I grew up as a Christian, in a Christian home, loving Christian parents, good Christian morals, and was on the path to the good Christian life.  That’s what I thought it meant to be a Christian.  I thought Christianity was a way of life.  It was in the way I chose to live my life in relation to God and relation to the people around me.  And for a long time, I thought I was a good Christian, or so I was told.

Logic eventually one out, and I realized that the concept of a “good Christian” was all hot air.  It was a show put on by many people to convince everyone around them that they were good Christians.  Some even try to convince God.  I think this was Martin Luther realized when he started to flog himself.  Instead of flogging, I just stopped calling myself Christian because I had no desire to be live my life to please others, even God.

I now realize that following God in the Biblical way has nothing to do with being a “good Christian”.  All along, I thought Christianity was about my choices.  About whether I chose to have the emotional prayer of accepting Jesus.  About whether I chose to live my life according to so-called Biblical values.  It has nothing to do with these things and everything to do with slavery.  A slave has no choice.  At the same time, a slave thinks nothing of his own well-being, just trusts the protection of his master.  Now I realize that there’s really only one choice that God forces us to make.  Do I or don’t I want to be God’s slave?  I have met very few people, Christian or otherwise, who have said they do and shown it in their lives.  For myself, the answer is something I still don’t know.  I know I want to because the other option I know to be the wrong choice.  However, I’m not sure if I can commit myself to slavery even though I know that only in being His slave does my life have any meaning.  That is probably a battle I will be fighting with myself for the rest of my life, and I really don’t know the outcome.

One thing is for sure, I never again want to be confused with a “good Christian.”

What I found amazed me.  I came to the realization that all of what I had been taught and trained, from childhood till now, was a waste of effort and the precious few moments we have.  To move forward in what I had now realized to be a meaningful life, I had to first let go of all that I had known.  This is the most difficult step I have taken so far.  I wonder if this is what Christ meant when he said the world and even your family would turn on you.  I don’t feel that anyone is physically turning on me, but every decision I make in this new direction makes no sense to anyone I know and who knows me.  However, I can’t help but feel that a step in any other direction is a step backward.

Two years ago, I had to make a decision.  I could either be satisfied in what I had uncovered and continued my casual approach, or I could try to take things more seriously and change the focus of my life.  I decided on the latter.  I enrolled in night classes in theology more as an exploration and a confirmation that this is what I need to be doing.  It was both refreshing in that for those 9 hours a week, I could feel satisfaction in my effort.  At the same time, the remaining hours spent at work were just a reminder that I was still moving in the wrong direction.  One more thing I slowly began to understand the sacrifice that would have to be made.  Both my family and my professional life suffered during these two years.  Was it worth it?  Now that I’ve graduated, I again need to make a decision on whether to take the next step in this direction or linger which surmounts to moving backwards.  I suppose it’s only worth it if you press forward.

I started to imagine how best I could translate predestination to the lay man.   It occurred to me the best approach would be to explain the way reading is explained to a child.  My daughter is four years old and learning to read.  She sounds out every letter.  If I show her a word, she would start to pronounce dddddduuuhhh–ooooooo.    At this point, no one would know what the word is.   For her or anyone understanding reading like her, it is in the future that she would understand what the entire word is.  For now, it is still unknown and somewhat frustrating.  However, to the adult who has had a lifetime of reading, we do not read in this way, at least perceivably.  We see the word and instantly think either “dog” or “door”.  The entire word is sitting their in plain site, but my daughter cannot comprehend the full word and its meaning in the same moment.  For her, the comprehension of the word is broken up into the past (the previous sounds), the present (the one she’s working on), and the future (the coming letters which will finally make sense and show her why she is reading this word in the first place).  This could be understood as my daughter reading words in two dimensions, while an adult reading it in three dimensions.  The word has always existed in the three dimensions.  My daughter just cannot comprehend it that way.

For God, it is the same for him and his creation.  We all agree that God is eternal.  This actually is understood to mean that God is outside of time.  For us, we see past, present and future in much the same way as my daughter read the word.  However, God sees it all at once.  We agree that God is the creator of creation.  Putting both of these agreed concepts together, we get predestination.  It has nothing to do with God’s foreknowledge because for God, there is nothing in the future.  All of creation, past, present and future, was created at the same moment in God’s perspective.  We just cannot comprehend it in the same way God does.

For us to be frustrated with this prospect is just because we do not understand.  If my daughter were to think that the real joy in reading was uncovering each word as it unfolds, she would be missing the real purpose and beauty within the novel.  God has created a masterpiece to show his glory.  We are worried about the significance in slowly unveiling  the minor details so much so that we are missing the purpose and beauty of his masterpiece.   And also, we think the beauty of the masterpiece lies in each word, namely each one of us.  Like any other novel, each word is very important and has a purpose in presenting the full picture.  However, it is the full picture which we should focus on, not each word.

I believe it is the nature of sin to “dumb” us down to place significance on each word when Adam and Eve (and Jesus) saw the picture.

I recently read a management book on how to manage like Jesus.  It compared the 12 disciples as the leadership team for Jesus’ ministry.  Somehow being a leader like Jesus is within the meaning of being Christian.

