The Evil Rich and Righteous Poor?

‘Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’; so says the Luke version of the beatitudes (Luke 6:20). The Matthew version says ‘blessed are the poor in spirit…’ and I suspect that Jesus used both versions. I was reminded of this recently in thinking about the current economic recession and as a result of seeing a PBS program a couple of days ago about the 1929 market crash that led to the Great Depression in which my parents grew up. This verse on the poor is in contrast to the passage on how difficult it is for the rich to be saved, like a camel going through the eye of a needle. A result of this contrast has been a teaching, especially of the social gospel proponents, of the ‘righteous poor and the evil rich’.

There is some basis in common experience for this, of course. Many rich have gained their wealth in unrighteous ways, whether from usury, trafficking in drugs or sex, extortion, slavery or any number of other evils including armed conquest. Until the industrial revolution, producing more than what you consumed was a difficult task indeed, which limited the ability to create wealth. As a result, when wealth was accumulated it quite often was due to unethical, if not illegal, means. We now have far more opportunity to create wealth than in most of history, but there is still much evil. The PBS program on the 1929 crash spent considerable time on how the market was manipulated by a few rich speculators who would collude to drive up a stock price, then sell after it went up by a multiple of 2 to 10x, and watch as other investors suffered huge losses when the price plummeted back down. This was not illegal at the time but it clearly was dishonest, literally stealing from those who were unaware of the collusion going on. This was so rampant for as much as 50 years before 1929 that it contributed to the severity of the crash. This was clearly an ‘evil rich ‘ scenario. Historically, the rich have indeed often stolen from the poor.

The current recession and the crash that started it has also been attributed to the evil rich, as bond rating agencies ignored the risk in the ratings they gave to bundled sub-prime loans and the banks excessively leveraged their balance sheets with subprime loans, resulting in collapse as the default rate rose. There is plenty of blame for the rich in this, but there is also plenty of blame for the poor. Those who took on home loans they clearly could not afford hoping to flip the house quickly, the enormous credit card debt buildup over the last decade, the negative savings rate: all of those were in the lower income groups. To me one of the differences in this current economic mess is that it is much more egalitarian in its causes than the Great Depression. I personally think the government’s pressure to make more subprime loans was the most serious root of the problem, but there was so much get-rich-quick mentality everywhere that rich and poor both have plenty of blame to go around. Of course, those we call ‘low income’ in the U.S. are not all that poor compared to those living on less than $5 per day in some parts of the world. But in the U.S. at least, the lesson in this current mess is not that the evil rich brought this onto the righteous poor; it is that ‘all have sinned and fallen short’.

Spiritual Discipline

Our pastor at church recently returned from teaching at a new pastor's training conference in India and participated in outreach events there. He mentioned in the pulpit today how much more modest the attire is there, especially among young women, and that you realize how much American culture is overly sexualized when you visit another more traditional culture. As he was preparing to return to the U.S. he was in a restaurant that had an American export, a sitcom, showing on a television screen. One of the local Hindu men, there with his family, became so upset about the trashy content of the show that he stood up in the restaurant and demanded it be turned off.



Being immersed in our own culture 24/7, we can easily fail to see that the media is all that most of the world sees of America. If that is all you know about America you can only conclude that America is focused mostly on satisfying our own appetites, as we feel that we have the right to satisfy any and all appetites at will. That of course has all kinds of non-sexual ramifications, like taking on too much debt to chase immediate gratification of other kinds (cars, houses, vacations), obesity, and whole cult of self-fulfillment.



While the Hindu world of the man in the restaurant includes an understanding of God that I cannot accept, most of the world, including the Christian world for most of history, has recognized that humans are prone to falling into bad behavior, behavior that is bad both for his overall culture and for himself. To prevent that bad behavior requires the practice of discipline, which conflicts head-on with the pursuit of self-gratification. It also requires many other things: grace, forgiveness, understanding among them. But it certainly requires disciplining ourselves as well.



One of the things that our pastor saw vividly when leaving our culture for a while is how very unwilling we are to practice self-discipline. This affects many areas of our lives: financial, eating, sexuality, education, anger, and more. While many of these appear to be matters of the body or money, they seem to me to be driven by spiritual discipline. If we do not recognize that our desires and appetites are prone to go bad, then we will not see the need to control them. If we believe that we have a right to fulfill any sexual desire, no matter how disordered it may be, we will not strive to control that desire. If we do not see the use of our money as a way to do what is right and make the world better, we will seek to consume rather than invest in a better tomorrow.



