Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work & Wealth

by Douglas Wilson

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”

the kind of questions that efficiency experts might raise after their visit to the factory. But do you want to be efficient like a machine, or fruitful like a tree?

It does not occur to him that he is simply yearning to become an old-fashioned ghost, haunting the computers of his old co-workers and weirded-out family members.

Now, what we call technology is simply an array of tools laid out on the bench for us. Technology is therefore a form of wealth.

So if technology is wealth, then we are all surrounded with astounding amounts of it. This is what I refer to as tangible grace. If you have a smartphone, you have more wealth in your pocket than Nebuchadnezzar accumulated over the course of his lifetime. We have a responsibility to turn a profit on these astounding resources—and that is what is meant by productivity.

We have a responsibility to do this methodically, deliberately, and intentionally. This is what I mean by ploductivity.

This is deliberate faithfulness: working in the same direction over an extended period of time. Our electronic servants may be super fast, ...

We therefore need to recover a distinctively Christian work ethic as an essential part of the process of salvation and sanctification. It points, like every faithful thing does, to Christ, and in Christ all of these issues are connected.

“Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before

kings; he will not stand before obscure men” (Prov. 22:29). Solomon is saying that first-rate work is going to be recognized.

If you get together with a friend and talk about how so-and-so is having trouble in his marriage, and you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem. You are a gossip. But if you tell a friend who asked about it that your brother in Christ installed your kitchen cabinets upside down, that is not gossip. People who do not want public evaluation of the quality of their work are people who have no business being in business. They should just buy a shovel and dig where they are told to.

As a general rule, the difficult parts should be moved to the front of the project. There is a way of avoiding work that multiplies work, and there is a way of embracingwork that saves work in the long run. “The way of the slothful man is as an hedge of thorns: But the way of the righteous is made plain” (Prov. 15:19).

As the saying goes, if you don’t have time to do it right, then how will you have time to do it over?

Workers are generous. Loafers are not.

In our sin, we were a bad work. The grace of God picked us up and placed us on God’s work bench, where He made us His project. The word there is poiema, which means creation or work—we are God’s craftsmanship. He fashioned us into the kind of creatures who are able to do good work.

Work is not a curse. The curse affects work, but work remains a gift from a gracious God. We were created for work, and we were created for work in an astoundingly fruitful world. In short, the grace of God leads to salvation and salvation leads to good works. As we consider this, we ought not to limit the phrase “good works” to helping little old ladies across the street or volunteering at soup kitchens. Those are included, certainly, but good works also include good work. Good works include turning a table leg on a lathe, or solving a mathematical problem, or shoveling out the barn. In sum, good works include, necessarily, the blessing of good work.

But this is not something the wealth does to us, but rather something we do with the wealth.

To say that wealth has a bias to self-sufficiency is a figure of speech. Wealth is inanimate, and it has no thoughts on the matter at all, one way or another. Wealth doesn’t care—the diamonds don’t care, the gold doesn’t care, the stock portfolio doesn’t care, all the tools on your workbench don’t care. And when I say they don’t care, I mean they don’t care whether you sin with them or not. To say that wealth has a bias is really to say that men and women have a bias when we look at them in relationship with the wealth around them.

Look closely at what the text says here. It says that a host of good things are good gifts from a good God. Full meals, good houses, multiplying flocks and herds, silver and gold multiplying as well, and the same good growth happening to everything else the wealthy possess. All the good comes from outside, from the hand of the Lord.

As Cotton Mather once put it, “Faithfulness begat prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother.”

what Paul tells these rich people to do. He tells them to not be snobs, and not to trust in their wealth, but rather in the living God. And how is the living God described here? As the one “who giveth us richly all things to enjoy” (v. 17). He tells them to enjoy what they have, and then tells them to be active in doing good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and eager to share.

He does not say that being rich is like having cooties, and that they should be trying to pass their cooties off to somebody else. As I say, he doesn’t teach that.

What was their problem? It was that they did not serve God with joy and gladness for the abundance.

If I were to make a decision to throw my old heart away, that decision would have to be made by my old heart. And if my old heart could do something as wonderful as throwing my old heart away, what is the need for a new heart?

So rightly understood, wealth is something you do. And

After the entry of sin into the world, one of the first things that happened was evasion of personal responsibility. Adam blamed the woman for giving him the fruit (and blamed God for giving him the woman), and the woman turned around and blamed the serpent. Sin occurred, and excuses followed hard after. When we sin with a material object, or in near proximity to a material object, the most obvious thing to occur to us is to blame that material object. We blame weapons for murder, alcohol for drunkenness, slow traffic for the anger, photography for lust, and so on.

They are both intended to make a task either possible or easier. Therefore they are both tools. And so we should define a tool in this way: something that is not part of a man’s body which makes something that the man wants to do possible or easier.

What tools do is make it possible for a larger number of things to be brought within reach. Either they extend your reach, or they bring things close to home.

I would define media in this way: working out from and including our bodies, media also include our clothes, other people, and tools, including especially tools for communication and infrastructure.

The reason it is helpful to think in terms of “media,” as opposed to the earlier concept of “tools,” is that this expansive category helps us see how inescapable it all is.

communication across distance) is nothing new in principle.

Contrary to the theory of evolution, we are not over-developed animals who moved away from the “natural” and down into the “artificial.” For man, the artificial is natural. We want nothing to do with Rousseau’s “noble savage.” Ten minutes after Adam figured out what that honeycomb was, he started looking around for that stick we mentioned earlier.