Jesus was a great leader; there’s no doubt about that.  In my communication classes, the prof mentioned over and over again how Jesus used various forms of media and communication strategies to effectively reach his audiences.  This is all true, however, what made Jesus who we was (from the human perspective), was not his leadership but the message he delivered.  He delivered the message embedded in God’s revelation for all man.  His leadership skills only served in propagating this message.

Satan is also a great leader.  Somehow he convinced and successfully led the revolution of one third of the angels of heaven against God.   Somewhat like a spiritual George Washington or maybe even like Gandhi since I don’t think any of the angels actually died in the revolution.  He’s not fairing too poorly these days either.  He clearly possesses great leadership and management qualities.  Why don’t we see leadership books on how to lead like Satan?  In fact, the Screwtape Letters, as satirical as they are, could easily be a textbook in any mba marketing class.

As one of my profs likes to say in his somewhat broken english, “Never bifurcate.”   Not sure if he actually knows what bifurcate means, but my prof’s message is never alter the revelation delivered by God with any other message we want to derive.  Our own message may make sense and may even be “moral”, but the minute we do “bifurcate”, we end up with a gospel that is not what God intended.

The Bible is a large voluminous book which spans all of time.  But in all of that text, there is only one simple message transmitted from God to man.  In Matthew 22:36, Jesus summarizes this message perfectly.  (The salvation brought by Jesus is not the message.  It is the back-door God allows for us because he knows we will fail at comprehending his message.  Christians often forget this.)  If you can successfully convince yourself that this message is adhered to within the marketplace, then you are a wiser man than I.

In today’s business community, politically correct catch phrases such as “corporate social responsibility”, “transparency”, and even “integrity” are being tossed around freely in board rooms and news briefs.  This sudden focus on business ethics and business ethical responsibility has come about in a time where the size of the industrialized workforce is doubling due to the expansion of the marketplace and middle-class consumer into the Eastern world, particularly India and China.  Now more than ever, the ethics of business need to be evaluated in order to understand how they will transform the emerging markets and societies that contain them.  With one billion new participants, the impact on the overall world community is going to be felt, particularly in the Eastern World.  In the West, the marketplace business ethics have been adopted since the Industrial Revolution over one hundred years ago.  It seems that in the past few years, the East is undergoing its own revolution marked by the staggering outbreak of its middle class.

With this cultural and ethical shift already initiated over the past decade, it is the responsibility of the Christian community to understand how the ethics of business correlate, if at all, to the utopian, ethical ideal of Christian ethics as established in the Bible by God and personified by Jesus Christ.  Without this analysis, the application of what is commonly referred to as “Biblical values” is thoroughly diluted and rendered meaningless.  As a foundation, a brief discussion on the evolution of ethics both from an Eastern perspective and a Western perspective is required.  The contrast will show both how ethics of business was shaped by Western thought and how the ethics of the East was based on metaphysics and parallels Christian ethics in many ways.  The gaps and harm in itself does not automatically build a final judgment of business ethics.  If this ultimately ends in the decision that business ethics is a shift away from Christian ethics, is there a solution?  Is it possible for business ethics to be redefined to allow for the same industrial progress while ensuring a societal shift towards Christian ethics?

Ethics are commonly understood to be the unspoken guidelines that define how a man, given numerous courses of action, should react in a situation.  These would constitute laws, rules, thou shalls and shall nots.  From this perspective, ethics is the summation of the predefined set of regulations that clearly state how we are to obey in relation with one another.  However, this definition of ethics is hard to accept by most because of the constant change in these laws from society to society and even situation to situation.  Out of this confusion, we come to the even more bewildering concept of situational ethics which merely states that ethics are malleable and cannot be 100% translated from one situation to another.  If this is truly the case, then why even bother having this discussion.  The discussion exists because man can ultimately accept only constant ideas derived from a constant source.  Over the span of human history, that constant source has been God.  From that source alone is it possible to derive a constant ethical ideal.  Through God and the Bible we can finally achieve that unchanging ethic that man seeks.  Unfortunately for humanity, there is one particular ideal attributable only to man, sin.  Sin is what compels us to not fully accept that universal, Godly ethic.  As a result, man has taken a circuitous path in establishing his ethic.  It is this long journey which will ultimately conclude, rather once again return, to the ethic of God as proclaimed in the Bible, presumably in the day of Rapture.  Today, at the midway point of that journey, it is important to understand the path taken and the path yet to be taken.

