Today on Radical Personal Finance, I have a real treat for you. That is, if you are the type of person who enjoys challenging, involved conversations about difficult social topics, economic topics, and theological topics. If that's you, you'll like today's show. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua, and I am your host. I am your fellow financial freedom fighter. And today I am your interviewer as I welcome my interviewee, Dr. Gary North, to Radical Personal Finance. I have threatened many times on the show over the past weeks and months to start bringing back more interviews to the show.

Once upon a time, I would do two interviews per week, and my intention is to bring you many more interviews. I have missed them, but I felt they were counterproductive for me given some of the things that I've had going on behind the scenes at Radical Personal Finance. But I intend to bring them back, and today we continue that process of bringing you more interviews on the show.

And I'm excited to bring you this interview with Dr. Gary North. If you enjoy challenging discussions with complex topics, I think you'll really enjoy today's show. If you're looking for a simplistic discussion on just a couple of quick tips that you can do to make more money, skip this show.

This one will not be for you. I will introduce Gary North in just a moment as I bring him on the show, but he is a force to be reckoned with, especially if you have any interest in the areas of Christian economics. Now, of course, there are many Christians who have no interest in economics, and there are many economists who have no interest in Christianity.

So the audience for people who are interested in Christian economics is quite small, but I don't think it should be. I think it should be quite large. And if you have any interest in these particular types of discussions, I think you will enjoy this. Dr. Gary North is one of the more challenging teachers in this area.

He is a force to be reckoned with. For the last 50 plus years of his career, he has been a prolific contributor in this particular area. In fact, I know of almost no one else who has done what he has done, which is to verse by verse systematically exegete the entirety of the Christian Bible with a specific focus on understanding what it has to say about money and economics.

Trained as a historian, also a theologian, and also in the field of economics, I always find Dr. North's writing and his perspectives to be very, very challenging, and I've appreciated much of what he has written. I've intended to bring him on the show for a number of years, but it was only in 2017 when he finally published some of his capstone work.

After years and dozens and dozens, tens of thousands of pages of writing specific biblical commentaries, he has been working through the process of publishing his capstone works, which are, in essence, a synthesis, an encapsulation of all of his 50 years of research in the area of Christian economics. He began in 2017 with the publication of Christian Economics, Student's Edition, and then he followed that up with Christian Economics, Teacher's Edition.

I have read both of those books. This is the first two parts of a planned four-part series. He is working currently on Christian Economics, the Scholar's Edition, and that will be followed by the Christian Economics, Activist's Edition. So if you're interested in these particular areas, I think this will be an interview that will serve you extremely well.

You'll find this interview very, very interesting and challenging. You will notice if you look at the timestamp on your podcast player that this is a long show. It wasn't necessarily intended to be as long as it is, but this interview was quite challenging and quite interesting. In essence, it's essentially two different parts.

In the first part, I interviewed Dr. North and engaged with him on some of the topics that he has written on, but the interview became an ersatz debate, wherein he discovered some differences in my thinking. And as I engage with some of the things that he's written, we wound up having a somewhat complex and comprehensive theological debate.

So I warn you now that this is not particularly specifically related to Christian Economics, but it is a very important part of life. And I am leaving it altogether because prior to the publication of this interview, I promised Dr. North I would release it as one unedited debate. Dr.

North, of course, holds many controversial opinions, and so he's used to being taken out of context, misquoted, et cetera. And one of the commitments I made to him was simply that I would release this as an unedited podcast. So you will hear the entirety of our conversation, and I think it will challenge you.

So without further ado, Dr. Gary North, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Well, I'm glad to be here. I've looked forward to this conversation since we scheduled it because you have an extremely unique story which is of interest to me. And perhaps peculiarly so, I haven't told you prior to our recording this, I haven't told you anything about me, but in the introduction for one of your recent books, which will be the teacher's, it's the preface to the teacher's manual of your book on Christian Economics, which we'll be discussing in the context of today's interview, you write, "I have a target group in mind, Christians who read serious nonfiction books.

Second, these people think that the Bible has answers for life's problems. Third, they are searching for explicitly Christian answers to economic issues. Fourth, they are concerned about the state of the economy. And fifth, they are willing to take action if they discover these answers. They are activists." So, in the next line you write, "Is this you?" So, if you're curious about who you're talking to, Dr.

North, that is me to a T. So, in the context of that, we'll be doing this particular interview. That's fine. My audience, however, is a mixture. My audience is a mixture of Christians and non-Christians. I have many qualified professional financial advisors who listen to this show and many interested non-professionals.

So, we'll be speaking and starting at a more basic level and then going into some specific questions that I have as a longtime reader of your work. I want to begin, though, with the background story to Christian economics and your series of books that you're publishing. How did you come to arrive and develop this project?

Well, that began in the spring of 1960. And I was an undergraduate freshman student at the University of California, Riverside. I was taking an economics class and I had been reading materials in the Freeman Magazine, which was published by the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. I'd been reading that material for about two years.

And I also read a tabloid, which was published in those days, every two weeks, called Christian Economics. And that tabloid was sent to almost every Protestant pastor in the United States. It was funded by a very rich man named J. Howard Pugh, who was the head of Sun Oil.

And he had a lot of money. And so he published this tabloid that was sent to the pastors and I read it on a regular basis. And I found that most of the writers in Christian economics were also writing for the Freeman. Well, the Freeman was non-sectarian, certainly. And Christian economics was at least sectarian enough to be sent to something like 170,000 pastors.

So I got a little bit confused because the men who were writing for the Freeman and for Christian economics tended to be, if not atheists, then agnostics. And their worldview did not, in any sense of the word, seem to be based on Christianity or the Bible. And that confused me at the time.

So I decided that I would find out, if I could, what the relationship was between the Bible and the type of economic thought that was being published in the Freeman and in Christian economics. And that really began this project. It escalated over time, continued to escalate, and came to a head in 1976 when I began to devote 10 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, to a verse-by-verse exegesis of the Bible in those areas that had something to say about economic theory or practice.

And my cutoff date was my birthday in 2012 when I would turn 70. And I finished the project approximately three weeks before I turned 70. So that may be an example of Parkinson's law, that is, work expands so as to fill the time allotted for its completion. But it was rather remarkable that the project, in fact, did take all of the last three weeks of that initial scheduling, which I'd done in 1976.

I'm sorry, it was a little later. I think it was maybe 77, but it was a long period of time. >>SACHIT EGAN: And along the way, my understanding is you wrote, was it 31 volumes of commentary and perhaps six or seven supporting books that weren't specifically passage-by-passage commentary to arrive at the source material for your capstone projects?

>>WARREN BUFFINGTON: Yes, it was 31 volumes. I've finally sat down and figured out the number of pages, and it was 8,500 pages typeset approximately. And to that, you would probably add another, I don't know, 1,500 pages, maybe something like that, of support volumes that came out of the writing project of the commentaries.

>>SACHIT EGAN: This is, of course, in addition to the four articles that you write and publish to your blog every day. By the way, Dr. North, I've gone to various conferences with bloggers and writers, and there have been times when I've listened to writers struggling to come up with material.

I've told them, "By the way, you ought to go and check out a writer that I read who writes not one every day, not one a week, but four new independent articles each day, six days per week for his website." And not a single one of them has believed me.

>>WARREN BUFFINGTON: Well, yeah, I got into this habit, I guess, about 12 years ago. I'd always done a lot of writing, but I just got trapped in this thing, and so I just keep going on it. Now, compared to somebody who's a really thorough and productive writer, Jacob Neusner, I'm, of course, and we're all a bunch of pikers, because Neusner wrote a book every three weeks for 40 years.

Every three weeks, a new book came out, original book that he had produced. So the total for Neusner was approximately 1,000 volumes by the time he died. Now, that's productivity, but I do crank out a good number of articles, and I have an advantage in that I have a lot of forums on my website, so when people ask a question on the forum that I can't answer in maybe a paragraph or so, then I will very often write an article that goes into detail to answer the particular question from the day before.

And that's a very good source of inspiration for me to produce at least one or two articles a day, at least in those periods when people are asking a lot of questions. So I want to begin now to home in on the religious context of this work that you have done with some background questions before we get to the specific findings that you've developed from these decades of study.

First, for your knowledge, how I arrived at your work was, I think, perhaps how others do as well. But my parents were not particularly involved in politics, nor were they particularly involved in economics. But when I was younger, being raised in a Protestant Christian household, I kind of naturally gravitated, as many Christians do, towards republicanism as an ideology.

And I was always interested in money and finance, and so I pursued republicanism and economics in the fairly mainstream perspective. When I was 18 years old was when President George W. Bush chose to invade Iraq, and I was a drum-pounding supporter of that decision because of that background. But when I went to college, I studied under fairly mainstream professors, beginning with a degree in finance and accounting, and I had a pivotal moment when I was in my third year of college.

I studied abroad in Central America, and my professors were Roman Catholic professors who were pretty hardcore liberation theologians. And our text for some of the discussion was the Book of Luke. And in the context of the Book of Luke, these Roman Catholic, although not all, some were Protestant and some were Roman Catholic, but these professors took Jesus' statements and teachings in the Book of Luke and started to expand them under the ideology of liberation theology, very, very hardcore leftist socialist liberation theology.

This really bothered me because it confronted my own free market approach. But I was in Central America, and instead of cheering for ideology or cheering for events such as NAFTA, I'm here walking on farms in Central America seeing and being told about the damage that a free trade agreement such as NAFTA had wrought in that particular country.

It was also a time, and it was one of the first times in my life, when my college professors were actually able to beat me down and dismantle my arguments to the point where I was left without an answer. After that time, I came back to the United States, and it was in that time that I became serious in my relationship with God.

I became born again at about the age of 20, and I really started to go back to Scripture to try to understand if what I had been taught by these liberation theologians was true. After studying that for a while, at some point, I glommed on and became aware of your work, perhaps as a reference to Jim Wallace, but I started to look and compare.

I've often used you as the antithesis of my liberation theology professors, and I've often looked at you and them as almost opposite sides, but yet both using the same text. I want to begin with the use of the biblical text within that context. Why do you think that it's appropriate to use the Bible to study a science like economics?

For the same reason that I would say that you use the Bible for a study of political theory or ethics or basic philosophy, because you have to start somewhere. At some point, you have to say a certain set of presuppositions is true. No set of original presuppositions is ultimately self-supporting if there is not a higher power or greater source of knowledge available that informs the individual of the nature of cause and effect in history.

So you have modern Darwinism, which begins with purposelessness, and of course ultimately begins with the Big Bang, for which there is no explanation as to what there was before the Big Bang or exactly what it is that the Big Bang is. But out of purposelessness, which was basic to Darwinianism, came ultimately life.

Out of life came mankind, and only with mankind do you have purpose. That's not a strong position to use to construct a philosophy, which ultimately begins with meaninglessness and then goes back to the heat death of the universe when it's all over, which is ultimately meaningless. So I would say you have to start with something that is not inherently meaningless to begin to build any system of philosophy and especially any system of ethics.

Where I differ primarily with free market economists, with a few exceptions, is that they assume that all economic theory is devoid of ethics or is in some way ethically neutral. That is the tremendous advantage liberation theologians have over conventional economists. And that is they appeal to ethics as the heart of their economic theory.

And people want to hear about ethics. We teach our children that honesty is the best policy. You don't find a culture, or at least very few cultures, in which the children are taught that dishonesty is the best policy. And even in societies where that is taught, it's dishonesty against outsiders, but not dishonesty against those within the group.

Ethics plays no real role in most approaches to economic theory. There were a few exceptions. Wilhelm Röpke was an exception, and I like Röpke's work. But generally, ethics plays no part in economic theory in the classroom, officially. Now, they sneak ethics through the back door, but officially, you have a supposedly systematic system of thought that is devoid of ethics.

I was convinced very early that that could not be true because ethics infuses every area of social theory. So I think what I would tell you is you can start with Luke, which tends to be of the four gospels, the one that could most easily be interpreted from the point of view of poverty versus wealth.

