Cedarville Magazine, Spring 2013

18 | Cedarville Magazine Music, sports, science, theatre, and so much more await you at one of Cedarville’s summer camps! Spend a week exploring your passion with incredible instructors and cool college students. The friends you make will share your interests and provide good competition, intellectual motivation, and lots of fun. LEARN MORE: CEDARVILLE.EDU/SUMMER are fulfilling God’s fundamental calling for human beings. In this way, wealth creation is profoundly Christian. That dominion and development have culminated in a great many marvels: an agricultural revolution, the transformation of fossil fuels into home-heating oil and plastics, and the life-changing applications for silicon in microprocessors. The world is fed, clothed, warmed, and supplied with myriad inexpensive conveniences because of these discoveries, and technology is not a respecter of persons. Rich and poor enjoy them. God established government chiefly to protect us in our persons and our property, that is, to protect us in our freedom to go about our divinely appointed human calling to develop and use the world in love for God and neighbor. Government, therefore, shields producers against those who would plunder . It secures our opportunity for production under the protection of law. It guards the fruit of production for rich and poor alike. And this is no small incentive for the poor to labor and rise! Notice that I have given you three P’s — production, plunder, and now protection. It also created safeguards against Israelite households falling into multigenerational poverty. After 49 years, even the most destitute would reclaim ancestral land. The Year of Jubilee functioned as an equalizing reset button, preventing the accumulation of gross wealth and the entrenchment of gross poverty. While theUnitedStates is not a theocracy, Israel’s Year of Jubilee offers a useful picture of the priorities within God’s economy: Unlimited business growth is not an expectation. Rather, God imposes regulations on the business sector that prevent its growth from reaching the point of empire. The well-being of workers and the land matters. God’s regulations limit exploitation and offer conditions conducive to flourishing by providing Sabbath and Sabbatical-year rest for workers and the land and by offering Jubilee debt forgiveness for all those enslaved to pay off debt. Private individual ownership of landdoes not exist. Rather, land is owned by God alone and exists for the common good of all the people and of the wild animals that live on the land (Lev. 25:1–7). Good people produce. Bad people plunder. Andgoodgovernmentprotects theproducers from the plunderers. But when government begins to redistribute wealth for the sake of “fairness,” it plunders instead of protecting the producers. Government redistribution of wealth is the many plundering the few by means of the government. It’s like a pillaging mob except more orderly. Jesus says to love your neighbor as you love yourself. There is a self -love that is fully compatible with neighbor love, and indeed that directs you in how better to love your neighbor. That is the kind of business — properly regulated and Christian- influenced business — that brings people together in the dignity of liberty, the comfort of prosperity, and the peace of moral flourishing, the kind of business that God intends for us. D.C. Innes is an Associate Professor of Politics at The King’s College in New York and is co- author of Left, Right & Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics . View a video of his full conference remarks at cedarville.edu/americandream . This is the dominion that Jesus announced as He read the Isaiah 61 prophecy in that Nazarene synagogue. The Year of Jubilee and the reign of God were at hand, and they stood in direct opposition to the kind of dominion practiced by King Herod and the Roman Empire. With his Luke 4 pronouncement, Jesus declares a divine revolt against the unjust systems and seditious priorities of the kingdoms of men. In Jesus’ proclamation, we see that the dominion of God prioritizes the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the oppressed, and the poor. And we see, above all else, that Jesus has come so that the image of God might flourish in people, not the image of earthly kings on coins. Lisa SharonHarper is the Director of Mobilizing for Sojourners, Founding Executive Director of New York Faith & Justice, and co-author of Left, Right & Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics . View a video of her full conference remarks at cedarville.edu/americandream . This article is an edited excerpt from Left, Right & Christ and is reprinted with the permission of the author and Russell Media. continued from Innes, page 16 continued from Harper, page 17