East versus West

Civilization began in the East.  With civilization, thought was born in a variety of spheres, one of which was the metaphysical.  The Eastern philosophy of ethics that was derived focused on the Eastern understanding of God as the universal force that connected all matter.  The ultimate goal, the heaven in Biblical terminology, was to rejoin that universal force.  This was translated into the primary religions of the East, including Buddhism and Hinduism.  By 2000 AD, the East had already established an ethic based on this communal presence to which all belonged.  The moral law centered on understanding the connection that one had with his fellow man, performing one’s role in society for the greater good of all, and at the same time fully being aware of the need to relinquish one’s self.  The analogy of a human body can best represent this ideal.  One person may play the role of the hand, another, the foot, and another, the head.  Each has his own role to perform, yet all the parts are connected.  The body as a whole was designed to work best when all parts are working in unison to the best of their abilities.  In the analogy of the human body, there is no conflict because no single part has an awareness of itself outside of the others.  The awareness is only of the whole.  An argument can be made for the mind but, as long as the mind is linked to the rest of the body, it does not “think twice” about whether or not there is a foot attached to it to kick the football.  This concept is evident in the caste system preached by Hinduism, but this complete connection of all parts of the body is not present in society and humanity as a whole.  In the case of the caste system, it is the self-awareness of the mind or arm that makes it feel individually superior to the foot.  It is the same self-awareness of the foot that makes it strive to become the arm.  Ultimately, the body is left lame.  This disconnect between one man and his neighbor, one man from his society, and one man and God is what resulted from sin entering into the world.  Perhaps, it is this disconnect that caused sin to enter.  Eastern ethics have fought against this self-awareness and focused on the awareness of the whole.

In the West, ethical study came about much later.  It was almost 500AD before Epicures, Socrates, Aristotle and Plato emerged on the metaphysical scene and defined ethics as they saw fit.  Ironically or not, all of these original western ethicists determined an ethical ideal that was very similar to the ethics of the East.  They preached uniformity and coexistence.  Epicurean ethics for example, strongly parallels the Eastern philosophies in that the search for inner peace will ultimately lead to a focus on the greater good.  As with his Western peers, Epicures accepted self-awareness but made it his ethical belief to convince the self that the betterment of the whole was what should be practiced.  The betterment of the whole ultimately leads to the betterment of the self.  It should be stated that Epicures teachings focused on ignoring the “perceived” pleasures and benefits of the materialistic world in order to focus one’s efforts on the true source of eternal and ultimate pleasure which would be in being within complete harmony with the world around.  This is a clear parallel to Eastern philosophy.

Over the centuries, Eastern philosophy has remained relatively stable.  However, Western philosophy has been constantly evolving.  Since the Enlightenment, such philosophers as Spinoza, Hegel, and Hume, began their search for ethics with the self.  What can the mind know but itself?  With this as the premise, God and spirituality were ushered out.  Instead, a cold, atheistic view began to emerge.   Kant, a devout Pietist, strongly fought to prove God against the recent victories of atheism.  However, he too used the self as the premise.  A brief tour of Kant’s thought throughout his writings will highlight his failure.

“…whether we should not succeed better with the problems of metaphysic, by assuming that the objects must conform to our mode of cognition, for this would better agree with the demanded possibility of an a priori knowledge of them.  “   [1]

Kant states his attempt to prove metaphysics through our own cognition, in other words through the self as the foundation of the proof.  This is counter to the Bible’s supposition that faith in a universal God can be the only foundation.  With the correct foundation, reason can come to the correct conclusions.

“Now I say: man and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself…Thus the worth of any object which is to be acquired by our action is always conditional…if all worth were conditioned and therefore contingent, then there would be no supreme practical principle of reason whatever.” [2]

Kant’s position is slowly shifting towards the inevitable conclusion, and a sense of despair is evident in this writing in his essay, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals.  Finally, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant has reached the end and acknowledges his failure.

“God, Freedom, and the immortality of the soul are the problems to whose solution, as their ultimate and unique goal, all the laborious preparations of metaphysics are directed.  Now it was believed that the doctrine of freedom was only necessary as a negative condition for practical philosophy, whereas that of God and the nature of the soul, being part of theoretical philosophy had to be proved independently and separately.  Then each of these two concepts was subsequently to be united with what is commanded by the moral law (which is only possible on terms of freedom) and a religion was to be arrived at in this way.  But we perceive at once that such attempts were bound to miscarry.”  [3]

If our own self-awareness is the root of our separation from the absolute God, then Kant had no chance of creating a link.  In the end, he also concluded that reason, based on the self, would ultimately defeat God and the spiritual ideal.  By the turn of the 19^th Century, philosophy had evolved to the point where evolution had become the model for ethics.  Survival of the fittest was theme of Spencer’s ethics.  Schopenhauer and later Nietzsche would replace the absolute God with their deduced God of the “superman”.  Nietzsche took his critique on Eastern philosophy so far as to call it the slave revolt of morals.

“Without doubt, once they succeeded in forcing their own misery, the whole of misery as such into the conscience of the fortunate: so that these latter would one day begin to feel ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps say to one another: ‘IT is a disgrace to be fortunate! There is too much misery!’” [4]

Western philosophy had moved beyond an acceptance of the Eastern ideals towards an almost disdain for them.  If God is the absolute perfection of the universe, the “superman” was the absolute perfection of the self, the individual man.  There cannot be two ideals of perfection to strive towards, so God would have to be replaced.

