Of Faith and Life

I hesitate to get into this discussion, because I consider it basically silly.  It is almost entirely a semantic argument, divorced from reality.  I speak of the phony and diabolical debate that poses faith in opposition to works. 

I enter into it, because this manmade doctrine too often becomes a shield against repentance and the changing of one’s life to become like Jesus Christ and receiving all that He has to offer us, which is everything.  In modern days, Jesus Christ announced that all who receive Him, “receiveth my Father; and he that receiveth my Father receiveth my Father’s kingdom; therefore all that my Father hath shall be given unto him.” (Doctrine and Covenants 84:37, 38)

That is to say, I take up the issue not to debate the doctrine, for there is no salvation in doing that.  Rather I seek to focus on how we live our lives to receive Christ, because happiness and salvation can be found there.

I know that there are some human doctrines that hold that a man or woman is “saved” only by faith, absolutely and completely unrelated to any good or evil that the person may do at any point in life.  That is the doctrine.  I do not, however, know of anyone who lives in accordance with that doctrine.  Since I do not know and could not possibly meet everyone, I do not deny that there might be someone who lives his life by that doctrine—I cannot imagine it—but I have yet to meet him, and I doubt that I ever will.

I say that because I hold that how someone lives is an exact and complete expression of his faith.  People think, however briefly, before they act, and their action is an expression of their faith in what will happen as a result of that action. 

You might ask, what about the person who acts on reflex?  I would ask, how did that person develop his reflex if not by thoughtful action, repeated over and over?  His reflex is the expression of his faith exercised in the development of the reflex. 

The same would be true for habits that have become very hard to break.  You may say that a smoker knows and has faith that smoking is bad for his health.  That may be true, but people do a lot of things that they understand to be bad for their health, but they do it anyway because it seems to them like a good idea at the time.  Often a desire for immediate gratification of a physical appetite overcomes understanding of some long off harm.  After all, all life takes place in the immediate moment, and the promise of future effects often can seem less persuasive and less real to the mind.  Faith in the present can trump faith in the future.

What does that have to do with faith and works?  Everything.  What people do are their works, and what they think before hand is where their faith resides before it manifests itself in their works, in what they do.  All we do, except perhaps when we sleepwalk, is a union of our faith and works.  Only in unreal, semantic debate is it possible to separate faith and works.  I have little time in this brief life for that debate.

The Apostles of Jesus Christ have all been, every one of them, practical men, living everyday life as we do.  The very practical James wrote in the New Testament, to those who asserted a separation between faith and works, “I will show thee my faith by my works.” (James 2:18)   So do we all.  Then in metaphor James explained, “faith without works is dead” (James 2:20).  As the body without the spirit is dead, there is no life in faith and works when separated.

I would offer another analogy, albeit one less elegant.  To say that faith and works can be separated and, moreover, that we can be saved by faith without any regard to our works makes as much sense as saying that a house can be built by plans alone, without brick and mortar.  A plan without the bricks and mortar is just so many pieces of paper, providing no shelter, warmth, or comfort for the living.  A house without plans will be nothing more than a pile of building materials awaiting application of some intelligent design.  There is no house without both design and materials organized and applied according to the design.

Sometimes at this point in the discussion an objection is made that there is no faith, no salvation, without grace, and that no amount of works no matter how good can make up for a lack of grace.  All of that is true.  And that is what I would explain next as a concluding point.

Never forget, ever, during this life of mortality that all of this existence on earth is temporary and was designed to be so.  All of mortality eventually has an end.  Men get into great difficulty when they try to make this mortality last.  Nothing of mortality lasts.  God designed and created this temporary life as a learning time and a place of testing to prepare us for worlds where endlessness is the rule, the existence where God lives and where most of life takes place, without end.

Part of that preparation in this life involves the voluntary reception by us of things from the eternal worlds that God offers to us in this world of mortality.  Anything of any real value in this life is what God has extended to us from the eternal worlds, and that is all that survives from our mortal existence.  It is all that we need and any good thing that we could want. 

All of those extensions of eternal things from eternal worlds come by grace, the free gift of God.  We can demand none of them, and there is nothing that we can do to merit them, but we do have to qualify for them.  Basically, to qualify for them we have to demonstrate to God that we will receive the things of eternity rather than despise them.  And then He gives them to us.

Let me illustrate by returning to the house analogy.  The plans for building the house are like faith.  Organizing and applying the bricks and mortar according to the plans are our works.  By grace God has inspired our plans, and by grace we receive from God the building materials.  Indeed, by grace God even works to correct the errors in our building.  Without grace there would be no plans, no materials, no house perfectly formed. 

