Here is an excerpt from the end of our discussion on the Civil War. If you interested, email me and I will send you the whole discussion (about 28 pages in Word). I will not send you the whole book. You will have to buy that.
One theological issue American Christians faced in the war was how to continue to construe their doctrine of the providence of God. The people prayed for the battles—one group of Americans praying for Confederate victory and another for Union victory on the field of battle. Most of the battles were won by one side or the other. Confederates scored the first victory, then had some setbacks, then regained ground and it was back and forth through 1862, with victories for the South at Seven Days, loss at Stones River, and strategic loss at Antietam. The Confederates did well in 1863 at Chickamauga and Chancellorsville, but also lost major battles at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. Then the tide turned against the Confederacy in 1864 with inconclusive larger battles, but with a loss of the means to continue the war. Both sides invoked the same God, asking him to help their cause and at the end of the day recognizing, whatever the outcome, that his will was done. Over and over they did this. John Adger, Southern Presbyterian, once the war was over, went to great lengths to insist on “the justice of the Southern cause,” but also conceded that “there was one error . . . into which we acknowledge that some Southern ministers sometimes fell.” That error was to believe that God must surely bless the right. What the Southerners had learn through the disposition of the war was that often let :the righteous . . . be overthrown.” Godly ministers may pray, but the outcome is left with God. His conclusion was, “Yes! The hand of God, gracious though heavy, is upon the South for her discipline.” It was not simply faith in the Bible that was at stake for war America, but faith in God himself.
A related issue had to do with military protocol in relation to civilians. The army leaders on both sides had been trained at West Point, believed the same doctrines of war, understood the same tactics and strategies in battle. One of their deepest held convictions was that war was for soldiers, not for civilians. This conviction held for the first year-and-a-half. In October 1862 William Tecumseh Sherman, attempting to hold on to his victory in Memphis sustained a series of guerilla attacks from Confederate fighters. In response he destroyed the town of Randolph, Tennessee. When the next attack came he destroyed all homes, farms and crops along a fifteen-mile stretch south of Memphis. “When a Memphis woman objected, Sherman replied that God Himself had destroyed entire populations for far lesser crimes.” This would be especially the lesson learned late in the war through Sherman’s march to the sea, exercising a final “vengeance upon South Carolina” for starting this whole mess.
One more thing needs to be said before we make a few notes about the economic impact of the war and then move on. The Civil War was, as we indicated earlier, the second defining moment in America’s history, which is why we have given it so much attention in our narrative. A third will come in the next century, and we will also give it a close look. A newcomer to the United States may have made the most telling comment on the nature of slavery and the war. His name was Philip Schaff, and he was a native Swiss who had studied in German, then accepted a call to teach at the German Reformed seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. In 1861 he penned a review article in the Mercersburg Review in which he called for the gradual, voluntary end to slavery, but noted also that, “The negro question lies far deeper than the slavery question.” Schaff, it turns out, was quite prescient. The Civil War did solve the slavery issue, once and for all, but neither the war, nor twelve years of “Reconstruction,” that is, oversight from the Federal government over the governing policies of the eleven rebel states, nor decades of Jim Crow and prejudice solved the “negro problem.” We will have to see whether that does get some kind of solution later in our story.
Chad Owen Brand
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
OPS (Other Peoples' Sins)
Sometimes the sins of others have a sanctifying effect on us. You can see hatred manifested in a dramatically horrible way, and it can so impact you that the next time you are tempted to lash out, you feel the twinge of pain that you felt when you observed that other act of hatred. It brings revulsion and repentance to your soul, and you simply say, “God help me, but I cannot go there, even though my heart sometimes wants to take me there.” It is both a sad and a glorious thing.
In 1 Corinthians we find the story of a church that was filled with various kinds of sins: sins of immorality, sins of dis-fellowship, sins of pride and arrogance, sins of theological defection, and more besides. Paul wrote this letter and in the providence of God it has been preserved for our edification and instruction. What do we get from it? Many things. But one thing we certainly get from the letter is that the sins of others are displayed so that we might learn from them not to do them. The sins of the Corinthians can have a sanctifying impact on us.
The same is true in our contemporary fellowship with believers and in our relationships with non-believers, both within and outside the church. You observe someone’s flash of anger in church and realize how much pain that has caused to a child observing it, and it makes you aware of how your own anger can be destructive. Someone you know asserts himself with arrogance and pride and that assertion brings disrepute to the cause of Christ in a community, and that makes you recognize that your own pride can do the very same thing. You are stunned to find that someone in your circle of friends has fallen prey to sins of sensuality, and at first it makes you want to be critical, and that is probably something that is appropriate, but it also reminds you that we are all vulnerable and that we can all fall prey to temptation. So, we humble ourselves before God and ask for grace and mercy.
We need to pray for one another that we will find sanctification, “without which no one shall see God” (Hebrews 12:14). We need to seek the holiness of the Lord in our own lives. At the same time, we can learn much from the sins of others. In playing pool, you often “go to school on the other guy’s shot.” We can do the same in life.
Chad Owen Brand
In 1 Corinthians we find the story of a church that was filled with various kinds of sins: sins of immorality, sins of dis-fellowship, sins of pride and arrogance, sins of theological defection, and more besides. Paul wrote this letter and in the providence of God it has been preserved for our edification and instruction. What do we get from it? Many things. But one thing we certainly get from the letter is that the sins of others are displayed so that we might learn from them not to do them. The sins of the Corinthians can have a sanctifying impact on us.
The same is true in our contemporary fellowship with believers and in our relationships with non-believers, both within and outside the church. You observe someone’s flash of anger in church and realize how much pain that has caused to a child observing it, and it makes you aware of how your own anger can be destructive. Someone you know asserts himself with arrogance and pride and that assertion brings disrepute to the cause of Christ in a community, and that makes you recognize that your own pride can do the very same thing. You are stunned to find that someone in your circle of friends has fallen prey to sins of sensuality, and at first it makes you want to be critical, and that is probably something that is appropriate, but it also reminds you that we are all vulnerable and that we can all fall prey to temptation. So, we humble ourselves before God and ask for grace and mercy.
We need to pray for one another that we will find sanctification, “without which no one shall see God” (Hebrews 12:14). We need to seek the holiness of the Lord in our own lives. At the same time, we can learn much from the sins of others. In playing pool, you often “go to school on the other guy’s shot.” We can do the same in life.
Chad Owen Brand
Monday, May 2, 2011
Justice and Retribution: Bin Laden
Shakespeare's Fool in Hamlet famously stated that "History is like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." September 11, 2001 seemed to bear that sentiment out. What has just happened to us, and why? But last night, about 10:45 PM, the "sound and fury" resolved themselves into a major chord of resolution, as we heard the news that justice had finally been done.