The Rise of the Middle Class

What had driven the paradigm of Western thought to such an egocentric conclusion?  There are two overlapping periods of societal change that seem to parallel this shift.  The Renaissance and later the Industrial Revolution, which affected only western culture, brought about the rise of the middle class.  The middle class represents those individuals who have no claim to authority through lineage but have amassed enough material wealth to remove struggle and insecurity from their life, at least when compared to the insecurity faced by the lower class on a daily basis.  This middle class was created out of human opportunity.  It was opportunity to improve one’s own status through one’s own efforts.  Prior to this shift, the classes were predominantly set based on ancestry, similar to the caste system in India.  With no hope for a change in one’s status, one would go about life looking for the greater purpose or God that saw it fit to delegate that status.   Never before had so many lower class dwellers been given such an opportunity to change their societal position.  This bred a culture of self-entitlement which fed off of itself to propagate throughout the Western cultural landscape.  All of a sudden, the feet were able to make the choice to become hands, and the hand could choose to become the head.  With such possibilities, who would choose to be the feet?  The key word is “choose”.  Needless to say, society, out of sheer necessity and circumstance, will force someone to be in the lower class.  However, the choice to remain there was not of one’s free will, but of the choice made by the rest of society out of contempt for that lower role.  And after all, ethics is about the choices people make.

It is commonly accepted that the Christian ethic parallels the Eastern ethic.  The premises of God and the core faith may be different, but the resultant ethical philosophies are virtually identical to those of other Eastern religions.  With this shift of the Western philosophy away from that of the East, it is deduction to conclude that Western ethics has shifted diametrically away from what the Bible holds as Christian ethics.  God and Jesus have proclaimed that we should love God and our fellow man, and sacrifice our “self” in the process.  The ethics of Western culture is the promotion of the self to the “superman”.   This has culminated in the West in a transient sort of ethics which is perceived to vary from society to society.  The ethics of the 70s were different than the ethics of the 90s and they will be different again in the 2010s.  This is merely the result of man attempting to derive his ethical ideal out of his own transient self.  Society is an extension of the self.  In the 90s, going green became an ethical position and now society has evaluated the “superman” as being one who is also concerned with the environment.  It only follows that the super ideal for society would also incorporate that standard.  In another 10 years, the definition of the “superman” will change yet again and so will the ethics of that society.  When broken down to this level, it becomes apparent that the ethics of the “superman” is the ethics of sin.

“In particular, sin is that power which makes human beings forget their creatureliness and dependence on God, that power which prevents humankind from recognizing its true nature, which deceives the adam into thinking he is godlike and makes him unable to grasp that he is but adamah. “  [5]

When Adam and Eve first ate the fruit, the Bible makes it clear that they immediately became self-aware.

“For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gen 3: 5).

Aside from that, they were the same two humans that God had perfectly created.  It is the self-awareness that separated them from God.  Fast forward to the present day and we can see the natural progression of this self-awareness in manifesting an ethic in which the sin from the Garden of Eden is not frowned upon but rewarded.  Before eating the fruit, man’s purpose was to be a part of God, simply to walk with God as Adam and Eve did.  After the fruit, man’s purpose is to become God or raise his own self to God’s level.  The serpent’s temptation to Adam and Eve was not a complete lie, but rather a lie of omission.  The serpent stated that Adam and Eve would actually “be like God”; the truth is that they would merely “think” they were like God.   Eastern philosophers have realized the futility and error in this for thousands of years.  However, with the seeming success that the middle class has achieved in pursuing this goal, western ethics are evolving to reinforce this sinful hope.

The Ethics of Business

The ethics of the marketplace are simply an extrapolation of the ethics of the men within the microcosm.  In many a seminar, the promotion of work culture and integrity is common.  Along with these characteristics, the same seminar will instill a motivation to excel through a sense of competition.  This competition is derived from the need for each person to elevate his own self to the “superman”.  Ultimately we must understand what causes a business to succeed?  It succeeds when it is able to provide security for its members.  It succeeds when it is able to provide wealth to its members.  It succeeds when it is able to provide respect and status within society.  Is there any other path for success?  On the grand economic scale, the various stock markets are the barometer for success, and any market analyst can confirm that at the end of the day, it is the money that separates a successful company from a failing one.  Some businesses attempt to blur the lines by having a moral goal.  For example, a business that makes seat belts for cars has as its mission to eliminate the preventable deaths resulting from traffic accidents.  At the outset of the business the goal may have been to prevent deaths, a noble goal.  However, in the ethics of business right and wrong is defined by dollar signs.  Somewhere down the road, a competitor will arise and the ensuing competition will force the company to blur the lines of whether its goal in all of its decisions is solely to save lives.  Adam Smith, considered the father of capitalism by many economic luminaries such as Alan Greenspan, himself saw this invariably disastrous outcome in his treatise, Wealth of Nations.

“That order of things which necessity imposes in general, though not in every particular country, is, in every particular country, promoted by the natural inclinations of man.  If human institutions had never thwarted those natural inclinations, the towns could no-where have increased beyond what the improvement and cultivation of the territory in which they were situated could support; till such time, at least, as the whole of that territory was completely cultivated and improved.  “ [6]

Smith states that without a third-party “thwarting” mankind, for instance a government, it would destroy its own environment, an altogether unethical outcome by any consideration.   The instant a decision has been made for the sake of profit, the line is blurred and will continue to blur until the original noble goal is merely an afterthought.  This happens for the simple reason that all three markers of business success are financial.  Without corporate success, the individuals cannot strive for the “superman” complex which society and sin have trained them to seek.  There is an old business axiom: “a

business that is not succeeding is failing”.  Regardless of the industry, owners, and employees, the gauge for success has always been and will always be money because society has determined that money is what provides the opportunity for the individual to achieve beyond himself and strive for the “superman”.

