Episode 20 - The Danger of Hanging Your Best investing Ideas on Scripture with Jerry Bowyer
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We’re so excited to share a conversation today that we think is long overdue. If you’ve been following the website, you’ve no doubt seen the name Jerry Bowyer as we’ve featured several of his blog posts (including “How God’s Work is the Model for Your Work” and others)—all of which are must-reads.
Jerry is a leading thinker in finance and economics and a frequent contributor for Forbes and Townhall. His writing has been influential in the faith driven conversations. One of the things Jerry is really known for is stretching our thinking. Often times he takes positions that cause many of us to consider the other side of a conversation and we think you’ll enjoy our conversation.
Tune in to hear Jerry’s thoughts on how to read the Bible and the dangers of trying to pin scripture on our business ideas vs. starting with what Scripture says and seeing our ideas move out of it. Our hope is that we walk away challenged to dive even deeper into Scripture and how to invest as faithfully as we possibly can.
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Episode Transcript
Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.
Henry: [00:01:55] Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. It is awesome, as always, to have you with us. I'm joined by my co-host, William. And we have a really special guest here that's made a big impact in the way that both William and I have thought about this larger faith driven investing lens and ecosystem. Jerry Boyer here. And we're going to get right into this. Jerry is very thoughtful about many different aspects of faith driven investing. He's thought about it, about what God says. I listened to a talk that he gave several years ago about how he looks at some Old Testament stories like the sons of Issacar and what they meant for this age. [00:02:32][37.3]
[00:02:33] And so, Jerry, I want you to take this conversation the way you want to. We were talking before the program started today, and you were like, you know, 'cause there's so many different podcasts that talk about God owns it all. And we're going to get right in this and just validate all that. We understand that there's an increasing awareness of Christ followers, that there's an opportunity to worship God with the money entrusted us to, and that we need to be vigilant for greed. That is a very important part of this overall piece. And yet it's just a little bit of a piece. You've done some really interesting work in going back into scripture to endeavor to understand what did Jesus say about invested in? What did Genesis say about investing in Genesis is an easy place to start. Is it the beginning of the Bible? What is your reading of Genesis tell you about how we might think about investing in a way that honors God? [00:03:21][47.5]
Jerry: [00:03:22] Well, I think if you look at the Book of Genesis carefully, and the easiest thing for us to do is to take our best thinking and hang it on a biblical text or to take our arguments or our debates or even our questions and bring them to the Bible and tell the Bible, "answer my question, Bible." And I happened, actually, my wife and I together decided to look more closely at the Book of Genesis several years ago. It was actually after a health crisis. I know you had a health crisis. You ended up in the hospital unexpectedly. So did I. And I was laying in that hospital bed and I thought, OK, God, I think this is a good chance to get closer to you. And I was already a Christian, and I think I would have considered myself a serious Christian, and most people would have said the same thing. But maybe I need to get more serious. [00:04:10][48.5]
[00:04:11] And I thought, well, what's God's love language? Well, God's love language is scripture, mostly Hebrew. So I said, okay, God, I think what you're calling us to do is to get deeply into the scriptures. Let's start from the beginning. So what my wife and I did is every night, my wife and I would read the creation account in the book of Genesis in Hebrew together, and we would do Genesis 1. And then, you know, that would take a couple of weeks. And then we go back to the beginning of 1:1 again. And then we'd go and when we that Chapter 2 the next time through and we just kept going until it was like Genesis 1 through 9. [00:04:49][38.3]
[00:04:51] And after about five years of that, an archbishop who had ordained me, who was also the chancellor of a university, asked me about my personal study. Jerry, what are you studying in your personal Bible study? And I told him about the Genesis work and he said, well, I think that's a master's degree or we call an STL. And if you enrolled and wrote an 80 page thesis on that, we think that could be a degree. Me being a deacon, him being an archbishop, I thought, I guess I better do this. So I did it. And it was 240 pages, not 80, spent about a year and a half on it. And so there's a lot there. So I don't really think we can cover the 240 pages, which are basically a commentary on Genesis 1 through 3 Hebrew text. But a lot of stuff jumps out in the Hebrew text and it's really not about what we bring to it. And what most Christians bring to the text of Genesis is our fight with Darwinism. And we have a fight with Darwinism and it's understandable why. So we want to know what can Genesis fit with an old earth or a young earth? [00:06:04][73.0]
