservative,” Bible-believing, Reformed persuasion, very popular, also fall for it. And some openly defend it. We will talk about some of them in future episodes.

So, Keynesianism has a ridiculous solution that makes no sense whatsoever; and socialism can’t even analyze the situation because it has no definition for it. What is then the Biblical solution for economic growth?

The Biblical solution is best described in the principle of John 12:24: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” While for most, this verse applies to economics only marginally, a careful reading of the Bible from an economic perspective shows clearly that the Bible expects economic growth to happen only where something is given up, sacrificed, or – in the economic sense of “sacrifice” – invested. Because investment is just that: restraint from current consumption of a certain resource, with the purpose of putting it to work and produce fruit in the future. It’s a sacrifice of sorts, it is dying for your present satisfaction in order to produce future growth. This is the only real solution to the problem of economic growth. Now, as we will see, just restraint from current consumption is certainly not enough; but whatever other steps are needed, this step is unavoidable, if we want to produce growth.

Thus, what Robinson needs to do to break the hopeless grim cycle of foraging for berries is forbear consumption for a certain period of time. That’s not enough, of course, just going hungry for a day doing nothing is not going to change anything. The time he will spare from foraging must be put to some productive use which will help him produce more berries the next day. But whatever he plans to do, there must be some sacrifice. If it’s not a sacrifice of food consumption, it must be sacrifice of sleep. He may decide to do it in one day, or he may decide to spread it over several days, just eating a little less every day. Or sleeping a little less every day. He has four options: not eating one day, not sleeping one night, eating less every day over a period of time, or sleeping less every day over a period of time. All these options have their relative advantages and relative disadvantages. Not eating for a whole day may be more painful than eating less for several days, but then, over several days he risks losing more and more of his strength if he hasn’t calculated his schedule well. Either way, he needs to sacrifice, and he has to take risks.

That, of course, is not enough. He needs to do something with the time taken away from foraging and sleeping. Robinson’s idea is to use his knife and some cords from the ship to produce a 15 ft pole to shake the berries off the trees instead of climbing the trees. It takes him exactly half a day – 12 hours – to find a few good limbs, cut them, prune them, and rope them into a good solid 15ft long pole. Them he goes to sleep. The next day he is hungry and weak, but he has a better technology which requires less strength to operate and produces more output for the same work time.

When he tries his new technology, he discovers that he can shake off the trees the same quantity of berries within half a day. He has an abundance of options before him now. He can choose to work half day, gather what he needs to survive, and then rest the other half of the day. That’s the socialist utopia. He won’t accumulate wealth this way, but he will have fun several hours every day. Another option is to spend the whole day working, and then consume everything he has gathered, twice the ration of what he needs to survive. That’s the Keynesian utopia. He won’t accumulate wealth this way either, but at least, he’ll add weight.

He has another option, then; the Biblical option. That is, consume less than what he produces. He can work the whole day, but only eat what he needs to survive, and save the rest. If he finds a way to dry the saved berries so that their nutritional value is preserved, he may be able to solve the problem with weakness in his old age: he can work 20 years, and accumulate enough food for another 20 years. Of course, all other things being equal, like no spoiled stock of dried berries, no need to build a house, etc. But all other things are never equal.

Our Robinson, being a good and conscientious Puritan, decides to ignore the socialist solution and the Keynesian solution, and goes for the Biblical solution. He works hard for several weeks, gathering more berries than he eats, and saves and dries what he doesn’t eat. Then one day, while working, he notices an animal: too far away for him to be able to chase it, but close enough to see that the animal is a goat. He figures that a lonely goat can’t exist on an isolated island, so there must be a whole colony of wild goats somewhere on the island. And then he realizes there is an opportunity in it. The next day he leaves his little patch close to the beach for the interior of the island, stocked with two weeks worth of dried berries, and armed with a musket from the ship, with some dry powder. His Biblical choice – work more, consume less – has made it possible for him to embark on this journey. Had he chosen a socialist policy (work only as much as needed to survive), he wouldn’t have the resources. Had he chosen a Keynesian policy (work a lot and consume everything he produced), such a trip would be equally impossible. Only because he chose to sacrifice something – work more, consume less – he is able to make that trip.

Two days later, he finds the colony, and shoots two goats. He brings them back home, cuts the meat, dries it, and now he has more than just berries: he has a source of fat and proteins. The game is not survival anymore; it’s prosperity. But it doesn’t stop there. While enjoying his goat steak, he thinks of milk. The next day he embarks on another trip, and this time he returns with two live goats, one male and one female. He now has enough saved resources to build an enclosure for them. Within a couple of months, he has captured more goats, and he now has milk. And he also has a house. And he is also capable of sewing some new clothes from goatskins. Etc., etc., etc. You can project where this is going. The limit of the growth of his economy is his ability to devise better and better technology to produce more and more value (nutrition, clothes, construction) for the same period of time.

Then, one day, Friday comes. The small economy now is faced with a choice: division of labor (everyone works) or administrative control (some work, some oversee, to make sure government policies are implemented).

Taking the first option, Robinson discovers that Friday is a seasoned fisherman. He just needs a small boat and a net. Making the boat and the net is not a problem now that Robinson has his small economy going. The two men have enough to eat for several days until the net and the small boat are ready to use. The next day Friday starts adding more value (protein and oil) to the economy of the small colony. We don’t need to continue. Everything is clear from there.

But what if they choose the course of administrative control, er, social justice and economic rationality? After all, we can’t allow any market chaos there, can we? What if the two men decide to actually exchange their produce, voluntarily. Complete market chaos, right?

So instead of that chaos, Friday decides, being the stronger of the two, to introduce some order. He decides to become a government supervisor (and a legislator, and a judge, and a cop, and a regulator) over Robinson, telling Robinson what to do, and also confiscating some of Robinson’s produce as a fee for Friday’s “services.”

If you thought such “policy” would be met by Robinson with severe resentment, then you have quite a realistic idea of human nature. He knows he can produce economic growth without supervision; and therefore he knows that such supervision is useless and counterproductive – because now Robinson will have to spend some time reporting to Friday about his activities during the day. Given that Friday is not familiar with the details of the workings of Robinson’s different enterprises (government bureaucrats are usually clueless about real work), Robinson will have to spend additional time explaining many of his activities and how much of real increase he has had. The time that could be spent on producing more value is spent now on producing reports which have no value to anyone at all. Not to mention that Friday doesn’t produce value but consumes it. Robinson’s righteous resentment of that will drive Robinson to even more unproductive activities: like concealing data from Friday so that Friday takes less of his produce. At some point the productivity of the only working person is below the total consumption of the two.

You think that can’t happen?

Look at Europe, with its economic growth in the negative for several years in a row. No, it has nothing to do with the price of oil or with the weather. It has to do with the disbalance between productivity of some vs. consumption by many. Economic growth is only produced when someone, out of their free will, decide to sacrifice something – nourishment, sleep, etc. – and then do something with the resources saved. Something that would lead to better productivity, that is, more output for the same input of resources (time, labor, raw materials). But keep in mind, there can be sacrifice which doesn’t lead to economic growth: when the sacrifice is forced, it destroys the spirit and the desire for building new things. And then such forced sacrifice leads to economic stagnation.

There’s one little problem to solve, though. We said that economic growth can only be produced by sacrifice and thrift. That’s the Biblical view. And indeed, there has never been economic growth where there has been no sacrifice and thrift. The rise of capitalism in Europe indeed started with sacrifice and thrift. The rise of the modern developed societies in East Asia – Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore – indeed started with sacrifice and thrift. In Europe, the attempts of triggering economic growth with injecting capital – as in Greece – have failed; there is no sacrifice and thrift. Sacrifice and thrift seem to be the necessary prerequisite to economic growth; and economic growth that doesn’t start with Robinson going hungry for a day, and then producing more than he consumes, is fake economic growth. Within a generation such economic growth stalls and disappears.

But while sacrifice and thrift seems to be a necessary prerequisite, it doesn’t seem to be a sufficient prerequisite. Several years ago in the UK, a homeless beggar passed away, and the authorities discovered that the man had a bank account with one million pounds in it? All saved and increased money from his begging. And yet, he never progressed above his homeless existence. There are cultures where sacrifice and thrift are traditional and established values – like China, for example. During the 19th century, as a result of the tea trade, China saw a great influx of Mexican silver pesos in their economy. British merchants were making a killing off the trade triangle Britain-Mexico-China. The main trip in that triangle was the sale of tea from China to Britain. But the Chinese merchants were not interested in anything Britain produced; they only wanted “specie,” that is, precious metals, gold and silver. Mexico, as the largest producer of silver in the world, had what they wanted. So British merchants would take industrial goods to Mexico, sell them for silver pesos, then take the pesos to the Chinese producers of tea, and take tea for them. The Chinese didn’t act as per the established mercantilist economic theory of the day. (We will talk about mercantilism as an economic theory in another episode.) They didn’t use their wealth to buy something they didn’t have. They didn’t crave anything to consume. All they wanted was to hoard their silver. And they did. They hoarded so many of those pesos that the British fought two wars (The Opium Wars, google it) to force them to start spending them on consumption. The Mexican peso of the 19th century became legal tender in Siam (today Thailand), China and Japan. In fact, the modern name of the Chinese currency – yuan – was in the 19thcentury the Chinese name for the Mexican silver peso. Billions of silver pesos were saved in personal safes in the Chinese Empire and later in the Chinese Republic. Even today, families in China who have managed to preserve some inheritance from two generation before (despite Communist confiscations of gold and silver), still keep Mexican silver pesos. And yet, China never developed the economic growth Europe and America developed, despite the gigantic amount of savings.

So what else is missing?

What is missing – and what is missed by most economists today – is that non-material, non-political, non-financial element of faith in the future.

You see, savings in themselves can be done for two reasons. One reason can be positive faith in the future. The other reason may be fear of what the future may bring. How do we know the difference?

