Seasoned Veracity

Your Jesus and Mine

When it comes to politics, everyone needs reminding: Jesus is not on a side. Jesus is a side. Nobody owns Him; He owns us, whether we're members of His official fan club or not.

To the right He says, "He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone." And to the left? "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments."

To all of us, He says, "If anyone would come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross." That's the challenge for left and right: Are we beating a drum, or dragging a cross?

  -- Janie B. Cheaney in WORLD

How To Reduce Poverty

In Christianity Today, Mark Galli shares good news from Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015, by researchers Laurance Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz.

While as late as the early 1980s more than half the inhabitants of developing countries lived in extreme poverty, by 2005 that number was cut in half. By 2010, "less than 16 percent remain in poverty, and fewer than 10 percent will likely be poor by 2015." 

In some 25 years, the proportion of the population in developing nations living in extreme poverty has fallen from above 50 percent to less than 16 percent!

This is fantastic news of amazing progress! What brought about this remarkable change? What lifted these masses of people out of poverty? Foreign aid programs from developed nations? Donations given through charitable organizations? Government programs to transfer wealth from rich to poor? None of the above.

The primary factor responsible for this huge reduction in poverty is economic growth. In particular, the economic progress made in China and India over the past 25 years has lifted the standard of living for hundreds of millions of individuals.

This is not to say that the problem of poverty has been solved, or that churches and charities have no role to play in helping the poor. But the record of what has been most effective in lifting the poor out of poverty offers lessons for governments, charities and churches:

• Governments in developing nations should focus on creating and preserving a business-friendly environment, keeping corporate taxes low and offering legal safeguards for businesses to operate with freedom and security.  
• Foreign governments should focus on maintaining free trade with developing nations in order to give their businesses a chance to succeed.
• Charities should focus on educating and training the workforce in developing nations.
• Churches should help people in developing nations to acquire the moral virtues that will help them succeed as employers and employees: honesty, thrift, diligence, service, self-discipline, etc., including Godly ways of attaining and using wealth.  

(Of course, this is not all churches should do; but this would seem to be the most effective way they can achieve the goal of helping people out of poverty.)   

Thank God for successful businesses which provide jobs to lift people out of poverty and raise the standard of living for all! Business as ministry, anyone?            

Christianity as an Interventionist Religion

Christianity stands in stark contrast to world views and religions which teach an ungodly, fatalistic merger with earth or time.

The biblical approach is driven by God’s social and cultural mandate (Genesis 1:28), and His strong prescription for life and against death after the Fall. Hands have to be put to the plough in toil; culture is to give shape to nature. The seeming finality of death is to be weakened by bearing children.

Scripture insists that men and women interfere with fallen nature and produce change for good against evil, for life against death, for reason against blind faith. Indeed, God Himself interferes through the written, spoken, and living Word. By His Word alone do we know that He is good, that there has been a terrible fall from wholeness, that we are made in His image, able to understand and apply His revelation.

The Bible calls us to active intervention, not resignation. It invites us to invent, to correct, and to critique. We are to dig and to delve, to vote and to veto, to discern and to discover. Life is our focus, death a temporary enemy resulting from sin.

Poverty, bad government, laughter at the misfortune of others is acceptable only in cultures where fate is assumed. No problem is recognized when all is seen as deserved or the result of destiny.

Western man and the biblical culture mandate of dominion are accused of interference. To this we gladly plead “Guilty!” In contrast, few outside the people influenced by biblical teaching ever stir to help the poor, intervene in catastrophes, work for better government and cleaner air. But God’s people do not lie low, do not accept a destiny; they not only describe, but also prescribe, and stand up to be heard and heeded.

    -- Udo Middleman

Read the full article in Kairos Journal

The Solution to World Poverty

I believe the only long-term solution to world poverty is business. That is because businesses produce goods, and businesses produce jobs. And businesses continue producing goods year after year, and continue providing jobs and paying wages year after year. Therefore if we are ever going to see long-term solutions to world poverty, I believe it will come through starting and maintaining productive, profitable businesses.

