The Exclusivity of Salvation Through Christ
At church today my pastor was discussing the following from Luke 13:
22 And He went through the cities and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem. 23 Then one said to Him, “Lord, are there few who are saved?”
And He said to them, 24 “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I say to you, will seek to enter and will not be able. 25 When once the Master of the house has risen up and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open for us,’ and He will answer and say to you, ‘I do not know you, where you are from,’ 26 then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets.’ 27 But He will say, ‘I tell you I do not know you, where you are from. Depart from Me, all you workers of iniquity.’ 28 There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and yourselves thrust out.
Now this particular pastor is the “nicest guy” of the three pastors we have; he was saying that these passages are admittedly uncomfortable to grapple with. Nonetheless, he went on to say, we are simply ignoring what Jesus said if we deny that there really is a hell, and that many people are going there.
Now here’s what’s interesting: The pastor went on to say that we Christians shouldn’t be afraid to say that yes we have the “right religion” and others are wrong, because (he continued) Jesus didn’t say, “I’m here to start a religion.” No, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through Me.”
But hold on a second. Jesus Himself, in the excerpt from Luke that we were discussing, says matter-of-factly that Abraham and the Jewish prophets are in heaven. Presumably they never acknowledged that Jesus died for their sins. (We can quibble with some of the prophets who arguably predicted that the Messiah would die for their sins.)
So isn’t it possible that however we explain that these giants of the OT were saved, might also apply in some fashion to (say) a God-fearing Muslim?
To reiterate, I’m not trying to evade what Jesus’ plain words were. I’m pointing out that His own words suggest that there are ways to be saved without believing the standard thing that modern evangelicals prescribe.
Last point: I’ve made the analogy before, but I will repeat it here… I wonder if the warnings of Jesus and the other Biblical figures about hell are analogous to a parent walking to the car from the park, and saying to her 4-year-old, “OK Jenny, I’m leaving. I hope you don’t get left behind…” Of course I don’t mean the analogy too literally, but I think it surely must be the case that we really have no clue how to comprehend exactly what it is that heaven is like, and that hell is like, and so it would be hard for Jesus to break it down for us. He is clearly telling us what is good for us–just like the 4-year-old really needs to get in the car with her mommy–but it’s possible that the literal interpretation of hellfire isn’t really accurate, because Jesus knew nobody would understand Him if He explained it more accurately.
Old-School Mises
Vaughn Kraft, one of my frequent Mises Academy students, sent me this email (and gave permission to reprint):
A gentleman friend of mine had recently told me a story about his interview with Von Mises to enter the Austrian master’s program. This took place around 1959 or 1960, when Von Mises interviewed him for the program. My friend told me that Von Mises only asked him two questions: first he asked, “Do you “read” German?”, and next he asked, “Do you “read” French”? My friend answered “No” to both questions–end of interview! However, Von Mises allowed my friend to enter the master’s program anyway; nevertheless, my friend knew that Von Mises would not think of him as an Economist, because he thought for one to fully understand the depth of the marginal revolution, one would have to be able to read and understand both German and French to comprehend this technical economic concept.
What’s Worse (Better) Than Sunday Blog Posts?
A whole conference dedicated to bringing free-market ideas to evangelical Christians! (The link is to the main website of The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, which is hosting me and a dozen or so other theologians and/or economists at a conference outside of DC.)
They showed us this snazzy video after the opening dinner:
All joking aside, what is the progressive response to something like this? Something like, “Nobody denies the importance of property rights, it’s just that you need a good social safety net and regulation, too.” ?
Murphy vs. Graeber on Money, Round 2
Some 5,000 years ago, anthropologist David Graeber and I battled over his scathing critique of the standard economist (and Mengerian) account of the origin of money. He insisted that I read his book before sputtering more nonsense, and so I got The American Conservative to get me a copy. My review is now online. The intro:
This book is just as audacious as its title suggests: Graeber, an anthropologist, walks the reader through the history of debt. How seriously does the author take his task? Consider: he devotes the 38 pages of Chapter 5 to constructing “A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations.” Inasmuch as Graeber takes aim at the economist’s standard account of the origin of money, his book presents a formidable challenge. Yet on close examination, Graeber’s ambitious and scathing assault largely misses the mark.