Usama Bin Laden has made a career of terrorism. Wandering from one patron to another, often duping those who thought he was serving their purposes, he ultimately was serving his own purpose, the purpose of destroying the non-Islamic world, but not merely that. His terrorism spent itself also in the destruction of Muslims, Muslims who did not support his brand of Islamic fanaticism.
That career is now over. Undoubtedly, some Christians (and others) will begin to second guess whether this act of justice was, well, just. After all, he had been marginalized and forced to live on the run, hiding in the mountains and in compounds where his quality of life was likely very meager. Perhaps that ought to be seen as punishment enough. And what about "Thou shalt not kill"? It is not as though he was in our country and could have been abducted by the police and put on trial. He was only apprehended by a nearly ten-year-long mission to find him and take him down, a mission that has cost American tax-payers billions of dollars. Why not just leave him to the Lord, and let God sort it out?
The answer is that God has ordained that justice in this age, for the matters of this life, in so far as justice can possibly be meted out in this age, should be carried out by governments. That is Paul's whole point in Romans 13:4. The government has been given the power of the sword and is a "minister" of God to the end of justice in this age. In other words, for governments not to carry out that role would be an abandonment of their calling. The US military forces that killed Bin Laden were doing their God-ordained duty, even if they did not see it in just those terms. Just yesterday I had a conversation with a 94-year old man who spent three years fighting the Nazis in France and Belgium. As he put it to me, "We were doing the Lord's work." Indeed they were, and I told him so! The men who lifted their weapons yesterday and drew down on this terrorist were doing the Lord's will every bit as much as pastors, standing in the pulpit, bringing the Word to his people yesterday, were doing the Lord's will.
I am not glorifying death. I am not in any way a hater of Muslims, though I reject Islam as a false gospel. I am not a hawk, calling for more war and death and destruction. I love peace, and I would wish that no other person, American or otherwise, would have to die for his country in war. But what I am saying is that the American government had a God-ordained duty to bring this man to justice, dead or alive. It has done so, and our attitude ought to be one of gratitude, of solemn recognition that our sins will find us out, and of knowing that every person will one day stand before God to be judged according to the deeds done in the body. We may take a moment to rejoice, but we also need to look to ourselves to be sure that our hearts are right before God.
Justice cannot always be meted out in this age. Adolf Hitler had to face the Lord without temporal justice being passed on him. On May 1st, 1945, it was announced to the world that Hitler was dead; exactly sixty-six years later, May 1st, 2011, it was announced that Bin Laden was dead. Our government has done the right thing. I am grateful to the President, to the American military, to the Pakistani government, and to Bible teachers and readers who still believe that justice is important in this age, as well as in the age to come.
Chad Owen Brand
Usama Bin Laden has made a career of terrorism. Wandering from one patron to another, often duping those who thought he was serving their purposes, he ultimately was serving his own purpose, the purpose of destroying the non-Islamic world, but not merely that. His terrorism spent itself also in the destruction of Muslims, Muslims who did not support his brand of Islamic fanaticism.
That career is now over. Undoubtedly, some Christians (and others) will begin to second guess whether this act of justice was, well, just. After all, he had been marginalized and forced to live on the run, hiding in the mountains and in compounds where his quality of life was likely very meager. Perhaps that ought to be seen as punishment enough. And what about "Thou shalt not kill"? It is not as though he was in our country and could have been abducted by the police and put on trial. He was only apprehended by a nearly ten-year-long mission to find him and take him down, a mission that has cost American tax-payers billions of dollars. Why not just leave him to the Lord, and let God sort it out?
The answer is that God has ordained that justice in this age, for the matters of this life, in so far as justice can possibly be meted out in this age, should be carried out by governments. That is Paul's whole point in Romans 13:4. The government has been given the power of the sword and is a "minister" of God to the end of justice in this age. In other words, for governments not to carry out that role would be an abandonment of their calling. The US military forces that killed Bin Laden were doing their God-ordained duty, even if they did not see it in just those terms. Just yesterday I had a conversation with a 94-year old man who spent three years fighting the Nazis in France and Belgium. As he put it to me, "We were doing the Lord's work." Indeed they were, and I told him so! The men who lifted their weapons yesterday and drew down on this terrorist were doing the Lord's will every bit as much as pastors, standing in the pulpit, bringing the Word to his people yesterday, were doing the Lord's will.
I am not glorifying death. I am not in any way a hater of Muslims, though I reject Islam as a false gospel. I am not a hawk, calling for more war and death and destruction. I love peace, and I would wish that no other person, American or otherwise, would have to die for his country in war. But what I am saying is that the American government had a God-ordained duty to bring this man to justice, dead or alive. It has done so, and our attitude ought to be one of gratitude, of solemn recognition that our sins will find us out, and of knowing that every person will one day stand before God to be judged according to the deeds done in the body. We may take a moment to rejoice, but we also need to look to ourselves to be sure that our hearts are right before God.
Justice cannot always be meted out in this age. Adolf Hitler had to face the Lord without temporal justice being passed on him. On May 1st, 1945, it was announced to the world that Hitler was dead; exactly sixty-six years later, May 1st, 2011, it was announced that Bin Laden was dead. Our government has done the right thing. I am grateful to the President, to the American military, to the Pakistani government, and to Bible teachers and readers who still believe that justice is important in this age, as well as in the age to come.
Chad Owen Brand
Friday, March 11, 2011
Trinitarian Monotheism, Economics, and the American Revolution
[The following is the first few paragraphs of a paper I delivered at the "Hobbs's Lecture" on March 9, at Oklahoma Baptist university. Read on down and see if you would like to have the rest.]
Trinitarian Monotheism, Economics, and the American Revolution
Chad Owen Brand
In his essay, “Good Infection,” C. S. Lewis talks about two basic things—that being Triune is intrinsic to who God is, thus enabling him to be love since the Father and the Son have existed in a relation of love for eternity—and that we can draw benefit from what it means for God to be Triune by being infected with the impact of God’s Triune nature by the work of the Spirit who applies the benefits of our salvation to us.
The early Christians had a great challenge, the challenge to re-envision the nature of the monotheistic God of Judaism now that they understood that the Son was divine and that the Spirit, poured out on them at Pentecost, was also divine, and to understand all of that in the context of the Old Testament faith that there is only one God. They worked on the language for decades, trying to get it right, since they rightly believed that if they did not get this right, they would probably be off everywhere. And the language that they were eventually satisfied with was the language of the Nicene Creed, along with the additions to that Creed made at the Council of Constantinople. But that alone was not enough.