[00:06:04] We're bringing our questions to it. But God didn't write Genesis 1 through 3 to refute Darwin. He wrote Genesis 1 through 3 to tell us something. So throughout we said, What are you telling us? In other words, we ask the Bible to tell us what questions it wants us to ask it rather than bringing our best questions. Two thousand years ago, the church fathers brought philosophical questions. Now evangelicals bring scientific questions. And we concluded that even though it has scientific or philosophical implications, it's not mainly about that. And we said, OK, God, why did you write this to us? [00:06:43][39.1]
[00:06:44] What are the questions we're supposed to be asking? And that's the work on Genesis. So we stop there and see kind of where you want to go from there. Because it's such a broad topic, it's really kind of hard to know what part we should focus on. Yeah, we could go a thousand different ways there. [00:06:57][13.2]
Henry: [00:06:57] I'd love to talk about the difference between reading the Bible in Hebrew versus English and I would like to go in all that, but we probably can't with this. What I'd like to go to specifically is as an investor and you speak a lot about investing, what does your reading of Genesis tell you about the way that you were to Steward Capital and to invest? How are you a better investor because you read through Genesis 1 through 3 exhaustively? [00:07:21][23.4]
[00:07:23] I wish exhaustively. I exhausted myself. But, you know, just as of yesterday, there's something else that popped out at us. It's really amazing. It's probably the densest piece of writing in human history, except maybe some of the gospel accounts. All right. So what do I take away from that? I take away from that that this is a book about apprenticeship. God is the Emperor and Adam is the prince in waiting. And Adam was put in a garden to learn how God did things. And then at some point, when he was sufficiently apprenticed, he and his wife were to be given a ceremony, were to be given authority, and then sent out into the world to make the wilderness, the land like the garden. [00:08:05][41.6]
[00:08:06] So that this is basically the story of a dynasty. What's called a co regency, where you have a senior king and a junior king or king in waiting who is watching and studying the ways of the palace so that someday he can rule together with his father, not replace like we have with human kingship ships, because the senior king, the emperor is eternal. But there was an under-agedness to Adam, which was not supposed to be permanent, and he was supposed to learn the ways of Elohim, learn the ways of God, and then go out and make the world that way. And the world was made to be remade, but the world wasn't finished. The garden was finished. But the wilderness was not finished. The garden was the model. The world was the clay that Adam was supposed to shape to make it more like the garden. And he was supposed to learn wisdom through an apprentice model. [00:09:00][54.2]
[00:09:01] So the world was made to be changed. And it yields over and over again what has created created as Baraa and made as Osei. So you have Osei God made, and that's similar to the word yield. Yield as an investment word. Well, the reason that we can have yield in investments is because yield is built into the creation. The creation is made to grow. When we interact with it and that growth or growth potential in the creation is the reason that yield is legitimate. Aristotle didn't think interest rate or yield was legitimate because he thought it was sterile. Marx thought it wasn't. A lot of medieval theologians didn't because they saw a static universe. Pagan economics just basically saw the universe as static and whatever god there was as either stingy or uninvolved. [00:09:46][45.4]
[00:09:47] But we have a God who's generous, and if God's generous, then I can lend you money and you can make money and you can still pay me interest because it grew faster than the interest. A generous God is a God where investment is possible, where me getting a dividend or an interest payment or a capital gain is not at your expense. Cause there's enough growth for the investi and the invest store to be partners with one another and grow together. Because the Hebrew universe is a seed in itself. Things multiplying universe, whereas the pagan universe is essentially a dead no growth universe. [00:10:23][35.8]
Henry: [00:10:25] So the first lesson from Genesis is that investments, looking to get a return on investments, is something that was part of the initial design. [00:10:32][7.2]
Jerry: [00:10:33] Yes, you can argue that God's making of the garden is an investment. He expends labor to create a physical plant environment. In this case, the garden is basically a school. It's job training for Adam and his wife to become, you know, the earthly king and queen of the universe. God spends of himself first to get a return later. So he himself is an investor. [00:11:01][27.9]
Henry: [00:11:03] OK, so things didn't go where it was just this beautiful investment with just yield year in, year out the way that it might have been their fall happened. Presumably that impacted not only the Garden and Adam, of course, irreparably, forever, but it also included the type of investments that man then made from that point going forward. Talk about that. [00:11:25][22.4]