I think the TV picture of America that the outside world sees is, sadly, all too true. As a culture we have decided to pursue the fulfilling of all appetites instead of passing judgement upon them and controlling them. That is fundamentally a spiritual problem. Too bad that folks here in the U.S. are not demanding change like that man in the restaurant. But then that would take some discipline.

National Parks and Tsunami

This week the new Ken Burns series on the National Parks is airing. It is very good, and as I have been watching it I am both reminded of the experiences I have had viewing the handiwork of God in Yellowstone, the Tetons, the Grand Canyon, the Smokies and also find myself anticipating the time when I will get to visit Yosemite for the first time. The National Parks are indeed a national treasure and I agree with Teddy Roosevelt that the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone/Tetons are so unique in the world and so breathtaking that all Americans should endeavor to visit them.

Yet I am also struck with the tone of the series that presents nature and wilderness as an unqualified good with no dark side. Though they mention at times how the frontier was in the 1800's viewed as something to be conquered rather than preserved, that point of view is presented as something to be looked down upon. This strikes me as a very recent point of view, and one that would fit into what C. S. Lewis calls 'chronological snobbery'. We take our own modern opinion to be so vastly superior to what came before that we don't even try to understand why our viewpoint is different.

Today the news provided a good opportunity to recognize the dark side of nature and reflect on our chronological snobbery as tsunami hit the Samoan islands and an earthquake hit Indonesia on the same day. Meanwhile the typhoon that hit the Phillippines a couple of days ago has now passed over southeast Asia and the death toll is starting to emerge. Among all of these some 1000 or so folks are now dead with the count likely to rise further in the days to come. The economic damage is huge as well.

While these kinds of storms and quakes are not the same as simply undeveloped land in parks, they do illustrate that nature is both enemy and friend. To the Pilgrims and all those after them who lived on the frontier, cutting down the woods for shelter and fuel and to allow farming was necessary to avoid death due to winter cold and lack of food. Killing grizzly bears and mountain lions and rattle snakes was to necessary to keep your children and milk cow alive. While nature provided wood and meat, it was also menacing in its ability to kill you and your family. It was to be conquered to stay alive. While many took this very much too far, slaughtering animals for feathers or hides, the threat of wilderness was clear to everyone.

In our sanitized, urbanized world we romanticize the wilderness and overlook the real threat the natural world posed to frontier families. Many early pioneers went to the opposite extreme, demonizing it. The truth lies in between. We are stewards of the earth, to both utilize its bounty and also keep it sustainable for the future. Nature is both beautiful and threatening, as people also can be. And so the apostle Paul concluded that both man and nature are fallen, and both are created by God and reflect His handiwork. Those two sides remain in tension as long as this earth remains.

Yom Kippur, Passover and the Lord's Supper

The sermon at our church this past Sunday was about the marriage feast of the Lamb in the book of Revelation, chapter 19, which seems to occur immediately before Armageddon. Since the chronology of Revelation is rather hard to sort out, it may not actually be in that order in my opinion, and in the sermon the pastor discussed the various concepts of the second advent of Christ and whether it happens pre-tribulation, mid-tribulation or post-tribulation. I agree with him that the pre-trib point of view requires a very strained reading of Scripture and is rather in conflict with the rest of the teaching in the Bible about suffering. I tend to think that the church may have to endure the entire tribulation, not escaping even mid-tribulation, but the truth is that no one really knows. The excessive confidence of the pronouncements by Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, and others are out of line in my opinion. We just don't know how all of that will unfold.



Anyway, after that discussion came the wedding feast of the Lamb and one of the points was that the Lord's supper anticipates that wedding feast. I commented here recently about how often the Bible compares Christianity to marriage, and this is another of those and this time the comparison has to do with when He is fully united with the Church, which is His betrothed until He returns. As we take the Lord's supper, we both look backward to the cross and forward to the marriage feast.



Since Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, happens in September the same week as this sermon, I was reminded of how that holiday relates to Passover, one looking back and the other more forward looking. The Passover lamb died to provide the blood for the doorpost in Egypt, protecting Israel from the death angel, causing him to pass over their homes. It is celebrated with a roasted lamb, bread, and wine as well as bitterherbs and salt water and looks back to that event in Egypt. Jesus became the Lamb who took away the need for more sacrificial lambs and took away our tears and bitterness, so the Lord's supper is celebrated with only the bread and wine. No other lamb will ever be needed. We look backward to His act of sacrifice in that way at the Lord's supper, and the absence of the lamb, bitter herbs, and salt water give testimony to what He did and it, as Paul said, 'proclaims the Lord's death until he comes' (I Cor 11:26).