They also knew that they had to conceptualize God’s relationship to the world in just the right way (a task partly solved by the language of the Creed), and that they had rightly to construe the nature of their ongoing conversations about all things theological (a task that certainly was part of what they were doing at the Council). They probably did not say all of that in just the way that I have said it, but this was part of their intent. One of the reasons for these two tasks was that those two questions had been faced and dealt with by the broad variety of religious traditions that stretched back into antiquity.
Let’s take the first question: what is God’s relationship to this world? There are three possible answers. The first is that God is remote from this world. Some religions argued that God made the world, but that having made it, he wanted nothing more to do with it. Others argued that he did not even make the world in the first place, and in that case he certainly wanted nothing to do with it. Another possibility is that God is completely immanent in the world, that he is virtually identified with the world, and that it is impossible to separate the identity of the world from the identity of God. If the first option could be analogous to God as some distant star right on the very edge of sight, the second would be analogous to the idea that God is like the dew that one finds on wet grass every morning. It is just there. But there is a third option, and that is that God is transcendent, that he is above us, but not far above us. He is above us, but he is reachable, not reachable by our stretching up to him, but by his reaching down to us. God may be variously pictured here as a lightning bolt that stabs out of the heavens, or as a gentle rain that refreshes our souls. This is of course the Christian view and it is enshrined in the Creed that states the maker of heaven and earth sent his son to die in our stead and then sent his Spirit to indwell us and to bring his spiritual presence into our very hearts. That makes Christianity unique among the religions of the world in the approachableness of God by his grace.
Then there was the second question, almost a background question. Just how do we talk about God? This was a serious matter at that first ecumenical council, for the Arians, those who were proposing to reject the deity of the Son, wanted only to quote verses from the Bible. But the other party, the party that won the debate, argued that we ought to be able to use human speech, rational speech, to talk about God, in ways that were consistent with Scripture but that extrapolated from Scripture and went beyond it. How could they defend such an argument? They argued that God had made us rational creatures in his own image, and based on that conviction, that our theology can and ought to be more that simply parroting Bible verses. In that moment, at that auspicious occasion, rational theology was born, and with the birth of rational theology, came, eventually, the rise of reason, the rise of innovation in commerce, the rise of science, and eventually, the iPhone. In other words, the notion of progress is an inherently Christian notion. All because of some cantankerous bishops debating the nature of God in western Turkey in 325 AD. Well, not just because of that.
It may seem odd to us, but the notion of reason and rational speech had never been applied to theological questions before. That is not to say that people had not talked about religion or theology. They had. But the idea that a discourse could lead to progress in understanding and that such progress could then be applied to other disciplines beyond theology so that they all contributed one to another had not. Not till Christianity, and not even to all Christianity, but only to western European Christianity, and that is because of western Christian ways of thinking biblically. The Chinese have had a longer cultural awareness than the west, but science did not originate there. Rodney Stark says that was because for them the universe simply is, and has always been that way. There is no reason to think that it functions according to some natural laws. Chinese intellectuals pursued enlightenment, not explanations. The Greeks did not invent science, though if anyone could, it would have been them. But their gods are inferior creatures and they saw nature as just endless cycles. Even Plato could not get there since his creator Demiurge was not even God, and Plato’s entire approach was to see this world as inferior to the real world of the heavenly forms. That just does not fire up the scientific imagination. But in western Christianity a series of episodes, some of them not even connected to one another directly led to a belief in progress, in science, and in human freedom. We will take the next few minutes to sketch some of the high (and low) points of just how that happened.
(If you would like to read the rest of the essay, email me at cbrand@sbts.edu and I will email you a copy.)
Trinitarian Monotheism, Economics, and the American Revolution
Chad Owen Brand
In his essay, “Good Infection,” C. S. Lewis talks about two basic things—that being Triune is intrinsic to who God is, thus enabling him to be love since the Father and the Son have existed in a relation of love for eternity—and that we can draw benefit from what it means for God to be Triune by being infected with the impact of God’s Triune nature by the work of the Spirit who applies the benefits of our salvation to us.
The early Christians had a great challenge, the challenge to re-envision the nature of the monotheistic God of Judaism now that they understood that the Son was divine and that the Spirit, poured out on them at Pentecost, was also divine, and to understand all of that in the context of the Old Testament faith that there is only one God. They worked on the language for decades, trying to get it right, since they rightly believed that if they did not get this right, they would probably be off everywhere. And the language that they were eventually satisfied with was the language of the Nicene Creed, along with the additions to that Creed made at the Council of Constantinople. But that alone was not enough.
They also knew that they had to conceptualize God’s relationship to the world in just the right way (a task partly solved by the language of the Creed), and that they had rightly to construe the nature of their ongoing conversations about all things theological (a task that certainly was part of what they were doing at the Council). They probably did not say all of that in just the way that I have said it, but this was part of their intent. One of the reasons for these two tasks was that those two questions had been faced and dealt with by the broad variety of religious traditions that stretched back into antiquity.
Let’s take the first question: what is God’s relationship to this world? There are three possible answers. The first is that God is remote from this world. Some religions argued that God made the world, but that having made it, he wanted nothing more to do with it. Others argued that he did not even make the world in the first place, and in that case he certainly wanted nothing to do with it. Another possibility is that God is completely immanent in the world, that he is virtually identified with the world, and that it is impossible to separate the identity of the world from the identity of God. If the first option could be analogous to God as some distant star right on the very edge of sight, the second would be analogous to the idea that God is like the dew that one finds on wet grass every morning. It is just there. But there is a third option, and that is that God is transcendent, that he is above us, but not far above us. He is above us, but he is reachable, not reachable by our stretching up to him, but by his reaching down to us. God may be variously pictured here as a lightning bolt that stabs out of the heavens, or as a gentle rain that refreshes our souls. This is of course the Christian view and it is enshrined in the Creed that states the maker of heaven and earth sent his son to die in our stead and then sent his Spirit to indwell us and to bring his spiritual presence into our very hearts. That makes Christianity unique among the religions of the world in the approachableness of God by his grace.
