COVENANT SANCTIONS: ETHICAL OR DIGITAL?

BIBLICAL ECONOMICS TODAY Vol. XX, No. 1 ©1997 Gary North December/January 1998 COVENANT SANCTIONS: ETHICAL OR DIGITAL? by Gary North When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given thee. Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; And when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint; Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee, and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end; And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day. And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God (Deut. 8:10-20). This passage gives us the basis of covenantal economics. It proclaims the following: God gives men grace in history before He gives them law. Grace precedes law. "When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given thee." God first gives them wealth; then they are then required to thank Him. This is the pattern of God’s judicial relations with man from Adam through eternity. There is more to God’s covenant than grace. There is also wrath: negative sanctions. God gives men grace. Men are to respond in humble thankfulness to God. If they refuse, he sends wrath. This wrath is as visible as His grace. But in dealing with His covenant people, the threat of wrath is always accompanied by the promise of deliverance. And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath driven thee, And shalt return unto the LORD thy God, and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul; That then the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath scattered thee. If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the LORD thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee: And the LORD thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers. And the LORD thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live. And the LORD thy God will put all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them that hate thee, which persecuted thee. And thou shalt return and obey the voice of the LORD, and do all his commandments which I command thee this day. And the LORD thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy land, for good: for the LORD will again rejoice over thee for good, as he rejoiced over thy fathers: If thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which are written in this book of the law, and if thou turn unto the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul (Deut. 30:1-10). God’s grace is more comprehensive than His wrath, but only with respect to His covenant people. His judgment on His people is judgment unto repentance and restoration. "He will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers." This is also the message of the Book of Job. "So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning" (Job 42:12a). The church is the heir of this promise. Moses wrote a prophecy: "And the LORD thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live." We read of its fulfillment in the Epistle to the Hebrews: "For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people: And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest. For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more. In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away" (Heb. 8:10-13). With the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70, the transfer of the inheritance from Israel to the church was ratified, as Christ had predicted: "Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof" (Matt. 21:43). Hebrews confirmed as having taken place definitively through Christ and His covenant what God had spoken by Moses: the circumcision of the heart. But if this new covenant is a fulfillment of the older covenant, then it must have the same five features as the Old Covenant had: sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and inheritance. The same kinds of covenant promises must extend to participants in the New Covenant. But if the promises extend into the New Covenant, then so does the law. The judicial language of Hebrews is clear: "I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts." Grace precedes law in both covenants. But law is present in both covenants. But if law is present, then so are the sanctions. We are back, then, to Deuteronomy 8. Positive Economic Sanctions "But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day" (Deut. 8:18). In this verse we have the Bible’s answer to the question: Why must the corporate blessings of God be visible in history? The answer is clear: to confirm His covenant with His people. The blessings are not merely internal. Covenant-keeping men have "the joy, joy, joy, joy down in their hearts," but they also have, on average, more money in their savings accounts than those who live in covenant-breaking societies possess on average. The economic success of a covenant-keeping nation is to serve as a means of its dominion in history: And all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the LORD; and they shall be afraid of thee. And the LORD shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers to give thee. The LORD shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow. And the LORD shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath; if that thou hearken unto the commandments of the LORD thy God, which I command thee this day, to observe and to do them (Deut. 28:10-13). Grace precedes law, but law does come. Law is a means of grace. By obeying God’s law, individuals and nations gain wealth: above-average wealth. The blessings therefore increase. What we have here is a description of a process modern economists call positive feedback. This process is grounded in the structure of the biblical covenant. God begins with grace. The visible blessings are then followed by God’s declaration of His covenant law. This law has sanctions attached to it. The positive sanction of wealth is supposed to confirm God’s covenant. This visible confirmation, in turn, is to increase men’s faith in God’s sovereignty over history. This increase in faith is then supposed to increase their obedience. Here