Jerry: [00:11:26] Yeah, well, God made an investment. And Adam and his wife were essentially the stewards, kind of the managers of that investment. And they ripped him off. And, you know, that's a problem that comes down to us today. Economist call it agency risk. If I'm the owner and I put assets under your care. Are you gonna follow my interests? Or are you going to follow your own interests at my expense? Are you gonna give yourself an expensive corporate jet or engage in political virtue signaling or just mismanage or grow out of a psychological need rather than, you know what's really wise or fail to grow, you know, whatever your thing is. Are you gonna be a self dealer or are you gonna be a faithful steward? [00:12:06][39.7]
[00:12:07] See, this idea of stewardship goes right back to Genesis. It's not something introduced in Jesus's parables. Jesus as parables are genesis based parables in many cases. It's why there's so agricultural. So God made an investment and the stewards of his investment essentially ripped him off. Now God came back in and rescued it, but he had to rescue it. And one of the ways he rescues it is in some sense by making it tougher on the stewards. The curses in Genesis after the fall tend to be weakening and confusion, curses, not just like punishment curses. So Adam's strength was his work, but now he sweats, right? Adam's strength again was his labor. He was supposed to conquer the world. You know, the wilderness. But now he gets thorns and thistles. The woman's role was to help him in that and to help him. You know, one of the ways was bring children into the world, but that's where it goes wrong. [00:13:03][55.9]
[00:13:03] So every place where the man and woman were strong, their strength was decreased a little bit. And so we live in that fallen world of we work and it's hard and there's sweat and we work and we intend one thing. But another thing comes out that's thorns and thistles. We think we're planting wheat. And what we end up getting is things that really don't serve our purposes. So in addition to the challenges of being a faithful steward of God's resources, which Adam had, we now have the additional challenges of not being able to be trusted completely with the power that man originally had and to have that power. In some ways, Kirst and turned down a little bit because if things were too easy, we'd have too much room to get into mischief. Human nature is such that we can't be trusted with as much power as we'd like to be or even as we were before the fall. [00:13:58][54.7]
William: [00:13:59] It's really interesting. Jerry, William here. I Love kind of going back through the word of God. I mean, we try to do that a lot here on the show because it does just reveal so much about God's character, who he is and what he wants us to do with our resources and our capital. And I love how you're kind of reframing maybe some common thoughts about a story, especially here, the creation story, and kind of bringing it back to, you know, what is the scripture actually tell us if we take away our world view that we're bringing to it. And I'd love if you would maybe dove into, you know, a topic or two more. Another passage to a scripture where maybe you've heard it used for the faith driven investing movement where you think, you know, hey, not that people are going to go wrong here, but maybe they're not seeing the full picture here of what God story is trying to tell us and how we should steward our resources. [00:14:47][48.2]
Jerry: [00:14:48] Well, yeah, I think that may be one of the things that we're missing or gets too little emphasis is that the main purpose of mankind is to glorify God by filling the earth and subduing it. The main purpose of man is not avoiding sin. And I think the evangelical conversation in general, and that includes the evangelical financial conversation can easily fall into the idea that the Christian life is the life of sin avoidance. And you certainly are supposed to avoid sin. I mean, the very definition of something you should avoid and God did give a limit. God did say guard the garden. Adam failed to guard the garden. And the serpent came in and ruined everything. We can come back on that if we want. I don't think the first sin was the eating of the fruit. I think the first sin was letting the serpent in. I'll just put that there is a marker. You want to come back? You can or we can just kind of move on. [00:15:42][53.7]
[00:15:43] Adam's job was primarily a positive one, which was fill the earth and subdue it. And however, Adam, I've got a restriction on you. There's a tree you're not supposed to eat from. But Adam's main job was not to refrain from eating that tree. Adam's main job was to fill the earth and subdue it and guard rails around that are one of the things you shouldn't do is eat from that tree unless I tell you you can eat from it. And I think what happens is that we get focused on sin. And arguably it was in fact too much focus on sin that made the tree so appealing when we're supposed be busy about the business of glorifying God. How do we glorify God? Well, how did he say to glorify him, fill the earth and subdue it? Exercise dominion over the birds. They are the fish of the sea and over the beasts of the field. That's the job of humanity. And that's largely what businesses. So that mandate is never removed. It's never turned down. It's never rescinded. It is, in fact, reaffirmed in Jesus the second Adam. And so that's mainly our job as entrepreneurs and investors is to fulfill that. And yes, of course, along the lines, sin messes it up. So avoiding sin is ancillary to the main goal, which is glorifying God in this case through dominion over the earth, glorifying it. [00:17:07][83.9]