God will not, however, build the house by grace.  He leaves that for us, in this world of action, and effort, and choice.  In what we do, by the exercise of our faith in Him through our actions, we show what we would do with what God gives us, and we qualify to receive all that the Father has.  We live our faith in this way so that the Father may say to us when we return into His presence, “thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things:  enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” (Matthew 25:23)

Of Claiming Good and Doing Bad

A very good book was published this month.  Ostensibly, it is about our economy and the recession.  It is actually about much more.  It is the first book about the current American economy written by a philosopher, and it is perhaps the best book I have read yet about all the recent unpleasantness.  Some might say that the economic trouble still continues, more like a long, slow convalescence from a serious illness than a healthy recovery.  For many whose financial condition stagnates, for those who have replaced a full-time job with one or two part-time jobs, for graduates who have a degree in hand but no work in the field for which they have trained, and especially for the millions who remain out of work, talk of an economic turnaround can seem like a mockery.

For those and others, Infiltrated, by Jay W. Richards, can help make some sense of what hit us.  The book does not suggest that there was a massive conspiracy to drive our nation into economic turmoil.  It explains how turmoil came nevertheless as national policymakers followed the prescriptions of people who claimed to be doing good but tried to cheat the laws of economics and markets to impose what they might call “benevolence” on the rest of us. 

It was their idea that in order to help more people own homes lenders should ignore such things as ability to repay a mortgage, strong history of employment and steady income, and having some equity in the value of the house so there would not be an incentive to walk away if prices dropped.  They also agitated for the government to expand its guaranties for mortgages to people with poor credit histories and loans where lenders cut corners.  And they badgered builders to keep building more houses. 

Their plans horribly miscarried, and yet those people have even more control over us and our economy today and are more able and determined to try again.  The recession, rather than educating and deterring them, has made them bolder.

I am reminded of what the late Louis Rukeyser, the very popular host of the PBS program Wall Street Week, wrote in the 1990s:

            Washington has been taken over by an impregnable mob of short-sighted, power-hungry megaclowns.

They try their worst to micromanage every detail of the economy, but succeed only in whipping the markets back and forth, up and down in spastic patterns.  They despise the gentler forces of a free market, which would moderate swings far more predictably.

(Louis Rukeyser, 1993 advertisement for his financial newsletter)

The people to whom I refer and whom Richards exposes in his book do not like the markets.  They trust themselves more and think that you should trust them, too.  They seriously do believe themselves smarter than the markets, and that is the problem.  No one, other than God, is smarter than the markets.  A large part of economic history, the tragic part, is a chronicle of the disasters caused when a small coterie of people are able to enforce their wishes and preferences on the rest of us in contravention of economic reality.  It never works. 

That was the story of the Great Depression, and it was entirely the story of communism, where whole societies were based upon the now well-proven fallacy that any group of people, no matter how smart or well intentioned, can gather sufficient data and know and understand enough to run a national economy.  It is just far too complicated, with billions of economic decisions being made by millions of people all day and all night long.  The markets make it all work, because the markets are the sum combined total of all of those economic actions and decisions interacting with each other.  No human five-year plan for economic control has escaped failure.

What is worse, as well intentioned as such people may start out, all too often, as Richards’ book exposes, their efforts not only fail to do what they set out to do, they fail to stay virtuous and instead  become enlisted in the service of private gain at the expense of the rest of us.  The Soviet system might have worked pretty well for the party owners of the dachas along the Black Sea but only by impoverishing the workers their leaders claimed to be serving.

Do not let yourself be put off that Richards is a philosopher.  His book is remarkably readable, one that you can take with you to the beach and actually enjoy, and feel that you have learned something—a lot—in the reading.  Richards mixes real life narrative with hard facts and good research, unified by sound reasoning to expose a nasty and growing problem in American government today.  The problem is a big part of why government is expanding and becoming more intrusive in all aspects of our lives, including our financial affairs, education, healthcare, energy use, the products we buy, the food we eat, and the entertainment we enjoy, and even the breath we exhale. 

That is to say that the story told by Jay Richards, in Infiltrated, is actually a longer story, a story that began long before the recession, and continues afterward, a story that is bigger than his book.  The recent economic events and their painful aftermath illuminate Richards’ core message, the human wreckage caused when some people are able to harness the coercive force of government to impose their personal notions of “benevolence” on the rest of us. 

Roger Kimball, writing in 2011 in The New Criterion, warned that such efforts are “intoxicating, addictive, expensive, and ultimately ruinous.” (Roger Kimball, “Liberty versus benevolence,” The New Criterion, February 2011, p.6)  Richards offers several well-described examples, well illustrating the truth of Kimball’s observations. 