And when He comes, we will do what Christ promised when He first celebrated the Lord's supper with the Disciples, saying about the bread and wine, ' I will not drink of the fruit of the vine again until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God' (Mark 14:25 but also Luke 22:18 and Matt 26:29). This could well be at the marriage feast of Revelation 19. I think of Yom Kippur as a fresh start, with the sins being carried off by the 'scape goat' and a chance to begin anew, and in that way the forward looking part of the Lord's supper, coming as it did in a sermon at the time of Yom Kippur, reminded me of that. Yom Kippur also comes at the start of the Jewish new year, which is a forward-looking time. Most often I only think about the backward looking part of the Lord's supper and omit the forward looking part. I appreciated, and needed the reminder about, the forward looking part.

Discipleship: Mentoring, Tutoring, or something else?

Our men's group just finished reading and discussing the book Transforming Discipleship and I have reached a few conclusions based on that discussion and the book. Things I like in the book include the description of a disciple as 'a self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted follower of Christ' and the diagnosis of some of the reasons why there is so little discipleship within the church, which has mostly to do with both pastors and the congregation not seeing making disciples as a primary reason for the existence of the church. Most act as if the Great Commission in Matt 28:18-20 says 'go and do church' instead of 'go and make disciples of all nations'.

As the book reaches its recommended course of action, though, the recommendations seemed to me to be pretty much the same as what happens on a college campus: commit to a one year small group, commit something like 5 hours a week to the overall effort (that includes group time, preparation, going and doing ministry), commit to the relationships and the risk of being transparent in the group, and committing to at least seriously consider leading a group the next year. This is to me a key issue: most folks with careers, mortgages, kids and some other basic commitments at church already don't have that time even if they are interested.

I had commented before on how discipling ministries seem to be effective on college campuses but much less so in local churches, and so here are some conclusions about what I think it would take for discipling to work within the local church:

• First it needs integration within the church program. At least in evangelical churches there is already a lot of 'content' on offer through Sunday School classes, sermons, other bible studies, etc. Adding more content is not needed: making the current content more relevant would be much better than yet another, separate time of study.
• I have commented elsewhere that I see discipling as different from mentoring. Mentoring is more about offering advice and sponsorship, less about training and doing things jointly. Discipling is more a group activity, less of a leader:follower activity. In that regard, a blog I saw today titled 'Mentoring is Overrated:Try Tutoring Instead' by Michael Schrage at Harvardbusiness.org made me think: maybe tutoring is a good paradigm for discipling in a church. If sermons and sunday bible study is the 'classroom', then the small discipleship group is more like a peer tutoring session (working on the difficult areas, asking the questions you can't ask in class) and peer tutors are not nearly so intimidating as a professor or a pastor.
• The time commitment has to be manageable: integrating the content with sunday school can certainly help that. Integrating the 'peer tutoring' with other ministries would do even more. Why isn't the goal of discipling built into all the other church ministries? How does choir build disciples? How does the sports ministry build disciples? How does women's ministry build disciples? Integration will be a must for it to work. The current patchwork of programs that seem to be unrelated to each other and without a common theme should have a common theme of building disciples.
• The content has to have more flexibility than in the book. An effort that takes a canned program of weekly meetings, works through it in a year, then moves those people out to do the same content with others next year is not likely to work for people who are out of school in my opinion. There is such a wide range of backgrounds in a church, folks with totally different gaps regarding how they could become 'self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Christ' that one canned program is going to fit only a few.
• To do all of this the pastoral staff will need to see building disciples as their key calling; not preaching, not worship, not pastoral care. Those others are important parts elements of being a disciple but are not ends in themselves.
• All of this re-confirmed to me what a great window of opportunity are the college years. If those years are missed it is much harder to build disciples in small groups later.

More on Marriage in the News

Continuing from last time, the current (October) issue of First Things has an interesting article titled 'What does Woman Want? The War between the Sexless" which discusses a number of recent articles by women in The Atlantic, Time, various blogs and books that have a common theme of middle aged women divorcing their husbands, claiming that their marriage is barren of sexual intimacy, and assigning blame mostly to things like extended life expectancy making marriage unsustainable, having been intended for a society where most people die much younger than now. The author of this article, Mary Eberstadt, effectively points out how bizarre this all is and makes some pointed observations, such as:

• Wharton economists have assembled surveys over the past 35 years showing steadily decreasing female happiness in general. This is despite large advances in education (more in college now than men), in job equality, sexual freedom, longer life expectancy,closing the wage gap, etc. Instead of improving their happiness, women's happiness is steadily declining, now less than men though historically it had been higher than men.


