Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work & Wealth

by Douglas Wilson

Have they ever accomplished anything productive outside of telling people how to be productive?

he is never in a fluster.

When it comes to the time in his day, he uses every single part of the buffalo.

he has never been too busy for his kids.

The man is endlessly patient, endlessly diligent, shockingly ambitious, and never in a flurry.

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

But do you want to be efficient like a machine, or fruitful like a tree?

what I have failed to grasp in all this is why Royal Standard typewriters have been allowed to squeeze out the quill pen.

We have a perennial temptation to locate sin as resident in the stuff.

Alcohol

that same cultural mandate is reiterated to Noah, right after the Flood, which means that the presence of sin has not altered the mission (Gen. 9:1).

“Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings; He shall not stand before mean men” (Prov. 22:29). The King James rendering of “mean men” does not intend unkind or cruel men, but rather obscure or contemptible men.

You can, and should, draw conclusions about people based on their work.

Solomon’s way of saying that cream rises to the top.

First, work is a good thing, and the hard way is actually the easy way. 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?

the book of Proverbs talks about laziness and work a lot. We may be justified in thinking that it is a perennial problem.

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. Our good works are never at the front end, but they most certainly are at the back end.

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.

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.

The solution to self-sufficiency is not to banish the goods that we used to forget God, but rather to make a point of remembering God in and through the abundance He gave to us.

if the problem is in our hearts, always in our hearts, whatever shall we do? We can’t throw our hearts away. We can’t get a new heart, or at least we cannot get a new heart on our own.

Wherever you go, there you are

it brings a greater ability to summon the labor of others.

God tells them to replenish the earth, and He also tells them to subdue it. On top of that He commands them to have dominion over the fish, the birds, and every living creature. Quite obviously, one of the first things Adam and Eve were going to need was tools.

All these developed during the lifetime of Adam and Eve.

Noah’s ark was the technological achievement of the antediluvian world.

We do not believe in the essential immortality of the soul, which is the Greek view. Christians believe in the resurrection of the dead.

A man with tools is not being an artificial man. My argument is that a man cannot be an authentic man without 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.

Tools enable us to widen our reach. Tools make it possible for our radius of fruitfulness (now there is a phrase for the ages) to extend much farther than it otherwise would.

we should regard our tools the same way we regard our money—with grateful suspicion.

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.

when Adam was introduced to Eve, not only did he immediately speak, he spoke in poetry.

some idyllic dreamers have assumed that the ideal condition of man must be the primitive one. But why would we assume that we have lost something essentially human just because we have gotten to the point where there are nearly eight billion of us, and we do need an Interstate? God was the one who told us to multiply. And one of the things that necessarily grows and develops with that multiplication is the largely invisible world of media.

a right recognition of the inescapability of media helps us to understand that when a man buys a tool belt and fills it up, he is doing something that in principle pleases God. This is what he was created to do.

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.

Godliness is free in its enjoyment of the pleasures of God. Obedience is liberty.

Enjoy your life, the one Christ has given you. And it is not possible to do this without enjoying Christ Himself.

experiencing the presence of Christ in your life and communicating that.

because of the way we are created, we cannot love others without media because love, like sound, doesn’t travel in a vacuum.

God has made the entire universe fertile. What looked initially as simply throwing hunks of metal overboard has completely transformed our lives.

There has never been a time when Simple Simon couldn’t go to the fair.

The two issues mentioned earlier that underlie economics are first, the need for us to respect the free choices of others, and second, to use our own power of free choice to investigate the fruitful world God gave to us.

we are accustomed to think about the world in quasi-Deistic terms. Sure, God made everything some time long ago, but things happen now because of impersonal natural laws, right?

We are to put our hand to the work, doing the best we can with it, and we are to keep our hands off the future.

wealth is a blessing, and what you do with it matters. What you do with wealth will either keep it a compounding blessing, or it will wreck everything.

wealth brings a great deal of responsibility to the wealthy.

Julius Caesar and George Washington got around their respective worlds in basically the same way. Transportation was either horse drawn or sail driven for both men.

even the programs that I do use are operating at about five percent of their capacity. In short, I am not nearly as good a boss as I 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.

the bias contained within technological advancements is toward forgetting God.

In the long run, pragmatism doesn’t work. Focusing on the GDP alone is bad for the GDP. It does not profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul, and there is an additional sting when he then loses the world too. 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.