Land monopolies

Every so often, Christian leaders in churches all over the world, gather together in leadership meetings to discuss how the church might become more relevant.

It has concerned me that many Christians don't realise that the bible has much to say about issues that are top of the mind in society today.

Let's take concerns over housing and the property market.  

All over the world, low interest rates, lax lending policies and globalization have resulted in rising land and real estate prices as cashed up investors look for bargains, bolt holes from potential conflicts or just to launder ill-gotten gains.

This has created enormous pressures for those who are entering adulthood, want to find cost effective housing for their families and increasingly the lower and middle classes are feeling like hard work is not going to allow them to own their own homes.

For example, in New Zealand, for most of the 20th Century, the average home was worth between 3-5 times the average salary.  Now it is sitting between 9-10.  The OECD reports that NZ housing ranks amongst the highest nations with overvalued housing when compared to long term averages price to income ratios. 

The social result is alarming:

1. Young families crammed into garages, living out of cars, 3-bedroom homes with a dozen or more people living together; no surprise that respiratory diseases such as colds, flus and pneumonia are common amongst these households.
2. Young couples putting off having families until they are well into their thirties, when their bodies are best suited to bear children in their early twenties.
3. An increasing gap between the haves and the have nots.
4. An increasing number of absentee landlords living in foreign countries.
5. Rising numbers of land bankers evidenced by an increasing number of unoccupied households and undeveloped land.

Social commentators are talking about generations of people who will forever be tenants, with no chance of owning their own homes, with an air of acceptance and inevitability.

This is not God's view of how life should be.  Consider these scriptures (hover over them with your mouse to read them:

1. Isaiah 5:8:  Land monopolies are a wrong.
2. Leviticus 25:8-13:  In God's society, people were allocated land, and every 50 years, land transactions were unwound, so that each family had their allocation returned to them.
3. Micah 2:2: Permanently disengaging a person from their land (their heritage) is an act of oppression.  

We have all played the game of monopoly.  We know how it ends.  It never ends well.

When discussing this problem with Christians the responses are less than encouraging:

1. I saved for my house, no one helped me, why should I help anyone else?
2. Everyone can own a house, said one Christian, it just needs good budgetting.
3. It's a free market, the incentives are there for all to work hard and progress in the world.
4. They should have saved, spent less, worked two jobs, used birth control...

But centuries of feudalism, class societies, aristocracy, slavery and oppression tell us unfettered free markets do require moderation and even intervention.  Without it, experiences such as the French Revolution and the rise of Communism, tell us that the inequalities become so severe that civil anarchy breaks out with much deadly violence.

The genuine Christian should be inspired by the bible to act vigorously to counter-act this great wrong.

Sometimes Christians throw their hands in the air, frustrated that though they might like to see social justice done, they are perplexed and clueless on what can be done about it.  In fact, the actions required are well developed and have been for many years.  They are not difficult to implement where there is a will:

1. Vote for land value taxes and reduce income and company tax.  In 1891 more than 60% of freehold land in New Zealand was held by fewer than 600 individuals or companies.  The Liberal Party of the day broke those land concentrations via land taxes.
2. Introducing standards of abandonment.
3. Adopting principles of usufruct eg Leviticus 19:9-10 and Leviticus 23:22.
4. Other ideas that include the application of easements, and real covenants.

How to cut down Logos 8's start up time

Faithlife's Logos 8 was released just before Christmas.  

One of the first thing's I noticed after installing it was how long it took to load up.  I don't have a huge collection of books (about 7GB) but it took over a couple of minutes to load.  

Painful.  

Logos 7 was sometimes slow too but I noticed this mostly around searches, I'm glad to report that searching resources seems much slower in 8.  

Here's a fix for greatly speeding up Logos's start up time:

1. Open Program Settings, find At Startup Open to and select Most recent layout - local


2. In the Command Box at the top of the Logos Window (with green GO in Logos 8), type Set Use Ngen to Yes and hit Enter.

My load up time fell to around 20 seconds.  Nice.

Logos for Children

Logos, was originally intended for serious adult bible students, seminary students, church and home bible study leaders.

What is serious?

I've come to realise that we take a very casual view of the bible and its study as Christians.  Jews and those who have been discovering the Hebrew roots of Christianity, this was not always the case.

Even in Constantinople in the 15th century, it was said that one commonly heard people discussing and debating theology in the markets of the city.

Small wonder then that we don't know what the bible has to say about how to deal with life's problems.  For example, during the recession, how many people heard sermons from the pulpit about how to solve it?

Does the bible have nothing to say about Collateralized Debt Obligations, Subprime Lending, Fiscal Expansion or Land Monopolies?  It's there.  If Christianity can't meaningfully contribute to a discussion about these kinds of topics, then this is a clue as to why Christianity's relevance to a modern society is in doubt today.

I want my children to have a deep knowledge of the bible, be confident to investigate the bible whenever they meet a life issue they haven't encountered before, be confident and respectful in discussing life and society's issues from a biblical perspective and be a part of society's attempts to solve life's problems.

By this, I hope they will be able to be guided by the bible so that they meaningfully contribute toward setting government policy, ethically conduct themselves within their families, jobs, businesses and voluntary organisations.

