Elemental Spirits
March 6, 2022
I don’t make the rules; I just live by them. It’s not my fault owners, managers, administrators, and others like them make more than laborers. The higher up in an organization you go, the more responsibility you have and the more money you make. When you’re overseeing other people, you earn more money than they do. When you oversee a lot of people, you make a lot more than they do. It’s just the way things work.
Apparently the Barnhart family looked at what Scripture teaches about wealth and got convicted (a video interview is available at https://generousgiving.org). When they took over Barnhart Crane and Rigging, they decided to limit their income.
Our principle is that the Army cook shouldn’t eat a whole lot better than the troops. Those of us who’re in a position to generate wealth aren’t entitled to a different lifestyle than the rest of the body, the rest of the troops. We may need different tools, just like that cook, but our lives shouldn’t be so different. (Quoted in Practicing the King’s Economy; this also sounds like Nehemiah’s approach to being governor)
In the end, this isn’t primarily an economic issue. It’s an economic implication of the issue of “elemental spirits of the world.” The elemental spirits are the basic, fundamental principles of life, the things we look at and say, “eh, that’s just the way things are.” Aristotle describes some of these as pairings—limit/unlimited, odd/even, unity/plurality, right/left, male/female, rest/motion, straight/crooked, light/darkness, good/evil, square/oblong. Everything in life is built on these building blocks. Paul seems to allude to similar ideas in Gal. 3.28—Jew/Gentile; slave/free; male/female.
We can think of other “rules of the universe”—“might makes right,” “survival of the fittest,” “love your neighbor, hate your enemy,” “make as much money as you can and enjoy it.” Sometimes we look at these rules and get queasy, other rules we simply take for granted. Fighting these things is like tilting at windmills. Maybe God will fix them; maybe God doesn’t care.
Enter Jesus. Jesus comes and teaches the Sermon on the Mount, where he critiques “the way things are” and commands us to be different—“hate your enemies? No, I tell you, love your enemies.” It’s not so much about making us follow the commands (thought that’s important), as it is showing us a new way to live, sparking our moral imaginations so that we can begin imagining new ways of being in the world. We read the Sermon on the Mount, and what the Barnhart’s do doesn’t seem so unimaginable. Enter Jesus. Jesus comes and dies, making a mockery of “the way things are,” (Col. 1.15-17; 2.15) and opening to us this new, imaginative way of life, this way of being new creation (Gal. 6.14-15).
—John Coffey