Henry: [00:17:08] So I love that from a couple of different angles. One is that a lot of times in our investment, we talk about sins that we see in our portfolio companies. In this one, I mean, we prefer sins of commission rather than sins of omission. We'd like to see leaders who will take action and error on that side. And I think it really comes to the subject really of taking risk. Since there is no specific example of exactly, here's what you're supposed to do next is not open, nor there's some risk involved of going ahead and trying different things towards an end goal in mind. And yet we have to take risk. If we're just focused on sin avoidance, then that's almost a risk avoidance. Absolutely. Maybe I'm reading into it too much. [00:17:46][38.4]
Jerry: [00:17:46] Now, I know you're not. That's right. If we're focused exclusively on sin avoidance, then what we will tend to do is we will get paralyzed. And I think this is part of the message in the gospels of the various paralytic that Jesus runs into, that a lot of society had become essentially paralyzed. I can't touch anything. I can't go anywhere. I can't do anything. Everything is unclean. Everything is bad. Or if it's not bad, it's debatable. And the Pharisees just added rule on top of rule on top of rule. And it was never enough. And you've got one group of Pharisees who come along and at some commands and then other Pharisees come along and say those other Pharisees, they're really soft on sin. Where the real pure ones. And then they add more and eventually you get the scenes. They have to completely withdraw from society. But even Knake Sin goes with them. You know, to the Kumaran community, right. Even though they're basically hermits, they're still sent in the world. And it's a paralyzing thing. And Jesus comes along and just breaks all those barriers down. He's touching unclean people. [00:18:46][60.2]
[00:18:47] Does he become unclean? No. They become clean. When Jesus touches a dead body, does Jesus become ceremonially unclean, like in the Torah? No. Why? Because the Torah was wrong? No. Because Jesus is contagious holiness. He's contagious life. So he's touching lepers and he's touching women with a mission of blood. All this unclean stuff. And also morally unclean. He's dealing with tax collectors. He's dealing with prostitutes. And he's getting criticized for it by the people who want to take no risks. So when in doubt, do nothing. Jesus is very active, taking all kinds of risks and getting criticized for it constantly. He is investing himself, even at the risk of being seen as being far too close to centers. [00:19:32][44.5]
Henry: [00:19:33] So this is fascinating. You're heading right into a big, big, big topic that's going on a feature of investing, which is how do we think about screens and negative screens? How do we think about companies that are doing things that would bother us as Christ followers? Maybe they're involved in pornography, maybe they're involved in tobacco. Think of the different things that would make us uncomfortable. And so on one hand, as someone who's driven by their faith. You don't want to presumably be a part of aiding and abetting somebody who's a known distributor of pornography. And some people would say that's what we do when we invest in a company that has that as a major part of their revenue. On the other part, you can see another angle, and I love to see just how you balance these two, which is if Jesus was out there talking to the prostitute into different people, tax collector and people who are thought of as unclean at the time, do we just run away from all those things? So how do we appropriately engage but without being in a spot which would make us fall into sin? So I think that everybody's following what you're saying. Make it real in the world of investing through this conversation about negative screens, please. [00:20:41][67.8]
Jerry: [00:20:42] Yeah. I'm happy to. But let me just kind of say that I'm happy to talk about that. But I do notice. I guess that's the big topic, right? So we sort of have to talk about it. But I'm bothered that it's the big topic because I don't think it's the big topic in scripture. I think it's there, but it gets so much more conversation. The Bible does deal with these issues. The Pharisees criticizing Jesus. Then later, the Judy Isaiah's and also some of the weaker brethren were concerned about meat being sacrificed to idols. Right. So you have those controversies. But those are almost side issues as Jesus goes about his business. And then later, as Paul and the apostles go about their business, their about their father's business. Right. And then these issues come up and someone accuses them and then they answer and then they get back to their father's business. So, I mean, in the providence of God, the evangelical conversation has largely been about sin screens, which I find unfortunate, but that is God's providence. So we kind of have to work with that. So what I would say is, first of all, if something is not a faith, that sin. So the Bible is perfectly clear that if you think something is morally wrong, it violates your conscience. You're not allowed to do it. So even though you have the freedom to eat meat sacrificed to idols, if you don't know that you have that freedom, if you think that it's wrong, maybe you're a recent convert and you still have feelings of religious piety towards the false idols. When you eat meat sacrificed to idols, maybe it understand how much liberty you have in Christ. Maybe it's a real stumbling block for you. Then you definitely should not eat. And screeners and financial advisers can help you with that. You know, you can tell them what you're scruple is and they can say, OK, well, we've got a fund for that or even we can set up a separately managed account so you don't have that. So I strongly affirm that people who have a conscience issue with a particular investment. [00:22:30][107.6]