But there's a systematic effort on the part of liberation theologians to ignore Mark and to ignore certainly the writings of Paul and to ignore Matthew. So what I did was start with Genesis 1-1 and then spent almost 40 years getting to the book of Revelation. I wanted to do the homework first, and that had not been done before, and so that's what I did.

>>SACHIT EGAN: The ethic that bothered me most—and by the way, Dr. North, could you give a concise summary of what liberation theology is? >>DR. NORTH: Well, liberation theology was a development primarily in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly within the Roman Catholic Church. And that position was all over the spectrum, starting with a basic leftism that was in favor of the welfare state and stretching all the way to Marxist revolution, in which the particular theologian believed, as Marx believed, that you had to have some form of revolutionary violence in order to purge society.

Most of them were somewhere in between those two positions. There were plenty of socialists. They believed in central planning. They believed in the idea that the government can help the poor and has a moral obligation to help the poor, and the way that you do that is by stealing from the rich.

The basic theology is thou shalt not steal except by majority vote. You could call it a radical form of social gospel economics, which began in the United States in the 1880s. This was a somewhat more radical form of the social gospel, but the basic outlook is the same. That is, they believe in the healing power of coercion by the state, and that that is the way that you establish a viable economic order that is also a just economic order.

Paul I will forever be indebted to those professors under whom I studied because they helped to disabuse me of the US-American imperialism that I had previously accepted without questioning just due to the virtue of being a part of mainstream Republican conservative circles in the United States. Ultimately, it was that question of coercion that I came down to and I realized it's not a matter of violence versus no violence.

It's a matter of who gets to control the levers of violence. Even while I was in Central America, I realized that this is a fundamental, to use your word, ethic that to me seemed insuperable. It seemed very clear that I could read the book of Luke and see Jesus' heart for the poor and his strong warnings against the rich, but to then take and say the next step that now we're going to take up arms by the poor in order to take from the rich to me didn't seem true to the actual text.

Speaking now of other religions, I've taken an interest to try to understand what other religious ideologies teach about economics. I've had a hard time finding representatives from other religions who have done similar work to you. Are you aware of anybody from non-Christian religions who has taken the central religious texts from their religious tradition and tried to bring it into a coherent model?

Not that I have found, no. You would expect that some Jew would have done it. Actually, I expected that Israel Kirzner would have done it because he's an Orthodox Jew, and actually he's a rabbi and very well versed in Orthodox Judaism, and was one of the four men who received a PhD in economics under Ludwig von Mises.

So I've often said, well, of all the men who've ever come down the pike, Kirzner is the one who is both a follower of Moses and Mises, but he kept the two positions sealed off from each other, using a pagan terminology, hermetically sealed off from each other, and never used his understanding of either the Torah or the Talmud to comment on economic theory as presented by Mises or anybody else.

He was the obvious man of my generation who might have done a similar project, but he chose not to do that. Most Jews who write in the field of economics are not Orthodox. If anything, if they're practicing at all, they may go occasionally to a Reform Judaism temple, if they do it at all, but most of them are atheistic, and Mises is a good example, but Milton Friedman would be another example.

And the texts of Judaism are simply ignored by these economists. However, that generally is also true of those who profess Christianity. I don't know anybody in the Mormon church that has done this. Mark Skousen is an excellent economist and is a Mormon, and will occasionally cite some aspect of Mormon practice as an example of how to handle property or how to handle charity, but he has not produced any kind of exegetical work that would apply the Book of Mormon or doctrine and covenants to the actual economic theories that he would preach in the classroom, and I don't know of anybody at Brigham Young University who has done that either.

When you look at the world of Christian commentary, and I think it's probably any world, I recently have tried to find analogs to you and to your work from other religions. I've looked for, over the last couple years I've been studying the Quran, trying to understand it a little bit more because it's an area of significant weakness, and as Islam rises more and more to importance in public conversation, I've been trying to do my homework.

I haven't been able to find an Islamic scholar who systematically works in the areas of Islamic finance yet, but in the world of Christian economic commentary, personal finance, economics, etc., it seems like you can find somebody professing an opinion on just about any extreme. So, for example, Jesus teaches that, it says in, was it Matthew 19, "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt and where thieves break in and steal, but instead lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not corrupt and where thieves do not break in and steal, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." I have read books on that from people who take that verse very seriously to the explicit point of obedience of not laying up any significant savings, stores of money, etc., at all.

On the other hand, there are entire, that's a very minority movement, but the people that I've encountered who write and who practice this type of approach are very sincere in their belief. On the other hand, there are wide swaths of Christianity all around the world which are major proponents of prosperity theology.

Come and give to God, and after all it says in the Bible, "Try me in this and give to God and God will give to you and God will pour out the riches of heaven on you and bless you with great wealth." So my almost presuppositional question to you is this, how do you figure out what's right, especially if you're not willing to dedicate 50 years to a verse-by-verse exegesis of all of the passages of Scripture?

Well, the safest bet, as I've told people, is get a verse that is bothering you, go online to my site at garynorth.com, click the section on Christian economics, go to the section on economic commentary on the Bible, and then choose the particular book of the Bible that has presented the problem to you and read what I've commented about it.

The great advantage of writing a commentary is that the commentary does serve as a good source of immediate information to people who get stuck on a particular verse. Now, nobody ever sits down and reads a commentary cover to cover, especially when it's 31 volumes long, and also it doesn't have any covers.

But what we do find is that when we get stuck with a passage that we can't explain, there are commentaries out there that may throw light on the passage, and that's where we ought to begin. Now, the issue of laying treasure up is a legitimate issue. If the treasure is productive capital that is improving the lives of individuals within the context of a free market economy, then the treasure which is laid up is a product of activities that have satisfied specific customers who come back and say again and again, "I'm going to deal with you again.

I'm going to buy from you again. I trust the way you're doing business. Your price is right. The quality is good. You have a money-back guarantee," and so forth. Well, that was how Jeff Bezos got rich being the richest man in the world. He offered the best possible prices and the best delivery system in the history of retailing.

He couldn't help but get rich. The profit system tells an entrepreneur what customers want, and when the customer begins throwing money at him, the customer is saying, "Do it again. Do it again. Harder, harder." The customer says, "I want to do business. I want better deals. I want better prices.

I'll keep coming back to you if you provide the services that I'm after." On the other hand, when you suffer losses, the customer is saying, "No, you don't offer a good enough deal. I'm not going to be purchasing from you again. I don't like the arrangement that you're offering me.

I've got better opportunities out there. I'm not going to be back." Well, that person gets poor. At least over time, he will get poor. That's the essence of the service motif. Jesus was clear that leadership within the church is to come from service. The service motif is basic to the Christian outlook.

Well, the service motif is basic to the free market economy, too. Do you serve the wants, needs of paying customers? You have to be a faithful servant if you're going to be successful in a competitive market setting. So in terms of ethics, it's the same with respect to the general principles of success, both in the church and in the free market.

Now, motivations can be radically different. And if somebody is out there saying, "My goal is to get rich, and I will provide these services in order to get rich," then he has been trapped by the service of what Jesus called mammon. He's serving himself. More for me in history.

And that's what Jesus warned against. It's not that he said wealth is wrong, but he warned again and again against the motivation of the individual who seeks wealth in and of itself for its own sake. But that's not unique to Christianity. You find that in virtually every organized religion in the world.

The ethical stand of virtually all religions is don't seek wealth and power for its own sake and for your own fame. But if wealth and power come because of faithful service, then wealth and power are legitimate. In your books, and here I'm referring to your Christian Economics Students Manual and the Teachers Manual, which are the two of the four that you've published, my understanding of your plan is that you started with a students manual, which is a simpler, concise presentation of your overall framework.

And then you develop a teacher's manual, which has a little bit more background. You're working currently on a scholar's edition, which has more footnotes and more academic connection. And then you have planned an activist version as well. In the introduction for your book, you make it clear that you're writing to Christians, but in your actual text, you don't distinguish between Christians and non-Christians.

Do you believe that somebody has to be a Christian in order to, for lack of better words, use the economic methods and principles of the Bible? Or do these rules or practices function the same for Christians and non-Christians? >>Well, let's go to the Ten Commandments. Let's go to this second set of five.

The prohibition on murder applies across the board. The prohibition against adultery applies. The prohibition against theft applies. The prohibition against bearing false witness applies. Is there some good reason to believe that the prohibition on coveting another man's property or wife somehow does not apply? So from the perspective of the Bible, God said in Deuteronomy 4 that the world would look at the laws that he had given to Israel, and the world would say, "This nation has a wonderful set of laws, that there's no other nation with a set of laws like the Hebrew nation," and therefore that this would be, in effect, a tool of evangelism, which I think it is.

So the law as given, at least with respect to economics and basic ethics in the Bible and in the Old Testament, certainly was expected by Moses and by the Hebrews to be applicable across the border. Now, not every law was. The laws regarding sacrifice were understood to be specific laws to the Hebrew nation, and certainly they did not go out and try to get people to adopt all the policies and practices of the priesthood as a way to transform the societies around them.

But they did expect people to abide by what I call the cross-boundary laws, best seen certainly in the second set of five commandments, but I think also they would apply in the first set of the five commandments as well. But certainly with respect to economic policy and practice, we're talking about the second set of five as being laws that apply across borders and across cultures.

>> So then in that answer, we come to the question of perhaps of, I guess, differentiation. It may have been one thing when Jews were ethnically separated by bloodline from Gentiles, but in our modern era, we have a question of those who walk by faith and those who don't, or some distinction, I use the terms Christians and non-Christians, believers, unbelievers, some form of that.

How do you personally teach people to interact where, when the Bible talks about faith and the personal experience that somebody has when approaching a question like the deity of Jesus, for example, versus understanding these principles that you elucidate in your work? Is there any distinction between them, or do we just say, "Well, these workings of economic principle and perhaps law just apply universally, and it doesn't really matter whether you have faith or don't have faith"?

>> Well, I've addressed that issue in a book that I wrote over 30 years ago called, a book on common grace, which you can download on my site, Dominion and Common Grace, and I talk about that. The problem you find is that at least through history, people will commit to fundamental ethical principles, but if they do not believe they'll be successful or their heirs will be successful in the future, or if they believe that they're going to be defeated in history, or if they believe that the basic cause and effect system which undergirds economic action, the profit and loss system, if people don't believe that there is something outside of themselves and outside of the state to enforce a system of causation, then at some point they will seek another god to be the incarnate deity, which they will then worship one way or another as an alternative to worshiping the God of the Bible.

And in modern times, the great deity has been the state, and that certainly was the case in the time of the Roman Empire. It was far less so during the medieval period, which was inherently Christian. But with the rise of the Enlightenment and especially the rise of the French Revolution, there has been a deification of the state, and it is only really in the last 25 years or 30 years that we have finally seen the beginning of the breakdown of that religion, manifested obviously in the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in 1978 to free up agriculture in China, and then of course the classic example on December 25th, 1991, when Gorbachev went on national television and basically buried the Soviet Union.

That was the end. Now, after that, it has become a lot more difficult for people to be taken seriously with some variety of the doctrine of salvation by state power. And so we're living in an era in which the alternative to the state as a way of establishing justice and defending ethics has been a kind of frantic scramble to see what the new deity is going to be.

And there really is no agreement on that today as there would have been when you were studying under liberation theologians. But remember, even when you got down to Latin America, the Soviet Union was gone. And it was easy to say you didn't like the empire of the United States in 2003.

That's pretty easy. What you did not find was liberation theologians in 1978 saying the Soviet Union is as evil an empire as the United States and a pox on both their houses. It was easy to do after 1991. >> There does seem to be, bringing it current, I have observed the trend that you're discussing in our modern society.

It seems to me with 32 years of walking this earth worth of experience and perhaps 15 years of adult focus, it seems as though the stakes in our current world have about government action and the involvement of the state have gotten higher. I read and have referenced on this show RJ Rush Duny's book, The Messianic Character of American Education, where I think he lays out the case quite strongly that the educational system, the government school system has taken on the modern function of a priesthood and the delivering of sacraments and that salvation for a person, the getting rid of sin and the enhancement of virtue, one variation of the word salvation, it tries to accomplish it through education.