But if you are alive, vibrant, and forgiven, you now live in a world where you can project that in amazing ways. The gospel is not some tiresome thing that door-to-door salesmen try to talk you into. “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19). We are actually talking about a cool breeze that blows off the ocean of God’s infinite pleasure and delight. We are talking about times of refreshing, and if we are not talking about times of refreshing, then we are not talking about the gospel as presented in Scripture.

A right understanding of the gospel is therefore delighted, and delightful. Godliness is free in its enjoyment of the pleasures of God. Obedience is liberty. “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). This is quite true—whatever you eat or drink, on whatever day, for whatever meal. This includes, of course, the french fries, but that does not mean that you are to stand on the restaurant chair in order to thank God that you are not like other men, the ones who do not glorify God for the french fries. The grace of God is good. Do not be like that nun that Brother Lawrence referred to, the one who wanted to be “faster than grace.”2 This is how we run headlong into scruples and fussing and various kinds of wowserism. Enjoy your life, the one Christ has given you. And it is not possible to do this without enjoying Christ Himself.

But all of us are involved and engaged. And to be honest, how much training does it take to share or retweet something?

It is not a matter of this technique or that one, this social media trick or that one, but rather experiencing the presence of Christ in your life and communicating that. Who is the Lord Jesus? Who is this King of glory? He is, among many other things, the Lord of the Internet. His lordship and His offered forgiveness should therefore be proclaimed there. Why would it not be? Is the world there? Do unforgiven men and women spend a lot of time there?

a point Lewis himself trenchantly makes in Abolition of Man—and thereby ruining their lives. He argues in that book that what we call control over nature is actually control over people, with nature as the instrument. We can say the same thing about the future. Control of the future is actually a (vain) attempt to control people, with the future as our instrument.

We demonstrate that we understand this by expressing our gratitude for God’s past goodness to us and by trusting Him for His future goodness. As I said, one necessary aspect of that trust is the refusal to try to control the future through utopian schemes. God will provide.

the wealth composed of technological progress over time. Wealth is a function of accumulated man hours. And in another way, wealth is the ability to command the labor of another—the ability to tap into some portion of those available man hours. This accumulation of man hours can come in one of two forms, or in a combination of the two. The first is a large enough population size to allow any specialist to be summoned, and the second is the incarnation of a specialist’s knowledge in a tool.

Workers must be given direction. In other words, wealth brings a great deal of responsibility to the wealthy.

Now, if you have a smartphone in your pocket, one of the things you also have in your pocket is nine thousand servants sitting on the veranda.

ought to be. In other words, if you are anything like me, you need to learn how to manage this embarrassment of wealth. In short, you need to learn how to become more productive. Put another way, you need to read the second section of this book.

God gives us the wealth that we will be tempted to put in place of Him. When God does this, we may show ourselves ingrates by turning away from Him, wealth in hand, or by throwing the wealth to the ground in front of Him.

The technophile just assumes that man is the measure of all things, and he plumps his resume in order to get a job with Google, so that he too may become one of the lords of the earth. The technophobe just memorizes the poetry of Wendell Berry, and yearns for the days of yesterday when all our food was eked out under a hot sun by a slow mule and a picturesque peasant staggering behind it. Both are forms of ingratitude; both are grotesque. The only obedient response is to accept that wealth as the gift of God that it is, and to keep it in its proper creaturely place.

But there is another category of technological development—say, longing for the day when genetic engineers can splice the genes of a silverback gorilla into a developing human fetus, in search of the ultimate NFL linebacker. Such things are malum in se, wrong in themselves. And they are wrong in themselves because the people engaged in such activities are seeking to play God. They are overtly rejecting the fact of a Creator God, the words of Scripture, and the authority of natural law. What they are doing is wicked. They want to tinker with man according to their own whims, which is to say, they want to be able to make man in their image. And that is the problem. The problem is not mere fact of a tool like genetic engineering. If genetic engineers at some point enable us to cure

we must recognize that things are muddled up even further by those people who call themselves progressives, who have absolutely no standard to measure progress by, and hence no way of defining whether or not progress has occurred. They like it this way because shortly after their policies kick in, everything starts to look pretty regressive. But they can’t see that because they insist on standing backwards, facing up the down escalator.

Whatever you worship in place of God is another thing you lose. Whatever you surrender gladly to Him is returned to you, pressed down, shaken, and running over.

If we had pure motives, we wouldn’t be needing to repent. When God establishes the nations of the next Christendom, He considers our frame. He takes us by the hand and teaches us that He is not mocked—a man reaps what he sows, and so do nations. If we do it God’s way, we live in His favor. If we refuse to live God’s way, we suffer the consequences. If we go this way, good things happen, and if we go that way, bad things happen.

Ploductivity The first step toward genuinely productive work is to make it a point to work coram Deo, in the presence of God. I don’t mean to limit this to formalities like opening with prayer or closing with a benediction, but this certainly means more than just some kind of formal recognition. And by saying this I don’t mean to imply that opening and closing with prayer is necessarily a “formality.” No, not at all. But if it is limited to that, it soon will be a dead formality.

In Scripture we are told to pray without ceasing (1 Thess. 5:17). We are told that whatever we do, down to the eating and drinking, we are to do it to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). And we are told to present our bodies as living sacrifices to God, holy and acceptable (Rom. 12:1–2). Now if my body is a living sacrifice, this means that everything it rests upon is an altar. The car I drive is an altar, the bed I sleep in is an altar, and the desk where I work is an altar. Everything is offered to God, everything ascends to Him as a sweet-smelling savor. Faith is the fire of the altar, and it consumes the whole burnt offering, the ascension offering. What ascends to the Lord is the sweet savor of our good works: “So as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:10, esv). Bearing fruit in every good work is fully pleasing to Him.