[00:22:30] Nick Stonestreet, my friend likes to say, let's say somebody who's a child was killed by a drunk driver. They don't want to invest in alcohol stocks. Honor that. They think it's wrong. Honor that. And an adviser who helps them honor that is in my opinion doing righteous work that should be praised. But to go the extra step, which is to say that your social associations, which include your commercial associations, mean that the sins committed by someone with whom you are associated or dealing even with a financial tie become your sins too, that they you're appropriating like you touch a dead body. And your ceremonially dead, I think, is not the teaching of the Bible. I think the biblical teaching is your sins or your sins. And if I associate if you're doing some sin, Henry, and I know you are. Because we all are. If you're doing some sin and I associate with you, your sin is in mine and my sin isn't yours. And if you have business dealings with somebody, if you buy a product from a company and something company does something sinful, their sins aren't your sin. Sin is not transferable along commercial associations. [00:23:44][74.0]
Henry: [00:23:46] But some people and I think you're very right, when you started it, when we started going down this rabbit trail, you said, you know, do we really want to go there? And if we go there, is that the risk of consuming what a lot of people are talking about right now, and yet they're missing a much bigger picture. I need to be very clear. I absolutely want to move on quickly from this to get onto the much bigger picture, because I think people are missing the positive aspects of how we might invest. I think that's important. I do want to just ask you this question, those clarifying things, some people, listeners might think, well, is it different, though, when we're investing in a company that's about adult entertainment? Is some aspect of debt financing or equity financing actually helping them to accomplish a goal or a mission that is counterproductive to society in the first line of society? And therefore, while we're not actually engaging in that pornography by investing in them, we're participating. Is that a dynamic or if that's too thorny, we can move on. We can go on to the positive side. [00:24:41][55.0]
Jerry: [00:24:41] But no, no. We can take it on. Like I say, I think that once we start with what are the limits and what am I allowed to do? We've already started the Pharisee's conversation. OK. And that conversation already kind of arcs the Pharisees direction. And that's why those are the kind of questions that came to Jesus. Generally, they didn't come to Jesus with. I mean, there's one who said, well, what's the law and the prophets? And he said, while you're close to the kingdom of God. With that answer. But generally it's what are the limits? How much can you do on the Sabbath? Who can you touch? Who can you eat with? And I think if that is the starting point of our conversation. And let's start off with hardest cases to find out whether there are any lines at all. Then we're already staring at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and saying, well, we can't eat it. Can we touch it? Can we eat the other trees? We're already starting. In my opinion, the conversation that then the Hosch wants to have, which is just how many commandments has God given you? And he seems to give you a lot of commandments and he seems to be a very restrictive God woman. [00:25:45][64.1]
[00:25:45] And she kind of goes along with it. She says, yes, we're not allowed to eat, nor are we allowed to touch. So I'll just put it this way. Where did Jesus put the limit? Who was Jesus unwilling to deal? With who was he unwilling to eat with? Who was he unwilling to have financial dealings with? He 8 with tax collectors and prostitutes. So where are tax collectors were so hated that. I mean, you think about ancient religious leaders. One thing religious leaders they like to do is they like to accept donations. Tax collectors were so hated that they were singled out as a group you couldn't even take donations from. So religious leaders who live on donations like. Yeah, but not from tax collectors. And Jesus constantly ate with them. [00:26:31][45.2]
[00:26:31] Some of them are dependent, but there's no sign they all repentant. They still ate. They bought him lunch over and over and over again. And in fact, Jesus, his critics even saw that. What did they call him, a glutton and a winebibber because he was living off of the ill gotten gains of the tax collectors. So I'll just turn it back. Let's look at the life of Jesus and let's find out where Jesus put his the limits on his relationship. I'm not seeing it. He deals with the rich young ruler. Right. The rich young ruler is corrupt. You can read an essay I wrote about that. I don't think he's just greedy. I think he's corrupt. [00:27:01][29.4]
