Moneybeat: The creation mandate

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Time now to talk business, markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David is head of the wealth management firm the Bahnsen Group, and he is here now. David, good morning.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Good morning, Nick. Good to be with you.

EICHER: Well, Happy Labor Day to you. I thought we should use the occasion to talk a little bit about that. Of course, for the September issue of WORLD Magazine, you have a really great essay on the need for Christians to develop a robustly Biblical view of work, and I’d like for you to define what that robustly Biblical view of work is. But first, because you grounded your essay in your own personal story, people know you fairly well, but I don’t think they necessarily know this: how you ground your essay in the story of losing your father at a young age. Why don’t you tell that here?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I’ll try to be as succinct as possible, but there is a sense in which in my essay, I’m very transparent about the fact that there’s a biography in addition to an ideology. You know, I have ideas that I think are rooted in Scripture, that I believe about work and why we do it, and what it was made for. And those ideas intersect with my own life story, and the passion I have for the subject comes from the combination of the two, not merely the ideas that themselves animate me. And what I mean by this is, you know, a lot of people have suffered a particular trauma in their lives and gone through a setback, a tragedy, a difficult situation, whatever the case may be, of different, you know, degrees of magnitude. My view is that losing my father at age 20, entering adulthood, and my mom was already gone. And the experience of first, the good side of the story being raised by my father, who was a Christian theologian and philosopher who himself advocated so much for the importance of work, the importance of a Christian worldview, the importance of the Lordship of Christ in all areas of life. 

So, there was a vocational theology in place for my upbringing, and then it was modeled by my dad. I saw how much he worked, how hard he worked, how much he loved his work, and then seeing him pass away when he was only 47 years old, it put me into a place, Nick, where I was very confused, very lost, very directionless. And it really was work that I think God used to help ground me a bit and give me a sense of purpose, a sense of direction, and I was able to, on a backward looking basis, hold fast to the things my dad had taught me. And on a forward basis, really, come to terms with the fact that God had a plan for my life, and that work was not only cathartic, but it was meant to be cathartic.

EICHER: Let’s get into that Biblical view, David. You write this, you say that the Bible, of course, does not start in Second Thessalonians. It doesn’t begin by saying, “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.” But you say, instead, it starts in the Garden of Eden. You write, “With God making mankind very good and tasking him to, well, work, God made us to be co-creators with him.” Could you talk more about what it means to be a co creator with God?

BAHNSEN: Yes, and answering that question requires me to first define what it doesn’t mean. And obviously, we all should know as believers that it does not mean we can create out of nothing, that God alone creates ex nihilo, but that this language is very important: God made the world incomplete. In other words, he made it with potential, and he made us in His image to be the only product of creation that shares these attributes with him, by which we can use our creative capacity, our productive capacity, our ideation, to create and to extract from the raw materials of the world, and build new things.

And so, the analogy I’ve used all over the country, speaking about this subject, is the iPhone that just so many people have. It’s the most successful consumer product in world history, and yet there’s nothing in it that didn’t exist at the Garden of Eden, the raw materials were part of creation. But what we did as mankind, using the creative capacity that God gave us as image bearers of him, was add, over thousands of years, ingenuity, ideas and so that the silicon and the materials that become the rubber and plastic and metal and whatnot, fabrications over time, combined into ideation that resulted in this product. That’s what I mean by co-creation. When we learned how to start a fire, when we invented the wheel, we’re using our creative capacity given to us by God before the fall to live out the mandate he gave us in Genesis 1, to be fruitful, to multiply, to grow, to fill the earth. And then in the subsequent verses, to have dominion over the world, to cultivate it, to care for it, to rule over it, caring for the garden, stewarding the habitat in which we were made. It elaborates on it further in Genesis chapter 2, these are all different verbs I can use that are synonyms of work.

EICHER: So, David, when you see the labor force participation rate, for example, that’s not just a number to you, that has theological implications to it, doesn’t it?

BAHNSEN: It absolutely does. And this is one of the great mistakes I believe that many on the right will make, is to, in their own arguments, reduce work to merely the economic output. The notion that, well, we are getting by, you know, we are producing, the standard of living is doing better, and ignoring the fact that there are 3.3 million men missing from the workforce who are between the ages of 25 and 35. That’s a very young bracket of age. And on the trend line of labor participation since the first decade of the 2000s were off in that age bracket alone, just 10 years a period total were down somewhere between 12 and 14 million. But just 25 to 35 year olds, men alone were down 3.3 million. And that is a spiritual issue, a cultural issue, and ultimately, I feel it’s spiritual and cultural, because it is a theological issue.

EICHER: Alright, David, so this is really going to date me. I’m thinking of the 1980s classic rock song “Working for the Weekend,” kind of the anthem of transactional economics. I didn’t like the song then, and I especially don’t like it now, but it really did sort of speak to our culture, didn’t it?

BAHNSEN: Well, and that early 80s cut also was criticized by a lot of Christians and whatnot, because it implied a certain hedonism. It was, ‘you work through the week and you’re going to party on the weekend,’ and people push back against that, but I’ll tell you, it’s the same message that so many Christian evangelicals say about retirement that, oh, we’re working to get to be age 58 or 62 and then we can cut out. And it may not be partying over the weekend. It now may be this 25 year life of solitude and relaxation. And many are familiar with John Piper’s famous moment of yelling, you know, for people to not waste their life as folks wanted to travel around the country collecting seashells. This is not against leisure. It’s against it’s for a biblical understanding of leisure. And that’s where I think the ‘working for the weekend’ mantra, the retirement mantra goes wrong is failing to understand that productive capacity is not a curse, it’s a blessing, and it’s ontological. It speaks to the very being and essence of humanity.

EICHER: Well, David, there is so much to say on this topic, but not a whole lot of time left. I just want to leave an open lane here for you as we go out, just in case my questions didn’t allow you to touch on something that you wanted to add. So I’ll just do that right here.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I think the essay tried to capture that we right now have a really bad message from the culture, and what I want is to at least let the church become an antidote to that message, not a complement to that message. And and when I refer to work being cathartic in my own life, we are right now told that work is the problem with our lives, that people are working too much, what we need is more me, time and terms like self care and work life balance. They seem innocuous to people. Everyone wants to be able to relax a little and have some hobbies and recreation, and obviously I’m not against any of that, but when the society is saying our problem is we’re working too much, when there are millions and millions of people not working, and what’s impoverishing their souls is, in fact, a lack of productive purpose, because they were created to have it, I am desperate for the church to prophetically stand against the culture’s message, not get in line with the culture’s message.

EICHER: All right. David Bahnsen, founder, managing partner and chief investment officer of the Bahnsen Group. You can check out David’s latest book, of course, it has to do with work, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life. Fulltimebook.com, that’s the website. I hope you have a terrific Labor Day, David and a great week. We’ll talk to you next time.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

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