Giving them a 21st century tool to be able to study the bible is a big step forward.

Faithlife, the producers of Logos, have an eBook store.  These eBooks can be purchased and they are automatically included amongst the resources in a given Logos account.

These resources are then indexed and searchable from within Logos.  Material from them will then appear in Passage Guides, and Topic Guides.  Terrific.

Their eBook store has an abundance of material intended for children.  Just use keywords such as "Kids", "Children" and "Student" to get you started.

As a way of introducing my children (aged 7-14) to Logos, I signed them all up for the free version of Logos, Logos Basic, which they can all access from their respective user accounts in Windows 10.

My 12 year old daughter has already set up her own prayer list and a reading plan.

I have set them up with some prioritized resources: Lexham English Bible, Lexham Bible Dictionary. 

They are OK for the 12 and 14 year old but not so much for the 7 and 10 year old.  

Each have their own favorite bible translations so I'm gifting them (oldest to youngest) ESV, CEV and for the two youngest, GNB.  

To make Logos more usable, attractive for them and to reduce the chance they would be overwhelmed, I: 

1. Changed all the fonts to san serif
2. Zoomed the program so that everything was 20% bigger.
3. Prioritized the Lexham Bible, Dictionary and Study Bibles
4. Modified one of the standard layouts to have two panels with the bible on the left and the Lexham Resources together with a Notes tab on the RHS.  Saved the layout.
5. Bought them suitable/preferred bibles
6. Set these as their preferred bibles
7. Cleaned up their home screens to reduce the stuff they wouldn't be interested in
8. Started looking in the Faithlife eBook store for suitable resources to add.

If you're a parent and you use Logos, I hope this blog entry is thought provoking.

Discipleship, Parenthood and Children

Over on the Logos.com forum, there is a thread that started this week about Logos for Children.

It touches on a subject dear to my heart:  how to raise my children in the ways of God?

Where I started with, was the thought, what would I like my children to have in their figurative "spiritual kitbag" by the time they were at an age where they might leave home to study, start a job or just to go flatting?  I thought 16 was a good target age.  They might stay home for longer, but from the age of 16, the risk they will leave home starts to go markedly up.

My answers to the question:

1. Be able to confidently find a church to join
2. Be able to join in with the youth ministry in that church.  
3. Know what a good church was from a bad one; and to reason that out
4. Know how to deal with pain and disappointment
5. Meeting God and talking to God through prayer, for themselves
6. Know how to discuss confidently and respectfully their beliefs with people who live different lifestyles or follow a different religion; eg LGBT community members, atheists, or Muslims.
7. Know his responsibilities as a parent to teach his children and his children's children to walk in the ways of God.
8. Know what are healthy relationships from unhealthy ones; such as relationships with the opposite gender based on respect and engagement rather than objectification and personal gratification.  

The list goes on but hopefully this conveys the idea.  

Then I started working backwards from there to find age appropriate material for my children, different stuff depending on their age and tweaking it for things that pop up through the course of their lives. 

A routine seems to work best so we put aside an hour or two each Saturday.  

When my children says how come nobody else can read Hebrew or study Leviticus, I just say "that's what we do in our family."

Atheist Delusional: A short review

Atheist Delusional is a warm series of interviews of Atheists in which Ray Comfort exposes how Atheists aren't quite so "open-minded" as they say, and find it difficult to admit they might be wrong.

Comfort does well in positing their true motivations behind why they resist acknowledging "a higher power" creator when he leads them to acknowledging that they are morally deficient and resist the idea:  They realise to do so, would mean that they would be accountable to someone else for what they did.

I don't follow the Atheism v Christianity debate in great detail but I have heard of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins before.

It was therefore an eye-opener for me to watch the clip of Dawkins try to argue that life would come from nothing, realise that that was logically unsustainable, and then try to ridiculously argue that nothing was something after all.

He seemed genuinely surprised when the audience laughed at him.

The video is informative for both non-Christians and Christians alike, who are unfamiliar with the arguments within the debate and want a high-level summary of the issues that count.  The rest are red-herrings.

Living Waters, the organisation that produced the video have made it freely available in its entirety.  Here it is:

Israel at 70: A miracle in disguise

A J Heschel

To mark the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the modern state of Israel, here are some of Heschel's thoughts on its establishment.

Unprecedented.  A people despised, persecuted and scattered to all corners of the earth, has the audacity to dream of regaining authenticity, of being free in the Holy Land.

For nearly 2,000 years and many times a day in joy and sorrow we pray for you, Jerusalem, and our prayers never turned pale.  What is it we implore the Lord every Sabbath as we are about to open the Ark to take out the Torah?

Merciful father,
Deal kindly with Zion,
Rebuild the walls of jerusalem,
Truly, in thee alone we trust
High and exalted king and god, eternal god.

Despoiled and dispersed, abased and harassed, we knew we were not estranged forever.  We mourned you, we never wept you away.  Hope was hatched in the nests of agony.

The love of this land was due to an imperative, not to an instinct, not to a sentiment.  There is a covenant, an engagement of the people to the land.  We live by covenants.  We could not betray our pledge or discard the promise.