Then there was the second question, almost a background question. Just how do we talk about God? This was a serious matter at that first ecumenical council, for the Arians, those who were proposing to reject the deity of the Son, wanted only to quote verses from the Bible. But the other party, the party that won the debate, argued that we ought to be able to use human speech, rational speech, to talk about God, in ways that were consistent with Scripture but that extrapolated from Scripture and went beyond it. How could they defend such an argument? They argued that God had made us rational creatures in his own image, and based on that conviction, that our theology can and ought to be more that simply parroting Bible verses. In that moment, at that auspicious occasion, rational theology was born, and with the birth of rational theology, came, eventually, the rise of reason, the rise of innovation in commerce, the rise of science, and eventually, the iPhone. In other words, the notion of progress is an inherently Christian notion. All because of some cantankerous bishops debating the nature of God in western Turkey in 325 AD. Well, not just because of that.
It may seem odd to us, but the notion of reason and rational speech had never been applied to theological questions before. That is not to say that people had not talked about religion or theology. They had. But the idea that a discourse could lead to progress in understanding and that such progress could then be applied to other disciplines beyond theology so that they all contributed one to another had not. Not till Christianity, and not even to all Christianity, but only to western European Christianity, and that is because of western Christian ways of thinking biblically. The Chinese have had a longer cultural awareness than the west, but science did not originate there. Rodney Stark says that was because for them the universe simply is, and has always been that way. There is no reason to think that it functions according to some natural laws. Chinese intellectuals pursued enlightenment, not explanations. The Greeks did not invent science, though if anyone could, it would have been them. But their gods are inferior creatures and they saw nature as just endless cycles. Even Plato could not get there since his creator Demiurge was not even God, and Plato’s entire approach was to see this world as inferior to the real world of the heavenly forms. That just does not fire up the scientific imagination. But in western Christianity a series of episodes, some of them not even connected to one another directly led to a belief in progress, in science, and in human freedom. We will take the next few minutes to sketch some of the high (and low) points of just how that happened.
(If you would like to read the rest of the essay, email me at cbrand@sbts.edu and I will email you a copy.)
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Christian Political Theology
In an excellent book published in 2007, The Stillborn God, Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla lays out an excellent analysis of what he calls the demise of Christian political theology. He argues that political theology arose in Greece, was transferred to Rome when that power overwhelmed the Mediterranean world, and after Constantine, it arose in the newly Christianized Roman context, but now as a "Christian political theology." That political theology was developed first by thinkers such as Eusebius, Athanasius, and the Cappadocian Fathers, but in spades by Augustine, especially in his City of God. Thomas further explicated how this could work, using especially Aristotelian categories, and Calvin finished the exposition, using biblical models for understanding exactly how such a culture should be molded.
This Christian political theology was not specific about just exactly what kind of rule was best (monarchy, empire, aristocracy, or polity), so that there was a great fluidity in Christian politics. But at some level the king was seen as the body of society and the church as its soul, or in some situations the king was seen as having "two bodies,"one physical and the other spiritual, or society was pictured as having two swords. In this trinitarian, incarnational theology of a God who was transcendent, yet not remote, lay the notion that God was close enough that he could come to us or that we could come to him, and that part of the governing structure of the body politic was to maintain that connection or nexus, however conceived.
Lilla argues that the beginnings of the end of this synthesis came with the English civil war. That war, waged largely between two varying interpretations of Anglicanism, brought an immediate, though not final, end to Anglican episcopacy. Lilla argues, though, that it had a larger impact. That impact can be seen especially in the work of Thomas Hobbes, and to a lesser degree, in the writings of John Locke. Hobbes's Leviathan spelled the end of Christian political theology, at least in the sense that he demonstrated it was no longer necessary, and that eventually it would fade from view. In the centuries that followed, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Marx and others would add their voices to the mix, and the result is what we see in European societies today, and, in an increasing obvious manner, in America.
The analysis is brief, though trenchant. One does not have to agree with all of Lilla's assumptions or conclusions to recognize that this is an important book. What surprises me is that I have missed the book for over two years though I have been working in this area. I recommend this as an important read for those interested in history, politics, or theology. Or all three!
Chad Owen Brand
This Christian political theology was not specific about just exactly what kind of rule was best (monarchy, empire, aristocracy, or polity), so that there was a great fluidity in Christian politics. But at some level the king was seen as the body of society and the church as its soul, or in some situations the king was seen as having "two bodies,"one physical and the other spiritual, or society was pictured as having two swords. In this trinitarian, incarnational theology of a God who was transcendent, yet not remote, lay the notion that God was close enough that he could come to us or that we could come to him, and that part of the governing structure of the body politic was to maintain that connection or nexus, however conceived.
Lilla argues that the beginnings of the end of this synthesis came with the English civil war. That war, waged largely between two varying interpretations of Anglicanism, brought an immediate, though not final, end to Anglican episcopacy. Lilla argues, though, that it had a larger impact. That impact can be seen especially in the work of Thomas Hobbes, and to a lesser degree, in the writings of John Locke. Hobbes's Leviathan spelled the end of Christian political theology, at least in the sense that he demonstrated it was no longer necessary, and that eventually it would fade from view. In the centuries that followed, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Marx and others would add their voices to the mix, and the result is what we see in European societies today, and, in an increasing obvious manner, in America.
The analysis is brief, though trenchant. One does not have to agree with all of Lilla's assumptions or conclusions to recognize that this is an important book. What surprises me is that I have missed the book for over two years though I have been working in this area. I recommend this as an important read for those interested in history, politics, or theology. Or all three!
Chad Owen Brand
Friday, August 27, 2010
DONALD GEORGE BLOESCH, 1928-2010
Donald Bloesch went to be with the Lord Tuesday, August 24, 2010. My interest in him goes back several decades, but his work on theological method was the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation in 1998. Bloesch was trained at the University of Chicago Divinity School and was a theologian in the United Church of Christ. He should have been a Process theologian, or at least a liberal in the old fashioned way of a Harry Emerson Fosdick or a William Newton Clarke. He was not. Encounters with Karl Barth, various American evangelicals, different forms of pietism, and a Bible-believing wife caused Bloesch to move increasingly in evangelical directions over the years. He was hired to teach at University of Dubuque Theological Seminary precisely because the administration was tired of their older professor (Arthur Cochrane), who was neoorthodox; they believed, because of his training and his heritage, that Bloesch would be a liberal. It was the first two years after doctoral studies that changed him. Bloesch wrote over thirty-five books in his lifetime, including two systematic theology sets, the first a two-volume systematic published in 1979, and the other a seven-volume opus published between 1992 and 2004. The latter set stands out as a remarkable addition to the field. Irenic, though feisty, Bloesch is often a joy to read, though at times he can frustrate evangelicals. He tends (though not always) to break most issues down into three possibilities: the liberal/mystical/irrational/novel possibility; the fundamentalist/simplistic/rationalist/traditional possibility; and then the third, which is his view and the correct view. His historical analyses were often brilliant, his exegesis was often sparse, and his knowledge of the literature was generally impressive. It is a rare theologian who really likes Irenaeus, Augustine, Anselm, Calvin, Luther, Wesley, Bavinck, Herrmann, Barth, Ellul, and Rahner all at the same time. If you want to position him at all, it is somewhere between Kierkegaard and Kuyper, somewhere between Henry and Herrmann. Bloesch made no large bold moves, hence there are no Bloeschites (or only a small group of them), but he made many small bold moves. He opposed what he called Carl Henry's evangelical rationalism, but he anathematized feminism's tendency to rename God into a feminine deity--he thought Henry compromised, but he considered Sallie McFague's theology to be idolatry. Thank God for Donald Bloesch. He will be missed, but his legacy is still here for us to learn from.