That if we could just educate somebody well enough, if we could just educate all those poor rotten street urchins, then we could drive all their vices out of them and we could save them so that they would be good and upright people. It seems to me that my analysis of 2018 politics in the United States of America, that we have just an intensification of this trend over the last 50 years, where we've got to be the only tool left for secular post-Christian man is the government, that the state has to do it.

The state has to be the one to come in and to cleanse the people from their sin, to lift up the people who are downtrodden and to perfect the society. I can see that. That's the trend that you're referring to in your commentary, right? >> Correct. >> Going back to the discussion of application, I'd like to go to one common scriptural passage and start in the Book of Malachi.

I guess what I'm asking is here a hermeneutical question, a question of interpretation. There is a scripture that I find extremely challenging to know how to deal with rightly, because it seems to me to be a use of much abuse, a scripture that is, from my perspective, abused. I am very concerned in some of my travels and exposure to places outside of the Western world, especially parts of Africa and elsewhere, how the Bible seems to be used as a battering ram to make one person, the preacher, rich at the expense of the congregants.

I think one of the most stark passages of this would come from Malachi 3. I want to read the verse in context. My question relates to how you approach a passage like this and understand who it is speaking to. Picking up in the middle of Malachi 3, verse 6, the prophet Malachi writes this, speaking in a prophetic voice for God himself.

"For I, the Lord, do not change. Therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed. From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts. But you say, 'How shall we return?

Will man rob God?' Yet you are robbing me. But you say, 'How have we robbed you? In your tithes and contributions.' You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house, and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts.

If I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need, I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not destroy the fruits of your soil, and your vine in the field shall not fail to bear, says the Lord of hosts.

Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says the Lord of hosts." So in this context, this particular passage, I see proclaimed by, I'm going to put my own ethical judgment, evil men who use this as a way of accreting to themselves great riches from the pockets of their congregants, which riches are used to furnish their own houses, to buy their own private planes on the backs of the poor.

And yet, it's very hard for me to deny the straightforward message of this particular scripture. The preacher stands up and says, "Give to God, bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, so give to the church." And it really bothers me, but yet, to know how to apply these, but it's basically a question of interpretation.

So how do you approach a passage like this, which is addressed to the children of Jacob, and yet apply it in a modern context? Well, it's the same principle as I discussed before. It's a principle of servanship. That is, if you look at 1 Timothy 3, especially, chapter 3, you have outlined what criteria for being a pastor, and the criteria are the same for being a deacon who will control the money, and that is, they're supposed to have good reputations with respect to the government of their families, and to the fact that they are not after, in the words of the King James, "filthy lucre," or dirty money.

The criteria are clear in terms of the New Testament, and I don't see that they would be any different in terms of the Old Testament as well, that the individual who is a good servant is not supposed to be impoverished. There is no teaching like that. But at the same time, there has to be a servant mentality in which the leaders are serving the people, whether they're political leaders, economic leaders, or ecclesiastical leaders.

So another, so for clarification, what I'm hearing you say is you would have no fear of publicly preaching the message that Malachi here is proclaiming to any people, but you would balance that with the clear scriptural mandates for other expressions of virtue and integrity, and say that both of these things are true.

So the point of, if one were to confront a pastor like I described, or preacher like I described, you would not confront him on the basis of his proclamation of this passage, but rather you would confront him on his seeming desire for filthy lucre. Is that an accurate summary of what you're saying?

>>Kaufmann Yeah. His motivation is not service, which is reflected in the fact that he has accumulated wealth that has been provided by the poor, but then that applies to every king in history. That's not limited ecclesiastically. >>Ashkahn So, go ahead. >>Kaufmann I guess what I'm getting at is this.

Would we say that a man who is accumulating wealth on the basis of service in the free market is doing the wrong thing? Well, the liberation theologians say yes he is, but the liberation theologians don't understand that he cannot be accumulating wealth in terms of a competitive market unless he's providing some kind of valuable service where people in the community voluntarily are coming back and saying, "Well, I think this is a good service." Similarly, people get reelected.

Well, if they're reelected the way Ron Paul was reelected on the basis of shrinking the government and resisting the expansion of the state, I would say, "Well, that's certainly a positive thing." On the other hand, if they're reelected the way Lyndon Johnson was reelected as a means of extracting wealth from richer people, officially at least, and giving the money to the poor, then I would say that's a misuse of the office.

But there's nothing illegitimate about the office. There's nothing illegitimate about the idea that people who run for office should be elected by the general public. The problem is that the public, unfortunately, wants to get its hands in the next door neighbor's wallet, but doesn't want to do it directly.

So, these people vote for politicians who are going to give them what they want. And Johnson was an exceedingly wealthy man, and he didn't get it in the free market. He got it through political manipulation. His wife had the only licensed television station in Austin, Texas, for years. Well, that was no accident.

So, we have a situation in which the principle of servanship can be used in order to accumulate wealth or power or influence or whatever else men pursue. And the old threesome has always been the same, money, sex, and power. And then for the people at the very top of the heap, we add fame.

And people will do almost anything at the very top to gain some degree of fame. And that's been the king's weakness for as long as we have kingship. So, I guess what I'm saying is I don't see that there's any difference in principle between the person who accumulates great wealth in three different spheres.

The question is, how did he do it? Does he lie? Does he cheat? Does he steal? Does he appeal to people's base instincts? That's certainly a way you can get rich, at least for a time. Or does he do something productive and yet cares only for himself, like the rich man who accumulated wealth in order to build barns so that he could store even more grain?

Well, there's nothing wrong with large barns storing grain, but that man only thought of the immediate goal of building those barns. And Christ said, "You fool, you're going to give an account for yourself this evening." That's the great error of power seekers. That's the great error of wealth seekers.

And that's the great error of people who use ecclesiastical influence to build up their own personal fiefdoms or personal kingdoms by means of a misuse of service. Coming back to Malachi chapter three, again, for a follow-up question. I use this passage because it's one of the only passages I'm aware of where there is such a strong statement by God where he says, "Put me to the test." And the passage says, "Bring the full tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house, and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need." Does this...

Go ahead. Well, that's just an extension of Deuteronomy 28, verses one through 14. The prophets always come to the people in the name of Moses, and thereby in the name of God who revealed himself to Moses. The message of the prophets over and over and over was simply, "You have violated my law.

You knew the law. It's been in front of you from the beginning of the nation after the Exodus. You're violating the principles. So you're going to get the negative sanctions that were listed in Deuteronomy 15 through 68, and you're not going to get the positive sanctions of Deuteronomy 28, one through 14." But there's no deviation.

And if you want to look at another passage, parallel passage, it's Leviticus 26. The prophets are not bringing a new message to Israel. The prophets always were bringing the original message that goes back to Moses immediately after the Exodus. So is this message in Malachi 3, Deuteronomy 28, and Leviticus 26, is this message to individuals, or is this message to a collective group?

Well, because of the doctrine of the Trinity, we have to say that there is both one and many. God is both one and many. Therefore, the law applies both to the one and to the many. And to say that it applies only to one and not to the other is ultimately going to lead to some form of either Unitarianism or polytheism, and neither of those positions can be defended in terms of the New Testament.

So that's a fundamental theological point that has to do with the original doctrine of God as taught in the New Testament, that there has to be both one and many. So the laws apply both to individuals and to collectives, and God holds both responsible. Societies are held responsible for deviant behavior.

And you will find people who say, "Well, that can't be true." But then you look at Germany in the 1930s, and then you look at what happened to them in the 1940s, and most people in the West would say, "Yes, that's legitimate. That's what should have happened." You can't do what Germany did in the 1930s and not wind up with something like what happened to them in the mid-1940s.

I think that's legitimate. People say there has to be some kind of relationship between ethical cause and economic collective effect, and that if you were caught in Germany under the rulership of a man like Hitler, then if you remained in Germany, you were very likely going to be on the receiving end of negative sanctions if he continued to follow the policies that he ultimately continued to follow.

And I think the same thing is true of Stalin. The death rate that was suffered by the famines that Stalin engineered, the death rates were in the millions in the Soviet Union because of the horrendous policies of socialized agriculture and confiscation that Stalin mandated and that his henchmen like Khrushchev enforced.

>>SAM: Beginning then with an individual, if I'm working giving financial counseling to an individual who is broke, poor, broke, I don't know that I've ever interacted with an individual except in another... I've never interacted with an individual in the United States that I think is ever truly broke or poor, at least using biblical standards that only has one cloak to cover them at night.

But if I'm interacting with an individual, should I think this is that their poverty is a result of their personal nonconformity to or disobedience to God's laws, or should I think that they may be entirely innocent and their personal poverty is simply a reflection of other people or other factors?

>>WILLIAMS Well, poverty in the modern world is virtually always the result of corrupt political systems. We've had the greatest amount of economic growth in history beginning around 1800, growth on a scale that could not have been conceived in 1800 and could barely be conceived in 1900, but that growth was not transferred to North Korea or Cuba, and it's certainly being withdrawn in Venezuela.

And the policies of those countries have been the reason why individuals in those countries are really under the burden of extreme poverty. So if you're looking at an individual who is sober and has stayed with his wife and seems to be a pretty good leader within the community, participates in some kind of church activity, clothes his children, feeds his children, provides some kind of education for his children, and he is still poor, then my opinion is you start looking at the society around him, the presuppositions about the nature of economic cause and effect, and you look to see where envy is loose in the land, the desire to pull down the rich person just for the sake of pulling him down.

Wherever you have political envy, you're going to have poverty. There's no way around that. That's the nature of economic cause and effect, and which is ultimately ethical cause and effect. So you have to look at the difference between what in the late 19th century and even earlier was called the distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor.

And the deserving poor were people who really were entitled from an ethical standpoint to be helped by others who had the means to do that, but the undeserving poor, the people whose lifestyle had brought them into poverty and who now want a handout, that was assumed to be wasted money unless you could bring that person to some kind of ethical transformation.

Basically, it's the same as handing out money to a man on the street who is in poverty and is a known alcoholic. You know what he's going to do with the money, and it's not to help educate his children. - Yeah, that's my personal beef with the government's, to use the US American phrase, war on poverty, by which they mean taking money from some people and giving it to others.

There's no mechanism for accountability. If I see the man in my neighborhood who is living on the street, I can go over and I can interact with him and I can find out what his circumstances are, and I can give him money to help him and seek to work with him.

But then if I see him using that money in the wrong way and not making progress, not taking steps of action, then I can freely and easily cut him off and he can experience the just rewards for his poor decisions, rather than continuing to pour money in due to some policy of non-discrimination against poor people.

It's really, I personally, from having done quite a bit of financial counseling, I really struggle with the destructiveness of government programs that transfer money from one person to another, because there is no ability for a bureaucrat to actually make judgments on the worthiness of a recipient. Only an individual can do that who's actually involved in taking the time, and only an individual who actually has the personal motivation to see their hard-earned dollars be used for good and to help somebody's life, only that individual will have the motivation to actually do the hard work of getting personally involved, at least as I see it.

>>WARREN: Well, from a legal standpoint, the person working with a government welfare agency is not allowed to ask most questions associated with ethics. The rare exception would be the case of aid to a woman who has a man, not her husband, living with her. Of course, the problem with that is the guy doesn't live with her full time.

He comes and goes. He is not a stable force in her life or the life of her children. So that law has backfired against the family structure in ghetto communities. There are no ethical criteria. There may be a technical criterion, that is, have you looked for a job over the last 30 days or however long it's been?

Do you have evidence that you have looked for a job? But these people know how to work the system, and they never seem to get employed on a full-time basis. It's only when they decide they want to clean up their acts that there is any real hope for them.

And that has to come from the individual. That's not going to work because some federal bureaucrat comes in and tells the person to shape up his life. Only if the bureaucrat is in a position to cut off the money is he going to get even token cooperation. >> So I want to finish this theme of questioning that I've been pursuing with an example from The Collective.