We know it by what they do with these savings. There’s the man who buried the talent. Why? He was afraid of what the future may bring. And there were the men who put their talents to work. Why? They had certain . . . faith . . . about the future which prompted them to overcome their fear of risk and failure and act. That’s what Jesus told the good servant, that he was faithful – that is, his actions had to do with faith. There has to be a specific faith that would trigger not only the desire to sacrifice and save, but also the confidence that efforts towards the future matter, and that there is a mechanism in our world that reliably and predictably rewards those who take risks and invest in better productivity. It is this faith that is the dividing line between a thrifty society like China and a thrifty society like Scotland or Switzerland. Without such faith, Robinson wouldn’t even take the pain of staying hungry for one day: Why would he, if his expectations of the future deny any return on his sacrifice? Even if he took the pain of staying hungry for several days (like many religious fanatics in India), he wouldn’t make the effort of making the pole. Why would he, if his expectations of the future tell him that nothing he does can change the future? There has to be an underlying faith and underlying presuppositions behind his sacrifice, which will make him use the time and the saved resources to invest in the future. And then the question is: what religion provides such a faith in a predictable world and optimistic future?

We are running out of time here, and therefore we will leave the analysis of this economically beneficient religion, so important for economic growth, to another episode in the future. To get a glimpse at what we will be talking about, y’all can read my article adorned with the long title, “The Rhetoric at the Foundation of Capitalism, and the Ethics at the Foundation of that Rhetoric.” There is a reason for the long title, and it is in the article. The article can be found on my blog, ChristendomRestored.com. Suffice to say here, without the development of that very special religion, and the development of the worldview following from it, the world today would have still been as poor as it was 1,000 years ago. But we will leave this to another episode.

To wrap it up, some time ago a pastor of a small church I used to attend told me that he had no idea how to decide among the multiple economic theories, and which is Biblical and which not. “I am not a trained economist,” he said. I told him, “You don’t have to be one. All you need to remember in order to assess an economic theory is this simple ethical rule: What does it say about economic growth? If it says that economic growth is produced by consumption, or re-distribution – which is theft – or by magical manipulation of reality (inflation), it is an anti-Biblical economic theory. But it says that economic growth is produced by sacrifice, work, and faith which lays the foundation for confidence and optimism of the future, it is close to the Biblical view of economics.” It’s that simple.

The book I will assign today is Gary North’s Inherit the Earth: Biblical Principles for Economics, part of the Biblical Blueprint Series. As all the book in the Biblical Blueprint Series, it is concise, simple, and even has questions for study at the end of each chapter. You can read it yourself, and you can make it part of your children’s homeschool as well.

And I want to turn your attention, again, to my ministry. It is important to me, because my heart is still there. On the mission field. America has become prosperous because she has had that faith that provided the conditions for economic growth. I want to bring that same faith to Eastern Europe, and I need y’all’s help. Please visit BulgarianReformation.com and consider donating. There are books to be translated and published, and especially books on the true nature of economic growth, in obedience to Christ and His Gospel. Just a little help will go a long way where the fields are white for harvest. Gob bless you.

Welcome to Episode 6 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about the cultural war in America today, and the responsibility of the churchian leaders and celebrities for the situation today. We will cover especially what I call Denethor ministries – a specific type of Christian ministries that have become very popular, entrenched in the church, and well-supplied with funds, when these same ministries not only did nothing to prevent the cultural defeats of Christianity in the last decades but also actively worked towards those defeats and encouraged them.

I will start with a quote from a recent interview on NPR, in relation to the current election campaign and the role of the evangelicals – or what passes for “evangelicals” – in it:

We have taken comfort in the fact that there have been millions and millions of us in America. Now we’re having to face the fact that, evidently, theologically-defined—defined by commitment to core evangelical values—there aren’t so many millions of us as we thought.

Now, it’s a fair statement. Yes, we as Christians have always thought that there were millions of us who have the same view of reality because we had the same theological definitions for everything. And since Christians are supposed to view the world through their Biblical understanding, we have supposed that there are many who think like we do, because these millions go to all these churches where they hear all these sermons based on the same theology – with some insignificant difference between the denominations. And yes, the rise of Donald Trump and his success among Evangelicals clearly show that we have been wrong about it. Most of these people don’t know what they believe in, and how what they hear from the pulpits bears on what is happening in the culture. So, yes, the sentiment seem to be correct, after all, at least judging from the developments of the last couple of years.

What’s problematic, though, is where the statement came from. Or, more precisely, who the statement came from. It came from Albert Mohler. Yes, the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. The man who, for more than 2 decades, has held the position of the highest theological authority in the largest Evangelical denomination in the United States – 16 million membership as of today. As such, he is the man who has been responsible for training the majority of that denomination’s pastors, preachers, seminary professors, etc. The man who has been allotted an annual budget of over $30 million to train a full-time equivalent of 2,000 students for the ministry, which means individual cost of about $15,000 per student per year. (To compare, Georgia Tech’s annual budget per student is about $35,000, but at least 1/3 of it goes to scientific, engineering, and technological research, so the cost per student is close to that of the Southern Baptist Seminary. And, of course, Georgia Tech has to maintain world-class scientific and engineering laboratories as part of the educational process.) This is the man who has every support of the largest Baptist denomination in the world to make his teaching and theological views available to every corner of the world, and train evangelists and preachers anywhere, at any time. This is Albert Mohler, after all, who, according to The Economist, is one of America’s most influential evangelicals.

Isn’t it quite strange, then, that the man who has at his disposal a greater abundance of resources to spread the Gospel and train ministers than all the Christian missionaries in the first 19 centuries of the Christian church, after two decades of work, would so casually declare the defeat of his own task and mission. He has been at the wheel all this time, commanding resources that could do miracles in other parts of the world, he could train and prepare ministers who could turn the world upside down, and yet, he states just matter-of-factly, we don’t have that many evangelicals in America today, at least not that many that would be theologically self-conscious enough to make a difference in our society.

The irony of the situation is stunning. If we translate the problem to the world of cars, and let’s say I complained that I can’t find a good car that is worth the price, and that the automobile industry has declined severely in the last 20 years, that would be alright. Imagine if the CEO of Toyota Corporation said it. Or in the world of technology: if the president of the MIT declared that we have seen a decline in technological development. You’d think it is the greatest joke ever, right? And how in the world is it possible that Albert Mohler can’t see the irony in his own words?

Apparently, he can’t. Because he has said it many times in his podcasts and his blog, and in other interviews. But there’s more. In some of his podcasts and blogs, when speaking about Christians engaged politically and running for political office, his concern is that many Christians are incompetent for office. His favorite dictum is “I’d rather be governed by a competent Turk (that is, Muslim) than by an incompetent Christian.” He ascribes the words to Luther although there is no evidence Luther ever said them; they were ascribed to Luther by later authors. Now, whatever one thinks of that dictum, the question remains: how is it that after centuries of competent Christian leadership in the Western world, we don’t have competent Christian leaders today, 23 years after Albert Mohler took over the leadership of the largest Christian seminary in the US. How is it that his leadership failed to produce the Christian ministers who would train the Christian leaders for every area of life? One Scottish immigrant back in the 1700s, John Witherspoon, was responsible for the training of a whole generation of American leaders who turned the world upside down – and Witherspoon didn’t have at his disposal anything close to what Mohler has, in terms of funds and technology. What happened to these $30+ million that Mohler’s seminary has been spending every year for the last 23 years?

However, don’t be left with the impression that I am simply picking on Albert Mohler. There is a general principle here. Mohler is just one of the more visible examples of a general phenomenon in the American church today, hundreds of similar ministries which I dub with the Middle Earth name “Denethor Ministries.” Mohler is one example of such ministries, but there are others. Similar statements about the decline of the cultural influence of evangelicalism were publicly shared by Franklin Graham; and his Billy Graham Evangelistic Association burns through $100 million of donations every year. John MacArthur has been burning through $70 million every year combined donations and tuition for his Grace Community Church, The Master’s College, and The Master’s Seminary; and yet, MacArthur has said it many times that if there was any cultural influence of Christianity in America, it is declining. This decline has been noted by professors at both Westminster Seminaries – in Philadelphia and in Escondido – and yet, both seminaries have been burning through $10 million a year combined, for many years now.

If we sum up all the money spent on these ministries – churches, seminaries, Christian colleges, evangelistic associations, missionary organizations – it will amount to billions of dollars every year. And yet, the very top leaders, those whom we have entrusted with the task of applying this money to good use, just casually tell us that all their efforts have failed, that Christianity is in decline, and there is nothing in their statement to indicate that they are aware of or willing to admit that they may be responsible for this gigantic waste of resources. It’s just business as usual, you know, give us more money to spread the Gospel, and, by the way, the Gospel is even less influential with the money you gave us last time.

No matter how you look at it, no matter what excuses you make up, it is obvious that Christians in America are supporting their own cultural defeat. There is no other way to describe the willingness to waste billions of dollars on organizations and ministers who just casually declare that after decades of work, America has become even less Christian, and Christians have become less theologically-conscious and less competent than ever. This is one very pricey cultural defeat, folks. We could have spent all these billions of dollars on bourbon and the results would have been about the same. In fact, I really harbor the suspicion that if we had spent that money on bourbon, we would have had better results. At least we would have seen the real nature of our misery and would have been motivated to do something, not just delegate it to men who specialize in wasting billions of dollars.

Why Denethor ministries? Who is Denethor anyway? Denethor, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, is the last Steward of Gondor, right before the return of the rightful King of Gondor, Aragorn. Now, if you just watched the movies and haven’t read the book, keep in mind that Denethor was there presented in a much worse light than in the book. In the book, he is a man of strong will, profound wisdom and intelligence, of foresight, of leadership skills, and of great personal strength, ethics, sense of honor, and commitment. Unlike Saruman, he is strong enough to oppose Sauron’s attempts at corrupting him. He raises his two sons, Boromir and Faramir, to be worthy of their calling – men of courage and strength, and leaders as their father. For a long time, the two brothers organize the defense of Gondor against her enemies, and are able to keep the enemy at bay. In all respects, Denethor, as described in the book, is an extraordinary man of extraordinary character.