[00:27:02] But who walks away? Does Jesus walk away or does the rich young ruler walk away? The rich young ruler walks away. Jesus was hanging in there. So when did we become the walkaway people? When did we become the first people to walk away? When did we become the people whose whole conversation is about? How long before we walk away from the Sanhedrin member or the tax collector or the center? No doubt there is some kind of limits and we can talk about limits. I think the limits are. Are you, in fact, yourself sinning? But let's get rid of any idea that having lunch with Zacchaeus, the tax collector catered by Zacchaeus with his dirty money, didn't make Jesus unclean. So let's keep going back to the life of Jesus and see where he put the limits, not where I put the limits. It's where he puts the limits. [00:27:51][49.5]
William: [00:27:52] That's good. That's good, Jerry. I want to switch out of a little bit and want to talk about that. I've heard you say before it's similar lines, but now I've heard you talk about Jesus never gave instructions on where and how to invest. One of the most famous investing parables, the parable of the talents. People bring that up a lot in these talks when they talk about faith driven, investing in a love for you to give us a little bit of what your study has shown you about that passage and how that translates into the everyday investor and how they should think about how Jesus thinks about stewarding our money. [00:28:27][34.5]
Jerry: [00:28:28] Yeah, I'm happy to. But, you know, I hate to be this guy who's always like critiquing the question because I love you guys. But I want to let the text tell me which questions to ask, not me. Say, what does this mean for investors? Right. And like so once we let the tech speak to us, once Jesus delivers his economic message to us, then we reflect on it. We chew on it like a cow chews on cud, and then we start applying it to our lives. So I don't want to go so quick to how do we apply this? I think we pre apply. We don't necessarily drink deeply and reflect over a long period and then apply. So I mean, it's that's part of the general conversation. What's Jesus doing all this money stuff in the Bible? I mean, the Gospels have an enormous amount of material about money. [00:29:14][47.0]
[00:29:15] And the really weird thing is that Jesus, who's supposed to be, according to a lot of the academic scholars, leading some kind of peasant revolt against business and against markets and all the rest of it seems to. Over and over again. Right. These little business stories, these little case studies, these parables in which the good guy is the investor and the unfaithful steward is the bad guy, a guy who's leading a peasant revolt against private property. And, you know, kind of like Jesus as Che Guevara or Fidel Castro, which became very hip in the 70s and 80s. And academic theologian circles. The way they had to do that is by basically saying Jesus didn't write those parables. They were added later. Well, you know, because Jesus couldn't have known all this stuff about finance. So therefore, these aren't from Jesus. Therefore, we can rescue Jesus, the revolutionary. Well, all right. That's wrong on so many levels. First of all, Jesus was financially sophisticated. How do we know? Because he grew up in Nazareth. And Nazareth was a small town, but it was a suburb of a large town, which was the financial center of Galilee called Sulfurous. There we have. We've dug up the banks. Jesus would have grown up around financially sophisticated people. So these parables are not beyond his ability, beyond the ability of the Jesus that we thought. We know the archaeology. Mel tells us that Jesus would have been around finance a lot. And he's telling stories in which the investor is generally the good guy. So I think that's a big part of just approaching Jesus as old money and his Jesus holds money. Conversation number one, he knew what it was talking about. He wasn't a country bumpkin. Number two, he seemed to have an investor's point of view. Number three, related to this, the economy of Galilee was very different from the economy of Judea. Galilee was a very entrepreneurial economy. I've just I've I've read the archeological reports almost on a nightly basis. Almost every Galilee in town had several shops. You had builders, you know, like Joseph and son. You had industrial they stone jar masons at Cana. Wedding at Cana rings true to history because they did make stone jars. There you have industrial fishing going on, not subsistence fisherman Peter and James and John. This was an industry. So Jesus grew up in an entrepreneurial area. [00:31:26][130.7]
[00:31:27] Down in Judea, it's very hierarchical, very old money, very politically connected. What we might call a crony economy. So here's something important to remember. Jesus does not have a single confrontation over wealth with any wealthy individual in Galilee. Not one. Every single confrontation with wealthy individuals is geographically near Jerusalem, the political capital, and socially near in that the confrontations are with a rich young ruler. Senator Zacchaeus, the tax collector and the moneylenders who had a monopoly from Herod. So Jesus. Only makes financial critiques when he is in places where the economy is largely a top down extractive as opposed to an entrepreneurial economy, and he only does it with people who are members of the extractive class. [00:32:20][53.4]