In your judgment, in 2012, my wife and I visited Haiti as part of our honeymoon. And it was my first time visiting Haiti. I've known a lot of Haitians since I live in South Florida. But it was my first time visiting Haiti. I had previously spent time in Nicaragua, which is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, but Haiti, of course, the poorest country.

And it was one of the most sobering and humbling experiences to actually be there in Haiti. This was after the major earthquake. And so I was in downtown Port-au-Prince. And I was looking at the rubble of the governor's palace and mansion, et cetera. And it was the most emotionally draining place I have ever visited in my life.

Because, of course, the majority of the country is dominated by squalor and tent cities and just ineffably awful human living conditions. And yet, those are the things that are easily seen in a video cast or pictures which tug at your heartstrings. But actually being there as a traveler, it was a draining place to be because practically, probably 80%, of course, but most of the people, with a few exceptions, most of the people with whom I interacted on a business level sought to cheat me and sought to take advantage of me and sought to...

were not very good hosts. I have since warned many people, "Do everything you can not to visit Haiti." And of course, there were exceptions. There were several honest people along the way that helped us and served us, and we were very grateful for it. But I couldn't leave fast enough because of the difficulty of traveling there and my need to constantly be on guard.

I was also, while there, deeply just impressed with a sense of darkness, just this deep spiritual darkness that was an impression, a feeling that was almost inescapable. Now, in modern society, I, of course, am guilty of racism for acknowledging these things of a primarily black country. But the reality was I have never known how to process that actual experience, the experience of being desperately filled with compassion and desperately wanting to help and to serve, but simultaneously being utterly offended and constantly on the defense because it seemed as though every single person was out to cheat me.

And of course, that may be a little bit hyperbolic, but that was what it felt like. And of course, it's easy for me to feel guilty in the modern era to say, "No, they're poor people and they cheat because they're poor." And I've always wrestled with this question, "Did everybody try to cheat me because they were poor and desperate, or are they poor and desperate because they tried to cheat me?

Is this a reflection of the broader culture?" So obviously, a difficult and pointed question. But when we consider a difficult case like Haiti, just a few hundred miles from me, how do we approach it from a biblical perspective, recognizing the darkness of the culture, but also recognizing our duty of compassion and care?

How do we approach it? And who do we hold responsible for their decisions? >> Well, the first thing you do is you have half your vacation in the Dominican Republic. >> Which is exactly what we did. >> Yeah. >> We were only there for a small period of time.

>> That's right. You see the difference. You can see the difference from the air. >> It's night and day. At the border, it's night and day. >> That's right. You don't have any better example of that in the Western Hemisphere. And I suspect you don't have any better example of that difference on Earth.

You have two radically different societies. It has nothing to do with the fertility of the soil. It has nothing to do with differences in the weather. It has nothing to do with telecommunications, potentially. Same systems, technical systems are available to both societies, but they are radically different cultures. Now, the Dominican Republic is no paradise of wealth by any standard.

But the contrast between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is such that if you wanted to make a video of the absolute bleakness of voodoo culture versus some degree of hope in Catholic culture, that's where you would make the video, on the two halves of that island. And this is not something new.

This goes back certainly to the original revolution in Haiti that took place over 200 years ago. That problem has been endemic to Haiti for as long as it has existed as a separate society. So again, you have to look at the nature of the doctrine of cause and effect in the two countries, the two social orders.

And they are very, very different social orders leading to different political orders, leading to radically different personal ethics, and then ultimately leading to radically different per capita income. Marc Thiessen So let me contrast that now with the United States of America, the per capita wealthiest country in the world, as my understanding at least.

In the modern US-American context, it would be relatively easy to draw the idea that, well, we as US-Americans are just so great people. We're fantastic, and we're rich because we're good. And that is certainly a perspective that I understand because I absorb some of that, especially from republicanism and conservatism in the past when I was younger and perhaps a little bit less self-aware.

But in our modern era, I desperately question that because by my analysis, the United States of America deserves very little except fire and brimstone from heaven, given our extremely deeply sinful culture. So do we take credit and say, "Well, we're rich because we're righteous in some way"? Do we look at, for example, I read a book on geography, the geography of the United States of America, people who try to explain the wealth of the United States based upon that, or do we look to ethics?

And how do we know if we're looking at ethics too much or too little? You go to the borders, and you look across the northern border to Canada, and you can't tell the difference. You look at the southern border with Mexico, and you can't avoid the difference. It's not geography.

The borders reflect two different cultures, two different approaches to the building of wealth and the inheritance of wealth over time. These are very, very different cultures on the southern border, and they are almost indistinguishable cultures at the northern border. People don't spend a lot of time discussing this and studying the difference, but certainly in North America, I think that's where I would begin any kind of analysis.

What keeps Mexico poor? And at the same time, why in the last 40 years or 35 years has Mexico progressively gotten richer, whereas now it's not a third world country at all? Well, I think the answer that the free market economists have always said would be look at per capita capital investment.

Look at the nature of the right of contract, for example. Mexico is much less tyrannical today than it was half a century ago, and certainly is much less tyrannical than it was prior to World War II. But we don't know much about Mexico. We don't study the matter. But here was a country that went through something like a socialist revolution before World War I.

It was not the Soviet revolution that was the model, it was the Mexican revolution. And you had this enormous exodus out of Mexico. I don't know how, what the numbers are. I don't know if we can know, but it's certainly over a million people who got out and came here because they could cross the border in those days.

It was legal. And they came here with nothing in their pockets and very little on their backs to escape the revolution in Mexico, which I think was a great idea. That's what I would have done too. So you have different social orders, different ethical standards, different legal orders. And when you find two societies across a border that reflect the different levels of productivity of the two social orders, then it's a good idea to start studying the differences between those social orders and legal orders as the source of the difference of wealth.

Then how would you respond to the perhaps secular academic who would observe these facts? Mexico is deeply Catholic and has a strong history of Catholicism, including of course Roman Catholicism under perhaps just a broad tint of mere Christianity. But yet Canada is, I don't know if the adjective deeply is appropriate, but very secular and increasingly secular, much more secular than the United States.

So the Catholic Mexico seems to be much poorer and perhaps through their society reflects these attributes that you're discussing. And yet the secular Canada seems to be much richer and to have a much higher standard of living, even though there is very little influence of the Christian religion. Does that defeat your case?

No, you have different legal systems. And you have the fact that in Mexico, you have, or very close to it, a one party system. Only in recent years have you developed anything like a two party system and it's not very strong. You also have a legal order that is based on Spanish law, whereas in the United States and in Canada, you have a legal order that is based ultimately, bottom line, on a legal order in which the judiciary has an independent status.

And so the legal orders of the two countries on the northern side of the Mexican border are very, very similar. The political orders, while different in terms of whether or not you have a parliamentary system or a congressional system, the legal orders are pretty much the same. There are strong two party systems.

And to some extent, of course, in Canada, you may get a three party system operating because the country is a parliamentary system. But in both systems, across the northern borders, you have a legal order in which justice is assumed to be different from politics. And the justice is a product of a long tradition of the Western legal tradition, which is based on an independent judiciary that has the power to thwart the expansion of the politicians in the central government.

And Britain has the same system. And you have it, obviously, in the ANZAC countries, New Zealand and Australia. You have English law, which is not centralized law, which is not politically based, but has an independent judiciary. Well, I think that's a basic biblical principle, is that you have to have the power of the courts deciding who is guilty and who is not.

And until quite recently, you had the concept of the independent jury. And jury nullification was possible, certainly after the mid 17th century, to thwart the expansion of centralized power, first in Great Britain and then in North America. That's a powerful tradition to keep liberty. And the English speaking world has had that tremendous advantage that the rest of the world has not had.

And it was in North America and in the British Isles that long term economic growth of 2% per annum first appeared. That had never happened in the world before. And over time, it has led to this tremendous disparity between the wealth of North America and the wealth of Great Britain compared to the second world and the third world.

And neither of those worlds has an independent judiciary, minimal central government, and by comparison, relatively weak government compared to the Anglo American tradition and the Western legal tradition. Is it fair then to characterize some of what you're saying in this way? Although Mexico may have many people who, when asked on a survey, would say, "Yes, I'm Catholic, I'm Christian," and Canada would have very few, or fewer, many, many fewer, many more in Canada would say, "I'm atheist, agnostic, secular, non-believer, I'm a nun," are you characterizing that even though they would self-report their religious identity differently, that the Mexican culture society systems reflect a much weaker representation of the biblical ideal than the Canadian do, even though the Canadian culture society, et cetera, reflects the biblical ideal?

Is that an accurate characterization of what you're saying, that the self-reporting is less important than the actual facts on the ground? >>WARREN: If you want to know the essence of what's going on in Mexico, look at the color of the people and look at the color of the rulers.

That's as racist a society as you'll find anywhere in the Western hemisphere, with the possible exception of Haiti. They are a separate culture, separate worldview, separate educational system, and Mexico has always had that. Latin America always had it to some extent, but not to the degree that Mexico does.

Everybody's white in the leadership in Mexico. Well, how is that possible in a democratic social order? The only time you have anybody who has dark skin is after a military coup, and you haven't had that in the post-World War II era. Something is fundamentally different about the Mexican political system, and you can see it if you look at the, literally, at the color of the leaders versus the color of the population.

Now, with respect to how serious are Mexicans regarding their commitment to the Catholic Church, I'm not an expert in Mexican religion to tell you, but historically, the commitment of the leadership has been to a white European culture, not to a mixed or mestizo culture that is operating at the lower end, the vast majority, but still the lower end of the social order that exists in Mexico.

There's something very peculiar going on there. Now, it's beginning to change. The free market is changing that. People can get good educations in Mexico today. There is greater freedom than there has been in the past. People who are at the lower end of the social order can use education and thrift and entrepreneurship to climb up the ladder of social influence and economic influence, and economic growth has been prominent in Mexico, certainly over the last 25 or 30 years.

It's not a third world country. It's a second world country, and it's moving up pretty steadily. So the free market is having its effect. Technology is having its effect. Communications are having a tremendous liberating effect in Mexico, and the country is different today from what it was 50 years ago.

But Mexico is behind, and I don't think it's primarily because of geography. I think it's because the social and political order has represented a more hierarchical system of ecclesiastical order than we have in a Protestant culture, and by the way, that we have in Catholic culture in the United States, which looks amazingly like Protestant culture, and especially that's true since the late 1960s.

So then what defense... Let's assume... And what I'm driving at here, I guess, is the impact of... You've written for 50 years, perhaps 9,000 pages on what the Bible has to say about economics. So of course, you are arguing vigorously and consistently for accepting the biblical structure, the biblical version of events, the biblical structure for economic systems, both personal and societal.

But I have, of course, many non-Christian friends, and I often look at the world through their eyes, and it's rather disheartening when you describe a deeply... Religion takes a bad rap, specifically Christian religion takes a bad rap when you describe a deeply Catholic culture as intensely racist, which aligns with some of my experience in Central America as well.

I used to think I was rather naive when growing up. I used to think that racism was connected to the color of somebody's skin until I traveled in Central America, and without indicting the guilty, I would be in one Central American country and listen to the things that people warned me about the neighboring Central American country, both of whose occupants had brown skin and spoke very similar Spanish, and yet there was an intense opposition to them.

Or similarly, I have worked with Black Haitians here in South Florida, and the level of racial animus between Black Haitians and African Americans, Black traditional African Americans, is not insubstantial. But back to the point, when I hear a Catholic culture, a predominantly Catholic Christian culture that is very racist, and yet a very secular culture that is less racist, and then it makes me say, "Well, what's the point of religion?" And, for example, our own Protestant heritage in the United States of America, we have so many sins in our past that it's not hard for me to understand the people who are vigorously anti-Christian.

They have plenty of grist for their mill. So what do we do with that? Do we say, "Well, you don't have to actually believe these doctrines, just do these things"? Or how do we hold that when talking about these things in public? >> Well, give me an example. >> For my friend who says, "Well, I agree that justice is important, but I don't agree that the source of justice, of the ethic of justice," or let's go back to the ethic of coercion, right?