And yet, all his strengths notwithstanding, Denethor is incapable of reversing the decline of Gondor, the realm under his Stewardship. The population of the Kingdom continues dwindling, even in times of relative peace and prosperity. At the same time Mordor is again filled with Orcs and is again expanding its power and its influence, making gains in both military strength and allies. Despite the wisdom and the leadership skills of Boromir and Faramir, the enemy continues rolling back the border defenses closer and closer to the capital at Minas Tirith. During the rule of Denethor, Ithilien, the easternmost territory of Gondor, across the Great River, is completely abandoned, and only Gondor’s Rangers go there. Osgiliath, the ancient capital of Gondor, on the Great River, is left uninhabited, only border ruins, harder and harder to retain, and eventually these ruins are taken over by the enemy. The plains to the north and northwest (the border with Rohan) are so depopulated that Orcs are left to roam freely. Gondor under Denethor is a shrinking kingdom, with its effective borders being pushed more and more back to the very walls of its capital city. When the final battle comes, and his sons are not with him anymore (Boromir is dead, and Faramir is mortally wounded), Denethor proves incapable of leading his men in the defense of the city because of what we can call a failure of nerve, and eventually commits suicide. The command of the forces of Gondor in the final battle falls to a stranger, Gandalf, and then to a ruler of lower rank, the Prince of Dol Amroth.

Why is that? Why is it that a man of such foresight, knowledge, wisdom, and moral strength, aided by the most extraordinary pair of sons a living man can boast of, is incapable of producing the progress and growth his realm needs in order to stand firm against its enemies?

The simplistic answer is that in his pride, Denethor failed to recognize the presence of the true King of Gondor, Aragorn. And there is some truth to it, and there is also a spiritual lesson for us all in it – and there is a spiritual lesson for all these modern ministries I mentioned above, that they all fail to recognize the present reality of Christ Kingdom.

But there is also a deeper reality behind Denethor’s failure; and this reality is rather ideological – or, rather, eschatological. In all his strength, knowledge, foresight, and wisdom, Denethor carries in himself deep pessimism about the future. His expectations are always grim and negative. He sees no hope for a long term victory. His statements show that the best he expects of the future is restraining action against evil, not a victorious campaign which would eradicate it. In his superior knowledge of the enemy and his strength, Denethor sees no weaknesses in the enemy, and sees nothing that could stop the enemy’s advance. When he sends his son Faramir to his certain death, it is only because he doesn’t see any other hope but heroic sacrifice which would delay the inevitable defeat. And when his son is returned to him mortally wounded from that last heroic effort, Denethor loses all hope and commits suicide.

Denethor expects the world to get worse and worse. While he doesn’t say this openly, and probably doesn’t even realize it, his eschatology takes his toll on his mind. None of his actions or words indicate any hope of victory, or any hope of improvement whatsoever. His relationship to his sons is marred by this pessimism. His relationship to his people is marred by it. His relationship to Gandalf and other foreign leaders who later take over from him is marred by it. And yes, even his rejection of the true King is the consequence of Denethor’s grim expectations of the future. Eventually, he withdraws more and more in his escapist individualist world of misconceived personal honor.

Denethor, in other words, is invested heavily in defeat. And this personal investment in defeat has influenced those under him. For all his wisdom and strength and knowledge and power, his personal expectations of the future bears heavily on their collective attitude. The period of peace and prosperity fails to produce growth. It fails to produce progress and conquest. When the leader is invested heavily in defeat, his people accept defeat as inevitable, and they work toward defeat as well. So much are they invested in defeat, that in the final account, it is foreign leaders and troops who save Gondor from final ruin.

Invested in defeat is exactly the most conspicuous characteristic of our modern American Denethor Ministries. For many American Christians who have grown up with these ministries and have listened to them for many years, this fact is not that visible – just as the water in the aquarium is not that visible to the fish in it. Every time I point to this investment in defeat, I meet bewilderment, “But wait, I have heard Mohler, or Graham, or MacArthur, talk about victory.” But for those of us who have lived through Communism and have seen its fall, and have seen the rise of societies driven by historical optimism, these ministries are heavily pessimistic, and heavily invested in defeat.

Yes, yes, every now and then they would mention victory. But their “victory” is always hyper-spiritualized, it always has to do with personal emotional or spiritual or moral issues. Or it has to do with Christ’s First or Second Coming. It’s always a “victory” of some cliché, like “We have victory on the Cross,” or “Our victory is in Christ,” or “our victory is when Christ comes,” etc. It is never victory in history, its never in the world outside our personal spiritual and emotional cloisters. The very slang of these ministries is specifically designed to create a dichotomy between the personal emotional and spiritual life of a person and the world outside. Phrases like, “here and not yet,” “we are royal exiles,” or “living a Kingdom life, or a redeemed life, in a fallen world,” or “living a Christian life in a post-Christian world,” etc., etc. . . . all these phrases have one purpose: to limit whatever victory and optimism there is to individual salvation, while at the same time proclaiming that the culture as a whole, or the society as a whole, or the institutions in that society, are doomed to remain unredeemed, wicked, and hostile to God.

More than that. The rhetoric of such celebrities and ministries is specifically geared toward rejecting any possibility for any cultural change to the good, in favor of the Gospel. Yes, in the last 2 years Franklin Graham suddenly discovered that our culture has become more and more pagan. And we saw his excessive political activism in favor the political party that traditionally has most evangelicals like him in its back pocket. But just 6 years ago that same Graham said in an interview that, “First of all, the Bible didn’t tell me to do that. I can’t Christianize this culture. The god of this world is Satan – this is his culture. He is the god of this age. I’m to preach the gospel. …. God is calling a people for Himself. I don’t know whom He’s calling, I just have to be faithful and preach.” This was in December 2009. And it wasn’t an isolated statement. He has made statements like that since the very beginning of his career: “I can’t Christianize the culture, I am here just to preach the Gospel.” His father made such statements regularly, in his career of an evangelist. When speaking of Christian Europe and Christendom in the past, Billy Graham liked to say, “You must remember that the worst part of history was in the Dark Ages, when the church ran everything.” (This is recorded in Marshall Frady’s biographical work, Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness, p. 245.)

Albert Mohler is not far behind. In fact, due to his adoption of the dualism of the Two Kingdoms rhetoric that has been recently revived by the Westminster Seminary at Escondido, he has said many times in his podcasts and interviews, that “Christian culture is impossible and is not the purpose of the Gospel.” In an interview with Peter Wehner over a book Wehner wrote on politics, Albert Mohler made sure he specifically mentioned this. Accordingly, he doesn’t have much optimism about the future; in his several commentaries on the pro-sodomy laws, regulations, and court decisions of the last several years, Mohler was sure to always add that these are signs of worse things to come upon the church. Of course, with such open pessimism about the future, and with such belief in the impossibility of Christian culture based on the Gospel, all of Albert Mohler alleged “Biblical worldview” boils down to helpless observation of what is happening, without any clear call to action as to how Christians can turn history around. Turning around history is not even an option in his so-called “Biblical worldview.”

And again, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Every single week, hundreds of ministries in America repeat the same sentiments on TV shows, radio shows, on the internet, in blogs, etc. “This is how the end begins,” “persecution is coming,” “you don’t polish the brass on a sinking ship,” “the new world order is here,” etc., etc., etc. I remember some time ago when I still used to attend Brannon Howse’s Worldview Weekend event when he would come to Houston, I was excited when Howse developed an assessment of modern events based on a Biblical worldview. Soon, though, it became clear that his point was not to issue a call to action for Christians to reverse the trend, but only to tell them what is going on while they helplessly watch the forces of the enemy take over the culture in the last days. At some point he even criticized the postmillennialists who thought that the trends of the last days can be reversed towards a victory of the Gospel in history. At that point I realized that the true name for Brannon Howse’s ministry should be not Worldview Weekend but World-end Week-view and I stopped attending it. And it goes to the lowest levels. The pastor of a small Baptist church we used to attend some time ago, when, one day, I shared with him my optimism about the future, looked at me astonished, “You believe anything can be turned around, with all that is happening around us?” And this is still nothing; missionaries go to the mission field with the same attitude, my friends, yes, missionaries. I have met missionaries who, after many years on the field, haven’t had much success, tell me, “But that’s exactly what we are supposed to expect in the last days.” And if you ask them, “Why are you then on the mission field, wasting other people’s money on an undertaking you know is hopeless?”, they will be very, very offended. But the pessimism they have been imbued with from their seminaries and pastors and the whole Christian attitude in the US will always prevent them from seeing the obvious and thinking logically about the connection between their beliefs and the fruit they bear in their ministries.

And the same applies to the tens of millions of Christians in the United States who diligently write the checks for those ministries, billions of dollars every year. For an outside observer this is madness: Christians pour billions of dollars into men and ministries who believe in defeat, and thus subsidize their own defeat. Like Denethor, we are all, as a church, invested in defeat, billions of dollars every year. We have accepted the inevitability of defeat . . . no, worse than that, we have have accepted that defeat is so normative that we should even subsidize it.

Is it then strange that after so many years of pro-life efforts, gun rights efforts, homeschool lobbyism efforts, anti-statism efforts, we continue losing cultural and legislative battles? We as a church haven’t invested in victory; we don’t believe victory is possible. Our own ministries have told us so, our own teachers and preachers and seminary professors and Christian book authors have told us so . . . and when we go to the voting booth, we go with the firm conviction that nothing of what we do in that booth actually matters, because we know, deep in ourselves, that nothing can reverse the course of history. We don’t believe it is possible to get the government out of education and leave homeschoolers alone; therefore we don’t do anything toward that end. We don’t believe abortion can be abolished and treated legislatively and judicially as murder; therefore we don’t do anything toward that end. We don’t believe it is possible to ban government attempts at destroying the Second Amendment; therefore we don’t do anything toward that end. All that we believe in is rearguard action while we retreat toward deeper cultural irrelevance and obscurity. And of course, as if it is not sufficient to waste billions of dollars on church and parachurch ministries to produce nothing but decline and retreat, we also willingly waste money on lobbyist gangs of lawyers – like the NRA, the HSLDA, various pro-life organization, the ADF, etc., not to mention hundreds of professional Republican politicians – whose agenda is to perpetuate the cultural and legislative problems so that they can have talking points each year when they ask for our continuing donations. Ever thought how it is that in the last 40 years we had 20 years of Republican Presidents and 24 years of Republican majorities in Congress, and things still get worse, legislatively. Ever thought how it is that all these lobbyist gangs of lawyers who are supposedly conservative and Christian has nothing to show for their money except for a few small imaginary successes here and there?