If people think business is evil, they will hesitate to start businesses, and they will never feel real freedom to enjoy working in business, because it will always be tainted with the faint cloud of false guilt. Who can enjoy being an evil materialist who works with evil money to earn evil profits by exploiting laborers and producing material goods that feed people’s evil greed and enhance their evil pride and sustain their evil inequality of possessions and feed their evil competitiveness? Who wants to devote his life to such an evil pursuit as business? What government would ever want to establish laws and policies that would encourage such an evil thing as business? If business is evil, why not tax it and regulate it until it can barely survive? And so with the attitude that business is fundamentally evil in all its parts, business activity is hindered at every point, and poverty remains.

If attitudes toward business change . . . then who could resist being a God-pleasing subduer of the earth who uses materials from God’s good creation and works with the God-given gift of money to earn morally good profits, and shows love to his neighbors by giving them jobs and by producing material goods that overcome world poverty, goods that enable people to glorify God for his goodness, that sustain just and fair differences in possessions, and that encourage morally good and beneficial competition? What a great career that would be! What a great activity for governments to favor and encourage! What a solution to world poverty! What a great way to give glory to God!

 -- Wayne Grudem

Vote for Cicero

"Gaius Gracchus proposed his grain law. It delighted the people for it provided an abundance of food free of toil. The good men, by contrast, fought against it because they reckoned that the masses would be seduced from the ways of hard work and become slothful, and they saw that the treasury would be drained dry." -- speech by Marcus Tullius Cicero (55 BC)

If only Cicero were around today to run for President of the US... 

Occupy Wall Street? We Need To Occupy Washington, DC!

In the eighteen months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, over seven million Americans lost their jobs, yet the number of federal bureaucrats earning $100,000 or more went up from 14% to 19%. An economic downturn for you, but not for them. They're upturn girls living in a downturn world. At the start of the "downturn," the Department of Transportation had just one employee earning more than $170,000 per year. Eighteen months later, it had 1,690. In the year after the passage of Obama's "stimulus," the private sector lost 2.5 million jobs, but the federal bureaucracy gained 416,000. Even if one accepts the government's ludicrous concept of "creating or saving" jobs, by its own figures four out of every five "created or saved" jobs were government jobs. "Stimulus" stimulates government, not the economy. It's part of the remorseless governmentalization of American life.

-- Mark Steyn

(all statistics footnoted and cited from USA Today and National Review)

Following the Resurrected Jesus

The first-generation Christians were confident that God included them in his rule and his ruling. And they prayed for the boldness that would reflect that confidence, would prevent them from sinking into a passivity that used God's rule as an excuse to be spectators to history.

They followed the resurrected Jesus with an air of triumph and praise. The gospel was not something private that they cultivated in the cozy security of their homes and hearts; it was public, the most powerful force in human history, shaping the destiny of nations as well as the souls of men and women.

        -- Eugene Peterson

The Church and Family in Today's America

The Church has been beaten into submission. The first commandment of speech in our public square is that we shall never invoke the name of God, unless we do so in vain.

The family is a ward of the state, tolerated as long as it does not neglect the children in those ways frowned upon by the elites (you can deprive your child of a father and be cheered for it, but God help you if you let him ride a bike without a helmet).

        -- Anthony Esolen

Reconciling the Rebels

The reconciling mission of the church in the world includes the task of proclaiming to the present "power structures" that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, and summoning them to climb down from his throne and take up their proper responsibilities in looking after his world. Having been defeated as rebels, they now can be reconciled as subjects. They do not own the world. They do not hold the keys of death and hell. They, being essentially of "this age," do not hold final authority over those who belong already to the "age to come."

-- N. T. Wright

Congratulations, Zoro!

According to Kyodo News, the "boss" of a troop of wild monkeys in Mt. Takasaki nature park in Oita prefecture, Japan, has set a new record by holding the top spot for 11 years and 3 months.

Zoro, a male monkey, is 28 years old, the equivalent of 90 in human years. He grabbed the Number One position in the 696-member troop by wresting a banana from Genta, his predecessor, in December 1998.