Some would argue that the indirect outcome of an act can ethically justify the act itself.  The success of the seat belt company is that more people are saved in car accidents.  The final outcome of the action was positive.  Nevertheless, ethics is not determined by the end result but by the intended result of the decision maker.  If a driver is driving down the road and sees a dog in the middle of the street, he may veer right to save the life of the dog.  That was his intention.  However, if in veering right, he may happen to run over two pedestrians standing on the side of the road.  The driver’s ethics remain intact because his intent in veering right is what is judged, not the outcome.  The man intended to save a dog, not to kill two people, a morally sound decision by any ethic compared to the converse which is to kill the dog. This parallels the Bible’s assertion that God does not consider our works in judgment, but instead he reads our heart.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves [it is] the gift of God Not of works, lest any man should boast.  – Ephesians 2:8-9

Consider how God used Nebuchadnezzar’s sinful, egocentric heart to perform his ultimately good and perfect will.  Nebuchadnezzar is in hell because of his desire to follow the sinful ethical ideal of self.  However, God caused the repercussions of his sinful desire to work for good.  A business, on the other hand, has only one intention at heart, to succeed.  God may use it to bring about a good work, but the intention is unchanged.  As discussed, in the current capitalistic marketplace the success of a business can be defined and measured in only three ways.  The first level of success is security.  Has the business achieved the necessary critical mass to safely continue to exist?  Some businesses live with the constant fear of closing their doors, this adds to the insecurity of the individuals within the company.  Insecurity from the Christian perspective is in itself a sin.  As Christians, God will see to our needs.  How can God be our rock if life is spent seeking security through one’s own efforts?  If we choose a will aside of God’s for the purpose of security, we can conclude that the decision is against the Christian ethic.  Secondly, a business exists to provide wealth.  The Bible is direct when it contends that seeking wealth is not in accordance with its ethic.  Instead, we are to seek to accomplish the will of God.  As hard as it is for some to understand what God’s will is, it is sometimes painfully obvious what God’s will is not.  It is not to amass self-wealth during our time on earth.  And as the final goal of business is self-aggrandizement of the individual within it, it can be safely presumed without debate that the will of God does not contain the promotion of the Christian self over another as its primary goal.   If the intent of business is the security, social elevation and self inflation of the employees within it, this intent equates to a direct antithesis to the Christian ethic of “love your neighbor as yourself”.

To further illustrate the justifications Christians use to rationalize their effort in business, one of the most popular sayings among Christians is “you must do your work for God’s glory”.  As Christians, we know that God’s will does not include any of the three driving forces in a successful business: security, wealth, and status.  Is it possible to work at a task for the glory of God when we are clear that the purpose of the task is not in God’s will?  An extreme case of this failed attempt at a division between task and intent was evident in the Nuremberg trials.  Many of the war criminals guilty of killing hundreds to thousands of Jews used the argument that they were simply following the orders given to them to the best of their abilities.  That is the same argument that is used in the case of individuals working for a business having intent outside of God’s will.  From a human perspective, being a software engineer working at Infosys trying for a promotion is “much less unethical” than being a Nazi war criminal having committed mass genocide; in fact it is ethical from the human perspective.  Once again, it is clear that worldly and business ethics are not Christian ethics.  Worldly ethics would determine that the Nazi war criminal was clearly “more” wrong.  Christian ethics would contend that neither of the two individuals was right.  “He that is not with me is against me…”  (Luke 11:23) To God, sin is sin; we are either choosing to follow His will or not.

Are all those who work in the business marketplace committing sin?  This is not necessarily true, though for the vast majority it is.  Again, to determine sin, God looks at the heart.  Put another way, Christian ethics looks at the intent.  If an individual truly believes that the business they have chosen to participate in is conducting itself within God’s will and their intent in being there is purely to aid in the progress of God’s will, that individual has a solid argument under the definition of Christian ethics.  However, it has been previously established that any business competing in the marketplace cannot be in God’s will because of its focus on security, wealth and status.  How is this individual able to conduct himself within God’s will while the business to which he is contributing is outside of God’s will.  The key is that what matters is what this individual “truly believes”.  Ultimately, the prior statement can be reworded to say, “If an individual has deluded or has naively convinced himself into believing that the business is within God’s will”.  This is a possible case because the intent within the individual’s heart was real, despite the fact he was oblivious to the truth.  Ignorance is bliss.  In reality, for most this complete misinterpretation and misunderstanding of the intent of one’s employer is impossible to achieve.  After all, in a world established on sin, the best sinners will usually prosper.  Jeremiah has a sorrowful realization of this fact in his mournful book.