A valuable lesson for policymakers and for the people they would govern:  the more discretion you give to government, the more you create the opportunity for abuse of that discretion for private gain.  Europe in the 18th century was lousy with the practice.  Our forebears sought to escape it and fought a revolution to get out of its grip.  The men who threw the tea into Boston Harbor were acting in protest of the partnership between the British Crown and the British East India Company. 

Beware the public-private partnerships.  Jay Richards explains how some public-private mortgage partnerships went bad, very bad, for the partners and for all of us caught in the dust and debris of their collapse.  I am reminded of the warning by former Congressman Dick Armey, that when you enter into a partnership with the devil, you are always the junior partner.

I conclude with the words of New York City Democrat Congressman Bourke Cockran, delivered 110 years ago:

That Government only is good, that Government only is great, that Government only is just, which has neither favorites nor victims.

(W. Bourke Cockran, speech given before the National Liberal Club of England, London, July 15, 1903, in W. Bourke Cockran, In the Name of Liberty, p.190)

Our government should be that government.

Of Liberty and Breaking the Rules

Sometime in the 1990s, before the days of YouTube, I received a homemade video from a man who owned and operated a small business near Dallas, Texas.  He ran a landscaping company, had a handful of employees, and, according to the video, was in violation of some rule or regulation of the federal government every day.  He did not intend to be in violation.  He did not want to be in violation.  As he explained, it was just impossible to comply with all of the requirements. 

The video began with the owner sitting behind his desk, explaining the problem.  He stood up and took the camera with him as he walked through different parts of his operations, pointing out what was required of him, his business, and his colleagues. 

In the main office he described the employment rules, the tax laws, the related mandates and regulations that applied because he had hired other people.  He walked over to the equipment and described the numberless “safety hazard” regulations, from warning notices that had to be glued beneath the seats of garden tractors, to how he and his workers used, carried, and stored their tools, gear, and machines, and what they were supposed to wear while using them.  He discussed the multitude of formal requirements for managing and applying the fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemicals that are commonly used in his business, including their handling, storage, clean up, and their transportation.  Speaking of transportation, because his company used trucks and other vehicles, there was another long list of rules and regulations that applied to that part of the firm.

Added to all of this, there were numerous reports, applications, notices, and other papers to be filed with a variety of agencies on a regular basis.  When he was through, he sat down again behind his desk and said, “I break the law every day.  I don’t intend to, but I cannot avoid it.  I can’t keep up with it all as long as I stay in business.”

How did we get here?  Is this America?  Is this the land of the free and the home of the brave?  Is this a land of freedom sustained by law?  It is an unknown America, too unknown to most but too familiar to people who run a business, especially the people who own a small company.  The rest of us see little of it, though perhaps we suspect it is there.  Some of us catch glimpses. 

In a large business it takes longer for the regulatory burden to become overwhelming.  For a while the boss can hire more people to help carry the load.  In the large firms of America there is a host of employees who produce no goods or offer any services to any customers.  They spend their careers complying with their slices of these federal rules, laws, and mandates so that some of the other employees can be involved in what the business is all about, providing something to a customer for which the customer is willing to pay. 

The customer may not realize that a large share of what he pays for he never receives; it goes to pay those people who work to keep the business in compliance with the government rules.  More than businessmen would be wealthier without this heavy, dead hand clamped on firms, factories, and farms.  The necessities and luxuries of life would all be a lot cheaper.  Or, another way to say it, we would get more of the goods and services we pay for, less of our money sunk into these hidden costs for unproductive activity. 

America’s Founders sought to create a land of freedom, not dominated by government and the officiousness of government functionaries.  To them “unregulated” was a goal, not a criticism.  They also knew the danger of what could happen, even in America.  James Madison wrote, “It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood. . .”  (James Madison, Federalist no. 62)

And yet here we are.  What the Texas businessman faced in the 1990s has not become any lighter since.  When was the last time that you read the full text of a law?  Who has read the Obamacare statute, the Dodd-Frank Act, or any of the other voluminous, incoherent laws recently enacted, each written on more than a thousand pages?  For each page of law enacted by Congress today government bureaucrats write ten pages of rules and regulations, all of which are enforced as law though never voted on by anyone who himself has been voted into office by the people.

In the land of the free, whose founding document begins with “We the People”, why do we tolerate it?  One of the complaints against the king of England in the Declaration of Independence reads, “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”  And yet we have done the same to ourselves.  The Dodd-Frank Act alone created several New Offices and has already stimulated the hiring of more than a thousand new officers.

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost.  “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.  Is its pattern strange to you?”

Scrooge trembled more and more.

“Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself?  It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago.  You have laboured on it, since.  It is a ponderous chain!”

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol)

There was a time when the chains had to be broken to restore the rule of law.