• Womens' and mens' narcissism is increasing. A study of 16,000 collegians personality tests showed a sharp increase in responses to such statements as 'I am an important person' (in 1950 12% agreed with this one; it was 80% by the 1980's)


• Women are becoming more the instigator of divorce. A recent Parade poll showed 70% of men said they would never leave their spouse, versus 50% of women say they have considered leaving.


• Men used to complain about sex-withholding wives and used it to justify affairs; now women do exactly that same thing. That is the whole gist of The Atlantic article 'Let's Call the Whole Thing Off'' by one Sandra Tsing Loh about her decision to seek a divorce.

Eberstadt could have done better in coming up with more clear conclusions from her survey of the angst this summer about marriage from female 'elites' in the media, but she does point out that much of this is the price of feminism, and part of the price of feminism has been its acceptance of pornography. As the article points out, pornography becomes an easy substitute for sexual intimacy in situations where that intimacy is strained by the pressures of life and marriage, and porn's easy availability now only makes it worse. Women have accepted porn in their quest for their own sexual license. Now it is helping destroy the intimacy they say they want, in addition to their own destructive work via promiscuity, abortion, narcissism, and career obsession.

I would add another point: competition. Loh paints a generality of the modern man as a sexless, sex-withholding 'competitor wife'. That is amazing since men historically have been blamed for being sex-obsessed and indeed that is why men are so vulnerable to porn. So what is going on? My opinion is that feminist women have been obsessed with competition with men to the point that they have made the home a place of competition instead of a place of acceptance. The word 'competitor' in 'competitor wife' is key. Men do not like to compete against women, especially their wives. Not in sports, not in school, not in a debate (see Hillary versus Barack for example), not anywhere. But now, men are competing with their wives to maintain their self respect as a provider, as a leader, and as a lover. In the home competition does not work. It shuts down intimacy and porn becomes an easy escape for many. I am not justifying porn: as I have said before, porn is a lie. But is an easy out for those tired of competing against their own wives. It is rather ironic that these feminists who have so strenuously insisted in competing against their husbands now find themselves in a no-win competition against the air-brushed, silicone-implanted, liposuctioned lie that is pornography.

Marriage in the News

Today's USA Today included an op/ed piece about how secularism is saving marriage. Since I commented recently that 'marriage is on shaky ground' in the post about grace and the radical idea that is marriage, I thought I should comment on that article. In addition, the current issue of First Things (the October issue: yes, the magazine gurus have decreed that it is now October even though it is only September 14) includes and article titled 'What does Woman Want', which goes well beyond Mel Gibson's take on that.

First of all let's look at the USA Today nonsense: either Oliver Thomas, who wrote the article, simply doesn't understand statistics or he is living in a land of make believe. Here is a broader view of the statistics: yes, the divorce rate did drop to the lowest rate as a % of marriages since 1970. Unfortunately, several other trends have been going on for a number of years as well including:

• The total % of unmarried women has moved steadily upward since 1960, from about 30% to over 40%. In 1960 the number of unmarried women was about half the number of married women; now the numbers are nearing equivalence and if the current trend continues, unmarried women will pass the number of married women in a decade or so.
• The average age of marriage is increasing (up to 27 for men, versus 22 back when I got married)
• The number of unmarried couple households has increased 10x since 1960

So how does this translate to secularism saving marriage? It doesn't. What it does imply is that fewer and fewer people are getting married, and those that do so marry later. This would more likely imply that those most committed to the idea of marriage are the ones getting married since the stigma of being unmarried, either alone or co-habiting, is now less. When the people most committed to marriage as a concept are the ones getting married, wouldn't you expect lower divorce rates? I would. And is there any evidence that the folks most committed to the idea of marriage are the more secular, non-religious folks? None.

To look at the long term trends in marriage statistics, visit www.biblenews1.com/marriage/marriags.htm . They have plotted the data from the U.S. Census Bureau, so this is not some survey skewed by the sampling plan. It is just census data, conveniently plotted. One thing you will note is that in 1982-83, during the last recession of similar severity to the current one, the divorce rate also dropped. There have also been several articles about how hard times force marriage partners to delay divorce and often to come together as a team.

So what is to be made of the drop in divorce rates? My opinion is that in light of the long term marriage statistics and the current recession combined, it was entirely predictable and has absolutely nothing to do with secularism. Quite the opposite.

However, there are some secular forces that are contributing to the long term negative trends in marriage, which the First Things article discusses. More on that next time.