Biblical Worldview and Investing

A recent statistic compares the percentage of investment dollars unbelievers put toward “ethical investment products” with the percentage of investment dollars Christians put toward “faith-based investment products.” The numbers signal a troubling reality. Unbelievers invest 18% of their investment dollars in products that line up with their ethical commitments while believers invest just 0.2% of their investment capital in products specifically designed to align with their Christian commitment.  U.S. Professionally Managed assets at year end 2021. Sources: Eventide, Morningstar, US SIF 2022 Report, Arizona Christian University (American Worldview Inventory 2021). While this statistic does not tell the whole story, it clearly indicates that something is awry. Unbelievers seem far more likely than Jesus’ followers to make the connection between their ethical convictions and their investment practices. Perhaps even more troubling, when confronted with this insight, some Christian investors are unperturbed. Seeing little reference to investing in the Bible, they feel no need to connect their faith with their investing choices.

What’s Going On?

At its heart, the problem is these investors’ failure to grasp and embody a robust, biblical worldview. The terminology of “worldview” was borrowed from German philosophy just over one hundred years ago. Essentially, a worldview is a grand narrative about existence, seeking to answer the foundational questions of the world, history and human existence that give meaning to our whole lives. A genuinely biblical worldview rejects a reductionist understanding of faith that does not embody the comprehensive breadth of Scripture. It resists the Enlightenment-influenced proclivity to relegate faith to a private realm. It celebrates Jesus Christ’s claim over every square inch and every split second by right of creation and restoration. It offers an articulation of the scriptural faith that can shape our involvement in public life – and that includes investing.  

Gospel of the Kingdom

If God has done in Jesus Christ what Scripture says he has done, then Jesus must be the starting point for our thinking about everything. Jesus interprets the heart of his own ministry with the terminology of “the gospel of the kingdom.” He announces it to open his public ministry (Mark 1:14-15) and explicitly states that making it known is the very reason he has been sent (Luke 4:43). It is this gospel of the kingdom that the apostolic writers unpack in the rest of the New Testament canon for the mission of the church. It lies at the heart of biblical faith.

The Jews believed they were living in a long story narrated in the Old Testament that recorded God’s journey through history to restore the creation from sin, idolatry, and the curse. God promised to restore creational blessing to Abraham, his family, and all nations (Gen 12:1-3; cf. Gen 1:28). The Jews at this time believed this blessing would come through a king in David’s line who in the last days would re-establish God’s rule over all the affairs of human life (Matt 1:1-17). In one of the best-known and most-loved prophetic promises of the time, Isaiah speaks of the “good news” that God is coming back to save his world and to re-establish his rule over it (Is 40:9-10; 52:7-10). Jesus and the gospel writers connect with this widespread hope and announce that the kingdom is breaking into the middle of history in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. 

The gospel is nothing less than the proclamation that God is present in power to restore his reign over the whole creation, which encompasses every aspect of human life. Unfortunately, it has become common to express “the gospel” as the sinfulness of each person who stands alienated under the wrath of a holy God, the atonement of Jesus as the answer to this problem, and the consequent gifts of forgiveness and justification with the hope of eternal life in heaven with God forever. In this rendering, salvation is reduced to the individual and a few benefits and is redirected to another world. While much of this is wonderfully true, it is a pale version of the gospel that Jesus and the apostles preached.

Three Biblical Lenses on the World

The gospel of the kingdom offers us three biblical lenses for viewing every part of public life, namely, creation, sin, and restoration. We must recover the rich teaching of Scripture in each of these areas if we are to see investing as part of our God-given calling.

The first lens is creation. There has been, sadly, an eclipse of a robust doctrine of creation among many evangelical Christians. The crowning moment of the creation story is God’s foundational command to humanity to image God in their bodily lives and to imprint his glory on creation through their culture-making (Gen. 1:28, 2:15). Culture unfolds as humanity discovers, awakens, and arouses the potential and power that God has buried in the depths of creation. This “cultural mandate” includes our economic calling to discover and steward the resources of God’s creation for the flourishing of all humanity. Thus, it encompasses all dimensions and structures of economic life—including the apparatus of investment. Yet the centrality of this original mandate to our very humanity too often plays little significance in believers’ day-to-day lives.

The second lens is sin. Sin is an image that pictures missing the mark of the glory of imaging God (Rom 3:23; cf. Ps 8:5). Perhaps the most central way the Bible speaks of human sin is in terms of idolatry, serving other gods. And it is cultural idolatry to which the Bible primarily refers: the organization of the whole of communal life around the service of false gods. The way we structure our cultural life offers a corporate answer to the question: What is the chief end of human life? Paul begins his analysis of Roman culture by calling out its idolatry, discussing how God gives people over to the gods they fashion until such behavior culminates in immorality and injustice (Rom 1:18-32). Paul speaks often of the “world” as human culture formed around a false god and animated by its spirit (Rom 12:1-2; Eph 2:1-3). He speaks also of “the powers,” which are demonic beings who enslave humans through the systemic idolatry of our culture (Col 2:8-9, 15; Gal 4:8-9). The humanistic idols of Western culture must be recognized and unmasked: our culture is neither neutral nor Christian but idolatrous. The gods promise life but always deliver death. 

The third lens is restoration. Salvation is restorative: God is restoring human life to be what it was meant to be in the beginning. God is not cleaning us up to take us to be with him in heaven; rather, he is cleaning up this world so he can come and dwell with us here. Salvation is comprehensive. It is the renewal of all things (Matt 19:28), the restoration of everything (Acts 3:21), and the reconciliation of all things (Col 1:20). Salvation encompasses the whole of our social and cultural lives, and that includes our economic vocation and the resources the investment industry offers for that task. 

Each of these three biblical lenses offers an essential perspective on the whole world. Every part of our world is God’s creation, every part is corrupted by sin, and every part is being and will be restored to God’s original design. Take any of them away, and your view of human life is distorted. 

Three Biblical Implications for the Church’s Mission

There are three important implications of this for the missional vocation of the church. The first is that mission includes the public square. The calling of the church from the election of Abraham until today is to be the new and true humanity that Adamic humanity failed to be. Part of the Adamic calling was the economic vocation, and so part of our missional task will be to embody what a healthy economic life looks like when it conforms to God’s wisdom.

The second implication is that in our mission there is no sacred-secular dichotomy. Our vocation to form culture is our divinely given call from the outset. This rejects a sacred-secular dichotomy which assigns certain vocations (such as being a missionary or pastor) to the sacred because they are divine callings and other vocations (such as scholarship or investing) to the secular because—allegedly—they are not. This dualism is seriously defective and even dangerous. God has called us to glorify him in all we do (1 Cor 10:31); to do everything in the name of Christ (Col 3:17), because he has supremacy in everything (Col 1:18). These are not pious platitudes but God’s claim on our whole lives. Investing is a sacred calling.

And finally, in our mission, there is a spiritual battle for the whole of human culture. Public life is not neutral; it is a spiritually contested space. In creation, God orders each aspect of cultural life including the economic. Systemic idolatry is the power of darkness at work in our culture to corrupt every part. But the gospel is the power of God at work in his people to challenge the idolatrous powers that would seek to destroy and diminish our lives. This spiritual battle envelops our investing. There is no naked or neutral public square. Some power will rule, either for human flourishing or for human ruin. Christian investors are called to participate in God’s work of restoration, aligning themselves with the kingdom of God. 

May followers of Jesus catch a vision of God’s kingdom for their investing! May our faithful, wise investments abound to the glory of God’s name and the flourishing of all people. May we be proleptic glimpses of what investing will be one day in the new creation!