Henry: [00:32:22] I follow that. This has been super helpful for me. And, you know, whenever we get ready to do this podcast, we come in with just a whole bunch of different questions we've been wanting to ask you for a while. And what you've done is you've changed the paradigm for me. And I hope that for a number of our listeners, which is what are the questions we should be asking and I want to get back into that. And before we go to wrap and I think Lord One, this will be first of many, many installments. I love the way you've been very thoughtful about all of this. And I know that you gonna be come out with a book, this simulator in the spring. There's so much more we can revisit on this. But before William asked you the final question, we always asked our guests. I want to ask you, what's another question that you see? Investors that endeavored to follow God was the question that they should be at. We know the questions are asking. Right. We're just as Sally said now, you just grain all those different different types. Then what can I invest in? What I can invest in? And I think that you've put together a very good point about why those are the wrong questions. But I'm curious about what's a question you see that investors should be asking but aren't. And how does the text answer that question they should be asking but aren't? [00:33:27][65.4]
Jerry: [00:33:28] Let me first mention the one that I want him to stop asking. You know, I used to be a Christian radio talk show host, so I kind of got a sense of how Christians thought. And we did, you know, shows on Christian entrepreneurship a lot. And a woman called in and she said, well, we're entrepreneurs. My husband, I own a business. But for, you know, a year and a half, we wanted to be business owners, but we didn't know whether we were allowed. So we talked to our pastor and we read books and we studied the scriptures to find out if we're allowed to be entrepreneurs. And they ended up believing that they were allowed to be entrepreneurs and they became entrepreneurs. And I was glad they landed there, but my heart was broken by that conversation. So what I would say, I mean, I almost want to scream it from the rooftop. Stop asking potential Christian entrepreneurs. Stop asking the question. Am I allowed? That is so much the wrong question. I'm telling you right now, you are allowed you are encouraged to by the example of God himself, is the creator of the universe and Jesus who came from an entrepreneurial family and an entrepreneurial culture and start asking God, how should I do it? [00:34:40][71.5]
[00:34:40] How can I do it with excellence? How can I be the best? Oh, and along the way, God, please help me avoid sin. But how can I glorify you with excellence so that people say, look at the excellence of this person's work and look at the wisdom they have. I want to talk to them and see where they get that wisdom from. Stop asking. Am I allowed? Stop starting off with what am I not allowed to do? And start asking God, what would you have me do? What is your command for something for me to do? Not focus on whether I'm allowed to be an entrepreneur at all. I took away from that conversation the idea that at least in the subculture of that particular Christian Christians had a year and a half disadvantage. They had a year and a half thinking about whether they're allowed to move and innovate, which non-Christians didn't have. I would rather we have a forward culture when it comes to entrepreneurs where we entrepreneur earlier and faster and it becomes part of our culture and entrepreneurial culture. And of course, don't sin along the way. [00:35:39][59.0]
Henry: [00:35:40] OK, so that's very helpful. I completely get it. I'm right with you. I see it all the time. So tell us, what does it look like? Where did the questions that we might be asking more generally of scripture that might lead us to being able to innovate and invest better and more quickly than rest of secular society because they're looking in the wrong place and they're asking the wrong question? [00:35:59][19.1]
Jerry: [00:36:01] Well, I'd say one of the things I would hearken back to a conversation you had with Trae Stephens and I look at the example of Peter Theil that the Christian philosophy of Renesmee rhade enabled that shop to have an advantage over others. They were able to set aside rivalry, what Gerard would call mimetic rivalry and ambition, and get through the tech burst at a time when others couldn't get through the tech bearse because instead of trying to make their enemy lose, they tried to actually do something. So they had a positive goal and their goal was not mainly. [00:36:36][34.9]
[00:36:36] This is something Peter likes to say. You know, the goal is not to disrupt. The goal is to provide a good or a service in a profitable way. Now, if it disrupts, all right, so be it. You know, that's in God's providence. So I think if Christians start to follow the example of Jesus, I'm really key into Jesus. I don't mean the word Jesus. I don't mean say the name Jesus. And then recall all the sermons you've heard about Jesus where people hung their best thinking on that. You know, Jesus says Gandhi or Jesus as Che or Jesus as Confucius. Wait. We got all these Jesuses of our own making. I mean, actually reading the gospels carefully and just kind of get Jesus in your gut. I mean, that's literally what we do in our Eucharist, right? I mean, theoretically or whatever, symbolically different conversation, but just begin to just think like Jesus and you will be a better entrepreneur because he was the most successful. I don't want to, like degrade him by saying he's much more. But he was he invested everything and he won everything. And entrepreneurs, in some sense, I don't want to do the Jesus CEO thing because Jesus is bigger than any business enterprise. But risking, loving, risking, serving, being willing to lose it all is not something that Christians should maybe be skeptical about. It's in the very nature of the Christian walk. And if we do that, we will in general be better entrepreneurs will be less afraid because we don't love money and don't worship it. We're more able to risk it. [00:38:04][88.1]