A creative rationalization for worldly success through business is the prosperity gospel.  This is a new age doctrine that states a life spent as a Christian believer will result in wealth and riches upon this earth.  One of the main reasons that this philosophy has gained momentum is because it satisfies the conflict between the ethics of the world and the ethics of Christianity.  In this way, business is transformed into a vehicle that God uses to dispense his blessings.  It correlates Godly blessings, considered a confirmation that one is serving God’s will, to the superhuman ideal, achieved by serving one’s self will.  The confusion or delusion stems from the definition of a blessing.  In fact blessing is not a proper translation of the Greek used in the original text.  Present understanding of blessing is some sort of a gift.  However, in the original Greek, eulogeitos, from which the English word, eulogy, is derived, is more accurately referred to as praise.  Western Christians tend to view blessings as the end result of a combination of hard work and God’s grace.  A blessing is simply praise bestowed on an individual by God in order to further His will in our lives and the world around us.  That is why in I Peter 3:9, Peter states “Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing… “ We are not called to give our wrongdoers gifts, but to return their evil with love and praise.  When an individual contorts a blessing in to some sort of reward or prize for services rendered to himself (or his business), we end with the prosperity gospel.  Jesus himself makes it abundantly clear when he says, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul.” (Mark 8:36) Combine that with His proverb of “No man can serve two masters.”  (Mathew 6:24), and it is evident that the riches we achieve on this earth do nothing for God’s kingdom and provide no service to the will of God.

No Man can Serve Two Masters

Having understood that one’s service as a Christian should not be towards business and the only truly “forgivable” service to such business is absolute ignorance, is there any ethical foundation for which to base and justify a life spent in the business world.  In the black and white of the Bible and of God, sin is sin, and the answer would be decisively “no”.  In the sin powered world of man, all one can hope to do is move towards the ideal that God has set.  As a result of the Fall, it is not possible to exist in a completely ethical state in God’s perspective, so God has graciously chosen to look at the heart.  Was the individual’s intent throughout his life to move away from the sin that consumed him?  The individual is guaranteed to fail, God understood this from the beginning, but perhaps He will consider an acceleration of service towards Him as an acceptance of Him and His ethics.  In the three-fold definition of business success, if judged by the human ethic, the sequence of superhuman rightness is security at the lowest level, next wealth, and finally status.

“’Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that remains into eternal life which the Son of man will give you; for him did God the Father seal.’ … That is a parable about life for many people.  They labor for the food that perishes…they give the best years of their lives in working for what is worthless.”[7]

An effort made towards a life driven by service of only God’s will as the “one and only master” would require a complete reversal of course.  If an individual has achieved status, he must ignore it and in some cases sacrifice it.  If an individual has achieved wealth, he must again ignore it and possibly sacrifice it.  Finally, if an individual has achieved only security, even that he must be willing to sacrifice.  The sacrifice is not a requirement, but the willingness, the intent, to sacrifice is, proven by the almost sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham.  An accelerated, conscious movement towards God is the most an individual can hope to achieve.  During their lifetime, many will not be able to get past “Level 2”, sacrifice their dependence on wealth.  The son of a king has the greatest hill to climb.  His status is considered his birthright. He must first relinquish his dependence on it.  He does not have to give up his crown, but he has to prove to himself and to God that he is not dependant on it, a very tall order.

Early on in Sunday School, young children are commonly taught by their Christian parents and elders to memorize the verse,

“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” – Romans 6:23

But equally worthy of memorization are the preceding statements Paul made in his letter to the Romans:

“For when you were slaves to sin, you were free in regard to righteousness…But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life.” – Romans 6:20,22

When considering all that has been said regarding business, Romans 6:20 and 22 present a bleak picture to humanity.  Man cannot serve sin and God at the same time.  He must choose, and as is understood, man will ultimately choose sin because, after the Fall, it is embedded in his nature to do so.   Paul immediately follows that the gift of eternal life is freely given, added almost as an empathetic solace.  As Jesus stated to the rich young ruler,

“One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.  But at these words he was saddened, and he went away grieving, for he was one who owned much property….It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.“  – Mark 10:21-25

Jesus gave the disappointed man a choice, give up all he had and choose God.  He even confirmed that God will take care of his needs.  The man could not make that choice; his ethics would not allow him to.  This is the strength of the grasp that our sinful nature has upon man, and as Jesus mentioned, wealth makes it all the more difficult.  Simply stated in the context of business, the more successful your business, the harder it will be to enter the kingdom of God.  And, in just a few versus prior, Jesus definitively answers the question about morality and the ultimate good.

“Why do you call Me good?  No one is good except God alone.”  – Mark 10:18

Christian ethics is defined by making the correct choice to serve God’s will.  Business, as it exists in the sinful world, is a choice not to serve God’s will.

Closing Analysis

The consequential question that was presented at the beginning is a challenging one.  “Is it possible for business ethics to be redefined to allow for the same industrial progress while ensuring a societal shift towards Christian ethics?”  The answer is in the definition of business success.  The scale by which business success is currently measured is money.  This is a direct consequence of the scale by which individual success is measured.  If all of the markers of business success are wealth, how can it be that the society which defined these markers is operating on some other scale?  However, there is an interesting distinction between business success and individual success.  Business success is a simplistic translation of individual success into a statistical value measured in currency.  Ultimately, individual success is about the foot not wanting to be the foot but to become the hand or even the head.   It is about self-respect and status among your peers.  For this reason, it is possible that society could shift the source of self-respect, so that the focus is not money.  For example, if somehow society, necessarily channeled by the government, could establish a system where business success (and individual success) was defined, not by wealth, but by the contribution to society, such a system would take the focus off of financial wealth.  This would appear more appealing.  Socialistic societies have established this ideal.  However, this is also a sinful system by Christian standards.  God wants the foot to accept that it is the foot and understand that its value is equal to all others.  More importantly, God wants the hand and head to realize the equal value of the foot.  Society cannot simply change the marker for individual success.  Money itself is not the problem.  For society to conform to the Christian ethic, the individuals within it must voluntarily forego individual success.  They must accept who they are and choose God’s role for them in His will.  An attempt to change their position for the purposes of establishing their own self-worth to themselves and within society is an attempt to step out of God’s will.  Business exists because of the attempts made by individuals to do just this.