Chad Brand
Professor of Christian Theology
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Chad Brand
Professor of Christian Theology
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Monday, June 7, 2010
ADAM SMITH AND THE FIRST MAJOR INSTALLMENT OF "THE DISMAL SCIENCE"
Adam Smith and the First Major Installment of
“The Dismal Science”
Before the late eighteenth century, various thinkers gave serious consideration to the interface between theology, politics, and economic issues. But it is clear that none of these thinkers, not even Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin, had really developed a full-blown theory of how economies worked. In 1776, however, that empty spot would be filled. In that year, a Scottish “moral philosopher” named Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a volume destined to rock the intellectual world almost as powerfully as the revolution of that same year rocked the international world of politics.
Sometimes it seems as though a mystical sort of synchronicity brings apparently disparate forces together at the same moment. The late eighteenth century witnessed revolutions of various sorts—the two most prominent being the French and American revolutions, one of which created a new republic, and the other of which eventually created a new despotism. But political revolutions were not the only type of that genre. The Industrial Revolution was whipping into fever pitch at about the same time as the American Revolution, with new technologies such as the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and just a few years later, the cotton gin. This revolution in technology was preceded, about a century earlier, by a Scientific Revolution known to us as the Enlightenment. That movement, insofar as it can be called a “movement,” itself built on the foundation of the Reformation, which was ushered in at least partly as a result of the Renaissance, an intellectual and artistic explosion which was also preceded by the Scholastic tradition of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What seems clear from this is that there is no mystical synchronicity, but, rather, movements and individuals building their innovations, in part, on foundations laid by others.
It is not mere happenstance that the Industrial Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and Adam Smith’s famous volume all came at about the same time. (It is a bit odd that the Declaration and Wealth of Nations happened the same year, though!) These are connected to one another, even as they built on the foundations laid by Renaissance and Scholastic Scholars, and on the religious ideologies of the Protestant Reformers and the Evangelical Revivalists. The individualism implied in Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, the notion of personal responsibility found in Calvin’s views on work, the concept of political freedom in a state with a division of powers articulated by both Locke and Montesquieu all came together in Smith’s volume and drove him to articulate a view of economics which is implicit in many of those earlier thinkers, but which never did quite come together until his work. As Skousen puts it, “Prior to this famous date, six thousand years of recorded history had passed without a seminal work being published on the subject that dominated every waking hour of practically every human being: making a living.” That history changed in a single day.
Smith’s basic ideology can be easily summed up, though his tome was nearly a thousand pages long. He believed in free trade, the division of labor, and the development of industrial technology. Throughout the book Smith advocated the principle of “natural liberty,” which meant, for him, that people ought to have the freedom to do what they want with little interference from the state, so long as they are law-abiding citizens. This is especially the case with reference to economic decisions. Smith believed that economic freedom was a basic human liberty, a view that he held in common with John Locke, who affirmed that we have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. In Wealth of Nations, he argued, “To prohibit a great people . . . from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.” The Scottish philosopher made it his point to stand up for those rights.
What was this “natural freedom”? For our Adam Smith, it included the right to buy goods from any source without having to pay crippling tariffs if the goods happened to be imported. It includes the right to seek any kind of employment one might desire. This was heavily restricted in most European countries in Smith’s day by both government regulations that required workers to obtain government permission to change jobs and by the stranglehold that trade guilds had on most skilled labor, trade guilds that held their authority by government sanction. Natural liberty for Smith also entailed the right to pay any wage that the market might bear and to charge any price for goods that the market might sustain, without the government setting standards for such things, arbitrary or otherwise. It also included the freedom to generate, accumulate, retain, and pass on capital and wealth to the next generation (or to anyone else) without government intrusion in the process. Adam Smith encouraged “the virtues of thrift, capital investment, and labor-saving machinery as essential ingredients to promote rising living standards.”
The most obvious implication of “natural liberty” was free trade. But Smith wrote during a time when trade was anything but free. Since the prevailing belief of mercantilism was that wealth was defined in terms of the accumulation of silver and gold, any threat to that supply was tantamount to a military threat. Because of that, most European countries had elaborate protectionist policies in matters of trade. High import tariffs were used to make it economically difficult for foreign countries to sell their goods in other countries—the cost passed on to consumers made it difficult for any but the richest of persons to buy those commodities. In the mercantilist understanding, trade was war.
Presumably that policy protected domestic production and manufacturing. Of course, what happened was that other countries enacted similar protective tariffs, thus preventing exports, which in turn damaged the economy of the producing nation that wanted to sell its goods in other countries. Smith argued that this circular policy of protection and threat helped no one in the long run, except the governments that collected the tariffs. When international trade itself is viewed as a kind of warfare, no one is helped and everyone is hurt. So, Smith argued for massive reductions of tariffs as a means to causing the wealth of all nations to increase. In his understanding the wealth of nations was not gold and silver, but productivity.
The second implication of “natural liberty” was the division of labor. Many trades had been regulated by government, by trade guilds, and by lack of technological advance so that there were many barriers to a worker being able to be hired and to have mobility in the work place. But in the area of technological development and innovation that came with industrialization some of that was already beginning to change in Smith’s day. His most famous example of the division of labor is his discussion if the “pin factory.” In previous generations a single individual would apprentice and then eventually master the skill of making pins to be used by seamstresses. There were many steps in making pins—cutting the wire, straightening the wire, sharpening the point, making the head, packaging the pins, and so forth. Pin-makers carefully protected their trade so that they could keep the price of pins high and so that they could earn a good profit, and forces within government and the guilds helped keep them protected.