It’s our own fault. We have believed our church celebrities, and we have invested heavily in defeat. Invested, in the real meaning of that word: we have put our money into it. Let that sink. If we have not invested in defeat, we wouldn’t get defeat. When the homeschool movement in the 1960s invested in victory, it got victory. Ironically, it took 40+ years for most Denethor ministries to even acknowledge its existence, let alone speak in its favor. It was too “triumphalist” for their taste, y’know, too much focused on a better future in history, for them to be willing to support it. But now that its visible success is obvious, many of these Denethor celebrities are beginning to express, half-mouth, some thought that perhaps it may be proven expedient for Christian parents to prayerfully consider pulling their kids out of the government schools. Just in case, y’know. But the homeschool movement is a clear example that when even a small portion of Christians invest in victory in history, what they get is victory in history. And that defeat is not normative; it is the logical consequence of investment in defeat.

Yes, folks, you heard that. Defeat is not normative. Not even decline is normative. In fact, if anything, we have a promise in Isaiah 9:7, which is a promise for the world after the First Coming of Christ, that “of the increase of Christ’s government and peace there shall be no end.” Of the INCREASE. Yes, yes, limited regions of the world, for limited periods of time will experience some decline; but such decline is only the result of the church’s investment in defeat. In the final account, future generations will look with astonishment at this generation of Christians in America and be astonished at how much we had, and how little we accomplished – if we have accomplished anything at all. And the reason for this is our willingness to support and follow Denethor ministries, and adopt their Denethorian ideology of the future: certain defeat, and no chance of victory.

And the next generation better take notes.

The book we will assign for reading this week is Gary North’s Millennialism and Social Theory. In many ways this book follows the lead of that most unique and most important book ever written in Christendom. R. J. Rushdoony’s The Foundations of Social Order. (We will talk about that book in another episode.) Gary North takes up the task of showing how our eschatology affects our social theory. And therefore how it affects our social action. And therefore, if we want to be consistent and connect the dots in our thinking and practice today, we should look at the dismal results we have been getting, and trace the source back to the dismal theology and eschatology we have been buying . . . literally buying, making its peddlers millionaires and billionaires. The book will open your eyes to that connection, and will give you the ideas of what needs to be changed in your eschatology – and in the eschatology of your pulpit – in order to see history turned around.

And don’t forget me and my work and my mission field in Bulgaria. When I started 20 years ago, I started with the full confidence that the future of Bulgaria will be a demonstration of the power of the Gospel to change history. No matter how small our resources were, I knew there will be growth. I just didn’t expect it so quick. I thought it would come after several generations. Well, I was surprised. It came much earlier. Donating to BulgarianReformation.com is not donating to a Denethor ministry, but to a ministry that is invested in growth victory, and already has much to show for the money. BulgarianReformation.com.

God bless you all, as you turn your minds from defeat, and then turn history around.

Welcome to Episode 5 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about modern Presbyterianism, how salt loses its savor, and is trampled under the feet of men. If you are a Presbyterian, by the end of today’s episode you will either hate me – because you are loyal to the current institutional system and you don’t see any problem with it – or you will be deeply disturbed by the picture of reality I present here. If you are not a Presbyterian – you may be a Baptist, or a Pentecostal, or a Charismatic, or Episcopalian, or just generally a good Evangelical, you may want to hit that shut-down button now, ‘cause it’s about them Presbies. But you may also want to stay and eavesdrop. For what you will hear, may apply in full force to your own group and denomination: it may either tell you why it has been trampled under the feet of men, just like the Presbyterians, or it may tell you how it may rise to being culturally victorious, as Presbyterians were in the past.

Let’s start with the obvious, which is not so obvious to many people today: This nation was started as a Presbyterian nation. No, I am not trying to denigrate any other denomination here. I am not trying to deny the contribution and the hard work and sacrifice and commitment of Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Congregationalists, Huguenots, Dutch Reformed, Episcopalians – well, Episcopalians were rooting for the King in the Revolutionary War, so I am not sure about that one. Even the small number of Roman Catholics in the colonies had adopted the liberty mentality of the generally anti-Catholic population and gave the Continental Army and Navy at least a dozen distinguished commanders. Yes, I know the Puritans and the Pilgrims came here two generations before the Presbyterians; during the Puritan Revolution in England, the American colonies barely had any Presbyterians. Yes, I know the first presbytery in America was not founded until 1706, more than 80 years after the first Pilgrim settlement, and the first synod was established as late as 1717. There is no doubt in my mind that compared to everyone else, Presbyterians were rather late comers.

But then, after 1717, their influence on the American culture grew exponentially. By the start of the First Great Awakening in the 1730s, the Presbyterian churches in America were the leading force in colonizing and evangelizing the “back country” regions in the South and in Pennsylvania. By the second half of the 18th century not only the back country, but the developed coastal areas were experiencing the influence of Presbyterianism. In 1746 Princeton University was established; and in 1768, John Knox Witherspoon, a Scottish Presbyterian, became its president. For the next 25 years, Witherspoon would be the main spiritual and intellectual influence on the colonies in their war for independence. British intelligence officers blamed the rebellious spirit of the colonies on him alone. Because of him and the new generation of Presbyterian ministers he produced, King George would call the Revolution the “Presbyterian rebellion,” and Horace Walpole would announce the news of the rebellion in the British Parliament with the words, “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson.” And indeed, while many of the Founding Fathers claimed to have gotten their Republican ideals from classical Greece and Rome, in reality, the majority of the population learned Republican political practices in their local Presbyterian churches, sessions, and presbyteries.

Throughout the 19th century, the influence of Presbyterianism on the American culture was complete to the point where the political debates were simply a reflection of theological debates within Presbyterianism. For better or for worse, Presbyterians were the top influence on both sides of the War between the States. Business in NYC was largely controlled by Presbyterians, even if the government of the city was in Irish, Roman Catholic hands. When John D. Rockefeller moved to NYC in 1884, he was a lone fundamental Baptist multimillionaire among Presbyterian magnates. So strong was the Presbyterian church there that the Roman Catholic bishop of New York complained that a large number of Irish Roman Catholic immigrants ended up converting to Presbyterianism; Presbyterian missionaries were taking the new arrivals right off the docks and provided for them shelter, employment, and adjustment courses. In the West, even though Presbyterian churches lagged behind the other denominations in missions and church planting, they still commanded a major presence among the economic and government elite in the western territories. As late as the 1930s the splits and the controversies within American Presbyterianism made headlines in the newspapers.

And then suddenly, the decline came. So abrupt was it that by the end of the 1940s Presbyterianism was now in the periphery of the American society where it remains today. So insignificant is it, and so outside the mainstream of our lives that the media don’t even bother to register scandals in it anymore. In fact, if we borrow the dispensationalist idea of the rapture, if the Presbyterian churches in America are raptured tonight, hardly anyone will notice their absence the next day. We have become irrelevant and insignificant.

No, worse. We have become salt that has lost its savor. This loss of cultural influence can be only blamed on Presbyterianism itself. Something shot it up to the top of its cultural influence 300 years ago; some spiritual and covenantal value that made it relevant, vibrant, practical, and influential. And if Presbyterianism today is trampled under the feet of men, it must be because that value has been lost.

And I want to talk to you today about the five things Presbyterianism has lost over the last 300 years. As I said, at the end, you may hate me. That’s OK. Hate me or not, though, don’t ignore my words. Give them a day in court. Study history. Study the Bible. You may discover that there is some truth in what I am saying. And perhaps, there is in my words a hint to the solution to our cultural problems, and to the restoration of the prominence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in our culture. So, five characteristics, five aspects that were lost, or rather, abandoned, which destroyed our influence. Let’s see what they were.

The first fundamental characteristic – first, because when it was lost, it affected the very concept of the sovereignty of God – were the Charismatic views of the early Presbyterians. Now, if you are a blue blood Presbyterian, born and bred with the Westminster Confession – or, I should say, with the modern interpretations of the Westminster Confession, you would laugh at this statement. You were always taught that the early Reformed were cessationists all the way through, and Charismatics were nowhere to be found at the time except among some heretical Anabaptists and Quakers. I have a surprise from history for you: Cessationism is a fairly novel doctrine in the church, only about 150 years old. Theological cessationism appeared in the church only with the spread of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and systematically developed cessationism came with the rise of dispensationalism.

In the 16th and the 17th centuries the Reformation in Scotland and England was developing steadily, and with the Reformation, the two nations experienced a very high level of prophetic gifts and miraculous experiences. As early as the mid-16th century John Knox and George Wishart delivered prophecies to their nation and were known among their followers and listeners as real prophets of God. Knox was called by his spiritual heirs “the prophet and apostle of our nation,” and Puritan missionaries among the Indians in the American Colonies were known as apostles. Robert Bruce had a healing ministry for epileptics and insane and healed people by laying hands on them and praying for them. The later Covenanters not only acknowledged the validity of the spiritual gifts in our era, they also incorporated their Charismatic views of the Holy Spirit in their documents. In 1998, a discussion panel of the Puritan Reformed Church of Edmonton was charged with the task to study the views of the original Covenanters in respect to the revelatory gifts. It came to the conclusion that not only their views were in favor of the continuing validity of the miraculous gifts today, but also that any denial of that validity – that is, cessationist beliefs – would be a violation of the covenant documents of the Scottish Kirk and is therefore an excommunicable offense. (This means that the majority of today’s Presbyterians and especially the modern so-called “covenanters” would be excommunicated from the original Presbyterian Church.) Samuel Rutherford specifically affirmed the validity of the prophetic gifts, mentioning Luther and Knox among the modern prophets; his only argument against the other Reformed groups was that prophets should prophesy only under ordination, within the church. And even earlier, John Calvin himself said about the only verse in the Bible speaking of cessation of gifts, 1 Cor. 13:8, that it is about the end of the world, and it is STUPID to apply it to an intermediate time.

