Abortion and Healthcare Reform

I try not to post many things here on political issues but this one does need to be noted.  I'm sure everyone is aware that both chambers of Congress passed bills on healthcare reform and the President signed it into law on Tuesday.  As you may be aware, there are provisions in the bill that would require qualified plans to cover abortion on a separate policy, which has the ultimate effect of leaving room for your tax dollars to subsidize abortion.  President Obama also signed an executive order stating that federal funds will not pay for abortions, however those orders do not have the power of law and if raised in court the order will be overturned.  Al Mohler has an excellent post on this whole sad subject.

Michael Horton on the "Two Kingdoms"

Listeners to the White Horse Inn or those who read articles by many of the Professors with Dr. Horton at Westminster Seminary California have probably at least heard of Two Kingdoms theology. Most simply put, this position argues that we have to maintain a strict separation between the kingdom of Christ, realized in the church, and the kingdom of the state. David VanDrunen from WSC has a book coming out this winter on the subject and Jason Stellman, a PCA Pastor in the Pacific Northwest Presbytery, recently wrote Dual Citizens: Worship and Life Between the Already and Not Yet.

Mike Horton has recently published three blog post addressing what he sees as some common misconceptions about two kingdom theology:

• The "Two Kingdoms" doctrine is a distinctly Lutheran view
• The "Two Kingdoms" doctrine encourages individualistic and passive view of the church's role in culture today
• The "Two Kingdoms" doctrine denies the presence of Christ's kingdom today

I want to preface the following by noting that I do not subscribe to the two kingdoms doctrine. I do think that the latter two arguments that Horton addresses are strawmen. However I do find Two Kingdoms doctrine to be an overly simplistic attempt to set forth a doctrine of church and culture and I do think the criticism that modern articulations of it are a Lutheran doctrine are valid and that Horton does not adequately answer this in his post. We should clarify that even if it is a Lutheran doctrine that this is not a sufficient reason to reject it but rather that our concern is that it is not a biblically or confessionally consistent way to address the relationship between church and culture.

When we examine the historical underpinnings of this doctrine we first need to note that Calvin, while explicitly separating the spiritual kingdom and the civil jurisdiction, does not go so far as to say that the spiritual kingdom is limited to the church. Instead he teaches that the civil jurisdiction has spiritual and religious duties imposed upon it by Christ as King. He writes that the state has the duty "to cherish and protect the outward worship of God, to defend sound doctrine of piety and the position of the church." (Institutes, 2:1487). Calvin goes on to say that civil government must “prevent idolatry, sacrilege against God’s name, blasphemies against his truth, and other public offenses against religion from arising and spreading among the people.” (Institutes, 2:1488) Further, Calvin explicitly gives the government the power to rightly establish religion. (Institutes, 2:1488) He states that the magistrate is charged “to promote religion, to maintain the worship of God, and to take care that sacred ordinances be observed with due reverence.” (Commentaries on the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, 52) Calvin also argues that the civil government must be concerned with both tables of the Law and not only the second. He argued that it would be folly to suppose that God gave magistrates the authority to judge over earthly controversies but then forbade them from enforcing the pure worship of God who is the source of their authority. (Institutes, 2:1495) Ultimately Calvin places the same limitations on the civil government in establishing laws that he does on the church in directing the exercise of religion; that neither can go beyond Scripture (Institutes, 2:1156-7; 1488).

On this basis Calvin's separation of the civil jurisdiction and the spiritual kingdom differs radically from that of Luther and Melanchthon and also from more modern articulations. Neither Calvin nor his immediate spiritual descendents ever argued for a modern separation of church and state in Geneva (nor did Bullinger or his students in Zurich). In fact, Beza and Bullinger wrote a strongly worded condemnations of the English regicide of Charles II following the English Civil War and Beza's counsel to the French Reformers enduring persecution was that their resistance could only extend so far as obedience to the king required disobedience to God and that he did not argue for an armed rebellion (Doug Kelly's book, The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World, is very good on this subject).

It should be noted that as Reformed and Calvinist political developed from Calvin that it did not do so in the same two kingdoms direction as Lutheran theology and that this can be seen on both sides of the Atlantic. In England and Scotland the Westminster Confession of Faith included a chapter regarding the duties of the civil magistrate to govern only in accordance with Scripture. In America the Presbyterians argued that, while church and state were separate, believers have the responsibility to enter the political sphere as representatives of the Prince of Peace. They insisted that civil government could only work with theistic principles and that this implies that while people should have freedom of religion that civil freedom only extends so far as what men have the moral right to do. In the Continental Reformed churches the influence of Abraham Kuyper and his ideas of antithesis and common grace led to a separation of church and state with the understanding that all spheres are under the rule of Christ.

Ultimately we have to find that the Reformed tradition does not give the state the liberal license that the modern articulation of the Two Kingdoms doctrine does. Instead, the Reformed tradition insists that Jesus Christ is King and that all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to him. This means that all individuals and institutions are called to submit to Christ's Lordship and that ultimately this is a gospel call. So the Reformed tradition teaches that this submission is not realized through a state establishment of religion but rather through equiping believers to put on the new man, not just in their church activities, but in every sphere of human activity and then to always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks a reason for the hope that is within us, with meekness and fear.