There are many secular libertarians who practice the non-aggression principle, who defend and practice the non-aggression principle, and yet they don't draw... >> No, as a matter of fact, there aren't. >> Okay, how do you mean? >> Well, first of all, there are almost no libertarians. You're talking about... >> That is true.

>> ...a couple of thousand people holding an oddball position. So who are these guys? Yeah, there are people who say they hold that position, but they are on the fringe of the culture. They've only been two representatives of the position of the 20th century and 21st, as Ron Paul and Howard Buffett, two congressmen at the time regarded as peculiar.

So if you're talking... See, you run in strange circles, and the circles you run in are not representative of really much of anything. If you're talking about mainstream Democrats versus mainstream Republicans, then you're talking about people who have pretty much the same concept of justice. They believe in juries.

Nobody's campaigning to say, "We gotta get rid of the jury system." You can't distinguish Democrats and Republicans on that issue. Nobody is saying that there has to be some means of centralizing power to such an extent that there has to be a vastly expanded, for example, federal department of education.

It's still pretty much on the fringes. Most of the federal agencies are run by certainly full-time bureaucrats, but you don't have the degree of centralized political control that the Soviet Union had in 1970. There isn't anything like that. Americans would not affirm that. The two parties are pretty much the same on the issue of the deficits.

The rhetoric may be different. They vote the same. So when somebody is running for office, do you ever find a guy saying, "I don't want the Christian vote. I'm going after the atheist vote." I've never heard that. If it's there, I've never heard a campaign based on that position.

The number of people, or at least the percentage of people who claim that they are Christians is certainly in the range probably of 60 or 65 percent. People who attend church once a month maybe are probably in the range of 40 to 45 percent and so forth. The number of people who claim that they believe straight Darwinism is under 20 percent.

Nobody else believes it. So what I want to see is in terms of the broad mass of American voters, where is this distinction that would say, "We don't believe in the 10 commandments. We believe in some other system," or "We don't believe in God. We don't believe that God intervenes in history.

We don't want your prayers for my sick child who's dying of whatever." That kind of attitude has always been extremely limited in the United States and certainly limited in terms of Canadian practice. And I think it's generally not been true in Mexico either. I think you're running in a very narrow circle, interacting with a couple of dozen people who are not representative of American culture as a whole.

>>AJ: I will concede your point. I find it very difficult in the modern era, especially for someone like me who spends much time alone in my office. I find it difficult to know how to avoid simply feeding my own confirmation bias with my own tiny, weird circles and how to get a grasp on what's happening broadly.

And I'll grant this for you as anecdotal support for the statements you've made. I remember during the previous presidential election cycle, there was a political candidate named Austin Peterson who is an atheist or agnostic. I'm not sure how hardcore his secularism runs, but he was an atheist libertarian. And yet, he was trying to run for the libertarian ticket.

He ultimately lost that attempt. But I have a much easier time with him. I would have an easier time voting for him because of his positions and supporting someone like him or preferring to live under the governance of someone like him because of his positions than I do some professing evangelical Christians who run under a statist platform.

So I'll offer that as anecdotal evidence to the point that you were making. >>Corey: Well, your buddy is not going to get elected, so let's eliminate him. >>AJ: He's not. Never known him, just read about him. >>Corey: I'd like to ask one more theological question. I want to pivot to some practical things as we wrap up.

So here's the last theological question. In all of your books, since I think as best I can discern from reading and skimming some of your work, since about the mid-'80s or late-'80s, you have seemingly structured your work in terms of a covenantal approach or the approach of the covenant.

My understanding is that the framework that you use was first promoted by Ray Sutton, an associate of yours, during the 1980s, and you've adopted it and adapted all of your work to fit that particular framework. Could you first describe what that framework is before I ask a follow-up question to that, please?

>>Jay: Well, in terms of social theory, there's a doctrine of sovereignty, and there's a doctrine of authority or representation. There's some system of ethics, in other words, a legal order. There's a system of cause and effect. And then finally, there's a doctrine of the future. And every social order has all five of these characteristics.

You have to go looking for them in some cases, because they may not be openly stated. But sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and time are basic to understanding every political order, every economic system that you have anywhere in the world, because every system of thought has a doctrine of sovereignty, authority, that is representation, law, sanctions, and time.

The version that Sutton was working with had been developed by a professor at Westminster Seminary in the 1960s by the name of Meredith Klein, and he got it from another professor in the 1950s who had worked on a similar study. His name was George Mendenhall. But the ancient treaties of the Middle East use this structure.

And what I discovered and Sutton worked on and others of us worked on was that the Pentateuch is structured in terms of these five concepts, and certain books of the Bible use the five concepts, God, man, law, sanctions, and time. You can't escape the structure. Certainly, you can't escape it in terms of the Pentateuch, but I think it exists in the book of Exodus.

I think it's basic to Leviticus. It's certainly true of Deuteronomy, and David Shilton worked on it with respect to the book of Revelation. So you can't escape this basic model. So what I have done is to take that basic model on this assumption. If you get these five points basically correct, you have a pretty good handle on whatever it is you're trying to discuss.

You won't get everything done. You can't get everything done. But if you don't have any one of those five concepts, you're not going to have any way to analyze accurately a particular social order or economic order. And so in terms of economics, you've got to have some concept of ownership.

That's fundamental. In other words, who owns the property? And then you have the question of service, which is the free market principle of serving the consumer. You've got to have some concept of law, which says your property is going to be defended by law. That's the eighth commandment. You've got to have some concept of judgment, which means you've got to have a legal order, which is not corrupt and which enforces predictably the legal order that has been established by law.

And then you've got to have a system of succession. You've got to have probably, and certainly in our order, you've got to have elections in which there is peaceful transition, where there's not a revolution every time some major political figure dies. There has to be a system of orderly judicial transition to the next generation.

These are basic concepts. You've got to have an inheritance. If you can't inherit what you've built up, if you can't leave that to your children, then what's the point of building up the inheritance? Why will people sacrifice for the future if that future is going to be called into question when they die and their children want to receive whatever it is the parents have built up and the state comes in and confiscates half the property, which is what is done, at least on paper, by the American political system, but which with non-profit foundations, the super-rich have always evaded the problem.

So in your use of this covenant, I've, covenantal theology is not something that I, when after reading your use of this covenant, I went back and started trying to study in the scripture the various covenants to understand for myself from the text of scripture the implication of them. And your expression there is a little bit different than in tone, though not in substance, of kind of what I describe as covenantal theology.

My question is this, do you think that somebody had, you defend a number of minority positions, minorities simply in terms of their broader acceptance in modern mainstream Protestant Christianity. You defend a number of minority positions, many of which are built around this, the tenets of this covenant or the tenets of covenantal theology.

You apply this to many areas. In your opinion, is it a package deal to somebody who's studying your work and studying your particular understanding of scripture? Do they naturally have to lead to, if they naturally accept covenantal theology, will they naturally wind up in the various positions that you have taken, although they're a, currently a minority, or will they be able to, or can people pick and choose from some of the things that you publicly defend?

Well, give me an example. Well, for example, covenantalism. So you defend the doctrine, you defend, with regard to Israel, you, I mean, grasping for the proper term, not, what's the term meaning that God finished with Israel and is no longer working with Israel? Well, that's the fundamentalist position. Okay.

But there's a, at least among some fundamentalists, that there has been a transfer of what had been the bride of God in the Old Testament, which was the nation of Israel, that has been transferred to the institutional church. Is that what you're pushing at? Yes. So in much of modern, I'm grasping for the theological term, but it's probably more helpful for my listeners for me to describe the meaning.

So in much of modern Protestant Christianity, especially more evangelical and fundamentalist sects, there is a promotion of the current nation state of Israel that as being God's chosen people, because of the ethnic bloodline coming down through Abraham. You reject that in your teaching. Rather, you say that God finished with Abraham and he judged Abraham in, or sorry, God finished with the Jews as an ethnic group, and that God finished with the Jews and he judged them in the year AD 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem.

Now, I just recently finished reading the book, I was, I recently read a book that you wrote the editor's note to called Second Chance, which was an application of the covenantal system of theology to the question of marriage, divorce, and remarriage. And it's interesting because I follow often the logical continuation that you apply in applying this thinking, but I struggle with some of the particular applications.

So in your writings on economics, I'm very much attracted to your writing on economics because a lot of it makes sense. I see the connection to scripture and it's a coherent, cohesive system. But yet I frankly have a difficult time with post-millennialism, although I am, well, I have a difficult time with post-millennialism.

I have a difficult time with the idea of God divorcing Israel, and I study it and try to understand it and think about it, but I wonder, is this a package deal? Similarly, with- It's a package, it is a package deal. Okay. Do you care to expand on that at all from my own understanding?

Because the covenant is a package deal. You don't take four points of the covenant, you take five points of the covenant there. Five points. God is sovereign. Man is created in order to serve God and to administer the creation. Law is given by God, and man is responsible to God for that law.

The sanctions will be applied both in history and eternity. And there is over time a correlation between covenant keeping and prosperity, and there's also a correlation between covenant breaking and defeat. That goes back to Deuteronomy 28. Now, if that's not true, then covenant theology is wrong. All forms of covenant theology are wrong.

But then try to build a civilization on this principle, honesty is not the best policy. What civilization is going to be built on that? Now, you've got to have a definition of honesty. You've got to have a system of cause and effect that brings that truth to fruition. And you'd better have examples of societies that have followed the legal order laid down in the Bible, the basic principles, and have established court systems that defend that legal order.

And if you find time and again that that kind of correlation leads to defeat in history, then covenant theology is not true. >>SA: I appreciate the clear answer. I'll have to keep thinking and studying that question for myself to resolve it. >>CW: Well, I know what—let me tell you what your problem is.

I can tell right now what the problem is, and you've cited the right book. You don't have a concept of biblical divorce. >>SA That is one fundamental, yes. >>CW Yeah, that's right. That you have to have a—the biblical concept of divorce in the Old Testament was divorce by execution.

And so Rush Duny and Bonson and Sutton come to the conclusion that if you have certain kinds of practices that would have led to the execution of the guilty party under the Mosaic law, that should allow the breaking of the covenant of marriage because you have to have the principle of victim's rights.

You have to defend the victim, not the perpetrator. And on that basis, you don't split the assets of the family 50/50. You take everything away from the victim—from the perpetrator. You transfer that to the victim. That should be the principle that you apply, not simply in the marriage covenant.

That's the principle of the church covenant. That should be the principle of the civil covenant as well. That there have to be negative sanctions imposed and that a breaking of the covenant is the equivalent of covenantal death. I don't see any way to run a family without that. Now, I'm sure you can do it as we do in the modern world with easy divorce, no-fault divorce, but then it's breaking up the family structure.

That's what happened. That's what happened to Israel. It was a covenantal divorce. That's what the difference is in terms of the covenant theology versus, say, premillennial dispensational theology. It's the issue of the covenantal divorce by God of Israel. Did that take place in AD 70 or didn't it? And the systems sort out on the basis of what was the divorce and what is the appropriate sanction for the divorce.

Correct. So you struck to the heart of the matter, which I will affirm you are absolutely correct. I defend—I believe and defend, for lack of a better term, I guess the permanence view of not easy divorce but no divorce. And here's my kind of deeper structure, deeper problem. I affirm that there is great value in some of the insight that can be gained from seeing something like the five points of the covenant.

I love to see a commentator write about the particulars, the background of a certain passage or a certain historical cultural thing. That's one of the reasons why I enjoy reading some of your commentary. Some of your appendices are books in and of themselves on topics that I find very fascinating but that would never have occurred to me.

But it seems as though to defend covenantal theology, the simplicity, perhaps the more I think it would be accurate to say the fundamentalist approach to scripture is weakened. And I'm not defending a wooden literalism. I'm not trying to defend a wooden fundamentalist approach. But when I read a passage speaking about divorce and remarriage, when Jesus says, when asked about divorce in Matthew 19 or 5, when the Pharisees come to him and say, "For what reason can a man divorce his wife?" And Jesus responds and says, "Not read from the beginning.

