Jerry Bowyer - The Maker Versus the Takers: What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics

Advance Praise for

We can no more stop participating in economics than we can suspend breathing, drinking water, or eating. That makes economics as spiritual as any other dimension of our existence, and Jesus had a lot to say about it. You wont find a better guide to what Jesus said about economics than The Maker Versus the Takers, and theres never been a better time to consider the topic than right now!

Joseph Castleberry, Ed.D., president, Northwest University and author of The Kingdom Net: Learning to Network Like Jesus

Jesus is too often misunderstood. Biblical Christianity can be seen as irrelevant when we fail to both understand the historical context and use it for a better lens for contemporary application. Jerry Bowyer offers a provocative and critical set of insights into how economics and geopolitical factors shaped the Gospel narratives in a way that helps us consider how Jesus would have us engage our present world as ambassadors of the Jesus Administration. Stimulating, beneficial, and disturbing in a good way!

Mike Sharrow, CEO, The C12 Group

Jerry Bowyer takes on the sensitive question of can wealth be righteous? Curiously, this was a political question even in the days of Jesus. If you have ever wondered what Jesus thought of wealth or why the rich young ruler was turned away, then The Maker Versus the Takers is for you.

Gordon Robertson, president, The Christian Broadcasting Network

Jerry Bowyers The Maker Versus the Takers is a tour de force! The teachings of Jesus are clear: either have a big state and a small god, or we can have a big God and a small state.

Chuck Bentley, CEO, Crown Financial Ministries, Founder, Christian Economic Forum

There are very few subjects that modern Christians get more wrong than economics, and very few people more qualified to help them get it right than Jerry Bowyer. The Maker Versus the Takers is all at once readable, logical, exegetical, and most importantly, biblical. Jerrys ability to help readers unpack all a text has to offer is extraordinary. The impact a Jesus-centered economics will have on our society is profound.

David L. Bahnsen, chief investment officer, The Bahnsen Group; trustee, National Review

A FIDELIS BOOKS BOOK

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

The Maker Versus the Takers:

What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics

2020 by Jerry Bowyer

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-64293-370-3

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-371-0

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE (NASB), Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

King James Version (KJV) is in the public domain.

Youngs Literal Translation (YLT) is in the public domain. Bible text designated YLT is from the 1898 Youngs Literal Translation by Robert Young, who also compiled Youngs Analytical Concordance. This is an extremely literal translation that attempts to preserve the tense and word usage as found in the original Greek and Hebrew writings. The text was scanned from a reprint of the 1898 edition as published by Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

This all started with a phone call to my radio show. A woman called in to attack me for not supporting socialism. Jesus said that its easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven. The answer popped immediately to my mind: But He said it about a senator, and you want to give senators like this even more money and power.

So, it started two decades ago with a debate, but over time I grew hungry to do more than just win the argument or to merely defend my views against shallow attempts to use the Bible to discredit them. I grew hungry to understand what Jesus really was saying, if He was saying anything at all, about economics.

This book is written for people who share that same hunger, who really want to know what Jesus said about economics. It may seem too obvious to mention, but in order to have a Christian view of economics, we need to study what Jesus said about it. Unfortunately, a great deal of the Christian commentary on economics is based on ideas that have been brought to the Gospel texts, rather than drawn out of them. Ive been wrestling with these questions since I rejected Marx and embraced Jesus thirty-seven years ago. Since I was a Marxist before becoming a Christian, I gravitated toward reading books about Christianity and economics, particularly Christian refutations of Marx.

What I saw then is pretty much the same as Ive seen since: people taking their best thinking and hanging it on a Scriptural passage. Folks on the left took their best thinking (which in my estimation then and now is not very good thinking) and hung it on some text from the Gospels or the prophets. They formulated a Marxian concept of justice and then simply read it into the text every time the word justice was used. You see, they first decided what was right and then concluded, since it was right, Jesus must have believed the same thing.

We free-market types had better economics but still tended to read our views into the text or, worse, attempted to shield ourselves from the text by spiritualizing away Jesuss references to the poor or to debt. Some of us push Jesuss economic message off to the distant future when He returns and the Kingdom comes.

Millennial Christians sensed a tension between Jesuss confrontations with wealthy people on the one hand and the attempts of free-market advocates to explain them away on the other. Many of these millennial Christians mistakenly embraced what they thought was a left-wing Jesus. They clustered around the movement that came to be called red letter Christianity, a name that refers to versions of the Bible that print Jesuss direct words in red ink. These progressives were saying to their conservative elders that they, unlike the conservatives, embraced Jesuss actual words, including clear denunciations of wealth.

And thats where were stuck, between red letter Christians and Christians who understand the true dangers of centrally planned economies but shy away from quoting Jesuss tough talk about economic exploitation. This book will argue forcefully that Jesuss denunciations of the wealthy are not calls for government expansionson the contrary, they are denunciations of those who wielded expanded state power.

This book is for those of you who want to become unstuck and maybe, by the grace of God, help the debate become unstuck.