John Howie’s book, The Scots Worthies, one of the most detailed descriptions of the personal lives of many Scottish Reformers, written in the late 18th century, describes a number of instances of prophetic and miraculous gifts among the Scottish Reformers in the 16th and the 17th centuries. Based on this and other historical evidence of that period, we can safely say that there has been no region and time in the history of Christendom that has seen so many manifestations of the power of the Holy Spirit in both miraculous deeds and special revelation; and there is certainly no other nation that has had so much of their individual and social life influenced and guided by special direct prophetic revelation. If even a woman prophetess could enter the highest military council of Cromwell’s generals and deliver a prophecy, and the council took several days conscientiously examining that prophecy, we sure know there were no cessationists in that time. (Read the story of Elizabeth Poole and her visions from God.)

But what about the Westminster Confession? True, it doesn’t specifically defend their Charismatic views. But it’s only because there was nothing to defend them against; there were no cessationists around. But it does contain an acknowledgment of those views: It is in the clause that places “private spirits” on the same level as “decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, and doctrines of men,” all to be examined by Scripture. Under modern cessationism, private spirits wouldn’t even be mentioned, let alone examined on the same level as decrees as councils.

Why is this important? Were the early Reformed occult? Did they try to deny the sufficiency of Scripture? No. Their Charismatic views followed from their belief in the Sovereignty of God. God was Sovereign for them not only in an abstract, remote way. As if He has written His Word and has left it to men and their powers to apply it to present use. John Calvin said in his description of the prophetic gift that it is “applying scripture to present use,” and explicitly warned, “it is not just bare interpretation, but special revelation.” God was transcendent, He had a general, canonic revelation for His covenant people; He was also immanent, that is, intimately present and participating directly in everything happening in his church and on the earth. An intimately present God can’t only speak through a remote Word; He must also speak directly in applying that Word to the specific circumstances of the day.

In his book, Systematic Theology, R.J. Rushdoony speaks of the importance of a high doctrine of the Holy Spirit and the relation between Calvinism and the Charismatic doctrines: “A Charismatic emphasis should be highly Calvinistic but it is not normally so. . . . Likewise, those who are Calvinistic and who stress God’s sovereignty should logically be very emphatically given to a high emphasis on the doctrine of the Spirit. This, however, is clearly not the case.” He explains why: “It may be that sovereignty is confused with an exclusive transcendence, so that immanence is seen as a compromise.” I would add: That’s exactly how Enlightenment rationalism and Deism operate: God is only transcendent but never immanent. And when in the mid-19th century Enlightenment rationalism hit the church, and cessationism became the dominant Reformed doctrine, God’s sovereignty was limited to His transcendence. God became an abstract entity who never speaks an immanent word. Man replaced God’s immanence. From being a faith in an immanently present God, Presbyterianism became an abstract doctrine of an abstract God who is silent concerning immanent matters. When it comes to application to present use, man is now who speaks in God’s place.

This leads us to the second important characteristic of early Presbyterianism which is lost today: the principle of plurality of elders. If you are a member of a Presbyterian church, you will jump at this one, “I got you now, Bo, this is not true. Plurality of elders is not abandoned and our church practices is.” Of course, you say it because you think that plurality of elders is having many elders in your church session, and they all make their decisions by voting; so, voilà, you have plurality of elders. Not so quick. Plurality of elders is not in decisions by majority vote. It is in veto by individual dissenters. The purpose of the principle is not giving legitimacy to church rule and government; the purpose is protecting the flock and imposing accountability on the rulers themselves.

I won’t be able to present to you the full case here today; we don’t have enough time. Earlier this year, I spent several months studying the historical Presbyterian and Covenanter practice and theory of church government; and I studied the Books of Church Order and of Discipline of most major Presbyterian organizations in the US today. The main line of my discoveries is presented in an article I posted in my blog, ChristendomRestored.com. The title is, “Modern Presbyterianism and the Destruction of the Principle of Plurality of Elders.” Read that article for more information. My conclusion in it is this: Not only is the principle of plurality of elders abandoned in modern Presbyterianism, it is in fact actively opposed, rejected, and legally stamped out from modern Presbyterianism. It is replaced with a rival principle: the principle of the dictatorship of the majority, or what I call, the “singularity” (as opposed to plurality) of the majority in the session.

The plurality of elders was never meant to mean rule by a majority vote in the session – imposing the will of the majority over dissenting elders. An elder – as an individual elder, not as a member of a collective – in the Bible is a position of authority, and no group of elders was meant to have a greater authority in the government of the church than any individual elder. (Augustine’s principle of the Trinity: no Person is greater than another Person, and no combination of two Persons is greater than the third.)

Plurality of elders involves three separate principles. First is accountability for the session. This one is based on the principle of balance between power and responsibility. If the session has executive power as a body, it must have executive accountability as a body – whether to a higher court (presbytery) or to the congregation. Which means, acts, decisions, and verdicts of a session as a body which are found to be sinful, unjust, or damaging to the church, must lead to sanctions against the session – from restitution (including financial, that is, the elders pay out of their own pockets to the party they have wronged) to collective excommunication for the session as a body.

Second, the spiritual authority of the elders. Each elder must be a man of gifting and ministry that are independent from his institutional power in the church. Only such a man of real spiritual authority would be able to stand alone against the majority in the session to hold them responsible for their actions and protect the flock from tyranny. Just like Paul stood up to Peter and the whole church in Gal. 2. The principle doesn’t allow for faceless bureaucrats; it requires that ordination is only an acknowledgment of already operating authority and ministry, not a creation of a new one.

And third, the power of the dissenting veto. An individual elder must be able to block decisions by the majority which he finds harmful to the health and liberty of the flock. Thus, the session will always be forced to either make corporate decisions by common agreement (no political factions), or, if such an agreement is not possible, work through the individual authority and influence of the individual elders to resolve the situation, not by bureaucratic decree. In addition, that individual dissenting elder must be protected and immune against persecution by the other elders.

These three were at the foundation of the early republican views in the colonies. Those who fought in the Revolutionary War learned republicanism from their local Presbyterian congregations. And this was what made Presbyterianism so important and culturally dominant – one of the factors. The Reformed doctrines of God, man, and society gave America the ideology of liberty which was at the foundation of the Revolution. Presbyterianism gave it the practical ideology of government, implemented and practiced in Presbyterianism for several generations before the Revolutionary War.

These three principles are lost today, and in my article I have shown that plurality of elders has been abandoned even in the very legal documents of the modern Presbyterian denominations. First, modern Presbyterian sessions are not accountable to anyone. At best, they can see their decisions repealed by a higher court; but there are no legal repercussions on a session if those decisions are sinful or unjust, or based on deliberate false witness. Second, elders are elected based on bureaucratic principles, not on the basis of proven authority from God, gifting, or existing ministry. Presbyterian churches today are led by faceless bureaucrats, like a government administration. And third, individual dissenters who dare try to protect the flock against injustice are not only not given a voice, they are also persecuted by the majorities in the sessions. From example for responsible, republican government, Presbyterianism has become an example for tyrannical, irresponsible, oligarchic government.

The third characteristic that was lost was the theonomy of original Presbyterianism. For those who don’t know what the word means, “theonomy” means simply, “God’s Law.” Presbyterianism in its early days was not the pietistic, gnostic, ou-of-this-world truncated doctrine only concerned with our individual salvation, spending countless of hours on the TULIP and on making fancier and fancier verbal description of the same basic truths of salvation, baptisms, predestination, laying on of hands and eternal life. It didn’t have irrelevant seminaries where students spent two years studying obscure topics like “pastoral hermeneutics” or “counseling.” It didn’t have expensive conferences dealing with “tough” questions like “Did Jesus have to die?” or “Do our unconverted loved ones go to heaven or not?”

Instead, it had a world to conquer and reform. And conquering and reforming the world meant that Presbyterianism had to have a comprehensive ethics of how the world is supposed to operate. Ethics not just for the individual man and his personal conduct, but ethics for his institutions as well – family, church, courts, government, military, businesses, taxes, finances, etc. In order to make sense be practically applicable, such ethics had to be consistent across the board: the same moral principles that applied to the individual had to apply to his family, his church, his business and his government. That is, God’s throne among His people was to be based on both righteousness and justice (Ps. 89:14). It made no sense to establish ethical boundaries of behavior for an ordinary man, if a man in power could break those rules using his power.

And where is a committed, Bible-believing Christian to find such comprehensive, consistent ethics for both man and his institutions?

That’s right. In the Bible. In the Law of God, where the rules and boundaries of conduct for both man and his institutions are established. The moral law of God – which includes morality both for individuals and institutions – is of continuing validity. The early Reformed groups – and especially the Presbyterians – took it very seriously in shaping the new legal systems of their nations. To understand how seriously they took it, keep in mind that their law books of the time contained both the civil laws and the Biblical verses from the Law of God in the Pentateuch. In England and Scotland in the 17th century, a commentary on Exodus 21-23 became very influential: Johannes Piscator’s Disputations on the Judicial Laws of Moses. The Westminster Divines quoted Piscator extensively, and laws and judicial decisions were self-consciously modeled on those judicial laws of Moses. Presbyterians in the 17th century – and not only Presbyterians, but also Independents, Baptists – went straight to the Law of God to get informed about the laws of their lands. True, they were not always consistent in the details and in their practical applications. In many cases the legacy of Romanist scholasticism marred their legal interpretations. But officially – and to a great extent in practice – theonomy was the accepted ethical and judicial standard, for both individuals and governments.

This gave the early Reformed churches – and especially Presbyterianism – a level of relevance far above their Romanist opponents. Relevance not in the sense preached by the modern childish parodies of churches and preachers – with focus on certain brands of clothes or music. Relevance in the sense of practical social and legal theory, of encoding the Biblical concept of good and evil in the very fabric of society, both for individuals and for institutions. Again, they didn’t get all the details right. But they got the spirit right, and that made Presbyterianism indispensable as a social force. Just as Calvin as a legal consultant and expert was indispensable for his theological opponents who ruled Geneva, Presbyterians were indispensable for the whole American society throughout the 18th and the 19th centuries; they had the solutions.

And, predictably, when theonomy was dropped, that relevance was lost. Modern “Reformed” seminaries who not only never mention theonomy but train their students to judiciously avoid going to the Law of God when discussing governments and institutions, are only contributing to the increasing irrelevance of modern Presbyterianism.