Man shall leave father and mother and be joined to his wife. And what God has joined together, let not man separate." He answers the question. And then the follow-up question goes on. And he says, "Why then did Moses permit a certificate of divorce?" And Jesus answers that and he says, "Because of the hardness of your hearts, Moses permitted divorce, but from the beginning it was not so." And there's this great impact of that from a theological perspective that you affirm and defend the various doctrines of theonomy and the binding applicability of God's law is revealed to Moses on many modern questions.

And yet, the clear teaching of Jesus there is that he seems to refer to Moses as working in an unregenerate, unrepentant people. And so he's ushering in a new working and a new thing. And so I see the logical applicability. And in fact, I'm deeply attracted to some of the specific work that Sutton does in that book and that you do in some of your writings on victims' rights to defend the victim in the case of wrongdoing.

And yet, I feel as though to affirm the theology or to affirm the aspects of covenantal theology would require me to deny the plain teaching of scripture and to have to tell somebody, "Well, in order to understand this, you can't take this in a simple way. You can't look at the New Testament and say, 'What did Jesus teach and let me apply it.' Rather, you have to have this deep understanding of 66 books of the Protestant Bible.

You need to go back and understand the working of God's covenant in Deuteronomy. You need to go back and read Gary North and understand his appendices where he outlines this richness." And it puts me in a bind because I feel like the simple understanding is often lost by this application of covenantalism, which is not explicit but is drawn from the overall text.

That's my personal problem that I don't know how to overcome. So don't be a wimp. Do you believe in the public execution of anybody who commits any crime listed as a capital crime in the Old Testament by which innocent parties gained divorce? I think so. But I'm not sure about the whole list.

Could we restrict it to something? Rush Dooney lists it. So remember, it's on page 504 of the Institute. So the reason I think I remember that— I've been reading the Institute for the first time. I have not read all three of his books. You've got—well, you only have to read the first volume.

And I think Bonson's—it occurred out it's the same page. I think it's 504 in Theonomy and Christian Ethics, depending on which typeset version you get. He's got the list. It's about 20 items. Okay, so you execute anybody who commits those items, male or female, certainly male. Well, then you don't have to have a divorce.

The victimized party remarries. But Jesus didn't live in that society. Jesus lived in a Roman society. There wasn't any available divorce on that basis. So he was trying to deal, judicially speaking, with what constitutes a divorce if the person has not created a crisis situation for himself by violating one of the capital crimes, which would mean it's divorce by execution.

That's what Rush Dooney talks about. Well, we don't live in that society now. Frankly, I think we're probably better if we did, but we don't. So then the question is, on what basis is there divorce? And the answer is covenantal death. That doesn't change Old Testament to New Testament.

Now, what Jesus was talking about is that the Old Testament allowed them to divorce—a man could divorce his wife not for the violation of a capital crime, but because she displeased him. And that's what upset the disciples. And that is a major difference between Jesus' teaching on the family and Moses' teaching on the family.

But he wasn't talking there about crimes that would have been divorced by execution. He was talking about what Moses did allow was that a wife had displeased her husband, and that was not even defined. And Jesus made a break with that, and the disciples said, "Wait a minute. How can you have any kind of justice in that system?

Who would accept that?" Now, let's push it further. If that isn't true, tell me what the basis is. Tell me what the basis is biblically against polygamy. Because the only passage I can find in all the New Testament that challenges polygamy is indirect in that passage, in which women now are going to be protected against husbands who want to get rid of them.

That's where you get protection for the wives. I don't know any other passage in Scripture in which there's anything like a statement where there is equality, and therefore, there is not to be a polygamous situation in which one wife is subservient to another wife. You had it in the Old Testament.

You don't have it in the New Testament. This is the passage that I would go to to try to defend the Christian concept against bigamy, because you're going to be hard-pressed to find any other passage in the Scriptures in which you can find an attack on bigamy other than this passage in which male and female are brought to equivalence in the marriage bond.

Paul I concede your point on polygamy. I generally try not to feed that particular argument, and very rarely do I come across somebody who's knowledgeable enough on the Bible to feed and say, "Well, Joshua, talk about polygamy." But it seems as though you're forced to one of two extremes, either to the extreme that you defend and are now defending, or to the extreme of, say, radical two-kingdomism or absolute all the way to where Jesus answers it and says, "But from the beginning, it was not so," and basically cut out, as much of Protestant Christianity does, cut out much of the Old Testament, specifically the law of Moses, and kind of cut it out and ignore it as only applying to Jews.

It seems like both of those extreme positions solve that problem, but I don't love either of them, and I struggle. Well, all right. Okay. Who's your third party, third movement, third position, middle way? Who's the theological, philosophical, cultural, historical defender of a middle way? I can't say. Who are you going to go to?

Yeah, because he doesn't exist. And that's the problem. That's been the problem in Christianity for a long time, certainly in Protestant Christianity. There's no middle position. So what happens is they just baptize the popular fad of 10 years ago. Right. Which is- Whatever that was, they buy into. Meanwhile, the humanist world has gone on to the next fad.

Right. And I think you see the destruction in 2018 of many Christian churches, say, most public Christian churches in the United States of America embracing, just embracing, to use your terminology, baptized humanism, but 10 years later. And you see the destruction, I see the destruction today in our modern culture.

Yeah, I think it's difficult to find the middle path because there aren't any leaders who've been on it and who've offered a philosophical defense of it. They're always quoting some humanist fad or some humanist philosopher and giving a little baptized language to it, but there's nothing consistent about the position.

And that's why I've been doing the work in economics to provide an example. That's what Rush Duny did with at least that first volume of Institutes of Biblical Law. Do you realize that was the only book on that position for exactly 300 years? No. Only one. Yeah, it goes back to the late 17th century with Richard Baxter, who wrote in 1673 this huge book on social philosophy.

It was the last time it was attempted on that scale. And for 300 years, the Protestant church simply stopped talking about it. Rush Duny shows up 300 years later as a kind of extension of Baxter, and he said, "Let's look at the text of scripture to try to find out what God has to say in these areas of civil government, personal government, church government, family government," which is what Baxter did in his book, A Christian Directory.

But nobody had read that for almost literally 300 years. It had been a completely forgotten book. So we have this problem of making up for lost time, and it's not easy to make up for 300 years of being in the shadows, not having anything particularly Christian to say, and simply adopting whatever the predominant humanist view is that prevails around us.

And that began certainly no later than about 1700 with the rise of Newtonianism and the rise of what I would call a more consistent kind of Enlightenment humanism. And some Christians went to the left-wing side, the French Revolutionary side. Some Christians, most Protestants, went to the right-wing side, Adam Smith, for example.

They prefer the free market social order of Smith to the French Revolution or to some version of communist tyranny, top-down tyranny. But the point is they chose those positions based on personal preference, not based on biblical exegesis. When I was younger, I did not realize this doctrinal problem that I have.

It was not until I began speaking in public here on Radical Personal Finance where I faced the inconsistencies in my own thinking. And the reason was when not speaking in public, and I don't label Radical Personal Finance as a... It's not called Christian Personal Finance for a reason. It's called Radical Personal Finance.

So I don't label nor do I have any desire to work just in the context of, "Oh, this is Christian stuff and just for Christians." But on the flip side, I also don't retreat from Christian positions. I see no reason why in the public marketplace of ideas why I should be the only diverse opinion that is beaten to the back and not permitted to compete in the marketplace of ideas.

And so I pull no punches about defending Christian ideology in public. I see no reason why it should be, at the very least, at the most perhaps reserved position, I see no reason why it should not be given at least the same consideration as any other philosophy or background in the public marketplace of ideas.

And so I don't label what I do as speaking to Christians, etc. But what that exposed for me was a new thing that prior to my beginning Radical Personal Finance, I was always clear on who I was talking to. If I was speaking in a meeting of a church, it was clear that I was speaking to people who were disciples, professing disciples of Jesus.

And so I could speak in a particularly Christian context. If I was speaking in a public meeting or speaking in a public scenario, then it would be relatively easy to stay focused on the topic at hand and to avoid the necessary intersections of Christianity and secular humanism that governs our culture.

But when speaking on my podcast, I have a mixed audience. And for the first time, I never knew who I was speaking to. And that was where I started to learn this deep conflict of, "Wait a second, are there different rules? Are there different rules for Christians and non-Christians?" which is why I have asked these questions of you.

So I want to just clarify and let you answer, and then I'll go back to a couple quick things, and then we'll wrap up today. I want to go back and respond to your question on divorce. Here's my concern. I guess it's a subset of the, "What about the naked savage on the island who never has heard about Jesus" argument in Christian apologetics.

But let's say that I only had the book of Mark to teach me about who Jesus was and the teachings of Jesus. Let's say that I were an early believer and I only had the book of Mark. In the book of Mark, chapter 10, in Jesus' teachings on divorce, marriage, there is...

I'll just read it because I have it, and it'll be more succinct than me trying to talk about it. "And again, as was his custom, Jesus taught them. And Pharisees came up, and in order to test him, asked, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?' He answered them, 'What did Moses command you?' They said, 'Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.' And Jesus said to them, 'Because of your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment.

But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.' And in the house, the disciples asked him again about this matter.

And he said to them, 'Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.'" And it goes on and talks about the little children. And it's in looking at these letters where I recognize that if somebody only had...

The question is, if somebody only had the book of Mark, would they have an accurate understanding of the teachings of Jesus? Or do they also have to go back and also have Matthew 19? Do they also have to then go back to Deuteronomy and understand what... Was it Jeremiah who rebuked...

No, it was Ezra, I think, who rebuked the Israelites who had married foreign wives. Do they also have to go back to do all of this? And if they also have to go back and put this together as you have done, Dr. North, then it seems as though the simplicity of understanding Christian doctrine is diminished.

So that's my specific question. What would somebody do if they only had the book of Mark? All right, go to Matthew 5, 17 through 19, and read it. You got your Bible in front of you, just go read it. Read it to the audience. So Matthew chapter 5... 17 to 19.

Correct. So Jesus is speaking and he says this, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished.

Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." So you better have more than the book of Mark.

And that's why we do have more than the book of Mark. That's why we have 66 books. And we have to be willing to study all 66 books to see in a particular topic, if there is anything specifically presented in any of those books that applies to the topic at hand.

And the early church was not in a position to do that, but the church certainly has been in a position to do it for the last 1700 years, and generally the church prefers not to do it. So on that basis, and I know, I think, I guess this is an important point, because obviously it's fundamental in my thinking.

In that same chapter of Matthew, and this was my beef with Sutton's book, again, his book Second Chance, was on that same chapter of Matthew, if we drop down to verse 31, which is one of the two references in Matthew where Jesus is teaching on divorce and remarriage. And Jesus says this, "It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery.

And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." So in this context then, and this was, again, I guess I'm driving at it, which you wrote the editor's introduction to it, but this was my issue with Sutton's book, is if we assume this, and if I adopt the idea that you teach, that the law of Moses is binding on all people unless it is superseded or abrogated by a specific statement of Jesus.

Is that a fair summary of what you would say about the law of Moses in your teaching on theonomy, Dr. North? I would say the major obvious break in the whole pattern of theonomic application is what you've just read. Jesus made a fundamental break with Moses's easy divorce position.

That's why the disciples were so upset about it. That's clearly a point at which there has been a fundamental difference between Mosaic law and the New Testament concept of ethical and judicially valid marriage. But Sutton didn't restrict—we're getting so off of personal finance—Sutton didn't restrict— Look, you've got a problem, and you're inflicting on your listeners your personal problem.

Now, we can go do this, and there are probably eight guys left out there who are listening. We can pursue it, but you have a personal problem with this particular passage. And the problem is this. You believe in victim subordination and perpetrator's rights. You believe that because that's the only way that you can maintain a zero-divorce position is to say that the victims must suck it up and the perpetrators are to win.

There's no neutrality. There's either a victim who deserves protection, or there's a victim who must suck it up for the rest of his or her life. And my position is the victim has the rights and the perpetrator has none, and covenantal divorce is the theological basis of protecting the victim, because there's only one other alternative, and that's you protect the perpetrator.