is positive feedback in action: grace, law, blessings, more faith, more obedience, more blessings. We can call this an upward spiral. God’s covenant is designed to produce a visible upward spiral. This passage in Scripture is the first written example in history of the concept of long-term economic growth, i.e., compound economic growth. This compounding process is based on the structure of the covenant. Built into the covenant is the promise of economic expansion. Negative Economic Sanctions The biblical covenant also contains the threat of economic contraction. The covenant’s sanctions are always two-fold: blessing and cursing. The potential contraction is comprehensive and visible to all: Thou shalt plant vineyards, and dress them, but shalt neither drink of the wine, nor gather the grapes; for the worms shall eat them. Thou shalt have olive trees throughout all thy coasts, but thou shalt not anoint thyself with the oil; for thine olive shall cast his fruit. Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them; for they shall go into captivity. All thy trees and fruit of thy land shall the locust consume. The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low. He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail. Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou hearkenedst not unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded thee (Deut. 28:39-45). The idea that compound economic growth can be sustained apart from God’s grace, which includes His law and its sanctions, is foreign to the Bible. The idea of blessing without obedience to God’s law threatens man. It is the lure of autonomy: "And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth" (Deut. 8:17). When large numbers of men indulge themselves with this fantasy, their destruction draweth nigh: "And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God" (vv. 19-20). These "other gods" need not be carved idols to be worshipped through elaborate liturgies. They may be idols of the mind: dreams of escalating wealth for all apart from God – new inventions, new technologies, new breakthroughs, new forms of indebtedness, upward and onward, world without end, amen. At the close of the twentieth century, these idols are worshipped by millions of people who believe that they can attain great wealth without much risk and without working 70-hour weeks, merely by investing their savings in stock market mutual funds. In the United States, the rate of saving is less than 5% of disposable income, yet the stock market has risen in the 1990’s as a result of the inflow of savings into the stock market from tax-deferred retirement programs and foreign investors. There are now more stock mutual funds in the United States than companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Today, academic economists say there is no reason why the stock market cannot continue to appreciate by 10% per annum indefinitely. This, in my view, is evidence that an economic disaster is imminent. Economists believe that man and society can be understood accurately by means of a few highly rarified theorems regarding autonomous man in an autonomous universe. They do not believe in God, God’s covenant, and God’s wrath. They do not believe that a personal God imposes corporate sanctions on societies. This belief is widely shared by most academics in the other academic disciplines. It is widely held by the media. It is even grudgingly admitted by most theologians – and sometimes not so grudgingly. The idea that Deuteronomy’s covenant structure still binds men together or scatters them apart is not taken seriously by more than a handful of Christians in the West. This is evidence of the near triumph of humanism’s theocracy: the rule of autonomous man, the only source of meaning and sanctions. (We might call this system of government anthropocracy, except that the word sounds academic, i.e., contrived.) Gods of the Countryside Men in poverty-stricken rural societies look to sources of power outside themselves. So do men in cities, but the gods of the countryside are thought to be in control of an environment that mankind surely did not make. Peasants are visibly dependent on the weather, the fertility of the soil, the size of insect populations, crop resistance to blight, and similar sanctioning agents outside their direct control. They rely on the intervention of supernatural beings to supplement whatever knowledge and tools they possess. Their capital is limited, consisting mainly of traditional farming methods. This knowledge base is unchanging over the decades because it is too risky to implement new ideas. When men live at the margin of existence, they do not accept marginal changes in the way they conduct their activities. They are too fearful of making a mistake or alienating some local deity. Even if their innovation should be successful, they risk the envy of their neighbors. Envy is taken very seriously in backward societies: the envy of the gods and the envy of neighbors. Peasant societies believe in magic more than technology. Their communications are limited. They do not have easy access to widely divergent ideas and approaches. It has only been through modern technology that these societies have been exposed to different ways of getting things done. As Western missionaries of various faiths, including the religion of messianic politics, have invaded peasant societies, peasants have had their way of life uprooted as surely as their crops. They have adopted new, capital-dependent technologies. One result has been the so-called green revolution: far more food per acre. The cost has been the elimination of local varieties of seeds, the development of cash crops, and the abandonment of traditional farming techniques. They have shifted their dependency from local gods and ancient traditions to high-yield hybrid seeds, chemical sprays, and fertilizers. They have learned to trust the West’s gods of plenty: technology, innovation, capital formation, road construction, telecommunications, and fractional reserve banking. They have placed themselves at the mercy of the