Clearing One's Head Of The Capitalist and Socialist Models

Churches are made up of people from a surrounding society,
who bring with them models of how the Church should be run - often with disastrous results.

Churches are made up of people who own or work in businesses in a surrounding society,
who usually know better than to take Church processes back into their businesses.

Now suppose that businesses adopted a healthier mode of operation.

Then the people from there could bring with them such models of how the Church should be run -
with much healthier results.

Then, when implemented, the church members could take these new Church processes back into their Businesses,
to the benefit of all the community.

One of the problems for all of us today is that we have been raised in a world where two dominant economic models - Capitalism and Socialism have so dominated the landscape that it is almost impossible to get out from under their influence long enough to see our world situation freshly.

With the end of the Cold War, the "triumph" of Capitalism, has complicated the problem further. Having a single dominant model in current use, makes it even harder to get out from under its influence in order to see freshly. At least when there were two dominant models, people had the benefit of each group holding up the weaknesses of the other. Now we lack such a mutual critique.

One author, Francis Fukuyama, even went so far as to declare Democratic Capitalism as being the last great unifying idea the world will ever see. He saw great ideas as being the catalysts of all former major societies, and in his controversial work The End of History and the Last Man, he contends that this idea is the last. How could life possibly be better than this? Well, as a friend of mine likes to say, "It may not be true, but it preaches well"!

Some interesting work has been written showing that the system of Democratic Capitalism is, for all its bragging about there being "economic laws" and so forth, really just a parable or model.

When Churches consider the economic problems of today, they tend to come out with either "theologically sugar-coated Capitalism" or "theologically sugar-coated Socialism, depending on the denomination doing the talking. The "socialist" leaning ones tend to have a tone of condemning capitalism as being "prosperity with no righteousness". The "capitalist" leaning ones tend to view Socialism as having "righteousness without prosperity". And both regard the other's success area with a great deal of suspicion.

All this raises questions about whether prosperity with righteousness is possible, and what God had in mind when he invented the world in the first place. Did God have in mind an economic road we were to walk along which, was to include both righteousness and prosperity? Is Life in its basic design so flawed, that people must choose between living prosperously and living righteously?

Is the reality of our situation closer to none of us on a road but all of us stuck in ditches along each side of the road, yipping about the group stuck in the opposite ditch? Would having a completely different model from the two current ones, free us sufficiently from our mindsets, to listen again to the words of Scripture which predate both models? Are we so blinded by our customary models that we can no longer see what's in our world, or in Scripture itself, because we are so sure about what we "know" is there?

This project section is being used to explore and develop a healthier view of economics than is possible using either of the two models in common use today : Capitalism and Socialism. It will seek to explore and develop a healthier view of economics by using the Biblical model of a "tree planted by the water" from Psalm 1.

This site asks the question, "What is involved in living the economic aspect of our life, if we were to assume that God intended life to be lived in both prosperity and righteousness? What does Scripture say to us about what God had in mind in this area of life? What if the realities that both Socialism and Capitalism address and examine in their extensive literatures, are quite correct in their noting the phenomena of their worlds, but are quite off-base in the matter of attitude or outlook? What would happen if the same phenomena were examined from a Biblical perspective, without being locked in by the limiting views of either current system?

The Biblical narrative starts with a fascinating story of the creation of man and how man was confronted with both a luscious garden to live in and a choice of two "attitude trees" which would define his attitude towards life in the garden. He could take one attitude or the other, but not both. One attitude was to draw upon God for guidance as to what was the best way to approach life (dubbed as "eating of the tree of life"). The other attitude was "please mommy, I'd rather do it my self" (dubbed as "eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil"). According to the story, we quickly chose to grab the "do-it-ourselves" apples and run, saying "please, I'd rather figure it out for myself".

The Biblical narrative goes on to tell of God's extensive efforts to get us back into relationship with Him, with very little co-operation on our part. This is an effort still in process.

This study assumes that, upon choosing to develop life our independent way, we made one central decision: we walled off a sub-sector of the "garden" and declared the one non-negotiable rule for life "inside that fence". The central rule was "you can define anything as being at the center of life, or the central unifying factor of life, except God. If you want to define life as having God at the center of it, you are not welcome within the fence, and had best leave.

The implications of this assumption, for purposes of this study, are:

So, in short, this site is a quest for "Garden Variety Economics". What was it that God had in mind in regards to the economic aspect of life, way back in the Garden, before we got ourselves all mixed up in it? It is an exploration which uses the metaphor of the tree from Psalm 1 as a mentally-liberating tool, to enable us to look with fresh eyes at both Scripture and the economic world around us. A cryptic version of the metaphor might be stated:

"A Church should be run like a business: and a business should be run like a tree."

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