Smith proposed, however, that an assembly-line process made more sense. Rather than have one man working, and making, perhaps, twenty pins in a day, Smith conjectured that ten workers, each of whom was adept at only one part of the process—cutting wire, sharpening points, etc.—that such persons, because they were not having to stop over and over again in the day to change work stations (Smith called it, quaintly, "sauntering"), could be far more productive. He estimated that the twenty pins made by one man per day might actually exceed 48,000 pins made by ten people operating under the principle of the “division of labor.” This would create more productivity, would employ more people in the making of pins, and would cause the cost of pins to decrease substantially, which, in turn, would lower household expenses, freeing up capital to be used to purchase other commodities, which, in turn, would create more jobs. Someone is hurt in the division of labor of course—the Master pin-maker, who now has to find other employment—but vast numbers of other people are helped in the process.
The third entailment of “natural liberty” would be to encourage industrial technological development. If the government and the guilds no longer control manufacturing and commerce, entrepreneurs and inventors would have a financial incentive to devote creative energy and time to technological development. When we think of the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, we think of a time of great technological advances. The steam engine (used on both land and water), the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, agriculture advances such as the McCormick reaper and the John Deere steel plow and new forms of milling grain and many other examples could be adduced to demonstrate how the Scientific Revolution had impacted and produced the Industrial Revolution.
It is not merely coincidence that many of these new inventions were created in Britain where governmental changes were giving greater freedom to individuals and in the new United States of America where the government laid a lighter hand on business and inventive creativity. Smith believed that a greater degree of liberty granted by governments would inevitably result in newer inventions that would make labor easier, faster, and more profitable. He was convinced that there was nothing wrong and everything right with all of this.
“Natural liberty” then was the key to economic development and the rising wealth of nations. There were, in addition, two other elements that we will discuss more briefly. The first is competition. Individuals have the right to compete with one another in the production and exchange of goods and services. Competition, in Smith’s view, is a sign of a healthy economy. There are several threats to competition, most of which are represented by the two regular sources of difficulty Smith had already identified: government and protectionist trade guilds or unions.
Governments can and do give preferential treatment either to certain sectors of the economy, or to certain competitors for the market within the economy, or to the guilds and unions. This is, in fact, the historic trend of governments all over the world. Some sector of the economy or some union or some wealthy entrepreneur provides needed political support to governmental leaders, and, in turn, they are rewarded with special government protection. This undermines competition, and, in the long run, eviscerates the freedoms of the people, and generally causes an increase in the cost for goods and service for all. To put it practically, it creates unemployment and rising inflation, along with other economic difficulties.
Alongside “natural liberty” and “competition,” Smith identifies one other important component to the development of wealth, and that is “justice.” “Justice,” for Smith, means that the economic actions of individuals must be just and honest. This is an important aspect of Smith’s philosophy that is sometimes ignored by his critics. Economic exchanges ought to be done in a just and honest manner. “Capitalism” (not Smith’s word, by the way), is not greed endorsed by political entitlement. This statement by Smith incorporates all three elements: “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men.” In other words, the process works as people pursue their own interests, but pursue them in a just manner.
When these three components come together in a nation’s economy, argued Smith, there will develop a “natural harmony” of interests between workers, landlords, entrepreneurs, and investors. In the pin factory workers and managers have to work together to accomplish their tasks. The division of labor was, for Smith, the key to a productive economy.
Consider the manufacture of a wool coat. There are dozens of steps in the process of growing the wool, shearing the sheep, making the cloth, producing the dye, bringing other cloths such as cotton into the process, the manufacture of buttons, of a fur collar, and many other steps besides. Large numbers of workers, most of whom never meet one another, are involved in making a single woolen coat. Each of their labor contributes to the other, though they never meet. Nor will they likely meet the eventual purchaser of the finished product—the retail consumer. At every step along the way people are simply pursuing their own self-interests—working to earn a paycheck, operating a business for profit, participating in a craft for various reasons, and shopping—and the net result is that everyone gets something out of it, something that they want.
Why does each one do that? Because each one is seeking his or her own self-interest of putting food on the table, of paying for college education, and so on. “By pursuing his own self-interest, every individual is led by an invisible hand to promote the public interest.” The larger part of this particular paragraph is worth quoting: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love. . . . Every individual . . . who employs capital . . . and labours . . . neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it . . . he is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society." Through the concept of the “invisible hand,” Smith contends that if an economy is just left to operate, it will do so in such a way that peoples’ needs are met through the hydraulic process of working and living, buying and selling, running businesses and employing personnel.
Though this part of Smith’s argument has sometimes been vilified by critics as “Smith’s grabbing hand,” this is to misunderstand his whole point. He is simply saying that an economic system in this age in which we live is not intended to and never could work simply on an altruistic basis and no other. Rather, each man or woman, knowing his or her own needs and the needs of the family, will work to supply those needs. But each one working to supply the needs of family will contribute to the whole enterprise. Would there be abuses to the system that might arise? Certainly, and it would not be long before critics would identify Das Adam Smith Problem. That will be dealt with later in this discussion (actually not in this blog--you have to buy the book!).
Smith’s views on free trade spilled over into his understanding of religious freedom. He lived, of course, in a country, Scotland, that had a state church, though by his day there was a great deal of religious liberty in his country. Smith believed that “a great multitude of religious sects” would promote toleration and would be a healthy thing for a nation. In other words, what he thought was good for the economy—freedom from government intrusion—he also believed was good for church and religion.
Smith’s book was not met with universal acclaim, though at the time it was hard to find any substantial critics. Certainly in the next century the book would have plenty of detractors. But the book has received high praise, even from those who, at the end of the day, do not accept his system of economics. English historian Henry Thomas Buckle opined that in terms of its eventual impact, the book “is probably the most important book that has ever been written.” Readers on both sides of the Atlantic found this tome to be extremely helpful in understanding just what economics is, and just why nations had struggled for centuries to generate and sustain wealth over time. The book just “made sense” to many in its day, not the least of which intellectuals and industrialists in the new world of America.
One other issue has to be dealt with in understanding Adam Smith’s contribution to economics. As we noted earlier, Smith argues that the primary motive for economic activity is “self-interest.” Everyone, pursuing the need to take care of the needs of themselves and their family, will engage in work, commerce, and buying and selling. But that is not the only motivation for Smith. The other is “sympathy.” He argued that everyone has a basic desire to be accepted by others. In pre-industrial times this manifested itself in village life where everyone knew everyone else and where it was important to build good relations so that one’s business and personal life could prosper. Even in the industrialized city, though, this would still be necessary, since, over the long run, a good reputation would be important for success. But these two motivations might appear to be at odds with one another. German philosophers believed they were, and designated this motivation crisis, “Das Adam Smith Problem.” It was not a problem for Smith himself, however, since it was his belief that economic activity and moral behavior were not contradictory to each other.
