ASSIGNING BLAME IN 2000 AND BEYOND, by Gary North

The Israelites would worship false gods, Moses prophesied. This would result in corporate negative sanctions against the nation. God would bring vengeance. This would not be permanent vengeance. The nation would be restored. "And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath driven thee, And shalt return unto the LORD thy God, and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul; That then the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath scattered thee" (Deut. 30:1-3). Israel’s hope in covenantal restoration was a hope in God’s negative corporate sanctions.

Israel’s abiding sin prior to the captivity was the worship of false gods, either foreign gods or gods of the land. This was why God threatened them with captivity: removal from the land.

In New Covenant times, captivity is not the threat. Social upheaval is. When Islam swept across North Africa in the seventh century, the church disappeared. It has yet to reappear there. Christians were killed, or forced to convert to Islam, or had to flee across the Mediterranean. Not many had the funds or the opportunity to flee. Most of them surrendered their faith or died for it. If there was anything positive about what happened to the North African church, I have not come across it. The fate of the North African church is not discussed much by Christian authors or pastors, for the story has no happy ending.

Yet sometimes negative sanctions are a prelude to a great blessing. Let us consider Nero’s persecution of the church. In 64 A.D., he began the terrible onslaught. It lasted until his death four years later. But it had an important result: it legally separated the church from Israel. The legal protection that the church had enjoyed for a generation because of its special relation to Israel ended in 64. Five years later, Israel rebelled against Rome. The destruction of Israel by Rome in 69 and 70 did not include the church, which had lost its legal connection to Israel under Nero. The sacrificial deaths of the martyrs under Nero saved the church under Nero’s immediate successors. This fact is rarely discussed by church historians.

Consider the bubonic plague of 1347-50. It wiped out a third of Europe. In the cities, the death toll was higher. It reappeared in England, generation after generation, until the great London fire of 1666. Then it stopped.

In the 1370’s, Wycliffe began to mobilize the nation by his translation of the New Testament into the vernacular. His devoted disciples spread out across the land to preach. The Lollard movement began to transform English Christianity. In central Europe a generation later the Hussites did the same. The Black Death had undermined the confidence of the late medieval church.

In 1493, Columbus’ crew brought back syphilis. By 1500, it was in England. Invading armies carried it home – a gift from local prostitutes. It spread through European society like wildfire. Adultery was rampant, so the disease could not be stopped. People knew where it came from, but they would not change their behavior. The self-confidence of the Renaissance was undermined. The sack of Rome in 1525 by Spanish and German mercenary troops completed this break in confidence. In 1517, Luther posted his 95 theses, the copyright-free printing presses began to roll, and the Reformation took northern Europe. But the price was high: disease preceding the event and over a century of religious wars following it.

A compromise settled the military issue: geographical in Germany (the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648) and philosophical in England (1660). Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. He immediately chartered the Royal Society. The rationalism of Newtonian science soon took hold of the intelligentsia. The economists invented the science of economics, self-consciously neutral in religion. The Enlightenment was born in 1660.

The intellectuals had seen a century of warfare in Europe. An appeal to the Bible or to religious principles had seemed to settle nothing. Men had resorted to the sword to extend their religious views. So, the intellectuals concluded, there has to be a higher truth, a higher knowledge that will bring all thinking men together. There has to be a higher reason that will bind up the wounds. Faith in scientific law steadily began to replace faith in God’s law in the realm of politics, and from there to almost all other realms. The kingdom of science extended its domain relentlessly.

We live in an era in which religiously autonomous science is seen as man’s salvation – an exclusively earthly salvation. Scientists appeal to mathematics, not to the Bible, in their search for truth. In mathematics, men expect to find a way to settle their disputes. But higher math led to the Manhattan Project and nuclear weapons. Faith in neutral number has begun to fade. But nothing has replaced it yet. Therein lies a great opportunity.

Modern secular education is based on a premise: the Bible is irrelevant to education, except possibly as poetry, and hardly anybody takes poetry seriously. But modern education has created the public school system, which has not brought forth the new man that its promoters had promised. The messianic character of modern education is no less messianic today, but it is a religion in disrepute. But nothing has replaced it yet. Therein lies a great opportunity.