William: [00:38:08] That's a good word. And as we do come to a wrap, the center said, I would love to find out a little bit about where God has you. So you've taken us through an amazing journey of God, Scripture and his lessons. What does he have you chewing on right now? That maybe would be fun for our listeners to hear about. Oh, you mean like with a day job rather than this sort of thing, like the quantitative analysis kind of thing? Yeah. Well, or just in God's word, right. I mean, something else that he's kind of put on your heart, you spent so much time in Genesis, you got a book coming out just. Is there anything else that's coming alive in a new way, maybe in your daily devotionals? [00:38:40][32.5]
Jerry: [00:38:42] Well, I'm continuing to find new stuff in Genesis that would kind of take a while to get us to the point where he could talk about it and certainly more and more about what we see with Jesus in the Gospels and how he's interacting along economic lines and all of the rest of it. I mean, he really, really all the treasures of the wisdom of God were hidden in Jesus. And if we'd stop skimming over the details, the details matter, place names matter. It matters that Jesus was killed in Jerusalem, not Rome. It matters that Jesus ascended from Bethany, the house of the poor. And, you know, not from Jerusalem. It matters that he was born in Bethlehem. Not Jerusalem. The story of Jesus. If we really believe in the incarnation, we believe that all of the story of Jesus is for us. And what you're going to find is every time he's in a city and every time the Bible tells us the name of the city. And then you compare that to Jesus's commentary there about wealth or about anything else. Jesus knew where he was. He wasn't giving the standard stump speech or if he was, he was varying it from place to place. You know, you've got the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew. But then you have the sermon on the plane and Luke. And they're different from one another. Right. So scholars say, oh, it's a contradiction. Sermon on the plane is given to a Judean audience, much harder on wealth. All of these little details matter. And we're so used to reading them spiritually, we skip right to spiritual. But Jesus didn't come as a spirit. He came in flesh and blood. So we can't skip just the spirit and skip over all the flesh and blood stuff we see Jesus doing. And, you know, we could spend hours and hours talking about how those details matter. But let me just convince you now, all of those details matter. There's no unimportant parts of the gospels. And if something Jesus says doesn't make sense to you. Or it's weird to you as it is to me, the Bible isn't weird. I'm weird. And the Bible will make sense to me when I stop being weird. And so we have to adjust our way of thinking to the Bible's rather than our own. And please stop taking our best thinking. And sometimes it's really good thinking and try to find a verse to hang it on rather than look at the context of the verse and let God give us his best thinking man. [00:40:52][130.6]
Henry: [00:40:53] So that's very helpful. A big takeaway for me and hopefully the investors that are listening is how important it is that we don't have the primary way that we engage in God's word through somebody else who goes ahead, puts her own spin on it. One of the things that you've told me is that you don't want it, not that you don't listen to sermons in other pastors. I'm sure you do. And yet you wanted to go ahead and spend time in God's word and you wanted to do it in the language in which was written and going in and asking God to speak to you through his word without being necessarily influenced by the questions of the day, whether it's science. And we would have that one hundred years ago, or whether it's negative screens now as a feature of an investor. [00:41:30][37.9]
Jerry: [00:41:31] Right. And let me make this clear. It's not that I'm reading it alone, but what do I read? I read Josephus and others from Jesus's time. I read the Roman historians. I read the rabbis at the time. If so, I don't want to get stuck in modern evangelic. Sure I listen evangelical sermons, but I already think like an evangelical because I've been in evangelical for 35 years. I need to learn to think like a first century Jew. And that's what we all need to start doing it for real. And once you do that, you will be amazed at how the storehouse, you know, how the treasure house, the thestories opens up to you. [00:42:03][31.7]
Henry: [00:42:03] There's a book in there. There's a podcast in there thinking like a first century Jew. I love that I would subscribe. There's no doubt about it. We got a taste of it today on the podcast. I think it's going to make us think differently about investing. I do absolutely know that. Jerry, I want to have you back. [00:42:17][13.8]
[00:42:17] I'm grateful for the time you spent with us. And yeah, I'm grateful. [00:42:20][2.9]
Jerry: [00:42:21] I'm grateful for you and for your mission and for what you're doing in the world and as being a leader in this space. [00:42:21][0.0]
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