For the sake of the audience and personal finance, I'll go back to personal finance, and I'll concede that I do have my own personal understanding that I wrestle with on this. So let's go back to personal finance with three rapid-fire questions as we start. Don't give me three rapid-fire questions.

Let's stick to this. Who gets the money? So the problem is—here would be my response then. I don't want to affirm perpetrator's rights, and I don't want to affirm the loss of—I don't want to affirm perpetrator's rights as contrasted against victim's rights. I want to defend consistently the victim.

However, I also want to compare that with the clear teaching of the New Testament, specifically in the teaching of Jesus, of him not taking up his rights, specifically in the teachings of Paul and the victimization that he suffered, specifically in the instructions of Paul to slaves who were unjustly treated, etc., and specifically even in the context of paying taxes to an immoral government, simple things like that.

There are so many instructions in the New Testament to disciples of Jesus not to stand up for their own rights that I don't want to affirm the perpetrator's rights as contrasted to the victim. But I do want to affirm that God has grace for the victim in a place of victimization, and that when a victim abandons—or when a victim, for lack of a better metaphor, takes up the sword, what happens is instead of it being a shame against the perpetrator, with the opportunity for the perpetrator to repent and to come back and for the perpetrator to repent, then it puts the victim in the place of the judge, and then the perpetrator has no incentive to come back.

So I don't know how to apply it on a complete society-wide basis. But what happens is it seems as though you lose if we don't allow for the victim to know God's grace in the midst of suffering and for that expression of righteousness to be a deep and constant shame against a perpetrator, then...I'll give you an example.

I know many people who are, from my own personal interaction and personal church and church experience, I know a number of people who were the victims in a marriage relationship. Specifically, let's talk about a very vulnerable person, a vulnerable woman who is the victim of her husband's immorality and adultery on her.

However, even through the victimhood, even through her victimization, by the sin of her adulterous husband, she has consistently known, per personal testimony if she were here, she would give a testimony of the grace of God to be her husband through the entire process and to give her the grace of forgiveness of him.

And that man, though he goes on sinning many decades later, that man will never be able to stand before God and say, "I don't know my sin," because his wife wears her wedding ring and her righteousness is an affront to his sin. So that to me is a big part of the tone and tenor of so many passages of the New Testament is, "Why not better be wronged?" As Paul talks about in talking about Christians suing one another.

He says, "Why would you not rather better be wronged?" And so for Christians, I can clearly and confidently proclaim that. The problem comes down to this question of the social order, which is, of course, what you're tackling in your work. It comes down to the question of, "Well, what about a social order that includes believers and non-believers, to use your terminology, covenant keepers and non-covenant keepers?

What about a social order that includes these things? How do we deal justly with those?" Which is why you get this bifurcation between two kingdoms theology, kind of a radical pietism, a radical two kingdoms theology versus as contrasted, so that there becomes a separation. And I can see that there are difficult passages.

Your writing is strong on that. But that's my concern is I don't want to affirm perpetrators' rights, but I also see even in the actual example of Jesus and his atonement on the cross, him laying down his rights and his judicial place of superiority for the sake of something greater.

That would be my response to your question. Well, the sons of the woman you describe are being sent a message. And they're being sent a message because most sons imitate their fathers, not their mothers. And the message is I can get away with murder and nothing's going to happen to me.

In Britain in the 19th century, if there was a divorce, the husband automatically got the children. And the husband was probably an adulterer. And the reason was very clear. Women would not leave their kids if they were going to lose the kids, so they put up with the husband.

And also went the other way, so the husbands really didn't want to have all the responsibility of the kids if the wife left. And so on a very practical basis, British government for hundreds of years kept the families together based on the principle of perpetrators' rights. And it worked, highly practical, kept the families together and the wives had to put up with it.

That I don't think is what Jesus taught. You're a pietist and yet you're schizophrenic. You're intellectually schizophrenic. Rush Duney wrote the book with that title. You are in the position of virtually all American Protestant Christians today. You don't want to make a break with either system. And that's why right down the middle, there isn't anybody or almost there are no people who go right down the middle and say, well, we can build a whole Christian philosophy without making a break.

Well, they do make a break. Kingdom, two kingdoms philosophy is one, pietism is one. I'm working on building the Christian case for a Christian social order. It's not my job to get everybody to believe it. I'm just wanting to get them to believe that they have to make a decision.

They have to fish or cut bait, as my mother-in-law used to say. And most Christians don't want to do either. And that's why we're in the situation we're in. It ultimately is a position that says perpetrators' rights. And we live in a society in which perpetrators' rights is the dominant philosophy operationally of the day.

And socialism is perpetrators' rights. It's what it is. It's the thou shalt not steal except by majority vote. And the perps attempt to get the money. Of course, it backfires and the super rich get richer and richer and richer because they know how to beat the system. And the average voter does not.

But he thinks he's going to beat the system. And we have built a social order since probably 1890s, 1895, that era with the rise of the social gospel and the rise of the progressive movement. We've built a whole social order based on perpetrators' rights. And I think it's time to break with it.

But you can't just break with it in economics. You're going to have to break with it across the board. Thus my question of it being a complete system. Because pietism works within the context of premillennialism, be it dispensational premillennialism or historic premillennialism. It doesn't work in the context of postmillennialism.

The task that you've-- Go ahead. Yeah, but the world isn't premillennial. I can see that. It's never been premillennial. It's amillennial. That's been the Catholic position. That's the Lutheran position. That's the bulk of the Dutch Calvinist tradition. The tradition of the world is not a premillennial position, which is a position which has only been defended publicly on a widespread basis in the United States since the 1880s.

It's an oddball position. Historic premillennialism has had almost no defenders. The world, the kingdom, two kingdoms philosophy is amillennial. And that's real clear. And that position is Deuteronomy 28 cannot possibly be true. And that either the rich get richer and the rich are unrighteous and they get richer, or it's a random position which covenant breakers and covenant keepers, it's flipping coins as to who wins and who loses.

But don't assume that premillennialism has been a position that has been widely defended historically because almost nobody has ever held it. And the same thing is true of postmillennialism. The broad mass of humanity within the Christian church has been amillennial from day one, or almost day one, certainly from Augustine's work, the city of God, most of Christianity has been amillennial.

Yeah, I've wrestled the last few years with eschatology and I'm unclear on where I personally, I'm unclear on my own personal conviction at present. It's been a difficult, a difficult journey for me that I've really wrestled with a lot over the last few years. I guess-- Well, keep wrestling.

Indeed I will. I guess the one comment, just to kind of conclude this, well, let me ask it in the context of a question. So preamble to the question. Throughout history and in the recorded history of the Bible, I'm thinking, for example, of Peter when he was jailed and then the angel came at night and released him.

So for my non-Bible reading listeners, there's an account written in the book of Acts where the apostle Peter is thrown into jail by the Jewish leaders that day because he was preaching about Jesus. In the middle of the night, the early disciples are praying for Peter and an angel appears in Peter's jail cell, essentially blinds the guards and opens the door.

Peter goes to the house of his friends and there's a quite humorous account recorded in the book of Acts where his friends, a servant girl within the household comes and opens the door and is so shocked to see Peter's face, she slams the door in his face and goes back in because she thinks she's seen the ghost or his angel.

Meanwhile, the people inside say, "Go back and open the door," and they open the door. So whether it's in a biblical account like that one where Peter's in jail and he's released by an angel of God from jail, or whether it's an account like the many miraculous occurrences that are recorded in a place like communist China over the last 40 years.

I remember reading a book called The Heavenly Man or Brother Yoon recounts a similar account where he is jailed for preaching by the communist government. He's many experiences, he's beaten, he's jailed multiple times entirely unjustly. But then during one context, an angel appears to him while he's in jail, literally blinds the eyes of the guard so that he can walk through, my memory doesn't give me the exact number, but three or four levels of security in the prison.

And he's transported physically over the walls of the prison where there's a waiting taxi sitting there and waiting for him, an entirely supernatural divine intervention of God in human history for that individual person. So I find that the history of Christian testimony is filled with these types of supernatural victory of the victim in the context of difficult circumstances.

And so it's not difficult for me, in the light of the whole tenor and tone of the New Testament, to affirm victim's rights, but also to affirm that God is the ultimate one who takes vengeance on the perpetrator. And that vengeance of God on the perpetrator is far worse than any vengeance of society around.

So in the context of that, my question, Dr. North, is how do you reconcile the so many testimonies of Christians being willing to be victimized for the sake of the gospel with what you've discussed? How do you reconcile those things? Do you deny one of those other? How do you reconcile that?

>> I think what I would say is very clear. The wife who's dealing with a drunken husband, she doesn't need him to be blinded. She's not blocked by the walls, but she probably ought to go out the front door and get that taxi. She doesn't need a miracle to get her into the taxi.

She just needs common sense to say, "I'm going to defend myself and my children against this perverse man I have married. I'm going to take myself and my children out of his jurisdiction, and I'm leaving." And the church should back her up with that departure. Now let's go to the Lord's prayer.

"Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." Okay. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." And now we get to the bottom line, "On earth as it is in heaven." Do you believe that that prayer is going to be fulfilled? >> Yes. >> When? In history or eternity?

>> I believe in history. >> You're a post-millennialist. >> Which is, of course, my challenge. But then we get to the question of what does it mean for it to be fulfilled? What does it look like in history? Is it now being fulfilled? And that's where I would draw a bifurcation.

Then why then does Paul draw a distinction in Corinthians behind what is appropriate in the church versus the state at that time? Why does he draw a special bifurcation about believers suing one another in the church if it's all a matter of the social system of the secular, of the, let me avoid that word secular, of the state, however it be?

>> Good principle. You don't sue the guy in the state because it's a satanic state dealing with the Roman Empire. You don't take a guy into a judge who is part of a legal order that's corrupt. Is that true in a Christian social order? Paul wrote that before AD 70.

In a Christian social order in which biblical law is enforced, why wouldn't you take him before a godly judge in a godly social order, godly legal order? He's broken the law. Okay, here's how we do it. We create a thing called a corporation. And so corporations sue each other because they're not members of churches, but the financial results are going to be the same, basically, not much difference.

You can create all kinds of ways around it, but the bottom line is this, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," which means it isn't done that way yet, and so you pray that it will be done that way at some point. And the amillennialist does not believe that can be fulfilled in history.

The premillennialist believes it can only be fulfilled in history when Jesus returns with the angels to set up an international top-down bureaucracy, probably with headquarters at Jerusalem, or if not Jerusalem, then Colorado Springs. But the reality of it is, if you don't believe that's going to be fulfilled in history and cannot be fulfilled in history, then you're a two-kingdoms man and you're amillennial.

So bringing it back then to the very example of Jesus, do you affirm or do you—Paul, when preaching about Jesus in Paul's letters, I can't cite the exact one off the top of my head, but Paul talks about how Jesus' death looked like a defeat, and yet for God it was a victory.

So what looked like defeat in Jesus' death on the cross was actually victory. Did Jesus have victory or did he have defeat in history and how did that look? And of course, it's a leading question, so let me just clarify it and allow you to respond. Sometimes I think what looks like success may not be a success.

And here we could go through much of Christian history over the last 2,000 years, and I think there are times—let me just use the example from our earlier conversation. What looks like success in Mexico with a broad Catholic population, a significant, perhaps majority, percentage of the people who would affirm and say, "Yes, I'm a Christian," in reality, based upon our earlier conversation, looks less successful than perhaps the less affirming society of Canada.

So what looks like success sometimes may not actually be success, and yet what is actually successful may sometimes not look like success, as in the example of Jesus. So where Jesus— Wait a minute. Wait a minute! Go ahead. You're talking about the crucifixion. Correct. What about the resurrection? It was a success and it was clear and visible to all who saw Jesus.

And what about the ascension? A success, clear and visible. Right. That's the pattern. That's the pattern. So— Thy will be done on earth, or in earth, if you're going to use King James, as it is in heaven. There's a prayer. Why would he ask us to pray that if he has no intention of fulfilling the prayer?