The destructiveness of the wars of the twentieth century has dwarfed all the religious wars ever fought. They have been fought in the name of humanism – a new humanity separated from traditional religion. That dream has come a cropper on the battlefield. But in two areas – technology and economics – humanism still confidently holds its ground. "You can’t argue with success," its promoters claim. But we can surely argue with failure. And we will. Soon.

The millennium bug will call into question science, technology, the free market, and the welfare State. It will call into question all of modern humanism. Blame will be handed out by the survivors. Assigning and avoiding blame on this matter will become the great political issue after 1999. The incumbents of this world will get the blame. Therein lies a great opportunity.

The battle will go far beyond politics. It will go to first principles. The humanists will try to avoid the blame, but they will not be able to. They were on the watch when this happened. It was not the typical Christian fundamentalist, sitting in the pew, who decided to save two digits. It was not pastors who sold disaster-prone computers and software to businesses and governments. Fundamentalists have long been relegated to the outer darkness of Bible colleges. It was all those bright people at the best universities and largest businesses who produced the computer revolution. They had the influence, the money, and the power. So, they will take the hit in 2000 and beyond.

Assigning blame is an inescapable social requirement when things break down. When the millennium bug does its pre-programmed work, the resulting crisis will generate demand for explanations. Those in charge of things when the crisis hits will soon be replaced. We have seen this before. In the 1930’s, businessmen took the hit politically. The New Deal rode into power on the rhetoric of economic envy. So did the Nazis and the Fascists. The Communists also made great gains among the intellectuals because of the Great Depression. They all pinned the economic tail on the donkey of capitalism. We still see the legacy of this shift in power in our textbooks. "The New Deal saved capitalism from itself!" And so on.

It has taken two generations for capitalist social theory to recover. Think of the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946. Leonard Read stood almost alone in his defense of the free market. The Mont Pelerin Society for its first three decades was unknown to the public and regarded by those few scholars who had heard of it as a plaything of a handful of eccentric, academically obscure free market economists. But then came the inflation of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, followed by the 1974 recession. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974. Keynesianism began to surrender territory. Failure has an inescapable cost: loss of influence.

The millennium bug will hit all over the world. Every society will suffer the terrible consequences of the unofficial decision of a handful of technologists a generation ago to save two digits on an 80-digit punch card. The ludicrousness of that decision will be visible to all.

There is cause and effect in history. The visible cause – saving two digits – will seem preposterous in light of its comprehensive, worldwide effects. If historical causation is limited to the decisions of men, then the millennium bug will be the ultimate testimony to the folly of man and the reign of meaningless chance. If an entire civilization is threatened – and possibly lost – because of the decisions of a faceless priesthood of programmers, then life has no meaning, no hope.

Christians have another explanation available: the judgment of God. As soon as the millennium bug hits in full force, pastors will make this their weekly theme. Not today, of course, when warnings to the congregations might save lives. But later, surely. They will go in search of an explicitly biblical social theory that relies on the judgment of God as a means of explanation.

I have a suggestion: the five-point biblical covenant model. Today, the Institute for Christian Economics has a near monopoly on this position, but not much demand. Demand will increase exponentially in 2000 and beyond. That will be a great opportunity for those who have read Ray Sutton’s That You May Prosper and the books in my Biblical Blueprints Series. A great reversal is coming. The compromise of 1660 is about to come unglued. Be prepared.

People don’t perceive what is about to hit them. They will perceive it when it hits. Then they will search for answers: cause-and-effect explanations.

It is our job to be ready to offer physical aid in the crisis and a biblical cause-and-effect explanation for the crisis. I am recommending that you prepare now to provide both.

Some of my many critics have understood what I am doing. I am arming a handful of people – a remnant of a remnant – with advanced warning and a biblical explanation. I am not getting encouragement from urban pastors. But I am getting support from a handful of laymen who perceive that they are at risk, society is at risk, and secular humanism is at risk.

To lay blame effectively, you must be willing and able to predict the event. That’s what I’m doing. I’m also laying the groundwork for handing out the blame. The battle for the minds of men after 1999 will, to a great extent, be a battle to assign and evade blame for the millennium bug. Christians will be in a position to win this battle.

I’ll put it bluntly: y2k is about handing out blame. The corporate judgment of God always is. Either I will be blamed in 2000 for being a nervous Nelly, or else my warnings will provide a remnant with a worldview for handing out blame. Blame is an inescapable concept. It is never a question of "blame vs. no blame." It is a question of who gets blamed, and by whom.

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