Two years ago Jeffrey Herbener wrote a review of Shawn Ritenour's book Foundations of Economics: A Christian View, now available online. Herbener begins by saying,
When God spoke the world into existence, He made a created order. He does not maintain order by continuous contact with creation for God is transcendent, apart from and above creation. Instead, He decreed order into the nature of created things. Order is maintained by the natural working of the things He has made. The order of the cosmos, for example, occurs because God has built gravitational attraction into objects with mass. Likewise, social order arises naturally from human action because of certain features God has built into human nature. By endowing man with reason, God made him capable of discovering the natural laws by which creation is ordered. And for His glory and man’s benefit, He commands him to live in obedience to His decrees.
The review is linked to Dr. Ritenour's blog post:
4 comments:
So I gotta ask, how does Ritenour's thesis about natural order answer to Hebrews 1, where Christ upholds all things by the word of His power? This seems to me to imply a continuous intervention in the cosmos.
Of course everything I've read by him on economics is brilliant, I'm just questioning his parable...
I admit thinking that Herbener's quote was a bit wanting, because God is not only transcendent but immanent in many ways -- including upholding the laws of nature "by the word of His power."
Herbener teaches with Ritenour at Grove City College. I doubt he sat in on any of the Brethren's summer conferences ;)
Sounds a bit like God the cosmic watch maker who winds it up and sits back and watches it tick.
Yes, the more I look at that quote the less I like it. There are some excellent ones pertaining to economics later in the essay; but I think this misses the focus of the Scholastics' work completely.
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