Bibliography

1. Dunn, D.G. James.  The Theology of Paul the Apostle.  Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publishign Company.  Cambridge.  1998.
2. Kant, Immanuel.  Basic Writings of Immanuel Kant.  New York.  Random House, Inc.  2001.
3. Morris, Leon.  Reflections on the Gospel of John.  Hendrickson Publishers Inc, Peabody, Mass.  2000.
4. Smith, Adam. Wealth of Nations.  New York.  Random House, Inc.  2003.
5. Smith, Douglas.  Friedrich Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals a New Translation by Douglas Smith. Oxford. Oxford University Press.  1996.

Wright, Christopher J.H.  Old Testament Ethics for the People of God. Inter-varsity Press, Leicester, England.  2004

[1] Kant, Immanuel.  Basic Writings of Immanuel Kant. (New York.  Random House, Inc.  2001. ) Pg. 12

[2] Kant, Immanuel.  Basic Writings of Immanuel Kant. (New York.  Random House, Inc.  2001. ) Pg. 185-186

[3] Kant, Immanuel.  Basic Writings of Immanuel Kant. (New York.  Random House, Inc.  2001. ) Pg. 384-385

[4] Smith, Douglas.  “Friedrich Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals a New Translation by Douglas Smith.” (Oxford: Oxford University Press.  1996.) Pg. 103.

[5] Dunn, D.G. James.  (1998).  “The Theology of Paul the Apostle.” (Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company.)  Pg. 112

[6] Smith, Adam. Wealth of Nations. (New York.  Random House, Inc.  2003.) Pg. 483.

[7] Morris, Leon.  Reflections on the Gospel of John. (Hendrickson Publishers Inc, Peabody, Mass.  2000.)  Pg. 220-222

I have so many things that I live for: my work, my wife, my daughter, my dogs, the Lakers, a Porsche 911 Turbo, my Google stock, a nice big house with a swimming pool, and whatever other ambitions I have for my future.  

The convict on the cross had nothing left to live for.  All that remained for him was God.  All that filled and ruled his heart was God.

That is why he is there with God, and why I probably won’t be.

What’s not ever spoken about is the cost.  The cost to us.  What is the difference?

In my job, I manage teams of developers attempting to deliver products our customers have paid for.  The sales team needs two numbers in order to make a sale.  The price that the customer is willing to pay.  And the cost that the development team requires to produce the product.  To the sales team, this cost represents how much the company has to pay in order to deliver what was paid for.  

What does this have to do with salvation?  Sunday School has taught us that the price Jesus paid means salvation is given freely.  This is the greatest example of false advertisement.  Jesus paid the immense price of salvation, but we are responsible for the immense cost.  Literally, the cost is our soul.  In an ironic twist, we have to sell our souls to God.  

This sounds trivial.  Of course, we would give our souls to God.  In a heartbeat, we would do it for free.  This is easy!  

However, despite what the movies say, we have already sold our souls to the devil.  From the day we were born, our soul has been his.  This is why we are all born sinners.  All our lives we have a desire and a tendency to sin.  Samuel told the Israelites to love God with all their heart and not love vain and worthless things.  Our entire lives are spent loving and seeking these vain and worthless things, our idols, our Baals.  Our soul was freely given to them from birth, and the cost to reclaim it and give it to God is more than many can bear.

Today in Church, the sermon spoke of the difference between the wealthy who would give up his spare change (a lot of it), and the poor who gave up everything she had.  The cost is not a transaction in your bank account.  It’s all the blood, sweat and tears you put into that bank account.  And usually that’s more than we are willing to give.

 The more I study, the more I realize that the false promise made in Sunday Schools (and big people’s Sunday Schools) puts people in a very unfortunate situation.  They are on the right track to understanding what it takes.  In their heart, they can feel they know what needs to be done.  But they are told that there is a shortcut.  When the cost gets too high, they choose to believe the shortcut.  

In Sunday School, I memorized:

“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal  life in Christ Jesus our Lord” – Romans 6:23

Too bad they failed to mention:

“But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.” – Romans 6:17-18

“But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life.” – Romans 6:22

No one told me I had to be a slave to anything (or anyone).  Is it possible to be somewhere in between being freed from sin and enslaved to God?  I think God answered that with the “no man can serve two masters” verse.  And I definitely know I have not yet chosen to be God’s slave.  So where does that leave me? 

If in everything else in life there are no shortcuts, why is this any different?  Jesus might have paid the price.  And it was a huge price to bear.  We have to bear the cost.  Only then can we deliver a product to God that is worthy of salvation.