In the early twenty-first century we live in a time when capitalism has been written off by many. Some even claim that it is the cause of the economic woes that have afflicted us recently. They say, "we have tried that, and look where it has gotten us." I want to respond by saying, "We have never tried it." Even in our country since at least the 1860s government intrusion of and manipulation of the economy (usually at the request of business!) have left us with a model not really tried in a national economy. I think we need a Das Adam Smith Revival!
(Excerpted from the forthcoming book, Seeking the City by Chad Brand and Tom Pratt.)
Chad Owen Brand
“The Dismal Science”
Before the late eighteenth century, various thinkers gave serious consideration to the interface between theology, politics, and economic issues. But it is clear that none of these thinkers, not even Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin, had really developed a full-blown theory of how economies worked. In 1776, however, that empty spot would be filled. In that year, a Scottish “moral philosopher” named Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a volume destined to rock the intellectual world almost as powerfully as the revolution of that same year rocked the international world of politics.
Sometimes it seems as though a mystical sort of synchronicity brings apparently disparate forces together at the same moment. The late eighteenth century witnessed revolutions of various sorts—the two most prominent being the French and American revolutions, one of which created a new republic, and the other of which eventually created a new despotism. But political revolutions were not the only type of that genre. The Industrial Revolution was whipping into fever pitch at about the same time as the American Revolution, with new technologies such as the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and just a few years later, the cotton gin. This revolution in technology was preceded, about a century earlier, by a Scientific Revolution known to us as the Enlightenment. That movement, insofar as it can be called a “movement,” itself built on the foundation of the Reformation, which was ushered in at least partly as a result of the Renaissance, an intellectual and artistic explosion which was also preceded by the Scholastic tradition of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What seems clear from this is that there is no mystical synchronicity, but, rather, movements and individuals building their innovations, in part, on foundations laid by others.
It is not mere happenstance that the Industrial Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and Adam Smith’s famous volume all came at about the same time. (It is a bit odd that the Declaration and Wealth of Nations happened the same year, though!) These are connected to one another, even as they built on the foundations laid by Renaissance and Scholastic Scholars, and on the religious ideologies of the Protestant Reformers and the Evangelical Revivalists. The individualism implied in Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, the notion of personal responsibility found in Calvin’s views on work, the concept of political freedom in a state with a division of powers articulated by both Locke and Montesquieu all came together in Smith’s volume and drove him to articulate a view of economics which is implicit in many of those earlier thinkers, but which never did quite come together until his work. As Skousen puts it, “Prior to this famous date, six thousand years of recorded history had passed without a seminal work being published on the subject that dominated every waking hour of practically every human being: making a living.” That history changed in a single day.
Smith’s basic ideology can be easily summed up, though his tome was nearly a thousand pages long. He believed in free trade, the division of labor, and the development of industrial technology. Throughout the book Smith advocated the principle of “natural liberty,” which meant, for him, that people ought to have the freedom to do what they want with little interference from the state, so long as they are law-abiding citizens. This is especially the case with reference to economic decisions. Smith believed that economic freedom was a basic human liberty, a view that he held in common with John Locke, who affirmed that we have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. In Wealth of Nations, he argued, “To prohibit a great people . . . from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.” The Scottish philosopher made it his point to stand up for those rights.
What was this “natural freedom”? For our Adam Smith, it included the right to buy goods from any source without having to pay crippling tariffs if the goods happened to be imported. It includes the right to seek any kind of employment one might desire. This was heavily restricted in most European countries in Smith’s day by both government regulations that required workers to obtain government permission to change jobs and by the stranglehold that trade guilds had on most skilled labor, trade guilds that held their authority by government sanction. Natural liberty for Smith also entailed the right to pay any wage that the market might bear and to charge any price for goods that the market might sustain, without the government setting standards for such things, arbitrary or otherwise. It also included the freedom to generate, accumulate, retain, and pass on capital and wealth to the next generation (or to anyone else) without government intrusion in the process. Adam Smith encouraged “the virtues of thrift, capital investment, and labor-saving machinery as essential ingredients to promote rising living standards.”
The most obvious implication of “natural liberty” was free trade. But Smith wrote during a time when trade was anything but free. Since the prevailing belief of mercantilism was that wealth was defined in terms of the accumulation of silver and gold, any threat to that supply was tantamount to a military threat. Because of that, most European countries had elaborate protectionist policies in matters of trade. High import tariffs were used to make it economically difficult for foreign countries to sell their goods in other countries—the cost passed on to consumers made it difficult for any but the richest of persons to buy those commodities. In the mercantilist understanding, trade was war.
Presumably that policy protected domestic production and manufacturing. Of course, what happened was that other countries enacted similar protective tariffs, thus preventing exports, which in turn damaged the economy of the producing nation that wanted to sell its goods in other countries. Smith argued that this circular policy of protection and threat helped no one in the long run, except the governments that collected the tariffs. When international trade itself is viewed as a kind of warfare, no one is helped and everyone is hurt. So, Smith argued for massive reductions of tariffs as a means to causing the wealth of all nations to increase. In his understanding the wealth of nations was not gold and silver, but productivity.
The second implication of “natural liberty” was the division of labor. Many trades had been regulated by government, by trade guilds, and by lack of technological advance so that there were many barriers to a worker being able to be hired and to have mobility in the work place. But in the area of technological development and innovation that came with industrialization some of that was already beginning to change in Smith’s day. His most famous example of the division of labor is his discussion if the “pin factory.” In previous generations a single individual would apprentice and then eventually master the skill of making pins to be used by seamstresses. There were many steps in making pins—cutting the wire, straightening the wire, sharpening the point, making the head, packaging the pins, and so forth. Pin-makers carefully protected their trade so that they could keep the price of pins high and so that they could earn a good profit, and forces within government and the guilds helped keep them protected.
Smith proposed, however, that an assembly-line process made more sense. Rather than have one man working, and making, perhaps, twenty pins in a day, Smith conjectured that ten workers, each of whom was adept at only one part of the process—cutting wire, sharpening points, etc.—that such persons, because they were not having to stop over and over again in the day to change work stations (Smith called it, quaintly, "sauntering"), could be far more productive. He estimated that the twenty pins made by one man per day might actually exceed 48,000 pins made by ten people operating under the principle of the “division of labor.” This would create more productivity, would employ more people in the making of pins, and would cause the cost of pins to decrease substantially, which, in turn, would lower household expenses, freeing up capital to be used to purchase other commodities, which, in turn, would create more jobs. Someone is hurt in the division of labor of course—the Master pin-maker, who now has to find other employment—but vast numbers of other people are helped in the process.
