Page 18 - Cedarville Magazine Spring 2013 Volume 1 Issue 1

Cedarville Summer Camps
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:
ƒ ƒ 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.
ƒ ƒ 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.
ƒ ƒ 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