Depending on your beliefs, it seems to me that one is a question of whether or not you a life is saved and the other is whether or not you choose to allow the happiness of a couple you believe are sinning.  And yet, using the Bible as a defense, many chose a ban on gay marriage.  

Jesus himself said that we should not judge, and he spent much time socializing with the “sinners” of the day.  It was the pharisees who made laws enforcing their definition of sin.  They were the one’s who passed judgement and shunned the sinners.  And Jesus chastised them many times for that.  

The suggestion that there is a health benefit (HIV) is hollow since the health benefit comes from abstinence, not the refusal to give a marriage certificate.  

The policing role of the government exists to protect human rights, not remove human freedoms based on a perceived moral law.  

It seems that, to many people, being “Christ-like” involves forcing others to not sin.  For those who believe they are doing God’s will by voting for a ban, they must take a second look at what they are trying to accomplish.  Is banning gay marriage preventing sin in any way?  Or is it just a way of rejecting a sinner? Regardless of the answer, in the end, salvation is dependant on the free will to chose it in favor of sin.  For salvation to be given, sin must be allowed.

I feel that the problem is similar to how Jesus and God are supposed to be separate but the same.  If Jesus had a separate nature from God, then would he still be God?  How about if Jesus had the same, shared nature but a separate will?  How could Jesus be God without God being Jesus?  Yet we are asked to understand that some part of Jesus was not God.

The only real difference is the concept of free will.  In a pantheistic God, God does not have a free will.  We do, but he is a part of us or, rather, we are a part of him just as all matter in the universe is a part of him.  Removing God’s free will sounds ridiculous.  

If we have free will, how could God not have free will?  That would almost make us superior to God in a way.  So we have developed this distinction between the omnipresent and the pantheistic God.  God is within us, in some compartment reserved for supernatural beings most likely located in our heart.  In this way, he can retain his free will and we continue to have ours.  But can we still qualify this God-passenger as omnipresent?

If God is omnipresent, is he within our thoughts?  Is our thought itself God?  It’s a vast, gray area which makes me wonder if a pantheistic God is the only form of God which could truly be labeled as omnipresent. If I have free will apart from God, then God does not exist in my free will, and that would negate his omnipresence.

As the world has become more and more diverse, the available career choices have expanded from farming and hunting to a variety of different options.  Vocation skill training has come along to bridge the perceived gap between education and life preparation that seemingly developed.  Whether vocation skill training, in the place of general knowledge, is a benefit to the individual in the long run and society in general is yet to be seen.  

From the general knowledge taught in higher education is the concept of a “well-rounded” individual has evolved.  In reality, “well-roundedness” is the ability to think abstractly.  There truly isn’t much benefit to knowing the details of the French Revolution other than perhaps for a round of Jeopardy, but with such knowledge, parallels are drawn with the real world.  These parallels are not in the form of witnessing a victim fighting back from a mugger and relating that to the French Revolution.  The understanding of the French Revolution and all other revolutions create an abstract and theoretical vision of the consistency of a revolution, and the parallel is drawn to that abstraction.  The same applies for the pythagorean theorem, and all other forms of “well-rounded” knowledge.  These parallels prove invaluable over the course of an individuals life.  

Despite the need for this theoretical thought process in our lives, vocational training is equally important for that segment of the population that is critically dependant on immediate income.  This development in education is important but should be used on an as needed basis and only after the foundation of theory has been set.  As an example of what not to do, my high school had auto-shop and machinery as electives.  At the age of just 14 or 15, these individuals were already being given vocational skills at the expense of theory, ultimately pigeon holing them into a certain life.  

Through all these years, there is still one critical aspect of life that is being neglected in education.  If education was designed to prepare the individual for life, then it has failed to incorporate philosophy and, by continuation, religion.  I feel the reason is that an extensive study of philosophy is the perceived disconnect between philosophy and everyday life.  If the French Revolution lays a theoretical foundation, then how could the Republic, The New Atlantis, or Spinoza’s Ethics not do the same?  

Ultimately, societal life itself has shown us why this is needed.  While everyone knows that teenagers go through a depression, is this depression not philosophical in nature?  This depression ultimately leads to the independant philosophical thought found in college, which vocational learners typically miss out on.  But this independant discovery is usually unsophisticated and repeats the discoveries of philosophers two thousand plus years ago.  The so-called mid-life crisis is another example of a depression that ultimately hits most of society in some form.  All such negative thought processes are a result of the gap in knowledge that philosophy and religion have tried to fill for centuries.  They are a search for the “meaning and method of life” which has always been the focus of philosophy.  We say that “those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.”  The same is true for philosophy.  

With a detailed knowledge and understanding given at a young age, all future thought could be built on that foundation.  Considering, how large a percentage of society has gone through these searches for meaning, it is hard for me to understand how education has gone so long without filling the gap.  In the Republic, Plato’s ideal society is led by philosophers, and the leaders of society are given philosophical training.  I believe this training is as fundamental to life preparation as any other and should not be denied to any.  

I for one, wish that my education had included a detailed philosophical study.  I probably would have written these articles fifteen years ago and would be that much further along in my journey.