But law without sanctions is a dead law. And sanctions in the Bible are not only human sanctions but also direct sanctions of God in history. Covenantal sanctions; sanctions that God metes out to people and institutions and communities for their obedience or disobedience to His Law. My favorite example of it is Sunday morning of September 4, 1650, when during church service in Edinburgh, Scotland, a messenger arrived from the battlefield at Dunbar with the news that Oliver Cromwell’s small expeditionary corps had just defeated the much larger and better supplied Scottish army led by the experienced general David Leslie, a man of 20-years military experience on the battlefields of Germany, Sweden, Poland, and Russia. Church ministers in Scotland immediately ascribed the defeat on the moral and judicial failures of Scotland, and called the nation to repentance. Granted, they may have judged wrongly on some failures, and may have failed to acknowledge others. But in their covenant theology they had no doubt that sanctions in history are indicative of God’s judgment – positive or negative – on a nation.

For these early Reformed, God was intimately close and involved not only in a Charismatic way – directly revealing specific applications of His Word to the present circumstances. He was also intimately present in a covenantal way – in correcting nations, or rewarding them, depending on their obedience of disobedience to His Law. History was the history of God’s covenant with man, both individually and corporately. And therefore society was an inescapable member of God’s covenant – with its duties and privileges under that covenant. And not only privileges, but also punishments.

This gave early Presbyterians a very clear and systematic way of interpreting history, one that was present in Christian thought as early as Athanasius and Augustine who saw history as God’s court and verdict on mankind and on the city of man. It was never developed, though, until John Calvin in his sermons presented a very systematic, covenantal reading of Deuteronomy 28; the chapter which lays out the blessings or curses of God on a nation for obedience or disobedience. The Puritans and the Presbyterians took the systematics from Calvin and developed it into a philosophy of history. History now had meaning. And, as we will see later, the future had meaning. And whoever can explain the past, controls the future.

Between the 17th century and today, this covenant view of history has been lost. It is not just lost, it is actively opposed in the “Reformed” seminaries. Meredith Kline, of the most influential theological voices in the “Reformed” seminaries of the second half of the 20th century, specifically insisted that history doesn’t present any discernible pattern or connection between covenantal obedience or disobedience and covenantal sanctions. His specific words about the course of history were: “. . . prosperity and adversity being experienced in a manner largely unpredictable because of the inscrutable sovereignty of the divine will that dispenses them in mysterious wisdom.” History, that is, doesn’t mean anything for modern Presbyterianism. Yes, it is controlled by God, but from a human point of view that control is mysterious and abstract; and it contains nothing of covenantal value. Presbyterianism has lost its view of history, and therefore it has lost its ability to change and direct history.

Once that view of history is lost, the view of the future is lost. And specifically, the optimistic view of the future. Early Presbyterians and Puritans were known for their bright, unapologetic postmillennial optimism. Iain Murray wrote his book The Puritan Hope about the Puritans, but the same spirit and optimism was shared by the Presbyterians as well. We cannot understand the theological, missional, economic, political, technological, business, social, and other developments in Presbyterianism in the 18th and the 19th centuries without their belief in a history that progresses to greater and greater influence of the Gospel in the world’s affairs, and culminates in the final victory of the Gospel in all the world before Christ comes. Naturally, if God punishes the wicked in history, and if He rewards the righteous in history, then history will see more and more success for the covenant-keepers and more and more defeat for the covenant-breakers. If history is a manifestation of the judgment of God, then it is also a manifestation of the victory of the Gospel and of Christ’s redemption.

It is commonly assumed that the present determines the future. Reality is opposite to this belief; the truth is that the future determines the present. The expectations of the future of a person, group, or society, determine the actions of that person, group, or society today. And when there are positive, optimistic expectations of the future, then men will cut their consumption today and invest in the future. And will prosper economically, intellectually, politically, and in many other ways. And will be culturally dominant.

Thus, postmillennial hope and optimism helped early Presbyterians to prosperity in everything they did, and helped their societies prosper. It was not the fake financial prosperity of the modern day fiat money systems. It was the real, substantial, social, intellectual, and also economic prosperity of the covenant of God.

As late as 1909, Presbyterian missionaries were confident that the world is ripe for the Gospel, and that the Gospel will bring not only personal conversion but also conversion of whole cultures. Find the book Students and the Present Missionary Crisis, a collection of lectures and reports of missionaries to the Student Society for World Missions in 1909. You may be surprised by their expectations and optimism. The PDF of the book is free online.

And this has also changed. After 1910, pessimism gradually crept into the Reformed and Presbyterian churches, and by the 1930s the majority of Presbyterian seminaries were officially amillennial or premillennial in their eschatology. (J. Gresham Machen was the last postmillennialist of the older generation.)

To wrap it up, for the last 3 centuries, Presbyterianism lost (1) its view of God sovereignty in God’s direct involvement in guiding His covenant people; God became an abstract entity, and man’s interpretations and application of God’s Word to present use became dominant; (2) its doctrine of government; from republican government where those in authority had a greater accountability than everyone else, it became an oligarchic government of bureaucrats who force accountability on everyone else but not on themselves; (3) its doctrine of the present validity of the Law of God as the only Biblical comprehensive and consistent ethics for individuals and governments; (4) its covenant theology, the doctrine of God’s Covenant as the frame for all history, and God as constantly and intimately involved in judging people and cultures in history; and (5) its postmillennial optimism which gave it the energy to look to the future with hope and confidence, and invest accordingly.

And today, Presbyterianism is not even a pale shadow of its former glory. If a person doesn’t know history, there is nothing in modern Presbyterianism that can tell him that just 100 years ago it was the central influence on the American culture. Nothing whatsoever. It is the perfect modern example of salt that has lost its savor, and was thrown out and is trampled under the feet of men.

The book we will assign for reading today is by Ben House, a historian and Presbyterian pastor, the title is, Punic Wars and Culture Wars: Christian Essays on History and Teaching. The book is a collection of essays on different periods of history, and the cultural lessons for our own experience today. Ben House is a history buff and he is amazingly capable of mining historical details and finding their rightful place in the big covenantal picture of history. This book is both delightful and instructive for true Christian Reconstructionists.

And don’t forget to pray and support my work in Bulgaria. As far as it lies with me, I am committed to not only learn the lessons from history but also apply them to my mission field, so that my heirs in Bulgaria do not make the same mistakes American Presbyterianism made in the last 300 years. That’s why we are building an intellectual foundation through translating the right books in Bulgarian. Pary for this work, and also, visit bulgarianreformation.com, and donate to help our efforts of placing these books in the hands of Bulgarian Christians. God bless you all.

The post Modern Presbyterianism: Under the Feet of Men appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio.

Welcome to Episode 4 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about Putin, Russia, and the Dutch Disease Curse. Don’t get lost yet, We will go through a short history of Russia in the last 40 years, then we will see what the Dutch Disease is, and then we will look at the covenantal meaning and lessons for us today as Christians.

The Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have built for himself a very high reputation among American conservatives and even many Christians. A Russian friend of mine, when I told him about this high reputation Putin has in the US, retorted wryly, “May be that’s where he is planning to flee to, when the time comes.” Putin’s photogenic masculinity is frequently compared in conservative media to Obama’s girliness. He is shown in a military uniform, even though the man never served in the military, his career was from the beginning with the KGB, which made him exempt from military service; one can say that joining the KGB was sort of a draft dodging for privileged children of families loyal to the Soviet regime. (Putin’s father was a member of the murderous “exterminators’ battalions” in WWII, charged with exterminating any opposition to the Soviet authority in the illegally annexed Baltic republics.) He is shown hunting with a rifle, or flying a fighter jet, or in the gym, etc., etc. Putin is also credited by many American conservatives and many church-goers with being a “protector of Christianity” around the world, on account of some of his statements and of his military venture in Syria. In general, as a European newspaper declared recently, the world is a stage, and Putin is an actor on it; we may add, he is playing the role of that powerful conservative Christian leader that conservatives and Christians in America and in Europe have been looking for for decades, with no success.

This desperate quest for a leader, of course, speaks volumes about the lapse into political idolatry by the Western Christians. That we are looking for political leaders and calling them “benefactors,” then we have become like the Gentiles in Jesus’ words in Luke 22:25: “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors.” Reformed Christians – and especially Reformed Christians in America – who for the last three centuries have steadily undermined the aristocratic view of society and government, have now returned to a pagan, idolatrous view of culture: powerful political leaders who use their political power as benefactors for the right side of the population: protecting the family, protecting the church, fighting the bad guys around the world, enforcing laws against liberals and hippies, etc. We seldom stop to think that such a view presupposes losing the political and economic freedoms our Christian forefathers fought for. They considered those freedoms a far more important application of the Gospel than having a powerful leader and benefactor who imposes the right laws with an iron fist. Yes, sometimes protecting the Christian liberty will mean protecting the liberty of pagans and sinners whose sins are not crimes according to the Biblical Law. Yes, sometimes protecting Christian liberty will mean that we are not going to have a homogenous society made up only of people who think and believe like we do. Yes, sometimes protecting Christian liberty will mean accepting refugees of a different culture, and we as Christians will have to make the effort to evangelize them and convert them and teach them the cultural demands of Christendom. Yes, Christian liberty means more responsibility, more inconveniences, and even more dangers; but that’s what liberty is all about. And when we abandon the concept, when we turn to political saviors and benefactors, when we are looking for that powerful leader and benefactor who will save us from that responsibility, inconveniences, and dangers, we have surrendered ourselves and the future of our children to political idolatry. But political idolatry we will leave to future episodes. Now we want to look at Putin’s Russia, and see what covenantal lessons we can learn from it. Because, from the perspective of Christian Reconstruction, there is no neutrality, and there is not a single inch in the universe where God doesn’t act according to His Covenant which He has established in the Creation and has restored and confirmed in the Gospel.