The third entailment of “natural liberty” would be to encourage industrial technological development. If the government and the guilds no longer control manufacturing and commerce, entrepreneurs and inventors would have a financial incentive to devote creative energy and time to technological development. When we think of the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, we think of a time of great technological advances. The steam engine (used on both land and water), the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, agriculture advances such as the McCormick reaper and the John Deere steel plow and new forms of milling grain and many other examples could be adduced to demonstrate how the Scientific Revolution had impacted and produced the Industrial Revolution.
It is not merely coincidence that many of these new inventions were created in Britain where governmental changes were giving greater freedom to individuals and in the new United States of America where the government laid a lighter hand on business and inventive creativity. Smith believed that a greater degree of liberty granted by governments would inevitably result in newer inventions that would make labor easier, faster, and more profitable. He was convinced that there was nothing wrong and everything right with all of this.
“Natural liberty” then was the key to economic development and the rising wealth of nations. There were, in addition, two other elements that we will discuss more briefly. The first is competition. Individuals have the right to compete with one another in the production and exchange of goods and services. Competition, in Smith’s view, is a sign of a healthy economy. There are several threats to competition, most of which are represented by the two regular sources of difficulty Smith had already identified: government and protectionist trade guilds or unions.
Governments can and do give preferential treatment either to certain sectors of the economy, or to certain competitors for the market within the economy, or to the guilds and unions. This is, in fact, the historic trend of governments all over the world. Some sector of the economy or some union or some wealthy entrepreneur provides needed political support to governmental leaders, and, in turn, they are rewarded with special government protection. This undermines competition, and, in the long run, eviscerates the freedoms of the people, and generally causes an increase in the cost for goods and service for all. To put it practically, it creates unemployment and rising inflation, along with other economic difficulties.
Alongside “natural liberty” and “competition,” Smith identifies one other important component to the development of wealth, and that is “justice.” “Justice,” for Smith, means that the economic actions of individuals must be just and honest. This is an important aspect of Smith’s philosophy that is sometimes ignored by his critics. Economic exchanges ought to be done in a just and honest manner. “Capitalism” (not Smith’s word, by the way), is not greed endorsed by political entitlement. This statement by Smith incorporates all three elements: “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men.” In other words, the process works as people pursue their own interests, but pursue them in a just manner.
When these three components come together in a nation’s economy, argued Smith, there will develop a “natural harmony” of interests between workers, landlords, entrepreneurs, and investors. In the pin factory workers and managers have to work together to accomplish their tasks. The division of labor was, for Smith, the key to a productive economy.
Consider the manufacture of a wool coat. There are dozens of steps in the process of growing the wool, shearing the sheep, making the cloth, producing the dye, bringing other cloths such as cotton into the process, the manufacture of buttons, of a fur collar, and many other steps besides. Large numbers of workers, most of whom never meet one another, are involved in making a single woolen coat. Each of their labor contributes to the other, though they never meet. Nor will they likely meet the eventual purchaser of the finished product—the retail consumer. At every step along the way people are simply pursuing their own self-interests—working to earn a paycheck, operating a business for profit, participating in a craft for various reasons, and shopping—and the net result is that everyone gets something out of it, something that they want.
Why does each one do that? Because each one is seeking his or her own self-interest of putting food on the table, of paying for college education, and so on. “By pursuing his own self-interest, every individual is led by an invisible hand to promote the public interest.” The larger part of this particular paragraph is worth quoting: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love. . . . Every individual . . . who employs capital . . . and labours . . . neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it . . . he is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society." Through the concept of the “invisible hand,” Smith contends that if an economy is just left to operate, it will do so in such a way that peoples’ needs are met through the hydraulic process of working and living, buying and selling, running businesses and employing personnel.
Though this part of Smith’s argument has sometimes been vilified by critics as “Smith’s grabbing hand,” this is to misunderstand his whole point. He is simply saying that an economic system in this age in which we live is not intended to and never could work simply on an altruistic basis and no other. Rather, each man or woman, knowing his or her own needs and the needs of the family, will work to supply those needs. But each one working to supply the needs of family will contribute to the whole enterprise. Would there be abuses to the system that might arise? Certainly, and it would not be long before critics would identify Das Adam Smith Problem. That will be dealt with later in this discussion (actually not in this blog--you have to buy the book!).
Smith’s views on free trade spilled over into his understanding of religious freedom. He lived, of course, in a country, Scotland, that had a state church, though by his day there was a great deal of religious liberty in his country. Smith believed that “a great multitude of religious sects” would promote toleration and would be a healthy thing for a nation. In other words, what he thought was good for the economy—freedom from government intrusion—he also believed was good for church and religion.
Smith’s book was not met with universal acclaim, though at the time it was hard to find any substantial critics. Certainly in the next century the book would have plenty of detractors. But the book has received high praise, even from those who, at the end of the day, do not accept his system of economics. English historian Henry Thomas Buckle opined that in terms of its eventual impact, the book “is probably the most important book that has ever been written.” Readers on both sides of the Atlantic found this tome to be extremely helpful in understanding just what economics is, and just why nations had struggled for centuries to generate and sustain wealth over time. The book just “made sense” to many in its day, not the least of which intellectuals and industrialists in the new world of America.
One other issue has to be dealt with in understanding Adam Smith’s contribution to economics. As we noted earlier, Smith argues that the primary motive for economic activity is “self-interest.” Everyone, pursuing the need to take care of the needs of themselves and their family, will engage in work, commerce, and buying and selling. But that is not the only motivation for Smith. The other is “sympathy.” He argued that everyone has a basic desire to be accepted by others. In pre-industrial times this manifested itself in village life where everyone knew everyone else and where it was important to build good relations so that one’s business and personal life could prosper. Even in the industrialized city, though, this would still be necessary, since, over the long run, a good reputation would be important for success. But these two motivations might appear to be at odds with one another. German philosophers believed they were, and designated this motivation crisis, “Das Adam Smith Problem.” It was not a problem for Smith himself, however, since it was his belief that economic activity and moral behavior were not contradictory to each other.
In the early twenty-first century we live in a time when capitalism has been written off by many. Some even claim that it is the cause of the economic woes that have afflicted us recently. They say, "we have tried that, and look where it has gotten us." I want to respond by saying, "We have never tried it." Even in our country since at least the 1860s government intrusion of and manipulation of the economy (usually at the request of business!) have left us with a model not really tried in a national economy. I think we need a Das Adam Smith Revival!
(Excerpted from the forthcoming book, Seeking the City by Chad Brand and Tom Pratt.)
Chad Owen Brand
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