It's worth closing by quoting R.L. Dabney's encouragement to Christians in the North and the South before the Civil War broke out. He writes:

But alas! how often do we go on Monday to the hustings, after having appeared on the Sabbath as servants of the Prince of Peace and brethren of all his servants, and in our political action forget that we are Christians? Here, then, is our first need, if we would save our country: that we shall carry out citizenship in the kingdom of heaven everywhere, and make it dominate over every public act. ("Christians, Pray for Your Country")

A few thoughts on the economic stimulus package

I've typically declined to write about political issues on here because the primary purpose of this blog is theological but having an economics degree I have a hard time staying away from the stimulus package that is soon to come up for vote in the Senate. I do think that it is wise for us to have at least an introductory understanding of a number of topics and so if economics is not something that you studied in college then it can't hurt to go out to a college bookstore or your nearest used bookstore and try to find an introductory textbook on macroeconomics. If you have options then I think the one by Greg Mankiw is quite good.

Speaking in the broadest sense, when an economy goes into a recession there are really two major tools that the government has to try to break out of the cycle and encourage economic growth (much of this has to do with the work of Keynes; especially his later work rather than his earlier, simpler models). The first is to cut taxes and the second is to increase spending. The goal of tax cuts is to increase consumer purchasing power and to create greater incentives for employment. The goal of the second is to increase demand as the government buys goods and services, which in turn then drives up employment and increases economic output. The U.S. government has employed these means at different times in our economic policy history, certainly most notably at the end of the Great Depression but also several times since.

The current stimulus package is (again, at least on the broad level) a combination of these two means. It does include both tax incentives and government spending policies. That said, there are a number of reasons why this package will likely cause more harm than good. The first goes back to U.S. economic policy history. One of the necessary conditions on this kind of government intervention in a market economy is that it must be a short-term intervention to break the recession and then government spending will be cut (with or without tax increases). The obvious reason for this is that decreased revenue coupled with increased spending is going to lead to increased borrowing. Normally this is not a problem for the United States as there is no shortage of lenders who love the security of loans to the U.S. Government. The problem is that the government begins to eat up capital that needs to be available to businesses. This has a long-term effect of reducing innovation and slowing economic growth. The fact is that historically many times that the government has intervened in the U.S. the increased spending has not been cut after the economic crisis has ended. This has led to the government, a relatively inefficient economic agent, dominating an ever increasing portion of the market. The consequence is that future interventions become less and less effective and so must be more drastic in scope to accomplish anything. President Obama's stimulus package is equal to the combined cost of the New Deal, the Korean War, and the Marshall Plan after adjusting for inflation. Think for a second about how much money that is and how much borrowing it requires!

Another more recent problem that has come to light is that government spending is actually relatively harmful to economic growth. President Obama's advisors seem to assume that a one unit increase in government spending will actually lead to a more than one unit increase in total economic output (see the Barro article below on this). Several statements have been made about how this package is a kickstart that will encourage consumers to spend more in addition to the government spending increasing. There is simply no empirical evidence for this. Instead a careful examination of the data suggests that times of increased government spending actually causes the economy to contract, again because the government is a relatively inefficient economic agent. So we will not see a one-to-one (or greater) increase in economic growth from spending in this stimulus package we will like see an increase that is much lower or even zero. The long term effects will actually be economic contraction.

Fortunately you don't have to take my word for it on this. Here are a number of links that are quite informative:
"What GOP Leaders deem wasteful in Senate stimulus bill" (CNN)
"Macroeconomic Effects of Senate Stimulus Legislation" (Congressional Budget Office - please note that these estimates are made available to all of your Senators and Congressmen regardless of party affiliation)
"Government Spending Is No Free Lunch" by Robert Barro in the Wall Street Journal (Dr. Barro is a tenured professor of economics at Harvard University specializing in macro and Keynesian economics)
"An Interview with Robert Barro" (The Atlantic) - Here's a great quote on the stimulus package:

This is probably the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s. I don't know what to say. I mean it's wasting a tremendous amount of money. It has some simplistic theory that I don't think will work, so I don't think the expenditure stuff is going to have the intended effect. I don't think it will expand the economy. And the tax cutting isn't really geared toward incentives. It's not really geared to lowering tax rates; it's more along the lines of throwing money at people. On both sides I think it's garbage.

So what should we do instead? First I'll point you to an economic answer. This is a suggestion put forward by Dr. Greg Mankiw, also a professor of economics at Harvard. I think that this is a much more economically reasonable proposal that actually has some regard for empirical evidence as opposed to wishful thinking.

Second, I want to point you to a theological response. This article by Carl Truman, professor of church history and historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, was written in response to the bank bail out bill (note that this was under the Bush administration so I'm not just picking on either political party, both are at fault). Trueman reminds us of several things when it comes to economic depressions and financial failures. First, all of this is a result of human sin. No matter what economic policies we pursue they are simply the best option given a sinful world. Second, our economic markets reflect human fallenness. The pornography and abortion industries demonstrate again the sinful desires of a sinful humanity. I highly recommend reading this essay though it is a bit dated with what Trueman was focused on.