Looking a little bit deeper below the idolatrous surface, at a level that is more essential and important, there have been a few positive developments in Russia under Putin. First, in 2001, Russia introduced a flat tax of 13%. It made the tax system simpler and more flexible, and it made it easier for foreign private investors to invest in the country. (Prior to 2001 most of the foreign investments were in the form of loans from governments and the International Monetary Fund.) Within the period between 2001 and 2015, the Russian government gradually removed the government monopoly on education, allowing more freedom for private educational institutions as well and homeschooling. In consecutive steps after 2008, also, military draft was severely cut, with plans to abolish it completely. You may wonder why this is an important development, but it is. Military conscription has been one of the sacred cows – if not the most sacred cow – of the traditional Russian and Soviet imperialism and militarism, and one of the main components of statist propaganda. These and other developments make some outside observers to believe that the ideology of the Russian government is changing towards more conservative and libertarian views.

But the truth is, most of these are simple pragmatism, forced on the Russian government by the circumstances, not by some change of ideology. The flat tax helped the administration streamline tax collection but it was not followed by removal of the tens of thousands of government regulations that choke entrepreneurship in Russia. So it didn’t really help the business. Besides, as we will see, the Russian government doesn’t rely much on tax revenues from private business. Most of its revenues come from oil and gas (controlled entirely by the government) and from import duties. By the standards of modern economics, Russia is not really an economy; it is a gigantic mining colony town where the mining business is the only real business. And everything else is like a convenience store in the town: formally a private business, de facto controlled by the mining company.

The freedom in education and homeschooling was forced by the fact that the old schools, built in the Soviet era, deteriorated faster than the government could build new ones. It is a bureaucratic decision to build a new school, you know, and a bureaucratic decision takes time; private companies need to have time to bid on those under-the-table benefits, if you get what I mean. So bad is the situation with schools in Russia that as of now, parents have to bribe local education officials to secure a place for their children in the local school. Since this started to become a serious problem, the central government was forced to free the educational market from the government monopoly: one of those examples where the government couldn’t meet its own promises. The situation is still not resolved, of course. There is no history nor tradition of homeschooling in Russia, and unlike the US, or the UK, or some Eastern European countries, there are no significant groups whose ideology drives them to homeschooling (like Protestant Christians, libertarians, or hippies).

The sharp cut of military conscription – and plans for future abolition of the draft – were forced by the lack of funds, and by the realities of modern warfare where small professional armies achieve better results than large conscripted masses. This, and some problems with the personal and sexual ethic always present in a conscript military, forced the government to consider abandoning the draft completely.

There are some rather popular myths about government legislation in protection of the family or against sexual perversions like sodomy, but these are quite limited. They are done for the PR effect, and not really enforced. Abortions are legalized in Russia and have always been since Stalin’s times; Russia has among the highest abortion rates in the world. Sodomy remains rampant. Russia has the same divorce-to-marriage ratio as Europe and the US. In reality, there is nothing in Russia that conservatives could look up to as an example. There is nothing in Putin’s policies that could make him even remotely close to a Christian or a conservative, leaving the propaganda stunts aside.

So let’s now turn our attention to the Russian economy and the covenantal lessons we can learn from it. Let me give you a short historical introduction. Before the fall of Communism in 1991, no one really knew how large the Russian economy was. There was a heavy smoke screen of government propaganda, and everyone on the other side of the Iron Curtain knew that the official numbers were lying. On the Western side of the Curtain, though, many economists believed the propaganda. The Canadian-American socialist economist John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, came to the conclusion, some time in the 1980s, that the economy of the Soviet Union was about 2/3 of the US economy. I remember how much I laughed when I first heard that. I am sure the Soviet leaders must have been in a quandary themselves, “Does Galbraith know something about our economy we don’t know?” When the Soviet Union disintegrated and a more unbiased assessment was made, it was 2/3 alright, but of the economy of Belgium, not of the US. You know, that little 10-million-population country between France and Germany which today is the capital of the EU? It had a larger economy than the Soviet Union. Anyway.

Boris Yeltsin, after the fall of Communism and the disbanding of the Soviet Union, started a process of liberalization of the Russian economy, and the economy grew. For a while, he had real pro-free market advisers and government executives. Between 1992 and 2000, the legislation of the Russian Federation moved really forward towards more market freedom. Not everything was fine in the culture and in the economy, of course, for legislation doesn’t solve problems, people do. And most people were born and lived in a society without private property, without responsibility, without entrepreneurship, etc. But little by little, step by step, as people learned, the economy grew.

When Putin took over from Yeltsin, this process was reversed. Putin had a reason for it. After the year 2000, the prices of oil and gas started going up, and there was no limit in sight about how high they may go. Russia has the largest oil and gas reserves in the world (most still undeveloped, unlike those in the Middle East), and in 2000 her natural gas production was still in the hands of a government monopolist, Gazprom. Oil production was decentralized and privatized, but within a couple of years Putin’s government forged a number of fake accusations against private oil industrialists, and by 2005, most of the oil industry was back in government hands. By 2008, about 60% of the government’s revenues came from oil and gas. Another 20% came from import duties. So, this leaves only about 20% revenues from the rest of the economy. Imagine this, if you could: the government of a huge country, 140 million population, makes 80% of its revenues from oil and gas mining and import duties, and the rest comes from the totality of the domestic economy. As I said earlier, Russia today is nothing more than a gigantic mining colony where everything rotates around the mining operations, and the rest is like a convenience store in the middle of a mining town: formally free, but in reality controlled and dependent on the mining cartel.

Putin’s government – I should say, a gang of close friends in power – saw this as an opportunity for remaining in power forever. The oil and gas business is easily centralized in government’s hands. With money coming in, the government budget will have enough surpluses to both fund an ever increasing military to terrorize the neighbors, and bribe the population to vote the same guys in power forever. Putin started his own party, Edinnaya Rossia (United Russia), which soon became the party of government apparatchiks. Predictably, the party has won all the elections from the very beginning of its existence. And all the money for this political conspiracy came from oil and gas. So important is the sale of oil and gas that the Russian natural gas monopolist, Gazprom, is the unofficial foreign ambassador for the Russian government. Such is the political power of Gazprom that in 2005 it hired as a second-level director Gerhard Schroeder, who up to that year was, for eight years, the Chancellor of Germany, and before that, for another eight years, the Prime Minister of Lower Saxony. The socialist Schroeder had spent his entire 8 years as a Chancellor working hard for the Russian interests in Europe. You know, any corporation can go shopping for prime ministers in places like the Balkans, Africa, or Latin America. Gazprom bought itself a German Chancellor. Putin looked unstoppable. In 2007 and 2008, commentators in Europe were already talking about the possible resurrection of the old, pre-Soviet Russian Empire.

And then came the fall of 2008. Fall it was, for the price of oil collapsed to a little over $40 per barrel. This was deadly news for Putin: The Russian government budget, entirely geared toward bribing the Russian population and expanding the military, was predicated on a price of $70/barrel. (For comparison, the price in June 2008 was $145/barrel, so the fall was $100, or 70%, within 4 months.) After basking in oil and gas money for 8 years, the Russian government was now running a serious deficit. The recession lasted only for several months and the prices were back to $100, but the Russian government saw the writing on the wall. In 2009, Putin declared that his new course is to develop the Russian industry and agriculture. A needed step, given that the next fall of oil and gas prices could be fatal.

The problem is, he couldn’t develop anything. Russia’s economy – outside the oil and gas industry – couldn’t move an inch above its levels of 2008. To this day, there is nothing that Russia produces in its industrial plants, offices, or fields, that the rest of the world wants and is willing to pay money for. In fact, even Gazprom, the Russian natural gas giant, buys its equipment from American companies. Russian industrial companies produce for their domestic market, and even there, even with the high import duties, they are barely competitive against imported goods – whether in price or in quality. And as of now, there is no hope on the horizon that the Russian economy would be able to rise above that level.

And then, 7 years after the slump in 2008, the oil and gas market collapsed again. And it’s different now. The collapse in 2008 was due to oversupply and excess stocks – so it had a short-term solution. This time it is different: new technologies, fracking and liquefied gas. And also, Texas and North Dakota with their large fields and their private ownership of gas wells and oil rigs. This time even the OPEC surrendered, let alone the underdeveloped Russia. The low prices are here to stay for a long term. And the Russian government budget is still calculated on $70/barrel.

Stay with me, we are getting close to our covenantal lessons from this history.

What Russia experienced was a heavy case of the economic phenomenon known as the Dutch disease. This is its most popular name, but another name would be the Resource Curse. The Dutch disease appears when a vast reserve of some natural resource is discovered in a country or a region; and specifically when that resource, (1) can be easily mined or extracted, and (2) enjoys a high demand and therefore high price on the world markets. That is, it has high marginal return on the investment. What does our instinct tell us about the economic development of such a country? Normally, we all think, “Lots of easily mined natural resources, increased export, mucho dinero, economic growth,” right? Wrong. The opposite is true. The influx of lots of easy money in an economy in fact slows down the economic development, and can easily produce even economic recession. Yes, folks, easy money produces economic recession. Keep that in mind.

The phenomenon has been present throughout human history but was first observed and described in the 1960s in relation to the discovery of the Groningen Natural Gas field in northern Netherlands in 1959 – the tenth largest natural gas field in the world. (Hence the name Dutch disease.) It was a blessing that the field was not discovered 20 years earlier. If the Nazis could take advantage of it, they would have had the fuel reserves to continue the war for much longer. And also the Netherlands would have been devastated, for Groningen is within easy striking distance for both the Royal Navy and the Royal Airforce; the Allies wouldn’t have left such strategic supply remain intact in the hands of the Nazis. By 1963 the field was operational. The Netherlands were producing between 3 and 4 trillion cubic feet of gas for a continent which was still recovering from the devastation of the World War. Within the next 10 years Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobile tapped the whole field and maximized production . . . just in time for the fuel crisis in 1974 and the steep rise of energy prices by 300%. The Netherlands were awash in natural gas money.

And contrary to the expectations, this didn’t produce an economic boom. To the opposite, the rest of the Dutch economy struggled, and in fact, during that period it even experienced a recession. Germany, Belgium, and France were pulling ahead in terms of economic productivity and investment; the Netherlands were lagging behind, despite all the money poured in the small republic. What has happened?