And a choice paragraph from the body:
Graeber unwittingly makes even more concessions to the Mengerian account when he later writes: “In the marketplaces that cropped up in Mesopotamian cities, prices were also calculated in silver, and the prices of commodities that weren’t entirely controlled by the Temples and Palaces would tend to fluctuate according to supply and demand.” So what the historical record actually shows us is a Sumerian economy in which merchants used silver in actual spot transactions when trading in the outside marketplace and Temple authorities kept track of internal bookkeeping operations through the use of silver valuations. And Graeber thinks it so self-evident that the causality ran from the Temple bureaucrats to the merchants that he actually says of the Mengerian account, “rarely has an historical theory been so absolutely and systematically refuted”!
However, lest you think me a doctrinaire, I do concede this much:
Although Graeber’s critique therefore misses the mark in one obvious respect, nonetheless he does seriously challenge the standard Mengerian account, in a way I’m embarrassed to say that I had never even considered when teaching the fable to my own students. Specifically, Graeber points out that barter spot transactions would really only be necessary between strangers who might not see each other again. In contrast, neighbors could engage in credit transactions even before the use of money had developed. For example, if one farmer had eggs to sell, while his neighbor didn’t have anything he wanted at the time, then the first farmer could simply give them to his neighbor, saying, “You owe me.”
Everyone On the Internet Thinks I’m Hilarious
Or at least, of the people who are my Facebook friends, that is the overwhelming consensus.
In related news, here are “4 Politically Controversial Issues Where All Economists Agree” (actual title), which I got from an enthusiastic link from Daniel Kuehn. Here are the four issues, as the blogger (Adam Ozimek) titles the sections–and I’m assuming he wrote the section headers, as opposed to The Atlantic editor who presumably chose the absurd article title:
#1. The benefits of free trade and NAFTA far outweigh the costs
#2. Government policies don’t explain high gas prices
#3. The Stimulus and Bailouts Lowered the Unemployment Rate
#4. The Gold Standard is a Terrible Idea
(Note that all English professors agree, your section titles should be consistently capitalized.)
Obviously you can always find some nutjob in a field who will disagree with what everybody else thinks is foundational to the discipline. If #1 didn’t mention NAFTA (which was a several-hundred-page document and thus hardly just a free trade pact), then I would agree it should be in the list.
However, #2 is more controversial, especially without being very specific about what “explain” and “high” mean, and also whether the Fed is included in “Government policies.”
#3 is actually rejected by some prominent Chicago School economists, isn’t it? What the heck is that doing on the list?
And #4 is where my selection bias comes in. I personally know at least 30 PhDs who would reject #4, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there were at least 250 of them teaching in the US and Europe at accredited institutions. (Note they didn’t simply say, “Going to the gold standard would be bad.” No, they said it is a terrible idea.) But admittedly, I hang out with oddballs and I don’t have an objective feel for what “the profession” thinks of the gold standard.
Landsburg v 2.0: This Time, It’s Personal
Steve Landsburg is putting out a revised edition of his classic, The Armchair Economist. Full details here.
Although Murray Rothbard is the economist who most influenced me, Landsburg’s book might be the single most influential volume in terms of how I try to relay economics to the layperson.
What may interest you is that I actually disagree with a lot of the things Steve says in the book, but he says them so clearly that I think we are all wiser after I blow him up…. For example, see this.
I mentioned to Steve in the comments at his blog that I had actually written him a critique back when I was about to start grad school. I’ll see if I can dig that up.
Jon Stewart Has Great Marketing Ideas
I Don’t Think He Liked Tyler Cowen’s New Book
Holy cow, Robert Wenzel links to this NYT review (“A Contrarian Chowhound Weighs In”) of Cowen’s new book. I haven’t read the book, but this guy (Dwight Garner) really puts on a show that is worth quoting:
Tyler Cowen’s “An Economist Gets Lunch” arrives on the table like a big, unidentifiable, whey-colored casserole. After 75 pages you’re still poking at it, thinking, “What is this thing?” and “Can I order something else?”
