The "Great Recession," Idols, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ...Continued from page 1

This is not an attack on free markets. Generally, as a matter of natural law or creational pattern, markets do a better job of promoting freedom than command economies. In recent decades, however, it has not always been easy to tell the difference between a "free-market" economy and an economy grounded in a spending frenzy. Consider that, when the bad news of the current crisis began to settle in, one of the first responses by some was to say, "We have to get people spending again." Repeatedly politicians have yelled at bankers to begin "lending again" even if those banks are insolvent, i.e. out of balance so that further lending would only cause them to close their doors.

The prosperity that began in the 1980s continued more or less unabated until the recent crash. There were pauses along the way, but not even 9/11 stopped the momentum. Some writers speculated that we might have defeated the historic economic patterns. We knew how the economy worked. We had a system. We had overcome nature. Except that, as it turns out, the prosperity of the recent decades was largely fueled by credit--credit that assumes sufficient future wealth or growth in assets to be able to repay the debt. But consumer spending has outpaced growth in earnings. Remarkably, we have spent our Gross Domestic Product for the foreseeable future. (Savings have risen more sharply in the last few months than at any time since the 1950s. That's extraordinary because, as many have noted for years, savings had dropped to record low levels.)

The spiritual question we must ask is what drove us all to the frenzy of spending that just ended? This frenzy was not only matter for "the culture" out there somewhere. The culture of spending was in the church. Why have "health and wealth" and "prosperity gospel" preachers flourished at the very same time our credit cards went gold and then platinum? Why was it that those middle-class suburban preachers whose attendance prospered in the same period were those who gave us relatively easy lists of do's and don'ts instead of God's impossible lists of do's and don'ts? It was no coincidence that the phenomenon of the "mega church" occurred during this same period. It was no coincidence that, during the great prosperity of the last quarter century, in some segments of "evangelical" theology, we manufactured a manageable "God" who does not control the future and who is contingent upon our sovereign free choices.

Even Reformed theology, piety, and practice has not been immune from the effects of the prosperity gospel. While Robert Tilton and Joel Osteen were preaching happiness and prosperity--"$29.95, send now before midnight"--some ostensibly Reformed writers were pointing to a coming earthly "golden age" when things would just get better and better. Some of them predicted a coming crash, out of which would rise, phoenix-like, a golden age. It almost seemed that, despite the warnings by some bunkered down and hunkered down prophets of doom, when Y2K didn't get us and then even 9/11 didn't bring it about, we were invincible. It was no accident that, in this time period, Reformed congregations were convulsed by a controversy over the doctrine of justification. Are we really so sinful that righteousness with God is purely by the unearned favor of God or may we play a small but necessary part in being right with God?