What happened was that with the influx of natural gas money, the price levels in the Netherlands went up. When you have an oversupply of one resource, its market price falls. When that resource is money, the prices of everything else rise. Wages went up, resource prices went up, rents went up. Or, put it in economist’s slang, the Dutch currency was “too strong” compared to the other currencies. (It’s the outward expression of high prices in a nation. When the currency is “strong,” it’s domestic prices are higher than everyone else’s prices.) This made the Dutch industry and agriculture unable to compete against the rest of the European countries; so the levels of investment in the Netherlands were low. (Who wants to invest in a place where all the resources are expensive?) When in the mid-1980s energy prices collapsed, the Dutch economy had to go through a severe bout of readjustment. And, as we will see, Russia’s situation is even worse.

Natural gas and oil are not the only factors that can produce Dutch disease. Precious metals like gold and silver are another factor. Spain’s and Portugal’s lagged severely behind England and the Netherlands when the galleons with plundered gold and silver started arriving from the New World. Mexico’s rich deposits of silver in the 18th and the 19th centuries can be partially blamed for the failure of that country to develop a strong manufacturing sector, despite the fact that it had a better starting point than the US. Signs of Dutch disease could be detected in California in the second half of the 19 century because of the gold rush, and later because of the discoveries of oil. China had a similar experience with its monopoly and control over the production first of silk and then of tea. (The emergence of alternative production in Europe and India caused severe damages to the Chinese economy.) Keep this in mind also: foreign aid is a major factor for the Dutch disease, for it involves an influx of money that is much easier than money from oil and gas. In every country in the world where there has existed a source of easy money, the economy has suffered. And, on the other end of the spectrum, nations with little to no natural resources at all have been leading in productivity and economic development – see Switzerland, Hong Kong, or Singapore.

But there’s more to it. The devastation from the Dutch disease is even worse when the economy is controlled by the government. When the influx of excess easy money comes into private hands, the market responds to it by raising prices but at least private individuals are generally focused on either saving the money or investing it in economically profitable enterprises. This mitigates at least somewhat against the damage of the Dutch disease. When the money comes into the hands of government bureaucrats, their “investment” is in politically profitable enterprises: bribing voters, rewarding cronies and lobbyists, and huge construction and military projects that produce no economic value but siphon money into the right bank accounts. Government intervention always distorts economic data and misinforms economic decisions. When the government controls a vast stream of easy money, the distortion is devastating to the economy. Venezuela is the ultimate modern example of such an economy; not only is the country unable to produce anything for export anymore (even their oil rigs are shut down, for the most part), it can’t even produce food for domestic consumption! The country with the best climate in South America and with the largest oil and gas reserves in the world!

And similar thing happened to Russia. It would have been bad enough if the over-reliance on oil and gas had happened in the context of a free market and unhampered economy. But Russia basically made itself into a mild version of Venezuela. The huge stream of foreign currency that entered the country in the last 15 years produced no growth in any sector of the national economy. In fact, it didn’t even produce growth in the oil and gas sector; technologically, these two sectors relied on the size of their fields, not on better technologies, which makes them uncompetitive against producers in Texas and North Dakota today. With the world’s oil prices well below $40/barrel, and with no developed economy, Russia is struggling. And the Russian government is in a quandary, seeing its monetary reserves dwindle away in payments for unrealistic promises. And there is no possible solution on the horizon. Yes, I know, from the outside Russia seems like a monolithic unity, and Putin seems to be on top of everything. From the inside, the picture is quite grim, if even Russian commentators are beginning to speak of “what comes after Putin” and the possible breakdown of the Russian Federation.

So, what is the covenantal lesson in all this? I am sure you are wondering.

The covenantal lesson starts in the Old Testament, in Daniel’s interpetation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in chapter 2 verse 44:

In the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, and that kingdom will not be left for another people; it will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, but it will itself endure forever.

And then, previously, in verses 34-35, the specifics of the dream were,

You continued looking until a stone was cut out without hands, and it struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and crushed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were crushed all at the same time and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away so that not a trace of them was found. But the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.

The fifth kingdom, of course, the stone cut without hands, is the Kingdom of Christ established in the days of those kings, that is, in the days of the last of the previous empires, Rome. Note well, the stone not only destroyed the previous empires, it also filled the whole earth.  That is, it would prevent other empires from being established against it on the earth. Keep in mind, that vision was given in a time when all that most people knew as political reality was oppressive empires which always tried to expand as far as they could, bringing as many nations and people as they could under their power. The spirit of Nimrod, the “first of the line of might men om the earth” according to Genesis 10:8, was alive and well in the world before the Cross. Large or small nations, they all wanted to be empires and to rule over other nations. Where the small nations couldn’t expand, local kings ruled over their own populations. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream described exactly that: a sequence of empires whose brutality increases with every step (Rome is described there as an empire which “crushes and shatters all things”). And yet, their moral quality decreases: the progression is from gold, through silver and bronze, and finally just iron, and then even iron mixed with clay. This is not just a prophecy for the Middle East before Christ, it is also a symbolic picture of the political reality in a world without the Cross: empires that are worth less and less, but their brutality is crueler and crueler.

When the Kingdom of Christ comes, was the promise of the dream, human empires won’t rise on the earth anymore. This doesn’t mean fallen men won’t try, and may be for a short time even do some damage. But in the world after the stone has hit the statue, the world will be gradually filled with that stone. After the cross, God works constantly to fulfill His promise in Psalm 2: The kings of the earth may rise against the Lord, but He laughs and scoffs at them, and says to His Son:

Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Your inheritance,

You shall break them with a rod of iron,

And indeed, as we see from history after the Cross, earthly empires have greater and greater problems remaining in power. Governments that overstep their boundaries established by the Law of God almost immediately hit a wall in our day, and can not continue expanding their power. Hitler’s Germany, so powerful at the beginning, was reduced to nothing within 12 years of its existence. Communist Russia, with more natural resources and territory than any other nation and empire in history, had to survive on handouts from the hated West, and eventually surrendered in 1991, after a little over 70 years of existence. Communist China abandoned Communism in practice as early as 40 years after its establishment. Any dictator who wants to build his own empire in our days finds out that he is running out of resources faster than he can plunder his victims. Even milder forms of dictatorship – also known as “socialism” – fail quickly and spectacularly in our day; France’s socialist government under Francois Hollande went into a bankruptcy mode just a few months after the first socialist measures were introduced. It’s getting tougher and tougher to be a dictator or an emperor these days. And the Dutch disease is one of God’s methods of dealing with candidates for empires.

You see, folks, a wicked government has the same motives and desires as a wicked individual. The same ethical principles apply to both. A wicked person is a gambler, he wants as much profit as possible for as little effort as possible. He wants to find that magical formula that would make him rich without having to spend anything for it. A wicked imperial government is the same way: it wants that magical resource that will give it all the money it wants. In the middle ages, this made many kings sponsor not science but alchemy, because alchemy promised to create gold out of base metals. And in our days, politically powerful men use valuable mineral resources – especially oil and gas – to finance their thirst for more power.

But God laughs at them. Any time such a powerful state arises based on a monopoly over a resource, the Dutch disease makes sure that that state remains economically crippled in everything else. It’s not felt right away, but eventually, God makes the price of that resource collapse overnight. Then they are left with nothing. And the Son then crushes them like earthenware. Kings and princes will be forced, more and more, to act as God’s servants, that is, ministers of liberty, if they want to remain in power. Power and authority have been re-defined on the Cross, and that re-definition of power, and Christ has been steadily enforcing this new definition of power through His Gospel. No more free lunches for dictators and bureaucrats, is where our world is heading to. And Putin’s government is in the process of discovering it.

But let me tell you this: Not just Putin’s government. Every government in the world is discovering the same thing. Lady Margaret Thatcher said that socialism is a good idea until you run out of other people’s money. But modern socialist and statist policies are running out not just of other people’s money but of God’s patience as well. If in the past such policies could continue for a generation or two without visible failure, these days they collapse almost immediately. We live in a world in which, more and more, it becomes impossible for government to continue the same wicked policies forever, without losing power. And Russia in the last one year is a good example.

We, American Christians, and often paralyzed by fear. We don’t admit it, or don’t even realize it, so habitual it has become to us to fear the future. We look at the developments in our own country and we say things like “this is how the end begins,” or “these are signs of worse things to come.” We are convinced that there’s nothing good on the horizon for America with the political power in the hands of God-haters, both Democrat and Republican. It is for this reason we succumb to the idolatry I talked about earlier: looking for a powerful leader. Behind every idolatry, there is fear, and every fear leads to idolatry. We see the visible things, and we are losing hope for our world.

But the truth is, in the world after the Cross, God has planted a mechanism of self-destruction into every institution of authority, be it family, church or state. And every institution of authority, when it trespasses God’s boundaries for it, triggers that mechanism, and it starts ticking. Whether it is Putin’s Russia, or the Islamic State, or Saudi Arabia, or the Obama administration, any political potentate who wants to get more power has to do it through acts that are ultimately suicidal for himself and for his plans. The greater the thirst for power, the greater the danger. And the more history progresses, the faster this mechanism ticks. Eventually, the wicked will find their plans thwarted even before they are put to action. Far from losing hope, all we as Christians need to do is what the Psalmist says in Psalm 91: “You will only look with your eyes, and you will see the reward of the wicked.”

Putin’s Russia is an example of this reward. And it is also a warning to other would-be dictators. And it is also a head-lifting reminder for us: We live in a time when the opportunities for the Gospel are greater than ever, and the laughter of God against His enemies in high places is louder than ever. There’s no place for despair or pessimism.

The book we will be assigning today is Peter Thomas Bauer, Dissent on Development. Lord Peter Bauer spent his career as an economist studying the so-called developing countries in Africa and Latin America, and specifically the impact of foreign aid on their economies. And what he has discovered concerning the factors affecting economic development goes directlyt against the accepted stereotypes of today. But guess what: it agrees completely with the Biblical covenantal analysis of man and his society.

So go, and conquer the world for Christ, through His Gospel.

And help me do the same in Bulgaria in Eastern Europe. There’s a mission field there. A little over 20 years ago, it was freed from an oppressive empire. And it is a fertile field, bringing forth 100-fold. Visit bulgarianreformation.com and donate. God bless you all.