…
Reading Mr. Cowen is like pushing a shopping cart through Whole Foods with Rush Limbaugh. The patter is nonstop and bracing. Mr. Cowen delivers observations that, should Alice Waters ever be detained in Gitmo, her captors will play over loudspeakers to break her spirit.
…
What’s cognitively dissonant about “An Economist Gets Lunch” is that Mr. Cowen combines this needling with his own brand of chowhound hipsterism. His book is also a long, Calvin Trillin-like ode to tamale stands and strip-mall joints and ethnic food, the more exotic the better.These cuisines appeal to the economist in him because they’re cheap and innovative. His book is packed with sentences like “Bolivian, Laotian and North Korean are staples of my dining out” and “I know how ‘Husband and Wife Lung Slices’ taste (not bad).”
This combination of elements takes some getting used to. Reading Mr. Cowen…is like watching a middle-aged man in a blue blazer play Hacky Sack at a My Morning Jacket concert.
“An Economist Gets Lunch” might have worked if, aesthetically, it wasn’t rather dismal. It’s flat, padded with filler, flecked with factual errors and swollen with a kind of reverse snobbery that’s nearly as wince-inducing as anything you’ll hear at the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn.
The quality of Mr. Cowen’s prose varies wildly. Many of his sentences read as if he composed them before entirely waking from a nap. Here’s an example: “The more fundamental problem is that labels do not encompass the same economywide information that is communicated by the price system in its assessment of competing uses for resources.”
Word-goo of this sort creeps in everywhere. One of his favorite books is assessed this way: “I found his writing compelling and the photos full of striking colors.” Items on one’s plate are “foodstuffs.”
You sense in almost every chapter that he’s stretching thin material. Thus the ponderous detours into much-trampled areas like the history of barbecue, the varieties of Chinese food and how to choose kitchen equipment. Truisms are sprinkled like whatever the opposite of salt is. “Barbecue restaurants often have idiosyncratic names,” he announces, to aliens I suppose. “Like Bubba’s.”
Mr. Cowen presents the wisdom of the ages as if it were a series of dispatches from the gastronomic front lines. To find good food and not get fleeced, he recommends, leave the city centers and seek marginal areas. Mr. Trillin has been saying this for at least 40 years. I suspect Thucydides preferred the little joint on a side street to the place with the fountains where the waiters peeled customers’ grapes.
Speaking of Mr. Trillin, this book makes reference to the kind of ostentatious restaurants he used to jokingly refer to as “La Maison de la Casa House.” Mr. Cowen quotes his patron saint incorrectly, replacing “House” with “Haus.” Not a big deal. Except that this mistake arrives on Page 2, rattling your confidence.
Mr. Cowen later writes, “Google brings up over a million mentions for ‘tofu fajitas.’ ” That sounds crazy, so you check it. It turns out that Google offers only about 30,000 mentions of “tofu fajitas”; giving it a wider search range (without quotation marks) brings it up to about 115,000. Confidence further rattled.
Deep down there’s nothing foodies loathe more than other foodies. Mr. Cowen’s prose is animated by his dislike of sanctimonious, more-organic-than-thou types — the foodie liberal elite — but his book is its own elaborate exercise in conspicuous consumption and reverse snobbery. He flies around the globe, eats at the most expensive restaurants and sneers at nearly all of them.
“For a few years running Noma, in Copenhagen, has been judged the world’s best restaurant, but my meal there bored me,” he declares in a typical formulation. Soon enough he’s back home slumming around in decrepit neighborhoods for food carts and talking about the four spice grinders he owns.
…
To give Mr. Cowen his due, he made me smile a few times. When choosing a restaurant, he suggests that if the people inside look happy, “run the other way.” He prefers spots where the diners “appear to be fighting and pursuing blood feuds.” Bitterness and gloom bespeak seriousness of purpose.Yet I felt gloomy reading “An Economist Gets Lunch.” It’s an argument for exoticism that tastes like paste.
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