When Israel was driven into exile, the pledge became a prayer; the prayer a dream; the dream a passion, a duty, a dedication.

Intimate attachment to the land, waiting for the renewal of Jewish life in the land of Israel, as part of our integrity, an existential fact.  Unique, sui generis, it lives in our hopes, it abides in our hearts.

It is a commitment we must not betray.  3,000 years of faithfulness cannot be wiped off.

To abandon the land would make a mockery to all our longings, prayers and commitments.  To abandon the land would be to repudiate the Bible.

Israel reborn represents a breakthrough into whole new areas of experience and understanding stop it defies conventional conceptions, ordinary expectations.  Its essence is a proclamation.

This is why the return to Zion is a source of embarrassment to so many of us who depend for intellectual efficacy upon conformity with mental habits.  In our scientific investigations, we use conceptual models in order to characterise an empirical situation under investigation; we are guided by the principle of generalisation, seeking to fit a particular object to a universal model.  The relation between model and things modelled is a relation of analogy.

In other words, our mental habit is to think in terms of sameness and to assume that things under consideration are mere copies, repetitions, and to disregard the unprecedented, distinctness, uniqueness.  We operate with established forms, with rubrics.

This is indeed the modern religious predicament.  The mysterious events so central to Judaism and Christianity seem so strange because they are unprecedented.

The return to Zion is an unprecedented drama, an event sui generis for which there is no model, no analogy.

The State of Israel is a surprise, yet the modern mind hates to be surprised.  Never before has a nation been restored to its ancient hearth after a lapse of 1,897 years.  This extraordinary aspect is bound to carry some shock to the conventional mind, to be a scandal to the mediocre mind and a foolishness to the positivists.  It requires reordering of some notions.

Here lies a lesson of importance.  It is the homogenisation of history that often deprives us of understanding.

Genuine history is not mere repetition, moving in a circle.  It is a fresh attempt, a new arrival.  The Bible begins with the words “At the beginning…” To Greek mythology, for example, where the assumption is that the world has always been in existence, the concept of beginning was inconceivable.  Jewish understanding further implies that also in history there can be novelty, beginning.

Israel is a miracle in disguise.  Things look natural and conceal what is a radical surprise.  Zion rebuilt becomes a harbinger of a new understanding, of how history is intertwined with the mystery.

Israel is the opposite of a commonplace, it is an extraordinary place, and it is on the verge of the extraordinary that we may encounter the marvel Israel as a novelty is not an absolutely new beginning, but a resurrection in Ezekiel’s sense.  It is in accord of a divine promise and a human achievement.

Source: Heschel, A J (1967).  Israel: An Echo of Eternity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  New York.  Pages 43-44; pages 49-51.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. Heschel, a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, authored a number of widely read books on Jewish philosophy and was active in the American civil rights movement.

Israel at 70: The Promise

A J Heschel

To mark Israel's 70th anniversary of its establishment, here are some comments about Israel's establishment from Abraham Heschel:

The Bible is the book of anticipations.  The ground for the hope is in the promise.  The future has a face, and on its face to see the glory.

There is evil, there is anguish.  There is death, agony, exile.  But beyond all darkness as the dawn.

“On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast… And he will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, avail that is spread over all nations.  He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people who will take away from all the earth; for the Lord has spoken.  It will be said on that day, “low, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us stop this is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation”” (Isaiah 25:6-9).

The evil state of the world, with its ugliness and violence, will not endure for ever.  At the end of days, and a climax of days, there will be a new dawn of history.  Redemption all come, cleansing the world from war and hatred.  This is God’s pledge and Israel’s hope.  At the same time, biblical eschatology and all our hopes for the future are mysteriously centred in the Holy Land.

There is a unique association between the people and the land of Israel.  Even before Israel becomes a people, the land is preordained for Israel.

Even before there was a people, it was a promise.  The promise of the land.  The election of Abraham and the election of land came together.  The promise of the land to the patriarchs as the leit motif in the Five Books of Moses.  Israel’s claim upon Canaan goes back to the earliest period of its history and was thought of as having as origin in the will of God, since it was to the Lord that this land belonged and he alone could dispose of it.

Beyond the promise of the land and increasing prosperity, the promised Abraham was a blessing for all the families of the earth.  The gift of the land is in earnest of a greater promise.

The granting of the land of Canaan to Israel by the Lord is a scene reflected upon again and again.  “Then he brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Deuteronomy 26:9).  Thanksgiving for this grant remained alive and never-ending praise throughout Biblical history.

Pagans have idols, Israel has a promise.  We have no image, all we have is hope.

Israel reborn as a verification of the promise.

History goes on in time as well is in space, and according to biblical faith, the promise of redemption of all peoples involves the presence of this people in this land.[i]

For Christians, the idea of a promise should immediately bring to mind Paul’s words: “the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.[ii]”

---

[i] Source: Heschel, A J (1967).  Israel: An Echo of Eternity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  New York.  Pages 43-44; pages 49-51.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. Heschel, a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, authored a number of widely read books on Jewish philosophy and was active in the American civil rights movement.

[ii] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (Eph 3:6). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society.