impersonal free market or the socialist planning board. In either case, the gods of their fathers are no longer the center of their hopes for the future. The sovereignty of complex Western institutions has replaced the sovereignty of local gods. Faith in the invisible hand of the free market has replaced faith the Hand, a local deity whose shaman once ruled the village. Gods of the City The city is an association of men who share faith in the ability of farmers to keep sending in food. An urban resident places his trust in other men in a way that a farmer does not. A farmer can conceivably do without the services of others, at least for a few seasons. No urban resident is that self-sufficient. He depends on complex economic institutions. This dependence on institutions has implications for religious worship. The city dweller may or may not believe in God, but he must believe in the complex system of markets that delivers his daily bread. For him, the invisible hand is a system, not a person. If this hand ever becomes palsied – through plague, war, or bankruptcy – then he may not be able to eat. The urban man cannot care for this complex system in the way that a rural man cares for his garden. Supply lines are far more indirect for a city dweller than the peasant. The peasant does not understand why the winds blow or the rains come, but he knows enough to recognize that wind and rain have measurable consequences on what he will eat and how much. He can look at the sky and make relevant predictions. And he can pray to and sacrifice to an invisible god who may have power over the invisible wind and the rain. The city dweller is almost as unaware of cause and effect in economics as the primitive man is regarding meteorology. But the primitive man’s knowledge is more immediately applicable to his situation than the urban dweller’s knowledge is. A peasant knows enough to come inside before it starts to rain. But how does an urban man recognize a looming depression? What can he do about it, even if he does? Traditional agricultural wisdom is tested and usually confirmed by the peasant every season. No urban resident has the same kind of laboratory at his disposal. Traditional wisdom does not have a ready market in a booming economy. The tried and true methods of a generation ago – or even last year – are abandoned without much nostalgia, in much the same way that a poorly performing mutual fund is abandoned. So, people in cities learn to trust complex systems that are far beyond their powers of comprehension. One reason why free market ideas are so hard to communicate is that they rely on a highly complex logic that applies to even more highly complex interrelations. Basically, it takes years of mental training and decades of social experience for most men to believe in the invisible hand rather than the Hand. This is why socialism is easier to believe in than the free market. Men can more easily imagine the Hand: the iron fist inside the velvet glove – or maybe no glove at all, in the case of Communism. Urban life fosters belief in the reliability of man-made systems, even when, paraphrasing the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Fergusson, we are speaking of systems that are the product of human action but not human design. The urban resident does not easily believe in the ghost in the machine. The peasant easily believes in the sprite in the forest. "The gods created the forest," thinks the peasant, "and some of them are still living in the neighborhood." "Men built this machine," thinks the urban man. Yet no man knows how to make even as simple a machine as a pencil, as Leonard Read taught us decades ago. It is only through the complex social institution known as the division of labor economy that the simple marvel of a pencil is possible: the vulcanized rubber eraser, the metal band, the specially cut wood, the paint, and the carbon rod. This tool costs so little and performs so remarkably. It looks so simple, but without a market, it is an impossibility. Urban man lives in what he believes is mostly – and maybe entirely – a man-made world. Rural man knows better. Even the peasant who spent his youth in public schools that taught him Darwinism knows that nature is inherently beyond man’s powers of comprehension. So is a pencil, but urban man is so devoid of awe, and so devoid of the fear of failure of complex systems, that he does not acknowledge his own blindness, his own dependence on forces that are outside his powers of comprehension and control. The gods of the country dwell mainly in the cracks of urban society, almost as blades of grass punch through cracks in the pavement. Other gods replace them: gods of organized political power, bureaucratized education, and fractional reserve banking, which promises every depositor the right to withdraw his money on demand, despite the fact that almost all of the bank’s money has been loaned out. No trance-induced shaman of the countryside ever offered a less inherently believable or more widely believed promise to his followers. God of Our Fathers The medieval city was a covenanted society. Max Weber, in his study of the city, stressed the confessional roots of the origin of the Western city. Men were covenanted together. Jews occasionally lived in a city, but only in a restricted area where their rabbis possessed the power of limited civil sanctions. Jews had a different confession, and so had a different covenant. The city was understood as being under the authority of the church. A city had its own bishop. The bishop represented an authority which stretched visibly to Rome and invisibly to heaven. There was no thought that the institutions of the city were outside the jurisdiction of God. The sanctions of church and State were understood to be part of institutional hierarchies of authority under a universal Creator God. The ideal of modern humanistic man – the ideal of autonomy – was not merely heretical; it was unheard of. The atheist’s confession is still not taken seriously outside of East Germany, but the God of the Bible is not associated with the operations of