Okay, so I concede your point. Now, let's go back to—and I never, of course, I never intended to get into divorce or remarriage here, but let's go back to this question that you talked about of an abusive and sinning husband. I affirm the need to protect the wife and children from that man, and here's where it's very important that we get involved, especially— Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Who's "we"? Who is "we"? Any person who is involved in the situation and aware of somebody being victimized. And you're going to give that person advice? Yes. I'm saying you should seek to protect the victim. Tell me the advice you're going to give to that wife. Okay, so in that context, I will then go to 1 Corinthians chapter 7, and this would be where, in my mind, you have an amplification, a New Testament amplification of what it means of marriage.

So Paul, speaking in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, he says this in verse 10, "To the married I give this charge, not I, but the Lord, the wife should not separate from her husband. But if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband, and the husband should not divorce his wife." Now, let me go on.

"To the rest I say, I, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him.

For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases, the brother or sister is not enslaved.

God has called you to peace. For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife? Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him and to which God has called him.

This is my rule in all the churches." So, I use that and say, I don't believe there is a contradiction between affirming, stopping, let's just stick with the physical battering of a wife or children. That should be stopped because that's a physical violence that needs to be stopped. And if the unbelieving husband separates, the wife is not enslaved.

Paul says the wife should not separate from her husband, but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. So, let's assume that that wife is able to bear the burden that God has called her to, as we says, only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him.

None of us get to choose. God may very well ordain and decree that tomorrow my wife is in a car accident and I care of the rest of my life for her. You're battling cancer right now. We don't get to choose these circumstances into which we're called, but God can give us the grace in those situations.

And so, I have observed testimony of, personally, a wife who is separated from her husband. She remains unmarried because the scripture says that she must either, if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. That husband, by virtue of the godly righteous testimony of his wife, is brought to a place of repentance.

He repents, and here I would bring in godly wisdom on behalf of those who are involved in the situation to make sure that there is fruit of repentance, a genuine lasting fruit of repentance through a period of time, and then she's restored to his wife. And I've seen husbands and wives in that situation give testimony of God's saving grace in that circumstance.

So, I don't see a disconnect between affirming protecting the victim, but also affirming that God's love can go even to the point where if we are victimized, we can still love in the midst of those circumstances. >>DAVID: They beat—the guy gets drunk every Saturday night, comes home, and beats the wife, puts her life in danger.

Then he beats the kids, puts their lives in danger. What's your advice to that wife? >>ASHKAHN: The wife and children should be separated from the husband. >>DAVID: And she cannot remarry and get a righteous father for those children. >>ASHKAHN: Based on these scriptures, I don't see any way that such remarriage could be affirmed.

Jesus was very clear that remarriage is adultery in his teaching. >>DAVID: In the Old Testament, they would have executed him for battery. >>ASHKAHN: Right. >>DAVID: So you're saying that because we live in an age of grace, grace has disappeared for the victim. >>ASHKAHN: Of course, this is the heart of what I'm wrestling with.

Let me go back to the next question, which does connect, and I'll give you the chance to clarify. Let's talk about the question of taxation. >>DAVID: Now, wait a minute! >>ASHKAHN: Let me connect it, please. >>DAVID: Man, it's like I'm watching a dancing master! >>ASHKAHN: I wonder now if I should have made the promise to you that I would release our podcast unedited.

Let me just simply say this. >>DAVID: Now, listen. >>ASHKAHN: Go ahead. >>DAVID: Listen. You're dropping the text, man. Verse 10 of 1 Corinthians 7. Read that text. >>Text on screen: "To the married I give this charge, not I but the Lord, the wife should not separate..." >>DAVID: Stop! Stop!

Read it again. >>Text on screen: "To the married I give this charge, not I but the Lord..." >>DAVID: Okay? This is the one passage in all of the Scripture that is not legally binding. >>ASHKAHN: How do you mean? >>DAVID: Because it's not from the Lord! This is his personal opinion, and you've gotten to that passage.

The one passage in which he says this is not from the Lord... >>ASHKAHN: Verse 12 says that, not verse 10. >>DAVID: I'm looking at verse 10, which you're quoting. >>ASHKAHN: Verse 10 says, "To the married I..." >>DAVID: Oh, I'm sorry. You're right. You're right. >>ASHKAHN: 12 says that. >>DAVID: I'm going...

I'm sorry. You're right. Okay. "To the rest I say, 'I, not the Lord.'" You have this situation in... Again, you are... It's for one, he is... This is not judicially binding, okay? Because it's his opinion. It is not from the Lord. But let's back it up. You're still in the position of affirming perpetrators' rights.

Now, you can dance, you can shuffle, you can tap dance across the stage. You are still affirming perpetrators' rights. You have to come to grips with the doctrine, the biblical doctrine that Sutton describes and Rush Gunny holds, of divorce covenantally, covenantal divorce. And covenantal divorce is covenantal death. The Old Testament, the guy would have been executed, but not in the New Testament, because we don't live under a Christian social order in which those laws are enforced.

So you have to have some kind of protection for the wife. And the answer to it, the answer to it is, she better get out of there and get her kids in a safe situation and get a good father and a supporter for that... For those children and for herself, because the courts probably won't enforce it.

And the church surely won't enforce it. So how is that woman going to survive if she cannot remarry? Because she's living with a man who should be, biblically speaking, executed, but it isn't possible in this society. So God says, you have the right of divorce on the basis of covenantal death.

The guy is dead. He's violated the rules of marriage. And that can happen with the woman doing it too. How about the case of the man who leaves the wife? Is there a legitimate divorce there? No. Well, let's put it this way. You've said the Catholic church is wrong.

You've said all of Protestantism is wrong. The libertarians aren't paying any attention to you. Other than you, who holds this position? I know a number of people who do, including all the people that I'm involved with in my local church. So I don't deny that it's a minority position.

Are they? Okay, who do they go to to defend this position theologically? And is it an independent church? And I'll bet it is. What do you mean by independent church? Does it answer to any hierarchy judicially? Yeah, there you got it. Okay, you're an independent guy in an independent church.

You answer to nobody, and the perps are protected. But hold on a second, Dr. North. I think you hold positions which are in the extreme minority of public, prominent Protestant Christianity, and you've defended that. Not on the position of divorce. Correct. Not on this position. What I'm saying is, it's at least intellectually possible that you could hold a position that is in the minority and be right, and that I could hold a position on this and also be right.

It's possible. But see, it's possible, but look. When any man stands against the tradition of the church, he's on thin ice. And I understand that with myself. But you're in a situation in which you have taken a stand against the entire history of the church. You are not in thin ice.

You've gone through the ice. I would deny that on this basis. First, you ask, what do you look for for theology? I'm quoting the clear scripture, which I think seem fairly clear. Now, any listener or reader would have to judge for themselves, and each person I would defend is able to make their own judgment on the teaching of scripture, because I'm not seeking to have anybody stand before me and be judged on me.

I'm saying we all stand before God. So my defense is these particular biblical passages that I'm quoting. That's my defense for a theologian. Now, we have to, of course, understand, apply, et cetera. We're not going to find a direct application for every point. We have to apply the teaching, or to use your terminology, we'd have to apply the case law to a system, which is what you are doing and what I'm seeking to try to do as well.

Now, the second thing is, I don't see how this is a historical theological minority, considering that the position that I'm defending is, in essence, the official teaching of the Catholic Church today, even though their system of annulling a marriage has become, in my opinion, a mockery in the modern world.

And I was struck by watching part of the series of The Crown that was produced by Netflix, and I was really struck at the inception of The Reign of Queen Elizabeth, how her predecessor, I think it was Edward, the guy who was bound to be king at that time, he was called, but in the land of Britain, he abdicated the throne because of his professed desire to marry a divorcee.

Now, I don't know what the circumstances of her divorce were, but I was struck by seeing that in The Crown, and then to compare that against the news from this last year of 2018, where the next royal marriage is set to occur, or has occurred, between a divorcee, and yet nobody, including, seemingly nobody in British society wants to take a stand against that.

And yet that was the very reason why Queen Elizabeth came to power. So I don't think I'm in the minority, I may be in the minority position, I am in the minority position today, I certainly seem to be that. But by all accounts, I look around at the mainstream Protestant position, and I don't see much success in maintaining marriages under any ground.

Even if we grant an exception for divorce, perhaps we grant a so-called exception for abandonment, I don't hear any Protestant, I am not aware of many Protestant churches who would even take a book like Ray Sutton's and try to apply it. What I see to the left and right of me is thousands and thousands of people who trundle into church buildings and trundle out of church buildings with very little applicability of trying to understand even what Sutton teaches to their marriage.

And I see the consequences of that worked out today in marriages all over the place, where I know plenty of people, those same, for example, those same liberation theologians would happily affirm homosexual relationships and homosexual marriages as entirely according to God's plan. I see it left and right of many people who happily affirm fornication with no marriage vows.

And so I don't have a high opinion of, and I can trace that back to the dissolution of this particular doctrine, and I can affirm that we have problems, but I don't have that much of a high opinion to say that somehow marriage that allows for divorce in case of adultery or wife battering, et cetera, that somehow that's going to stand the test of the homosexual activists on our doorstep today.

So I'll give you the last word on this to wrap up. I'll give you the last word, Dr. North. You're an amazing dancer. I love to see a guy with footwork like yours. What do you tell the wife? God's grace is sufficient. Victim, loss, perpetrators, rights. And I think we ought to end it on that.

Deal. You've written an entire book on the subject, victims' rights. Please share with my audience a little bit about your books, your website, some of the things that you have available that may be helpful with a special emphasis on personal finance. Well, just go to the site. There's a large section of the site that's free.

You can download hundreds, maybe not hundreds, maybe 150 books, something like that. A lot of books, free. You can download and print them out. There are sections on personal finance and so forth, not investment advice. That's part of the subscription section of the site. But if you want to pursue these topics, you can go to the site.

You can look up the particular topic under Christian economics, or there's Gary North's free books, which is well-named. They're all free books. You can go in and look at the various titles that are available. And you can download all of them free of charge if you want to do that.

So that's what the site's there to do. And it's been up, I guess, now about 12 years. So a lot of people have downloaded a lot of books over the years, and you might as well do it if any of these topics are really of interest to you. I will link in the show notes directly to your recent books on Christian economics, the student's manual and the teacher's edition.

And Dr. North, I'll say to you publicly here, I do want to thank you and appreciate you for your willingness to stand for the difficult, unpopular doctrines that you believe or that you teach, the convictions that you hold in the face of much public scrutiny. I don't know if it comes easier for you than for me, but I have always found it very difficult to be in a minority position and to publicly be pilloried for those positions.

And I take comfort in watching the testimony of other men, especially older men like you, who have withstood the flood of abuse for many decades and have stayed true to what you see. So thank you for your willingness to stand for and clearly proclaim what you believe and why you believe it.

I appreciate that. All right. Very good. I hope you enjoyed that discussion with Dr. North. And certainly I would imagine it was provocative and I hope engaging for you. On the discussion regarding divorce, marriage, remarriage, I don't wish to discuss it further at this point in time here other than to simply send you back to your Bible and your knees.

The end of life, we stand alone before God, not before one another. And you're not accountable to me or to Dr. North. You and I are accountable only to God. So I send you back to your Bible and to your knees. I will say this, that in our conversation, we touched on some of the most difficult, difficult things, most hotly debated topics.

And so what I would commend to you is that if you have a source of significant disagreement on some of the moral issues, theological issues, even political issues, I would refer you before you write emails to me or Dr. North or post comments that are just short and angry, go and spend some time reading because it's very hard, especially on these topics.

It's very hard when there have been serious thinkers who've written tens of thousands of pages. It's of course hard in an ad hoc interview like this to answer all of the criticisms and the responses and the rebuttals. So please, I urge you, go and spend some time doing some reading before just simply responding to let me know how upset you are.

Go and read Dr. North's books on Christian economics. All of them are free, available for you free, which is fantastic. Download them, read them. I think you will learn something and whether you agree or disagree, you will be challenged and that is an excellent thing. As we go, ad for today is Samaritan Ministries.

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