social institutions, except perhaps in wartime, and probably not even then except for the parents of sons who are doing the fighting – the sons of poorer people in most cases these days. The God of the Bible is formally acknowledged as the God of baptisms, weddings, death-threatening medical conditions, and burials, but not much in between. Men today put their faith in they know not what. They trust in the continuing productivity of complex systems that they do not understand, cannot understand, and are not expected to understand. They doze in an airplane at 30,000 feet: a machine powered by a series of explosions in engines that they do not understand, lifted by principles of physics that they do not understand and which are inherently implausible (different rates of air flow beneath and above wings), and flown by pilots who are members of a union that is hostile to their economic interests as consumers. Yet millions of people allow these complex devices to carry them above the clouds every year. Do you think that Isaac Newton would have gotten on board an airplane the size of a 747 in the confident expectation of arriving in Berlin an hour later, based solely on his study of physics? I don’t think so. But you and I think nothing of it. Why? Because we have seen many airplanes fly. They are common. We do not understand them, but we are familiar with them. We assume that the production system that produced this particular plane produced all the other planes that have been flying for years. As for the one that crashed, this was a statistical fluke. We go by the odds. Most commercial jets have not crashed in the past. So, we extrapolate, based on the law of large numbers. This law – statistics – is one of the West’s most amazing discoveries. It has allowed men to stand, in the title of a recent book on the history of statistics, against the gods. We climb on board a plane in confidence that it will take off and land safely. But I will not do this on the evening of December 31, 1999. Nor will you. Nor will anyone who is a member of a pilot’s union. We will all know the truth of statistics: the odds that day will be against the familiar performance of the computer-driven air traffic control systems. A Digital Faith During the second half of the twentieth century, we have collectively made a series of covenantal assumptions. First, computers are trustworthy devices that are capable of integrating the details of complex systems. Second, programmers – the high priests of computer society – can be trusted to design code that will not threaten these systems. Third, the laws ("grammar") governing computer code are consistent across 2,500 different languages. Fourth, relevant cause and effect is inherently digital: a matter of ones and zeroes. Fifth, the code will operate without major problems indefinitely. All of these assumptions are false. How false? That question will be answered across the face of the earth, beginning no later than January 1, 2000. We have assumed, religiously, that men can successfully deal digitally with problems that are not exclusively digital, i.e., problems of social integration and cooperation. We have worshipped the great god number. We have not dealt with men as analogical to God – made in God’s image – but rather as made in the image of number. We have placed an entire civilization into the hands of technicians and managers who cannot understand the actual operations of even tiny systems. In short, we have handed modern society over to an unorganized priesthood of individuals who use computers, yet not one of whom is understands how to make a pencil. There is now no low-cost way out of the trap we have naively walked into. The high priests a generation ago decided to save money by saving disk space. They dropped the first two digits of the twentieth century. Now they must find a way, simultaneously and consistently, to reorganize the previous work of millions of programmers over a 40-year period: a trillion lines of code, more or less. Here is our problem: they are not omniscient. As I wrote in Remnant Review (Jan. 3, 1997), and which Leon Kappelman reprinted in his book, Year 2000 Problem (International Thompson Press, 1997), "a compliant computer can crash a noncompliant computer. It works both ways: a noncompliant computer can corrupt the data in a compliant computer. The entire system must work perfectly as a unit for any part of it to be reliable. To fix one computer is not sufficient. We must fix every computer that is in the system, and then coordinate these fixes, all over the world. In short – and I mean this literally – the programmer had better be God. He must be omniscient. He must also be omnipotent. He must know exactly what to do and have the power to make other programmers do it his way. Finally, he must have the money to do it." Conclusion God brings corporate sanctions in history. He brings positive sanctions to confirm His covenant, but also to serve as temptations for covenant-breaking societies to overestimate their power. The West has enjoyed unprecedented wealth even as it has abandoned faith in the God of the Bible. This has been duly noted in heaven. The entries in the ledger have been made – and not just digital entries. The account books on the West will eventually be closed. The question we must ask, and then answer, is this: How soon, or Lord, how soon? I think the West’s preliminary accounting will take place no later than January 1, 2000. I hope it is not the West’s final accounting, but it could be. Modern man believes that life is digital, that the measure of man is inherently digital. God allowed the high priests of this civilization to drop two digits and thereby test the assumptions of digital man. The answer, I believe, will be digital: "And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting" (Dan. 5:25-27). Copyright 1997, Institute for Christian Economics P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711 Donations are fully tax deductible; checks should be made out to Institute for Christian Economics. 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